The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology 9780415968119, 9780415968126, 9780203879559

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Prologue: Thomas Elsaesser and The Mind-Game Film
The Mind-Game Film: Provenance of a Concept
“Minding Hollywood”
Politicizing the Mind-Game Film
1. On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points: The Challenges of Cinema in the New Century
2. Too Late, Too Soon: Body, Time, and Agency
3. The Mind-Game Film
4. Time Travel Films: An Ethics of Redemption, Rescue, and Regret
5. The New Normal – Trauma as Successfully Failed Communication (NURSE BETTY 2000)
6. Saving Private Ryan
7. Philip K. Dick, the Mind-Game Film, and Retroactive Causality
8. Actions Have Consequences: Logics of the Mind-Game Film in David Lynch’s Los Angeles Trilogy
9. Zero Dark Thirty: Genre Hybridization as (Parapractic) Interference
10. Cinema and Games: Contingency as Our New Causality
11. Contingency, Causality, Complexity: Distributed Agency in the Mind-Game Film
12. The History of the Present as Paranoid Mind-Game
Index

Citation preview

THE MIND-GAME FILM

This book represents the culmination of Thomas Elsaesser’s intense and passionate thinking about the Hollywood mind-game film from the previous two decades. In order to answer what the mind-game film is, why they exist, and how they function, Elsaesser maps the industrial-institutional challenges and constraints facing Hollywood, and the broader philosophic horizon within which American cinema thrives today. He demonstrates how the ‘Persistence of Hollywood’ continues as it has adapted to include new twists and turns, as well as revisions of past concerns, as film moves through the 21st century. Through examples such as Minority Report, Mulholland Drive, Source Code, and Back to the Future, Elsaesser explores how mind-game films challenge us and play games with our perception of reality, creating skepticism and (self-) doubt. He also highlights the mind-game film’s tendency to intervene in a complex fashion in the political moment by questioning the dominant power’s intent to program both body and mind alike. Prescient and compelling, The Mind-Game Film will appeal to students, scholars, and enthusiasts of media studies, film studies, philosophy, and politics. Thomas Elsaesser was Professor Emeritus at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since 2013 until his passing in December 2019 he was Visiting Professor at Columbia University, USA, and from 2006 to 2012 he was Visiting Professor at Yale University, USA. Among his books as author are European Cinema and Continental Philosophy (2019), Film History as Media Archeology (2016), The Persistence of Hollywood (2012), Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (2010, 2015) co-authored with Malte Hagener, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (2005), Weimar Cinema and After (2000), Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (1996), and New German Cinema (1989).

THE MIND-GAME FILM Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology

Thomas Elsaesser Edited by Warren Buckland, Dana Polan, and Seung-hoon Jeong

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Thomas Elsaesser to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-415-96811-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-96812-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-87955-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

List of Contributors

vii

Prologue: Thomas Elsaesser and The Mind-Game Film Silvia Vega-Llona

1

The Mind-Game Film: Provenance of a Concept Warren Buckland

4

“Minding Hollywood” Dana Polan

11

Politicizing the Mind-Game Film Seung-hoon Jeong

16

1 On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points: The Challenges of Cinema in the New Century

23

2 Too Late, Too Soon: Body, Time, and Agency

72

3 The Mind-Game Film

89

4 Time Travel Films: An Ethics of Redemption, Rescue, and Regret

113

5 The New Normal – Trauma as Successfully Failed Communication (NURSE BETTY 2000)

146

6 Saving Private Ryan

168

vi

Contents

7 Philip K. Dick, the Mind-Game Film, and Retroactive Causality

187

8 Actions Have Consequences: Logics of the Mind-Game Film in David Lynch’s Los Angeles Trilogy

208

9 Zero Dark Thirty: Genre Hybridization as (Parapractic) Interference

224

10 Cinema and Games: Contingency as Our New Causality

245

11 Contingency, Causality, Complexity: Distributed Agency in the Mind-Game Film

260

12 The History of the Present as Paranoid Mind-Game

297

Index

311

CONTRIBUTORS

Silvia Vega-Llona is a trained anthropologist with clinical experience. She earned her PhD in Performance Studies at New York University, and her MA in Anthropology at University of California San Diego. She is Associate Teaching Professor at The New School University in the areas of visual culture, film theory, and documentary. Her current research focuses on Pre-Columbian Andean textiles, art objects and architecture, their influence on European Modernism, and on contemporary fashion, design, and photography. She is the author of Fear and Healing in the Global City (2005). Warren Buckland is Reader in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. His research interests include film theory, narratology, and contemporary American cinema. He co-wrote Studying Contemporary American Film with Thomas Elsaesser (2002), and is author of Wes Anderson’s Symbolic Storyworld (2019), Film Theory: Rational Reconstructions (2012), The Cognitive Semiotics of Film (2000), and is editor (with Daniel Fairfax) of Conversations with Christian Metz: Selected Interviews on Film Theory (1970–1991) (2017). Dana Polan is Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author of 10 books in film and television studies including, most recently, The LEGO Movie and the forthcoming Dreams of Flight: The Great Escape in American Film and Culture. Seung-hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at California State University Long Beach. He wrote Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media (2013), co-translated Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature into Korean (2013), co-edited The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema (2016),

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List of Contributors

guest-edited an issue of Studies in the Humanities, “Global East Asian Cinema: Abjection and Agency” (2019), and is writing Global Cinema: A Biopolitical and Ethical Reframing (2021).

PROLOGUE Thomas Elsaesser and The Mind-Game Film Silvia Vega-Llona

This posthumous volume The Mind-Game Film is the outcome of an epic life. Many of us played a role and had a part in Thomas’s global, playful, and adventurous journey; at the same time this didn’t come lightly. The rigor of his thinking, his constant meditation and observation of the world, from individuals to society, the arts, and the political sphere, his incisive analysis and counter-analysis didn’t allow his interlocutor to take things with indifference or distraction. One couldn’t get ‘offfocus’ when Thomas started a conversation because he encompassed multiple angles and contradictory arguments, which required our minds to be at play or in ‘game mode,’ always focused on experimenting with thoughts while acutely observing and analyzing the changes in our contemporary environment. He had a sense of humor and manifested exhilaration while discovering. His acuteness and care for the people near him and the planet in general were such that one could only become a better person, or at least a responsible thinker, by being next to him. I witnessed close-up the journey of The Mind-Game Film. It started in the early 2000s. It was around that time when Thomas had two established cities of residence – NYC and Amsterdam. It was film, yes, that sparked his ideas about the mind-game, but also, and of equal significance, were his observations on contemporary culture and society, the media landscape and studies on local and global politics, that made his work deeply connected with and to the new generations in the global sphere. His life in NYC played an important role as the scenario for his new ideas. A new form of humanity was breeding there, and he recorded it like an anthropologist, to then come ‘home’ to write his elaborate and conceptual insights. It didn’t stop there because he was constantly recontextualizing his ideas during his stays in other cities and continents. Thomas was invited to The Institute of Advanced Studies in Tel Aviv in 2003/ 2004. It was then when he started to lecture about productive pathologies, parapraxis

2 Prologue

and the new forms of trauma the protagonists performed in certain movies mostly at the turn of the millennium. His meditation was constant, not only with his colleagues and students but also by the seashore. Let me explain: I thought a swim would be reconstituting after long hours of research and lecturing, but even while swimming I was his interlocutor, he couldn’t stop thinking and testing his ideas. As someone who grew up by the seashore, I was supportive of this practice. The Greeks walked and talked, I thought. Thomas and I swam while having a conversation about his latest ideas. We then continued the evening with a Mediterranean meal and after dinner he would write down the ideas he had during our conversation at the sea. I am not claiming authorship; I listened and had observations about particular forms of behavior that he integrated into his thinking. I was the anthropologist with clinical experience, he was the theoretician with a vivid understanding of the new forms our humanity was taking within the political context and media landscape. He was also an erudite scholar, constantly studying and exploring. After his fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, he continued developing the mind-game theory during the seminar he conducted with the Cinema Europe group in Amsterdam. Then, from the Spring of 2006 until 2012 Thomas was visiting Professor at Yale, where he taught “Film Theory through the Senses,” “New American Cinema and Global Hollywood,” and “The Moving Image in the Museum.” During his years at Yale, the concept of the mind-game kept on being recontextualized and then he published ‘The Mind-Game Film’ in an anthology edited by Warren Buckland in 2009. At Yale he had some of the sharpest interlocutors amongst his students; I can recall Seung-hoon Jeong and Daniel Fairfax. From 2013 until his passing in 2019, Thomas was visiting Professor at Columbia University. It is in his lectures on the mind-game film at Columbia that we witness his latest groundbreaking ideas. In 2018 Thomas published ‘Contingency, Causality, Complexity: distributed agency in the mind-game film.’ Here he expanded the context with a new agenda as new issues were appearing. But even that was insufficient for Thomas. He pushed further, compelled to recontextualize the mind-game within the political. When he first passed on to me his notes of this latest development, while in our apartment by Washington Square in NYC, I thought Thomas was into something defining for our new decade. Thomas’s working methods were dynamic and exhausting; he wouldn’t stop until he felt the analysis was getting us (we, the community) into a path of explosive understanding. But it wouldn’t end there; as soon as we thought something was resolved he would move it forward and expand it. He kept on questioning and expanding almost non-stop. The Mind-Game Film book is the product of that working method that took place before, during, and after the seminars mostly at Yale and Columbia, but also during his lectures all over the world. We felt the necessity to finish the book. Three forces came together: Warren Buckland, Dana Polan, and Seung-hoon Jeong, everyone feeling the need that this coming to fruition should happen as soon as possible. First, Dana as the senior

Prologue 3

state master coordinating the entire editing process; Seung-hoon (who, to my request, flew from South Korea specially to teach Thomas’s “Mind-Game” at Columbia) and I got together at the Marlton in NYC, Thomas’s regular spot, and we gathered over 2,000 files plus the ones Warren had in Oxford. Soon after, I called Veronica Pravadelli and Lorenzo Marmo in Rome who generously forwarded the files they had for Corpi Conflicti nel Cinema Contemporaneo (2018), and Boaz Hagin in Tel Aviv with warmth sent a number of files for the book Trauma and Phantasy in American Cinema that he was (is) co-authoring with Thomas. As I mentioned earlier Thomas had an epic life. He cared deeply with a sense of responsibility and generosity for others: the principle of Le Don (The Gift, Marcel Mauss), I believe, is at the core of the completion of this book. He cared about his friends, about their ideas, artistic and scholarly accomplishments; he also cared about their children, love lives, and presence in the world. Thomas thought through carefully about how he could help to make their lives more complete and joyful as he was aware that it was a quite complex and difficult world, without losing his sense of cheerfulness while finding new ways of understanding and conceptualizing. He was never satisfied with one answer; life was a thought-experiment and as such it constantly needed testing and retesting. The colleagues and friends I mentioned along this opening account, their care, professionalism and generosity have been insurmountable. A labor of love, an act of reciprocity and respect. The process of finishing the book took place during the pandemic and the editors completed the book during the pandemic.

THE MIND-GAME FILM Provenance of a Concept Warren Buckland

During the 1990s I co-taught with Thomas Elsaesser on the MA Film Theory seminar at the University of Amsterdam. The seminar focused on contemporary American cinema; Thomas presented on classical/post-classical Hollywood, deconstruction, oedipal and post-oedipal narratives, feminism, Foucault, and Deleuze, amongst other topics, and I focused on mise-en-scène theory, statistical style analysis, thematic analysis, theories of narration, and video game logic. We collaborated on writing up our separate notes as a book. This took several years, but the co-authored volume eventually emerged under the title Studying Contemporary American Film in 2002.1 During this MA seminar both of us worked on post-classical cinema. At that time, Thomas defined post-classical films not in terms of an excess of spectacle and a diminishing role for narrative but as an excessive or self-referential classicism. Post-classical films are films that have mastered the codes of the classical, and they are not afraid to display this mastery as “play,” in the way they are able to absorb, transform, and appropriate also that which initially opposed the classical – be it other filmmaking traditions, such as European art cinema, Asian cinema, television advertising, or even video installation art …2 (See also Dana Polan’s Introduction in this volume.) However, during the 1990s a series of films challenged this conception of American post-classical cinema, a new type of filmmaking whose possibilities outstripped the post-classical – including Groundhog Day (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), 12 Monkeys (1995), Lost Highway (1997), Being John Malkovich (1999), eXistenZ (1999), Fight Club (1999), The Sixth Sense (1999), Memento (2000), Donnie Darko (2001), and Mulholland Drive (2001). I formulated my thoughts on these films around the narratological concept of the puzzle film, while Thomas

The Mind-Game Film 5

objected to the term “puzzle” and instead developed the broader concept of the mind-game film. At the same time, we expanded our scope to include the study of world cinema.3

The Mind-Game Film: 2006–2018 Thomas’s idea of the mind-game film crystallized in written form in 2006. His ideas came together in a keynote paper presented at the international Colloquium “Moving Images – The Morphing of the Real and Its Vicissitudes” held at Tel Aviv University on June 7–9, 2006.4 Thomas sent me the first draft as an attachment in an email dated 22 August 2006 to see if it would fit into my forthcoming Puzzle Films book: “here it is,” he wrote in the accompanying email, “not quite in the way I presented it in Tel Aviv, but with all the half-finished thoughts and repetitions of a spoken presentation. It will at least give you an idea whether (some of) it fits into your book.” He called the 14,000-word paper “Mind-game Movies: Tel Aviv Paper.” This 2006 paper begins with the well-known crises and symptoms created by the human/machine interface, in which machines are not only extensions of the human senses but also alter the senses, with cinema (the vision machine, the cinematic apparatus) extending but also altering our sense of memory and experience, as well as the boundary between public and private space. This leads to an anxiety over subjectivity and identity – specifically, the integrity of the body and the trustworthiness of the senses. These initial observations set the stage for the theory of the mind-game film. Thomas emphasized in this 2006 paper that the mind-game film covers mainstream, independent, and avant-garde films from across the globe with similar aspects of style, narrative, and character-interaction. They can be analyzed from multiple perspectives: narratology, psychology, history, politics, ontology. In this early formulation, he thought of mind-game films as complex hybrids of horror, science fiction, teen film, and film noir, in which fragments of these prior filmmaking trends interact with each other and are incorporated into the mind-game film. He formulated a list of the mind-game film’s features: (1) the protagonist (and spectator) participates in unusual events, whose structure does not follow cause– effect logic/linear progression; (2) a deluded protagonist who cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality (and their experience is shared with the spectator); (3) the protagonist has a friend who turns out to be imaginary; (4) the protagonist questions his/her own identity and existence; (5) the narrative undergoes a dramatic plot twist; (6) the protagonist is plagued by delusions about the disappearance of a child.5 The invariant core these six features share is the idea that mind-game films revolve around mentally unstable characters. In modernist narratives, for example, the stable center moved from the external narrator to the internal character – that is, shifted from the external all-knowing narrator to being focalized closely around the perceptions and

6 The Mind-Game Film

thoughts of characters embedded within the narrative. In mind-game films, this internal center is no longer stable. The pathologies of the mind-game protagonists include paranoia, schizophrenia, and amnesia (usually based on a traumatic past). These concepts are key to Thomas’s discussion of mind-game films, but what is most important is that he discusses them in terms of his central concept of “productive pathologies” (which features prominently in the current volume). Drawing upon Benjamin, Foucault, and Deleuze, Thomas argues that these pathologies are productive in that they are a response to a new symbolic order based on control societies – the individual’s adaptation to a “new world of flexible bio-power, multi-tasking and parallel processing, where long term memory, linear thinking and mono-causal chains of reasoning are all becoming if not ‘evolutionary’ disadvantages, then distinct drawbacks in the modern labour market.”6 He defined the mind-game film as a symptom of this new symbolic order, and these symptoms are manifest not only in pathological protagonists (especially in their bodies and experiences) but also in forms of textual organization that transcend the spatio-temporal limitations of a linear cause–effect narrative logic. The mind-game film’s new forms of textual organization point to one of its more general features: its critique of Western notions of knowledge and representation: [Mind-game films address] epistemological problems (how do we know what we know) and ontological doubts (about other worlds, other minds) that are in the mainstream of the kinds of philosophical inquiry … regarding multiple worlds, Plato’s parallel universes and post-Cartesian philosophies of mind, that is: the relation between body, matter, perception, self-reflection and inter-subjectivity.7 Mind-game films “work through” paradoxes of representation and paradoxes of time. In a paradox, if one part of a statement is true, the other part cannot be true. The time-loop paradox (such as the grandfather paradox, which Thomas discusses throughout this book) is a common paradox of time. In regard to paradoxes of representation, a representation makes present again, via resemblance or reproduction, something that is absent, or makes visible an intangible abstract object. But these meanings create paradoxes in that they present something that is not literally present, or they represent the unrepresentable, and even represent something that does not exist – in which a representation creates the illusion of a referent, one that does not exist but which the representation is purportedly imitating. “The Mind-Game Film,” the revised conference paper published in Puzzle Films in 2009 and reprinted in this volume (Chapter 3), addresses many of these issues again – in particular: complex storytelling (investigated through the concepts of the “database,” “narrative logic” and “game logic”); the idea of identity crises (paranoia, schizophrenia, amnesia) as “productive pathologies”; and the

The Mind-Game Film 7

social uses of mind-game films that function either as forms of “discipline and control” or to “teach and train.” Thomas emphasizes that the mind-game film is not a genre, but a mode or tendency in contemporary world cinema, and he lists the six common features he first formulated in the 2006 Tel Aviv paper. He also expands upon the words “mind” and “game” to pinpoint what meanings refer to the mind-game film. “Game” operates at two levels – films in which a character is subjected to a game, and films in which the spectator is subjected to a game (the same film can embody both types). “Mind” also operates on the same two levels – characters suffer from unstable identities, and their unpredictable view of the world is conveyed to spectators as the film’s norm. What is distinctive about the mind-game film is that the spectator becomes caught up in the game and in the character’s unstable mind. The spectator’s positioning is therefore key to the mind-game film. In the 2009 chapter (Chapter 3 of the current volume), Thomas framed his conception of the mind-game film in terms of a crisis in the traditional filmspectator contract: As such, mind-game films could be seen as indicative of a “crisis” in the spectator—film relation, in the sense that the traditional “suspension of disbelief” or the classical spectator positions of “voyeur,” “witness,” “observer” and their related cinematic regimes or techniques (point-of-view shot, “suture,” restricted/omniscient narration, “fly on the wall” transparency, mise-en-scène of the long take/depth of field) are no longer deemed appropriate, compelling, or challenging enough. The traditional film-spectator contract creates a stable subject-position and a reliable form of narration from which to view (the illusion of) a spatio-temporally unified, enclosed, fixed, autonomous, linear diegesis. In place of this traditional subjective position, mind-game films create a new film-spectator contract via “unreliable narrators, the multiple timelines, unusual point of view structures, unmarked flashbacks, problems in focalization and perspectivism, unexpected causal reversals and narrative loops” and the “insistence on temporality as a separate dimension of consciousness and identity, the play on non-linear sequence or inverted causality, on chance and contingency, on synchronicity and simultaneity and their effects on characters, agency, and human relations” (Chapter 3). This new film-spectator contract expresses changes brought about by contemporary control societies, in which individuals need to adapt to a new social order that is under continual surveillance and constant change, which requires cognitive skills such as multi-tasking and parallel processing, and where data is organized nonlinearly in databases and networks. Within this new environment, cognitive skills limited to linear cause–effect reasoning that search for a singular, fixed, permanent meaning are distinct drawbacks.

8 The Mind-Game Film

Due to the success of the puzzle film book, I decided to edit a sequel, called Hollywood Puzzle Films.8 I again approached Thomas to contribute. In an email dated August 5, 2013, he wrote: “Personally, I am fascinated by the phenomenon of ‘retroactive anticipation,’ i.e. the loop where something is recognized in the present as having been anticipated in the past, which is, of course, an effect created in the present in order to make the past enable or empower the present.” He suggested analyzing retroactive anticipation in the many Hollywood adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s fiction, for Dick not only predicted the post-World War II surveillance state, his productively pathological characters also demonstrate how to survive and thrive within it. In November of the same year we were both invited to present keynotes at the conference “Film, Virtuality, and the Body” in Rome,9 where Thomas updated me on his chapter, now called “Philip K. Dick, The Mind-Game Film, and Retroactive Causality.” It was published in Hollywood Puzzle Films in 2014 and is reproduced in this volume (Chapter 7). A few years after completing this extraordinary essay on Philip K. Dick, Thomas began rethinking his conception of the mind-game film. He gradually reworked his ideas via “distributed agency” (a concept he mentioned in his Philip K. Dick chapter). He presented the paper at the conference “Fast, Slow & Reverse: Faces of Contemporary Film Narration: Around Mainstream Cinema,” in Gdan´sk, May 24–25, 2017 (where both of us were again invited to give keynote presentations).10 He published the final version in 2018 under the title “Contingency, Causality, Complexity: Distributed Agency in The Mind-Game Film”11 (published here as Chapter 11). Thomas argues that the mind-game film replaces the “autonomous subject”/“split subject” dichotomy with a new and more complex type of agency and subjectivity: mind-game films gravitate around one central issue: dismantling both the sovereign subject and its antidote, the divided self of modern subjectivity, in view of accepting more complex but also self-contradictory, more limited but also more extended forms of agency. (Chapter 11) In the 2009 chapter, Thomas used the term “productive pathology” to characterize non-normative subjectivities within control societies. In the 2018 essay, Thomas retains the term but theorizes it within the broader context of its relational and interdependent position within networks – that is, as a form of distributed agency. This, in turn, necessitated the development of a complex network of concepts, which Thomas spelled out in the essay’s abstract: (1) multiple universes, (2) multiple temporalities, (3) causality between coincidence and conjunction, (4) feedback: looped and retroactive causalities, (5) mise-en-abyme constructions, (6) the observer as part of the observed, (7) living with contradictions, (8) imaginary resolutions no longer dissolve real contradictions, (9) antagonistic mutuality under conditions of distributed agency, (10) agency – with the self, against the self, (11) time travel films as black boxes and (12) the mind-game film as pharmakon.12

The Mind-Game Film 9

It is difficult to single out individual concepts because they are so well integrated. But I shall simply highlight in passing features (7) and (8), which return us to the mindgame’s starting point – its difference from both classical and post-classical cinema. In the 1970s, a number of film scholars studied film from the perspective of myth, as theorized by Claude Lévi-Strauss.13 Lévi-Strauss identified the structure and function of myths, focusing on how they operate as a form of symbolic reasoning that progressively resolves on an imaginary level real human contradictions and mysteries (concerning life/death, born from one/born from two, etc.). Film scholars similarly analyzed mainstream films as symbolic texts that present an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. Thomas argues that the mind-game film does not function in the same way: The main point to stress, however, is that whereas classical Hollywood sees the world as a set of problems, to which one applies solutions, the mind-game film is more likely to see the world as full of dilemmas, which one can explore and probe, but to which one cannot apply or even invent solutions. (Chapter 11) The mind-game film does not present an imaginary resolution of real contradictions but exacerbates those contradictions: the contradictions are not resolved, but remain deadlocked. (However, we can distinguish between “authentic” mind-game films, where the dilemma is foregrounded and remains unresolved, and mind-game films – usually made in Hollywood – that tend to compromise by providing some type of resolution.) This, incidentally, explains Thomas’s aversion to the term “puzzle film,” for it suggests a solution to a problem: the term puzzle film already assumes as given what might actually be the key stake at issue, namely whether we are dealing with a puzzle that has a solution, in contrast to, perhaps, a film posing a dilemma, for which there is no solution as such. (Chapter 11) For Thomas, mind-game films do not solve a problem by unpacking a puzzle, but contain unresolvable dilemmas and contradictions that they do not pretend to unravel and decipher. Thomas tackled the mind-game film again in 2019 in a series of papers published in this volume for the first time, including “On Mind Game Films as Tipping Points” (Chapter 1) and “The History of the Present as Paranoid Mind-Game” (Chapter 12). Seung-hoon Jeong discusses these in more detail in his Introduction.

Notes 1 Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (London: Arnold; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

10 The Mind-Game Film

2 Ibid., p. 79. 3 Warren Buckland, ed., Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Thomas Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film,” in Puzzle Films, 13–41 (which I shall call the “2009 version”). 4 https://www.openu.ac.il/events/070706.html 5 Ibid., 6–7 (the list remains the same in the 2009 version). 6 “Mind-game Movies: Tel Aviv Paper,” p. 19. 7 “Mind-game Movies: Tel Aviv Paper,” p. 5. A shortened version of this statement appears in “The Mind-Game Film” (the 2009 version, p. 15; and Chapter 3 of the current volume). 8 Warren Buckland, ed., Hollywood Puzzle Films (New York: Routledge, 2014). 9 “Film, Virtuality, and the Body” conference, Università Roma Tre, 26–28 November 2013. 10 https://fil.ug.edu.pl/media/promowane/65207/miedzynarodowa_konferencja_fast_slow_ reverse_faces_contemporary_film_narration 11 “Contingency, Causality, Complexity: Distributed Agency in the Mind-Game Film,” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 16, no. 1 (2018), 1–39. 12 Ibid., p. 1 (the abstract is not reproduced in this volume). What the abstract does not spell out is Thomas’s integration of the concept of embodiment in his rethinking of the mind-game film: “An element overlooked or under-emphasized in my 2009 essay was the nature of embodiment, indeed the very status of a (human) body in mindgame films” (Chapter 11). In the mind-game film the rational mind of protagonists is in fact downplayed and their somatic body takes precedence (Chapter 11). For a significant development of an embodied theory of the mind-game film, see Simin Nina Littschwager, Making Sense of Mind-Game Films: Narrative Complexity, Embodiment, and the Senses (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). 13 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 206–31.

“MINDING HOLLYWOOD” Dana Polan

As the reader of the packed pages of this book by Thomas Elsaesser will quickly discover, Thomas was quite enamored of critical concepts, and of tight terms to give name to them, that often are about holding ostensibly contradictory attitudes together, yet showing that contradiction is also complementariness and fruitful complexity. Think, for instance, of the role of the idea of ‘productive pathologies,’ so productive itself in the following pages as it unveils what appears to be a liability flipping over into quite effective promise and potential, especially for subjects of modernity – and this might describe many if not all of us! – whose apparent pathological conditions can reveal themselves ultimately as so many strategies of coping, resisting and revising, and challenging the political status quo. In this respect, one terminological field I find particularly salient in Thomas’s work is that of ‘double occupancy,’ itself occupied with many resonances but suggesting generally the yoking together in one phenomenon (a cultural practice, say, or, equally, a theoretical model adequate to understanding that practice) of disparate and even conflictual values, existing then at one and the same time and in one and the same place. Think here, for instance, of the very idea of ‘Hollywood,’ as it runs from Thomas’s earliest writings on cinema – an engagement well chronicled at the beginning of his aptly named The Persistence of Hollywood (Routledge, 2012) – up to the present, posthumous volume. ‘Hollywood,’ as Thomas chronicled it, is not only the ‘classical’ or the ‘post-classical’ but the two together and not only across time (the ‘post’ as the ‘after’ to the ‘classical’) but often (or perhaps always?) in a single and singular time. Thus, in an earlier book on American cinema that he co-authored with Warren Buckland, Thomas makes multiple passes at the action film Die Hard, changing method and angle of approach to capture (among other aspects of ‘double occupancy’) how the film is both classically tight (lots of narrative economy),

12 “Minding Hollywood”

character-driven, caught up in meaningful character growth, organized around a central conflict, and so on and so on, even as it’s also about play, surface (lots of breaking glass), disarming humor that undoes its own narrativity, and so on and so on. ‘Hollywood’ persists through all the changes of history – indeed, referencing the idea of ‘feedback,’ as he does in the current volume, Thomas goes so far as to suggest that Hollywood persists because of changes, taking each new challenge as a way of being tested and then expanding its reach – and that persistence is also its persistence in Thomas’s own writings, across decades: a never-flagging sense, from his early breakthrough writings on genres, such as melodrama, and on energetic auteurs, such as Nick Ray or Sam Fuller, that Hollywood in all its movement and meanderings needs to be accounted for and needs for that accounting interpretive models that are doubly, if not even more multiply, occupied. Hollywood, as he chronicles it, is an economic and industrial phenomenon, an anthropology of America (but also a critique, through style and the sheer energy of action, of mainstream American values), a stylistics and a narrative force, and, among other proliferating ideas, a seismograph (as he calls it in the present volume) that registers proximate transitions in the business of moving images as well as broader transformations in American life – and American media-saturated life (if not the global life of humanity) – more generally. In this spirit, but in no way imagining I can aspire to Thomas’s level of productive complexity, I intend the title of this short essay, “Minding Hollywood,” to itself be occupied multiply by diverse, overlapping or intersecting resonances. Minimally, there’s the sense that, as we see from his earliest writings to this late, last book, Hollywood was something that Thomas knew he (and we) had clearly to pay attention to: just like ‘minding the shop,’ say, Hollywood’s complex history had to be paid mind to, analyzed for its complex, even convoluted, place in our social, cultural, existential life. But maybe there was also the sense of being bothered (‘Do you mind?’ ‘Yes, I do mind’): the Hollywood cinema as our great popular culture, one worth devoting one’s life to as Thomas admits in the opening autobiographical pages of The Persistence of Hollywood, but also one worth questioning – as would happen from within by those energetic auteurs who, insofar as they reflected a “psychosocial element of affect, energy and emotion,” constructed a cinema that stood as “an immanent critique of American ideology” (Persistence, p. 5; emphasis Thomas’s) but also from without by the critic (Thomas himself) who would turn to anthropology to see Hollywood as the site in which dominant mythologies of American existence, such as the questing male hero, were formulated and forged. As he puts it in Chapter 9 (on Zero Dark Thirty) of the present volume, Genres are the traditional narrative and formal vehicles by which nations or communities conduct their own internal dialogue with themselves and their members, testing the norms and limits of what is acceptable and what transgressive, thereby creating the sort of negotiated consensus which Claude Lévi-Strauss formulated as the function of myths, when he called them ‘the imaginary resolution of real contradictions.’

“Minding Hollywood” 13

These multiple meanings to Hollywood entail the necessity of multiple critical models. As Thomas puts it early in The Persistence of Hollywood, he is working to establish “frameworks” that will help us understand the formal features as well as the historical dynamics that allow Hollywood to be in constant change and yet stay the same, to be the most adaptive and the most conservative, the most revolutionary and the most conservative force in global culture: a perplexing and paradoxical anthropological phenomenon that will never have been studied enough. (7) Stasis, change. Change itself as one of the ways Hollywood maintains its power, even a stable presence in the media landscape fostered through that very change. It is here, as the present volume demonstrates in depth, that the mind-game film, although only one phenomenon among others in the newest New Hollywood, has an essential role to play – and is essentially symptomatic of the present moment, both within the movements of media culture and without in the larger convulsions of truth and post-truth in our complicated, complex, contradictory political moment. It is in this respect that I intend one more meaning to the notion of ‘minding Hollywood.’ This would take ‘minding’ to be an active verb – the imparting of mind, of the processes of mentation, to at least this iteration, the mind-game film, of Hollywood cinema. To encourage us to think of Hollywood films as themselves mechanisms of thinking is an idea that runs through Thomas’s work: it’s there, for instance, as far back as his first dealings with those auteurs (Nicholas Ray, for instance, or Sam Fuller or, in a different register Vincente Minnelli) who, as Thomas sees it, built worlds and epistemologies to go with those worlds but, also, in so doing, offered conscious and critical cognition around more conservative world-building in the mainstream of the Hollywood system; it’s there in the general philosophy of film that Thomas and co-author Malte Hagener fashion step by step in their guide to film theory (Film Theory through the Senses) where the ‘through’ of their subtitle can seem less to mean something like ‘by means of’ than voyaging ‘through’ successive stages of sensory impact that move ultimately (but it’s not a one-way street) from the surface of the body to the interiority of mind; it’s there in Thomas’s growing interest in giving the name ‘thought-experiment’ to something he assumed films always were but which became more evident in postmodern times; and it’s there in Thomas’s interest in the mind-game film (which he simultaneously names as less consequential for Hollywood as a business than other of its practices but also treats as a veritable research arm of the industry). At the same time, it is important to note that, in his brand of dialectical thinking, intellectual activity doesn’t mean that more sensuous levels of affect in our response to film are superseded and don’t also have their role (including a political one) to play. In Chapter 11, in particular, what Thomas pointedly terms “film’s therapeutic and pedagogical dimensions” work beyond intellect alone and offer forms of

14 “Minding Hollywood”

intuitive understanding [that] reinstates the dignity of the everyday, the resistance of the material, the intimacy of the sensuous, but also gives the fleeting and ephemeral ‘evidence and presence.’ Cinema thus becomes a form of apprehending the world: thereby complementing comprehension as legitimate forms of acquiring knowledge and adding ‘pathos’ to ‘logos.’ If films (some or all) are experiments in affect and in thought (some conformist, some moving the industry and the spectator along with it into new directions), the status and role of fictional thought in the real world then needs to be raised: if films (and other forms of narrative: we are reminded in the present volume – even to the extent of his citing his doctoral thesis on Michelet and Carlyle – that Thomas’s first studies were literary) offer us thoughts that we can experiment with, do we do so only in some safe space of ‘play,’ or does playing itself tip out of the fiction and have real world impacts? The question becomes moral as much as aesthetic, and it is far from unplanned that Thomas’s Mind-Game book ends with politics as much as fiction. To take just one example, when Thomas tells us in Chapter 8, on David Lynch’s so-called LA trilogy, that “what Lynch is demonstrating is that in a world where multiple identities, sitcom lives and self-empowering fantasies are part of the flow of the everyday (into which, not least thanks to movies, music and other media, we are individually and collectively immersed), the laws and logics of consequence still obtain,” we might recognize: that, first, there’s an insistence here that films as textually complicated as Lynch’s can still serve as acts of ‘demonstrating’ (and maybe doing so in fact because of their textual complications); that, second, life and art, as a privileged arena within life, are here recognized not as opposed but imbricated (media teach us a new everydayness and accustom us to its multiplicities and fantasies and so on); that, third, because of this, fictions do have consequences (an idea essential to the Lynch chapter, and indeed to the entire book) and bear ties to real-life laws and logics even as they might imagine playing with them. As Thomas puts it later in the same chapter, “mind-games are a phenomenon that spectators recognize as relevant to their own lives: they identify with worlds that are predicated on contingency, but where actions do have consequences, nonetheless.” This is not an appeal to some sort of premediatized authenticity (‘authenticity’ is itself deconstructed in a chapter on Saving Private Ryan and how that film actually creates its immersive sense of being right there in D-Day through both digitalization and a canny revisiting of photos and other nostalgia media from the past). And it’s not exactly the same, as Thomas insists at one point, as Brechtian distanciation which operates by putting us outside the work of art by judging it directly against political realities that lie beyond art: “not exactly the same,” since Thomas’s gambit is to eschew the inside/outside distinction and look inward at the aesthetic operations themselves as a commentative complication of politics from within. As Thomas puts it, the mind-game film proceeds

“Minding Hollywood” 15

not in the manner of a Brechtian alienation effect or by deconstructing ‘narrative’ in the manner of the 1970s avant-garde, but by deploying inherently filmic means that make open-endedness and undecidability (as ways of staging the impossibility of solutions) both pleasurable and intriguing enough to keep the spectator engaged. It’s the very confusions and complications within the aesthetic text that can, as he says, “reveal political dilemmas, ideological divides and ethical ambiguities that constitute or embody an important truth about the United States, its self-image and its ‘political unconscious.’” To take just one example, Thomas trenchantly argues that the genre-mixings within Zero Dark Thirty make the film into a work that offers no simple take on politics and that in that is itself saying something about the complexities of politics. In his words, “The ideological function [of Hollywood film] is also severely challenged by the perceptual irritants, leaps of logic and general undecidability that the spectator has to contend with and make sense of,” and it’s the word ‘irritant’ that stands out for me here. Zero Dark Thirty is, for instance, irritated from within by the viruses of genre impurity, and this causes slippages between and within aesthetics and politics. What this means in terms of any direct activist program we might take from Thomas’s book remains open-ended: it is, to my mind, revealing that several of the chapters in this book end with interrogation – question marks, literally – and that the final chapter “finishes” with a “provisional” conclusion. And I say ‘to my mind’ deliberately since it’s finally up to the reader (myself and others) to work through the issues and make some consequential decisions about art and action. Writing up through some pretty challenging political times (to say the least), as the last chapter especially bears out, Thomas was clearly trying to negotiate the potential political bleakness of our times and a possible set of roles for art within them. And his book calls upon us to do that also, in our ways, in our own lives. Personally, I’ve long been quite taken with the famous phrase of Gramsci, “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will,” which in the bleakest moments can seem to have flip-flopped, with pessimism gaining for a time (how long?) the upper hand. Maybe, though, Thomas’s packed book holds out another dialectical twist here: the very fact that intellectual work persists – the very fact that in this specific case of an intellectual (Thomas) who energetically was discussing and lecturing until the very last minute, intellect thrives with energy and enthusiasm – shows how mind can persist and serve as enlightening inspiration in even dank and dour times.

POLITICIZING THE MIND-GAME FILM Seung-hoon Jeong

The mind-game film study is Thomas Elsaesser’s pioneering project for which, among others, he did want to be remembered in academia as far as I can tell. He adopted the notion of mind-game to explore the trend of complex narratives in his uniquely multilayered, cross-methodological frame. His hermeneutic fever never stopped at the narratological level of solving what Warren Buckland termed “puzzle films,” not least because the crux of the mind-game film lies in its potential to be unresolvable, as Warren’s introduction in this book also points out. ‘Constructively instable’ with fascinating dilemmas, this potential is interpreted and over-determined through Thomas’s psychoanalytic text analyses, allegorical readings of the film industry, renewed studies of genres and auteurs, and philosophical reflections on socio-cultural changes, which all resonate with some paradigm shifts in understanding human mind (subjectivity) and reality (society). In this sense, the way Hollywood offers “access for all” while “keeping control” of ambiguity and contingency, which Thomas sees the mind-game film exemplifies, characterizes his approach to it as well. His research mirrors its very object. As his favorite time travel films reflect the observer-observed interaction in modern physics, his long-developed mind-game film study now appears like a labyrinthine multiverse of critical mind-games and their palimpsestic updates. Then, how could we trace Thomas’s “thought experiments”? I suggest doing so in the overall direction from cinema to reality as also noted in Dana Polan’s introduction, given Thomas’s ultimate question posed to film studies: no longer ‘what is cinema?’ or ‘when/where is it?’ but ‘what is cinema good for?’ (Chapter 10).1 Why and how is it still worth seeing and studying in a world taken over by post-cinematic media and post-truth simulacra? Here, Thomas claims that cinematic mind-games maximize post-classical Hollywood’s ambivalent engagement in today’s world order while embodying and problematizing its neoliberal

Politicizing the Mind-Game Film 17

ideology and virtual technology, thereby helping adapt to and see through its flexible control and media effects. To paraphrase “Always historicize!” – the slogan of Fredric Jameson, whom Thomas often quotes – we could thus find cinema useful by ‘always politicizing’ it. However, Thomas does not dream of utopian alternatives already exhausted in our post-political age when power serves money, media engulfs reality, and history becomes databases. What can be political instead is to richly reflect on the deterioration of politics, critically appropriate new modes of agency, and cognitively map this global system full of deadlocks at least not to be defeated by it. Thought-experiments that mind-game films invite us to do, in Thomas’s view, empower us to persevere in this suspended time between the past political age and an as yet unseen future. Let me begin as follows. This temporality of being in limbo is palpable in contemporary cinema, but even in classical film noir whose hero finds himself “too late to recover, and too soon to expire, existing in the negative ‘now’ of suspended animation” (Chapter 2). He lives like the undead, stuck in a sort of post-catastrophic situation that allows neither action nor closure. In post-classical neo-noir, a traumatic event causing its hero’s symbolic death remains an excess of limit experience inassimilable into organic time and discourse, thus making him “play dead” to emotions (“It hurts so much, I cannot feel a thing”). However, Thomas perceives in unsolvable traumas “a new ‘economy of experience’: its shortcuts, blackouts and gaps are what saves the self from an otherwise ruinous psychic investment in the multitude of events observed, of human being encountered, of disasters and injustices witnessed.” Trauma then serves as “a ‘solution’ to a problem yet to be specified” or “located elsewhere.” Interestingly, post-classical cinema often stages imaginary problems that reactivate the classical action narrative to fix them but leaves subtle gaffes, slips, and holes that inspire conflicting views. The hero’s broken sensorimotor system is recovered in the American ‘movement-image,’ not radicalized as in the European ‘time-image,’ while something post-classical emerges nonetheless. Telling are films about ‘saving public America’ from its historical traumas such as race, the Vietnam War, and 9/11, and Thomas scrutinizes them in several chapters, including one dedicated to Saving Private Ryan (Chapter 6). Though not a mind-game film per se, this Spielberg blockbuster stimulates Thomas’s typical Freudian reading of “parapraxis”: the successful but “wasteful” mission to save Ryan during World War II disguises yet evokes “a much more valuable rescue not having been undertaken: the saving of the Jews.” What lies under the film’s surface, “like a watermark or a palimpsest,” is thus Spielberg’s ethnic coming-out project Schindler’s List. We could then ask: what if American soldiers, not only a German industrialist, indeed saved the Jews? Such a ‘what-if’ scenario of hypothetically realizing a failed historical redemption materializes partly in Argo (Chapter 1). Based on the real story of rescuing six Americans from Iran in 1979, the film virtually overdramatizes American heroism assisted by Hollywood at the cost of strong international collaboration and digitally stitches up the traumatic memory of the yearlong hostage crisis

18 Politicizing the Mind-Game Film

with a speedy tale of a small victory. This focus shift to alter historical perception is the whole point for Thomas. Trauma requires not the classical therapy of working through or acting out, but “a digital Band-Aid” on the nation’s wounded pride to be “photo-shopped out.” Argo, if not a mind-game film, plays mind-games with history in this way, allowing Hollywood to celebrate itself and reinforcing “the standard trope of American war films: ‘let no man be left behind,’ i.e., rescue the boys and bringing them home.” Thomas’s lengthy genealogy of time travel films in Chapter 4 illuminates this ideological maneuver performed in the sci-fi genre. Time is reversed, he says, to complete the “unfinished business” of restoring America’s self-image, turning the hypothetical “what if” into the optative “if only,” the modality of regret for a past failure of redemption. Admittedly, time travelers often do not change but keep their past, thereby avoiding the grandfather paradox inherent in time travel. But it is crucial that time travel enables them to reconstruct the past as it happened while changing our perception of it. For instance, the 1980s teenager in Back to the Future assumes Chuck Berry’s patrimony during his travel to the 1950s in the way of reclaiming (black) rock ‘n’ roll for the white male “by re-fathering it, so to speak, by inventing it a second time, in a gesture of appropriation, narratively disguised as a double last minute rescue” of his future parents’ romance and the band at their prom. In other words, time travel was needed to redefine white America’s debt to black music as the former’s gift to the latter. This reversal of causality acknowledges and integrates black culture into mainstream America, adapting the mission of rescue to liberal yet still white-centric cultural politics.2 Here, Thomas enriches the Freudian idea of “retroactive causality” to examine how time travel creates a causal loop where the effect causes its own cause or even injects a new cause back into the past, thus nurturing mind-game motifs such as alternative history, butterfly effect, and parallel world. Retroaction becomes more radical when action heroes go back in time to stop a disaster that has already happened. The post-catastrophic redemption narrative in the disaster genre then turns into pre-catastrophic prevention, but often involving another complexity level, as shows Thomas’s reading of Twelve Monkeys. Its causal loop paradox is that the hero has to find “the cause of which his appearance is the effect” while unwittingly triggering the bioterror attack he must investigate. The resolution is “to die and therefore neutralize the agency that caused the cataclysmic consequences he was hoping to prevent.” The traumatic scene of his younger self witnessing his future death, then, visualizes “a special sort of in-action-as-action.” Here comes back the sense of suspended temporality; the past into which he jumps to overcome the frozen present is just another futile present, symptomatic of the collapse of the symbolic order (no law, no authority). Nevertheless, the hero “helps the events ‘realize’ themselves” as if to “become his own begetter” when no oedipal father secures him. For Thomas, this post-oedipal self-making agency signals “the freedom of time travel” within determinism. And it is this paradoxical freedom that unexpectedly allows his death to take on self-sacrifice,

Politicizing the Mind-Game Film 19

thanks to which a scientist from the future approaches the virus (poison) to develop a cure (gift) and rescue humanity in the end. Post-9/11 action thrillers about the War on Terror – the kernel of the time travel mind-game film – maximize both potentialities and dilemmas of this sacrificial agency. In Chapters 1, 4, and 11, Thomas explores Déjà Vu (an ATF agent travels back in time to prevent a ferry explosion recalling the Oklahoma City bombing and the post-Katrina devastation) and Source Code (an army pilot relives the last minutes of a passenger in a bombed Chicago commuter train over and over until finding the bomber). What operates these counterterror missions is no longer “the old can-do macho action hero posture” but agency refigured in “retroactive, posthumous and even post-mortem forms.” Its core affect is less resentment characterized in the slogan of ‘Make America Great Again’ than regret for not having prevented the trauma of terrorism typified on 9/11 (Chapter 4). If fiction in general unfolds in the “as-if” mode of narration, the mind-game film plays the hypothetical “what-if” of thought-experiments and, again, the time travel subgenre is driven explicitly by the optative “if-only” of regret and “its wish-fulfilling fantasies of undoing what has been done” (Chapter 1). The thing is that this retroaction is not neatly sutured into happy closure but entails side effects of sovereign power. In Déjà Vu, the agent’s guilt for spying on a woman through a Time Window changes into his love for her and desire to rescue her, which legitimizes “illegal, unauthorized but state-sponsored ubiquitous surveillance” (Chapter 4). Source Code updates this supralegal justification of the “dark state,” militarization of civilian life, and ideological contraband (Chapter 1). Its hero in a coma, thus symbolically dead, is drafted into the eponymous time-reassigning program that sends his mind into a virtual loop of the past, where his borrowed body has to die and repeatedly resurrect, thus never dying but only replaying a traumatic serial game. While such a video-game logic peaks in Inception as Thomas and other scholars discuss, it may be the Dark Knight series in the filmography of Christopher Nolan – a leading mind-game film auteur – that resonates with Source Code when it comes to justifying and questioning the sovereign system and agency. The system reformats an abject figure as a sovereign agent only to eternally exploit his undead problem-solving skills for the sake of the system itself rather than people. Moreover, let me emphasize that his self-sacrifice made of his free will itself is ‘undone’ along with the train explosion; it annihilates the entire virtual loop and launches a new actual world where he, still alive though comatose, is waiting for the first call from the Source Code yet to be used. It thus seems that the film does not resolve the terror-counterterror cycle but rather takes it as an unsolvable ‘new normal’ and prepares for its re-run by creating agency that can embrace and reinforce itself in action-for-mission without any need for memory or sacrifice.3 Perhaps this sci-fi imagination ‘premediates’ the direction that today’s world would take in feasible ways though time travel is impossible. Far from being too fictive, time travel films indeed epitomize the global regime’s modus operandi of controlling contingent threats and managing uncertain risks through hi-tech

20 Politicizing the Mind-Game Film

media and security measures. As Thomas asserts that mind-game films provide imaginary solutions to real contradictions yet also betray that there are no real solutions except formal, ludic ones like time travel (Chapter 11), what matters is thus reality as such full of contradictions: the vicious cycle of (war on) terror never-ending, ‘control societies’ reshaping all aspects of life as free, neoliberal capitalism co-opting whatever resistance flexibly, and the like. No wonder the life lesson of the mind-game film for Thomas is “living with contradictions,” reacting or adapting to their affects and traumas, and inventing or internalizing survival strategies from this experience. He formulates this new mode of subjectivity throughout this book in terms of “productive pathology” and “distributed agency,” as discussed in the two other introductions. Let me briefly compare two female protagonists in this regard. The CIA agent obsessively pursuing Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty represents “a society of moving towards ‘data-mining’ all its vital areas of social life and human existence” (Chapter 9). It is a post-political society where democracy is handed over to technocracy, and history is reduced to data extracted from the past and projected into “a future we inadvertently empty of possibility, of contingency, and radical change (and therefore pre-empt and prevent).” Addicted to data-mining, patterrecognition, and risk-assessment, the agent embodies the procedural and even looks like an automaton, “the human face on the Turing machine.” On the contrary, Nurse Betty reflects another type of addiction (Chapter 5). A massive fan of TV dramas, the heroine shifts from her reality traumatized to her favorite soap opera world under a delusion, but this fantasy evolves into a new reality happily shared with others. Her “sensory overload” with media stimuli and “post-traumatic symptoms” serve as “adaptive responses” to forces of disorder and positive feedback loops. As Thomas puts, addiction to media thus becomes the addict’s own “antibodies, homeopathy, and the pharmakon.” Reality is, however, not like a single TV serial but a rhizomatic network of games, “the site of simultaneous, multi-directional, reciprocal, recursive, and looped interactions” (Chapter 10). Similarly, today’s cinema is driven by “‘distributed,’ antagonistic and yet interdependent forces” in Thomas’s view, also “teaching its audiences new rules while it is simultaneously learning these rules itself.” By extension, chaos theory teaches how undecidable phenomena are still intelligible (Chapter 1). The chaotic mind-game film is, I say, a sort of ‘interface’ through which to access complexities more intelligibly. It works as an empowering, addictive platform for learning. It injects faith in science as today’s God by displaying magical devices for memory erasure, dream stealing, and time-warps. It channels our world system into our agency, “keeping and relinquishing control.” While this control is the key to Hollywood’s management of the unpredictable film market and industry as Thomas elaborates, let’s not miss its Deleuzian implication: we are controlled to believe that we control ourselves, but we also learn about this control society and our agency through mind-game films.

Politicizing the Mind-Game Film 21

All these dilemmas indicate historical paradigm shifts. In Thomas’s expression, we are “at the tipping point of epistemes” measured by Renaissance perspective, Cartesian reason, Western Modernity, digitalization, post-humanism, and the Anthropocene (Chapter 1). That is, we are in an uncertain time. Even Philip K. Dick’s futuristic sci-fi imagination refers us back to the here and now of our reality (Chapter 7). As in A Scanner Darkly, Thomas sees “the post-Cartesian self” whose interiority is replaced by “media images and pop culture fantasies” like drugs. Its “distributed subjectivity” lacks even “the ‘lack’ of oedipal identity (i.e., symbolic castration)” as there is no father figure, ideal or evil superego even to resist. Just like the godless, self-indulging ‘last man’ in Nietzsche, this post-political subject is addicted to the perpetual present of hedonistic consumerism and confined in the relentless reification of human relations after the so-called ‘End of History.’ We must be on the “untranscendable horizon of capitalism,” and our ambivalent agency might be “stuck in a ‘frozen dialectic’ of our own making.” In this regard, it is significant that Chapter 12 closes the book by highlighting not a mind-game fiction but a documentary about today’s post-political reality itself playing mind-games. Adam Curtis’s HyperNormalisation looks indeed like a film version of Thomas’s mind-game theory. It traces how financial capitalism has replaced governance, the common good, and human decency with algorithms, rumors, and big data, and how the world economy has consequently become irrational, sociopathic, volatile yet dynamic like “a Grand Las Vegas casino,” where very few players hit the jackpot by moving fictitious money globally and electronically. Paired with the US foreign policy of “constructive instability,” this neoliberal system has turned politicians into “complexity-reduction managers, spinning either simplistic or totally fake versions of reality, stage-managed by playing on people’s fear, anger and resentment.” That is, politics gives way to risk management for the status quo and a “pantomime theatre” for “a constantly shifting narrative with new heroes and villains.” This post-political theatre causes “hypernormalisation”: the state-created media effect that makes you resigned to maintain the pretense of a functioning system and not see its beyond. As Vladimir Putin does, power can even keep any opposition “constantly confused” on media so that you cannot distinguish between true and false or do not even care about what is real or fake. This “perception management” peaks in Donald Trump’s “twitter storm, scandalous speech or 180 degree policy turnaround.” Interestingly, I add, he is now treated like the Boy Who Cried Wolf just as his COVID-19 infection is suspected to be a hoax. A related New York Times article reads like a critique of his tiring mind-game play: people have heard “a warp-speed whiplash of conflicting realities” so that “nobody believes anything”; he is spreading “the virus of casting doubt” on any information; his people have “not historically been reliable narrators”; he stages “a political stunt to redirect attention”; in a word, he is “gaming.”4 Let me note that when global media are endlessly replaying Trump’s reality show, the less telegenic Azerbaijan–Armenia war is producing weird videos of

22 Politicizing the Mind-Game Film

drone attacks shot from the “vertical perspective” in Hito Steyerl’s terms, which Thomas quotes. Drones here do not so much kill enemies looking like ants or dots on the ground as merely erase them like visible specks, and move to the next targets as if to play computer games. This cutting-edge pseudo-divine cleansing of ‘bare lives’ is thus seamlessly sutured into the familiar imagery of digital culture. Such new-normal media effects permeate the global regime as a whole, where the exceptional state of ‘indistinction’ between actual and virtual, authentic and fabricated, legal and supralegal, private and public is so ‘hypernormalised’ that we, even if skeptical or critical, cannot easily imagine an alternative to this chaotic status quo. Again, we are in a historical double bind. But at least our mind can get feedback from cinema about how to grasp, challenge, and survive this stalemate. Thomas concludes: “This cognitive-epistemic loop may be the best that cinema has to offer, by actively submitting to the post-truth condition, but in such a way that mind-game films would be the homeopathic cure, the poison in small doses that may inoculate us against the bigger toxicity of our public life and of the global power politics that feed on it.” Indeed, our body produces antibodies while partly ‘em-bodying’ viruses in a healthy way. The mind-game film is such a Derridean pharmakon, an addictive poison as a potential remedy. It may vaccinate us against the pandemic of hypernormalisation even if no utopian way out is available. If there is any hope, then, it is that our performative thought-experiments with the mind-game film might “one day allow for radical change, prepared for by the fluidity, indeterminacy and unpredictability” of our very world.

Notes 1 A more detailed discussion is found in Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2016), 21–26. 2 For a close analysis of the film, see Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (London: Arnold, 2002), 220–248. 3 I elsewhere explored this ‘sacrifice of sacrifice’: Seung-hoon Jeong, “A Thin Line between Sovereign and Abject Agents: Global Action Thrillers with the Sci-Fi Mind-Game War on Terror,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 21, no. 7 (2019), 1–13. 4 Sarah Lyall and Reid J. Epstein, “Trump’s Covid News Meets a Landscape Primed for Mistrust,” The New York Times, October 7, 2020.

1 ON MIND-GAME FILMS AS TIPPING POINTS The Challenges of Cinema in the New Century

Some ten years ago I took a group of quite well-known films from the previous decade, many now recognized as ‘cult classics’ – such as Memento (2000), The Sixth Sense (1999), Fight Club (1999), Being John Malkovich (1999), Donnie Darko (2001), Source Code (2011), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Mulholland Drive (2001), Inception (2010) – and gave them a new name: ‘mind-game films.’ I wanted to understand what made them different from both classical and post-classical Hollywood films, and why they had emerged at this particular point in time. My essay, now in the present volume as Chapter 3, initially appeared as the first chapter in an anthology entitled Puzzle Films, the name by which these films are also known.1 Signaling larger trends in contemporary cinema, and also referred to as ‘complex narratives,’ mind-game or puzzle films were invariably associated with the transition from analog to digital in film production and distribution platforms, as well as reflecting changes in audience behavior, including the relevant demographics’ familiarity with video games. Despite the different names, there was surprising unanimity and consensus about which films qualified. By now, typical features of mind-game films have been listed on many occasions:2 non-linear narratives, jumbled chronologies, with split or doubled timelines (Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Source Code, Donnie Darko); labyrinthine spatial orientation (Inception, Eternal Sunshine); impossibilities made plausible, such as time travel or body-swapping (Déjà Vu [2006], Being John Malkovich); iteration, compulsive repetition and loops (Groundhog Day [1993], Source Code, Looper [2012]); characters that change identity (Lost Highway [1997], Mulholland Drive, Predestination [2014]), have mental conditions, such as schizophrenia, amnesia (Memento, Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind [2001]) or are dead without knowing it (The Sixth Sense, The Others [2001]), in stories with a twist or a turn that require a radical

24 On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points

revision of one’s assumptions about the reality status of what one had been watching (The Usual Suspects [1995], The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Shutter Island [2010]). Taken together, these features seem to present a major challenge to the psychological realism, reliable narration and narrational transparency of ‘classical’ Hollywood storytelling, where chronology, perspectival space, narrative redundancy, coherent point of view, and goal-oriented protagonists generally ensure identification, comprehension, closure and overall intelligibility. If David Bordwell memorably called classical Hollywood ‘an excessively obvious cinema,’ are mind-game films merely deviating by degree, and thus confirming the norm?3 Or are they breaking the mold by devising story structures (narratives) and ways of storytelling (narration) altogether more complex and puzzling? If one (small) part of Hollywood has been producing an excessively oblique cinema, why so now, and to what ends? In this introduction – and by extension this book – my purpose is not simply one of classification, or to offer a definition. Coming at the phenomenon from different vantage points, I want to examine the industrial-institutional challenges and constraints facing Hollywood, and the broader epistemic horizon within which American cinema survives and indeed thrives in the 21st century: the creative and capitalist environment of which the mind-game film appears to be both prototype and symptom. This paradoxical dualism is also one of the reasons I chose the term mind-game film, rather than puzzle film or complex narratives. A puzzle is something one solves, once the pieces are put in place, while a mind-game is something more fundamentally disorienting and inherently indeterminate. It implies an exchange of presumptions and conjectures that navigate the treacherous dynamic of hidden or asymmetrical power-relations. The emphasis on ‘mind’ furthermore indicates that some of these films challenge our eyes and vision by directly appealing to our minds (or by asking us to ‘enter into the mind’ of the protagonist, sometimes literally, as in the opening of Fight Club). ‘Game’ is important, because these films play with our perception of reality, which connects with manipulation and deception: an important aspect of narration, but also a feature that creates skepticism and (self-) doubt at an epistemological level, while alternating between trust and cynicism on a moral level. In addition, the word ‘game’ has a double meaning: it refers to the ludic drive (Spieltrieb), important in stimulating creativity, the imagination and validating the ‘as-if’ mode of all fiction, while also hinting at gambling and addiction: aspects of the term that are important in my discussion of the films. And finally, there is the mind-game as thought-experiment: the ability to probe a dilemma, or to explore an apparently impossible but conceivable situation, while keeping two conflicting thoughts simultaneously in one’s mind. I therefore see mind-game films also as a sideways, oblique entry-point for trying to understand how from an Enlightenment epistemology of truth, fact, evidence we have arrived at a situation where the manifestly false can wield power in the real world, where lies are more attractive than the truth, where facts are trumped by feelings, and where more information is as likely to foster ignorance as it is to produce

On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points 25

knowledge. While part of the answer to ‘why mind-game films now?’ is – as we shall see – to be sought in the historic realignment of forces in mainstream cinema’s more competitive and diverse media environment (the so-called migration or relocation of cinema in the digital age), the mind-game films’ function is more ambiguous, in that they both mimetically double and allegorically reflect (and deflect) this epistemological realignment. One symptomatic value of mind-game films would then be that as meta-cinema, they reveal the degree to which cinema in the 21st century is our culture’s seismograph of tectonic epistemic shifts, but perhaps also its pharmakon: both toxin and vaccine, both poison and cure, in our experience of, and encounter with, the world at the tipping point of epistemes, whether measured by 500 years (Renaissance perspective), 350 years (the Cartesian mind-body divide), a 150 years (Western Modernity) or a mere 50 years (the computer and the digital). Other timelines or time-scales would place cinema at the fault-lines of the human and posthuman, the animated and the automated, the Holocene and the Anthropocene.

Mind-Game Films Are Not a Genre These are large claims for mostly small films. While not necessarily major box office draws, the films listed above have invariably attracted vigorous debate online, on YouTube, blogs and on lists. Judging by the number of publications, they also continue to prove a popular topic for scholars and academics.4 Directors of mind-game films – David Lynch, M. Night Shyamalan, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Jonze, and above all David Fincher and Christopher Nolan – are recognized as ‘auteurs’: controversial yet also fiercely admired. On the other hand, Charlie Kaufman, in his capacity as screenwriter, became the ‘auteur’ of several mind-game films, the most important of which he did not direct (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation).5 Despite the proximity to Hollywood and the prominence of auteur-directors, I do not think of mind-game films as an autonomous genre, nor do they represent a new ‘art-and-auteur cinema,’ however much several of the characteristic features coincide or overlap with those identified as art cinema mode.6 In fact, it is my argument that they arise out of conditions and respond to constraints typically facing Hollywood as a global film industry that yet again must retool and reinvent itself in order to stay the same – and stay in the game. Puzzle and mind-game films are part of Hollywood’s own pushback and adjustment to the major changes in the technological infrastructure of cinema (digital imaging and post-production) and they answer to an expanded entertainment environment (where feature films compete with computer games as well as with cable television and streaming web series). The invention of the DVD and subsequently the availability of high-speed streaming video created the contemporary audience ecology, where film theaters are merely one among several options for watching movies, and movies are only one option for engaging with visual narratives, transmedia stories and moving images.

26 On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points

However, mind-game films are not the only or even the major rejoinder of the film industry to the general migration, mutation or relocation of cinema between 1995 and 2015. They play a very minor role, compared to the introduction of digital 3D, the new life breathed into blockbuster and franchise films, the reboot of Marvel comics and DC superheroes and the general revival of feature-length animation films by Disney and Pixar, as well as the rise of Netflix high-end series across all genres:7 all developments that are far more symptomatic of the adaptability of Hollywood as an entertainment industry and more decisive in bringing about new cinematic forms, or retooling traditional ones, thanks to the opportunities offered by computer-generated images and digital techniques of motion capture, blue screens and other techniques and technologies that simulate photo-realistic representations of live action and spectacle. Mind-game films could be regarded more as a niche tendency or symptomatic mode: much like neo-noir in the 1970s and 1980s, mind-game elements infiltrate and hybridize established genres. Yet while neo-noir features in Western (The Unforgiven, No Country for Old Men), science fiction (Blade Runner, Total Recall) and other genres added a darker, more cynical mood as well as raising issue of gender (the neo-femme fatale in Chinatown, Klute, or Fatal Attraction), body (as discussed in the Chapter 2 “Too Late, Too Soon”) and politics (the neo-noir paranoia cycle, such as The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor and JFK), mind-game films more radically destabilize the narrative structure of the genres they inflect (from thrillers, time travel, heist films to action-adventures, comedy, horror and rom-coms), and add a dimension of epistemic doubt and skepticism. They challenge classical Hollywood conventions (in the treatment of time, space, causality and character consistency), while still depending on genre and canonical storytelling as their ‘hosts’ (many still rely on the three-act division, turning points in the plot and deadline structures). To give just some examples of genre-infiltration: the psychological thriller (Lost Highway), film noir (Memento, Mulholland Drive), the buddy film (Fight Club), the sci-fi genre (Interstellar [2014], Arrival [2016]), the war veteran film (Source Code), detective film (Déjà Vu), the coming of age high school film (Donnie Darko), the heist film (Inception), as well as horror films (The Sixth Sense, Shutter Island, Get Out [2017]) and rom-coms (Groundhog Day, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Her [2013]). This might suggest that in the context of the Hollywood film industry, mind-game films occupy something like a parasite-function in a mutually beneficial host-parasite relationship with mainstream genres. Another useful metaphor is that of a virus that enters the body of classical Hollywood storytelling and causes a kind of epistemological ‘rash’ or ontological ‘fever.’ And like a fever, it could be a way the cinematic body purges itself of a vulnerability or exposure coming from outside, such as video games or HBO type series, as well as from inside: new business models, changes of management practice, or how to deal with ‘big data.’ Alternatively, classical Hollywood may simply be the scaffolding on which mind-game films hang their new narrative architectures, in a version of what has been called

On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points 27

‘change inside out’:8 more radical changes are taking place, but the outer shell or body remains the same, until suddenly the new manifests itself in more violent forms, as for instance, the authoritarian-populist turn of so many liberal democracies as a latent effect of the 2008 economic crash. A further possibility is to see mind-game films as the test bed or research-anddevelopment section of an industry always mindful of the need to adjust to changing external pressures and demands, and to adapt by incorporating the hacker, appropriating the indie, or recuperating the avant-garde. As will become clear, I intend to make an additional case, namely that mind-game films differ from puzzle films because they ideally establish an irresolvable indeterminacy and maintain a permanent state of under-determination: rather than seeking to resolve the puzzle of their formal or generic identity, they are trying to sustain multiple, even seemingly incompatible interpretations. However, before setting this out in more detail, it is worth considering the arguments of those determined to decide the films’ generic identity issue one way (classical narrative) or another (video game logic).

It’s Business as Usual: Source Code as Classical Narrative To start with the main pragmatic – technological, economic, demographic – reasons for these somewhat unusual films to have emerged when they did: the invention of the DVD and of mp4 files as compact and affordable alternatives to theatrical movie screening, allowing for multiple viewings, and also (unlike the preceding videotape cassette) enabling random access; the emergence of computer games as a cultural form that compares with films and cinema in popularity, profitability and conceptual sophistication; the multiplication of screens as high-definition viewing platforms, in the shape of beamers, monitors, laptops and smart-phone touch screens, making ‘cinema’ both mobile and portable, and potentially expanding the audience-base by supplying targeted entertainment to spectators of all ages, countries and demographics. The scholarly debates reflect these types of description and analysis, and among the interpretative moves three major ones can be identified: first there is the question whether such films even merit a separate label or require a paradigm shift. If not, then the task is simply one of translating their apparently deviant features back into ‘business as usual.’ Others, in contrast, have argued that their typical characteristics so much resemble the rules of video games that it makes sense to treat them as hybrids and demonstrate their affinity to interactive games. A third approach has been to concentrate on the films’ mode of narration, and determine the degree of reliability, unreliability or outright deception in the way they convey or withhold information, and what kinds of cognitive benefits or affective pleasures such play with narration affords the viewer. All three approaches have engaged some of the best minds in film studies and have consequently been very productive. For instance, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson have been the most steadfast and also the most persuasive

28 On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points

proponents of keeping puzzle films (or forking-path/multiple-draft/network narratives) within the fold of the classical storytelling framework. For Bordwell (The Way Hollywood Tells It) and Thompson (Storytelling in the New Hollywood), it is an article of faith that no American film made in the past 20 years is too obscure in its character motivation, too convoluted in its narrative arc, too non-chronological in its timeline not to be perfectly explicable within the traditions of the three-act story-division, the dual plotline structure or the deadline that tells us when and why the hero must and will reach his goal.9 Bordwell also has to hand numerous examples from the 1920s or the 1940s (Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling) that prove there is nothing new under the California sun when it comes to how to twist a story, to tease with confusing flashbacks and to tantalize an audience with an ambiguous ending.10 A truly encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, coupled with Bordwell’s brilliance as film analyst, stylist and polemicist, manages to put a remarkable degree of order into the most confusing, non-linear or even seemingly ‘cheating’ plotlines. Take the instance of Source Code, a film that – as we shall see – has given rise to several competing and possibly incompatible interpretations. Bordwell’s introduction to the film on his blog Observations on Film Art is typical: Source Code provides a nice occasion to update my argument. My main point remains: More than we often admit, today’s trends rely on yesterday’s traditions. Quite stable strategies of plotting, visual narration, and the like are still in play in our movies. When a movie does innovate in its storytelling, it needs to do so craftily. The more daring your narrative strategies, the more carefully, even redundantly, you need to map them out. The game demands clarity through varied repetition.11 Bordwell goes on to make explicit in what way Source Code’s main protagonist Colter Stevens – an Afghan War veteran severely mutilated and thus more dead than alive, who is being used as a high-tech guinea-pig by some shadowy government agency in order to forestall a terrorist attack that has already taken place – has both a mission and a goal, and that here too, as in almost any conventional Hollywood films, official mission and personal goal are in conflict with each other, and that resolving these dual objectives is what the story is finally about. Source Code is conventional in several other respects as well: it combines a romance (a love story) with an adventure (an action plot, a chase, a rescue mission), whereby the terms of the resolution of one storyline help the other narrative come to a close. Equally conventional is the deadline structure (the ‘ticking clock’ – the eight minutes on the train before the explosion), which alerts the audience to set their own temporal clock of expectation and generate the necessary suspense: [T]he film alternates between two zones of action. At the Nellis facility, time moves forward as Colter gradually comes to understand his circumstances

On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points 29

and his mission. This action is under the pressure of a deadline: find the culprit before the dirty bomb is triggered. The other zone of action is the train, where the deadline is tighter (eight minutes before Ventress’s death) and the action is replayed as Colter tries different tactics to fulfill his charge.12 But there is a third, more implicit assumption driving the analysis. Bordwell wants to show that the makers of Source Code subscribe to the problem-solving mentality of classical cinema: a belief (as an American) he fully shares and endorses. This mentality manifests itself in the classic three-act structure, with a coda: [Source Code’s] plot is articulated in quite traditional ways. At less than 90 minutes, the film yields three large-scale parts or ‘acts.’ The Setup introduces us to the premises, establishing the train bombing and the Nellis facility supervision; I’d argue that this ends at about 28 minutes … The second stretch of the plot consists of more failed efforts, but culminates at about 56 minutes, when Colter correctly identifies the bomber, Derek Frost … At this point his official mission is over. But the movie isn’t. Colter persuades Goodwin to let him go back one more time to stop the train bomb and save the passengers – effectively countermanding Rutledge’s injunction that the past can’t be altered. A three-minute epilogue starting around 82:00 wraps things up.13 In other words, enigma solved, all loose ends tidied up, and therefore no need to invoke any of the issues that so preoccupies other interpreters of the film, for instance, Garrett Stewart, for whom Source Code displays a new kind of reflexivity regarding digital cinema, while also underlining Hollywood’s tacit acceptance of ubiquitous surveillance and the militarization of public life: arguments to which I shall return.14 Bordwell does address the question already raised: why this recent (re-) emergence of such complex narratives (using time travel and looped action scenarios): What led to the resurgence of multiple draft storytelling in our day? Partly, I think, the changing genre ecology of Hollywood. During the 1970s and 1980s, certain genres like the musical and the Western faded out, and horror and science fiction/techno-fantasy became more important. These genres, still going strong today, encourage playing around with subjective states (dreams, hallucinations), devising misleading narration, and creating branching and looping timelines (through time travel, telepathy, multiverses, and the like). The filmic experiments probably owe something as well to the rise of popular writers in the vein of Stephen King and Michael Crichton, along with the revival of the work of Philip K. Dick. Pop science also furnished new narrative possibilities … More generally, you can also invoke Steven Johnson’s argument that we’re getting smarter about picking up quickly emerging conventions. Popular culture, he

30 On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points

claims, is more intellectually demanding than it used to be; examples would be The Wire and Lost. I’m not wholly convinced … I’d relate the intricacy of some popular narratives partly to the proliferation of more niche genres and specialized publics, along with the growth of pop connoisseurship. Aging hipsters and cool college educated youngsters, fortified with high disposable incomes, now flaunt a nerdy side and enjoy avantgardish innovations.15 “Aging hipsters and cool college educated youngsters” flaunting “a nerdy side” and enjoying “avantgardish innovations”: The uncharacteristically dismissive tone makes one wonder whether there is not after all a certain defensiveness in play, as if Bordwell wanted to avoid at all cost to be drawn into any cultural, ideological, or political interpretation. And why should he, if he can ‘solve’ the problematic narrative by pointing out just how classically conventional the underlying construction is? Does philosophy not teach us that the simplest explanation is always the best (‘Occam’s razor’)?

Source Code as Video Game? Proponents of the label ‘puzzle films’ like to point to the family resemblance of complex narratives to games and riddles, as intellectual exercises for their own sake. Rather than reintegrate puzzle films into the classical Hollywood format, an alternative explanatory model is to align them with the design principles of interactive video games. Even a blockbuster like Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), discussed in a later chapter, has a number of features in common with video games: for instance, its intersecting and interdependent storylines, with several distinct subplots presented as ‘rules needing to be mastered,’ before the main narrative can conclude. Or, to put it in some of the categories used by video game analysis, Minority Report contains serialized repetitions of actions, multiple levels of adventure, magical transformations (improbable sci-fi devices, such as the pre-cogs), as well as immediate rewards and punishments. More typical mind-game films such as The Game (1997), Being John Malkovich, Fight Club have all been convincingly interpreted as following the specific iterative, spatial and action logics of computer games. Time-travel loops, forking-path narratives, multiple timelines, repeated actions, body-doubles, dream levels can all be found in the films and have their equivalent in the successive ‘lives’ granted to the player, whose actions are determined by the rules that constrain and the moves that are permitted in a video game. This in turn has given rise to locutions such as ‘interactive narratives,’ ‘scripted spaces,’ ‘transmedia narratives,’ ‘hybrid storytelling,’ as well as to awkward neologisms such as ‘viewser’ to indicate the multiple roles assigned to newly activated audiences as spectators, players, and users.16 Unexpected help in this respect also comes from structuralist theories of narrative that emphasize functions, actions and permutations, rather than individuals with characters traits, or narrative arcs with

On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points 31

resolution or closure. Roland Barthes, Vladimir Propp and Algirdas J. Greimas’s ‘semiotic square’ have all been cited in order to bridge the gap between video games and feature film narratives.17 However, an important difference between computer games and mind-game films is that in computer games the player knows she is playing, while in the mindgame film both the spectator and the protagonist may initially assume s/he is a free agent, and only eventually realizes s/he is being played with. The protagonist not knowing why and by whom he is manipulated applies to The Game and Groundhog Day, where the person being played with tries to ‘master’ the game or crack the code while undergoing a steep (The Game) or step-by-step (Groundhog Day) learning curve. In Groundhog Day the hero has a definite goal, whereas other films, notably Being John Malkovich confirm that in both computer games and mind-game films the protagonist-players are also engaged at another level: there it is a matter not just of ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ but of understanding the terms and nature of the game. Learning the new rules (of the digital world) is part of the pedagogical value of both, except that in the case of mind-game films the training may well end up traumatizing the main character, which seems the case in The Game, Fight Club or Memento. The chapter here on Nurse Betty (2000) examines in more detail the paradoxical relation that can exist between trauma, memory, fantasy and role-playing or gaming. Someone who has systematically investigated the similarities between video game logic and narrative logic is Warren Buckland. In a close examination of Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997) Buckland contrasted Barthes’s famous structuralist analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine with George Landow’s hypertext, as well as invoking Simon Gottschalk’s and Nicholas Luppa’s rules of game construction:18 These rules, which are reliable in that they are systematic and unambiguous (for they are unencumbered by morality or compassion), constitute the video game’s environment, which is not restrained by the laws of the physical world. The game user can experience video pleasure primarily by attempting to master these rules – that is, decipher the game’s logic. Moreover, the desire to attain mastery makes video games addictive, which at times can lead to the user’s total absorption into the game’s rules and environment.19 Buckland has since extended his comparative analyses to include Source Code20 and Inception.21 As if to counter (or complement)22 Bordwell’s complexity-reduction exercise that straightens out the kinks of Source Code, Buckland makes the case for its narrative architecture and action scenario typically fitting the video game logic.23 In particular, the ‘exploit’ and the ‘sandbox mode’ (respectively, glitches in the game design and free play in the game environment i.e., modes where the rules are suspended and otherwise unexplained events can occur) become important reference points for Source Code, where, in order to engineer a happy ending, a second timeline is suddenly opened up that allows Colter to rescue the passengers on the already doomed train and walk off with his new love interest Christina:

32 On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points

The way the exploit works is obscure, although it involves a series of actions: Goodwin switching off Colter’s life support (in reality three) after eight minutes (just before he returns from reality one, on the train), and Colter disarming the bomb on the train and, at the eight-minute mark, kissing Christina. These events pause the game at the eight-minute mark, freezing everyone on the train in what appears to be an eternal moment. But a few moments afterward, the train and the lives of its passengers inexplicably continue unhindered, as action enters the free play of the sandbox mode. This exploit and move into the free play game mode enables Colter to save everyone on the train from the terrorist attack, at least in an alternate, parallel universe, and to construct a stable future for himself and Christina.24 In support of his findings – rather than relying on metaphoric analogies with video games, such as referring to a film’s ‘dense, video-game narrative style,’ Buckland introduces a broader frame of reference, Lev Manovich’s ‘software studies’: [Software] algorithms do not simply reproduce or remediate the physical objects; instead, the objects are represented as discrete digital bits of information that can be extended – amplified, manipulated and transformed – at will … Analyzing video game rules within the context of software studies focuses attention on general game structures and techniques that have been remediated and transformed in video games. In turn, we can use this framework to study the way video game rules are remediated in certain films.25 The key term facilitating the crossover between narrative logic and video game logic is Bolter/Grusin’s ‘remediation,’ now extended to what Manovich calls the ‘deep remixability’ of different media in the digital environment.26 It allows Buckland to specify the formal elements that structure, for instance, Christopher Nolan’s Inception thanks to his list of typical game strategies (among them serialized repetition of action at different dream levels, space-time-warps, magical transformations and rewards/punishment that act as feedback loops): In narrative terms, [the opening scenes] serve to introduce film spectators to one of the film’s main themes, the invasion of a character’s dream space to extract information. These scenes therefore present the characters performing a ‘dry run’ before the more complicated invasion of dream space later in the film – to perform inception on Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). But, in terms of video games, the opening scenes of Cobb’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) team attempting to steal secrets from Saito’s (Ken Watanabe) mind resemble an in-game tutorial level, introducing the game rules to film spectators by showing them how the game is played. The tutorial is repeated when Ariadne (Ellen Page) enters a dream space (Paris) with Cobb, where he spells out the game rules to her, while she learns to manipulate the environment.

On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points 33

However, Ariadne is punished when she attracts the attention of Cobb’s projections, including his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), who kills her in the dream space, forcing her to wake up and exit the game.27 In line with Manovich’s ‘deep remixability,’ Buckland’s conclusion is to reclaim for puzzle films like Inception or Source Code the status of hybrids, where narrative and video game structures combine and coalesce, rather than contrast and compete. The benefit is what Buckland calls ‘non-structural complexity’ and it has distinct advantages for Hollywood, since adding video game structures to classical narrative conventions generates narratives that are unpredictable and cognitively unstable, which in turn creates a cult following and encourage repeat viewing in order to unpack “ambiguities, improbabilities and plot inconsistencies on blogs, dedicated web pages and in academic volumes.”28

Groundhog Day and the Creation of a Cultural Meme An intriguing example of such hybridity is Groundhog Day, a film almost universally appreciated for its wit, intelligence, and a stellar performance by Bill Murray. Made a few years prior (1993) to the main wave of mind-game or puzzle films, it belongs to the present context for several reasons: first, while it has distinct features of the mind-game film (time-loops/time travel, and a character who is being played with, when forced into involuntary repetition), it is often compared with one of American cinema’s all-time favorite feel-good movies, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946): The movie is like some insane mongrel commingling of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Twilight Zone and Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. Yet it is very much a film [that] springs straight from the heart of the great tradition of American trash surrealism, which is precisely what makes it so immediately and delightfully accessible, so multilayered and rich without pretension … There is a moral to the tale as well, and it even strikes an uplifting note. But, for once, the audience isn’t forced to surrender its intelligence (or its healthy cynicism) to embrace the film’s sunny resolution. When Phil has his change of heart, he doesn’t suddenly become a stranger. He’s the same man, the same jerk, but a far wiser, more likable jerk … Murray’s double-jointed ironic charm is our insurance against dishonest optimism. If this caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it’s a butterfly with a lot of worm left in him.29 The second reason why Groundhog Day deserves attention is that it, too, can be perfectly explained in terms of classical Hollywood narrative, while an equally persuasive case has been made for it functioning like a video game. Kristin Thompson, for instance, was quick to demonstrate how ‘classical’ the film is, and confidently states at the outset:

34 On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points

The entire plot is structured around changing his character from the cynical, nasty, exploitive man we first see to someone who is vastly different – kind, considerate, and lovable … The only real departure from tradition – admittedly a striking one – is the failure to motivate or explain the plot’s sudden move into an impossible situation. In this way, the film is like It’s a Wonderful Life with the angel not present, only implied. As Danny Rubin said of his original script, ‘It’s still Hollywood, it isn’t a Luis Buñuel film.’30 By contrast, others have granted the film just such an avant-garde status: The artist and film-maker Gillian Wearing included Groundhog Day in her alltime top 10 … Her list included other enigmatic, if less multiplex-friendly, films – L’avventura, The Exterminating Angel, Last Year at Marienbad. ‘All those films reinvent structure and create a new conceptual framework that makes you understand them,’ says Wearing. ‘They share an almost surrealistic vision, and they pose philosophical questions. Groundhog Day … makes me think of [the French philosopher Gilles] Deleuze and his thoughts on how change can arise from repetition. The film follows that to the letter.’31 The case for Groundhog Day functioning like a video game is made by Martin Hermann, who sets out in convincing detail just how closely the narrative follows a game strategy, most prominently thanks to the fact that the time-loop narrative is divided into individual ‘rounds’ through which the protagonist improves his performance – a clear parallel to the process and progress of playing a video game: [W]hereas computer games turn users into characters, filmic narrative remediations of computer games turn characters into users. In this way, Phil [is] distinctively different from the ordinary protagonist in film (or literature). Those conventional characters are able to live, and thus play, only once, and what they do and how they behave is irreversible and fixed in time. In contrast, the main character, and nobody else, in a time-loop narrative is allowed to live, or rather play, the same day all over. What he does in the course of the day becomes undone when the next day, i.e., the next round, starts, which forces – or allows – him to start all over … Phil in Groundhog Day grasps the implications of this logic at the end of the third Groundhog Day when the locals from the bowling club tell him: “That would mean there’d be no consequences.” From this point on, he sees himself as the player of a game, testing what possibilities this particular game can offer him (driving on the railroad tracks, robbing a money transport, eating as much as he can, etc.).32 Phil, in other words, has several ‘lives,’ even when he tries to commit suicide, much like the player in a video game always lives to see another day, except that for Phil this ‘freedom’ is first a curse before it becomes a chance: a curse, since

On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points 35

neither staying up all night nor trying to kill himself changes the outcome of each day, which always begins with a complete reboot. But it is also a chance, because memories linger, and skills are acquired: Phil becomes an expert pianist and brilliant at ice sculpting. While this is the only inkling we have of how long – months, years? – Phil has been living in this hell of eternal return, it does present a seeming inconsistency in the internal logic of the narrative: if the slate is wiped clean every night, how come he can carry memories forward? Yet this is obviously necessary for Phil’s to be able to ‘learn’ – first in order to better seduce Rita (which fails, despite his increasing facility in anticipating her wishes and ‘read’ her mind), and then to be able to ‘become a better person’ (which succeeds in winning Rita): the measure of his learning curve, and the ostensible goal of the narrative at the story level. Retaining memory and acquiring skills, however, does make sense in the alternative logic of the video game, where indeed the player carries the knowledge gained from one level to the next. Unlike Source Code, we are not so much in parallel universes as we are in parallel modalities or logics. However, as indicated, the difference between a computer game and a narrative is that in the film you are involuntarily drawn in and you cannot stop the flow, which makes Phil the mimetic stand-in or avatar for the movie-goer rather than the gamer, as if the makers of Groundhog Day were to tease its viewers with the mental and sensorymotor habits of game players, while making a strong plea or case for the unique pleasures and terrors of the movie-going experience, where the flow of time is irreversible, and the body is mortal. But Groundhog Day not only mimetically doubles the spectator; it also reflexively allegorizes Hollywood: first, it thematizes its competitive relation with television. In a chapter, suggestively entitled “Let’s Make the Weather: Chaos Comes to Hollywood,” J. D. Connor has persuasively shown that Groundhog Day is also about the Columbia Studio’s relation to ‘film as film’ in the age of chromakey television: the opening sequence of Groundhog Day [which shows Phil in the studio forecasting the weather] foregrounds the techniques of (cheap) video production and turns to (expensive) film as a way to show video technique. And as it typically does, Hollywood substitutes technology and practice for materiality and essence – the movie as movie for the film as film.33 Yet, since one of the clearest indicators of Phil’s initial boorishness is his arrogant boast that he is a ‘talent’ destined for better roles than as weatherman in a local television station, the narrative can be seen as his ‘screen test’ for just such a big role: Groundhog Day is about acting. Each day is a new take on the same material, and each day, each line reading, each performance is slightly different. Phil tries to plan the perfect day so he can get Rita into bed, and his planning

36 On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points

takes the form of repeated takes of the same scene. But the moment he has everything perfectly planned, his timing becomes slightly off, and he is rejected. The small change blows up in his face in a montage of slaps. The film is thus deeply about chaos. Its formal center, the process of multiple-take, discontinuous Hollywood acting, is a phenomenon susceptible to the butterfly effect … Weather forecasting itself is a strange attractor that allows communication between Phil Connors’s human scale and Punxsutawney Phil’s rodent scale. And the self-similarity of those scales (weatherman to weatherhog; Phil to Phil) can happen only on a scalar day – February 2.34 Connor expands on this further, by tying the take-after-take-after take structure of the narrative into Columbia Studio’s changes of management and ownership: ‘Talent’ is one of the film’s running gags, from Chris Elliott’s joke that the only network interested in Phil is the Home Shopping Network to Phil’s unknowing remark that Rita’s job as producer is to ‘keep the talent happy.’ ‘Did he just refer to himself as “the talent”?’ Chris laughs. It is only after Phil has taken the time and spent the money (one thousand dollars per lesson) to acquire a new talent – the piano – and displayed it for free at the town dance that he becomes ‘the talent.’ Rita, who stood in for [the] Columbia [lady with the torch] in the opening sequence, stands in for the studio again when she cleans out her checkbook – $339.88 – to buy a date with him at the bachelor auction. The economy of all this rests on the belief that talent can and should be bought even if it is vastly expensive. This is [Mark] Canton’s economy, [Peter] Guber’s economy, the economy Sony wanted to believe in when it bought Columbia …35 Connor concludes his analysis by pointing out how subtly the motif of the hand – from that of the weatherman gesturing in front of the blue-screen to the piano player’s on the keyboard, and from Rita giving Phil a helping hand down from the podium to her hitting the snooze button when, released from the time-warp, they wake up in bed together – is woven into the Sonny & Cher song that starts his day, which no longer plays the line “then put your little hand in mine,” but ends on the triumphant “I Got You Babe”: a claim to ownership that, according to Connor, refers us back to the studio’s relation to its ‘talent.’36 A further reason Groundhog Day retains our attention is that despite its feel-good reputation, and ostensibly happy-end resolution, it manages to deal with some darker themes and lingering existential issues that take it right into the heart of the mind-game films’ more philosophical preoccupations, notably free will and determinism, and the function of time and causality in relation to identity and agency. Groundhog Day also makes a strong case for my genre argument, in that it shows how a traditional genre (in this case, the rom-com) has been infiltrated by mind-game elements (the time-warp or time bounce), which is here bent into the specific

On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points 37

purpose of life-changing self-improvement: by not solving the puzzle of what the malign forces are that trap him in Punxsutawney on February 2nd, Phil does solve the puzzle of how be a ‘mensch,’ how to win (and deserve) Rita and thus attain a measure of happiness. At the same time, the questions that the (expressly unexplained) time-warp explicitly poses are the typically philosophical mind-game questions of ‘other minds’ (we see Phil gain unfair advantage over other people’s minds, notably Rita’s), free will, i.e., actions and their consequences (or lack of them) and the ethics of ‘return in order to repair’ (time travel), which here become ‘repeat in order to reform’ (time-loop): all of which operates as parts of a wish-fulfilling fantasy. In real life we are rarely given a second chance, and when we are, we usually bungle it: making the same mistakes over and over again; choosing the wrong partners time and again, staying in an abusive relationship even when knowing it is abusive. Unlike It’s a Wonderful Life, there is no God or ‘angel’ to fill the hole that would have stopped ‘desire’ turn into ‘drive,’ for it is the latter that makes us repeat offenders. Precisely the lack of explanation for why Phil is trapped is thus the film’s way of letting us know that it knows it is a wish-fulfilling fantasy: not so much the wish that Phil ‘gets the girl,’ but that we should be given second chances to change our life choices. Kristin Thompson seems oblivious to these considerations, when she calls the time-warp in Groundhog Day a ‘loony narrative premise.’37 It is the core of the film, and also the reason why ‘Groundhog Day’ has become a cultural meme: my final reason for discussing the film. A cultural meme is usually an idea or a reference point that rapidly spreads within a given culture or across shared social media platforms: often conveying a particular phenomenon or containing a simple but revealing piece of wisdom. What made the phrase ‘Groundhog Day’ a meme is not the film’s apparent happy ending, nor the superstitious weather story, but the instant recognition of the paradoxical truth about us often doing the same thing over and over again while vainly expecting a different result. Focusing on the stalemate and the deadlock, the meme acknowledges the film’s underlying dark side, while ignoring or dismissing its feel-good rom-com generic identity. Thus, although it is possible to show just how ‘classical’ the film is, the key to its success as a cultural meme is the keen awareness that the film wrestles with existential questions that it does not and cannot answer: about actions that do and do not have consequences, and about ethics when such actions do not seem to have consequences. My later chapter on David Lynch’s mind-game films will return to this conundrum.38 The philosopher Stanley Cavell listed Groundhog Day as one of his favorites, saying that the film “ask [s] how, surrounded by conventions we do not exactly believe in, we sometimes find it in ourselves to enter into what Emerson thought of as a new day.”39 Here, the groundless ground of the mind-game film is both recognized and countered by a pragmatic trust in repetitions actually producing ‘a new day,’ the belief that ‘change can arise from repetition’ as Gillian Wearing asserts, quoting Deleuze, or as Connor concurs, quoting Edward Lorenz’s butterfly effect.

38 On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points

At the other – religious – end of the faith spectrum we also encounter Groundhog Day, which has been cited by people of very different belief systems, in order to extract from the film ‘deep spiritual meaning’: Groundhog Day [makes one] realize that the only satisfaction in life comes from turning outward and concerning oneself with others rather than concentrating solely on one’s own wants and desires. As such, the film has become a favorite of Buddhist, Christian and Jewish leaders alike because they see its themes of selflessness and rebirth as a reflection of their own spiritual messages. It has even been dubbed by some religious leaders as the ‘most spiritual film of our time.’ … The term is also entering the real-world lexicon as witnessed by the following comments from R. Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, on talks on the Israel/Lebanon conflict in August 2006. ‘We’d go home at 10 or 11 at night and say, “Tomorrow will be a better day.” But the next day was Groundhog Day all over again.’40

Narration in the Puzzle Film If one adopts the video game analogy as the favored model for interpreting puzzle films, one implicitly assumes that (Hollywood) filmmaking responds and reacts to pressures from outside, and that the evidence of video game logic in feature films, including blockbusters such as Inception is indicative of these pressures – which may be no more than saying that Hollywood is exceptionally aware of its shifting and volatile audiences and targets these films towards one of its best-known demographics, i.e., males between the ages of 15 and 35. They will have grown up playing video games, and are therefore not only acquainted with the rules of video games but familiar and comfortable with them: buying a film as a DVD or downloading it as an mp4 file, for the express purpose of frequent and non-linear viewing. This may go some way towards accounting for another phenomenon associated with mind-game films: the proliferation of YouTube videos that set out to fill in the gaps in a mind-game film’s narrative, that straighten out non-linear chronologies, and provide helpful analyses of ambiguous endings, while going to great length to elucidate the arcane physics of time travel and wormholes, or the paradoxes of retroactive causality and predestination. It is the extraordinary hermeneutic activity that mind-game films give rise to, which gratifies not only the basic ‘play pleasure’ (the already mentioned Spieltrieb of German idealist philosophy) but takes pleasure in solving puzzles (hence the choice of calling them ‘puzzle films’), and in sharing this pleasure with others. In one sense, these ardent interpreters of seemingly obscure movies are an unpaid army of studio publicists, adding value and cachet to the niche product that are films like Fight Club or Being John Malkovich. In another sense, their efforts confirm that puzzle films rarely if ever break entirely with the conventions of

On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points 39

classical storytelling, allowing audiences either to side with the recognizable underlying story construction or to enjoy the tantalizing, frustrating or misleading enigmas (also known as ‘mind-jobs,’ mind-f*cks’ or ‘mind-bending films’).41 There is a broad agreement that puzzle films are the way they are, in order to bind volatile audiences, socialized through video games and spoilt for choice in their entertainment needs, to the Hollywood product. They do so, in a different manner, but with the same goal that franchise movies and superhero blockbusters employ: invite repeat viewing and encourage return. If one adds how Netflix and other platforms stream their series for ‘binge-watching,’ one can use a stronger term: mainstream media are complicit in fostering addiction, one of digital capitalism’s major resources and discoveries about human subjectivity for the 21st century, after capitalism having initially established itself on need (in the 19th century) and successfully catered to desire (in the 20th century). It is therefore not entirely unreasonable to wonder whether some of the more formal analyses of puzzle films do not also provide something like ideologically neutral cover for addictive behavior by claiming to probe more deeply into the cognitive rewards and affective pleasures that such hybrid films offer and afford. A case in point would be the third type of approach to puzzle films, which looks at their typical features primarily from a narratological perspective. Here one can apply terminologies derived from literary studies, centered on narrators, reliable or unreliable, and on narration, embodied or impersonal. These literary theories have been partly superseded by methodologies more closely aligned with cognitivism, evolutionary biology and the neurosciences around rewards and punishments, or pleasures and their reinforcements or resistances. Drawing on narratology has a long tradition within film studies and it again boasts with David Bordwell, Edward Branigan, Mieke Bal, Monika Fludernik and Seymour Chatman of some very distinguished representatives. In his Introduction to Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, Buckland sets out the issue quite clearly: “In the end, the complexity of puzzle films operates on two levels: narrative and narration. It emphasizes the complex telling (plot, narration) of a simple or a complex story (narrative).”42 Often, it is Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film that provides the basic vocabulary (notably his distinction between ‘syuzhet’ [plot]and ‘fabula’ [story]), and authors tend to rely on, or refine his respective taxonomies of classical narration, art cinema narration, historical materialist narration and parametric narration. Thus, when placing puzzle films between classical Hollywood narrative and video game logic, but also when comparing them to post-classical narrative and global art cinema practice, the option of a narratological approach is tempting insofar as it promises to reduce the surface differences and historical complexities by offering a stable (and widely used) set of terms and concepts.43 The problem arises when trying to come to grips with the narration in films like Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Fight Club and Donnie Darko: some of the main parameters of viewer orientation, such as point of view

40 On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points

structure, prove difficult to apply, insofar as it is frequently impossible to distinguish between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ shots. And when these common criteria of suture, alignment and audience identification no longer have traction, it helps to refer to narrating instances and to focalization, to invoke ‘communicative’ or ‘restricted’ narration, and to distinguish between ‘reliable,’ ‘unreliable’ and ‘deceptive’ narration. The consensus that has emerged – not surprisingly perhaps – is that mind-game films tend to feature unreliable narrators, but that their unreliability either only emerges right at the end (as in The Usual Suspects, Sixth Sense and Fight Club), or dawns on the spectator gradually, but never quite resolves itself, as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Donnie Darko. In other words, when fabula and syuzhet seem at odds with each other (as they are in films with a ‘twist’), then unreliable/deceptive narration becomes the new normal, requiring another kind of ‘trust,’ now based on a new contract with the viewer, who has ‘learnt’ the rules of the game and feels comfortable navigating between unreliable and deceptive.44 Thus, if we assume that there has been a change in default values embedded in the narrative twists of films like The Sixth Sense, Shutter Island, Memento or Fight Club, then we will have unreliability in our minds right from the start. Suspending trust in the tale becomes the sensible approach to the ambiguity between objective, subjective and ‘impossible’ points of view in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Shutter Island and Being John Malkovich. It further suggests that in mind-game films the fabula (story) is not only dependent on the syuzhet (plot) but is entirely taken over by it, so that the narration does indeed constitute the only ‘reality’ to which the viewer has access: there is no corresponding reality ‘outside,’ in which everything we see can take place. Or rather, the narration establishes a reality (or a reality status) in its own right, instead of presenting the presumed story world in the most suspenseful or intelligible way. Unreliable narration then becomes the mind-game’s default value, except that ‘unreliable’ would no longer be the appropriate term, since it is now the acknowledged basis of the film’s contract with the viewer, who either knows or has learnt the rules of the game: the narration is assumed to be laying false trails, playing tricks, taking us not only on but for a ride: not so much ‘until proven otherwise’ (e.g. by the twist ending) but in order to right away lure and loop us into a second (or third) viewing. In this respect, the films of David Lynch are exemplary insofar as ‘unreliable’ is here clearly an understatement, with opinion divided instead between ‘deliberately incoherent,’ ‘confusingly misleading’ and ‘frustratingly deceptive.’ But if one accepts the argument just made, and sees the spectrum of narrational practices running from Nolan and Fincher to Shyamalan and Lynch as the new normal (their confirmed auteur status helps to validate such an assumption) then one can say that in mind-game films the narration/narrators should be deemed unreliable unless proven deceptive. This extends the point made above and includes a further switch of default values, insofar as it is the narration (the syuzhet or plot – i.e., the way we receive information) that establishes what a mind-game film is about, while the narrated (the fabula or story, i.e., the logic of the action, the ‘diegetic world,’

On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points 41

the time-space continuum, the identity of the characters) becomes malleable, fluid and deliberately indeterminate, which not only corresponds to the reality of digitally generated images, but echoes Zygmund Bauman’s concept of ‘liquid modernity.’45 Such films are no longer grounded in a specific time or place, and they confound the reality status of what we see and hear: it is a situation that describes especially well the films of Lynch. An example would be Inland Empire, with its confusing proliferation of locations and ‘nested’ as well as ‘looped’ character identities, where actors play characters who are themselves actors in a film that is a remake of another film which might be the one that we are watching, where actors play characters, who are themselves actors … It also explains the peculiar figure-ground reversal effect one often senses in Lynch, equally present in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. There, several ‘worlds’ are co-present, but the normal distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘dream,’ wish-fulfilling fantasy or dreaded nightmare scenario – and even the difference between a flashback and flash-forward – is blurred or suspended, lacking enough clues to disambiguate which is which. It leaves the viewer with the choice of either giving up on the story in frustration, and float on the successive waves of images and sensations, or to decide on the most likely primary diegetic world, into which various other worlds – at first (mis-)identified as dreams, flashbacks, memories – are embedded or nested. Except that it might turn out that the ‘embedded’ worlds are actually the ones with the more decisive consequences for the actions, the motivations and behavior of the protagonists. This brings Lynch’s films closer to the type of narratives that literary scholars like Linda Hutcheon or Brian McHale have characterized as ‘postmodern(ist).’46 The advantage of such a description for the overall argument (made about Lynch in my later chapter devoted to his LA trilogy) would be that it confronts us with the non-hierarchical coexistence of several worlds, which the narration strives hard to keep ‘open,’ ‘possible’ or ‘suspended’ as long as possible, preferably right until the end, while nevertheless insisting that the forces operating in and upon these worlds are interconnected and co-dependent, and therefore that – despite appearances to the contrary (as indicated in my discussion of Groundhog Day above) and against the postmodern notion that ‘everything goes’ (not only in Lynch’s worlds) – ‘actions do have consequences.’47

‘Impossible’ Puzzle Films A more explicitly cognitivist take on narration – and thus on unreliability, deception, instability and open-endedness – can be found in Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen’s Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema.48 They place themselves firmly on the side of Bordwell and distinguish three types of puzzle films, only one of which they call ‘impossible,’ while the other two types are, first, ‘deceptive’ but comprehensible, thanks to a

42 On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points

twist or reveal, i.e., they are no longer puzzling on second viewing, once the shock of recognition has passed that crucial information had been withheld, and once the twist that requires the revision of one’s usual assumptions about the story and its (fictional) reality status has been registered. The second type of puzzle films comprise narratives that are ‘disorienting,’ due to pervasive ambiguities but which ultimately can be made sense of, especially if one accepts such pseudo-science devices as time travel, teleportation and ‘inception,’ i.e., films that can be disambiguated in the manner routinely undertaken by Bordwell with such virtuosity. This leaves relatively few impossible puzzle films: besides Lynch’s LA trilogy, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, Shane Caruth’s Primer (2004) the authors include lesser-known films, such as Christopher Smith’s Triangle (2009) and James Ward Byrkit’s Coherence (2014), along with one or two films from Belgium and Spain. What makes these films ‘impossible to make sense of’ is that they are ‘designed to defy resolution,’ with ‘impossibility’ being a possible function of complexity when viewed from the perspective of its effects on the viewer. The questions raised are therefore primarily about reception: “‘How do viewers usually make sense of or assign meaning to contradictory and impossible narrative elements?’; ‘What kinds of interpretive activity do these challenging films evoke in viewers?’ and ‘How do such interpretive activities shape our viewing experiences?’”49 Kiss and Willemsen more or less reject the kind of hybridity advocated by Buckland: “we believe a fundamental caution should be maintained with regard to claims crossing over from different media,” but concede that “in highly complex films, viewers do not just experience complexity and dissonance, but are also often inclined to try to understand the underlying logic of it.” This leads them to a double hypothesis: even if impossible puzzle films do not offer the usual ‘rewards’ of meaning-making (the revelation of the twist, the sense of resolution and closure), the meaning-seeking impulse remains unabated, as if the solution to the puzzle is still hovering above, always just beyond one’s grasp. Secondly, they point to the fact that such unsuccessful grasping may itself be pleasurable, quoting Umberto Eco who, with reference to impossible fictional worlds, argued that there was indeed ‘the pleasure of our logical and perceptual defeat’ to be reckoned with, and thus a seemingly perverse satisfaction in failure.50 Quoting Jesper Juul, a Danish writer on games, who insists that failure is part of the experience because it “promises us that we can remedy the problem if we keep playing,”51 they argue that: [I]mpossible puzzle films may beguile viewers with a similar promise, as their highly complex (but seemingly logical) narration continuously encourages viewers to rationalize and narrativize the illogical. The prospect of the potential intelligibility of these films inspires viewers to keep trying to overcome their felt inadequacy – which, as Juul notes with regard to games, is ‘an inadequacy that they produce in us in the first place.’52 By arousing a sense of inadequacy,

On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points 43

impossible puzzle films seem to trigger a similar motivational bias: viewers may feel that their competence or intelligence is being challenged in cracking the puzzle, and therefore submit to the urge to overcome ‘their’ failure through recurring attempts of problem-solving.53 It would seem that Kiss and Willemsen hint, but do not quite state explicitly, that one of the functions of impossible puzzle films is indeed to make their viewers addicted. In other words, an approach such as theirs which focuses primarily if not exclusively on reception and the viewers’ response tends to treat viewers also as consumers whose experience of emotional frustration combined with the promise of relief makes them targets for addiction, and whose cognitive dissonance that craves for clarity put them in a double bind that inclines towards obsessive-compulsive behavior or paranoia. This may seem rather unfair, given the intellectual effort and erudition they put into scouring the behavioral and cognitivist literature for more benign explanations, such as ‘effort justification’ (the more effort we invest in something, the more valuable it becomes to us), ‘actuality-decoupling’ (the basis for human memory and fantasy), ‘fascination with infinity’ (the pleasure we take in loops, Möbius strips, Penrose steps and other illusionist ways of forestalling finitude) and ‘ontological metalepsis’ (destabilizing our sense of reality in challenging ways), as well as learning from confusion (‘eudaimonic motivation,’ i.e., seeking self-improvement and acquiring competences). These various benefits and gratifications allow Kiss and Willemsen to conclude on an upbeat note: we would propose that feeling ‘challenged’ by complex movies may be more important than solving their puzzles. In this light, the success of impossible puzzle films can be seen as the result of a narrative audacity that takes its viewers’ ‘empowered’ positions into consideration; these films dare to enduringly confuse viewers, and boldly leave large chunks of the interpretive and analytic work up to their cognitive and interpretive competences. The narrative and psychological pressures on viewers to resolve dissonances and achieve comprehension make room for all kinds of creative, intellectual, analytic and interpretive skills and processes.54 What this suggests for my overall argument is that the change in narrational regimes from reliable to deceptive is acceptable, indeed pleasurable not only because it challenges ‘creative, intellectual, analytic and interpretive skills’ but also because it implicitly acknowledges what has come to be known as the ‘post-truth’ condition (“the only truth is that we are being lied to all the time,” as Salman Rushdie once put it). Thus, by a paradoxical, but otherwise quite logical turn, deceptive narration is more truthful (to experience) than reliable narration, which is either ideologically naïve and/or suspect: of complicity, hiding its own deception.

44 On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points

Mind-Game Films as Meta-Cinema Nonetheless, what the various scholarly approaches to puzzle films despite their differences have in common is that they all stress the importance – and attraction – of engaging with and learning to apply the ‘rules’: to become curious about the deeper structures that generate the narratives and their manner of addressing and activating the viewer. Buckland points this out, Kiss and Willemsen do likewise, and even Bordwell’s “ageing hipsters” are savvy spectators who are in on the game. As I put it some ten years ago: the audience is being played with, knows it is being played with, and does not seem to mind being played with. This ‘I-know-that-you-know-that-Iknow’ aspect of the ‘play-drive’ in mind-game films seems to stand in some tension with the argument just made about ‘impossible puzzle films’ possibly fostering addiction, paranoia and obsessive-compulsive behavior, but it is precisely this tension that I would wish to highlight and leave – at least at this stage – unresolved. Instead, I want to switch perspective and approach the mind-game film not from the reception or viewers’ standpoint, whether mimetic, affective or cognitive, but from the point of view of the institution, that is, as part of the reflexive self-allegorization with which I concluded my previous study of classical and post-classical cinema, The Persistence of Hollywood.55 I have already had occasion to quote J. D. Connor’s more wide-ranging but similarly producer-focused writings on contemporary cinema, which he calls ‘neoclassical,’ and will want to refer to his examples again, but here make the seemingly more classically modernist claim, namely that mind-game films are Hollywood’s contemporary meta-cinema: cinema that a) enacts Hollywood’s own survival strategies, b) besides mimetically doubling the participatory viewing situation of its audiences, also self-allegorizes its complex institutional and creative feedback loops, while c) being reflexively embedded in the cognitive ecosystem of contemporary neoliberal America, where the terms ‘mind-game,’ ‘perception management’ and ‘post-truth conditions’ play a critical strategic and increasingly politicized role. Insofar as mind-game films are symptomatic of Hollywood’s own conditions of possibility in the digital era, the films are always self-referential, reflexive and actively engaged in dynamic feedback with its real-life (economic, corporate and demographic) environment.56 Thus, finding an appropriate response to the changes in the overall media-scape – the changed ecology of streaming platforms, quality TV series, computer games and online videos challenging but also complementing the still crucial theatrical release of a film – is clearly a factor in the emergence of complex forms of storytelling and the puzzling, seemingly indeterminate plots. But one can understand these moves and measures also as an updated version of what Hollywood has always been aiming at: to incorporate new technologies into its traditional practices, to absorb experimental forms, to naturalize avant-garde practices, to appropriate ‘talent’ wherever it might show itself, and above all, to ward off outside interference through all manner of internal self-regulation.

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Reflexivity and self-reference in Hollywood is not a distancing device or a self-critical stance; they exist and are deployed in order to ensure the industry’s – and if we follow Connor, the individual studios’ – self-preservation (‘survival’) and self-presentation (the logo, the brand).57 This strategy can also, as I have argued in the case of James Cameron and Avatar, lead to fulfilling the apparently contradictory injunction to provide ‘access for all’ while ‘keeping control.’58 Correspondingly, mind-game films (but not only mind-game films)59 may be understood as allegories of such self-preservation under adverse or conflicted conditions: Since each stand-alone film represents not only a major financial investment, but involves different players (actors) following different agendas (scripts), its coming into being can itself become a mind-game narrative, and as we shall see, Inception is an outstanding example of such self-allegorizing meta-cinema. Having to serve global audiences in a medium whose easy reproducibility encourages piracy posed another challenge to Hollywood, met with different strategies. Faced with aggregators of critical opinion that make or break a title within a weekend of its initial release, a film that requires multiple viewings is something of an insurance policy. On the other hand, enigmatic or disorienting films may not add cash to the box office, but they create cultural capital, thanks to the online debates and commentary they generate, which feeds back to the studios and the producers as valuable ‘data’: to be processed, monitored and mined for purposes of more accurate prediction and potential risk reduction. Much like the data accumulated and aggregated by social media companies, by online retailers and search engines, the film industry increasingly looks to AI in order to interpret the data gathered not only from box office or online traffic.60 It is in this sense that mind-game films might have been the ‘canaries in the mine-shaft’ or the test-runs of new prototypes: a function that since the mid-teens Netflix’s own series and commissioned films have tried most astutely to take on and expand. Regarding the second meta-cinema dimension, the mimetic enactment of audience expectations and behavior, here too feedback loops come into play. What films with non-linear storylines, time travel devices, disorienting spaces, mutable character identities and uncanny doubles enact is to translate into story terms (and thus also to mirror) the bodily engagement and motor-sensory behavior of a new kind of viewer, who – thanks to the DVD or the download – can stop, rewind, replay, alter and generally interfere with the flow of a film. This flow – the smooth synchronization and subtle alignment of screen time and lived time – had previously been (and still is in the movie theater) irreversible.61 The new viewer, however, grown up with video games, is used to – indeed may expect to encounter – alternative story worlds, different game levels, avatars, replay actions and reboot functions. It is as if mind-game films enact the technical conditions that made them visually possible: reliance on post-production allows the makers to control and manipulate virtually all the parameters of physical reality and bodily motion. But the films also anticipate and even invite this other

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mimetic relation, the one that appropriates, samples and repurposes them online, in mash-ups, super-cuts, or video-essays.62 Taken together, these factors raise a high bar for Hollywood directors and writers: their films have to look good on the big screen as well as ‘hook’ the casual viewer when played on a laptop; they have to work as coherent stories and autonomous self-contained narratives, yet remain comprehensible even when cut up into scenes or plundered for spectacular set-pieces; they have to hide cues and plant special information (‘Easter eggs’), so as to both require and reward the multiple viewings that now make up a sizable portion of a film’s overall income. This high bar is met by mind-game films: not only or not necessarily in terms of content but rather at the level of structure and design. If symptomatic of the challenges presented to the film industry by digital media and concomitant changes in technology and by audience behavior accustomed to random access and familiar with video games, then mind-game films tackle these challenges at the metalevel. What scholars have identified as opposing tendencies (e.g., classical storytelling versus non-linear storytelling, single chronology versus multiple timelines, narrative logic versus video game logic) are no longer either/or alternatives but built into the very structure of the films as equally possible identities (as we saw in the case of Groundhog Day and Source Code), as performative contradictions (in films like Primer, Predestination or Looper), or (when relying on time travel, teleportation, body-swaps) as equally plausible impossibilities. However, the underlying principle is not in itself as new as it might seem. Considered from the perspective of Hollywood – that is, from the point of view of an industry mindful of its self-preservation, self-regulation and non-interference autonomy – the strategy of generating indeterminate narratives, unpredictable outcomes or other forms of under-determination can be regarded as an updated variant on an old Hollywood rule or practice, namely that of ‘deniability,’ as implicitly laid down and codified in the much maligned Hays Code (official name: Motion Picture Production Code).63 What looks like a long list of prudish do’s and don’ts in fact also legislates for a style of indirection, of suggestiveness and deliberate gaps: an art that was aimed at creating ambiguity without becoming incoherent. Such ‘structured ambiguity’ is responsible for those moments or scenes in a film where it is left to the audience how to understand an innuendo, spot a doubleentendre, or interpret a fade to black. This form of self-censorship was deemed necessary from the 1930s to the 1950s, in order to forestall state censorship and pressure from religious or other special interest groups. Take the example of Doris Day, the epitome of ‘wholesomeness,’ of the ‘girl next door’ and of the ‘virginal’ career woman. What no one failed to point out in her obituary is how carefully double coded this particular image was. As A. O. Scott put it: “[Her] movies are naughty beyond imagining, and as clean as a whistle. In Pillow Talk – in effect the first movie about the pleasures and consequences of phone sex – [Rock] Hudson and Day take a bath together. It’s a split-screen shot, but still. The plot of Lover Come Back turns on the mass marketing of a powerful, possibly hallucinogenic

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drug. Heterosexual courtship under the mandate of matrimony has rarely looked so kinky. We’re not even talking about what it means that Rock Hudson is the male lead. The ambiguity is ambient. The deniability is perfect, and perfectly preposterous. [Doris] Day is the key to it all, because her presence simultaneously upholds the pretense of virtuous normality and utterly transgresses it. She is a walking semiotic riot with a pert nose and a winning smile, keeper and scrambler of a whole book of social norms and cultural codes.”64 After the relaxation – and then abolition – of the Hays Code in the late 1960s, this type of double coding was in part replaced by what I called the sliding signifiers of post-classical cinema.65 Yet since the 1990s, the mind-game film, besides structured ambiguity and sliding signifiers (such as the hand in Groundhog Day), sets out to also strive for maximum structured undecidability. It does so, however, for comparable reasons, namely for internal self-regulation and to manage positive feedback. But what has obviously changed are the forces that make such ambiguity and indeterminacy necessary: if in the days of the Hays Code it was an attempt to avoid polarizing the audience or otherwise create controversy, today it is the volatility of Internet word-of-mouth, the unpredictability of social media response and the make-or-break power of Rotten Tomatoes ratings66 that worry Hollywood, while polarizing audiences and generating critical controversies is actually regarded as useful ‘click-bait.’ What distinguishes Hollywood’s ‘keeping control’ from more outright and overtly authoritarian censorship is the ‘postmodern’ insight that one can actually keep control over reception and meaning-making by seemingly relinquishing control, i.e., through indeterminacy and undecidability. Such strategies also ensure ‘access for all,’ insofar as interpretations are hard to falsify, and – as this chapter tries to demonstrate – a mind-game film accommodates several conflicting ones and even welcomes them. After seeing Under the Skin (2013), the blogger Ivan Paio wrote: So long as we restrict our knowledge to what’s on screen, every interpretation will inevitably be incomplete. The fact is that the plot is deliberately impenetrable. Is this movie the umpteenth parable about what qualifies us as human beings? A Hobbesian reflection on mankind’s intrinsic evil? Or maybe a self-referential meditation on the Seventh Art? [The director] has orchestrated the movie precisely so that we come out of the theater in confusion. The clues we piece together just aren’t sufficient to build up a fullfledged story unless we introduce, with a considerable degree of arbitrariness, some information that the film lacks.67 On this reading, narrative complexity is the viewer’s version or perception of structured undecidability, and as such, also a matter of perspective or position: not every viewer has “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”68 and not every mind-game film can enact or fully sustains the necessary ‘parallax view’69 that accommodates conflicting or

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non-convergent responses, while challenging an audience to detect the rules beneath the rules. As we saw, scholars have proposed degrees of ‘puzzlement’ (solvable, solvable under certain conditions, impossible to solve),70 in order to get a better grip on the issue, but when trying to justify the desirability of the mind-game film’s carefully crafted openness (of which the apparent compatibility of ‘classical narrative’ and ‘video game logic’ would constitute proof of sorts), it becomes evident that undecidability is not a design flaw but a design feature. Thus, whereas Buckland argues for puzzle films to be regarded as hybrids that blend the characteristics of both forms, I maintain that for mindgame films a different image might be more appropriate: I am thinking of the perceptual illusion of the duck-rabbit drawing, where you ‘recognize’ either a duck or a rabbit, but you cannot see both at the same time. In fact, Groundhog Day makes a similar case, when one of Phil’s drinking companions raises his beer glass and claims that one can tell a man’s character depending on whether he sees the glass as half full or half empty.71

Towards a Symptomatic Reading of Mind-Game Films Yet what if this formal feature of undecidability – here examined as part of an overall strategy that protects Hollywood’s autonomy (‘keeping control’) while preserving Hollywood’s hegemony (‘access for all’) – is nonetheless also a ruse and a lure? This time not so much/not only for leading the way to addictive behavior on the part of the viewer as ‘user,’ but as a cover for other kinds of ‘games’: more oblique messages, diversionary maneuvers or hidden manipulative moves? Such a possibility raises both methodological and ideological issues, and it revives debates over the political function of Hollywood, especially regarding the kind of ‘soft power’ exercised through Hollywood’s dominance, both domestically and globally. It has always been an axiom that American movies fulfill an important role for the United States’ self-image and self-understanding: they have been the nation’s secular mythology, and in this respect can be said to function much the way that Claude Lévi-Strauss identified myths as offering the imaginary resolution of real contradictions.72 Thus, whenever Hollywood films are discussed with a view to their cultural impact or significance, commentators and critics invariably treat the movies as symptoms directing attention to another cause: the ‘cause’ usually being one of the crises affecting, or traumata afflicting, the body politics of the United States at any given time. This goes both ways: every violent event, disaster, war or other national crisis is assumed to produce the films that reflect or react to the most recent calamity: who does not remember the post-Watergate films, followed by the post-Vietnam films, with in each case a plethora of academic articles and books drawing out or teasing out the parallels? The rationale for such a correlation between movies, history and politics is often justified in terms of the more general purpose of ‘popular culture,’ of which cinema is a key component:

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We tend, in times like these (politically, socially, morally tense ones), to look to the culture to address them. Even the most benign films in the 1970s seemed in some way to be a response to – or to have absorbed – their moment. So, we can see allegories from Watergate and the Vietnam War in both work about those subjects and in work that ostensibly has nothing to do with them. The ’70s were just a decade, but they were also an atmosphere, and that atmosphere was present in a lot of the culture this country produced.73 From this notion that films are a ‘response’ to a significant historical event or have ‘absorbed’ the atmosphere of a ‘decade,’ it is, however, another step to arguing that Hollywood needs to be at the vanguard of social change. The intense battles fought every year around the Oscar nominations and Academy Awards on behalf of ‘representation’ (the 2016 hashtag #OscarSoWhite, followed by #MeToo and amplified in 2017 with #TimesUp) suggest that America increasingly looks to its movies not just as a major source of national self-analysis, or for a ‘working through’ of trauma but expects cinema to play an active/activist role in identity politics and the culture wars: TV and film are in the thick of an unprecedented sociopolitical reckoning, the first ever of such scale and ferocity, a microcosm of our ever-more-literal national culture war. But to make that reckoning stick, we have to look ahead and ask ourselves what we want of this new Hollywood, and look back to avoid repeating the past. Hollywood is both a perfect and bizarre vanguard in the war for cultural change. Perfect because its reach is so vast, its influence so potent; bizarre because television and movies are how a great many toxic ideas [have] embedded themselves inside of us in the first place. By ‘toxic’ the writer is primarily referring to the traditional depiction of gender roles and gender relations, in the formation of which the movies play – according to this account – an inordinately decisive part: From romantic comedies, I learned that stalking means he loves you and persistence means he earned you – and also that I was ugly. From Disney movies, I learned that if I made my waist small enough (maybe with the help of a witch), a man or large hog-bear might marry me, and that’s where my story would end. The Smurfs taught me that boys can have distinct personalities, like being smart or grumpy, and girls can have only one (that personality is ‘high heels’). From The Breakfast Club, I learned that rage and degradation are the selling points of an alluring bad boy, not the red flags of an abuser. From pretty much all media, I learned that complicated women are ‘crazy’ and complicated men are geniuses.74

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Yet the notion of Hollywood as purveyor of ‘toxic’ stereotypes is one that actually had its heyday in academic film studies during the 1970s. Aimed initially at exposing ‘bourgeois ideology,’ as in the famous call to arms by JeanLouis Comolli and Jean Narboni,75 ideological critiques of Hollywood were soon extended to include a feminist agenda. Although initially focused on the question of ‘representation’ (i.e., negative stereotyping), feminist readings since the mid-1970s developed more extensive (and intrinsic) critiques of the formal and narrative means by which (patriarchal, sexist, racist) ideology was naturalized and rendered invisible in Hollywood genre cinema. Not much has changed, one might say, and the call to arms is once more necessary, but what is striking is the phrase ‘at times like these …’: for it seems that every time the US is involved in a protracted war or tries to disengage itself from undecided conflict outside its own territory, Hollywood produces some versions of mindgame movies. Thus, the Korean War gave us, besides the films of Sam Fuller (The Steel Helmet, Shock Corridor) also John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, a classic of an earlier incarnation of the mind-game film (albeit with resolution and narrative closure). The Vietnam War and Watergate are generally regarded as the political-moral background to the cycle of paranoia films of the 1970s (with their all-encompassing conspiracy theories): Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, All the Presidents’ Men, while Oliver Stone’s JFK – referencing the Kennedy Assassination of 1963 – was a nostalgic evocation of the 1970s paranoia genre, made at the point in time when the US entered what came to be known as the First Gulf War (1991). It is as if the present – faced with conflicts of uncertain outcome – returns to the past, but not to some idyllic golden age, but to a period of similar uncertainty, paranoia and conspiracy. Paranoia, in other words, is somehow seen as the solution, rather than as the problem, which would fit Fred Jameson’s analysis of paranoia as the only way – perverse and paradoxical as it may seem – that a sense of totality (i.e., the view of ‘the big picture’) can survive in a ‘postmodern’ society.76 Thus, it is hard to escape the speculation that the re-emergence of paranoia in the form of mind-game films might well be connected with the First Gulf War of 1991 and its aftermaths – the shock and trauma of 9/11 and then the second, disastrous Gulf War in both Iraq and Afghanistan. There is of course, by now no shortage of Hollywood films that thematize the Iraq War, from Brian de Palma’s Redacted (2007) to Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014), from In the Valley of Elah (2007) to Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016), from The Hurt Locker (2008) to Green Zone (2010), from Jarhead (2005) to War Dogs (2016) and from Good Kill (2014) to Eye in the Sky (2016). While several deal with individual trauma or PTSD, and some portray their central characters as psycho- or sociopaths while other protagonists display more ‘productive’ pathologies, none of the titles would qualify as puzzle or mind-game film. The situation is different when thinking about 9/11, because – as many commentators have pointed out – an attack on New York’s skyscrapers and the fall of the Twin Towers had been prefigured countless

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times in Hollywood films ever since the mid-1990s, making the catastrophe of September 11, 2001 as much a matter of time-warps and retroactive causality as it is was shockingly unexpected, but it did leave bafflingly open what kind of mind-game imagination must have been at work to produce such a strange and uncanny constellation that anticipated the traumatic event, and replayed it before it actually happened. Fight Club, one of the films, which in its penultimate scene has two skyscrapers collapse into rubble and dust, was made in 1999, could not but change meaning and reference after September 2001; and yet however much it is a mind-game film, it is not a typical post-9/11 mind-game film. For this we need to return to Source Code, and look at it afresh, now primed for other levels of reference and thematic resonances. What, for instance, would it mean to focus on the fact that its protagonist Colter Stevens is an all but dead US war veteran and Army pilot, shot down somewhere over Kandahar in Afghanistan? Are we perhaps inside his trauma, the film in fact a flash-forward last-minute dash into fantasy as he is dying or has his life support switched off? What most certainly comes to the fore is a damaged masculinity, not unlike the hero’s condition in Avatar, where a paraplegic war veteran is given a virtual body that transforms him into one of the fabled Na’vi creatures flying through the air, endowed with superhuman strength and mobility. In Source Code Colter’s mutilated body is also given a projection of exceptional agency in a parallel universe, where he is able to rescue the passengers on the train, much the way in Avatar the ‘White Messiah’ rescues the planet Pandora and its inhabitants. These are thus wish-fulfilling fantasies, which in Source Code are embedded in an oedipal triangle, making it appear that the Nellis facility/cockpit-capsule situation is structured as a family constellation, with Captain Coleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) playing the role of the ‘mother’ and Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) the ‘father’ against whom the ‘son’ rebels, while also talking to – and reconciling with – his actual father, albeit in the persona of the dead passenger Sean, thus engineering a classical resolution of the son’s father complex, by not only splitting the paternal image into a good and bad father-image but also splitting the son’s body and identity: a typical mind-game stratagem within a classical Hollywood family scenario. However, what Source Code does not address but provides evidence for is an issue that also connects to 9/11 in more indirect ways: the emergence of the surveillance society or the ‘dark state,’ in parallel to elected governments, and what could be called the consequent militarization of civilian life: in one sense, the political byproduct of video game logic,77 but in another sense, part of the ideological contraband that mind-games might also be transporting. Like other paranoia or conspiracy thrillers, mind-game films that deploy time travel, such as Source Code and Déjà Vu, tend to introduce secret government agencies, which conduct missions or carry out experiments that take place beyond democratic oversight or transparency, if not outside the law altogether. Although at one level introduced to make plausible the impossible, i.e., time travel, their plausibility

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rests on the likely existence of similar agencies in today’s America. As has been the case since 9/11, the threat of a terrorist attack serves to strengthen the role of the military in domestic affairs, in the name of security and prevention. The urgency of imminent danger must justify a virtual state of emergency and suspends the concomitant questions of power and accountability. In Source Code, it is the military that ‘solves’ the problem of the terrorist attack on the Chicago train, but it is the hero disobeying the rules who ‘saves’ the passengers in a parallel universe: one where a speeding train can function as a horizontal skyscraper. This would be another layer of wish-fulfilling fantasy that puts the focus on one of the more ideologically revealing features of time travel films more generally: the wish to make something undone that has already taken place. And in this fantasy, 9/11 does indeed play a crucial role, as Garrett Stewart has also pointed out, with reference to Source Code: “… can it be an accident that this happens exactly in connection with a scheme of ex post facto prevention – the ultimate fantasy in this epoch of 9/11 hindsight? Typical in being strictly implicit, buried in a single allusion to Iraq War technology, here is the un-thought wish that, if we could actually turn back the clock, there would be no War on Terror, nor terror’s war on us. Instead … we have the nightmare of further sacrifice, even death, at the hands of terrorism: before the quantum leap (cinematographically figured) into a happy ending.”78 Such a reading – using the hermeneutics of suspicion to uncover a hidden political message or pinpointing a specific capitalist/neoliberal ideology – would indeed disambiguate mind-game time travel films like Source Code or Déjà Vu and indict them for promoting the acceptance of ubiquitous surveillance and the militarization of civil society. However, it would do so at a price, which is, to ignore the indeterminacy, the plausible impossibility, the reversible and parallel timelines, all of which makes them mind-game films in the first place. As mind-game films, they advertise their narrative as wish-fulfilling hypotheticals, taking us from the ‘what-if’ of time travel to the ‘if-only’ of wanting to undo what cannot be undone. In other words, the ideological charge turns the mind-game films back into classical Hollywood narratives and thereby undoes the work that the mode of undecidability is able to do: to offer the suspension of determination, including ideological determination.

Argo as Mind-Game History In separate chapters on time travel, I shall be looking more closely at the narrational modes that take us from the ‘as-if’ of fiction in general to the hypothetical ‘what-if’ of mind-games-as-thought-experiments to the optative ‘if-only’ of time travel’s genuine but inadmissible feeling of regret, which so often underpins its wish-fulfilling fantasies of undoing what has been done. Here I want to present by way of contrast, the operation of a wish-fulfilling fantasy in a classical action-adventure film, whose mind-game makeover by Hollywood resides not in its form but rather in its

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ideology. It, too, concerns, a historical event and its traumatic aftermath for the American nation: the Iran hostage crisis. Lasting from November 1979 to January 1981, it made Jimmy Carter a one-term president and resulted in implacable hostility toward Iran, the country that – in the eyes of US Conservatives – had managed to humiliate the ‘Leader of the Western World’ and that, to this day, disproportionately preoccupies and determines US Middle Eastern policy. The film that captures this humiliation, but turns it inside out, is Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012), the story of CIA operative Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck), who with the help of the Canadian Ambassador in Iran manages to spirit six US diplomats out of Tehran, under the pretense of filming a science fiction film in November 1979 at the very beginning of the hostage crisis. Part thriller, part comedy, it is also meta-cinema, in that it celebrates movie magic and its power of make-believe, giving inadvertently insight into the kind of political agency Hollywood now (rightly?) attributes to itself. If time travel films, as I shall try to show, are rarely about looking ahead into the future, and much more often vehicles for going back to the past, in order to redo or undo something that has already happened, but whose consequences impinge adversely on the present, then Argo qualifies as a time travel film, because – even though ‘based on a true story’ – the film returns to a specific moment in the past in order to shift focus and manage perception, thereby obfuscating causes and altering awareness, in this case, of US–Iranian relations and the reasons for their mutual animosity and dangerous distrust. A murky episode of international relations and buccaneer diplomacy, following decades of political interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, is being retold as a brave, bold and brazen rescue mission, thus allowing a political catastrophe – the 444-day siege of the US Embassy in Teheran – to be rewritten as a triumphant success. A lone but plucky American, with a little help from the CIA (and the Canadians), outwits the natives (the Iranian National Guard): this time not by selling them shiny glass beads, but by showing them glossy storyboard pictures made in the dream factory of Hollywood. Argo uses the masterminded fake – with a nod to Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog (1997), Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) and, possibly, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) – in order to prove the superiority of impersonation, performativity and make-believe over armed confrontation but also over ‘reality,’ which can be staged as a kind of mind-game of managed perceptual expectations. Second, Argo extensively displays and deploys the industrial technology of such ‘faking reality’ in action (in the scenes set among Hollywood screenwriters and executives), but extends its reach to include television and the surveillance apparatus (which in other action-adventure or ‘caper’ films is routinely invoked as the final guarantor of veracity and authenticity). Once we are in the realm of images, Hollywood is still the master of special effects, with digitization making it possible to turn reality itself and its most authentic touches into special effects. Argo not only has television sets and monitors everywhere, it also takes great pains in getting period details, props and clothes exactly right, and it digitally recreates the setting (Teheran,

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Los Angeles etc.) and restages the photos from the historical event, as its way of bringing real events from the past back to life. With Argo, trauma is no longer a matter of ‘working through’ or even ‘acting out.’ Rather, as one might polemically put it, trauma has been photo-shopped out: no therapy is required for the nation’s trauma, more a digital Band-Aid on the nation’s wounded pride. Considering Argo as a time travel film means asking if the film goes back to the 1970s in order to retroactively reclaim agency in a situation where the US proved so spectacularly (and for the American public, so painfully) powerless, while making sure that nothing changes in the present (i.e., that no lessons need to be drawn from history). What does it mean that the film rewrites history through the perfect enactment of its digital substitute, by showing the formidable agency of a fake, the efficacy of deception? On the one hand, it helps to heal the nation’s narcissistic wounds, without disturbing its ignorance, and on the other hand, it congratulates Hollywood on its own power position of being in the ‘reality-creating’ business, much in the way that George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff Karl Rove is said to have boasted to a journalist that “America is an Empire now: when we act, we create our own reality.”79 It is in response to such ideologically as well epistemologically overconfident claims in both mainstream movies and politics that mind-game films are reflexively allegorical. They often stage and expose the very mechanisms that make such sleights of hand as Argo possible, because – as argued above – they come to the question of veracity, truth and reality from the other side, as it were, by positing deceptiveness and the power of the false, indeterminacy and the implacably ludic force of contingency as cinema’s new normal (which is in fact its old normal, when remembering that these are among cinema’s originary properties, prior to its capture by narrative).80 The path to truth is not by disguising cinema’s intrinsic artifice, but by training, teaching and if necessary, traumatizing the viewer into recognizing, and indeed appreciating the ‘rules of the game,’ which is to say the rules of the world constituted by different temporalities and multiple realities, each of which may be the ‘truth’ (or indeed the ‘rescue’) of the other.

Mind-Games, Meta-Cinema, and Self-Allegory: The Case of Inception Argo, I am arguing is not a mind-game film, but plays mind-games with history, as an ideological maneuver that allows Hollywood to celebrate itself, while contributing yet another narrative emplotment to the standard trope of American war films, which is: ‘let no man be left behind,’ i.e., rescue the boys and bringing them home. From Rambo to Black Hawk Down, from Apocalypse Now to Saving Private Ryan the rescue scenario is America’s self-serving representation of what are otherwise (ruinous or failed) invasive military missions (for ‘restoring democracy’). If Saving Private Ryan is a different case – as I try to show in the chapter devoted to the film – it is also because WWII is still considered one of the United States’

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honorable and just wars, and because Spielberg’s film questions the very logic of ‘save and rescue’ one (man/cause/community) and not another. A film that also reworks the ‘heroic’ rescue mission trope in the reflexive mode is Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, paying homage to Saving Private Ryan in its opening segment, before opting for a different kind of complex narrative with interlocking actions and the same characters turning up in different segments. Mostly, Dunkirk’s disorienting elements are the compressed and dilated time-scales across its three hours duration.81 But it is Nolan’s Inception (whose plot, incidentally, also pivots on the homecoming trope) that is perhaps the most paradigmatic mind-game film, serving as a kind of summary for the different steps of my argument. We saw how it obeys the rules of classical Hollywood narrative construction while also embodying to perfection the video game logic as identified by Buckland. Its narrational strategies have been identified not so much as unreliable or deceptive, but as so complex as to defy analysis. Part of the difficulty stems from the way the power-relations among the protagonists are ‘nested’ in dreams-within-dreams: a mise-en-abyme that is further complicated not only by so-called ‘lucid’ (i.e., shared) dreams, but by characters finding themselves inside someone else’s dream. Thus, given the non-chronological narration, with unmarked flashbacks that could be flash-forwards (and vice versa), doubled by asymmetrical power-relations of who is in whose dream (and by extension, who is manipulating whom), Inception represents a special case of the uneven distribution of knowledge to be found in most films working with suspense, anticipation and retrospective revision, as well as with identification and participation. Nolan visualizes (or better: diagrams) the nested narrative by an image of the Penrose stairs, with their four 90-degree turns, infinitely ascending and descending in a continuous loop, and indicates an (equally ascending and descending) verticality by way of an old-fashioned, scissor-gate elevator. For Eliot Panek, Inception is extreme, in that a similarly Penrose-like architecture applies to the distribution of knowledge as it does to the reality/dream status of the images and the nested narrative levels, while also implicating the audience: The audience finds out, later, that Cobb and Arthur know that they are in a dream within a dream. However, the audience possesses a bit of knowledge that Cobb and Arthur do not: when Arthur asks, “What’s going on up there?” the audience knows something he and Cobb do not know – that the rumblings are being caused by rioters running through the streets, blowing up cars. This knowledge might keep the audience from totally giving up on interpreting the scene: being kept disoriented for too long while characters, apparently, know more than you do is likely to feel alienating … [Yet] the protagonists also know something that the first-time viewer cannot know: that they are in a dream within a dream. It is thus not easy to say who is at an advantage here in terms of knowledge (the audience or the protagonists),

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but if one had to decide, one would likely say that the audience is still at a disadvantage, not even knowing the extent to which any of what they see is ‘real’ within the diegetic universe.82 Detailing what he calls the ‘back-and-forth’ between “revealing that the protagonist and antagonist had knowledge that the other (and the audience) did not,” Panek uses sophisticated narratological tools to establish how carefully Inception is plotted as a film, and how it both seeks to engage an audience through the management of knowledge distribution, while simultaneously maintaining a high degree of confusion and deliberate disorientation, verging (for some viewers) on incoherence. Inception, however, is above all the mind-game film as meta-cinema, and not merely by the way it so self-referentially flaunts its Escher-like labyrinths and Gestalt-switch trompes-l’oeil, taking us back to the duck-rabbit version of mindgame undecidability. Nor is Inception meta-cinema merely because so self-evidently readable (and frequently read) as an allegory of filmmaking, with its star Leonardo DiCaprio the alter ego of the director in much the way that Marcello Mastroianni was Federico Fellini’s alter ego in 8 1/2: The heist team quite neatly maps to major players in a film production. Cobb is the director while Arthur, the guy who does the research and who sets up the places to sleep, is the producer. Ariadne, the dream architect, is the screenwriter – she creates the world that will be entered. Eames is the actor (this is so obvious that the character sits at an old fashioned mirrored vanity, the type which stage actors would use). Yusuf is the technical guy … That leaves two key figures. Saito is the money guy, the big corporate suit who fancies himself a part of the game. And Fischer, the mark, is the audience. Cobb, as a director, takes Fischer through an engaging, stimulating and exciting journey, one that leads him to an understanding about himself. Cobb is the big time movie director … who brings the action, who brings the spectacle, but who also brings the meaning and the humanity and the emotion.83 As the reference to Fellini indicates, Inception is furthermore meta-cinematic in that it alludes to more movies than one would care to enumerate: from James Bond, Bourne, Mission Impossible blockbusters to The Dirty Dozen, Oceans 11 heist films, from Buñuel (Un Chien andalou) to Cocteau (Orphée), and from Antonioni (Zabriskie Point) to the Wachowskis (The Matrix), the allusions and homages are so pervasive that they sometimes take the form of an entire film-within-the-film pastiche. However, we must add another layer: Inception allegorizes quite specifically digital filmmaking, insofar as in contemporary cinema, more and more devolves on post-production, with the film taking shape through outsourced special effects labs and sub-contracted work-stations. ‘Dreaming’ here stands for ‘digitizing’: every reality, every solid object, every setting or city can become liquid,

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malleable, expand or contract, explode or vanish, neutralizing the laws of nature and suspending the force of gravity. However, the meta-cinematic dimension of Inception goes further even than authorial self-portrait, digital dematerialization, or as allegory of the teamwork and post-production division of labor required for the making of a contemporary blockbuster film. The very action the plot revolves around, namely inception, is what not only this but all movies strive to do: extract profit from ‘dreams’ and plant ideas in minds. The ‘real’ title of the film, in other words, is ‘cinema,’ which means that Inception is a mind-game film not least because it is an allegory of a mind-game: an elaborate manipulation of the viewers’ sense of reality, their orientation in space and time, across the act of testing their capacity for comprehending a narrative by trying to follow a story. And while the references to dream levels, ‘kicks,’ ‘limbo’ may mimetically enact the moves of a video game and mirror the actions of the players, the narration gives the audience just enough of an ‘Ariadne’ thread to follow the leads – movie-suspense fashion – through the labyrinth, in the expectation of coming out at the other end, and together with our hero, returning ‘home.’ If Inception is the mise-en-abyme of inception as the meta-cinematic truth of contemporary cinema, then the question arises: does it formulate an ideological critique or present a postmodern celebration? After all, it is a heist movie: these avatars of a film crew are thieves and criminals, and the stand-in for the audience is called ‘the Mark’ – the target or victim. Quite openly we are told that we are ‘robbed in broad daylight,’ as it were, except that the robbery takes place in the darkness of a movie theater. The film candidly concedes that extraction and inception is what cinema shares with advertising, propaganda, brainwashing, hypnosis and other forms of influence peddling and mind-control. Yet this in turn suggests that the sort of symptomatic reading or ideological critique as conducted by Garrett Stewart no longer has traction, given how openly the film hides this analogy between cinema and inception in plain sight. Such ideological readings risk doing much the same that Bordwell does: translate mind-game complexity and narrative ambiguity ‘back’ into what we already know, whether it is classical story construction or capitalist corporate ideology. It assumes that it can reveal what the mind-game tries to hide, and ends up disambiguating the undecidability on the side of its ideological message. But perhaps this is because the question – critical or celebratory, deconstructive or conformist, classical or postmodern? – is wrongly posed. I have been operating with a different set of terms, arguing that mind-game films mimetically enact and reflexively allegorize the material and technological conditions that make them possible. Mimesis and allegory in this context are not two diametrically opposed modes of representation, or affirmative and critical by another name, but more the two sides of the same coin, which allows the film to address and appeal to several distinct constituencies and as such another version of ‘access for all’ while ‘keeping control’ – control here being the hiding in plain sight or the robbery in broad daylight.

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However, in the case of Inception, one can argue that the film’s narrative architecture resembles not only a kind of trompe l’oeil perspective, in which the twodimensionality of the screen is used for three-dimensional illusionist tricks (the Penrose stairs as the film’s structural metaphor), but that there is also a parallax of another kind at work, which tempts us to look at the wrong thing or follow the wrong person, and thereby miss what is also going on. For instance, the most sustained debates surrounding Inception concerned the question whether the spinning top (the telltale ‘totem’ that was supposed to help separate reality from dream) at the end was wobbling and about to fall, or kept spinning: by cutting to black, Nolan left us ‘in the dark,’ and thus undecided whether Cobb when reunited with his children was still in a dream, or finally back ‘in the real world.’ All the options were debated, and plausible solutions offered for each (the spinning top is a red herring, because not his totem at all, but Mal’s, his deceased wife, while his totem is the wedding ring, which sometimes he wears and at other times not; the whole film is a dream, and the dream/reality divide is a red herring; etc.). These different possibilities alert us to the structuring principle of equally plausible alternatives, i.e., undecidability, but why stop there? Why not, as Todd McGowan has done, argue that Cobb is not the central figure but decentered in relation to his own ‘desire,’ which makes Mal the film’s gravitational center.84 Or – given the powerfully oedipal thematics that run through the film, with Saito and Fisher senior clearly functioning as father figures – why not add the Professor (Michael Caine), Mal’s father, Cobb’s father-in-law and the one who lets Cobb take ownership of another of his ‘daughters,’ Ariadne. And what if Ariadne, who is the one figuring out the role Mal still pays in Cobb’s ‘subconscious,’ has been ‘delegated’ by the Professor to extract and incept Cobb, which is what her name suggests, as the one who holds all the threads? The Professor, having lost Mal through Cobb’s recklessness, certainly has motives for wanting to ‘control’ Cobb. What is important is not whether this is the correct version, but merely the fact that there are several additional possibilities of how the narrative can be framed and reframed, centered and decentered, thus maintaining the story’s parallax displacement and with it the possibility that a shift of angle might reveal a different view of the object. Almost everyone writing about the film also acknowledges “Inception was clearly built with ambiguity in mind and that’s going to make finding a final, true answer nigh-impossible.”85 While this has not stopped critics and commentators to stake their reputation on giving a definitive reading, mostly focused on how to interpret the ending, and to decide whether Cobb in the final scene is still dreaming, or awake in some more fictionally ‘real’ reality, where he is united with his children. By positing so openly the question of what is real and what is dream, of why dreams can feel so real, and how can we tell whether we are dreaming or not, Inception has also attracted its fair share of philosophers. The bait here is a problem as old as philosophy itself, going back to Plato and the parable of the Cave, itself become the myth of origin of sort of cinema: what if the phenomenal world we see, touch, and grasp is merely a chimera, the reflection of

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some ideal world of forms we can only attain through abstract concepts (or as we would now say: through mathematics)?86 While this debate between Socrates and Glaucon in The Republic about the nature of perception and knowledge has been kept alive through Descartes, Hume, Bishop Berkeley (to Hilary Putnam’s ‘brain in a vat’ thought-experiment), the neurosciences have given a new life to the possibility of either a radical disconnect between our brains and our bodies, or of a mind entirely dependent on electro-chemical impulses, in order to see or sense and thus to know anything at all. Thus, Inception can be seen as Platonic in its emphasis on ‘ideas’ but also anti-Platonic in that it treats these ideas not as guarantors of some higher truth, but as the very stuff that can be instrumentalized, manipulated, monetized. Ideas are actually referred to in the script as ‘parasites’ that worm themselves into the brain: more like idées fixes or obsessions, and thus once more close to paranoia and addiction: the Holy Grail of Hollywood today. As a multidimensional, non-linear film, a tale told by competing narrational authorities, requiring several viewings, giving rise to mutually compatible but diametrically opposed interpretations, and offering layers upon layers of metacinematic reflexivity, Inception fulfills all the criteria of the mind-game film as I have been laying them out in this chapter. Packed into an oedipal story of father-son rivalry and a family melodrama of guilt, trauma and the return of the repressed, Inception, as Nolan claims, also delivers a self-presentation as candid self-exposure: “that’s how we do it, in the Hollywood film business of today; we sub-contract the best talents from all over the world, and we treat the most beautiful spots on the planet as our film sets, which when we feel like it, we blow up, foul up or fold over.” Cool confidence, detached equanimity, and irony laced with cynicism keep their balance in this ‘realistic’ assessment of global Hollywood. Assertive or anxious allegorizing is nothing new to both classical and postclassical cinema, as J. D. Connor (who prefers the term ‘neo-classical’) has been demonstrating for the past decade and more. Inception, produced in conjunction with Legendary by Warner Bros., with whom Nolan forged a close relationship since the Batman franchise, lends itself especially well to a reading that highlights the competing centers of power and authority within global entertainment conglomerates, which in the film are identified as being in the business of dominating the world’s ‘energy’ market, itself an apt metaphor for cinema as an affect and emotion machine. Furthermore, if filmmakers in the US – Hollywood studios and independents, separately and in relation to each other – are indeed at all levels tied into competitive-cooperative relationships, then Hollywood is best characterized by the positive/negative feedback loops that I try to capture in my formula ‘access for all’ while ‘keeping control.’ The tension inherent in this formula no doubt needs to be further elaborated in terms of the specific budgetary moves (e.g., tax credits, labor contracts, choice of locations, crews etc.), legal maneuvers and interaction with authorities, which determine the material conditions of a script ending up as finished movie, but it provides a template for the ways the corporate-entrepreneurial power-constellation enters into the film’s

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narrative and allegorizes the self-representation of the production companies involved, while also keeping the contending forces in balance, which – as Inception makes clear – means stealing from people in such a way that they believe they are freely giving. Yet in this chapter, my main focus has been on mind-game films, and how and why they generate moments of undecidability, whose uses and function are potentially in conflict, so that undecidability itself becomes that which keeps the balance, and cinema at the tipping point. Such work of undecidability – and as I hope has been clear throughout, constructing semantic Penrose steps and structural Escher labyrinths is work: demanding significant dramaturgical expertise and considerable writing skills – such work may well serve in response to the old William Goldman adage about Hollywood: ‘nobody knows anything.’ What Goldman meant was that no one in the motion picture business, irrespective of their position in the corporate hierarchy, their talent or their experience knows for certain what film is going to succeed, or indeed why those that are successful, have become so. What this implies, however, is not that it’s just ‘dumb luck,’ but that there are probably too many variables for ‘linear’ prediction, which is indeed one way in which narrative complexity and non-linearity of the kind typical of mind-game films allegorizes the real-world conditions under which films get made in the era of creative agency-led one-off package deals: If every screenplay is a business plan, then every production is a dummy corporation, a virtual corporation that gives rise to and reflects the actual corporation that it is. In Production Culture, John Thornton Caldwell puts it like this: ‘Because film and television are so capital intensive, a script also functions as a financial prospectus, a detailed investment opportunity, and a corporate proposal.’ Is a star available? Is a location ‘fresh’? Should this movie be marketed for Christmas release? Does it have a guaranteed cable slot? How will it play across the windows of distribution? These are a film’s virtual times and spaces, and as they become actual, they may also, and by that very same maneuver, be retained in their virtuality, as images and sounds, as self-allegorizations.87 Assuming that for producers, complex narratives are a way of keeping contending economic interests, strategic objectives and managerial decisions in balance, then on the side of the audience undecidability takes the form of not being able to agree not so much what a film means, but on how it means. As such, it may be the appropriate conditions for an age of increasing (political) polarization, but also of increasing skepticism. To the nobody knows anything would correspond nobody can agree on anything, which is what mind-game films self-referentially stage rather than merely provoke. A similar case has been made for long-running television series, such as Game of Thrones, which was specifically contrasted with Lord of the Rings on the grounds of the disagreements it was able to sustain:

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What made Game of Thrones emblematic of its time is how it divided its audience from start to finish, right down to the matter of what a happy ending would even constitute. It gave its intense fandom multiple angles to debate as well as to enjoy … The most popular fantasy epics tend to focus on a quest the audience agrees on. The Ring must be destroyed, Voldemort must be defeated, Aslan must prevail. [With Game of Thrones] a certain amount of dissonance [was] built in to a saga that combined the HBO sensibility – dark psychological realism and realpolitik moral ambiguity – with epic high fantasy: a genre in which, once upon a time, the only shades of gray were in the wizards’ cloaks.88 If even fantasy genres are banking on undecidability, then the mind-game ‘virus’ has begun to go mainstream.

Mind-Game Films and Chaos Theory However, if one looks beyond the immediate industry-audience context and regards undecidability as a necessary consequence of complexity, while considering complexity itself as the natural state of affairs of the dynamic interdependent feedback systems for which Hollywood can stand as emblematic, then another horizon opens up against which mind-game films become legible: that of chaos theory. Chaos theory is the name for the recognition that many of the phenomena that influence or determine our lives are made up of complexly interwoven dynamic processes that interact with each other in often wholly unpredictable, but also both unintended and catastrophic ways: the chain of unpredictable and unintended consequences known as the butterfly effect is the most obvious example of ‘sensitivity to initial conditions,’ which is the technical term for indicating that filmmaking and film-viewing as interactive and interdependent activities constitute feedback loops sufficiently complex to test the respective institutions’ ability to control or contain their effects. The more variables are identified as relevant to such an interdependent process, the more difficult it becomes to exercise negative feedback, i.e., to install regulatory mechanisms. My argument has been that the complexity and indeterminacy of mind-game films are just such attempts at devising negative feedback mechanisms, but operating against the background and in an environment of ongoing positive feedback, i.e., of too many variables interacting simultaneously, and thus gone out of control, either because of their complexity or their scale, quantity and intangibility. In this context, undecidability would be optimal negative feedback. Yet chaos theory came to prominence through the study of more seemingly innocuous, ‘atmospheric’ phenomena, such as cloud formations, the turbulence of water, or the shape of cigarette smoke blown into the air. It was the challenge of being able to mathematically model such apparent randomness and ‘in real time’ (i.e., as process) that gave rise to chaos theory: In A Beautiful Mind John Nash’s

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obsession with finding a mathematic equation for the frantic to-and-fro of pigeons as they compete for food, or for the Princeton grad students’ competition over girls, is credited with inspiring him to develop his game theory and the ‘Nash equilibrium.’ Since then, game theory, chaos theory, complexity theory, emergence theory have been among the most compelling, and also most consequential developments spilling from the hard sciences into our everyday lives, with their impact on weather forecasts, climate science, on the world financial system, on policing crowds and directing traffic, on life insurance and risk assessment. Countless other large and small events, exceptional and everyday activities now find themselves modeled, predicted, ‘premediated,’ anticipated, calculated and contained.89 Some have even argued that if relativity was the crucial discovery of the 20th century, chaos theory will dominate the 21st century.90 The question then becomes: why has the American cinema since the mid-1990s turned towards stories that toy with the hypothetical and counterfactual, narratives that openly offer forking-path alternatives, that foreground the contingent, the possible (and, as I argue, also the impossible), and play these potentialities off against the likely, the plausible and the probable? If, so far, my answers have included: managing audience expectations acquired from video games, maximizing profits by rewarding multiple viewings, and self-regulating a high risk industry that needs to address a global and increasingly polarized audience, then the common denominator of these seemingly disparate explanatory schemes is indeed some version of dynamic system theory, whether we call it positive/negative feedback, game theory or chaos theory. As J. D. Connor puts it: “When chaos theory arrives in an industry where unreliability, unpredictability, and the alibi are essential … the idea begins to have strange consequences. Chaos theory provided a way to think about the general situation of the contemporary studio.”91 What this means is that in the case we are concerned with – the movie business – it is not so much (or not only) a matter of too many variables interacting with each other to allow for reliable prediction, but rather a question of ‘unreliability, unpredictability and alibi [i.e., deniability and ambiguity]’: i.e., human minds interacting with each other, on the uncertain ground of – on one side – projection and identification, of desire and drive, of repetition and compulsion, and on the other side, strategic second-guessing, anticipating next moves, ascertaining what goes on in the public’s head and heart, while using where appropriate the tools of manipulation or deception, in order to effectuate the requisite cognitive and affective energy exchange. Yet do we need ‘chaos theory’ for any of this? Would not some more homely metaphor, such as ‘playing cat and mouse’ do just as well? Chaos theory, as indicated, harnesses contingency into predictability, and it is this aspect that makes me consider it in the present context: the degree of credibility, not to say credulity invested in the science and mathematics that underpin chaos theory. It is this blind faith that supports my general argument about mind-game films and the purpose of their undecidability. This is because mind-game films such as Inception, Eternal Sunshine, Donnie Darko, Déjà Vu, Arrival, Interstellar or Source

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Code do not just ask us to keep two realities simultaneously in our minds (and still function) but also to accept that time travel, memory erasure, dream stealing, timewarps, languages without tenses, wormholes or Einstein-Rosen bridges are not only theoretically possible but also practically functioning ways of solving problems, of carrying out risky missions or of preventing disasters (especially those that have already happened). Crucial to almost all mind-game films is that they introduce into the diegetic world an object, a device, an invention or a gadget that makes possible the impossible, and then makes the impossible plausible. It is what fills the gap between two orders of being, but it is also what opens up such a gap in the first place. Most frequently, at issue is some sort of time machine – a DeLorean car, a supercomputer, a tele-porter or time-bending software, or any other highly advanced technology device, dreamt up by visionary scientists or a top-secret lab and developed by the military. Its function is to mediate: often between a given reality and a desirable alternative, which is why it can appear as wish fulfillment. In a fairy tale we would call it ‘magic,’ in the New Testament a ‘miracle,’ and in all cases – fairy tales, religion and mind-game films – the device (magic wand, Jesus or technology) creates or inserts a causal link, or a reciprocal relationality, a retroactive determinacy between two events, states of affairs or temporalities that are otherwise separate and unconnected. It posits an agency inaccessible to the human actors and yet crucial to their story world. Structurally, it is the place reserved either for God or for the frighteningly indifferent forces of nature and the beautiful mysteries of the universe. That in mind-game films this locus of absent-but-necessary agency is filled by ‘science and technology’ is significant in several respects: on the one hand, it confirms that there exists this almost unlimited faith in contemporary science, perhaps nurtured by the miracles technology has worked in the past 150 years. On the other hand, quantum physics, set theory mathematics, genetics or the neurosciences are well beyond most people’s understanding, other than that we grant these sciences enormous agency, trusting them to produce spectacular results, but also fearing their potentially fatal consequences: with the paradoxical result that science in mind-game films stands for contingency, but contingency harnessed or transformed into a necessity. For a Marxist like Slavoj Žižek, such faith in science and technology, rather than a guarantor of truth and objectivity, is therefore pure ideology, because it is what we entrust our lives with, even though we do not understand it, or rather, because we do not understand it, we put our faith it in, since it bridges the gap and fills the explanatory void in our understanding of the forces and powers that determine our lives. Inception is again an excellent example in this respect: on the one hand, the dream extraction mechanism that Cobb and his team use does not exist as a technology. On the other hand, what it signifies, i.e., cinema/advertising/mind-control clearly does exist. The impossibility of the device here covers (but also highlights) the audacity of what the film admits to, namely that movies are thieves. Similarly, the memory erasure machine in Eternal Sunshine does not exist, yet the task it

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fulfills is one we both desire and dread, which is in fact the story the films sets out to tell: as with Groundhog Day and Source Code, repetition may be the only way to deal with the tragic fissures that protect us from what we want. The temptation is to call such a deployment of contingency harnessed to necessity ‘junk science’ (Bordwell), but if anything, it is better referred to as ‘voodoo science,’ as a reminder of its connection with magic. It is not junk because it is functional also in another respect: as impossible but necessary, such science and technology – especially where it claims to affect or alter our experience of temporality, causality and agency – reorganizes the interdependent relation between free will and determinism, and introduces the idea of undoing what has been done, and thus of dealing with trauma, guilt, regret through action. Causality, agency and temporality are among the parameters that under the headings of ‘distributed agency’ and ‘time travel’ get as much attention as they do in subsequent chapters, and also why trauma is a topic I turn to in two other chapters, one involving a war film, the other a melodrama. Time travel is symptomatic both from a symptomatic point of view and from a philosophical point of view: first, in that almost all time travel films go back in time (rather than forward) because they invariably want to right a wrong, add a missing piece, undo something that has already happened or prevent something from happening in the present. But blocked from changing the past due to the time travel paradoxes, time travelers need to invent ingenious ways of changing the meaning of what has happened, open a second alternative timeline, or generate a loop in the form of a Möbius strip, where retroactive causality operates and effects create their own causes (often through the recovery or exchange of photographs, as in Back to the Future, The Terminator, Twelve Monkeys). What predominates in time travel is: return as alert, return as rescue or as return as replay (until you get it right). And insofar time travel takes the protagonist to a past moment in time (but always to the same place), in order to try and make amends, James Gleick captures it, when he writes: “regret is the time traveler’s energy bar.” Second, from a more philosophical point of view, time travel, as already indicated, raises the question of free will and determinism, of individual agency in a world where contingency is the new causality, and by extension, where time may no longer be the medium of meaningful or purposive action, nor memory a reliable index of identity. Mind-game films, as we saw, strongly suggest that memories are unreliable, can be implanted (‘incepted’) and are no guarantee of identity: action in the here and now is what assures agency, and agency in the form of performativity seems the only kind of identity that matters. Crises of identity, with the somatic or traumatized body somehow in command, was what initially suggested the term ‘productive pathologies’ which I introduced into the debate in my 2009 essay as typical of mind-game films. While ‘formatting’ subjects in order to make them fit in and fit for social media and the surveillance state, they also alert and sensitize viewers to the ‘state of exception’ the story world assumes as the new normal. What were once considered ‘pathological’ conditions

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turn out to be potentially advantageous adaptation to real-world conditions. When personal memories become traumatic, and trauma becomes an impediment to action, then certain ‘disabilities’ can become assets (‘autism is in,’ ‘insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world,’ or ‘attention deficit disorder will soon be known as rapid reaction capability’),92 because the situations are such that only a different psychosomatic personality type can survive or succeed. Mind-game protagonists, such as Leonard in Memento or Tyler Durden in Fight Club are in this sense the verso to the recto of superheroes (James Bond, Batman or Spiderman), who also derive their agency from traumatized psyches and schizo-personalities: like Leonard they are primed like a weapon, while programmed or guided by an external force. Yet in politics, too, as well as in business, ‘pathological narcissism’ and ‘sociopathic’ predatory behavior have emerged as winning survival strategies. Such a diagnostic demands a broader horizon within which to identify the symptomatic value of mind-game films, if one positions them at the cusp of seemingly incompatible and yet mutually interdependent systems. In one sense, this broader horizon is, of course, neoliberal capitalism, which is what drives the movie-making business (global, corporate, networked, for-profit) while the addressee (viewer, player, consumer) is local, self-motivated, entrepreneurial (neoliberalism’s typical form of subjectivity). What model of antagonistic mutuality or positive/negative feedback, then, can best clarify what is at stake? Gilles Deleuze’s ‘control society’? Michel Foucault’s biopower? Jacques Lacan’s desire/drive? Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer/sovereignty? Game theory’s ‘Nash equilibrium’ and the ‘Prisoner’s dilemma’? Plato’s pharmakon? In trying to understand complex narratives and mind-game films these – and several other – schema have all been proposed and applied, but are they compatible, and do they overlap? Do they all try to answer to the same problem/dilemma: that we are stuck in a ‘frozen dialectic’ of our own making? In this sense, too, mind-game films are both mimetic and reflexively allegorical: mind-game films’ indeterminacy mirrors our very attempts to decode and decipher them. In another sense – and this has been my main objective – the symptomatic value of mind-game films is nonetheless tangible: to suspend or defer the validity of the usual binary pairs: real/fantasy, true/false, but also past/present, and even sane/ pathological. Mind-game films tell us that in order to make sense of a world that may not make sense by rational means, by linear causality or by ocular verification, we need to open up to epistemic frames different from the ones just enumerated. Mind-game films may not tell us what these new epistemic frames are but in the way they play with our perception of reality, with our need for time to manage repetition and difference, and with our innate sense of truth, they act as early warning systems of what is now referred to as the ‘post-truth condition.’ Several of Nolan’s films make this their business: to make deception the ground and condition for a truth, but one relative to the fiction it thereby retroactively confirms. This cognitive-epistemic loop may be the best that cinema has to offer, by actively submitting to the post-truth condition, but in such a way that

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mind-game films would be the homeopathic cure, the poison in small doses that may inoculate us against the bigger toxicity of our public life and of the global power politics that feed on it.

Notes 1 Thomas Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film,” in Warren Buckland, ed., Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 13–41. Reprinted in this volume. 2 Warren Buckland, for instance, summed up the typical features as follows: “puzzle films embrace nonlinearity, time-loops, and fragmented spatio-temporal reality. [They] blur the boundaries between different levels of reality, are riddled with gaps, deception, labyrinthine structures, ambiguity, and overt coincidences. They are populated with characters who are schizophrenic, lose their memory, are unreliable narrators, or are dead (but without us – or them – realizing).” Buckland, Puzzle Films, 6. 3 In David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 3–11. 4 See the bibliographies in the various books published on puzzle films, skepticism films, mind-game films, as well as the monographs devoted to directors such as Christopher Nolan or a writer such as Charlie Kaufman, as well as of individual films such as Memento, Fight Club, Eternal Sunshine, Inception. 5 Some of these directors are Hollywood outsiders, some belong to the Indie world, but others have moved into the mainstream, most conspicuously perhaps Christopher Nolan and David Fincher, and some are Hollywood insiders as outsiders, notably David Lynch (see the separate chapter on Lynch in the present book). Another major figure is the posthumously resurrected Philip K. Dick, a writer of time-travelling, mind-bending stories, to whose Hollywood afterlife I later devote a separate chapter. 6 That these features overlap to a significant degree with the categories David Bordwell had identified with art cinema narration becomes evident when we remember his list: story gaps, loose or no causality, a high degree of ambiguity, either lacking closure or arriving at an indeterminate resolution (David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985]). This makes it important to consider the mind-game film within the context of Hollywood, and at the same time not to reduce the mode to European ‘influence’ but to see the films in the context of the ideological and conceptual work they do on specifically American issues and challenges. 7 I am leaving out of consideration the challenge to film and cinema, presented by high-end, ‘quality’ television series, starting with shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, through Mad Men and Lost, to Homelands and Breaking Bad – which became available first on cable TV, and then on platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime or Apple iTunes, turning streaming video into a delivery system for films that significantly affected viewers’ behavior. Several such HBO or Netflix serial narratives fitted the criteria of mind-game films in content and style, but also in format and delivery, especially in the way the concept of ‘complete seasons’ invited compulsive or addictive viewing habits (‘binge watching’). 8 This is a concept I owe to Lev Manovich. It is discussed at length in Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2015), 204–206. 9 David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

On Mind-Game Films as Tipping Points 67

10 David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 11 David Bordwell, Observations on Film Art. www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2011/05/03/ forking-tracks-source-code/ 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Garrett Stewart, “Fourth Dimensions, Seventh Senses,” in Warren Buckland, ed., Hollywood Puzzle Films (New York: Routledge, 2014), 170–171. 15 Bordwell, “Observations,” loc. cit. 16 Kristen Daly, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 1 (Fall 2010), 84. 17 See, for instance, Jan Simons, “Narrative, Games, and Theory,” Game Studies 7, no. 1 (2007). http://gamestudies.org/07010701/articles/simons. 18 “S/Z, the ‘Readerly’ Film and Video Game Logic,” in Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film (London: Arnold, 2002), 146–167. 19 Warren Buckland, “Inception’s Video Game Logic,” in Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy, eds., The Cinema of Christopher Nolan (New York: Wallflower Press, 2015), 191. 20 Warren Buckland, “Source Code’s Video Game Logic,” in Hollywood Puzzle Films, 185–197. 21 Buckland, “Inception’s Video Game Logic,” 189–200. 22 In his essay on Inception, Buckland acknowledges Bordwell’s classical narrative reconstruction: “By analyzing Inception in terms of video game rules, I am not proposing that the film simply simulates a video game. Classical narrative structures (setup, complicating action, development, climax, exposition, deadlines) and film aesthetics (or at least, intensified continuity) still dominate (see Bordwell 2013).” (The reference here is to David Bordwell, with Kristin Thompson. Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages [Madison, WI: Irvington Way Institute Press, 2013].) And he concludes: “I have identified several … video game structures evident in Inception, which, of necessity, go beyond but complement the canonical narrative structure predominant in the film’s Hollywood storytelling techniques.” Buckland, “Inception’s Video Game Logic,” 190, 197. 23 Buckland, “Source Code’s Video Game Logic,” in Hollywood Puzzle Films, 185–197. 24 Ibid., 196. 25 Buckland, “Inception’s Video Game Logic,” 190. 26 J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999). 27 Buckland, “Inception’s Video Game Logic,” 194. 28 Ibid., 197–198. 29 Hal Hinson, “Groundhog Day,” Washington Post, February 12, 1993. https://www.wa shingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/groundhogdaypghinson_a0a 7e9.htm 30 Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood, 131–132. 31 Quoted in The Guardian, February 3, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/ feb/07/groundhog-day-perfect-comedy-for-ever 32 Martin Hermann, “Hollywood Goes Computer Game: Narrative Remediation in the Time-Loop Quests Groundhog Day and 12:01,” in Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze, eds., Unnatural Narratives: Unnatural Narratology (Brussels: de Gruyter, 2011), 152–153. 33 J. D. Connor, “Let’s Make the Weather: Chaos Comes to Hollywood,” The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970–2010) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 222. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 224. 36 Connor cites Kristin Thompson who first noted the change of tune: “Having solved the Producer/Talent problem … Rita, Phil, and Mark Canton face the new day.

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37 38

39 40 41

42 43

44

45

46 47

48 49 50

‘Why am I here?’ Phil asks. ‘I bought you. I own you,’ she answers. ‘Why are you here?’ ‘You said stay and I stayed.’ At this point, though, the radio is playing, ‘They say our love won’t pay the rent, before it’s earned, our money’s all been spent.’ It nearly has: she has cleaned out her checkbook; he has paid one thousand dollars for a piano lesson and purchased, as [Kristin] Thompson notes, every conceivable insurance policy. Rita hits the snooze button. With her hand.” The Studios after the Studios, 226. Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood, 154. As for causes and consequences, the screenwriter originally wanted to introduce an external agency, in order to motivate the time-warp, namely a ‘gypsy curse,’ but that was dropped in the final stages, apparently on the insistence of Columbia’s new studio boss. Interestingly enough, this ‘gypsy curse’ reappears as the external instigator of compulsive repetition in David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Cited by J. D. Connor, The Studios after the Studios, 221, who cites it from Stanley Cabell in William Rothman, ed., Cavell on Film (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 222. Wikipedia “Groundhog Day.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film). https://taylorholmes.com/2011/01/08/5-best-mind-bending-movies/ https://taylorholmes.com/2017/02/03/help-me-build-a-new-mind-job-mind-bendi ng-mind-f-movie-list/;https://taylorholmes.com/2018/05/22/the-top-25-movies-on-ne tflix-right-now-to-make-you-think/ Buckland, Puzzle Films, 6. Edward Branigan defines narration as: “the overall regulation and distribution of knowledge which determines how and when a spectator acquires knowledge [of narrative events].” Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), 76. “The phenomenon of which I speak … is the twist of the plot argument, which I interpret as a subjective reaction in a strong sense against the interactive malleability of the postmodern story and its consequent symbolic lightness. Now, it is not a search of the metaphorical meaning by juxtaposition, habitual procedure in the historical vanguard or in the so-called new cinemas, but of a torsion of the argument for the economy of the plot, of the exhibition from the narrative information to the viewer in which they are involved, both in the classic flashback economy and other modes narratives, which require this strange syntax to lead to the work of spectatorial interpretation, without which the film text does not sustain itself.” See Palao Errando, “La relación entre la trama y el argumento: reflexiones en torno al thriller contemporáneo,” in J. Marzal Felici and F. J. Gómez Tarín, eds., Metodologías de Análisis del Film (Madrid: Edipo), 180. [Editors’ note: big thanks to Teresa Sorolla-Romero who located this reference for us.] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Polity, 2000). By liquid modernity, among other things, Bauman referred to increased mobility of people, goods and capital but also contemporary approaches to the self, where constructing a personal identity that coheres over time and space becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989); Brian McHale, Postmodern Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1987). Apart from Inception, another film that wants to maintain consistent duplicity and double perspectives right up to the end is Shutter Island, where Scorsese’s aim seems to be to sustain several readings and multi-modal reality status, even during a second viewing, when we still wonder about the deeper meaning of the final phrase about what is better: “to live as a monster or to die as a good man.” Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen, Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Kiss and Willemsen, Impossible Puzzle Films, 6. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 77.

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51 Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 7. 52 Kiss and Willemsen, Impossible Puzzle Films, 7 53 Ibid., 197. 54 Ibid. 55 Thomas Elsaesser, The Persistence of Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2013). 56 For close and sustained analyses of Hollywood self-reflexivity and self-reference, see Jerome Christensen, America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), and J. D. Connor, Hollywood Math and Aftermath: The Economic Image and the Digital Recession (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). 57 See Connor, The Studios after the Studios. 58 Thomas Elsaesser, “James Cameron’s Avatar: Access for All,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 9, no. 3 (2011), 247–264. 59 Besides Groundhog Day, J. D. Connor examines several major blockbusters as allegories of their own coming into being, including Jaws, Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather, The Conversation, Saturday Night Fever, Jurassic Park, etc. None of these are mind-game or puzzle films, but Déjà Vu and Source Code are, and they too, are analyzed as studio-allegories. 60 James Vincent, “Hollywood is quietly using AI to help decide which movies to make,” The Verge, May 28, 2019 and Michael T. Lash and Kang Zhao, “Early Predictions of Movie Success: The Who, What, and When of Profitability,” Journal of Management Information Systems 33, no. 3 (2016), 874–903. 61 Charles Ramirez Berg, “A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying the Tarantino Effect,” Film Criticism 31, nos. 1–2 (Fall-Winter, 2006): 5–61. 62 See, for instance, Jason Mittell’s “Adaptations’ Anomalies.” http://mediacommons. org/intransition/2016/03/18/adaptations-anomalies and Agnieszka Piotrowska, “Inception – A Surrealist Tale of Lost love.” http://mediacommons.org/intransition/ 2018/01/11/inception-2010-surrealist-film-about-love-and-loss 63 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code 64 A. O. Scott, “Doris Day: A hip sex goddess disguised as the girl next door,” New York Times, May 14, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/movies/doris-day-app reciation.html 65 See Thomas Elsaesser, “From Thematic Criticism to Deconstructive Analysis: Chinatown,” in Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film (London: Arnold, 2002), 117–145. 66 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/26/avengers-endgame-critics -film 67 Ivan Paio, “Confusion is sexy: Under The Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013).” https://goya cinema.blogspot.com/2014/10/confusion-is-sexy-under-skin-jonathan.html#more 68 The saying attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald runs in full: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/f_scott_fitzgera ld_100572 69 See Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006): “Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today’s theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. Žižek … focuses on three main modes of parallax: the ontological difference, the ultimate parallax that conditions our very access to reality; the scientific parallax, the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation, which reaches its apogee in today’s brain sciences; and the political parallax, the social antagonism that allows for no common ground.”

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70 71

72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79

80 81

82 83

Publisher’s blurb. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallax-view. All three of these registers of parallax are ultimately relevant for the undecidability of mind-game films. See the previous section, “‘Impossible’ Puzzle Films.” Phil is sitting in a bar, anxious to strike up a conversation with two working-class regulars, already heavily into the evening’s drinking. He tells them about his peculiar situation, which is that he wakes up every morning and is reliving the same day over and over again. One of the buddies comments: “That about sums it up for me, too.” The other inebriated barfly then holds up his beer glass and sums up how he is responding to his situation: “You know, some guys would look at this glass and they would say, you know, ‘that glass is half empty.’ Other guys’d say ‘that glass is half full.’ I bet you is a ‘the glass is half empty’ kind of guy. Am I right?” Groundhog Day (transcript). Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology, translated by C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 206–231. Wesley Morris, New York Times, March 5, 2018. Lindy West, “We got rid of some bad men. Now let’s get rid of bad movies” New York Times, March 3, 2018. Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni’s published their editorial essay “Cinema/Ideology/ Criticism,” in Cahiers du cinéma no. 216 (October 1969), 24–29: “There can be no room in our critical practice either for speculation or for specious raving.” Instead, politically informed analysis would tell readers about the ideological content of films, according to seven types of films, each of which transmitted ideology in its own specific way. Fredric Jameson, “Totality as Conspiracy,” The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (London: BFI, 1992), 9–85. See Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greg de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xv. Garrett Stewart, “Fourth Dimensions, Seventh Senses,” in Warren Buckland, ed., Hollywood Puzzle Films, 170–171. The original quote did not identify Karl Rove: “The aide said that guys like me [i.e., journalists] were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ [not in contrast but in parallel to the ‘faith-based’ communities] which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’” Ron Suskind, “Faith, certainty and the presidency of George W. Bush.” The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004. See Thomas Elsaesser, “Siegfried Kracauer’s Affinities,” NECSUS (Spring 2014). http s://necsus-ejms.org/siegfried-kracauers-affinities/ (last accessed 8 May, 2019). For a reading of Dunkirk in the spirit of time-bending, see Matt Zoller Seitz, Dunkirk, rogerebert.com, July 21, 2017. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dunkirk-2017. Tracey J. Kinney, “Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk as Film and History,” Mise-en-Scene 3, no. 2 (Winter 2018), 53–65. Eliot Panek, “‘Show, Don’t Tell’: Considering the Utility of Diagrams as a Tool for Understanding Complex Narratives,” in Warren Buckland, ed., Hollywood Puzzle Films, 81. https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/49059535.html. In fact, Nolan himself has detailed these analogies: “Nolan says that the metaphor for cinema developed organically as he wrote the script over a 10-year period. Cobb’s crew of mind-hackers don’t infiltrate people’s ‘real’ dreams – they actually build ersatz dreams and place them inside people’s heads, in the same way moviemakers craft worlds that are transmitted into our brains via movie projector. Nolan explained that each member of the team serves a role that has a movie analog. The Architect (Ellen Page) would be the

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84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

production designer. The Forger (Tom Hardy) would be the actor. The Point Man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) would be The Producer. The Extractor (DiCaprio) would be the director. And [Fisher] The Mark (Cillian Murphy) would be us – the audience. ‘In trying to write a team-based creative process, I wrote the one I know,’ says Nolan … ‘It’s rare that you can identify yourself so clearly in a film. This film is very clear for me.’” Jeff Jensen, “Inception: Behind the scenes of a movie about movies – and the mind of its maker,” Entertainment Weekly, July 24, 2010. See Todd McGowan, The Fictional Christopher Nolan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 163. ‘williamb.’ “Inception 2nd take.” https://chud.com/inception-2nd-take/ Plato, The Republic, Book VII. https://bacchicstage.wordpress.com/plato/the-cave/ J. D. Connor, “Like Some Dummy Corporation You Just Move around the Board,” in Leigh Clare La Berge and Alison Shonkwiler, eds., Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 143. James Poniewozik, “‘Game of Thrones’ is going out fighting. So will its audience,” New York Times, May 18, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/18/arts/televi sion/game-of-thrones-season-8.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_190519 See Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). See James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking Press, 1987). Connor, The Studios after the Studios, 219. Sasha Baron Cohen, in Brüno; attributed to R. D. Laing, Jack Lee Seymour, Margaret Ann Crain, Joseph V. Crockett (1993) Educating Christians, 53; my own (polemical) formulation.

2 TOO LATE, TOO SOON Body, Time, and Agency

The Paradigm Shift This chapter takes as its framework the turn to emotions in film studies, a distinct move in the field that implies a turn away from other ways of looking at the cinema. Thus, the new focus on emotion clearly takes its distance from psychoanalytic film theory, notably from an emphasis on the specular drives, on desire and lack. Impatience with the psycho-semiotic approach to spectatorship, however, is itself an emotion: probably shared by groups of film scholars – cognitivists, culturalists, and Deleuzians – who otherwise do not have much in common, and rarely, if ever, seek to engage in a debate with each other.1 The temptation to initiate a debate between these camps, or at least try and find some common denominators is great.2 Resisting it, I shall instead sketch a different context, which allows me to reintroduce Walter Benjamin into the debate, and with him a term possibly even more contested than that of emotion: ‘experience.’ My recourse to Benjamin and experience wants to keep an opening for both psychoanalysis and cultural studies, without foreclosing either Deleuze or cognitivism. One specific entry-point can be simply stated: whereas semiotics generally regarded film as a discourse or a narrative, the turn to emotion presupposes film to be above all an event. And while so-called apparatus theory took the cinema to task for pretending to be a window on the world (and not acknowledging its mirroring effects), the presumption now is that the cinema involves neither miscognition nor illusion, but is best understood as a perceptual act like any other, heightened perhaps by its immediacy and immersiveness.3 Insofar as a film engages with the world, it does so in the form of embodied knowledge, of percepts and affects, and insofar as it assigns a role to its spectators, it does so by casting them not as voyeurs or across the imaginary identification of the split subject, but as witnesses or participants. Instead of

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the Cartesian mind–body split and the Lacanian identity-machine, we now have the cinema as ‘emotion machine.’4 Central to this configuration, and a ground that both the old and the new paradigm can indeed share, is the notion of experience, which to me is preliminary to any discussion of emotion in the cinema. But what sort of experience? The term, in German at least, gives rise to a rich and confusing palette of meanings: Erfahrung (between traveling [fahren] and standing still), Erlebnis (between living [leben] and death), Empfindung (between finding [finden] and loss), Gefühl (between feeling [fühlen] and touch). What is cinema if not a configuration of the semantic fields thus circumscribed? The very diversity leads me to limit the possible concepts of experience I am concerned with here to three domains: embodiment – experience as immediate sensory presence and corporeal plenitude; time – experience as retrospectively constructed, temporally or discursively mediated self-possession and self-appropriation; and agency – experience as the exposure to limits, and the recovery from extremes. By making experience a key term, I intend furthermore to highlight the role of the cinema in modernity, and in particular, in two moments or crises of ‘modernization.’ It is one particular semantic field – experience as a retrospectively constructed, temporally mediated self-possession and self-appropriation – that resonates with Benjamin’s concerns, and especially his well-known discussion of the conditions of experience under capitalist modernity, as elaborated in the essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.”5 In line with many German late 19th- and early 20th-century theorists, Benjamin makes a distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, the first associated with moments of sensation and the second with a more sustained texture of experience. As Martin Jay points out, “The immediate, passive, fragmented, isolated, and unintegrated inner experience of Erlebnis was, Benjamin argued, very different from the cumulative, totalizing accretion of transmittable wisdom, of epic truth, which was Erfahrung.”6 Evidently, in Benjamin’s dual scheme, Erfahrung was something no longer available to the individual in the modern world. As Jay puts it, “The continuum of Erfahrung had already been broken by the unassimilable shocks of urban life, and the replacement of artisanal production by the dull, non-cumulative repetition of the assembly line. Meaningful narrative had been supplanted by haphazard information and raw sensation in the mass media.”7 Yet Benjamin’s tragic sense of life, along with his dialectical cast of mind, ensured that the fractured, reactive, transient experiential state of Erlebnis was not viewed nostalgically, from the perspective of some past, fully realized plenitude or ‘ethos.’ The impoverishment or atrophy of Erfahrung he diagnosed as constitutive for modernity was itself typical of experience per se, so that the ‘loss of experience’ in the modern world was in actual fact the always already present ‘experience of loss’ in human existence. How can Benjamin’s distinction be made productive for our view of the cinema, how might it help us understand what is at stake in the paradigm shift alluded to above? An answer might be given through another distinction: the one between classical cinema and modern cinema (in Deleuze’s sense of the word), and between classical and post-classical cinema (in Anglo-American parlance). It is

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remarkable, for instance, how closely current definitions of classical cinema correspond to Benjamin’s notion of Erfahrung: typified by narrative integration and temporal development, whether conceived in a linear fashion, as a life story, a journey (as indicated, the German word Erfahrung has as its root the verb ‘fahren,’ to travel) or whether retrospectively reconstituted as a form of learning, in its character-centered cohesion and biographical closure. Even the structuralist account of the imaginary resolution of real contradictions (Lévi-Strauss) or the pragmatic-cognitivist one of ‘problem solving’ and of ‘functional equivalence’ point in the same direction.8 Furthermore, the affective structure of classical cinema – as with Erfahrung – is that of a healing, a therapy, a cathartic progress from hamartia (ignorance) and miscognition, to anagnorisis (recognition) and the narrational play of different gradients of knowledge towards their eventual convergence. Classical cinema operates in an integrative fashion, and the function of narrative is to facilitate this process of turning discontinuous Erlebnis into transmissible Erfahrung. Hence Benjamin’s own emphasis on montage as cinema’s specific contribution to modernity. However, if we take Benjamin’s arguments seriously, then under conditions of modernity, only the experiential modality of Erlebnis is possible, not that of Erfahrung. And insofar as the cinema is unthinkable outside the sensory and affective conditions of modernity as specified by Benjamin’s theory of perceptual shock and the optical unconscious, then a cinema of Erfahrung, such as the classical, would indeed be an ideological construct, a nostalgic or reactionary shoring up of the fractured nature of modern experience. In other words, ‘pathos’ rather than ‘ethos’ defines the affective regime of modernity, if we consider Benjamin’s Erfahrung to be retrospectively constructed and integrated, while Erlebnis is self-presence without self-possession, and ‘pathos’ the affect appropriate to Erlebnis: singular, intermittent, discontinuous, transitory. Such a view gives added significance to those moments (or sub-genres) in the classical period that are typified by excess, dissonance, and deviations from the norm. Christine Noll Brinckmann, among others, has written eloquently about the deviant modes of the classical, notably in the musical (Busby Berkeley’s “Lullaby of Broadway” from Golddiggers of 1935).9 Here, in the present chapter, the norm-deviancy model will be replaced by the Erfahrung/Erlebnis model and extended to the debate around melodrama. Melodrama came to prominence in film studies when this previously despised genre began to be theorized within the psychoanalytic paradigm of desire and lack, absence and presence, of gender asymmetry and deferred closure. But if one were to take account of the changed paradigm, and look at cinema as event and experience, it would make of melodrama, belonging to the disruptive genres of excess just highlighted, one of the genuinely modern(ist) types of experience, at the limit of Erfahrung. Its ‘deviations’ from the classical would become the very index of its more historically appropriate form of ‘authenticity.’ Or put the other way round: if the cinema – insofar as it is part of modernity and insofar as we

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regard it as an authentic ‘experience’ – has, as indicated, to be defined as Erlebnis, and not as Erfahrung, then (the theoretical interest in) melodrama is symptomatic of the recognition that cinematic experience is by necessity disruptive, fractured. Melodrama becomes, as it were, the hidden ‘truth’ of the classical by highlighting just how far any kind of classical cinema must be a retrospective revision of Erlebnis into Erfahrung. Always bearing in mind that the historical grounds for such a retrospective revision in the American cinema may be more complex than simply ideological obfuscation or nostalgic (self-)deception, this double face of melodrama may well have been one reason why it became crucial in the debates of the 1970s, at the same time as Hollywood cinema’s illusion of coherence was deconstructed from positions more radical than Benjamin’s distinctions between the two kinds of experience.10

Experience of Limits, Limits of Experience However, the attempt to resituate the classical cinema (and to indicate a possible basis on which to distinguish within its deviant genres, while also identifying a line from classical to post-classical cinema) is not the only reason for invoking once more Benjamin’s idea that cinema is Erlebnis, rather than Erfahrung. By underlining the distinction I also intend to specify in what way I sense myself at odds with the cognitivists on a procedural point, when they use the cinema to define experience normatively. For cognitivists, the skills involved in the processes of perception, sensation, affect and feeling when in the cinema are not merely identical with those deployed in ordinary life-situations. They are evolutionary adaptations, and thus to all intents and purposes hardwired, so that it makes little sense to speak of a ‘modernist’ visuality. Nor, accordingly, should we attempt to periodize particular somatic states or changes in the human nervous system, in the hope of correlating the cinema experience with a historical episteme or with social processes and technical innovations, such as – to name a few of the usual suspects – urbanization, the railways, electrification or any of the other cultures of modernity.11 Yet there is certainly something symptomatic (and thus variable and contextdependent) about the cinema. When thinking about film-viewing as a mode of experience, both the conditions of spectatorship and the affectivity these conditions generate are part of a historically specific (visual-sensory) culture, subject to change and analyzable from an aesthetic as well as anthropological perspective. In particular, the constellation of event, spectatorship and experience suggests issues of cultural memory, and this in turn raises questions about the function of cinema as a prime means of rhetorically organizing, technically storing and culturally transmitting such a memory. Going to the cinema, however common an event it has become in the last hundred years, is still pursued as an experience which viewers expect to be exceptional, rather than normative. Why we go to the cinema, what we go to

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the cinema for, and what, time and again, takes us back to the movies is the anticipation of an extreme experience, of a limit experience. It is something larger than life, something out of the ordinary, which may include minimalist states or experiences at the edges of everyday perception and sensation. It involves registers where cinema tests – and contests – the conjunction of affect and agency, so crucial to both phenomenological and cognitivist accounts of emotions, but also central to the (classically defined) aesthetic act, viewed under the double injunction of (passive) receptivity and heightened (active) awareness.12 In order to illustrate this dimension of cinema, it may be useful to introduce my third definition of experience: experience as the exposure to limits, and the recovery from extremes. Avant-garde art in the 20th century is replete with experiments and explorations of ‘limits’ and ‘extremes,’ most strikingly after the traumata and horrors of WWI. But philosophy and critical theory have also had much to say about limits: from Nietzsche’s anti-Kantian aesthetics of the Dionysian to Georges Bataille’s idea of ‘expense,’ and from Maurice Blanchot to Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben.13 In this sense, exposure to and recovery from limits is as fundamental to modernity as is the cinema itself. The conjunction suggests a focus on three aspect of experience, already alluded to: ‘embodiment,’ ‘time,’ and ‘agency’ as those modalities of experience that can be associated with experience as a limit, and its negative correlative, the limits of experience. Limit experiences are above all limits in our sense of body and embodiment, agency and helplessness, time and its apparent irreversibility. The self-shattering type of experience, as imagined, for instance, by Bataille, exceeds the bounds of both chronos (the linear flow of time) and kairos (the decisive moment, the epiphany). Bataille had a lifelong preoccupation with the intensity of the instant, which he played off against the opacity of duration. His notion of ‘inner experience’ was fundamentally negative, and in particular, it was “the opposite of action. Nothing more. ‘Action’ is utterly dependent on project”; and project, according to Bataille, would “situate true existence in a future state, thus undermining the moment of presence, albeit not a plenitudinal presence, that is essential to inner experience.”14 It is not easy to specify what Bataille meant by ‘inner experience’ which for him was intense, discontinuous, punctual. While for Ernst Jünger, battle as inner ‘Erlebnis’ became the new (post-bourgeois) foundation of self, unmediated and authentic, for Bataille, there was no inner experience other than negative, dissociated. One might say (paraphrasing Marx) that the experience of limits is something that happens to human beings ‘behind their backs,’ and while it may not be ‘against their will,’ it challenges notions of bodily integrity, of agency, as well as of temporality, by keeping the self in a permanent present, which is also a state of tension and suspension. This permanent present, long recognized as the very condition of time in the cinema, has been interpreted both positively and negatively, and occasionally it has even been seen as a positive negativity, while cultural pessimists tend to see such ‘now-ness’ as the very curse that afflicts our societies of the spectacle.15

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Even mainstream cinema, when seeking out the limits of experience, has, whether by default or design, come up against the experience of limits, if not exactly as envisaged by Bataille or Blanchot. However, while the references are different from those either of the post-WWI avant-gardes’ experience of limits, or of the postWWII reflections on the limits of experience (as in Foucault, Lyotard, or Agamben),16 the experiential parameters are remarkably similar. The second half of this chapter will therefore specify further these three kinds of ‘limits’ that are the conditions of possibility of the cinematic experience as Erlebnis always at the edge of Erfahrung: the body as limit, time as limit, and agency as limit.

The Body as Limit In recent years, there has been an extensive focus on the body, gendered and sexualized, ethnically marked or set up as norm, fetishized or deviant, in Hollywood cinema. While this debate has been predominantly concerned with issues of representation, the notion of the body as experiential limit has occasionally been raised, most notably perhaps in discussions of the horror film. There, theorists as different as Carol Clover, Murray Smith, and Noël Carroll have been careful to make distinctions between psychic, somatic, physiological, and affective states, all involving the body as total perceptual surface, rather than merely metonymically represented through the eye and the look, or metaphorically as the (over-determined) bearer of coded cultural and gendered signs.17 One important essay is Noll Brinckmann’s exploration of the somatic responses and bodily reactions that images or sound–image combinations can generate in the classical cinema. In her paper “Somatic Empathy,” the examples are mostly drawn from the thrillers of Hitchcock, focusing on the affective ‘motor mimicry’ that they elicit from the spectator.18 Among the studies that Brinckmann cites is Linda Williams’s very well-known essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess” from 1991.19 There, Williams probes the interface between the psychic (fantasies), the physiological (somatic, involuntary manifestations) and the affective (emotional states and the range of feelings) of the spectator’s body, when watching certain types of movies. She pays particular attention to what she calls the body-genres: melodrama, horror films and pornography. Williams’s thesis has been so influential not least because she identifies three genres in which bodily integrity is in some sense the limit, and where the codes of representation are fractured, even if only momentarily, by somatic responses that are transmitted to the spectator, opening up a kind of circuit of contagion beyond empathy and close to bodily mimesis. Although apparently similar, Williams’s findings stand to some extent in contrast to Brinckmann’s investigation, which focuses more on the contradictory, negative play of somatic empathy, how it works against the flow of the spectator’s sympathy, such as the involuntary salivation that sometimes occurs when watching someone cut a lemon.

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Brinckmann’s perspective, even on Hitchcock, is informed by the practice of the avant-garde in film and the visual arts. Extending her double focus, one could draw on quite a range of artworks, e.g., the films of Valie Export from the 1970s, or the subsequent generation of body artists using film and video, in order to test the spectator’s somatic stamina. Such body-based performance art has emerged with special force since the 1970s – coinciding with the rise of video and the women’s movement. Apart from the Vienna Actionists (to whom Valie Export belonged), one could name Carolee Schneeman, Vito Acconci, Paul McCarthy, Shigeko Kubota, Marina Abramovic, and Orlan. These artists foreground a body often in pain, or seemingly beyond pain, as it submits to repetitive, mechanical intervention or makes itself vulnerable to technological, often medical, invasion. The always implied limit here is death, and as Hal Foster has polemically argued, this art “oscillates between the obscene vitality of the wound, and the radical nihility of the corpse.”20 We will come back to this distinction, having sketched the second parameter.

Time as Limit One source that Williams quotes is Franco Moretti on the question of why we cry in the face of works of art and literature. Moretti’s thesis is that several conditions need to be met before there are tears: one, a situation of powerlessness to intervene, which for Moretti is tied to a perceived asymmetry between the wrong that has been done, and the punishment it receives. Tears result from one’s helplessness, as a result of excessive justice, which is to say, injustice; second, a sudden, but carefully prepared switch of narrational perspective and point of view is required, leading to a shift in the regimes of knowledge among the characters and between the characters and the spectator. Finally, there needs to be a moment of recognition (or anagnorisis), but a recognition that comes too late (to prevent death): the rhetoric of ‘too late,’ as he calls it.21 It is an experiential category that might be aligned with the predicament of arriving or knowing too late that delimits the Erfahrung of self in Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood.22 Moretti’s hypothesis, which has helped to explain, in film studies, the affective-somatic effects of melodrama’s uneven distribution of knowledge, or moments of belated anagnorisis, emphatically relates tears in fiction not to description or depiction, but to story construction, and in particular, to narration, focalization, and point of view. In addition, the ability of melodrama to arouse time-based emotions such as melancholy, regret, nostalgia, and a sense of loss – the typical ‘pathos’ of melodrama – refers us back to the original meaning of pathos already quoted, namely of a feeling that pertains to the fleeting, the transient, the ephemeral in life, in contrast to the permanent and ideal (ethos), which originally referred to the universal. Williams, in her essay, extends Moretti’s ‘rhetoric of the too late’ to posit several orders of temporality, assigning not only to each of her genres one particular bodily

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fluid (sweat, tears and semen) but also one particular time-frame: ‘too soon’ for horror, ‘too late’ for melodrama, and the ‘now’ of pornography. This is both witty and ingenious, and these time-frames help to modify the idea of a directly mimetic response that could otherwise be read out of her body-genres, with their specific physiological, involuntary responses. Asking for more work to be done on the historical context, the social parameters, and the generic origins, Williams might, however, also have argued that more work should be done on these temporalities, or rather, on the aspect of their failure, in relation to the affect they are supposed to produce. Were one to think her ideas about time-frames and temporality further, one could answer Williams’s question about the historical context of these genres with her own argument. When she correlates these time-frames with the fantasies underpinning the three genres she discusses (the fantasy of union with the mother in melodrama, the primal scene and the threat of castration and sexual difference in the horror film, and the primary fantasy of parental seduction in pornography), she already holds the key to at least one aspect of their temporality. For as we know, the very nature of fantasies is that they are experiences of failure, which is why they have to be repeated, endlessly; and thus their temporality of repetition joins those secondary elaborations, which at least in melodrama and the horror film, are characterized by bad timing, missed opportunities, or excessively close encounters. All of these, it is true, have to do with a belatedness in the characters’ responses to a given situation, but also with an alternative turn, or a course of action that was not taken. Melodrama, for instance, is as much a genre of the ‘if-only,’ of the temporality of regret, as it is of the ‘too late.’ This contrasts, one might say, with the ‘happy’ genres of perfect timing, notably comedy and the musical. The genre that is missing, however, and which under the aspect of its time-frame, becomes even more suggestive after reading Williams, is film noir. Admittedly, one would be hard put to assign to it a similarly clear-cut somatic response or physiological attribute (‘cold perspiration,’ perhaps: sweat having already been assigned to horror), but that is also because the bodily state it suggests, and the temporality it is caught up in, are so extreme, and involve such limit-situations that recovery is almost inconceivable. To put it very briefly, the temporality of film noir is that of empty time, at least by our conventional standards, beyond both chronos (linear time) and kairos (closure, anagnorisis). Perhaps it could be the temporality that the Greeks called aion, and that, according to Deleuze, is the non-pulsed time of a floating, nondirectional universe, the simultaneous presence of past and future as pure extension, but also as pure repetition.23 In film studies, film noir is often associated with the temporality that Freud called Nachträglichkeit, deferred action or après coup: it, too, is too late, like melodrama, but whereas melodrama is infused by desire, and thus knows regret, the temporality of film noir is one beyond desire. The disaster, the catastrophe, has already happened, it is definitely too late (for action), but it is also too soon (for closure). In other words,

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while classical cinema potentially deals with all these temporalities, for film noir the same temporalities constitute an impossible temporal horizon, where there can be no single time-frame: in the time of the limit experience it is invariably too soon/ too late, it is invariably now and always. Thus, the non-mimetic, and yet somatic side of cinematic experience at the limits is found especially in film noir – a genre long recognized at the margin of the classical cinema, and yet sensed to be at the heart of many of our definitions of modern cinema, and very much – in the form of neo-noir – a central genre of so-called post-classical cinema. Why? For the protagonist of film noir, it is too soon, too late and now, because he is someone who has already survived his own death. Film noir asks: what does it feel like when you may be already dead, whether you know it or not? This leads to the third limit.

Agency as Limit Moretti already pointed out that helplessness in a situation that, from the ethical point of view, requires action is one of the conditions provoking an (involuntary) bodily somatic response. However, his theory of tears was based on the inability to intervene on behalf of an other. What states of body and mind correspond, then, to action in the name of the self, and conversely, what kinds of limit to agency is at stake when acting on behalf of the self is blocked? Agency in the name of the self is, of course, the very presupposition of the motivational action-schema typical for classical cinema. Its standard definition, as formalized by Bordwell, speaks of a ‘charactercentred causality,’ embodied in a protagonist who is goal-oriented, who believes in process-as-progress and whose behavior is oriented towards solving a problem.24 In the terminology of Torben Grodal, these modes of agency are called ‘telic,’ ‘paratelic,’ and ‘pragmatic.’25 If such are the normative formulations, what would constitute the limits of this classical model of agency? Already in the 1980s Steve Neale attempted to define Hollywood genres according to different action-schemata and their blockages, derived partly from Moretti (in his essay “Melodrama and tears”),26 and partly by adapting concepts from psychoanalysis. Thus, comedy could be characterized by moments where blocked agency in the hero leads to involuntary laughter, a redefinition of the reality status of the action or a switch in context, and the musical would be the genre, where moments of blocked agency in the plot or the emotional entanglements among the characters lead to dance, also redefining the reality status of the image, by designating it as dream or fantasy.27 All three approaches in turn can be contrasted to the classical psychoanalytic-semiotic formulation by Raymond Bellour, for whom Hollywood action and suspense genres, and in particular Hitchcock’s films, operate according to the repetition-resolution schema of what he terms ‘symbolic blockage.’ Subtending the logic of overt action-adventures is a psychic schema that enacts a set of symbolic relations, in which actions are not so much pragmatic and telic, but parapractic and iterative, based on miscognition and (compulsive) repetition, thereby protecting the protagonist from the knowledge of the ‘true’ (i.e., incestuous) goal of his unconscious desire.28

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In Bellour’s version of classical cinema the nexus of cause and effect, the logos of chronos, remains preserved, as is the body-image of the male hero. What holds time, body, and action together in his version of the classical, is that conscious and unconscious motivation inhabit the same narrative space, rendered homogeneous and transparent because linear purposive action is ‘doubled’ and split across the divide of (unacknowledged) sexual difference. Yet here Gilles Deleuze’s revisions of the classical are of special interest, since the same Hitchcock is singled out as the director in whose work the sensory-motor scheme of the body of classical cinema experiences its first critical rupture. Eschewing psychoanalytic or gender-specific terminology, Deleuze notes a crisis of the ‘movement-image’ (his term for classical Hollywood), for which Vertigo can stand as a prime example, announcing what he calls the ‘time-image’ of modern (European) cinema. In the time-image, the prevailing temporality is, as already mentioned, that of aion, the time of an immanent now, into which are folded several pasts, or as Deleuze puts it, “the unlimited past and future, which gather incorporeal events at the surface, as effects.” Agency, in this model would be that of neither action nor project, to pick up Bataille’s terms again, but of intensities, dispersals, and of those perpetual, reversible states that Deleuze calls ‘becomings.’29 Nothing at first glance, therefore, would seem further removed from this modern cinema of Deleuze than the kind of action-cinema we have become familiar with from contemporary (blockbuster) Hollywood, also referred to as postclassical cinema. Indeed, in several definitions, the post-classical is a kinetic-mimetic cinema of pure sensation, mechanical energy, violence, acceleration, approximating the roller-coaster ride (Speed), imagining plots of spectacular technological failure or natural disaster (Titanic, Twister) or both (Independence Day), exposing the sensorium to barely conceivable body horror (Silence of the Lambs) and slasher violence (Halloween, Friday the 13th).30 To its detractors, post-classical cinema is a return to the movement-image in its most unsublimated and unsymbolized forms, politically reactionary and aesthetically retrograde.31 For others, it is a cinema of an immersive experience, breaking down that artificial window-on-the-world effect of classical cinema,32 often quite literally: scenes of shattering large sheets of glass are some of the notable effects in works as different as Die Hard and James Bond movies (The World is not Enough), The Hudsucker Proxy and The Matrix. Tactile and haptic sensations compete with ocular events, doing away with that carefully crafted architecture of looks of classical mise-en-scène (based as it was on regulating distance and proximity through inference and ‘suture’), but also redrawing the spaces of ‘experience.’33 From the perspective of the classical, this crashing through the mirror/window metaphor becomes emblematic of breaking out of some sort of limit, most clearly in The Matrix, and its play with ontological boundaries, leaving the protagonist, among others things, not knowing whether he is an action hero or acted upon (Neo’s dilemma of being or not being the ‘chosen one’). More generally, the socalled action-hero genre represents a break with the classical, precisely to the degree

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that it enacts another limit of agency: extending ad absurdum the character-centered causality of the classical calculus of motive, means, and effects, the hero’s actions mark a limit (the proverbial ‘overkill’), as he takes extravagant risks, exhibits unmodulated extremes of affect or emotion, and deploys his bodily or ballistic means spectacularly in excess of his goals. But while in the classical cinema, excess marked the moments of exception, in post-classical action-cinema, excess has in some sense become the norm, or rather: excess is now the sign of crisis of the norm, not the deviation from the norm. Accordingly, one should read agency in such films not as action in the conventional sense, but as instances of a reactioncinema, in which the causal nexus has broken down. Its barrage of spectacular effects is, properly speaking a protective shield, to fend off not only an overload of stimuli, as Benjamin had argued for the cinema of montage in the 1920s, but an overload of systemic breakdowns, incalculable risks, and invisible threats. As such, the action hero is in a permanent state of hypertension and alertness at the exposed limit of an experience that is no longer narrativized or integrated. Instead of containing threatening events in a perception-affection-action-schema, as did the classical hero, the new ‘action hero’ masters experience in a mode of temporal suspension: he anticipates the omnipresent emergency and catastrophe by perpetually pre-empting their imminence. Phrased like this, post-classical action-cinema has structural features that make it the inverse of another kind of limit to agency, at the other end of the spectrum so to speak, invoking the classical and also exceeding it. This limit is once more the blockage of action on behalf of the self, to which we earlier assigned a genre but no somatic state. Helplessness in relation to the self generally implies the subject-position of the victim, and although this can occasionally be found in male heroes, it is not the one that holds the key to the genre we are here concerned with. For most directly opposed to the helplessness on behalf of another of melodrama, as well as to the pre-emptive anticipation on behalf of the self just discussed in the action-adventure film, is the protagonist of film noir. Retrospectively, he might now be seen to represent an inversion of both: anticipating an omnipresent emergency, he is nonetheless helpless to help himself, becoming more often than not a spectator and witness of his own doom (cf. The Killers). In this sense, film noir has very distinct parameters not only of action, but also of body and time. Classic noir, for instance, invariably features the male body as damaged: he may have head wounds and suffer from amnesia, as in The Blue Dahlia or The High Wall; he may be stricken by insomnia, as in Woman in the Window; he may be fatally poisoned, as in D.O. A. or he may be bleeding to death, as in Double Indemnity. Film noir knows two temporalities that are rarely synchronized: time running out, emptying itself (e.g., The Killers), and the temporality of the flashback, i.e., a time of ambiguous retrieval (e.g., Detour, Criss-Cross). In either time-frame, the noir hero usually finds himself too late to recover, and too soon to expire, existing in the negative ‘now’ of suspended animation.

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Once again, the post-classical cinema has produced a genre or group of films which has tended to aggravate, amplify or radicalize these states of mind and body: the so-called neo-noir. Neo-noir knows its own time, body, and action-schemes, but its starting point are those of noir: Head wounds return in Angel Heart or Memento; hypnagogic states and insomnia return, for instance, in Lost Highway, Fight Club, or Insomnia; we find the poisoned body of D.O.A. in the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple or the inexorably dying replicants of Blade Runner, while a visibly maimed body is that of Jake Gittes with his slit nose in Chinatown. Yet there are also intensifications, so that neo-noir’s body schema tends to be that of paralyzed in-action alternating with hyperactive violence (Lost Highway, Fight Club), prosthetic bodies (Blade Runner, Terminator), amnesiacs (Memento). The appropriate temporality is that of the time travel paradox (Total Recall, Terminator II, Twelve Monkeys) and the time-loop or Möbius strip (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive), while the limit of agency is that of catatonia, or, as already hinted at by Hal Foster, the ‘nihility of the corpse.’ For what is remarkable about many contemporary films, right across the genres yet all inflected towards neo-noir, is how many of their protagonists are in some sense already dead, even as the action continues: explicitly so in Robocop, Interview with a Vampire, Pulp Fiction (the character of Vince), The Sixth Sense and American Beauty, or symbolically so, in Fight Club, Twelve Monkeys, and arguably, Forrest Gump. Whereas Gump, on the surface at least, is able to tell his story and to make for himself a (fantasmatic) place in it – however scandalous, impertinent, or comic this place may appear to the spectator – in a film like Memento, the hero definitely cannot get his story together anymore, not even through flashback, nor by letting time run backwards.

The New Limits: Trauma and Experience If these protagonists are ‘dead men’ (rendered explicit in the title of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man or Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking, but also in Lester Burnham’s opening words in American Beauty), they have, psychoanalytically speaking, fallen out of the symbolic order of desire and lack, and have become ‘drive creatures,’ psychic automatons or zombies, whose narrative goal is less aimed at regaining their ability to ‘desire’ than it is their need to restore their (consciousness of) mortality (in order for there to be closure). Paradoxically, as Freud noted, it is the death-drive that prevents an organism from ‘dying,’ so that, in these films, we can say that the classic noir hero has merged with the vampire figure, but not as the blood-lusty predator, rather as the melancholy undead Dracula, haunted as much as haunting. The privileged body of neo-noir is therefore indeed the corpse, reviving the figure of Nosferatu, carrying his own (metaphoric) coffin. What makes the neo-noir hero undead (and thus, after all, a companion to the cyborg of the Terminator type action-hero genre) is an excess of ‘experience’ as limit-Erlebnis, obliging him to “play dead” to human emotions: they have become ‘too much.’ As a hypothesis one could say that while the cyborg hero is the drive creature of pure affectivity (the ‘obscene vitality of the wound,’ in Foster’s phrase), the neo-noir protagonist

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experiences emotions so extreme, so irretrievable in terms of temporality, event, and body that he is not merely helpless to act. He no longer even feels the impulse to act, however catastrophic the wound. Thus rather than speaking of an experience of failure, as in classical noir, we would have to speak of the very failure of experience: no words, no action, no memory can recreate a coherent sequence of events or restore the cause-and-effect chain of a chrono-logic: “it hurts so much, I cannot feel a thing” is how Foster aptly summarized a certain body art he is describing. The name for this ‘failure of experience’ in contemporary culture is trauma, not only because the traumatized person cannot put his or her experience into discourse, but because the shock of trauma is often said to leave no visible symptoms, no bodily marks.34 While it would be grossly oversimplifying to assert a single concept of trauma, or to suggest that its uses in culture can be defined outside specific political and ideological debates, there are aspects of the trauma discourse that address issues implicit in my question about the limits of experience/the experience of limits.35 The very diffuseness of the term across high and popular culture, and its migration from clinical psychology to literary discourse and critical theory suggests that ‘trauma’ offers itself as a ‘solution’ to a problem yet to be specified. In respect to contemporary cinema, the shattering, immersive and at the same time fragmented experience alluded to, and reproducing the breakdown of Erfahrung into Erlebnis also on the side of the viewer, suggests – at the beginning of the 21st century – a set of analogies to the period close to the beginnings of the 20th century, when Walter Benjamin first theorized shock, trauma, and dissociation as both cinematic forms and symbolic cultural formations. Thus, just as after 1918, the violent disarticulations of body and time, found in the practices of the avantgardes, were related to the war neuroses which first gave rise to the discussions about trauma,36 so Gilles Deleuze, for instance, sees the disarticulation of the body schema of perception-sensation-action in the cinema after 1945 as a consequence of the catastrophic events of the Second World War, especially the Holocaust and the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Deleuze’s insights have also been applied to American cinema in the 1970s, relating its ‘affection image’ to the trauma of Vietnam, and the defeat of the aspirations of the Left.37 Convincing as this may seem, one has to ask oneself: why this return to (the discourse of) trauma, in one case (the Holocaust and Hiroshima) with a 50-year delay, in the other (Vietnam) after a 20-year hiatus? If latency is a recognized feature of trauma, and if a generational change may also provide an explanation, a more provocative answer might be that of Hal Foster, whose observation that trauma became in the 1990s the ‘lingua franca’ of the art world implies that ‘trauma’ may be the conveniently established label for a sensibility or state of mind only tenuously connected to the historical events we usually associate with the term.38 Foster’s answer addresses more the high-culture discourse of the art world than the prevalence of what he calls trauma ‘babblings’ in popular culture.39 To include the cinema, for instance, might be more complicated, just as it

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might prove more controversial. Here the return to Benjamin offers a particularly intriguing hypothesis, since he had, in his reflections on the sensory ramifications of modern experience as typified by shock, discontinuity, and distraction, paid less attention to war-trauma than many other contemporary commentators. Instead, he highlighted the impact of the technical media as well as of metropolitan modes of existence: in other words, the modernizing aspects of a subjectivity apparently similar to a traumatized state of mind. Following Benjamin, therefore, the question to ask would be: what is so ‘modern’ about this disarticulation of body, sense, memory, and speech that it makes trauma the appropriate term? Or even more pointedly: what is so (post-)modern and modernizing about trauma? In an essay on Christopher Nolan’s Memento, I have explored these issues, arguing that the film uses both its generic identity of neo-noir and its modality of experience as trauma in order to put forward a new model of the body as somatic-sensory medium of inscription. Such a conception of the body bypasses perception, affect and cognition by making the protagonist an amnesiac, unable to remember events or recognize his surroundings other than through visual aids, scriptural traces, and acts of repetition.40 Perhaps I can conclude by extending this suggestion with a particularly provocative hypothesis. Can we connect the types of ‘failure’ to integrate perception of place, painful memories, uncertainty about cause and effect, as well as the co-presence of past events in the present and the mixing of temporalities (all usually associated with trauma) to a seemingly quite unrelated or opposed phenomenon, namely the ‘themed environments’ of tourist cities, shopping malls, ‘parks’ and entertainment ‘worlds’? The hypothesis would be that the pervasive trauma discourse as diagnosed by Foster does indeed point to a crisis of experience, of the ability to be an agent in and the author of one’s own life. Yet rather than this ‘trauma trope’ relating to particular historical events, or even to a competition for ‘authenticity’ by each of us claiming victimhood (as Foster asserts), trauma would represent the ‘solution’ to a problem located elsewhere: it would be the name for a new mode of Erlebnis without Erfahrung. Not, for sure, that of the Benjamin’s metropolis or assembly-line factory work, but of a perceptual and somatic environment so saturated with media-experience that its modes of reception, response and action require various kinds of uncoupling and unstitching of the motor-sensory apparatus in order to ‘cope.’ ‘Successful’ immersion in this environment would have as its correlative a ‘traumatic’ mode of spectatorship, by which I mean the kind of flexible attention and selective numbness that absorbs the intermittent intensity of affect, the shallowness of memory, the ennui of repetition, the psychic tracelessness of violence which constant contact with our contemporary mediatized world implies. Trauma would be the solution, because it represents a new ‘economy of experience’: its shortcuts, blackouts and gaps are what saves the self from an otherwise ruinous psychic investment in the multitude of events observed, of human being encountered, of disasters and injustices witnessed – which no personal memory nor even public history could encompass or contain. Its

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opposite but also complement would be the new ‘experience economy’: the themed environments of carefully controlled narratives, where distant pasts are made present and faraway places brought near, where reality takes on the shape of a story, while stories become real and fictional characters come to life. These are the contemporary spaces of Erfahrung devoid of Erlebnis: staged events, simulated dangers and performed identities – all made ‘safe,’ ‘familiar’ and ‘closed,’ this time by enacting the limits of experience through regulated zones of access and exclusion, at once mediated and transparent, at once therapy and stimulation, in other words: policed in equal measure by force and by fantasy. Thus, the limits of experience taken from Benjamin, and explored in cinema theory around body, time, and action have led, via film noir and neo-noir, back to Benjamin’s original distinctions. Thanks to his perspective, however, the experience of limits in post-classical cinema and contemporary media culture now suggests certain limits of (the word) ‘experience’ as an operative term in this project of modernity – seeing how the new frontiers of the experience economy make personal or national trauma and Disneyland or shopping malls the recto and verso of each other: indeed, they make Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park belong together under more than the heading of Steven Spielberg’s authorship. It remains to be seen whether this is an impasse or a passage along which either the idea of post-classical cinema or the new turn to emotions can be further discussed.

Notes 1 For Gilles Deleuze, see his Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). A programmatic statement of the cognitivist approach is: David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). 2 See Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kies´lowski between Theory and Post-Theory (London: BFI Publishing, 2001). 3 For apparatus theory, see Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985). A critique of illusionism is provided by, among others, Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). A strong case for cinema as immersive event is made by Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 4 The subtitle of: Ed S. Tan, Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996). 5 “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” (1940), in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 155–200. 6 Martin Jay, Cultural Semantics (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 48–49. 7 Ibid., 49. 8 The terms of definition are taken from: David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

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9 Christine Noll Brinckmann, “Busby Berkeleys Montageprinzipien,” in Hans Beller, ed., Handbuch der Filmmontage: Praxis und Prinzipien des Filmschnitts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1993), 204–220. 10 Colin MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema: Notes on some Brechtian Theses,” Screen 15, no. 2 (1974), 7–27; Cahiers du cinéma editors, “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln,” in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 493–529. 11 David Bordwell has polemicized most sharply against what he sees as the fashionable argument around visuality and modernity; see his On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Tom Gunning has responded in “Early American Film,” in J. Hill and P. Church Gibson, eds., Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 269–271. 12 For a slightly different formulation of the affectivity shaping the viewing condition of Hollywood films, see Thomas Elsaesser, “Narrative Cinema and Audience-Oriented Aesthetics,” in T. Bennett et al., eds., Popular Television and Film (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1981), 121–136. 13 See Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, translated by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 14 See Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 46. 15 See Roger Kennedy, Psychoanalysis, History and Subjectivity: Now of the Past (New York: Routledge, 2002). 16 Michel Foucault, “An Aesthetics of Existence,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–84 (New York: Semiotexte, 1984); Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and the Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998). 17 Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990); Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 18 Christine Noll Brinckmann, “Motor Mimicry in Hitchcock,” in her Colour and Empathy (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 135–144. 19 Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1991), 2–13. 20 Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic: The Aesthetic of Abjection and Trauma in American Art in the 1990s,” October 78 (Fall 1996), 106–124. 21 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1983). 22 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 395–396; Selected Writings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 354. 23 See Gilles Deleuze: Seminar session, 3 May 1977, “On Music,” translated by Timothy S. Murphy. http://nml.cult.bg/data/music 24 David Bordwell, “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures,” in Phil Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 17–34. 25 Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 283. 26 Steve Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” Screen 27, no. 6 (Nov/Dec 1986), 6–22. 27 Steve Neale, Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1980). 28 Raymond Bellour, “Symbolic Blockage (on North by Northwest),” in Constance Penley, ed., The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 77–192.

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29 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Continuum, 2004), 72. 30 See, for instance, Geoff King, Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: I.B.Tauris; New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000). 31 One of the fiercest critics is Jonathan Rosenbaum; see his Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See (Chicago: A Cappella, 2001). Others regard the notion of the post-classical as misguided and superfluous; see David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2002), 16–28. 32 See Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 33 Thomas Elsaesser, “Classical and Post-classical Narrative: Die Hard,” in Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 26–60. 34 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 35 See my “Trauma: Postmodernism as Mourning Work,” Screen 4, no. 2 (Summer 2001), 191–203. 36 See Tony Kaes, “War – Film – Trauma,” in Inka Mulder-Bach, ed., Modernität und Trauma (Vienna: Edition Parabasen, 2000), 121–130. 37 See Christian Keathley, “Trapped in the Affection-Image: Hollywood’s Post-traumatic Cycle,” in Anthony Enns and Christopher R. Smit, eds., Screening Disability (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 99–116. 38 Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” 106–107. 39 Ibid., 106. 40 Thomas Elsaesser, “Was wäre, wenn du schon tot bist? Vom ‘postmodernen’ zum ‘post-mortem; Kino,” in Christine Rüffert et al., eds., Zeitsprünge (Berlin: Bertz, 2004), 115–125.

3 THE MIND-GAME FILM

Playing Games In December 2006, Lars von Trier’s The Boss of It All was released. The film is a comedy about the head of an IT company hiring a failed actor to play the ‘boss of it all,’ in order to cover up a sell-out. Von Trier announced that there were a number of out-of-place objects (“five to seven”) scattered throughout, called lookeys: “For the casual observer, [they are] just a glitch or a mistake. For the initiated, [they are] a riddle to be solved. All lookeys can be decoded by a system that is unique … It’s a basic mind-game, played with movies.”1 Von Trier went on to offer a prize to the first spectator to spot all the lookeys and uncover the rules by which they were generated. ‘Mind-game, played with movies’ fits quite well a group of films I found myself increasingly intrigued by, not only because of their often weird details and the fact that they are brain-teasers as well as fun to watch but also because they seemed to cross the usual boundaries of mainstream Hollywood, independent, auteur film, and international art cinema. I also realized I was not alone: while the films I have in mind generally attract minority-audiences, their appeal manifests itself as a ‘cult’ following. Spectators can get passionately involved in the worlds that the films create. They study the characters’ inner lives and back-stories and become experts in the minutiae of a scene, or adept at explaining the improbability of an event. Besides reaching movie-house audiences, several of the films have spawned their own online fan communities or forums on the IMDb website. Film critics, as well as scholars from different disciplines and even social commentators and trend-watchers, get hooked, judging by the interesting things they have to say. This widespread, but diverse appeal, as well as other differences make me hesitate to call the films in question a genre or a subgenre. I prefer to think of them as a phenomenon, or

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maybe – in deference to François Truffaut – a ‘certain tendency’ in contemporary cinema. But if it is a tendency, in which direction does it point? And if it is a phenomenon, what is it symptomatic of? First of all, a broad description of the mind-game film. It comprises movies that are ‘playing games,’ and this at two levels: there are films in which a character is being played games with, without knowing it or without knowing who it is that is playing these (often very cruel and even deadly) games with him (or her): in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) the serial killer ‘Buffalo Bill’ is playing games with the police (and the women he captures) and Hannibal Lecter is playing games with Clarice Starling (and eventually, she with him). In David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), John Doe, another serial killer, is playing games with the rookie policeman played by Brad Pitt. In Fincher’s The Game (1997), Michael Douglas is the one who is being played games with (possibly by his own brother). In Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), the eponymous hero leads an entire life that for everyone else is a game, a stage-managed television show, from which only Truman is excluded. Then, there are films where it is the audience that is played games with, because certain crucial items of information are withheld or ambiguously presented: Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995), Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), John Woo’s Paycheck (2003), John Maybury’s The Jacket (2005), David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001) fall in this category. The information may be withheld from both characters and audience, as in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) and Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), where the central protagonists are already “dead, except [they] don’t know it yet,” to quote one of the opening lines of Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999). Sometimes, the ‘masters’ of the game reveal themselves (The Truman Show, Se7en), but mostly they do not, and at other times, a puppet master is caught up in his own game, as in Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich (1999), the hypochondriac writer in the same team’s Adaptation (2002), or the two magicians in Nolan’s The Prestige (2006). Other films of the mind-game tendency put the emphasis on ‘mind:’ they feature central characters whose mental condition is extreme, unstable, or pathological; yet instead of being examples of case studies, their ways of seeing, interaction with other characters and their ‘being in the world,’ is presented as normal. The films thus once more ‘play games’ with the audience’s (and the characters’) perception of reality: they oblige one to choose between seemingly equally valid, but ultimately incompatible ‘realities’ or ‘multiverses:’ Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001), David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002), Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001), or the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix (1999). The nature of consciousness and memory, the reality of other minds, and the existence of possible/parallel worlds are equally at issue in films like Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004), Michael Gondry/Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001, a remake of Amenábar’s Abre los Ojos, 1997), Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors (1998).

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The last two titles indicate that the tendency is not confined to Hollywood or North American directors. To varying degrees and in sometimes surprisingly different ways, ‘mind-game’ films are also being made in Germany, Denmark, Britain, Spain, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan: Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998), Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996), Julio Medem’s Tierra (Earth) (1996), Pedro Almodovar’s Habla con ella (Talk to Her) (2002), Kim Ki-duk’s Bin-jip (3 Iron) (2004), Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express (1994), In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004). Park Chan-Wuk’s Oldboy (2003), Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), Code Inconnu (2000) and Caché (2005) with their sado-masochistic undertow of revenge and guilt, also qualify, along with many others. While several mind-game films have affinities with genres such as the horror film (The Silence of the Lambs), science fiction (The Matrix, eXistenZ [1999]), the teen film (Donnie Darko), time travel films (The Village [2004]) and film noir (Lost Highway, Memento), they address not just the usual (genre-) issues of adolescent identity crises, sexuality, gender, the oedipal family, and the dysfunctional community, but also epistemological problems (how do we know what we know?) and ontological doubts (about other worlds, other minds) that are in the mainstream of the kinds of philosophical inquiry focused on human consciousness, the mind and the brain, multiple realities, or possible worlds. Yet one overriding common feature of mind-game films is their aim to disorient – some would say mislead – spectators, but one might also argue: lead them to other realities, other possibilities (besides carefully hidden or altogether withheld information, there are frequent plot twists and trick endings, but also moments of perfectly ‘suspended animation’ and ontological hesitation). For one further notable feature is that spectators on the whole do not mind being ‘played with’: on the contrary, judging by the comments on the web, they enthusiastically rise to the challenge. The fact that audiences are set conundrums, are sprung ‘traps for mind and eye,’ or that they are – as with von Trier’s lookeys – confronted with odd objects or puzzling details that do not ‘add up,’ even though the overall experience ‘makes sense,’ would indicate we are dealing with a phenomenon that spectators recognize as relevant to their own worlds. Mind-game films thus transcend not only genre but also authorial signature (even though recognized auteurs are prominent) and national cinema (even though a Europe–East Asia–American independents triangle can be discerned). If read symptomatically, from the point of view of reception, what is at stake are new forms of spectator-engagement and new forms of audience-address (although ‘new’ here functions merely as a diacritical marker of difference: the genealogy of the mind-game film includes such venerable master-magicians of surprise, suspense, and the double-take as Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles, as well as 1950s/1960s ‘art cinema’ films by Akira Kurosawa, Alain Resnais, and Ingmar Bergman). As such, mind-game films could be seen as indicative of a ‘crisis’ in the spectatorfilm relation, in the sense that the traditional ‘suspension of disbelief’ or the classical spectator positions of’ ‘voyeur,’ ‘witness,’ ‘observer’ and their related cinematic

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regimes or techniques (point of view shot, ‘suture,’ restricted/omniscient narration, ‘fly on the wall’ transparency, mise-en-scène of the long take/depth of field) are no longer deemed appropriate, compelling or challenging enough for the way we want to engage with, or are interpellated by, media of the moving image. It would not be the first time that the ‘institution cinema’ experiments with spectator-address, in the face of technical, economic, or demographic changes. Lars von Trier’s lookeys, for instance, and the idea of offering prizes to the audience for correct guesses, deliberately confuse film-viewing with game-shows on television, in order to provoke a different, more direct form of participation: the cinematic equivalent of the phone-in. But in the early-to-mid-1910s, when the so-called ‘cinema of attractions’ was said to give way to the ‘cinema of narrative integration’ a German director, Joe May, initiated a successful, if brief vogue for so-called ‘Preisrätselfilme’ or prize-puzzle-films as a subgenre of the (Danish-inspired) detective film, where clues were planted without being revealed at the end. Instead, prizes were offered to spectators who identified them.2 On the other hand, besides the transition from ‘early’ to ‘classical’ cinema, drastic changes in audience-address (at least in mainstream cinema) have been relatively rare, and are usually coded generically (comedy and the musical allowed for frontal staging and direct address, which would not have been common in Westerns or thrillers). If mind-game films are indeed harbingers of such changes in audience-address and spectator-engagement, then the underlying transformations of the ‘institution cinema’ would presumably have to be correspondingly momentous. Some candidates suggest themselves, such as the changes brought by digitalization, but perhaps better to first consider some alternative definitions and explanations.

A List of Common Motifs Taking a step back: what goes on in mind-game films, what stories do they tell, what characters do they depict, and why should they be so popular now? Even though this is not an exhaustive catalogue of typical situations, here are some of the most frequently named features of the mind-game film, by way of a map or directory of motifs: 1.

2.

A protagonist participates in, or is witness to, events whose meaning or consequences escape him or her: along with him or her, the film asks: what exactly has happened? There is a suspension of cause and effect, if not an outright reversal of linear progression (Memento, Donnie Darko, Lost Highway). A protagonist seems deluded or mistaken about the difference between reality and his/her imagination, but rather than this inner world becoming a clearly marked ‘subjective’ point of view of a character (as in the European art film), there is no perceptible difference either in the visual register or in terms of verisimilitude, between real and imagined, real and simulated, real and manipulated. As one commentator puts it: films like The Matrix, Dark

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3. 4.

5.

6.

City (1998) and The Truman Show involve “a hefty plot twist, one that forces the protagonist to question reality itself. Said reality tends to be nothing more than a simulation, and a conspiratorial simulation at that.”3 A protagonist has a friend, mentor or companion who turns out to be imagined (Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind, Donnie Darko, Lost Highway). A protagonist has to ask himself: ‘who am I and what is my reality?’ (the Philip K. Dick adaptations Blade Runner [1982], Total Recall [1990], Paycheck, and Minority Report [2002]), and even ‘am I still alive or already dead?’ (Angel Heart [1987], Jacob’s Ladder [1990], The Sixth Sense, The Others). Not only is the hero unable to distinguish between different worlds: he or she is often not even aware that there might be parallel universes, and neither is the audience – until a moment in the film when it turns out that the narrative and plot have been based on a mistaken cognitive or perceptual premise (Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, A Beautiful Mind). The point in the story at which it undergoes such drastic revision, where the ground is pulled from under the audience’s feet, is commented on by one of the fans as follows: “You want that big, juicy, brain-blasting, oh-my-god-everything-has-changed feeling,” to which another blogger replied: “Yes – but the ‘oh-my-god-everything-has-changed’ feeling in The Sixth Sense is reinforced by the ‘gotcha’ feeling of replayed scenes from earlier in the movie that you now understand differently. The viewer gets to have it both ways: have the oh-my-god feeling and watch the protagonist experience it too.” A character is persuaded by his – or more often, her – family, friends, or the community that she is deluded about the existence or disappearance, usually of a child – a self-delusion brought upon by trauma, excessive grief, or other emotional disturbance. He/she insists on maintaining this delusion against all odds, and is usually proven right, by uncovering a conspiracy, either of a very sophisticated, diabolical kind, or on the contrary, consisting of a very ‘scientific,’ bureaucratic or routine ‘test’ or ‘measure’ ordered by the powers that be (Minority Report, The Forgotten [2004], The Village [2004], Flight Plan [2005]).

From such ad hoc definitions and the folk/fan wisdom, it is evident that the mind-game film can usefully be analyzed under several headings: for instance, one can foreground issues of narrative and narratology (by concentrating on the unreliable narrators, the multiple timelines, unusual point of view structures, unmarked flashbacks, problems in focalization and perspectivism, unexpected causal reversals and narrative loops); one can highlight questions of psychology and psychopathology (characters suffering from amnesia, schizophrenia, paranoia, ‘second sight’ or clairvoyance); philosophers of mind can find conundrums about the relation of body, brain and consciousness that challenge concepts of ‘identity,’ or ask what it means to be ‘human’ as we share our lives with ever smaller machines and ever more ‘intelligent’ objects. Mathematicians can elucidate game

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theory, explicitly thematized in A Beautiful Mind and implicitly instantiated in David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner (1997), or they can comment on the role of contingency, chance, stochastic series, and explain the ‘butterfly’ effects of chaos theory, the ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’ thesis, (positive) feedback loops as opposed to linear causality (in films like The Butterfly Effect [2004] or Donnie Darko). Several films raise matters of ontology and parallel worlds, while skepticism and doubt, but also their obverse, belief and trust, are often the epistemological issues at stake. Not all of these approaches or entry-points can be discussed here, and I shall limit myself to three: the case for ‘complex storytelling’ (and the possible disjuncture between ‘narrative’ and ‘database,’ ‘narrative logic’ and ‘game logic’), the idea of identity crises and personality disorders as ‘productive pathologies,’ and the ‘social uses’ of mind-game films as either helping to ‘discipline and control’ or to ‘teach and train.’

The Mind-Game Film: A Case of Complex Storytelling? There is clear evidence that cinematic storytelling has in general become more intricate, complex, unsettling, and this not only in the traditionally difficult categories of European auteur and art film but right across the spectrum of mainstream cinema, event-movies/blockbusters, indie-films, not forgetting (HBOfinanced) television. Several of the features named as typical of the mind-game film are grist to the mill of professionally trained (literary) narratologists: single or multiple diegesis, unreliable narration and missing or unclaimed point of view shots, episodic or multi-stranded narratives, embedded or ‘nested’ (story-withinstory/film-within-film) narratives, and frame-tales that reverse what is inside the frame (going back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1919]). As a consequence, the films I group under the mind-game tendency are generating a broad literature focusing on the narratological issues raised, with corresponding terminologies: some talk of ‘forking path’ narratives (David Bordwell) or ‘multiple-draft’ narratives (Bordwell; Edward Branigan, 2002),4 others refer to them as (psychological) puzzle films (Elliot Panek, 2006), twist films (George Wilson, 2006), complex narratives (Janet Staiger, 2006), or try to define them as special cases of ‘modular narratives’ (Allan Cameron, 2006). Jason Mittell (2006) has also studied the complex puzzle narrative in contemporary television.5 Let us assume that the mind-game film sets the viewer a number of narratological problems or puzzles: Mind-game films at the narrative level offer – with their plot twists and narrational double-takes – a range of strategies that could be summarized by saying that they suspend the common contract between the film and its viewers, which is that films do not ‘lie’ to the spectator, but are truthful and self-consistent within the premises of their diegetic worlds, that permit, of course, ‘virtual’ worlds, impossible situations, and improbably events. Audiences, for instance, felt cheated by a film like The Usual Suspects (1995), because it involved not only an unreliable narrator, Keyser, but also a mendacious point of view shot, implying the presence

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of a witness in a crucial scene, when there was none. Bona fide mind-game films by contrast maintain a basic consistency and self-consistency or they enact the very condition their hero suffers from, in the structure of the film itself, as in Memento, where the film, as it were, wipes out its own memory, by being told in short segments that precede each other, rather than follow each other. Films such as The Matrix, Donnie Darko, and Fight Club present their parallel worlds without marking them off as different by superimposition, soft focus, or any of the other conventional means by which films indicate switches of register or reference. The question then becomes: do the films ‘lie,’ or is it the very opposition of truth and lie, between the actual and the virtual, the subjective, and the objective that is at stake? The disorientation of the spectator extends to the reality status of what is being shown, and unlike other forms of deception, illusionism, and make-believe, the mind-game film does not involve a matter of ocular (mis-)perception, nor does it have to do with perspectivism; it is neither a matter of the human eye missing something (such as the body in Antonioni’s Blow Up [1966], which is then revealed via the mechanical camera), nor are we presented with several versions of the same event, as in Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). Film scholars who have turned to narratology to explain these films can point to precursors of the complex storytelling mode and of multiple point of view narration, such as Bergman’s Persona (1966), the unreliable narration from Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950), with its ‘lying’ flashback, Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window (1944) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) or Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year in Marienbad (1961), not to mention Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and F for Fake (1974) or almost the entire oeuvre of Luis Buñuel, mind-game player par excellence, who needed to invoke neither external agents nor aberrant psychology to persuade the audience of multiple universes, held together by chance and contingency, between which characters may switch on a mere whim or when perceiving a seemingly banal object. In literature, too, there is no shortage of precursors: Boccaccio, Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, tracing a line to Chesterton, Borges, Gide, Nabokov and Calvino (each one a master of the shaggy dog story of mutual/multiple embeddedness), as well as including the classic modernists from Flaubert to Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce, or Conrad, Mann, and Faulkner. Narratologists tend to perceive mind-game films either as occasions for refining existing classifications or as challenges to prove that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to storytelling. A head-on exercise in demystification of mind-game films has been undertaken by David Bordwell.6 Under the name of “Forking Path Narratives” he discusses among others, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance, Mike Newell’s Sliding Doors, and Wai Ka-Fai’s Too Many Ways to be No. 1 (1997) (while in another publication, Kristin Thompson sets out to prove just how ‘classical’ films like Groundhog Day [1993] are, appearances to the contrary).7 Bordwell’s main line of argument, for instance, is that the paths (or narrative trajectories) are still linear once they have forked,

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that the forks are signposted and foreshadowed, that forks are made to intersect eventually, that all paths are not equal: there is a hierarchy, and the last one taken presupposes all others. And finally, that there are still deadline structures (such as in Donnie Darko, or Run Lola Run), which hold the narrative universe together and inflect it with a linear causality. The perspective taken by Bordwell, Thompson, as well as Murray Smith and others is that this is a challenge to theory that can be ‘mastered’ simply by extending classical narratology to include some of the recent work in cognitive psychology, about how the mind organizes visual cues, how perception, identification, and mental schema function.8 The result is that the para-normal features are given normal explanations, and the narratives are restored to their ‘proper’ functioning. The problem with such approaches is that they tend to reduce the films to business as usual, making one wonder why the writer or director went to such trouble in the first place. Surely, in these films (as indeed, some earlier ones as well), the most intriguing and innovative feature is this insistence on temporality as a separate dimension of consciousness and identity; the play on non-linear sequence or inverted causality, on chance and contingency, on synchronicity and simultaneity; and their effects on characters, agency and human relations: we are in worlds that often look just like ours, but where multiple timelines coexist, where the narrative engenders its own loops or Möbius strips, where there may well be a beginning, a middle, and an end, but they certainly are not presented in that order, and thus the spectator’s own meaning-making activity involves constant retroactive revision, new reality-checks, displacements and reorganization of not only of temporal sequence but of mental space, and the presumption of a possible switch in cause and effect. A countervailing strategy in the field of narrative analysis has been to consider the mind-game films as leftovers of classical narrative, during a period of transition, when the default value of cinematic storytelling is rapidly becoming that of the interactive video game and the computer simulation game. In practice, there clearly are crossovers, as many Hollywood blockbusters (from Die Hard [1988] to King Kong [2005]) have lucrative parallel lives as computer games, and stories originating as games have found their way into the cinemas, such as Resident Evil (2002), Doom (2005) and Silent Hill (2006). The crossover ‘graphic novel’ has also been a recent phenomenon much remarked upon, after the box office success of Ghost World (2001), V for Vendetta (2005), Sin City (2005) and 300 (2006). But the assumption of video game architecture now determining narrative is as much an oversimplification as the earlier voiced complaint that special effects were driving out narrative and plot in the blockbuster film. Both assertions should certainly leave the theoretician dissatisfied: the literature on whether games are narratives at all, or need to be seen as an entirely different species, is vast and vastly divided, and the arguments for blockbusters still being intricately plotted, as well as multimodal with respect to video game logic, have also been made9

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Narrative versus Database The popularity and profitability of computer games has nonetheless given rise, among film and humanities scholars, to a renewed interest in mathematical game theory. Especially, ‘new media’ theorists have begun to rethink the logic of traditional narratives, arguing that the storytelling we know and are familiar with from Homer to Homer Simpson may itself be a historically specific and technology-dependent – and thus a doubly variable – way of storing information and of organizing direct sensory as well as symbolic data. It would therefore be not altogether unreasonable to assume that new technologies of storage, retrieval, and sorting such as the ones provided so readily and relatively cheaply by the computer or Internet servers will in due course engender and enable new forms of ‘narrative,’ which is to say, other ways of sequencing and ‘linking’ data than that of the story centered on single characters, and with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. For contemporary cinema, the challenge might be: what is the equivalent, or rather: what sorting principles can replace or complement narrative? Because narrative, considered as a universally prevailing basic ordering principle, does have peculiarities: it enforces a linearity and teleology; it operates a logic of sequential implication (post hoc ergo propter hoc), and it tends to rely on causally motivated chains of events, propelled by identifiable agents, usually human beings. That is fine as far as it goes, but if one considers it purely under the aspect of its ordering function, it also looks very self-limiting and possibly even unsuitable for a whole range of tasks at hand. These new tasks or challenges to narrative can be defined in three directions: one leads us towards the rhizome, the archive, the database, as foreseen in the writings of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson, the Cold War 1950s geniuses of hypertext architecture and cyberspace. The hotspots and network nodes that now link the web are clearly breaks with narrative linearity, and the literate community has adapted surprisingly quickly to the labyrinth pathways and navigational principles behind such architectures. The second way, in which a complement to (modernist) narrative might be conceived, is in upping the ante in terms of convolution and involution, layering and mise-en-abyme, i.e., accommodating seriality, multiple options, and open-endedness within a still broadly telic and goal-oriented storytelling format. Narrative accommodates quite well its own enunciative double-takes, its own reflexive bootstrapping and metaleptic strategies, but computer and Internet-driven demands for more ‘dynamic,’ ‘real-time’ feedback and response are putting pressure even on (post-)modernist narrative. The third direction would re-assess the present state and future potential of the material object and symbolic form which has largely shaped linear narrative in both word and image: the printed book. From an evolutionary-anthropological perspective, human beings have developed in the course of their history two symbolic systems of representation: the

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visual-mimetic and the verbal-symbolic. Both received a major boost/underwent a quantum leap in 15th/16th century Europe: the linearization of the verbal system (‘the word’), with printing and the book, and the spatialization of the visual-mimetic system (‘the image’) with perspectival projection and portable, oil-based, easel painting. The 20th/21st century may come to be seen as having effected a similarly epochal shift in these representational systems, around the computer, wireless telephony, and digitization. Even if the philosophical implications and political consequences of this shift are not yet as clear as those of the Renaissance and Humanist Enlightenment, it is safe to say that fixed perspective and the ‘window on the world’ of easel painting (and cinema) is competing with the multiple screen/monitor/interface (with its virtual windows, refreshed images, embedded links, and different forms of graphics, topographies, and visualizations) and that the book is also in full mutation, as written texts become both searchable and alterable, as well as dynamically linked with images, diagrams, and graphics. The consequence is that narrative (as the traditionally most efficient organizing principle of connecting disparate information to a user) has to contend and rival with the archive and the database and their forms of organization and user-contact. Such ‘automated’ user-contact, for instance, would be the ‘digital footprints’ web-users leave behind, and the ‘data-mining’ that connects their activity to the textual body or viewed object, often played back to them as their ‘choices’ and ‘preferences.’

Mind-Game Films as Examples of ‘Productive Pathologies’ What one can say about mind-game films with respect to narratology is thus that they are different from their literary forebears that play with narrative mise-en-abyme, unreliable narrators, and the multiple embedding of points of view, in that the mindgame films emphasize, not a ratcheting up of auto-reflexivity and self-reference, but instead a ‘lowering’ of self-consciousness and a different form of recursiveness by, in some cases, knocking out part of the conscious mind altogether, and replacing it with ‘automated’ feedback: this is signaled by protagonists suffering from various personality disorders, among which schizophrenia or amnesia are the two favored forms of disordering identity and dis-associating character, agency, and motivation, and thus of motivating a ‘re-boot’ of consciousness and the sensory-motor system. Some critics have pointed out a certain nihilism in Hollywood’s manipulation of referentiality and temporality in these films.10 While there are cases where this may be so, I would argue also for the possibility of a properly philosophical nihilism about the conceptual and perceptual impasses, which our image worlds have burdened us with. At the same time, I see a certain radical ambivalence in the way these films present their characters as suffering from particular pathologies, for – as indicated – mind-game films tend to revolve around mentally or psychologically unstable characters, whose aberrations fall into three major types: paranoia, schizophrenia, and amnesia. Even though the films identify them as ‘conditions,’ the fact that these

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characters’ point of view is usually privileged over all others (and thus functions as the spectator’s guide) is more than a ‘trick’: it points to a peculiar aspects of their mental state, namely that it suspends our usual categories of sane/insane, as well as those of victim and agent (and even: dead/alive). As to the latter, the pathologies are often connected to a personal past: mostly a traumatic incident that keeps returning or insists on manifesting itself in the present, such as the violent death of Lenny’s wife in Memento, the death of John Anderton’s son in Minority Report, or a childhood injustice that comes to haunt the hero in Caché. This would call for a psychoanalytic approach, and indeed, once one begins to assess the different traumata from this perspective, one can see the mind-game protagonists’ plight as the pathologies of individual lives, but just as forcefully, opening out to contemporary issues of identity, recognition by others and subjectivity in general, so that the pathologies prevailing in the films reveal other dimensions as well.

Paranoia Recent paranoia films include Hollywood films where women – mothers – grieve for a child, or are haunted by the loss of children. Often it is not clear whether these children were ever there, or whether husbands, therapists, or doctors are merely trying to persuade them they never existed. Examples are The Forgotten, Flight Plan, The Others, What Lies Beneath (2000), The Village, and even Spielberg’s Minority Report. Usually some conspiracy – instigated by a powerful father figure – lies at the bottom. In many ways the paranoia mind-game film is a revival of a classical genre, derived from the Victorian Gothic tale, such as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, or Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, still the two most frequently used templates. Feminist critics have exhaustively studied these ‘paranoid woman’s films,’ ranging from Rebecca (1940) Gaslight (1944), Experiment Perilous (1944) to The Locket (1946), The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), Secret Beyond the Door (1948) and Caught (1949).11 In all of them, women fear for their sanity because of the mixed messages they get from the world around them, or are driven insane by husbands whom they no longer think they can trust, until they are either disabused of their delusions, or in the case that their worst fears are confirmed, until they are rescued by another male, usually younger and more ‘modern,’ but male nonetheless. Flight Plan knowingly reverses the stereotype by making the younger man the villain, not the racial or ethnic other, and the unwittingly colluding therapist is a woman, rather than an instance of paternal authority. Yet paranoia, one can argue, is also the appropriate – or even ‘productive’ – pathology of our contemporary network society. Being able to discover new connections, where ordinary people operate only by analogy or antithesis; being able to rely on bodily ‘intuition’ as much as on ocular perception; or being able to think ‘laterally’ and respond hyper-sensitively to changes in the environment may turn out to be assets and not just an affliction. The ‘creative potential’ of

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conspiracy theories lies in the way they help deal with impersonal bureaucratic systems, based on protocols and routines, and practicing mysterious forms of inclusion and exclusion, rather than implementing transparent laws and explicit prohibitions. Paranoia might also be seen as a response to the crisis in subject formation, which instead of following the oedipal trajectory of law versus desire and accept ‘castration’ as entry-point, engages with the symbolic order by constant disarticulation and vigilance towards its systemic intentions and disembodied intelligence. Paranoia and conspiracy theories, by shifting perspectives and generating horizons with higher degrees of complexity, can lead to new kinds of knowledge.

Schizophrenia Classical films featuring protagonists with mental problems, such as Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1943) or Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956) tended to focus on the family and on patriarchal authority as the root cause of the affliction. A loving and understanding partner was seen as the best cure. In this respect, the films of Roman Polanski marked a change: in Repulsion (1965), for instance, the spectator observes and sides with Carol’s terrified realization of how predatory and casually aggressive the male world around her behaves, before beginning to suspect her to be not only unusually sensitive but mentally unbalanced. As in several other films by Polanski, one is invited, indeed seduced into entering another mind, and see the world from his or her perspective, before being led on a downward spiral to murder and/or suicide (as in The Tenant [1976], Death and the Maiden [1994], or Bitter Moon [1992]). Yet however shocking the dénouement, the spectator is usually allowed to withdraw into a relatively safe zone of fascinated, spellbound, or horrified observation, rather than being caught entirely unawares or left in mental and moral limbo. Mental illness in a mind-game film is generally not signaled in the way it is in Polanski. Usually the frame of ‘normality,’ against which a character’s behavior can be measured is absent, and even the revelation of his or her condition does not provide a stable external reference point. In David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002), the protagonist is schizophrenic, a condition made clear both by plot and behavior, but the fusion of memory and delusional fantasy engenders its own kind of unframed vision, increasing the spectatorial discomfort, as we realize the nature of the delusional labyrinth we have come to share. It provides the film with an unreliable narrator, whose unstable mind and oedipal obsessions create a state of tension and suspension, without endowing the hero with special insight, as does Rain Man (1989), a film that rewards the autistic Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) with a photographic memory and a phenomenal ability with numbers. By contrast, A Beautiful Mind begins with a character who, while shy and withdrawn, seems different only by degrees from the Princeton freshmen he shares his time with. Awkward social behavior is here compensated by a mind – at once

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more acute and more dissociative – that makes some astonishing discoveries, which begin relatively harmless, like spotting patterns and resemblances where no one would suspect them (between neck-ties and cut-glass fruit-bowls), or being able to translate the random scurrying of pigeons for bread-crumbs in the quad into mathematical formulas. The apotheosis of this paradox of the supremely gifted misfit comes in a scene where he and his friends are trying to seduce some girls in a pub, and John Nash comes up with a formula that guarantees success, but which, inadvertently, lays the foundations for a whole new branch of mathematics – game theory – to which the ‘Nash equilibrium’ makes a major contribution. During the first half of the film, as John is inducted into the rarefied and highly competitive world of Princeton’s mathematics department, he has a room-mate, whom we only much later realize is a figment of his troubled mind, aggravated by his involvement in the shadowy world of the Rand Corporation and Cold War espionage. Yet A Beautiful Mind is about mind-games (as played by mathematicians and US Government agencies), more than it is itself a mind-game film. For that it would need to maintain the premise of the first half, where we share John Nash’s ‘deluded’ world and assume it to be normal. Instead, the plot gradually dismantles the layers of invisible framing, so central to the mind-game film, turning an initial pleasure in sharing the exhilaration of a brilliant mind and his special insights into patterns, where ordinary mortals see nothing but chaos or contingency, into the disappointment at having been ‘had,’ followed perhaps by pity for Nash, his schizoid delusions and marriage-destroying self-deceptions, from which the true devotion of his wife eventually rescue him. Donnie Darko, on the other hand, is a more achieved mind-game film, even though the hero’s schizophrenia is clearly signposted from the start. At first, Donnie’s ‘weirdness’ is more like a probe, by which the nuclear family, the school dynamics, and the small-town suburban community are tested and found wanting. On the margins of this world, a wise but mad old lady, and a frightening figure in a bunny suit called Frank emerge as ambiguous figures of authority and agency, but not necessarily of wisdom and salvation. However, the character of Donnie Darko remains darkly mysterious in his motivation, perception, and possibly pre-emptive action, even given the ample clues and references to the supernatural, to string theory, and books about black holes. Indeed, they almost seem to be planted in the film, in order to divert attention from some of the more ‘unframed’ events that structure the narrative, such as the airplane engine that drops out of nowhere on his parents’ roof, or the figures he encounters during his nightly sleepwalking. Donnie ‘keeps it low,’ meaning that he stays matter-of-fact even in the face of the most extraordinary encounters and events, so that nothing gives us access to his mind other than the reality that we experience in his presence. Without endorsing R. D. Laing’s motto “schizophrenia isn’t always a breakdown; sometimes it’s a breakthrough,” Donnie Darko presents its hero’s condition as a pathology with a special kind of use: at the very least as a different way of connecting mind and sensation/perception/action, but possibly as the redemptive and saving grace in a world in denial of its fallen state.

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Amnesia Memento’s Leonard Shelby has become the archetypal example of the character who suffers from a loss of memory. His condition not only damages his personality and subjectivity, but also utterly transforms the way he views and interacts with the world. While, to all appearances, Leonard struggles to regain his memory, in order to avenge the death of his wife, the very fact that the film ‘runs backward’ allows also an inverse reading of his intentions and goals. Considered as a productive pathology, Leonard’s amnesia would remind one of the importance of forgetting, rather than remembering. Through the ‘stripping’ of long-term memory into disconnected media-chunks (polaroids, scribbled notes, and memos), i.e., the way that repetitive tasks are inscribed in the body, and by the manner in which revenge becomes a meaningless concept, the film foregrounds the idea of ‘programming,’ as opposed to remembering: it points to the importance of the change from a society based on law/prohibition (so strong in analyses of myths and narratives) to one organizing itself around procedures and protocols (in systems analysis, engineering, and information sciences). As one can see from the uses that the other protagonists in Memento – especially Teddy and Natalie – make of Leonard, in order to further their own ends and objectives, the amnesiac hero is in his pathology programmable like a weapon: he becomes literally a smart bomb, a repeat-action projectile on auto-pilot. To this extent, Leonard represents not the old-fashioned film noir detective, but the new multi-tasking personality (dissociative, reactive: not rapid reaction, but random reaction force), with a subjectivity programmable not through ideology and false consciousness, but programmed by a fantasy (of being an avenging film noir hero), or self-programmed through the body (where the body functions as a technology of recording, storage and replay): the somatic or pathologized body as an advanced ‘neural’ or ‘biological’ medium, in its mental instability and volatility potentially more efficient than the current generation of electronic media, at least for certain tasks.

Schizophrenia, Paranoia, Amnesia, and the Risk Society What used to be private detectives looking for clues down those mean streets in film noir appear now to be insurance agents assessing risk on behalf of their corporate employers in the neo-noir films of the 1990s. Not since Double Indemnity has this profession played such a prominent role in the movies, when we think that Leonard Shelby, the hero of Memento is an insurance man, and so is Jack, played by Edward Norton, the hero of Fight Club, who also works for an insurance company as a risk assessor and loss adjuster. In Leonard’s case, his job is directly related to his memory disorder, insofar as the disavowal of his guilt-feelings regarding his role in the death of his wife converge with his guilt-feelings regarding one of his clients, the wife of amnesiac Sammy Jankis, with whom Leonard increasingly comes to be identified. In Jack’s case, guilt-feelings are a no less prominent motor of his behavior that finds in

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the split self and alter ego Tyler Durden its most stabilizing form. But ‘trauma-theory’ is only one path to access the mind of mind-game protagonists. If we understand these illnesses as anthropomorphized versions of mathematical code and automated programs, then they seem to liberate and create new connections, establish new networks, but these are not ‘open’ and ‘free.’ They are contained and constrained within a protocol, whose subjective dimensions have not yet been fully understood, not least because of the way they model the future at the same time as they pre-empt it, and thus potentially short-circuit the very connections they seek to establish: hence the allegorical (and tragic) figure of the ‘risk-insurer,’ who risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophet. In each pathology of subjectivity, I would argue, the mental condition is such that it exceeds the clinical case-story. Indeed, the point of giving such subjectivitiesin-action the format of a mind-game film would be to draw the audience into the protagonists’ world in ways that would be impossible if the narrative distanced itself or contextualized the hero via his or her (medical) condition. In other words, the hypothesis would be that mind-game films imply and implicate spectators in a manner not covered by the classical theories of identification, or even of alignment and engagement, because the ‘default values’ of normal human interaction are no longer ‘in place,’ meaning that the film is able to question and suspend both the inner and outer framing of the story.

Disavowal Finally, there is disavowal, not only on the part of the protagonists but also at the level of reception. I noted earlier on that Internet fan communities are particularly aware of the mind-game film (which features there under the different label of the ‘mind-fuck film.’)12 But the fan sites and Internet forums for mind-game films also seem to operate according to their own mind-game principle: irrespective of how implausible the causes or ‘magical’ the agents are that the film deploys, the status as artifice is disavowed. Instead, the world depicted is taken as real: as if this is the rule of the game, the condition of participating in the postings. No more ‘representation,’ no insistence on ‘cultural constructions:’ the discussions take for granted the ability to live in fictional or rather virtual worlds, often enough amplified and extended by links to recommendations or other forms of advertising. The directors themselves, as integral parts of the film’s marketing, provide additional clues (notably David Lynch, but as we saw, also Lars von Trier with his lookeys), to suggest that the featured world can be opened up, expanded, making the films into occasions for further para-textual or hypertextual activity. As a node that sustains and distributes a particular form of (floating) discourse, a given film allows fans to engage with each other, by suspending their ‘reality-check,’ while nonetheless endowing the text with a plethora of clues, on which paranoia can feed, networks can proliferate, and conspiracy theories can blossom: all occasion for an extraordinary surge in hermeneutic activity, or ‘close reading.’

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On the one hand, thus, we are dealing with pathologies (of subjectivity, of consciousness, of memory and identity): indications of crisis and uncertainty in the relation of the self with itself and with the world (and by extension: of the spectator with the screen). On the other hand, these apparently damaged minds and bodies are capable of displaying remarkable faculties at times, being in touch with agents from another world (The Sixth Sense), intuiting imminent disaster (Donnie Darko), or starting popular protest movements (Fight Club). Their ‘disability’ functions as empowerment, and their minds, by seemingly losing control, gain a different kind of relation to the man-made, routinized, or automated surroundings, but also to the more ‘cosmic’ energies, which usually center on the new physics of time travel, curved spaces, stochastic systems, and warps in the universe. In other words, these pathologies are presented to the spectator in some sense as productive pathologies.

Discipline and Control, or Teach and Train? This would indicate that ‘trauma’ is not only something that connects a character to his past but also opens up to a future. It suggests a Foucault-inspired approach: Foucault sought to explain mental pathologies in terms of bodily regimes, discourses, and institutional practices, which go beyond the individual instance, and inscribe pathology ‘productively’ – in terms of the micro-politics of power – into society at large. Given the resonance that his theories have had in most humanities fields, we should perhaps read the mind-game film also across the paradigms of ‘discipline’ and ‘control.’ For instance, seen from the Deleuzian interpretation of Foucault’s shift from ‘disciplinary’ to ‘control’ societies,13 these pathologies of the self are a way of making the body and the senses ready for the new surveillance society. They inscribe ‘index and trace’ in the form of Aufschreibsysteme (systems of inscription) on the individual body, much the way that Kafka depicts the governor in The Penal Colony being inscribed by his own machine, or the way Leonard in Memento has his body tattooed, in order to remember not to forget, as well as the uses he puts his Polaroids to. A line could even be drawn from Walter Benjamin’s theories of the technical media and the body (around concepts of ‘shock’ and the ‘optical unconscious’), which (in German philosophy) leads to thinkers like Friedrich Kittler, Klaus Theweleit, and Peter Sloterdijk, with their interest in extending the ‘materialities of communication’ to writing and literature (their examples are drawn, besides Kafka, from modernist writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Gottfried Benn, not usually associated with the ‘technical media.’) Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999) would be the most systematic attempt, in this vein, to analyze the physiological effects of media-practices, including those of writing, recording, and imaging.14 Mind-game films would thus be the narratives of such ‘inscription systems’ under the conditions of generalized surveillance and real-time, positive (i.e., amplifying, and no longer self-regulative) feedback.

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For French philosophy, on the other hand, in the wake of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (originally 1961) and following on from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (originally 1972), madness, rather than signifying, as it had done for the Romantics, exceptional talent and genius, becomes a way of ‘socializing’ subjectivity in bourgeois society and under the conditions of liberal market economics. Read ‘politically’ in the light of Foucault, mind-game films would show how perceptual or somatic faculties released or manifested by illness are equally ‘socialized:’ they either represent the (individual) solution to a (collective) problem – rather than constituting the problem, as in the case study – or the illness is made to work, fitting a body (through its mind no longer ‘in control’) around a new set of social tasks and political relations. In this way ‘aberrant’ mental states signify the effects of the new disciplinary machines of which they are the early warning systems, heralding the next step after internalizing (bourgeois) self-discipline and self-monitoring, where it would no longer be the mind – not even the Freudian mind, with its unconscious and superego competing for control – that is in charge, but instead, where the senses, the sensations, affects, and the body are the ones that are being directly addressed, stimulated, and appealed to, and thus ‘organized’ and ‘controlled,’ in order to fit the subject into the contemporary world and the social matrix of ‘affective labor.’15 While this recalls once more Walter Benjamin, and his theory of the cinema as a disciplinary machine, ‘training the senses’ for modernity and urban life, it also provides a bridging argument to an apparently quite different school of thinking about reordering and realigning our somatic responses with the sensory overload of contemporary life. According to Benjamin, shocks to the body are ‘buffered’ by the cinema, in that films duplicate, repeat and thereby make pleasurable in the form of humor (slapstick, Charlie Chaplin) the terrors of a world, where the human body is exposed and subjected to the logic of abstract systems or machines, be they bureaucratic or technological. Cinema thus rehearses and readies the human sensorium for the tasks of ‘distracted attention,’ especially with respect to the perceptual organization of the visual field at the place of work and in everyday life (for instance, when crossing a street with traffic, as in Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton films). Thus, on the one hand, Benjamin’s thinking seamlessly precedes (and in its historical reference, follows) that of Foucault about the body and the senses in the ‘modern age,’ except that for Foucault, the micro-systems of power (of the 18th and 19th century) had ways of inscribing themselves directly onto the body, in the form of sexual mores, rules of hygiene or the rigid timetabling of the working-day, rather than ‘mediated’ by modern audio and visual entertainment forms. On the other hand, within an apparently quite different ideological context, because given a positive turn, one finds a similar argument made by the American social analyst Steven Johnson, in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You (2005).16 There, Johnson develops a theory about the post-industrial role for the modern media, by arguing that computer games, and especially contemporary American television, notably

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some of the HBO-produced or inspired programs such as The X-Files, The Sopranos, 24 or Lost (as well as ‘weird’ movies: more or less the same titles I cite as mind-game films) are ‘good’ for the young, because they train new cognitive skills and teach appropriate ways of responding to and interacting with automated systems of surveillance and control, such as they increasingly predominate on the work-floor and in offices, as well as in the home and in interpersonal discourse. Johnson, in other words, takes a pragmatic and proactive view of the new control society, making the best case for America’s mass media fulfilling their historic role in adapting the working population to the social technologies that promise their economic survival, maintain civic cohesion, and assure America’s hegemonic position in the world. Trend-watcher Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Johnson’s book, tellingly entitled “Brain Candy” (a possible alternative for mind-game) sums up the case as follows: To watch an episode of Dallas today is to be stunned by its glacial pace—by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships, by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of The Sopranos, by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot … The extraordinary amount of money now being made in the television aftermarket – DVD sales and syndication – means that the creators of television shows now have an incentive to make programming that can sustain two or three or four viewings. Even reality shows like Survivor, Johnson argues, engage the viewer in a way that television rarely has in the past: When we watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around us – the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation and gesture and facial expression – scrutinizes the action on the screen, looking for clues … How can the greater cognitive demands that television makes on us now, he wonders, not matter? … Johnson’s response [to the sceptics] is to imagine what cultural critics might have said had video games been invented hundreds of years ago, and only recently had something called the book been marketed aggressively to children: “Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying – which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements – books are simply a barren string of words on the page … Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children … But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion – you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you … This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change

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their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.”17 While tongue-in-cheek and deliberately provocative, the argument put forward here by both Johnson and Gladwell about television watching, game-playing, and moviegoing is clear. The counterintuitive and counterfactual example of the book being invented after the video game is a useful reminder of the role which systems of representation occupy in human history as ‘symbolic forms,’ besides being techniques or machines. But above all, it confirms that media consumption has become part of the ‘affective labor’ required in modern (‘control’) societies, in order to properly participate in the self-regulating mechanisms of ideological reproduction, for which retraining and continuous learning are now a lifelong obligation. Undergoing tests – including the ‘tests’ put up by mind-game films – thus constitute a veritable ‘ethics’ or ‘hygiene’ of the (post-bourgeois) self: to remain flexible, adaptive and interactive, and above all, to know the ‘rules of the game.’

The Rules of the Game This may explain why mind-game films are at once so popular and give rise to such a flurry of hermeneutic activity. The films are experienced as pleasurable, but also perceived to be relevant. What is, however, remarkable is that this relevance is neither mimetic (based on ‘realism’) nor therapeutic (‘cathartic’ in Aristotle’s sense). We noted the extraordinary diversity of the commentators, from Internet fan communities to philosophers, from literary scholars to trend-analysts, from high theory to social analysis: not only does everyone have something to say, they say it at a meta-level, of which one extreme is to treat the mind-game films as ‘symptomatic’ and the other, to treat them as ‘literal’: this, too, a form of meta-commentary. Postings on fan sites are usually grouped under FAQs, so that, for instance, for Silence of the Lambs, one finds questions like: “Buffalo Bill’s House: How many rooms were in that basement?” “Who did everyone find scarier, Jame Gumb or Hannibal Lecter?” “What order should I watch these in?” “What is the song that is playing when Buffalo Bill is dancing in front of his video camera?” “What does Hannibal Lecter mean when he says that ‘Anthrax Island’ was ‘a nice touch’” “What is [on] Buffalo Bill’s tattoo?” In other words, the FAQ either ignore the fictional contract and treat the film as an extension of real life, to which factual information is relevant, or they tend to use the film as the start of a database, to which all sorts of other data – trivia, fine detail, esoteric knowledge – can be added, collected, and shared. What they do not seem to be engaged in is (symbolic or allegorical, intentionalist or symptomatic) interpretation. Instead, they are serially guilty of the ‘pathetic fallacy.’ This is surprising, given the patently impossible or at least highly implausible ‘realities’ the films deal with. Since the fan-base for mind-game films is rarely a credulous new-age cult community, but made up of very savvy media-consumers, one has

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to assume that such ‘taking for real’ is one of the rules of the game that permit participation. The film is thus part-text, part-archive, part-point of departure, part-node in a rhizomatic, expandable network of inter-tribal communication. The narratologist, too, is not interested in interpretation, but concerned with definition and the general rules by which certain effects are generated or validated. George Wilson, elaborating a theory of what he calls “perspectively impersonal, but subjectively inflected” film sequences in Fight Club and The Others concludes: It would be interesting to inquire why cinematic assaults on the norm of narrational transparency have become so common around the turn of the century. I do not know the answer, and I am not sure how such an inquiry, responsibly conducted, should proceed. No doubt a certain amount of copycatting has gone on, and perhaps some kind of postmodern skepticism about the duplicity of reality and the photographic image has drifted over Hollywood. In any event, my present aim has been to say something fairly systematic about what some of these subversions of cinematic transparency amount to.18 By contrast, high theory and social commentary could be said to be nothing but interpretation. They take the films as symptomatic for broader changes in the field of (bourgeois, oedipal) subjectivity, of (theories of) consciousness and identity (as I did above, with ‘productive pathologies’ and as Slavoj Žižek has done in his readings of Lynch and Kieslowski), they promote the cinema – across such films – as examples of ‘doing philosophy,’ or they ask: what are these films (good) for (and answer in the way that Johnson, Gladwell, or Douglas Rushkoff have done).19 Yet, these too, like the other communities, have their ‘structuring absences,’ which define the rules of the game. What is left out (though hinted at in Johnson), for instance, are the material conditions of the mind-game film (e.g. the economic benefits of making films that require repeated viewings). But these are not ‘repressed’ truths that somehow need to be brought to light; rather, the material conditions and the hermeneutic games are each the recto of a verso, where both sides cannot be visible at the same time. In this case, moving from the recto to the verso means to shift from reception to production, and to consider, however briefly, what the rules of the game now are for, say, Hollywood film production, but also for other filmmaking nations (another symptomatic feature of the mind-game films, is that they are, as indicated, not limited to Hollywood, but appear a typical product also of Hollywood’s alter ego, in respect to production, distribution, and marketing: the international film festival circuit).20 Hollywood has always had to produce ‘texts’ that are highly ambiguous, or permeable, when it comes to meaning-making: movies had to permit multiple entry-points without thereby becoming incoherent. This is what David Bordwell has called the “excessively obvious” nature of the classical film, and why he and

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others, such as Edward Branigan, have insisted on comprehension (along with transparency, linearity and closure) as the abiding virtues of Hollywood, while others – with equal justification – have pointed to the lacunary, redundant, and circular nature of the same classical cinema. One might call it a policy of ‘access for all’ (“a Hollywood film is a party to which everyone can bring a bottle” is how the director Robert Zemeckis once phrased it), and no small achievement, when one considers what multiple entry-point means in practice: to cater for audiences of different gender, different age-groups, different ethnic or national identities, different educational backgrounds, but also quite literally, for audiences that ‘enter’ a film at different times during a given performance (on television) or at different points in its history or life cycle (the ‘classic’ or ‘cult’ film, and their periodic revivals). Films also have to perform well on different media platforms, at least since the 1960s: as theatrical releases, as television re-runs, as pre-recorded videotapes. Since the 1990s, both the market place has expanded (it has become global, rather than merely US-domestic, European, Japanese, and Australian) and the platforms have diversified: besides the ones named, one needs to add: a film’s Internet site, the movie trailer, the video game, and the DVD. And while scholars can draw up useful binary distinctions – between special effects and intricate plotting, between cinema of attraction and narrative integration, between narrative structure and game logic, between linearity and seriality, between ‘optical vision’ and ‘haptical vision,’ between classical and post-classical cinema, between ‘home entertainment’ and ‘event-movie,’ between private realm and public space – Hollywood has no such luxury. As the phrase goes: in order to exist at all, it has to be ‘a major presence in all the world’s markets,’ but also, one can add, ‘a major presence in all the world’s modes of representation.’ This is no longer only ‘no small achievement,’ but a truly daunting challenge, when one considers the proliferation of reception contexts and media platforms. What once was ‘excessively obvious’ must now be ‘excessively enigmatic,’ but in ways that still teach (as Hollywood has always done) its audiences the ‘rules of the game’ of how a Hollywood film wants to be understood, except that now, it seems, at least as far as the mind-game film is concerned, the rules of the game are what the films are also ‘about,’ even more overtly than before. My conclusion would therefore be something like this: the new contract between spectator and film is no longer based solely on ocular verification, identification, voyeuristic perspectivism and ‘spectatorship’ as such, but on the particular rules that obtain for and, in a sense, are the conditions for spectatorship: the double-register, meta-contact established by the different interpretative communities with the films, across the ‘rules of the game’ that each community deems relevant and by which it defines itself: its ‘felicity conditions,’ as linguists might say. What makes the mindgame films noteworthy in this respect is the ‘avant-garde’ or ‘pilot’ or ‘prototype’ function they play within the ‘institution cinema’ at this juncture, where they, besides providing ‘mind-games,’ ‘brain-candy’ and often enough, spectacular special effects, set out to train, elaborate and, yes, ‘test’ the textual forms, narrative tropes,

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and story motifs that can serve such a renegotiation of the rules of the game. Mind-game films, we could say, break one set of rules (realism, transparency, linearity), in order to make room for a new set. Their formal features – whether we examine them from a narratological angle, from an ontological, epistemological, psychopathological, or pedagogical perspective (for all of which they provide usable “entry-points’) – represent a compromise formation, which is itself flexible, adaptable, differential and versatile: not unlike its ideal (implied) spectators, if we follow the arguments I have presented here. In addition, they fulfill the material conditions of multiple entry, as well as of multiple platforms. To take just one example: for a feature film to be not only recordable, storable, and playable as a DVD, but in some sense, particularly ‘DVDenabled,’ it would have to be a film that requires or repays multiple viewings; that rewards the attentive viewer with special or hidden clues; that is constructed as a spiral or loop; that benefits from back-stories (bonuses) or para-textual information; that can sustain a-chronological and non-linear perusal or even thrives on it. All these conditions chart the type of textual organization which responds to the conditions of distribution, reception, consumption, cinephilia, connoisseurship, and spectatorship appropriate for the multi-platform film, which can seduce a theater-going public with its special effects and spectacle values, engage the volatile fan communities on the Internet by becoming a sort of ‘node’ for the exchange of information and the trade in trivia and esoterica in social networking situations, as well as ‘work’ as a DVD and possibly even as a game. It will not come as a surprise, if I have described several salient features of the mind-game film, now looked at from the point of production. We seem indeed to have come full circle. Initially, I posited that the main effect of the mind-game film is to disorient and reorient the audience, and put up for discussion the spectator-screen relationship. The notable emergence (some would argue: re-emergence) of mind-game films since the mid-1990s would be one sign of this ‘crisis,’ to which they are the solution at a meta-level. After exploring some of these meta-levels, and showing why there might be too many explanations of the phenomenon, only some of which complement each other, while others could prove incompatible, I can now conclude that as a solution, the mind-game films set out to aggravate the crisis, in that the switches between epistemological assumptions, narrational habits and ontological premises are intended to draw attention to themselves, or rather, to the ‘rules of the game.’ These rules, in addition to what has already been said about them, favor pattern recognition (over identification of individual incidents), and require cinematic images to be read as picture puzzles, data-archives, or ‘rebus-pictures’ (rather than as indexical, realistic representations). Thus, what appears as ambiguity or ‘Gestalt-switch’ at the level of perception, reception and interpretation is merely confirmation of strategy at the level of production and marketing: with the mind-game film, the ‘institution cinema’ is working on ‘access for all,’ and in particular, on crafting a multi-platform,

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adaptable cinema film, capable of combining the advantages of the ‘book’ with the usefulness of the ‘video game:’ what have called the DVD-enabled movie, whose theatrical release or presence on the international film festival circuit prepares for its culturally more durable and economically more profitable afterlife in another aggregate form. Which leads one to conclude that the mindgame films make ‘mind-games’ out of the very condition of their own (im) possibility: they teach their audiences the new rules of the game, at the same time as they are yet learning them themselves. It is for this reason that I want to insist on treating these films as a ‘phenomenon’ and a ‘certain tendency.’ It may be true that many, if not all, can – in due course and given sufficient determination – be disambiguated by narratological frames, forcing the analyst, too, to refine his or her tools, and in the process, forcing the films to yield their secrets (which – let us be clear – will turn out to be ‘banal’). Yet given their often cult status, the interest they have elicited from pop culture fans, philosophers, public intellectuals, and even people who usually do not write/think about movies, it is probably equally sensible to treat them as symptomatic for wider changes in the culture’s way with moving images and virtual worlds. Mind-game films may show how the cinema itself has mutated: rather than ‘reflecting’ reality, or oscillating and alternating between illusionism/realism, these films create their own referentiality, but what they refer to, above all, are ‘the rules of the game.’ This means that, indeed, we cannot be sure if contemporary cinema is ‘part of the problem’ (Foucault, Deleuze) or already ‘part of the solution’ (Johnson, Gladwell) in the re-orientation of the body and senses, as we learn to live symbiotically with machines and ‘things,’ as well as with hybrid forms of intelligence embedded in our many automated systems. In this respect, the cinema – even more than a machine of the visible – may be a mode of performative presence, teaching us not only to think, but to be in several dimensions at once: that is why I believe these films are mind-game films, and not merely complex narratives, or rather: why complex narratives are only one of the games they play with our minds. [Previously published as “The Mind-game Film,” in W. Buckland, ed., Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 13–41.]

Notes 1 M. Brown, “Lookey here: Lars von Trier is at it again,” The Guardian, December 8, 2006. http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Guardian/0,,1967275,00.html?82%3A+Film+ne ws (accessed April 20, 2007). 2 K. Pehla, “Joe May und seine Detektive. Der Serienfilm als Kinoerlebnis,” in HansMichael Bock and Claudia Lenssen, eds., Joe May. Regisseur und Produzent (München: edition text + kritik, 1991). 3 Daragh Sankey, blog entry at: http://d.sankey.ca/blog/131/mindfuck-films 2001 (accessed September 5, 2006).

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4 David Bordwell, “Film Futures,” SubStance 31, no. 1 (2002), 88–104; Edward Branigan, “Nearly True: Forking Plots, Forking Interpretations: A Response to David Bordwell’s ‘Film Futures’,” ibid., 105–114. 5 Janet Staiger, “Complex Narratives, an Introduction,” Film Criticism 31, nos. 1–2 (2006): 2–4; Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Allan Cameron, “Contingency, Order, and the Modular Narrative: 21 Grams and Irreversible,” The Velevet Light Trap 58, no. 1 (2006), 65–78; Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” The Velvet Light Trap 58, no. 1 (2006), 29–40. 6 Bordwell, “Film Futures”; Branigan, “Nearly True: Forking Paths.” 7 Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 8 Murray Smith, “Parallel Lines,” in J. Hillier, ed., American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), 155–161. 9 Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, “S/Z, the ‘Readerly’ Film, and Video Game Logic,” Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2002), 146–167; Jan Simons, Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007); Geoff King and T. Krzywinska, eds., ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces(London: I.B.Tauris, 2002). 10 Garrett Stewart, “VR ca. Y2K,” paper given at the Time@20: The Afterimage of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy Symposium, Harvard University, May 6–7, 2005. 11 See Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 12 Jonathan Eig, “A Beautiful Mind(fuck): Hollywood Structures of Identity,” Jump Cut 46 (2003). www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc46.2003/eig.mindfilms/index.html (accessed April 20, 2007). 13 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October no. 59 (1992), 3–7. 14 Fredrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Stephen Mulhall, On Film (New York: Routledge, 2002). 15 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, new edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 16 Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005). 17 Malcolm Gladwell, “Brain Candy: Is pop culture dumbing us down or smartening us up?” The New Yorker, May 16, 2005. www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/05/16/050516crbo_books (accessed April 20, 2007). 18 George Wilson, “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (2006), 94. 19 Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2000); Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzystof Kieslowski between Theory and Post-theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001); Stephen Mulhall, On Film; Murray Smith and Thomas Wartenberg, eds., Thinking through Cinema: Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); Douglas Rushkoff, Playing the Future: What We Can Learn From Digital Kids (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995). 20 Thomas Elsaesser, “Film Festival Networks: The New Topographies of Cinema in Europe,” European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 82–107.

4 TIME TRAVEL FILMS An Ethics of Redemption, Rescue, and Regret

[Editors’ Note: this chapter remains incomplete. We deleted some draft sections and integrated others into existing sections. In particular, we deleted a set of short notes on Interstellar that left the chapter with an open ending that only Thomas Elsaesser could have closed.]

Introduction It may come as a surprise to realize that time travel is a relatively recent concept, dating from the last decades of the 19th century – not much older than the (fictional) invention of a ‘time-machine,’ a word coined by H. G. Wells, in his novella of the same name, published in 1895.1 Suddenly finding oneself in an epoch of the past (Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court), or waking up at some point in the future (Washington Irving’s Rip van Winkle) are relatively well-known literary conceits.2 Yet the notion of ‘time travel’ – the idea that one can go backward and forward in time – depends on one’s ability to imagine time in spatial terms, and space in terms relative to mobility and locomotion. Paraphrasing Wells, James Gleick asks: “What is time? Time is nothing but one more direction, orthogonal to the rest. As simple as that. It’s just that no one has been able to see it till now till the Time Traveler.” “Through a natural infirmity of the flesh … we incline to overlook this fact,” he coolly explains. “There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.” In surprisingly short order this notion would become part of the orthodoxy of theoretical physics.3

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A film like Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014) would seem to take this alignment between time travel and quantum physics literally, since – unlike many other films persuading us of the possibility of time travel – the writers of Interstellar go out of their way to impress the viewer with the film’s scientific underpinnings, interspersing the action with lengthy disquisitions about ‘wormholes,’ ‘black holes,’ ‘gravitational singularities,’ “slingshots,’ ‘tesseracts’ and ‘event horizons.’ However, more specific, historically grounded reasons have also been offered why the period around 1895 was ready for a more radically spatial conception of time. New modes of transport, such as the railways, introduced nation-wide timetables and encouraged the habit of calculating distance in terms of hours. Telegraph communication proved the usefulness of synchronizing time zones across the globe, making time calculable and giving a new precision to chronology as a “measured portion of eternity.”4 At the other end of the spectrum, the rise of archaeology, notably the discovery of the mummies in the royal tombs of King Tut, must have made a trip to Egypt and the Pyramids seem like a transport in time: the vividness with which lives lived thousands of years ago took tangible shape before one’s eyes, made one come face to face with humans, perfectly preserved across the millennia.

The Cinema as Time Machine Yet these reasons may be secondary when considering the impact that the invention of cinema – also in 1895, and thus contemporaneous with Wells’s work – made on our imagination of time and our sense of temporal flow.5 Maxim Gorky’s description of an evening at the cinema as a “return from the kingdom of shadows” already implies the idea of time travel (albeit to a netherworld). The popularity of biblical stories as film subjects around 1900, the re-enactment of historical events, whether coronations or sea battles, as well as costume dramas set in Rome or during the French Revolution confirm that audiences, from the start, were willing to consider cinema a time machine. Equally important, editing (the elision of time) and cross-cutting (the duplication or paralleling of timelines) made time be experienced as malleable and multiple, extensible and contracting: speeded up or slowed down, cinematic time became the opposite of time measured in exactly equal units, by means of watches and other chronometers, adding a technologically produced subjective dimension.6 In this sense, turn-of-the-20th-century philosophers and modernist writers were perhaps the ones who most acutely registered the cinema’s influence on the common experience of time, even if they articulated its impact in conflicted or apparently negative ways. While the ‘spatialization of time’ became a major theme in modernist fiction,7 so did its opposite, the insistence on ‘duration’ – the physicalphysiological experience of time – as the ground of human consciousness. As the rhythms of daily life accelerate, and telephone and telegraph bridge distances in an

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instant, time becomes a problem: how is it connected to space, when does it give you wings, when does it weigh on you like lead? Either way, it becomes intensely felt, subjective: a medium whose uncanny force and sensed presence is its invisibility. The triad of movement, matter, memory (in Bergson), of ‘being and time’ (for Heidegger) became the basis for a new philosophy of the self in the world, while the narrative manipulations of chronology and the play with tenses, such as the future perfect in the writings of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust were the literary response to the manifold manifestations of temporal dislocation, of which the cinema may well have been both the active instigator and the reflective instantiation.8 Wells’s own description of time travel reads like the acceleration or the ‘fast-forward’ of a movie-reel, alternating light and darkness at ever higher speeds, and producing first a stroboscopic effect, until the images become as mere blur: I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment, came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind … The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous grey-ness.9 Wells’s time traveler can go forward and backward (he can ‘gain yesterdays’ and ‘accumulate tomorrows’) but in fact only goes forward: he looks into the future – but rather than, as one might expect in periods of rapid (technological) change, wanting to know how new technologies affect social life and mankind in general, Wells’s time traveler is mostly interested in extrapolating from the present and projecting into the future certain reformist ideas of the day, for instance, speculating if it is Fabian socialism or Marxian communism that promises a better way of organizing (British) society (neither will). In this respect, his book is different from other millennially induced futuristic fantasies of the time, which often took as their basis recently introduced technologies of communication. Inspired especially by the telegraph, the phonograph, and the telephone, these inventions were usually fantasized into gadgets or Rube Goldberg contraptions that looked like they wanted to anticipate interactive television. While Wells thinks in proto-cinematic terms, these other ‘visions of the 20th century’ dreamt up during the last years of the 19th century were already leapfrogging into what we can now recognize as a post-cinematic age: instead of thinking movie reels, or darkened spaces traversed in static vehicles, the predicted technologies envisioned mobile phones, or home entertainment

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projectors serving Skype-like two-way interaction with one’s loved ones across (colonial) distances and (equatorial) time zones. Hence the paradox already mentioned: Insofar as time travel narratives are indeed symptomatic of a tendency in the late 19th and 20th century to ‘spatialize’ time, they connote the opposite of movement, countering the new technologies of mechanical transport and increased mobility with instant switches and sudden altered states. Yet the more we spatialize time, the more time becomes variable in speed and reversible in direction, creating a deadlock around two conceptions of time: one non-linear whose vectors extend in all directions, the other relentlessly linear, reminding us that in our own lives, time’s arrow is irreversible. This paradox points not only to an unresolved tension; it also speaks of a fear, indeed hints at a trauma, induced by the unhinging of time from space, and space from stasis. Could it be that time travel was dreamt up, not to celebrate the new mobility, but to deal with this deadlock, in order to ward off the realization of a potentially traumatic no-longer-groundedness in time: neither cyclical and self-renewing, nor linear and goal-oriented? It could explain why time travel is a typically modern phenomenon, because it tries to fill – and to visualize this filling in the modes of ultra-rapid transport – the gap between the irreversibility of time’s arrow in individual human existence and the loss this entails when no longer cushioned by the belief in progress, whether understood as individual self-perfection or aimed at ameliorating humanity’s existence. Yet time travel could also be the escape route from the repetition compulsion that lingers at the border of this loss of faith that voids the future of all but the dystopian winding-down: of energy into entropy and of (self-)creation into decay.10 What at first appears as empowered freedom and enhanced agency – to travel at will between past and future – reveals itself on closer inspection to be hedged by anxieties about foreclosed alternatives and by fears of having forfeited a feasible future.11 An implicit acknowledgement of time travel as a symptomatic substitute and fantasmatic placeholder is the fact that the genre – both in literature and filmmaking – is defined by a number of paradoxes and contradictions that are always already nesting inside the physical impossibility of reversing time or fast-forwarding into the future. The best known is the causal paradox, where a future event is the cause of a past event, which in turn is the cause of the future event of which it is itself the consequence. Since this interdependence (where cause and consequence change places several times) can be visualized as an inside-out circle, without origin or closure, it is usually called a time-loop or causal loop.12 The second type of paradox also retroactively changes the past, but instead of an event, it is the time traveler’s action or presence in the past that negatively affects or impacts a future that has already taken place, with potentially nonsensical or paradoxical consequences: “The consistency paradox or grandfather paradox occurs when a future event prevents the occurrence of a past event that was partly or entirely the cause of the future event, thereby preventing the future event from occurring, thus creating a contradiction.”13

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Time travel thus from the start stands for certain seemingly irresolvable dilemmas of human reasoning, and may be read symptomatically, for instance, as an ‘imaginary resolution to a real contradiction.’ If the issue seems to be the nature of causality, and – in the name of the ‘grandfather paradox’ – the succession of generations, which the action of the time traveler can jeopardize (were he to kill his grandfather, he would prevent himself from being born), the more anthropocentric contradiction about time travel is that between ‘free will’ and ‘determinism.’ Even if it makes some difference whether we consider these two coexisting forces within a theological-religious framework (predestination, fate), within a secular philosophical discourse (Newton versus Spinoza), as a problem of our respective theories of causation (contingency and retroactive causality), or as a consequence of new insights into the laws of physics (Einstein’s relativity theory, Heisenberg’s quantum physics): in each case we end up with a conundrum that takes our reasoning to its limits, which in turn keeps time travel alive, and generates the challenge and pleasure of ‘looped’ narratives. Indeed, for much of the 20th century and into the 21st, time travel has been one of the more vivid vehicles and dramaturgical devices helping us visualize the enigma of our agency as humans in the world, fashioning stories that highlight our ambiguous role in the Anthropocene as both decisive and powerless, as both at the center of and yet wholly irrelevant to the universe. In the present chapter, my own argument will bear in mind these frameworks of coexisting and contending forces, but it will explore the inherent dynamics of this performed contradiction (which I see as animating the time travel genre) within a different problematic. This problematic – i.e., the question/contradiction to which time travel thinks it provides the imaginary answer/substitute resolution – revolves around regret and repetition, rescue and redemption, resistance, and reversal. These different states of affect and agency (or movements-at-a-standstill) I want to place under the notion of an ‘ethics of time travel,’ a concept I hope to illustrate with a number of examples drawn from films made mainly over the past 30 years. But before doing so I need to first review some other interpretative frameworks that have been proposed: psychoanalytic, narratological, political, and counterfactual.

Time Travel and the Oedipal Matrix Constance Penley, in a wide-ranging and much-cited article from 1986, entitled “Time Travel, the Primal Scene and the Critical Dystopia”14 and ostensibly triggered by the success of James Cameron’s The Terminator (1985), also homes in on the symptomatic nature of time travel films since the mid-1980s. She writes: “The Terminator can best be seen in relation to a set of cultural and psychical conflicts, anxieties and fantasies that are all at work in this film in a particularly insistent way.”15 At first, these anxieties cluster around the military-industrial use of new (but still analogue) technologies of communication, such as answering machines, beepers, personal stereos, laser disks, (non-portable) telephones, and (non-personal) computers. Depicted as failure-prone and – even when functioning correctly – as

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having unintended consequences, they give The Terminator its dystopic mood and tone, which Penley calls ‘techno-noir’: “The film seems to suggest that if technology can go wrong or be abused, it will be, [and] tech turns noir because of human decision-making and not something inherent in technology itself.”16 The ‘critical’ part of the dystopia is thus the nefarious intent or simply careless behavior of humans, rather than the gradual handing over of human will and agency to more efficient and deterministic machines, even though the underlying premise of The Terminator is that a supercomputer has concluded: “all people are a threat,” and decided humanity’s “fate in a microsecond. Extermination.” The Terminator provides one of the most elegant time-loops that join prevention to anticipation, and pre-emptive action to retrospective recognition. It takes the elements of classical tragedy – the hero’s flawed character, the wrong choices, the impetuous actions and their unintended consequences, the moment of anagnorisis (recognition, which always comes too late), and the final downfall or death – and reassembles them in such a way that the events’ relentless irreversibility is twisted into a causal time-loop, which both justifies and necessitates time travel as the medium of this rearrangement (allowing for a repeat, another loop, and several sequels). Thus, when Penley asks “what is the appeal of time-loop paradox stories?” it makes sense that she locates one of the basic contradictions time travel tries to grapple with in (Greek tragedy’s, but also Freud’s) oedipal identity formation. In the case of the film under discussion, it is initially the staging or re-living of the ‘primal scene,’ which Freud identified as the fantasy of having been present at one’s own conception: “The idea of returning to the past to generate an event that has already made an impact on one’s identity, lies at the core of the timeloop paradox story.”17 Yet not only is it a matter of the child witnessing parental intercourse, but the accompanying desire to substitute himself in the father’s place also belongs to the primal scene. The Terminator perfectly combines both: The last words that Kyle Reese throws at the Terminator, along with a pipe bomb, are “Come on, motherfucker!” But in the narrative logic of this film it is Kyle who is the mother fucker. And within the structure of fantasy that shapes the film, John Conner is the child who orchestrates his own primal scene, one inflected by a family romance, moreover, because he is able to choose his own father, singling out Kyle from the other soldiers. That such a fantasy is an attempted end-run around Oedipus is also obvious: John Conner can identify with his father, can even be his father in the scene of parental intercourse, and also conveniently dispose of him in order to go off with (in) his mother.18 Time travel thus helps circumvent the incest taboo, giving it in sci-fi stories or dystopian blockbusters a fictional scenario as disguise and camouflage. Her examples, apart from The Terminator, includes Back to the Future: another film (or better, another movie franchise) where the figure of the father looms large, where

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the son has to substitute the father as his future mother’s love object, and where troubled and protractedly played out, reversed and reiterated father-son relationships are central to the narrative twists and turns: The appeal of Back to the Future should now be apparent – it is only a more vulgar version of the desire manifested in these stories … The desire represented in the time travel story, of both witnessing one’s own conception and being one’s own mother and father, is similar to the primal scene fantasy, in which one can be both observer or one of the participants.19 Time travel for Penley becomes the necessary fiction or generic device that admits to, then disavows and finally embodies in an action scenario a desire that is not only tabooed, i.e., incest, but enacts a fantasy that tries to resolve a fundamental human conundrum: In the realm of the unconscious and fantasy, the question of the subject’s origin, ‘Where do I come from?’ is followed by the question of sexual difference, ‘Who am I (What sex am I)?’ It is by now well known that the narrative logic of classical film is powered by the desire to establish, by the end of the film, the nature of masculinity, the nature of femininity, and the way in which those two can be complementary rather than antagonistic.20 She quotes Raymond Bellour as saying that men in the 19th century looked at women and feared they were different. In the 20th century, men look at women and fear they are the same.21 Time travel, cyborgs, aliens emerge as symptomatic motifs of the “other” in Hollywood genre cinema, according to this argument, in times when it becomes culturally difficult to sort out sexual difference, i.e., when the marks of gender difference are beginning to socially blur or disappear (women in positions of power, equal pay, equality at the work place, etc.). Yet time travel, besides being a symptom of the crisis in masculinity and sexual difference, is also a narratological device – or better still, a logical operator – deployed to reconcile or resolve a logical paradox, by projecting the contradictory terms on a spatial axis where the dilemmas can be sequentialized, as well as made reversible. If this is the case, critical or contradictory issues in all manner of different fields can similarly be ‘resolved’ by way of time travel, including the one Penley also alludes to, namely how to be both observer and participants in a ‘scene’ – one of the perennial issues about cinematic spectatorship and the question of identification.22 At the same time, this would confirm once more that time travel is an excellent example of the function Claude Lévi-Strauss assigned to myths in anthropological studies: to act as the imaginary resolution to real contradictions. Keeping this formula in mind, as well as the function of a logical operator more generally, I will return to especially Back to the Future from a different angle and addressing the problematic already mentioned, namely the ethical-political dilemmas of regret, rescue and resistance.

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Penley’s implicitly narratological argument leads me to mention David Wittenberg’s more sustained argument about time travel stories being essentially ‘meta-narratives.’ ‘narrative machines,’ or ‘narratological laboratories’ which give fictional form to basic principles of storytelling.23 For Wittenberg, time travel is the genre that accomplishes in popular fictional form what high modernist literature does in a more anti-narrative, deconstructive manner: analyze what is involved in telling a story, and engaging the reader by manipulating both flow of information and temporal sequence: As Mieke Bal notes, within conventional narratives, temporal discontinuities, dilations, and repetitions occur constantly, “often without being noticed by the reader.” Indeed, in most stories, quite drastic manipulations of chronology on the level of form - hiatuses, flashbacks, sudden temporal cuts, overlapping events – are cheerfully tolerated by the story’s audience … However, in a time travel story, even the most elementary experience of plot involves an essentially abnormal meta-narrative intervention, since the “classical” mechanisms of temporal discontinuity, dilation, or reordering are now introduced directly into the story itself, in the guise of literal devices or mechanisms. They are no longer either tacit or formalistic but rather actual and eventlike or, in terms of the fiction itself, real – a fact that makes time travel fiction already, and inherently, a fiction explicitly about the temporality of literary form.24 Time travel is thus a dressing up in action and adventure of the task and toil of plotting, of playing off fabula against syuzhet, of separating the underlying chronology of events from the a-chronological way of communicating suspense and anticipation.25 Wittenberg backs these claims by identifying three (historical) phases in time travel fiction, of which only two are exploring the ‘causal contradictions’ generated when going back in time (rather than forward). Wells, who had no interest in time-loops, is for Wittenberg of little consequence, so that his Time Machine is a ‘utopian romance’ rather than a time travel story, as we now understand it. Wittenberg distinguishes time travel stories based on Einstein’s relativity theory, where causal loops along a single timeline prevail, and a more Heisenbergian variant, which deploys parallel universes and multiple timelines coexist simultaneously. What in Wittenberg’s account binds the physics of relativity to the meta-level of narratological experiment (and thus the reader-viewer to the story) is, not unlike in Penley’s analysis, the psychoanalytic fantasies of identity and origin: “What physics finally enables within science fiction is a meta-literature of Oedipus and Narcissus, a literature about encountering (or reencountering) oneself, about meeting (or re-meeting) one’s progenitors, about negotiating (or renegotiating) one’s personal and historical origins.”26

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Back to the Future Of special interest in the present context is Wittenberg’s chapter on Back to the Future. Here Andrew Gordon gives a summary of its main points: His chapter on Back to the Future sees that film as a distillation of the two “central historical trends of time travel fiction” (178) the book describes: first, social critique, through comparisons of past, present and future, as in the utopian romance, though here presented in broad, clichéd form, and played largely for laughs; and, second, “the depiction of structuring conditions of narrative in plot-like and diagrammatic forms” (179). He shows how “a time travel film is capable, perhaps as no other filmic type, of literally and realistically emplotting the act of viewing” (191). For example, Marty (Michael J. Fox) gauges the progress of his parents’ budding relationship by viewing a family photograph in which the images of himself, his brother and his sister begin to vanish or re-emerge depending upon whether his parents’ romance is cooling or warming. And in the film’s climax, Marty returns to the present only to view himself viewing Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) once again being gunned down by terrorists: “Marty sees himself enacting the earlier scene; he sees the part of the film that we, the audience, have already viewed” (192). In psychological terms, “The film is the analysand, and we, the viewer … are the recipient of its full speech, its analyst” (200).27 This is a compelling reading of the scene in Back to the Future, where Marty sees himself as he comes back from the past, but also sees Doc Brown shot by the Libyan terrorists. It interprets Marty as stand-in for the spectator, and regards time travel once more, as did Penley, to serve as metaphor for psychoanalytic subject formation. At the same time, what we need to hold onto is that time travel – through the paradoxes – is not only a metaphor. It is also the operator or device necessary in order to solve ‘impossible’ tasks. We could say that whereas myths offer imaginary resolutions to real contradictions, time travel narratives offer impossible solutions to real contradictions, and yet we accept them, partly because they challenge our reasoning, and partly because they fulfill deep-seated narcissistic fantasies. Yet thanks to the physical impossibility of time travel, these solutions are clearly marked as ‘impossible,’ in contrast to myths and other narratives, which use a different set of tools (such as Greimas’s semiotic square) to disguise the contradictions rather than stage them flamboyantly. This aligns with Wittenberg’s key point, namely that conventional narratives and time travel narratives both freely manipulate time, but whereas in classical narrative this is done in a ‘tacit’ way and remains unmarked, in time travel tales it is ‘actual and event-like.’ However, this covers only half of what concerns us. At stake is the onto-epistemological status of time travel, but also of its impossibility: is it merely a genre assumption tolerated because it tickles the brain

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with intellectual puzzles and fills the soul with incest fantasies, or is it called upon and invoked also in order to mark the presence of a problem, a gap in logic, which time travel solves or fills, but only by way of the circularity that is the causal loop and which should be called a tautology? Is it cause or effect, is it effect masquerading as cause: in narratological terms it mirrors or instantiates exactly what it is expected to accomplish in the fictional world: to make cause and effect interdependent and reversible in relation to each other. To put it in slightly different terms: time travel now emerges not so much as an impossible device but rather as the device of impossibility. What is in any case ensured is that time travel visualizes the limits of the possible and the impossible in thought, and it casts them into action scenarios. Having said this, there is yet another way of approaching the psychological layering that Back to the Future accomplishes across the device of time travel, which brings me closer to what the real problem might be in a given film of which time travel is the imaginary-impossible solution. Alongside the impossibility of seeing oneself’ from the outside’ that Wittenberg notes, the doubling of Marty in the scene in question also dramatizes Marty’s inability to act directly and consequentially, either in the time of the ‘now’ or in the time of the ‘then,’ thus doubly – and in the context of Doc’s ‘death’ tragically – highlighting Marty’s impotence and helplessness. The film thus has to find another way of endowing Marty with agency, across an interventionist mode that nonetheless acknowledges his powerlessness, to which the grandfather paradox condemns him. The question then becomes, what room for maneuver does the time travel genre give such a protagonist? How can it contribute an imaginary solution, while nonetheless ‘exposing the device’ to use the language of the Russian Formalists, to whom Wittenberg refers, when claiming that time travel stories are meta-narratives, while what is also needed is a scenario ‘exposing the real contradiction’? In case of the latter, I want to take a closer look at one scene towards the end of Back to the Future, but will first briefly recapitulate the situation the protagonist finds himself in. Marty McFly, a small-town middle-America teenager in trouble at home and in school, hangs out with Doc Brown, a slightly crazy inventor, but also Marty’s mentor and substitute father, until one day, Doc Brown gets shot by Libyan terrorists, while his invention, a time machine in the shape of a plutonium-powered DeLorean car, accidentally transports Marty back to his home town 20 years earlier, just in time for him to bring about the meeting of his parents and thus his own existence. The story is, at one level, the ‘optimistic’ (comedy-romance) reversal of one of the time-travel loops, the grandfather paradox. Rather than travel back in time, and accidentally murder your own grandfather and thereby cease to exist, Marty’s paradox arises when it is his future mother who falls in love with him, and his father turns out to be a weak wimp, nerdily obsessed with science fiction. Without Marty’s intervention, his parents will never mate, and therefore he won’t exist, unless he makes them meet and fall in love.

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The scene I want to focus on is the one where Marty seizes his last chance to bring about this necessary encounter. It is the high school prom dance at the ‘Enchantment under the Sea’ and Marty has to go on stage to play the guitar, because the band’s lead guitarist has injured his hand, while trying to help Marty escape from the town bully, Biff, and his vengeful friends. More anxious about how to make sure he is being fathered than afraid of Biff, Marty hits on the idea of playing a Chuck Berry number, ‘Johnny B Goode,’ without realizing that neither the audience nor the band had ever seen or heard of rock ‘n’ roll. In fact, while Marty is playing, the injured lead guitarist, who happens to be Marvin Berry, picks up the phone to talk to his cousin Chuck, so that Chuck Berry can hear Marty’s rendition of ‘Johnny B Goode’ and with it “the sound you [Chuck] have been looking for.” The scene is played for maximum comic effect, especially when one notices that Marty is also doing Chuck Berry’s famous duck-walk stage act. And while we hear what Chuck Berry hears (via the phone), we also see (indeed, ‘recognize’) what Berry does not see (since he is miles away), allowing us, the spectators, to stay one step ahead in the game. But our pleasure at the plural in-joke may make us miss what is also going on: at the height of Marty’s plight about making his father into a man, so he can make a son, a substitution seems to occur, at once an inversion of and a parallel to the patrilineal passage of the main plot. Something passes between the father of rock ‘n’ roll and a son who – in the present of the 1980s – plays rock ‘n’ roll at school, but is too afraid to send his demo-tape to the record company, for fear of being thought not good enough. So – if only he knew it – ‘teaching’ rock ‘n’ roll to one of the fathers of rock would be sweet revenge, except that the scene introduces another modality: the ‘son’ merely remembers rock ‘n’ roll which, however perfectly matches the symbolic father’s anticipation of rock ‘n’ roll (“the sound you’ve been looking for”). In other words, Marty is able to assume Chuck Berry’s patrimony, which is nothing less than the body language, the music culture and with it much of the male ideal that was to define the essential features of US-American masculinity for the second half of the 20th century – but only on condition that he does not become aware of it, i.e., that the ‘true’ historically black origins of this ideal masculinity remain disguised and unacknowledged. In other words, it would seem that the reason beneath the reason (Doc Brown) beneath the reason (making his parents meet) that Marty McFly has to time travel is a historical one, at once specifically American and deeply implicated in questions of race and otherness: Marty’s mission is to ‘redeem’ and ‘reclaim’ (black) rock ‘n’ roll for the white all-American male, by re-fathering it, so to speak, by inventing it a second time, in a gesture of appropriation, narratively disguised as a double last minute rescue: he saves the honor of the band, being the ‘stand-in’ for the injured Marvin, and he makes his father take his mother home from the dance (and thus form the erotic bond needed to produce the nuclear family).

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The perfect formal match of “remembering” and ‘anticipation’ as the temporal categories of a virtual past and a virtual future, thus hides and disguises an equally perfect ethical mis-match of power and ownership. Perfect because inverting an ethical relationship (the debt owed by white masculinity to black culture), while at the same time repressing a history of ‘love and theft’ (regarding black music and youth culture). Given the history of disavowal and appropriation, the scene could serve as the very example of the formation of a (perpetrator) trauma, insofar as trauma and symptom formation always require two events, one apparently neutral, which nonetheless, by virtue of some isomorphic or parallel aspect of the experience, serves to activate the originary, repressed occurrence. The question therefore arises: what could be the event to which the repeated, ‘inverted’ invention of rock ‘n’ roll corresponds, in order for the two to map themselves on each other, and what could be their parallel feature? The event that fits, in both respects as far as Back to the Future is concerned, is not the history of race per se, but more evidently the (repeated) spectacle of the father’s humiliation, in public, and in particular, in front of the eyes of the son, as impotent bystander, at the hands of the bully Biff, who in the 1980s present, is Marty’s father’s boss. This situation, too, is iterative, since it occurs twice over with exactly the same words being exchanged, once in the present (the 1980s), the second/first time in the past (the 1950s). However, just in case we miss the point, the film helpfully doubles this personal story of humiliation with the scene of the Libyan terrorists gunning down Doc Brown, while Marty helplessly looks on – in fact, as we saw, while two Martys helplessly look on. Under the circumstances, it is not difficult – though not essential – to think of this as a metaphor for any number of the United States’ then still recent public humiliations: Richard Nixon impeached, Jimmy Carter and the Iran hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan and Colonel Kaddafi – all, in a sense, impaired or humiliated fathers. But unlike most reviewers of Back to the Future more interested in chiding it for its nostalgic ‘Reaganite revisionism,’ I would argue that neither a positive or negative metaphorical construction of the plot in terms of American politics of the 1980s helps understand why time travel is essential. In fact, it might be a diversion, a secondary revision in Freudian terms, because the film has not forgotten about either race or patriarchy. At the moment of closure, after Marty’s successful intervention, the roles have once more been reversed, and it is McFly senior who now patronizes Biff. But Biff, the town bully has metamorphosed into one of the most odious racial stereotype, the black ‘boy,’ recognizable from 1940s and 1950s Hollywood movies: the sort of character often played by Stepin Fetchit, the shoe-shining black, jocular, lazy, up to no good, but always ready to jump to attention, as in the scene where Biff polishes the car, and is caught out telling a white lie to cover for his indolence. As if to underline the importance of this submissive/subaltern figure for the transfer of paternity that the film needs to enact, he also figures in the 1950s past as the floor-sweeping soda-jerk Goldie Wilson, who enters the picture and

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intervenes at precisely the moment Marty McFly recognizes his future father in horror and is too stunned to answer the latter’s question: “and who are you?” Luckily, Marty also ‘recognizes’ Wilson, and can confidently tell him that one day he “will be the mayor of this town,” as if to suggest that Marty is not only appropriating rock ‘n’ roll, but as it were, inadvertently also claims some ownership to the civil rights movement as well. The problem at the heart of the film, it would seem, is not so much – or not only – the inadequacy of this particular specimen of fatherhood which is George McFly, but the very idea of paternity and masculinity in relation to white American middle-class culture, which – as the film so carefully and in many ways so candidly demonstrates – must pass via the re-repression of racially coded humiliation, if it is to find a stable identity inside the terms of a symbolic order, which it does not in Back to the Future since the film never stops gyrating or ‘looping’ between these master-slave, father-son reversals, without finally inscribing race into its cast of castrating and castrated figures, other than by its ‘black-and-white-minstrel’ dissimulations. There are several points one might wish to make with this example from Back to the Future. First, it is fairly unusual, at least until the late 1980s, for a mainstream Hollywood film, with a perfectly traditional ‘coming of age’ agenda, i.e., charting the rites of passage to adulthood for a young white male along the oedipal path of incest and parricide, to resort so explicitly to race as the field of symbolizations from which the representations can be drawn that stabilize subjectivity and secure identity for the white male and by extension, patriarchy. To believe the film, this recourse to race has to do with the disturbances and confusions surrounding the figure of the father – the weak, absent, or inadequate father – a figure that by the 1980s, the decade that saw the ‘revival’ of Hollywood, became almost the founding condition of contemporary American action and adventure films. Appropriation of racially stereotyped cultural exchanges here supports a masculinity no longer secured by the white totemic father. Only time travel makes these sleights of hand invisible, by turning their audaciously insidious impossibility into humorous gags. Second, and this would be the reversal, where time travel helps to negate its own negation, I know few Hollywood films (in this only comparable to the same Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump [1994]) that gets so close to naming the nature of American race relations centered on rituals of humiliation, and furthermore, to suggesting – however much in covert form – that some sort of debt may have to be acknowledged. On the one hand, Back to the Future makes use of race, in order to shore up a very traditional all-white American masculinity, by massively improving the father-image that allows Marty to become adult, so that his emancipation and empowerment is purchased at the price not only of rewriting the history of American popular culture, but at the price of once more stereotyping black Americans with the very same gesture that begins to acknowledge their place in this American history. On the other hand, the ethical element would be that the filmmakers deemed it necessary to stage these reversals and transfers explicitly and

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flamboyantly, and that they found in time travel the most appropriate vehicle and device to generate a solution that bears so clearly the marks of its own impossibility, which is why it can function as a way of formulating the wish for respect and (mutual) redemption. Whatever one may think of Back to Future – Penley called it ‘vulgar,’ most others qualified it as ‘reactionary’ – one may nonetheless recognize, in the spirit of Wittenberg, the narratological ‘work’ that has gone into the film’s textual elaboration, and how useful, indeed essential, the non-resolvable paradoxes of the time travel film are, in order to accomplish the ideological sleight of hand that both displays and disguises ethical dilemmas around race for which the United States seems further than ever from having found a solution.

Time Travel: Rescue and Redemption Coming-of-age stories are capacious vehicles in American cinema for raising any number of contentious issues, mostly but not exclusively about masculinity and male identity. Another very popular (‘cult’) film that brings together adolescent angst and time travel is Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001), and here a much more convoluted storyline than either The Terminator or Back to the Future does hint at major ideological – and ontological – work the film sets out to accomplish. In contrast to the Einsteinian time-loops of Back to the Future, we find ourselves sharing Donnie Darko’s possibly more Heisenbergian universe, with space folds and parallel timelines. Yet in other respects, we are in the same small-town America, where the protagonists still go to school, have their first love crushes and are surrounded by adults at once sinister and supportive. A possibly paranoid-schizophrenic teenager who hears voices warning him about an impending disaster, narrowly escapes death one early morning as a jet engine plummets from the sky and crashes into the upstairs bedroom of his parents’ house. It turns out that this course of events is only one possible option, and that parallel to the Primary Universe (PU), there is also a Tangent Universe (TU), out of which the crashing jet engine has fallen and into which it has now inserted the current course of events. The TU, however, is inherently unstable, and will, if not “closed” within 28 days, take down the Primary Universe and thus cause the end of the world. The messenger from the TU is a giant rabbit named Frank, whom only Donnie can see, and who tells him that it is his task to ‘save’ the world. This he does by time traveling back 28 days to the point where he can make the event of the falling jet engine repeat itself (through a ‘tornado wormhole’), but this time he has himself be killed, whereupon the suspended PU once more takes over. “Put differently, a disaster occurs at the beginning, Donnie is set as the juncture of two universes, and his time-reversing power enables him to prevent the apocalyptic collision of the two worlds at the cost of his life.”28 The events that follow the initial jet engine crash therefore either ‘belong’ to the TU or the PU, but since there is no difference in the way they are presented, the logic that binds them causally or in some other way escapes the viewer (and,

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it would appear, the characters). If there are indeed two different timelines, then in one Donnie stays in bed and is killed, while in the other, the voice saves him, but burdens him with this monstrous task. Saving the world turns Donnie into a rebellious teenager, who besides flooding his school and setting fire to a happiness guru’s house, also calls his teachers’ bluff and in other ways speaks truth to power. Tele-commanded by Frank, Donnie is able to uncover several misdeeds and mitigate injustices, becoming a kind of avenger-figure before he willingly submits to the disaster that was 28 days in waiting. This ‘restores order’ to the community, with all those who had died during the course of the film – his mother, little sister and girlfriend – still or once more alive, while he is not. Donnie emerges as someone who has sacrificed himself on behalf of others, which is why in the abundant literature trying to ‘explain’ the film, he often appears as a Christ-like figure. Few films by a first-time filmmaker have given rise to as much perplexed, profound, speculative as well as specious commentary as Donnie Darko. From the perspective of the present chapter, which looks at the function of time travel as a uniquely suited operator or device for revealing while also concealing a contradiction in the fabric of society or of human existence, Donnie Darko most explicitly (but by the same logic, perhaps also most deceptively) thematizes the intractable dilemma of ‘free will’ and ‘determinism.’ Initially this is sparked by a discussion at Donnie’s school, where the science teacher introduces Donnie to (the fictitious) Philosophy of Time Travel written by Roberta Sparrow (a.k.a. Grandma Death), a former teacher at the school and now an elderly recluse, but still a mysterious center of (negative) energy. The outcome of several Socratic dialogues Donnie has with his teacher on the topic of determinism is indeterminate, but what transpires is that if everything is determined in advance, then knowledge of it would reintroduce choice, and therefore suspend or negate determinism, whereas if there was such a thing as free will, there could be no regularities in the world, no laws of nature that predict the sun will rise tomorrow, and every moment simply becomes an accumulation of contingencies – much as we witness the world in the film that we are seeing. Free will and determinism must therefore be interdependent, conditional and relational to each other. Yet by putting it this way, we merely arrive at yet another conundrum, or a recto-verso situation, which neither advances the matter nor illuminates the underlying issues. This is where time travel can help unblock the deadlock, by offering a temporal axis onto which the mutually exclusive options can be projected and sequenced in their paradoxical coexistence, successively arranged in their mutual determination, or reversed and replayed in their relationality. One way to picture this is to think of it as similar to conceding the possibility of counterfactual thinking: a ‘what-if’ to the past, tabooed or deemed inadmissible for the traditional historian. In a review essay of a book on counterfactual history, Slavoj Žižek has a brief discussion of free will and determinism, focusing on the (Protestant) paradox of believing in predestination as a way of keeping the future open, and thus the exact opposite of

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what Donnie’s science teacher tells him. Mindful of Max Weber’s famous study of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic, Žižek wonders “[why] did people’s belief that their redemption had been decided in advance not only not lead to lethargy, but sustain the most powerful mobilization of human resources ever experienced?” The answer he gives, in a suitably roundabout way, passes via counterfactual history, which comes to look remarkably like H. G. Wells’s time machine, given that it is mainly a revisionist genre, inspired by the sort of speculation that muses “how different – how much better – the world would be today, had Lenin been shot on his arrival at the Finland Station.” But Žižek’s purpose is itself counterintuitive, insofar as he wants to rescue counterfactuals for the Left: Marxists are not the historical determinists they are usually made out to be, and if they are, they should embrace the openness and indeterminacy of a contingent outcomes in history that the natural sciences, but also evolutionary biology are attributing to life in general: The “hard” sciences seem to be haunted by the randomness of life and possible alternative versions of reality: as Stephen Jay Gould put it, “wind back the film of life and play it again. The history of evolution will be totally different.” This perception of our reality as only one of the possible outcomes of an “open” situation … conferring on [reality] an extreme fragility and contingency, is by no means alien to Marxism. Indeed, the felt urgency of the revolutionary act relies on it.29 Applied to Donnie Darko, it suggests a somewhat different reading from the one above, with a greater emphasis on the motives and means that impel Donnie to sacrifice himself, hinted at by an enigmatic smile that comes over his face seconds before he dies. This would assume that the Donnie/Frank pair is the embodiment of the dilemma of freedom and determinism, insofar as Donnie, the adolescent rebel stands for the random destructiveness by also liberating force of freedom, while Frank the Rabbit is the embodiment of determinism full of future predictions, announcing as he does, the end of the world in 28 days, an at once arbitrary and fixed prognostication. Donnie’s problem, once he accepts Frank’s authority (after all, he owes him his life) becomes: how can I assert my freedom in the time left to me and to what purpose? What he does is to exercise his freedom by becoming a subversive force, a rebel and non-conformist, helping to uncover social malfeasance, hypocrisy, bullying – yet all of which only gives him agency in relation to the dominant society whose negative image he becomes. More radical, therefore, is the possibility of him asserting his freedom from within, but this requires a different kind of acceptance – which has both a tactical and an ethical side. The tactical side would be an amor fati, an embrace of destiny, which according to Nietzsche alone allows us to escape fate’s grip and therefore sets us free. The ethical side would be more Kantian, where my freedom consists in repeating an act or event, with the crucial difference that second time round I actively seek out, embrace, and affirm what I cannot alter. As Seung-hoon Jeong in a perceptive essay, quoting Slavoj Žižek, summarizes this point about Donnie Darko:

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His own ethical time traveling is, in this sense, nothing other than ‘repeating’ the past moment of the engine terror ‘differently.’ … This is proper to the aforementioned notion of freedom as a self-determined necessity, and furthermore, of life as autopoiesis, that is, a self-organizing system in which the current self can be viewed not as merely resulting from past causes but as retroactively positing its own causes. It is thus not simply determined by contingent conditions but self-reflexively determines this determination itself. Life “posits its presuppositions” in this infinite feedback loop, thereby repeating itself with different outcomes at every moment. (Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View [Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009], 205) It is indeed not a repetition for sameness, but a repetition for difference, an insertion of the possibility of difference back in the past for a different future regardless of its result being positive or negative. Nietzsche’s amor fati says: “Accept fate as inevitable, and you will break its grasp on you” (Žižek, 207). This turn of the “eternal return’ from negative to positive depends on our epistemological reconfiguration of sublime fate as the precondition of ethical freedom against it. Unlike Spinoza’s stone, our free will is neither free from fate, nor free from knowledge of fate; it is rather willing to make fate itself free only by consciously (re)embodying it. One may, of course, doubt the positivity of a return that requires Donnie’s death. But his amor fati is all the more sublime because the positive return of a new life is given to the entire world instead. The world will now live a second time, which lets us sense a more ontological dimension of the world than would be apparent in an individual’s poetic justice or moral sacrifice.30 While Jeong emphasizes the redemptive function of time travel as ‘repetition with a difference,’ one can also see this repetition as an alignment of my free choice with the predetermined course, actively charting a path, which may look identical to passive acceptance, and yet radically differs from it. This, too, could be depicted (and may in fact only be representable) in the form of time travel, because a history that has already taken place which I revisit and relive, is precisely the secular, i.e., non-theological version of fate or destiny, i.e., something that is predetermined by virtue of the fact that I cannot alter it, but where I am nonetheless called upon to exercise my autonomy as an agent, self-appointed or tasked to fulfill a certain mission. The time traveler confronted with the grandfather paradox is thus merely living through the situation of trying to find a way of being an interventionist free agent, while knowing full well the constraint he is under, i.e., that he must not change what has already taken place, lest he undoes his future existence, and with it, that of the ‘world.’ His freedom therefore consists in helping into being what has already happened. This is in essence the situation of both Marty McFly and Donnie Darko, one in a comic mode of oedipal rivalry, the other in a horror-fantastic mode of demonic possession, voices and hypnosis, where the

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verso of a paranoid-schizophrenic personality disorder is a repressive and hypocritical society. Donnie’s slightly maniacal laughter right at the end, seconds before the jet engine annihilates him, can thus be read as the moment of freedom where he has successfully inserted himself and his human agency into an event that has already happened, giving him the chance to retroactively attribute personal significance to an otherwise meaningless and massively destructive event – indeed giving him the heroic role of redeemer of the world, a supercharged form of (negative) agency. Time travel thus provides the pseudo-scientific rationale for a young man to come of age, by learning about the kinds of freedom possible within a deterministic universe, a lesson after all not so different from the classical oedipal one of accepting submission under the patriarchal law (‘castration’) as the price of manhood and coming of age. Donnie Darko’s is thus a ‘symbolic’ death, or rather his death is also his birth into the social symbolic of his community.

A Rescue That Remains Unredeemed: Twelve Monkeys One of the films Constance Penley discusses in her article on time travel is Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a landmark film about a man, imprisoned by the underground survivors of a post-nuclear disaster, who is sent on a time travel mission by his captors, in order to find either in the past or in the future the means to rebuild their devastated society. On one of his trips into the past, he falls in love with a woman, whose image has haunted him since childhood: she was the face and the eyes he locked into when he saw a man being shot on the observation deck of Orly Airport near Paris. His mission accomplished, he is about to be executed, but manages to escape into the past where he hopes to unite with the woman, but just as he spots her, he realizes that this is the scene he had dreamt, and that, now that he is back as a child, he has in fact witnessed his own death. Penley sees significant parallels between La Jetée and The Terminator, calling the latter La Jetée’s “mass-culture remake,” noting that “Marker’s film too is about a post-apocalyptic man who is chosen to be a time traveler because of his fixation on an image of the past. It too involves a love affair between a woman from the present and a man from the future, and an attempt to keep humanity from being wiped out.”31 However, she goes on to argue that La Jetée is more honest than The Terminator, because “in the logic of [Marker’s] film [the protagonist] has to die, because such a logic acknowledges the temporal impossibility of being in the same place as both adult and child. In La Jetée one cannot be and have been.” I think this is a possible misunderstanding of what time travel can and does accomplish, underlined by Penley’s assertion that despite The Terminator looking like an industry remake of La Jetée: Marker’s film could not be remade because in its very structure it is unrepeatable. Inasmuch as it acknowledges the paradox of the time-loop and rejects the rosy nostalgia of a wish-fulfilling version of the primal

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scene fantasy, it is not likely remake material with respect to popular film’s demand for pleasure without (obvious) paradox.32 Little could she know in 1986 that just such a remake of La Jetée would be made in 1999, and that it would turn out to be one of the most remarkable explorations of precisely the time travel paradoxes of loops, but also of that other aspect of La Jetée – the way time travel can serve as the logical operator for the insight that a single course of event may have two radically different causal trajectories without ever generating a collision or a discrepancy – what Žižek calls the “parallax view” of causality in relation to freedom and determinism. Before making Žižek’s points more explicit, I need to take a look at the film that is usually thought of as a ‘remake’ of La Jetée, even if Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995) only takes the basic structure of the story and a number of motifs from Marker’s original. Like Marker, it assumes the catastrophe has already happened, but unlike the historical references to WWII, Nazism, the French Resistance, and the trauma of collaboration in Marker, Twelve Monkeys is located in Baltimore, but beyond some abandoned and overgrown landmark buildings roamed by wild animals, infested with rodents and watched by birds of prey (in the present), the general impression conveyed (in its past when it was still inhabited) is of a city where there seems to be no law, no government, no nuclear family, no paternal authority, and thus no instance of the symbolic order that could secure the passage from infant to adult, from subject to self. I argued that Back to the Future confronts in a particularly explicit, but nonetheless quite complicated way, a multilayered, twisted and turned-inside-out version of the ‘Grandfather Paradox,’ which the protagonist resolved by returning to the past in order to interfere with it. However, he had to conduct his interference – his actions and agency – in such a way that he merely intensified and colored with anxiety that which had already happened. By contrast, Twelve Monkeys confronts the causal loop paradox, where the hero’s agency – even though he has superior knowledge from the future – is blocked and sabotaged, so that he not only has to establish his identity by providing himself the cause of which his appearance is the effect – similar to the situation in The Terminator – but he also is unwittingly the source of the catastrophe that he himself is sent into the past to investigate. The resolution, in his case, is to die and therefore neutralize the agency that caused the cataclysmic consequences he was hoping to prevent. On the other hand, he is not sent back into the past to undo what has already happened, but to get to the origins of the disasters, so as to distill from the poison (the pure virus) the cure (the inoculation and antidote). “Are you going to save us?” a doctor asks. “How can I save you? This already happened,” Cole replies, aware throughout that his purpose is not to alter the destiny of the world, but to trace the path of the virus to the point of outbreak. Put in different terms, whereas, as we saw, Back to the Future is a classically oedipal time travel story, Twelve Monkeys features two deep-structure narratives: one centered on Oedipus, the other on Narcissus, and it turns out that

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the oedipal story (Jeffrey Goines and his father) was the false trail and a misleading cue: Cole’s story is in fact a Narcissus story, with Cole’s own identity across the image of the boy seeing a man being shot the crystallizing issue. Twelve Monkeys, like Donnie Darko, is not primarily about rescuing someone or something for the future, as in Back to the Future, Total Recall, or the Terminator films, but about sacrifice and the possibility of redemption through submission to a higher purpose – the survival of the human race, regardless of whether it deserves to be rescued or not. But like Back to the Future, Total Recall, or the Terminator films, in Twelve Monkeys, too, the protagonist is sent from the future to the past in order to fix something that has gone wrong in the present, whose full consequences will only be apparent in the future. Since the time travel paradox, strictly speaking, means that whatever the time traveler does in the past to which he returns, cannot and must not do something that alters the future, which is, of course, already decided, the action of the hero has to suspend action, it has to freeze time, and create a special sort of in-action-as-action. What gets suspended, put between brackets, so to speak, is the ‘present’ – which becomes a mere passage from a past that is already known to a future that has already happened. This becomes particularly evident in Twelve Monkeys which whatever else is about, is also concerned with an impaired masculinity and a split identity. The main character, Cole (played by Bruce Willis), is sent from the future (at least from ‘our’ point in time he ‘is’ in the future, when first we meet him in his detention ward) into the past, several pasts in fact, not in order to avert the disaster that has befallen the world and wiped out most of mankind, but merely to retrace this disaster’s ‘origin.’ Very pointedly, unlike Marty McFly who uses his foreknowledge to good effect to further his oedipal quest, Cole’s problem is precisely his foreknowledge: by trying to warn people of what the future holds, he is merely declared insane and locked up. The gap between free will and determinism enshrined in the time travel paradox here becomes the means of dramatizing the unavailability of social roles that might shield and protect the damaged male. Instead, the bouts of time travel mainly drive home his bodily vulnerability: bruised, lacerated, bandaged, or injected with potent pharmaceuticals, Cole is for most of the film the spectacle of a body incapable of growing a ‘skin.’ Always on the verge of making the journey from adult male to infant babe in reverse, his physical environment reflects this in-between state by the womb-like enclosures cocooning him on his travels: from the hoisted infant chair to which his minders strap him at the debriefing sessions, to the plastic sheathing that lines his passages from one world to another. At once sealed off and totally exposed, Cole is himself the ‘in-between man’ around which the film is formed, as indicated by his recurring dream or nightmare of watching a man being shot at an airport. Twelve Monkeys begins with a framing narrative, set in 2020: an underground prisoner, forcibly volunteering for a dangerous mission, from which no one has yet come back, is promised a pardon if he succeeds. Cole’s first time-trip is to 1990, but he thinks it’s 1996. He gets locked up as a lunatic, where he meets

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Brad Pitt, whom he unwittingly gives the idea of the Twelve Monkey conspiracy – rather like Marty unwittingly gives Chuck Berry the idea of rock ‘n’ roll, except the subtext of appropriation works the other way round. In Twelve Monkeys this doubling of giving and receiving which inverts the relation of cause and effect, will be crucial and fatal – two symmetrical fictions will create a reality, which, however, turns out to be a false trail. The Twelve Monkey conspiracy is a causal loop in which Cole investigates in 1996 the consequences of what he himself caused in 1990 by befriending Brad Pitt: it’s a tautology disguised as a causal relation. At the same time, the female psychiatrist and part-time art history student who takes him on as her ‘charge’ is also bound to him by such a looping structure. Cole’s second trip is to the year 1914, where he is shot, and his picture is taken in the trenches. It is this picture that the psychiatrist comes across in her post-traumatic stress research, and thus beginning at seeing Cole not just as a mental patient. In other words, in order to be a real enough subject capable of speaking to another person – the psychiatrist whom he needs to convince that he is on a mission – Cole has to become this other person’s ‘memory’ first. And he becomes real, by being the memory of a photo she recalls seeing in a book of a naked man lying wounded in the trenches during World War I, and which she ‘recognizes’ from her own research. Cole’s existence is therefore nothing more secure than a series of circumstantial verifications or photographic veridications in other people’s memories. Likewise, during Cole’s third trip – now to 1996, the crucial year – he tracks down the psychiatrist, but has to kidnap her, and escape with her, while trying to convince her not only of his sanity but of his foreknowledge – for which he now sees the proof of what he predicted, namely the Twelve Monkeys conspiracy. All the clues give substance to his story, but it happens to be false clues to a real event: the spreading of the deadly virus. As with the Renaissance paintings of trompe l’oeil representations, two mirrors create the illusion of a ‘ground’ where there is no ground at all, except that the actual conspiracy, i.e., the real event, causing all the evil consequences, is right next to it, as it were, but hiding in plain sight. Yet, like Cassandra, the Greek prophetess to whom Cole compares himself at one point, he is unable to avert what he sees so clearly before him. Indeed, in keeping with the logic of the time travel paradox, Cole has to be killed at the very moment that the knowledge he has acquired about the deadly virus he is tracking puts him in a position to do something to stop its fatal proliferation! He must not actively intervene with that which has already happened – the grandfather paradox – but this is only part of what is taking place: the film also suggests that Cole inadvertently created, in one of his travels into the past, the disaster he is now sent back to investigate, thus creating yet another loop, this time the causal time travel loop of reverse causality or retroaction. If you cannot or if you must not alter the past, what then could possibly be the attraction of time travel? Twelve Monkeys makes this fairly clear: time travel

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movies are not necessarily about saving the world: they may be about saving the self, at the point of maximum extremity. The film keeps to a single timeline – no alternative universes – and thus retains a basic commitment to both causality and chronology which is to say: history. The shifts of register, the shuttling back and forth in time, the various acts of self-displacement along the fictitious but fundamentally unalterable singular temporal axis – past-present-future – assure the self of its quest for identity and self-coherence. You know you are you, because you have just come back from the future to tell yourself so, as in Total Recall. Cole will finally know he is identical with himself, when he – at the moment of being shot – makes eye contact with the boy that he was in his dream/nightmare all along. Thus, paradoxically, time travel does not defeat mortality, but insists on the singularity and irretrievability of our life. A time travel film like Twelve Monkeys wants to cure us of our fantasy of escaping time and thus perhaps wants to therapize both our powerlessness and our media-induced hubris of ubiquity and omnipotence. The fundamental, if implicit, assumption of the time travel genre is that the world is out of joint, that society’s public and domestic institutions have broken down. As in Back to the Future, knowledge of the future only confirms what we already know: the catastrophe has already happened. In the suspended threshold realms of the so-called present that this time traveler finds himself – 1990 and 1996 – there seems to be no law, no government, no nuclear family, no paternal authority, and thus no instance of the symbolic order that could secure the passage from infant to adult, subject to self. This may, of course, be taken as yet another dystopic comment on the world we live in, a convenient metaphor for the sense of anomie following the dashed hopes of the post-Cold War new world order. Cole, for instance, experiences his time in 1990 mainly inside a mental institution, and in 1996 surfaces in a riot-torn urban wasteland. But it could also take us into another direction: time travel films are symptomatic of shifts in media technologies, or rather of the ontological changes that different media technologies can introduce into our self-representation as spectators, witnesses, actors and inter-actors: in short, time travel films are asking how we can reconcile ourselves to the illusion of control and agency that our modern media suggest we have –via mouse-clicks and touch screens. This is one of the arguments I have put forward in writings on how media technologies re-arrange and reformat our body and our senses, allowing us the ‘freedom’ to time shift, to ignore distance and be immersed in simultaneity, but only at the price of forgetting and disavowing rather than mastering the irreversibility of time and overcoming our mortality. Both Back to the Future and Twelve Monkeys take seriously what I have just called the ‘ethical’ imperative of the time travel paradox: namely that the traveler can intervene in the sequence of events and the causal nexus on condition that he helps the events ‘realize’ themselves, and thus to become what they already are.

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For if time travel introduces different temporalities into quest narratives, it makes them reversible only insofar as a given trajectory becomes retraceable along a path marked in advance. Within determinism, this is the freedom of time travel, and Twelve Monkeys frees its hero, it would seem, precisely by allowing Cole to die once more, to catch up with his childhood memory of the airport assassination, granting him to die in front of himself, as it were, in order to become the symbolic ‘father’ who is watched by the symbolic ‘son’ – and across a meeting of looks, recognized by the ‘mother’ – now not humiliated as he was throughout the film when hauled before his minders, but heroically attempting, after all, to save the world. Yet this fantasy, too, exacts its price: Cole’s role at the airport is determined by a disguise, insofar as Cole at this point is dressed up and made up as a hippy tourist leaving for a holiday in Florida. He is granted a second, symbolic death, in other words, to redeem the physical, pointless one, but only on condition that he wills it, even if the masculinity thus sanctioned in the act of self-sacrifice is recognized as a masquerade. Twelve Monkeys here shows most clearly its difference from La Jetée, by which it was inspired. Whereas in Chris Marker’s 1962 film the hero chooses to stay in the present, for the sake of a woman, and thus accepts mortality, echoing many a literary and cinematic myth, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses via F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu to Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, Terry Gilliam’s hero no longer romantically affirms the power of love, as in Interstellar, or engages in an oedipal struggle with the father figure (as does Jeffrey Goines, played by Brad Pitt). Instead, Cole plays out the drama of mortality across the figure of Narcissus, seeking an image in the deep pools of an as yet innocent gaze belonging to his former self: Twelve Monkeys makes the sheets of time into the mirror in which the hero hopes to catch his own reflection. Twelve Monkeys is thus ultimately the story of someone who sends himself on a mission, in order to find himself, to find out who he is, in a world also without fathers, because it so insistently asks not only ‘who guards the guardians.’ By first identifying as the villain a super-father-scientist (whom our hero thinks he is tracking via the demented oedipal complex of Goines), and then making him turn out to be disappointingly and ineffectually ‘normal,’ the film enters into a new register of anxiety. While the replicants in Blade Runner are still able to go in search of their maker in the corridors of the Tyrell Corporation, no such directly oedipal quest is open to Cole. By contrast, Goines is the quintessentially oedipal adolescent male, whose hatred of the father is both monstrous and a caricature. These examples might help to get a clearer idea of the kind of subjectivity that is also at stake in the time-travel films, which essentially involves exploring what strategies might support a masculinity no longer secured by the oedipal father, and willing to take risks by crossing boundaries of bodily integrity and mental sanity. The time travel films enact these crossings by devising narratives in which a hero has to send himself on a journey or mission, and therefore has to become his own begetter, or at any rate, his own post-oedipal antagonist.

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At first viewing it may not be clear that Cole had in fact succeeded in his mission, precisely by ‘failing.’ For it is his failed attempt to kill the red haired man at the airport which had enabled the others ‘from the future’ present at the scene to identify this man as the one with the pure virus and thus allow the woman scientist to materialize on the plane and take the sample from him, in order to make a vaccine out of the virus. Rather than pursuing the idea that Cole’s mission was to save all of humanity, by preventing the virus from being released at all (a transgression of the law of time travel that you cannot alter what has already taken place), the film thematizes a different reversibility of agency, one inherent in the relation between virus and vaccine: the pharmakon. Cole, via the female scientist, allows the poison to become the cure, via the retroaction of antibodies. Saving all mankind is the Hollywood blockbuster movie-fantasy the film subtly displaces, making it no more than an echo from Hollywood’s preoccupation with action heroes in the Die Hard mold. Cole’s more modest – and for us, more interesting – goal is to get a sample of the pure virus so that the remaining, underground survivors left after the viral holocaust can get inoculated and emerge above-ground again. Cole, in other words, did manage to rescue a small part of humanity, raising once more the issue of ‘rescuing,’ ‘saving’ and ‘redemption’ in relation to the community and ‘humanity’ such as they arise in Spielberg’s films (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan) and also Forrest Gump – films that can be discussed under the heading of ‘trauma,’ which raises issues similar to those of time travel (see Chapter 6 of the present study). Are there sacrifices that individuals can make, and for whom or what? Can ‘one’ stand for the many, when one cannot rescue the many? Can the ‘chosen few’ appropriate life, at the expense of the many? Twelve Monkeys, too, touches on the question: what does it mean to ‘make the world a safer place’? Does it simply mean ‘safer for Americans’? Twelve Monkeys is therefore an intriguing addition as well as variation on the genre of time travel, not least because it is the remake of a European film. Yet so thoroughly has Gilliam converted Chris Marker’s art cinema film into an American idiom that it has become a doubly instructive example of how to figure post-classical Hollywood out of the transformations and transmutations of classical Hollywood, as well as out of European art cinema (albeit in the case of Monty Python’s co-creator, of a rather odd and unusual kind). What is remarkable about Twelve Monkeys is just how ambiguous it is about the possibility of the protagonist’s time travels – his multiple returns and repeats ending in his death – having a redemptive function in and for the community. By assuming, in a much more explicit way than Donnie Darko that the catastrophe has already happened and is in some crucial ways irreversible, it shifts the moral weight, and the protagonist’s ethics of sacrifice into another register. After all, is it not the case that within the post-apocalyptic world Cole finds himself in, he is himself the cause (of the Twelve Monkey conspiracy) of the evil he thinks he is investigating, whereas in the wider scheme of things, he is merely the tool of another ‘conspiracy’ of which he remains largely ignorant? At one level he is a tragic hero, in fact another version of Oedipus investigating himself, but at another level, where he is the instrument of

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other forces, he would need to be even more paranoid-schizophrenic than Goines, in order to acquire the mindset adequate and commensurate to his situation.

Repeat, Return, and Rescue As the preceding examples have tried to show, time travel films can be understood in several different ways: they can be taken at their fantastical face-value, making us believe, for the sake of the story and thanks to genre conventions, that time travel is possible and allows for mind-bending adventures, comic situation of mistaken assumptions, and paradoxical encounters that turn logic upside down and make a mockery of common sense. Then there are time travel films – Interstellar, but also Déjà Vu, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and even Inception – that go out of their way to provide scientific evidence or the paraphernalia of a scientific explanation in order to persuade us that time travel might just – if not now, then in the foreseeable future – be possible. A third possibility, discussed above, is that time travel films merely make explicit what every film (and every story does) does, namely manipulate chronology in order to impart and disclose information in the most suspenseful or intriguing way – literalizing the gap between ‘fabula’ and ‘syuzhet.’ On the other hand, time travel in a film can also be the very mark of the impossibility of time travel in the real world, and thus a way to alert us to some real-world problem that time travel both reveals and conceals, but of which it nonetheless leaves traces: what I called signposting as impossible the imaginary resolution of real contradictions that more conventional films are said to accomplish. This is time travel as a kind of ‘black box,’ in which certain input–output exchanges are transacted, whose precise functioning is kept in the dark, as long as the results seem plausible and persuasive enough to help the plot move along. And finally, there is the suggestion that time travel is a way of casting in narrative form, of visualizing in terms of characters, events and action not just an intractable problem, but a logical contradiction and an ethical dilemma – for instance, the question of free will and determinism. This would be time travel as a logical operator, translating either/or and other binary relations into reversible sequences graphed and plotted along a temporal axis, which is itself treated as if it was an extension in space. What I have also already hinted at, but now want to focus on, is the substantial group of films that – at the narrative level – seem only to be traveling back into the past, rather than predict, peer or project into the future. The hypothesis I am putting forward to explain this feature, especially of contemporary time travel films is that in these cases, time travel – whatever else it signifies – also alerts us to the fact that there is there what one might call ‘unfinished business’ in the past that the time traveler is meant to complete. Such is the case of Marty McFly in Back to the Future whose time traveling job it is to make his father into the ‘man,’ or there is an action taken in the past whose intended or unintended consequences in the present need

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to be undone or reversed, as seems at first to be the mission of Cole in Twelve Monkeys. It is to highlight this phenomenon, before I attempt to account for it, that I argue that time travel invariably involves some or all of the different re’s: repeat, rewind, replay, repair, rescue, restore, regret and redeem … If I were to formulate a kind of operational diagram within which these re’s occupy a place and fulfill a function, it might run something like this: The objective of a time travel film – at its most abstract, and depending on the circumstances, but also at is most ethical – is to repeat in order to repair, to rescue in order to restore while an underlying feeling of regret prompts the hope for redemption as its goal and resolution, which, when all these moves are taken together, turns a hypothetical modality of ‘what if’ into the optative ‘if only.’ In the case of time travel we are therefore dealing not so much with a new mobility in spatialized time, as it seemed when time travel first emerged, but with something like a new mobility of ethical agency: between negative or reactive moral feelings (‘regret,’ prompted by guilt) and positive or proactive emotional investment (‘redemption,’ prompted by hope). For these states of mind and morals, the technological fantasy/practical impossibility of time travel serves primarily as the narrative engine and visualizing device. Time travel may in this context be seen as the attempt to ‘master’ both the past, and its repeated returns by, as it were, anticipating or forestalling this return by proactively staging and undertaking its repeat and replay. It would confirm that it is this ‘unfinished business’ that necessitates a ‘rewind.’ Yet because this is Hollywood, the unfinished business usually has both an external component (the adventure part) and an internal counterpart (a moral crisis in the protagonist), meaning that an objective-material and a subjective-mental dimension are involved. Thus, for instance, some films are set on repeat, until the hero rectifies and corrects his behavior (a learning curve from selfishness and self-indulgence to self-improvement and self-reflexivity, as in Groundhog Day [1993]); others repeat in order to repair (iterative, retroactive re-enactments, as in Source Code; oedipal guilt, trauma, and loss, as in Back to the Future, Twelve Monkeys and Richard Curtis’s About Time [2013], treated as bitter-sweet comedy); some repeat in order to indicate the contingency of our choices and the fragility of our actions (this is more European than Hollywood: Blind Chance [1987], Run Lola Run [1998], Sliding Doors [1998]); and yet others repeat as a repetition compulsion indicative of an unresolved inner conflict that returns to the past in the form of acting out, as in Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012). At the same time, given what has been said so far, prior to any specific event, incident, cause or source, the reason for the necessity of time travel would therefore depend on the enactment or instantiation of a complex matrix of motifs and actions, which is why I could summarize the underlying constellation also as follows: a time traveler returns to the past, in order to repeat a situation, hoping to reverse an action and in the process, rescue something or someone. Driven by an underlying emotion of regret the traveler is prompted to imagine redemption as his goal and the film’s resolution.

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Surveillance as Rescue: Déjà Vu I would like to test this constellation by examining a scene from Tony Scott’s 2006 film Déjà Vu. Let us take the scene about one-third into the film, where Denzel Washington as Special AFT Agent Carlin, having had the Einstein-Rosen bridge, together with other, more voodoo-like space-fold science, explained to him, decides to send a warning message to himself at his office four days ago. As bad luck would have it, Carlin has already left, and the message, successfully teleported, is read instead by his partner, who acts on the warning, but ignorant of the extreme danger the terrorist poses, pursues the suspect and is then killed by him in the most callous and brutal manner. This murder Carlin and all the others on the team have to watch ‘in real time’ (even though in the past), without being able to intervene or to interfere. They see but they cannot act, and by extension, we know but cannot act: at the allegorical level, the dilemma mankind faces, insofar as we know what’s wrong about the world, but we have neither the individual nor the collective will to act in order to effect change. On a more immediate level, Carlin and the team are of course stand-ins of us, the spectators. What we see in the scene is a literalization of us as spectators, via the characters as avatars: doubling the anxious viewers, they are also the players (of a multi-users video game) but where they both can and cannot effectively intervene. The high-tech science lab, where they use the electrical power of half the Eastern Seaboard to turn back time by four days, is little more than a collection of screens and monitors, reflexive of the transitional state of cinema itself, but also doggedly determined to keep within the realm of the visible that which has long ceased to be visible (vast and complex computational calculations). The film obsessively retains in the sphere of the visible what are effectively ‘operational images,’ which in the age of the computer do not need any visual interface at all. When Carlin carries the so-called goggle rig, it is as if he is carrying his own head – his brain and his eyes – he becomes almost a kind of mythological creature. Seeing is split from hearing (‘can you hear me?’) body is split from brain, but Carlin also – in the earlier scene in the office, meets himself, so that he is (as indeed throughout the narrative) both split and double. Most of the time, all the team members can do to tele-guide Carlin on his mad ride is adjust the point of view and the frame, their action is as viewers: nonetheless, they do instantiate that the default value even of moving images is increasingly that such digitally generated images are no longer there to be viewed or contemplated but to act with or to be acted on – at a distance, usually in space, but here also in time – so that we can execute some kind of action through images, except that the basic limits to this ‘acting on’ are also dramatized, in the form of the helplessness and anguish the team members experience of not being able to prevent the murder of a friend and colleague. That time is spatialized is emphasized by the line: “I can see him, right in front of me” across time: a moment of point of view shot counter-shot, a moment of suture, if you like, just as we have it in the cinema, where what was shot a year ago, or ten years ago, confronts us in the act of projection in a permanent ‘now.’

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Yet what we also have, less reflected and not at all commented upon is a general argument about the purpose of all-powerful, ubiquitous surveillance by the state, or rather by state-sponsored but effectively ‘secret’ (that is, not falling under democratic control) agencies: and what this ubiquitous surveillance is narratively deployed for in the film is to ‘rescue’: a potentially malign ‘Big Brother’ eye in every city, street, or private space is introduced into the story as an ostensibly benign instrument of rescue. The attempt to save his buddy – whom he has put in harm’s way in the first place (by a scheme he initiated with his laser pencil prank) – gives Carlin both an ethical motive (rescue a life) and a less ethical motive (the guilt-feelings of having put his colleague in danger), but once the two come together, these motivations seem to justify and legitimate that Carlin in his Humvee can effectively turn the entire city of New Orleans into a war zone and a battlefield, in short, militarize an urban freeway, crash cars, kill innocent people, ride roughshod traffic laws, damage property – all in pursuit of someone who was there three days ago, and whom he chases like a phantom in his own brain, driven by guilt and regret. The narrative creates a state of emergency, which justifies the suspension of all normal or legal behavior. It is not as if the film wasn’t aware of it, on the contrary, it piles one disaster on another, but it also creates these paradoxes of split vision: the present in one eye, the past in the other, and then, when Carlin crashes the car, continuing regardless, driving blind at high speed, while one of the operators ‘talks him through the past’ while he only sees the present. By extension, these paradoxes and improbabilities do allow us to become aware just how dangerous it is to interfere in the past, but the film counters this with the suggestion that rescue can be justified as pre-emption (a theme at the center of the ethical dilemmas of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report). But here, rescue is also ‘retroaction,’ indicative that the motif of rescue is a powerful mobilizer of positive emotions, covering up and disguising some very problematic motives and circumstances. Creating a moral dilemma and a sense of guilt for the hero, and then combining it with powerful affective state such as love, as well as prominent cinematic references – critics have called Déjà Vu ‘Tony Scott’s Vertigo’ – not forgetting some equally powerful resonances from mythology, such as ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ – gives a very strong cover and legitimation to what is in effect illegal, unauthorized but state-sponsored ubiquitous surveillance. It is in this sense that time travel in the rewind mode (rather than the fast-forward mode) breaks down the paradigm of surveillance into scenarios fashioned around repeat, rescue, regret and redemption – which constitutes a significant variation on the classic formula of drama and tragedy – revolving as these do around a fatal mistake, a moment of recognition, and the realization that redemptive action invariably comes too late, or in the case of romance, recognition and coincidence lead to a happy ending. Déjà Vu wants to have its cake and eat it too, but it does so, not by an imaginary resolution to real contradictions, but by aggressively and spectacularly highlighting the need for time travel, as well as its impossibility, in

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order to achieve a happy ending of redemptive grace, as well as making us feel regret, guilt, loss, and death as intensely as any Greek tragedy. Thus, whether by default or by design, Déjà Vu also demonstrates something else: not only knowledge of the future, when seen from the past, nor knowledge about the past when seen from the present guarantees the ability to act. The idea, that if only we knew more about all the hidden mechanisms and machinations that control our life we could take charge of it, turns out to be a self-serving illusion or even delusion. We know too much, not too little. And a film like Déjà Vu conveys this bitter truth. Therefore, whenever time travel entails the protagonist going back in time, some key disparity between human knowledge and human agency is highlighted.33 Arrived in the past which is someone else’s present, his or her superior knowledge of what has already taken place in the time traveler’s present empowers him/her and imparts a special agency. However, the various time travel paradoxes mentioned above severely constrain this self-same ability to act on this knowledge in ways that could change the future, which in fact no longer is one. All a time traveler can do, as we saw, is to insert him/herself into the predetermined course of events, exerting a peculiarly fatalistic but by the same token also potentially ethical form of agency, as it were, by actively helping to bring about that which has already come to pass: if this is the case in Back to the Future and Donnie Darko, it is presented in a possibly even more challenging form in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, where it is treated in a somber and ethically quite demanding key.

Arrival: Memory, Trauma [Editors’ Note: Elsaesser simply copied and pasted David Bordwell’s blog page on Arrival here, which serves as a film synopsis and standard review. He may have planned to further analyze the film in his memory-trauma frame, but left only the following paragraph.] Is it good to know the future? Louise (Amy Adams) submits to the knowledge of the death of her daughter. In terms of my argument, she does in relation to the future what I claim other films do in relation to the past – submit to what cannot be changed. But in this film it is the Heptapods that represent determinism – they know the future, they are the superior intelligence, they use humans as tools, in other words, they have taken on the function of God, but also of a God who is fully in tune with Einsteinian physics, insofar as the Heptapods do not recognize time, and so it is the Heptapods who teach the humans – at least this one human – what it means to be living in the world of relativity, where there is not past, future or present. So she is in some respects a figure similar to all the other protagonists I’ve looked at who time travel in order to actively insert themselves into something they cannot alter, which is what I have called the ethics of time travel.

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The Loop of Agency and the Nature of Causality How does the loop work that allows this transference of agency from future to past, i.e., which ensures that retroaction works, and an effect can indeed generate its own cause? Interestingly enough, in The Terminator and Twelve Monkeys it is a photograph, in Back to the Future it is a song Johnny B Goode, in Déjà Vu it is also a LEGO message on a fridge door, and in Arrival it is a telephone number – in each case a media-object that is used to build this bridge that then forms the loop that transfers knowledge and agency from the person in the future to the person in the past. This suggests or makes evident that time travel is heavily invested in the concept of retroaction and has to do with the nature of causality (change) and its apparent opposite, contingency (chance). It creates or suggests a different kind of agency that seem both tempting and terrifying: whereas the negative agency (“regret is the energy bar”) model suggests an ‘if only’ modality (if only I could undo what’s been done, rewind history to make a different decision), the ‘what if’ – when seen as a positive form of agency – can generate hypotheticals (let’s assume that … which is both a research strategy (thought-experiment) and a delaying tactic (suspended causality): what if I could peer into the future (and use this knowledge to my advantage – say on the stock exchange or in any other endeavor that involves risk assessment and speculation)? Which is to say that we are in the realm of speculation and risk assessment: a highly-valued mode, but also a dangerous mode (as we see currently: ‘a self-fulfilling prophecy’ – a positive feedback loop, here a self-fulfilling panic look – so-called ‘investor confidence’). Might this not also be another powerful reason why time travel becomes so easily acceptable? We read about it all the time, about ‘futures,’ about buying or selling ‘short’ (betting that stocks will fall, etc.): Wall Street is really a time travel capsule – but into the future: here, in this discussion, we are more interested in time travel into the past, so we have a different ‘what if’: what if I could travel into the past and change the past? What are the dangers, what the benefits, what are the consequences? Time travel can be seen as an antidote to feeling powerless, because time travel promises agency, even super-agency: but thanks to the paradoxes, it marks this agency as highly problematic! Any situation, where one has no control over one’s life, encourages the invention of a past that could explain the present. One invents a time travel quest (motivated by a narrative pretext: one is sent or accidentally finds oneself on …) in order to establish a configuration which makes the present seem the result of choice and volition, thus regaining once more the initiative i.e., agency over something one cannot change. Chronos into kairos, philosophically and ethically, the legacy of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Kafka: not unlike those situations, where we know we are guilty, but we don’t know of what, and we feel the punishment, but don’t know for what, so that another loop is formed, one where the punishment seeks the crime.

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“Regret is the Time Traveler’s Energy Bar”: The Unfinished Business of (American) History Myths, fairy tales, and classical cinema have one thing in common: they are narratives that want to provide ‘imaginary resolutions to real contradictions’: The idea that films function as imaginary resolution to real contradiction is one of the ways one can understand the cultural, indeed the anthropological function of popular narratives, such as they are provided by cinema. It is also a useful working hypothesis, if one wants to understand why complex storytelling, puzzle films, and mind-game films have arisen. Although originally formulated for myths, the imaginary resolution to real contradictions formula applies to popular narratives, because it highlights on the one hand, the narratological and visual complexity of a major Hollywood production, and on the other hand, it allows one to understand the ideological task of mainstream cinema, and how it is possible that mass entertainment can address, process and ‘work through’ the problems of a nation, a culture, a society: in line with the motto: “what are the problems to which the film thinks it’s the solution?” Time travel raises the stakes, when it comes to solving problem. The can-do, problem-solving routines of ‘classical cinema’ are replaced or made more problematic and challenging by having to pass through paradoxes. In this sense, time travel films take the classic formula of a hero encountering a problem, or obstacles, and then through his physical strength, his reasoning skill, his helpers, etc., he manages to solve and overcome them. Time travel takes this formula, and complicates it – by inserting between hero and efficient action the time travel paradoxes that render his actions either tautological or mark them as failed successes or successful failures. So time travel is the solution, but it is a solution that generates its own problems. In contemporary cinema, however, not even action heroes have full agency: as we shall see, the Batmans and Spidermans or Hulks are themselves afflicted or held back by a trauma (which is another name for a problem for which straightforward action and full-bodied agency doesn’t produce a solution). In this manner, even action pictures know and openly acknowledge that we humans are mostly not in control of our lives. They show us just how impossible the odds are of us getting what we want, by ‘supercharging’ the heroes with powers to win wars, stamp out crime, and save the world, but making the same heroes vulnerable and fatally flawed in other respects, usually in the sphere of affective relations and primary emotional bonds. A similar constellation obtains in time travel films, where the reversibility of time, the suspension of chronology, the opening up of possible worlds may all be enlisted in an attempt to undo what has been done, to reverse irreversible decisions, to make room for changing what, however, cannot be changed, and in this sense, time travel films not only confront paradoxes and contradictions, but their very strategies to engineer solutions has something inherently futile and even tragic. What this indicates is that time travel films, at another level, which may well be the

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ideological level, have unfinished business with America itself, acknowledging implicitly the US’s changing position in the world, especially since 9/11: the old can-do macho action hero posture is no longer possible or credible, and agency has to be refigured, to include retroactive, posthumous, and even post-mortem forms of agency as well. While resentment and repetition characterize a slogan like ‘Make America Great Again,’ the overwhelmingly present affect typifying repetition in time travel films is that of regret.

Notes 1 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (London: William Heinemann, 1895). 2 See Bud Foote, The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel in the Past in Science Fiction (New York: Praeger, 1990), and Paul J. Nahin, Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction (New York: Spring, 1993). 3 James Gleick, Time Travel: A History (New York: Random House, 2017), 10. 4 “Technology helped in another way. Time became vivid, concrete, and spatial to anyone who saw the railroad smashing across distances on a schedule coordinated by the electric telegraph, which was pinning time to the mat.” Ibid., 13. 5 “In October 1895, month after reading H.G. Wells’s utopian novel the British inventor R.W. Paul applied for a patent for a ‘novel form of exhibition,’ in which ‘spectators have presented to their view scenes that are supposed to occur in the future or the past, while they are given the sensation of voyaging upon a machine through time.’” From Anne Friedberg, “Cinema and the Postmodern Condition,” in Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 67–68. 6 For a more sophisticated argument about the ramification and consequences of the ‘emergence of cinematic time, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 7 See Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945), but see also W. J. T. Mitchell, “Spatial Form in Literature: Towards a General Theory,” Critical Inquiry 6, no. 3 (1980), 539–67; and, especially relevant in the present context, Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 8 See David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007) and Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 9 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (London: 1895), chapter 3, p. 16. See also www. gutenberg.org/files/35/35-h/35-h.htm 10 Fredric Jameson is the foremost critic of this closing of the future as a frontier. As Constance Penley remarks: “Our love affair with apocalypse and Armageddon, according to Jameson, results from the atrophy of utopian imagination, in other words, our cultural incapacity to imagine the future.” Constance Penley, “Time Travel, the Primal Scene and the Critical Dystopia,” Camera Obscura no. 15 (Fall 1986), 66–84. 11 Penley also notes this foreclosure but qualifies it: “A film like The Terminator could be called a ‘critical dystopia’ inasmuch as it tends to suggest causes rather than merely reveal symptoms. But … like most recent science fiction … The Terminator limits itself to solutions that are either individualist or bound to a romanticized notion of guerillalike small-group resistance. The true atrophy of the utopian imagination is this: we can imagine the future but we cannot conceive the kind of collective political strategies necessary to change or ensure that future” (68). 12 “A causal [or temporal] loop may involve an event, a person or object, or information. A causal loop is also known as a boot-strap paradox, predestination paradox or

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25

26 27 28

29

30 31 32 33

ontological paradox in fiction.” From “Temporal paradox”: https://en.wikipedia-onipfs.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox.html. “Grandfather paradoxes.” https://www.blackwomxntemporal.net/black-grandmother-pa radoxes Penley, “Time Travel,” 66–84. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 75. Raymond Bellour, “Un jour, la castration,” L’Arc, special issue on Alexandre Dumas, no. 71 (1978). “Spectatorial identification is more complex than has hitherto been understood because it shifts constantly in the course of the film’s narrative, while crossing the lines of biological sex; in other words, unconscious identification with the characters or the scenario is not necessarily dependent upon gender.” Penley, “Time Travel,” 73. David Wittenberg, Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative (Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013), 2–3. Ibid., 5. Wittenberg takes the terms fabula and sjuzet from the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky, meaning roughly ‘story’ and ‘plot’: “[We might define the ‘normal’ narrative] as one in which divergences from regular chronology occur only on the level of the sjuzhet, never in the fabula … By contrast, in a time travel fiction, no such underlying coherence in the fabula may be assumed. A time machine potentially alters the chronology of story events themselves, making it impossible to presuppose or determine any single consistent relationship between fabula and sjuzhet, and requiring, therefore, more or less artificial or narratively supplemental mechanisms of coherence … Even the naive reader or audience of a time travel fiction becomes, by default or exigency, a practicing narrative theorist or a practical experimenter in the philosophy of time.” Wittenberg, Time Travel, 7–8. Ibid., 64. Andrew Gordon, review of Wittenberg, Science Fiction Film and Television 7, no. 1 (Spring 2014), 153–54. Seung-hoon Jeong, “The Apocalyptic Sublime: Hollywood Disaster Films and Donnie Darko,” in Todd A. Comer and Lloyd Isaac Vayo, eds., Terror and the Cinematic Sublime: Essays on Violence and the Unpresentable in Post-9/11 Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 78. Slavoj Žižek, “Lenin Shot at Finland Station” (review of Andrew Roberts, ed., What Might Have Been: Imaginary History from 12 Leading Historians), London Review of Books 26, no. 16 (August 2005). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n16/slavoj-zizek/ lenin-shot-at-finland-station Ibid., 82. Penley, “Time Travel,” 80. Ibid., 81. Editors’ Note: We include a few lines that Thomas inserted at this point and originally used in Chapter 11 where it appears as part of a discussion of agency and determinism in time-travel narratives of a journey to the past to try to alter future events. It seems appropriate to both chapters so we have left the lines in both.

5 THE NEW NORMAL – TRAUMA AS SUCCESSFULLY FAILED COMMUNICATION (NURSE BETTY 2000)

Introduction: Trauma, Trauma Theory, and Cinematic Representation This chapter raises a question, first posed by Sigmund Freud,1 but also by Walter Benjamin,2 namely in what sense and under what conditions can trauma be the ‘solution,’ rather than the ‘problem’? It would have to be the solution to a problem not yet fully identified or, at the very least, in need of being redefined. Such a redefinition is my aim, asking whether there might be objective, historical circumstances which make being traumatized (i.e., living with post-traumatic symptoms) ‘the new normal,’ so that the usual forms of therapy, such as acting out, working through, or narratively integrating the traumatic event, merely misrecognize the conditions under which trauma may now occur, and what might be its purpose for the organism thus affected (and not only ‘afflicted’). It could lead to the surprising and thoroughly counterintuitive possibility that trauma, rather than harm or hinder, may actually benefit the victim. How do I arrive at entertaining such a possibility? The thought occurred to me after a second look at Nurse Betty (dir. Neil LaBute, 2000), a critically acclaimed and moderately successful Hollywood film, starring Renée Zellweger and Morgan Freeman. As often as it was praised, it was also dismissed as lightweight and silly, because either irresponsibly endorsing its airhead heroine’s addiction to TV soap operas, or as cruelly mocking her naïve, if persistent credulity. The ambivalence is nicely caught in a caption review for the film: “what happens when a person decides that life is merely a state of mind? If you’re Betty, a small-town waitress from Kansas, you refuse to believe that you can’t be with the love of your life just because he doesn’t really exist. After all, life is no excuse for not living.”3

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The ironic-sarcastic tone reflects the fact that in Nurse Betty, the consequences of trauma are strangely enabling and empowering. One hypothesis would be that trauma, in the form of a post-traumatic state of mind, now functions as a ‘black box.’ That is, when invoked in contemporary media, such as on television shows, where it is frequently signaled by amnesia, it provides a ‘missing link’ in motivation (covering a gap in narrative logic, or a character being written out of the series) without actually explaining anything. Similarly, when trauma appears in films as either background information (Mystic River [2003], The Silence of the Lambs [1991]), in order to motivate a character’s personality (the 1989 initiation of the Batman franchise, to name one prominent example), or as the trigger for a character’s actions (as in the case of Nurse Betty) it also can become a ‘black box’ of a more general kind. For instance, it can point to a crisis in what we understand as personal experience, and by extension, ‘trauma’ connotes ambivalence regarding the sites, sources, and elements of personal identity. In this sense, the signifier ‘trauma’ highlights one of the roles that popular media – possibly substituting for or supplementing religion – now tend to fulfill: to present personal experience and social reality as meaningful, which is to say, to narratively process everyday lives and extraordinary events, not so much as these occur or are reported in the news, but as lives and misfortune are depicted in the melodrama genres of soap opera and other television series, as enacted in talk shows, or as they furnish the subjects and topics for reality TV. In each genre, but also in mainstream cinema, including franchise and blockbuster films, such meaningfulness is increasingly both connoted (suggested or implied) and denoted (directly referenced) by a traumatic incident, which has to stand for an otherwise inaccessible source or unknown origin. Needless to say, this work of ‘black box’ meaning-making-without-making-sense in the popular media takes place against the background of the self-same personal and social reality being experienced as random, contingent, unpredictable, empty. Trauma, by contrast and by definition, is deemed to be significant: which is why it can be deployed as a special category of potentially momentous experience. As such, it brings with it some of the philosophical baggage that the term ‘experience’ has acquired over the course of the 20th century, during what we usually refer to as ‘modernity’: in German Lebensphilosophie, in Walter Benjamin’s distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis (discussed earlier, in Chapter 2), but also in phenomenology, feminist film studies, the affective turn and in the political-economic category of the ‘experience economy.’4 In several of these contexts, trauma would stand first and foremost for ‘failed experience,’ i.e., non-integrated and non-assimilated experience, but – this will be part of my argument – the formal or aesthetic significance of this apparent ‘failure’ has not always been fully recognized or appreciated. For instance, the most visible external index of this potentially traumatic non-integration manifests itself in a feature much prized by audiences of cable television in the 1980s and 1990s, and the hallmark of the high-end television output of streaming services, such as Netflix: namely the open-ended, addictive character of soaps and series, feeding on a repetition compulsion that always promises closure and always frustrates the desire for it.

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In other words, it seems the occurrence of ‘trauma’ in the popular media is especially effective when highlighting the gap between media reality and an individual’s life-world reality, insofar as trauma symbolizes different kinds of rupture, but ‘fills’ them negatively, by an absence that also serves as a punctuation mark. Such a notion of trauma as both an aspect of lived experience and as an element in a formal semiotic system means that trauma translates a certain type of experience into a new meaning system whose key has been lost, has not yet been found, or at any rate is no longer or not yet accessible to the subject concerned. In this sense, trauma does not necessarily have to refer to an actual event, such as the one that occurs in the story world of Nurse Betty and triggers the subsequent action: trauma could be something like a placeholder category in the reality discourse of the media, pointing to the inevitable failure of experience to be meaningful. It may be why ‘trauma’ can paradoxically acquire both the status of a cause and the force of an explanation. The logic would be that of the old joke of the drunk, who loses his house key on the way home and looks for it under the lamp-post. Asked by a helpful policeman if he was sure to have lost it there, he answers, “Of course not – but here at least there is better light.”5 The joke aptly illustrates the efficacy of trauma as a placeholder (the lamp-post), for a non-integrated experience or an unsuccessful mediation (the house key), by fusing two sites that are strictly separate: the site of origin (‘losing’) and the site of explanation (‘finding’). Trauma, as constitutively non-integrated or failed experience, points backwards to a past event, but by the very fact of being non-integrated, also cuts potentially loose from this past, thereby freeing energies that are directed towards a differently meaningful future. Given these considerations, I understand this chapter as also a contribution to the question of why the idea of trauma today seems to play such an important role in media studies and in the humanities: it offers a way out of an otherwise intractable dilemma of how the arts, humanities and social sciences can still make sense of the contemporary world. Secondly, the fact that trauma has become such a popular topic also means that we now not only have one trauma theory, but even several, partly competing, trauma theories.6 Thirdly, with the pervasiveness of the concept of trauma, we may have left behind a certain approach to ‘working through’ as applied to both life and literature? That is to say: could it be that the classic therapeutic or Aristotelian theories of drama and narrative have given way to another model, which it would be wrong to describe as ‘Brechtian,’ but which works more like ‘homeopathy’ or as a pharmakon, with antibodies of the same substance fighting the debilitating effects of trauma? One of these antibodies is repetition, addiction or paratactic sequencing (as indicated above), while another one – the one that interests me here – is a special kind of non-integration and disconnect, which I call ‘parapractic.’7 It manifests itself by way of ‘successfully performed failure’ (parapractic being the English translation of Freud’s Fehlleistung, failed performance/ performed failure), which – in the case of Nurse Betty – tends to take the form of ‘successfully failed communication.’

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For a long time, the leading trauma theory has been the version made popular by Cathy Caruth in the 1990s, when she drew on Sigmund Freud’s writings Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and another meta-psychological study Moses and Monotheism (1938). Partly inspired by Paul de Man’s deconstructionist literary theory, Caruth, in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996), as well as in another collection edited by her entitled Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), deals with historical traumas, such as the Holocaust or Hiroshima, treating them as ‘texts,’ requiring a particular hermeneutics.8 Their afterlife is manifest in the many discourses on the crisis of representation and in the postmodern concept of history. In a century as fractured by moral catastrophes and political violence as the last one, the traditional historical categories of linearity, causality, and narrative telos must fail – a sentiment or argument we also find expressed in the writings of Hayden White and of other philosophers of history such as Jean-François Lyotard or Reinhart Koselleck. Thus, the past no longer coheres or consolidates into history: the so-called afterhistory (‘posthistoire’), according to which nothing new can happen anymore, is, following Caruth, better understood with the concept of trauma, which would then be something like ‘failed history’ – at once close to the ‘postmodern condition’ and yet also quite different.9 Confronting the problem of unrepresentability and the unspeakable in the testimonies of survivors, Caruth’s theory of trauma seeks to develop a performative theory of language and hermeneutics, according to which it must be possible to arrive at a new concept of history that is taking hold whenever discourse seems to be cut off from the plane of reference. If ‘history’ (as a past with consequences) only emerges when there is no predetermined course or goal, then history becomes history precisely at those points where reality manifests itself in the form of trauma: in the face of natural or manmade disasters, unexpected coincidences or improbable parallels in events, personal and social reality appears as ‘text,’ demanding to be ‘read,’ because manifesting the kind of stylistic figures or tropes familiar from rhetoric: hyperbole, chiasmus, zeugma, non-sequitur, paradox – and, I would add, parapraxis, the ‘Freudian slip.’ This would be the performative aspect of trauma, to which one might have to add the peculiar tense of ‘deferred action’ (also typical of trauma), i.e., the apparent reversal of cause and effect, of ‘before’ and ‘after,’ and ultimately of latency, according to which the processes of transmission or transition are no longer straightforward but either abrupt or hidden, either sudden or protracted – also between the generations, the sexes and in the asymmetrical power-relations of a postcolonial world. Caruth’s model of trauma theory does not put the emphasis on repression (‘return of the repressed’) but on the body and language.10 Arguing for the mutually conditioned and interdependent relationship of the (invisible) wound and the (inaudible) voice, Caruth not only gives the (female) voice a special meaning in the trauma theory. She also develops a theory of witnessing, which takes traumatic relationships into the intersubjective realm, including into the discussion of trauma the question of identification, over-identification, and transference.

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A critique of Caruth’s trauma theory has been offered by Susannah Radstone.11 She cautions that the concept of trauma as a ‘language of the body’ should not be transferred too directly to historical and social reality, since the danger is for trauma to attain a kind of metaphorical universality, which is then applied literally to a person’s life story. And it is true that trauma theory has become an important but double-edged weapon in the arsenal of identity politics and the so-called memory wars, where the invisibility of the wound can be invoked as the very sign of oppression, and the inaudibility of the voice as eloquent testimony to forcible silencing.12 Radstone’s own trauma theory changes Caruth’s psychoanalytically oriented hermeneutics in order to intervene strategically in the body politics of (gendered) identity by assigning a central role to the concept of fantasy, less in the sense of orthodox Freudian theory, as for instance, in the problematic ‘seduction fantasy’ of sexual abuse by family authority figures, but by examining the place of fantasy in the mediation of social and historical experience. She develops a theory of the subject, and by extension, of the spectator-observer, not based on desire and its constitutive origin in ‘lack’ (the Freud-Lacanian route of castration anxiety), but centered on memory and its – politically undetermined yet patriarchal dominated – gaps, absences, and unmarked traces. In its most polemical form, this trauma theory would be a charter for victimhood and the politics of blame, in which various ethnic minorities, gender activists, or sexual preference groups stake claims and demand rights from society, the State or the privileged elite: sometimes in solidarity with each other, but on occasion also competing against each other.13 Radstone analyzes why there has been such a resurgence of victimculture, relating it to the fact that authority and power structures have become increasingly ungraspable as well as to a corresponding inability to tolerate internal conflict or cognitive dissonance. My reading of Nurse Betty will reflect some of Radstone’s concerns. By reviving the concept of fantasy in connection with trauma theory, Radstone is trying to redefine the theoretical and political ground about the status of fantasy, which was once thought of as the motor of political action – the May 68 slogan of l’imagination au pouvoir – but is now more often blamed as the engine that drives consumerism, without giving up referentiality (as does deconstruction, or when fantasy is opposed to reality). On her account, the scope of trauma theory extends well beyond grappling with the aftermath of historical traumata, which suggests that its emergence in the humanities is a symptom for which the reasons may have to be sought elsewhere than in war and genocide alone. The juncture of fantasy and trauma (as opposed to fantasy and desire), and the slippage between fantasy and reality, but also between recall, (false) memory and amnesia do point to a fractured relation between an inner psychic reality and outer public reality. Media and cinematic representations are filling the gap, but as I am arguing, they do so in the mode of performative failure or ‘failed experience,’ as another word for trauma, which brings me back to Nurse Betty.

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Nurse Betty – Which Story, Which Genre? To briefly recapitulate the action of Nurse Betty: Betty Sizemore (Renée Zellweger), a waitress at a diner in the small Kansas town of Fair Oaks, is married to the abusive and shifty second-hand car-dealer Del (Aaron Eckhart), but spends much of her time both at home and at work watching the daily television soap opera A Reason to Love. One day, unobserved and undetected, Betty is witness to two men identifying themselves as Charlie (Morgan Freeman) and Wesley (Chris Rock) entering the house, tying up her husband, torturing and then brutally killing him, in pursuit of a shipment of drugs he had failed to deliver and tried to double-cross them with. The shock of the violent murder is such that Betty immediately represses the memory of the incident. Convinced that she is in fact a hospital nurse who was engaged to Dr. David Ravell (Greg Kinnear), a fictional character in A Reason to Love, she decides to leave town and drive to California in order to reunite with her ex-fiancé, taking her late husband’s car, unaware of the stolen drugs hidden in the trunk. Throughout her trip she is being tailed by the two hit men trying to recover what they consider theirs. In Los Angeles, Betty becomes involved with the soap opera’s production team, who believe she is an aspiring actress, pitching herself ‘in character’ for a part on the series, while one of her husband’s killers is convinced she is a calculating “cold blooded bitch” who has knowingly absconded with the stolen drugs. After a series of eventful encounters and violent confrontations, which, among others, confirm her aptitude as a nurse and eventually eliminate the hit men, Betty’s memory is restored thanks to another shock. Having been a sensation with her traumatic delusion, she is hired by the production to play the part of a nurse, while using her earnings to continue her studies to become a trained nurse. As this summary indicates, Nurse Betty is an unusual film, sustained by a wildly implausible premise. Yet in feel and some of its plot twists it is also symptomatic and almost prototypical for a certain genre-hybrid that has emerged since the turn of the century: It shows affinity with films variously labeled puzzle films or mindgame films, such as Pulp Fiction (1995), with which it shares both the cartoonish violence and a loquacious pair of gangsters; Memento (1999), with which it shares an amnesiac central protagonist; The Truman Show (1998), with which it shares the confusion of reality and make-believe; and EdTV (1999) with which it shares the celebrity-driven milieu of reality television. Other films that come to mind are The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Being John Malkovich (1999) and even the reallife confidence trickster comedy-drama Catch Me If You Can (2002), while one explicitly named cinematic subtext is The Wizard of Oz (1939), with Betty at one point referred to as ‘Dorothy,’ and a more in-joke reference is to the Coen Brothers’ Fargo (1996), when Charlie says “I see Betty as a Midwestern Stoic type. Ice water in her veins. A clear thinker. Probably a Swede or a Finn.” In other words, Nurse Betty heightens its hybridity as a neo-noir black romantic comedy to the point where the pile-up of genre clichés and stereotypes becomes a clever collision of seemingly incongruous plot situations and character traits.14

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The clash can easily be read as mirroring the heroine’s own mental state of splintered and multiple identities, which she does not seem to register as fragmented: an effect that transmits itself to the spectator for whom the generic confusion, too, gradually merges into a more or less seamless fusion of kaleidoscopic, but somehow fitting moments and incidents.

The Traumatic Incident: Trigger or Retroactive Confirmation Central to the idea that Nurse Betty is about trauma and its consequences is the extremely violent scene, taking place early on in a domestic setting, and acting as the trigger to produce in Betty a form of amnesia described as ‘dissociative fugue.’15 As the local doctor explains: “She’s in a kind of shock. I see all the signs of a post-traumatic reaction with possible dissociative symptoms … It’s a type of altered state … it allows a traumatized person to continue functioning.” Thus, the film specifically identifies Betty as ‘traumatized,’ which differs from other examples already cited, where a traumatic experience is either gradually revealed (Memento, The Truman Show) or merely implied (Forrest Gump [1994], with whose idiot savant protagonist Nurse Betty has in common the Zelig-like blending into whichever setting she finds herself in). The key scene of the murder is carefully set up. Before the two hit men turn up at Del’s second-hand car lot, they get their breakfast at the diner where Betty works. She elegantly serves them coffee and second guesses their preferences: to the astonishment of Charlie who admires the skill she shows when pouring the coffee without as much as taking her eyes off the television set.16 Later on, when Del accompanied by Charlie and Wesley, enters the house, nobody knows that Betty is home, engrossed as she is in her bedroom watching A Reason to Love on tape. The noise from the kitchen draws her attention, she “quickly snaps out the light and closes the door until it is open only a crack” and then watches as if through a peep-hole or camera obscura the grisly scene of Del being interrogated, tortured, and then scalped. When Del is finally shot in the head, Betty turns away, hitting the rewind button on her VCR to catch the soap opera scene she just missed.17 Later, when the local Sheriff and a reporter arrive at the scene to investigate the crime, Betty does not seem to be put out by what she has witnessed. She calmly packs a suitcase to spend the night at one of her friend’s house. In her mind, she has already become the character of the nurse in A Reason to Love, and in the middle of the night, she leaves the friend’s home, gets into Del’s Buick LeSabre, and takes to the road. Whatever her trauma, she acts like a winner, not a victim. If we therefore have to assume that Nurse Betty is neither the case history of a mentally disturbed or psychologically damaged individual, nor a satire on the dangers of watching too much television, but a film that uses Betty’s ‘altered state’ as a probe, or thought-experiment, then what is it that is being probed, what is the experiment about, and what becomes apparent by telling the story through

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this oblique angle of trauma? To put it in the terms indicated at the outset: is it possible that Betty’s ‘condition’ – in its apparently post-traumatic manifestations of dissociation, fugue, fantasy, and disavowal – is the solution to a trauma that precedes her husband’s brutal murder? In which case, what problems – or violent incidents – preceding her trauma, do the actions that Betty’s trauma triggers bring to the fore? An answer might come in two variants, apart from the most obvious one, namely that her marriage to Del was so traumatic that the violent manner of his death was indeed a liberation. Another kind of violence that Betty’s post-traumatic behavior highlights would be that in order to cope with contemporary (media-saturated, non-integrated, incomprehensible, dystopian) ‘reality,’ the more fluid and flexible a person is in negotiating what is real and what is imagined, what is true and what is false, what is authentic and what is performance, the more ‘successfully adapted’ and effective an actor (also in the sense of possessing agency) s/he can be. Alternatively: in order to cope with everyday reality, its boredom and routine, but also its disappointments, its unexpected contingencies and sudden catastrophes, the modern subject, in order to survive, needs to develop a ‘dysfunctional functioning’ personality, and acquire what I call a ‘productive pathology,’ such as being an amnesiac who is also a schizophrenic. Betty is just such a (‘Sizemore’ – larger than life) survivor, with her fantasy of being a character in a soap opera as her tactically productive pathology. Thus, the surface meaning of Nurse Betty would be that here is a woman who manages to ‘cope’ with her drab suburban life by learning systematically to split herself into two modes of existence (the fantasy-identification with the love life of characters in a soap opera) and a grim reality life (the marriage to Del, life as a waitress in small-town Kansas).18 However, the one sustains the other in a delicate but livable balance. Once the soap has become Betty’s primary reality, the marriage is just a bad dream: this would be the status quo ante at the beginning of the film. She still knows the difference between the two worlds which she navigates by a kind of division-of-labor schizophrenia, depicted in the film by having Betty watch television also at the diner, her work place, where the other waitresses happily play along with her addiction to A Reason to Love, for instance, giving her a life-size cardboard cutout of Dr. Ravell for her birthday. Del by contrast, ignores her birthday, in fact has sex with his secretary on the office couch, while Betty is working her shift at the diner. The film leaves no doubt that Betty’s day-to-day reality with Del is traumatic precisely to the extent that it obliges her to be in denial about the sheer awfulness of her situation in life. Del not only cheats on Betty, he in turn berates her and takes her for granted, and in every possible way behaves as a monstrously detestable husband. The thought of wishing him dead must have crossed her mind more than once.19 Being the sweet person that Betty is, having to suppress this thought is already part of her parlous state of mind, so that having her wish come true most probably also enters into the traumatic aspects of her situation and condition.

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Under these circumstances, disavowal becomes a ‘successful’ coping strategy, making Betty being in denial neither a sign of naivety nor a form of self-deception. Rather, her traumatic non-witnessing of Del’s murder is like a retroactive confirmation of a prior intention, so that the ‘dissociative fugue’ which Del’s gruesome death triggers is merely acting on the decision she wished she had taken earlier: to leave Del and head out to LA to start a new life, and finally to be the nurse her marriage to Del had prevented her from becoming. It is in this sense, too, that the trauma is not the problem, but the solution. If ‘being in denial’ turns out to be a coping strategy, an asset and a ‘productive pathology,’ what about Betty blurring the distinction between real and imagined? One answer is that such a blurring reflects the core dilemma of American domestic melodrama, where individuals – mostly – put unrealistic demands on themselves, of what their lives must be like, in order to be the good wife, perfect mother, helpful neighbor of the ‘American dream.’ The inevitable failure to live up to these demands may well generate, in the case of Betty, a compensatory split, which the traumatic incident did not cause but merely brought to a tipping point. It was her normal life that first created the ‘disconnect’ between different realms of experience, leaving them non-integrated, unassimilated and unmediated – other than by being hyper-mediated in the form of her daily dose of soap opera. Once Betty decides to pack up and go, she actually heals the traumatic rift, unifying herself around chasing the dream of romantic love. We can once more think of the lamp-post/lost key effect. Romantic love (as the lamp-post) would be answer to a life whose meaning (the key) had been lost somewhere else – well before the hitmen killed her husband – namely when she became the good wife and gave up on her personal ambition to become a nurse. In this sense, being able to transition between the real and the imagined is more a back-and-forth shuttle between reality and fiction, shown in the film not as the perilous slippage from the realm of truth to the land of make-believe, but rather as the ability to manage fluid identities and flexible performativities, as the situation demands, by effecting smooth transitions between actual and virtual, while, as it were, reaping the benefits that come from negotiating possibly equally valid ontological registers, in a world built on nothing more solid than the belief in self-perfection, while permeated by hypocrisy, lies, and fake news.

Fantasy Is on the Side of Reality Disavowal as dissociation and flipping the actual and the virtual are in this context strategies that ‘liberate’ energies and enable actions that might otherwise be tethered by hesitation or paralyzed by self-doubt and depression. It is the point where the category of fantasy can be usefully re-introduced, at first perhaps in the way that it is often understood: as one part of the dialectic between desire and fantasy, where desire projects one forward into unknown territory, while fantasy normalizes and

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thereby ‘defangs’ the dangerous side of desire. If “the fundamental role of fantasy [is] to provide relief from desire,”20 then it does so for the subject in the mode of either neurosis or psychosis. While the neurotic seeks in fantasy “a substitute satisfaction for what she or he does not find in reality” (a common reading of Betty’s addiction to A Reason for Love), the psychotic “confuses reality and fantasy and experiences them as equivalent”21 (Betty’s state subsequent to the murder). This, however, may be only one construction of the function of fantasy in Betty’s case. As discussed above, there are several theories of fantasy in relation to trauma: for Cathy Caruth, trauma is unmediated, so that for the traumatized subject, there is no room for ‘fantasy’ to intervene. For Susannah Radstone, fantasy is what ‘covers’ and mediates, and thus it helps to ‘work through’ trauma. For Slavoj Žižek fantasy is necessary for facing reality, but it is external to the subject: we are not free to choose our life-sustaining fantasies, they are the synthomes that make up the (irrational, unconscious, hard) core of our existence. If we apply Radstone’s interpretation of fantasy in relation to trauma to Betty and to the collective national fantasy usually referred to as ‘The American Dream,’ we can concur with Radstone that an event is experienced as traumatic when it “puncture[es] a fantasy that has previously sustained a sense of identity – national, as well as individual.”22 In the case of the United States, the dominant fantasy screens the culture had erected around itself were, according to Radstone, fantasies of “impregnability and invincibility,” buttressed by macho posturing and “male narcissism.”23 These were shattered by ‘9/11,’ which is why it was cast by the culture as ‘traumatic.’24 Similarly, in the case of Nurse Betty, it may be that the (female gendered) fantasies associated with the ‘American Dream’ were being pierced by the brutal violation of Betty’s home and domestic space, confronting her with ocular evidence of what she already knew: that her marriage was a sham. For as Radstone also points out, some traumatic events are ‘unimaginable’ precisely because “they had previously been imagined,”25 referring to the fall of the Twin Towers ‘playing’ like a Hollywood movie, while Betty, in the face of what she has just witnessed in her kitchen, presses the rewind button on her remote control. If, on the other hand, we follow the psychoanalytic theories of fantasy, where it is tied up with a deadlock around the demand/desire of the (big) Other, then trauma has a different function. Desire is here equated with lack or the void, opened up not by striving after what one wants, but by not knowing what the Other wants (from me). As Todd McGowan argues: “in the place of the question of desire that results in a perpetually dissatisfied subject, fantasy offers the possibility of satisfaction, albeit on the level of the imaginary. Instead of suffering the perpetual uncertainty of desire, fantasy allows the subject to gain a measure of certainty” – and one might add: of agency and control.26 Referring to a similar deadlock, Žižek explains the workings of ideology by way of fantasy, when he points out that fantasy is not the binary opposite of reality, but “must be placed on the side of reality,”27 i.e., it is the very means that allows us to function in reality, and not be overwhelmed or swallowed by it. Žižek calls this the fantasy

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frame of ideology, necessary as a ‘support’ for reality (in the sense of empowering one to take meaningful action): Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy construction which serves as a support for our “reality” itself: an “illusion” which structures our effective, real social relations … The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.28 Applied to Nurse Betty (and my reading of it), the heroine’s ‘psychotic’ (rather than ‘neurotic’) response is in fact the more sensible and socially adept, not only insofar as this turns out to be a ‘successful’ strategy with respect to some of her life ambitions, but because it unifies the subject around a productive pathology. Also, Betty’s ‘psychotic’ strategy illustrates another point, often made by critics when defending women’s penchant for soap operas, namely the extent to which soap operas are not so much killing time or even filling time, as they provide eminently useful lessons in living under neoliberalism.

Learning from Soap Operas In one of their quarrels that opens the film, Del dismissively but not without wit retorts to Betty: “[soap operas are] shows for people with no lives, watching other people’s fake lives.” For a fraction we might be tempted to agree with him, but since his remark occurs in an exchange about whether it is better for Betty to watch soaps, or watch (with) him play tenpin bowling, which is supposed to involve superior ‘skills,’ we may well switch sides. The argument, put forward by feminists and television scholars, is that soaps are not just comforters and palliatives, but actually train women for staying focused while dividing their attention, as well as for empathy and several other important social and nurturing skills.29 While men may not appreciate the type of engagement, patience, and focus it takes to ‘learn’ from soaps, Nurse Betty vindicates these skills, not least when as the fake nurse she saves a real person’s life. I’ve already mentioned the scene in the diner, where Betty’s skills at multi-tasking are appreciated by her customers, especially by Charlie (which foreshadows his admiration and idealization of Betty’s ‘grace’). The point is that Betty may be spacey and dissociative, but the flip side of the coin is her precise attention to detail: she displays what one might call the new aptitudes of a labor force turned service personnel: distributed attention, and the efficient execution of seemingly unrelated activities, such as pouring coffee, anticipating the wishes of her customers, while not taking her eyes off the television set. Betty is, in this somewhat under-appreciative environment of the local diner, an example of the female multi-tasker, showing special skills around ‘affective

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labor.’ As a waitress, she displays a remarkable ability to successfully and simultaneously process diverse information from various sources. One of the demands of the new economy that was beginning to become dominant at the time the film was released was to be able to manage data and to work the post-Fordist social ‘machine’ not only of customer relations but of the service sector quite generally: from nursing and home care to education and child rearing. In their performative dimension, these types of affective labor bring the domestic sphere of the home, the institutional sphere of the hospital or school, and the make-believe world of the movie and television industries rather closer together, indicative of the degree to which television soaps and melodrama are embedded in, but also are enabling a certain (wo)man-media-machine symbiosis, where the sincere and the simulated, the actual and the virtual merge and converge with the animated and the automated. Feminist cultural studies has had a special interest in soap opera spectatorship, leading to intriguing empirical fieldwork about the viewing behavior of daytime television audiences. It seems to confirm that viewers are fully aware of the fictional nature of what they are watching: they know the constraints of their own material situation but are nonetheless willing to suspend this knowledge for the sake of heightened participation. They appropriate ‘their’ soaps as a way to assert the right to something of their own, to claim time for themselves, and to own their pleasure in transgressive fantasies.30 Based on her analysis of fan letters, interviews, and conversations, Louise Spence has argued that the same viewers who give advice to the characters and send them wedding presents as if they were real, are also the ones who comment critically on a show’s evolving narrative, suggest new plotlines, object to the quality of the acting, or complain about sloppy writing.31 Equally relevant here is some of the more theoretical work, which focuses on the affective side of the soap opera experience, which also brings us back to trauma. It was Tania Modleski, who first argued that daytime television “plays a part in habituating women to distraction, interruption, and spasmodic toil”32 – necessary for women’s work in the home which requires dealing with several people of different ages and needs, coping with interpersonal conflicts and emotional problems, and functioning by distraction and not by concentrating their energies exclusively on any one task. Women, as Spence has observed, often perform chores while viewing television in a distracted mode.33 She, too, points out soap opera viewing enacts multiple interruptions, as each show follows numerous storylines that interrupt each other, commercial breaks interrupt with their own narratives (where mundane crises of housework are quickly resolved), and viewers might follow multiple soaps as well as other morning programs like quiz shows.34 Modleski maintains that “the flow within soap operas as well as between soap operas and other programming units reinforces the very principle of interruptability crucial to the proper functioning of women in the home.”35 If such interruptability, along with repetition, the rewind and distributed attention are properties (or symptoms)

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of television, trauma, and the neoliberal economy, then this would in itself constitute not only an apt rejoinder to Del’s quip about “people with no lives, watching other people’s fake lives,” but also confirm the idea that the representation of trauma has become a kind of homeopathic medicine for some of the consequences of neoliberalism, by training ‘resilience’ to precariousness and teaching ‘flexibility’ in the face of discontinuity, interference, non-integration, and sudden change.36

Nurse Betty as the mise-en-abyme of its Own Premise The arguments from soap opera about affective labor at home and in the workplace, about interruptability as a practical feature of women’s (and – one may now want to add – house husbands’) daily lives and as a formal feature of television series – as well as the fluid transitions from one reality to another under the sign of performativity and participation – all have one feature in common: they establish a symbiotic, interactive, and self-referential relationship between the soaps and their spectators, between the work of fiction and the world it purports to depict. This auto-reflexivity extends to the film itself and its eponymous heroine: Nurse Betty. One can speak of a mirroring relationship, but not in the sense of some version of realist reflection theory. Rather, what emerges is a system of feedback relays, where doublings and echo-effects build up and consolidate a free-floating but self-supporting structure of cross-references that amounts to a mise-en-abyme, where the film repeats its own premise (fusing into a back-and-forth actor, fictional character, social role, and fantasy figure), by enacting these reversals literally and metaphorically, and reproducing them as themes-and-variations.37 The process plays out on several levels, and presents itself in the form of character interacting across shared movie references, repeated scenes at identical locations, mistaken identities, or common obsessions across the differences of race, gender, occupation, and region. For instance, throughout the film Betty encounters very diverse characters who are all familiar with the show A Reason to Love: a housewife and a (male) reporter from Betty’s home town; Ellen, the waitress in an Arizona bar who tells Betty about the time she visited Rome: a visit that Betty will repeat and re-enact at the end of the film. While the waitress chose Rome to finally ‘be herself,’ in honor and memory of (and thus re-enacting) Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday (1953), Betty when in Rome watches an Italian-dubbed A Reason to Love in a café, which keeps the waiter spellbound and multi-tasking in exactly the way she was glued to the screen in the diner at the beginning while pouring coffee. The show is also followed by Rosa, the sister of the woman whose son was rescued by Betty, and from whom Betty rents a room; likewise the (female) attorney that Rosa works for in Los Angeles, who gives Betty an invitation to the party where the cast of A Reason to Love are celebrating and thus enables her introduction to ‘Dr. Ravell.’ Even Wesley, a criminal whose life is certainly not short of excitement, makes it a point to stay up-to-date with the series because he has a crush

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on ‘Nurse Jasmine.’ Toward the end of the film, Wesley and several other characters he is holding hostage come together in front of the television set in Rosa’s apartment to watch a tape of the latest episode, in order to find out whether Jasmine really is a lesbian, a revelation that so upsets Wesley that the hostages manage to retrieve a gun and fatally wound him. Similarly structured as a mise-en-abyme is Charlie’s growing obsession with Betty, which comes to mirror Betty’s with Dr. Ravell. The critic Roger Ebert was the first to comment on the parallels: Nurse Betty is about two dreamers in love with their fantasies. One is a Kansas housewife. The other is a professional criminal. The housewife is in love with a doctor on a television soap opera. The criminal is in love with the housewife, whose husband he has killed. What is crucial is that both of these besotted romantics are invisible to the person they are in love with … Under the influence of Betty’s sweet smile in a photograph, he begins to idealize her and to see her as the bright angel of his lost hopes … Once you understand that Charlie and Betty are versions of the same idealistic delusions, that their stories are linked as mirror images, you’ve got the key.38 Calling them “besotted romantics” is one way to understand what takes place between Charlie and Betty when they encounter each other in Charlie’s imagination at the edge of the Grand Canyon. It is a scene that doubles an earlier one, when Betty on her way to Los Angeles, also stops at the South Rim Lookout and has a vision of Dr. Ravell greeting her with a bouquet of flowers.39 The parallel is so explicit that it draws attention to itself, acting as the kind of structural support typical of Hollywood narratives, when scenes ‘rhyme’ or repeat themselves in variations. But it also invites one to put the two fantasies in relation to each other, where the apparent similarity turns out to be asymmetrical and inverted. Once he is convinced that Betty has the drugs he is after, Charlie forms an image of her as the femme fatale from a 1940s film noir, cold-blooded and calculating in the mold of Barbara Stanwyck of Double Indemnity (1944). It is an image (and not a fantasy) built up from information that Charlie gathers piece by piece, more like a detective constructing the forensic profile of a suspect. This profile is confirmed for Charlie after he sees Betty’s picture in the newspaper, in an article explaining that she is missing from home after having witnessed a murder. Remembering her deft service skills at the diner and remarking on her quick departure and deathly silence during the murder, when most women in a similar situation would have screamed, Charlie deduces that she must be “a cunning, ruthless woman.” He questions another waitress at Betty’s former workplace who shows him the photograph of Betty holding the life-sized cutout of Dr. Ravell: further proof to him that Betty had big plans for herself to move up in life.

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But Charlie’s is also an image formed and contaminated by the movies, and in the course of the film it undergoes a transformation into a fantasy: perhaps a less complicated, compensatory fantasy, of an old man regretting the errors of his past and wanting to make good with a pure angel of a woman. Having tracked down Betty’s grandparents, Charlie sees another photograph of her, aged 12 and dressed as a ballerina, prompting him to comment on her grace, perfect posture, and impressive poise. And after reading excerpts from the journal she kept as a child, the fantasy forms in his mind that casts Betty as his soul mate, sent his way to show him the path to salvation.40 That path leads directly to the vision he has of Betty at the Grand Canyon, leaning on the guardrail as he approaches and kisses her. Later on, during a phone conversation when trying to locate her in Los Angeles, we get a sense of how Charlie now thinks of her: “Betty Sizemore … blonde hair, a great figure … sort of a whole Doris Day thing going on. That’s what I said – Doris Day. You could see her working at the U.N., or something. ‘The U.N.’ United Nations.” As in his mind Barbara Stanwyck gives way to Doris Day, and Betty the femme fatale turns ‘wholesome,’ Charlie, the hard-bitten criminal and cold-blooded killer loses his grip on reality: coming too close to his fantasy turns out to be fatal for him (in contrast to Betty whose persistence in her fantasy ends up netting her respect and a career move from waitress to nurse to soap star). When Charlie and Betty finally meet at Rosa’s apartment, amidst hostage taking, a shootout, and the storming of the building by the police, he finally realizes how wrong he has been about Betty.41 Yet rather than kidnap or kill her and shoot his way out, he locks himself in the bathroom and puts a gun to his head. The fantasy literally kills him: taking his own life is the honorable thing to do for this professional, caught out by his imagined code of a Roman general falling on his sword.42 But not before he has some sage advice: “I want you to listen to me, Betty. People don’t lie when they’re about to die. You don’t need that doctor. You don’t need that actor. You don’t need any man. It’s not the 1940s, honey. You don’t need anybody. You’ve got yourself … and that’s more than most people can say.”

Successfully Failed Communication “You’ve got yourself” – the phrase is deeply ironic, especially when understood to echo what (moment before) Charlie reads to Betty from her own diary: “If who I am and who I hope to be should meet one day, I know they will be friends.” Yet by the logic of what I am proposing, “you’ve got yourself” is not at all ironic, since it confirms that the two Bettys are indeed ‘friends,’ but only because they have been living on parallel but separate tracks for so long. Maintaining disavowal, shifting between real and imagined, and deploying ‘fantasy’ as reality-sustaining rather than as realitydenying are Betty’s ways of owning herself, of possessing agency, and of being selfsufficient. Being and having yourself in the 21st century is to master strategies that a generation earlier would have been identified as ‘post-traumatic.’

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One of the reasons, however, why these post-traumatic pathologies work for Betty is that almost all her contacts with the world are based on creative misunderstandings or comic miscommunication. Once upon a time, communication functioned because both speaker and listener adhered to a number of mutually agreed rules or ‘felicity conditions.’43 Now, in our post-truth age of ‘fake news,’ those rules may no longer apply, having been replaced by a generalized form of performativity: if a lie is performed often enough, and repeated by enough different speakers, it now has a good chance of becoming fact. In John Langshaw Austin’s speech act theory, for instance, a performative utterance is neither true nor false, but can instead be deemed ‘felicitous’ or ‘infelicitous’ depending on the nature of the interpretation given: is it a declaration, a request or a warning. One could argue that Betty’s behavior and utterances are in a similar but also different sense ‘performative,’ insofar as with her conviction that Dr. Ravell is real and that she was once engaged to him, she wills a reality into being, which – under conditions of the industrial production of fantasy which is the Hollywood of daily soaps – does indeed have the necessary traction of constituting a workable reality. If successful communication is normally dependent upon speakers being sincere in their statements and commitments,44 then Betty qualifies, since she is manifestly sincere and authentic in what she says. So how can one square this particular circle, where she is both sincere and delivering a performance, while neither naïve nor delusional? Returning to my earlier point about the ‘parapractic’ nature of Betty’s response, and remembering that parapractic is the translation of Freud’s Fehlleistung, failed performance/performed failure, one can speak of Betty’s utterances or mode of verbal interaction as ‘successfully failed communication.’ It is one of the achievements of the script, and in no small measure due to Zellweger’s acting skills that the same statements and events can be understood in radically different ways, producing what could be called parapractic (i.e., unintentional) double-entendres:45 post-classical versions of classical Hollywood’s ‘structured ambiguity.’46 Enchanted by her professionalism in staying in character, George begins to improvise along with her, performing a duet as if in a Mozart opera. Each side slips into the fantasy space of the other and assumes they know what the other wants, and, in this way, the two successfully conduct an entire conversation: they are indeed lovers – inebriated by being in love with their own projections. Betty’s sincerity is productively misunderstood as method acting, and when George (‘David Ravell’) says: “God, I haven’t felt like this since I was with Stella Adler in New York. You’re so … real,” Betty answers, slightly piqued: “You never mentioned a ‘Stella’ to me … I would have remembered that name. The only Stella I ever knew was a parrot.” Real for George is still a category within acting, while for Betty the mention of a woman’s name stirs real feelings of jealousy, comically – but also aptly – deflected by the reference to a parrot, the only bird that can act as an echo, repeating, mimicking, and ventriloquizing human communication. Conversely, when Rosa, her landlady, finds out that ‘David,’ Betty’s ‘boyfriend’ is Dr. Ravell from A Reason to Love and she

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confronts Betty with this fact, Betty thinks Rosa is merely jealous and forgives her, knowing that Rosa has had some bad luck with men in the past. Nurse Betty is thus structured around a series of successfully ‘failed’ exchanges and improbably ‘successful’ encounters. Lines from the soap turn up in Betty’s conversation, but also vice versa: an exchange between Betty and George is repeated in an episode of the show. If Betty successfully incorporates George, the actor, into her fantasy of ex-fiancé David, George, too incorporates Betty into his own fantasy of trying to revive A Reason to Love which has gone stale, by bringing Betty into the show. His exchange with the show’s producer Lyla Branch hints at the dizzying depth of the mutual mise-en-abyme: It’ll be like live television! Let’s live on the edge a little. You and I can break the mold here! LYLA: I said I’ll think about it. GEORGE: Fine, but promise me one thing. If we use Betty, I want to direct those episodes. She’s my discovery. LYLA: Actually, she was my discovery … just like you. GEORGE:

Soon Lyla will characterize Betty’s story as “beyond belief” and therefore “perfect for us.” Eventually, she orders George to fly to Oak Falls, Kansas and get Betty to come back and join the cast. The reasons she has to bring Betty back are instructive, since they demonstrate why ‘parapractic’ double-entendres and successfully failed communication are so useful: twice the film shows that when communication is direct (face to face, ‘real’), the encounter ends in ‘death.’ I have already discussed Charlie’s fatal face to face with Betty in Rosa’s apartment; but Betty’s face-to-face exchange with George is only slightly less devastating. When “David’ does in fact direct Betty, and finally realizes she was not ‘in character’ but had indeed not realized the Loma Vista Hospital was a set (where scenes require different takes), he treats her with brutal disdain. He so humiliates her in front of the cast, with words that directly echo Del’s dismissiveness about ‘fake lives,’ that she not only walks out, but suddenly remembers Del’s murder: the protective fantasy collapses, but what appears is not truth, but its monstrous perversion: Žižek’s ‘traumatic kernel’ of the real.

Conclusion My argument has been that many of the symptoms we generally identify as posttraumatic – disavowal as a coping strategy, blurring the distinction between ‘real’ and imagined, erecting a protective fantasy screen and adopting psychic mimicry, and ignoring the felicity conditions of normal conversation in favor of psychotic doublespeak – are in Nurse Betty at one level presented as, precisely, post-traumatic. However, the fact that they appear in what I called a ‘black romantic comedy’ should alert us to the possibility that these symptoms are treated in the film not only as reflexive

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and self-referential, but more importantly: as highly adaptive strategies of survival in a new epistemological and ontological environment, irrespective whether we call it ‘post-modern,’ ‘post-truth’ or … ‘post-traumatic.’ The adaptive part is the reverse side of the traumatic coin: ‘in denial’ as a successful tactic rather than a form of selfdeception, fantasy as reality-sustaining rather than as reality-denying, psychotic double-speak as successfully failed communication or ‘parapractic double-entendres’ while mental conditions such as amnesia, schizophrenia, autism, bipolarity might turn adaptive when they are part of a ‘productive pathology.’ If the language of trauma is seen as not only ‘pathological’ but also as ‘parapractic’ and if some of its main features (dissociative fugue, schizo-splitting, etc.) can function as adaptive strategies, then perhaps we may not want to call it trauma, just as we may not want to continue to refer to ‘attention deficit disorder’ but value its symptoms as assets, for instance, as ‘rapid reaction and redeployment capability.’47 My provocative suggestion that trauma is the solution rather than the problem might no longer seem quite so strange and counterfactual, as when I announced it in my opening paragraph. The lesson to take from Nurse Betty (the film and the character) is indeed meant to be nurturing and healing: learn to live with contradictions, do not try to integrate, narrativize, or assimilate: in the traumatic element immerse!48 Instead of seeking coherence and identity, open yourself up to the contingency of the world, while keeping your innate goodness and grace. Beware of deploying trauma as the black box for the loss of meaning in your life and for missing explanations – the ‘victim’s’ way of retroactively attaining (negative) identity – but let trauma lead you to coping with the positive feedback that a world out of control has made into the new normal.49 ‘Accommodate, aggravate, and accelerate your symptoms’ might be the appropriate, but also appropriately risky motto …50 If Nurse Betty features a protagonist whose scary dedication to disavowing the difference between artifice and life is mistaken for method acting, it is perhaps no wonder that the old problems of realism and reference in the arts are revived in the digital age, where the fake looks more ‘real’ than ‘the real thing,’ but where we have become so suspicious of authenticity and where the image worlds we inhabit are of such universal duplicity, that it is axiomatic that “the real thing” must be fake. As with films like The Truman Show, The Matrix (1999), or Being John Malkovich, the intriguing questions at the heart of Nurse Betty are philosophical: the (epistemological) problem of ‘other minds’ and the (ontological) problem of ‘other worlds’ – in the first case, what would it mean to ‘know’ what goes on in someone else’s mind, and what proof do I have that others actually exist, and in the second, if the world I live in is merely someone else’s fiction, where would the ‘outside’ be, from which I could ever see that I’m trapped ‘inside,’ if not inside someone else’s inside? Trauma as a topic in culture – understood as the non-integration of experience, as ‘failed experience,’ as the unexpected return of a violent incident, or the sudden opening up the void – would be the affective, subjective side of such radical philosophical skepticism. In this sense, trauma is the problem and the solution: a symptom

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of sensory overload (not least of ‘too much’ media stimuli), it is the fever that purges, before it breaks. But post-traumatic symptoms are also adaptive responses to these forces of disorder and positive feedback loops, which is why I mentioned antibodies, homeopathy, and the pharmakon. Watching soap operas, as depicted in Nurse Betty, is not just a primer for the ‘justified life of the housewife’ or the escape fantasy for a traumatic or traumatized existence, but reveals itself as part of a survival kit for the ‘next society.’51 This next society is one where the majority, and especially housewives will have to survive not just in a fully mediatized, high-tech environment, but navigate everyday life between creative flexibility and economic precariousness, between affective labor and boredom, between low-level anxiety and variable attention. To function, one needs to be ‘flexible’ and ‘creative,’ also towards yourself: among our skill-set will be dissociation and numbness, amnesia and rapid reaction. If so, ‘the new normal’ is to be ‘traumatized.’ And popular entertainment, so my argument suggests, may be more attuned to this condition than high theory acknowledges. If Albert Camus said, “we must imagine Sisyphus happy,” then perhaps Nurse Betty says, “we must imagine trauma a happy state of being.”

Notes 1 On Freud’s notion of trauma as a way for an organism to cope with excessive stimuli, see my “Freud as Media Theorist: Mystic Writing-pads and the Matter of Memory,” Screen 50, no. 1 (2009), 100–113. 2 For Walter Benjamin, shock and trauma were the very indicators of ‘modernity.’ See his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). I examine this aspect more closely in “Between Erlebnis and Erfahrung: Cinema Experience with Walter Benjamin,” Paragraph 32, no. 3 (2009), 292–312. 3 Advertisement for Nurse Betty in the Billings Gazette, March 27, 2017. The tag ends with: “Traumatized by a savage event, Betty enters into a fugue state that allows – even encourages – her to keep functioning in a kind of alternate reality.” 4 See Elsaesser: “Between Erlebnis and Erfahrung.” 5 The joke is often referred to as “the streetlight effect.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect and https://quoteinvestigator.com/ 2013/04/11/better-light/ (both accessed March 3, 2020). 6 Among the most important interventions are: Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October 78 (Autumn 1996), 106–124; and Wulf Kansteiner, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor,” Rethinking History 8, no. 2 (2004), 193–221. 7 Thomas Elsaesser, “Postscript to Trauma Theory: A Parapractic Supplement,” in German Cinema: Terror and Trauma (New York: Routledge, 2014), 306–323. 8 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 9 The term ‘posthistoire’ is seen as a new phase in human culture, where the old worldviews no longer apply and new ones are not yet articulated or accepted. Posthistoire does not mean that nothing happens anymore, but that a certain historical momentum in the West (of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) has exhausted itself. But the

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10 11

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13 14 15

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concept of the posthistoire must be distinguished from that of postmodernism. A philosopher of postmodernism such as Jean-François Lyotard argues that the end of the grand narratives of progress breaks with the Hegelian model of history as the self-realization of reason, while philosophers of the posthistoire such as Francis Fukuyama are more likely to appeal to Hegel and proclaim the ‘fulfilment’ of History. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 3–4. Susannah Radstone, “Introduction” and “Screening Trauma: Forrest Gump, Film and Memory,” in Radstone, ed., Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 1–22 and 79–107, as well as her introduction to the “Screen Dossier on Trauma,” Screen 42, no. 2 (Summer 2001), 188–193. These reservations apply more whenever trauma theory enters the realm of activism and militancy, whereas Caruth initially formulated her theory mainly within the context of and in response to a series of crises in literary studies and feminist theory. See Thomas Elsaesser, “Trauma Theory: Postmodernism as Mourning Work,” Screen 42, no. 2 (Summer 2001), 193–201. See also Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996). One commentator called it “a virtual bran-tub of genres, from soap opera, road movie and crime drama to comic satire and romance.” Christopher Bigsby, Neil LaBute: Stage and Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 194. “Dissociative fugue is a psychological state in which a person loses awareness of their identity or other important autobiographical information and also engages in some form of unexpected travel … In addition to confusion about identity, people experiencing a dissociative fugue state may also develop a new identity.” See Psychology Today, last reviewed 01/22/2018. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/conditions/dissociative-fugue-psychogen ic-fugue (accessed March 3, 2020). Script: CHARLIE: Miss? Betty leans forward, grabs the coffee pot and moves in front of him. Without taking her eyes from the TV, she pours the java, which somehow lands in his cup without spilling a drop. CHARLIE (cont’d), Very impressive. That is very … (turning to younger man) Did you see that? CHARLIE (cont’d), Thank you. Could I bother you for a little more …? Before he can even finish, Betty is topping him off with milk. Nurse Betty, screenplay by John C. Richards and James Flamberg, story by John C. Richards (Shooting Script 3/9/1999). www.dailyscript.com/scripts/nursebetty.html (accessed March 3, 2020). Ibid., script: Betty points her remote at the dining room and clicks it, as if trying to make the image disappear. Finally, she gives up, slowly turning away from the carnage and aims at the TV. A Reason to Love pauses on the face of David Ravell and Betty sits in absolute silence. “Kansas” in this context has become an overdetermined signifier, not just because of The Wizard of Oz, explicitly mentioned. It is also in the title of one of the key books analyzing the right-wing lurch of Middle America: Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). The town’s law-enforcer, Sheriff Ballard, when investigating Del’s murder, actually raises the possibility that Betty herself might have ordered Del’s assassination. Script: ROY: You said a woman couldn’t have done it. BALLARD: A woman can write a check.

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20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

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ROY: So you’re saying Betty Sizemore – our Betty Sizemore – who you were in swing choir with – has now hired somebody to scalp her husband in her own kitchen while she watched? You’re amazing. BALLARD: It’s just a theory … just ’cause I’m thinking it don’t mean I like it. www.dailyscript.com/scripts/nursebetty.html “The fundamental role of fantasy: to provide relief from desire.” Todd McGowan, “Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway: David Lynch’s Lesson in Fantasy,” Cinema Journal 39, no. 2 (2000), 54. Ibid., 53. Susannah Radstone, “The War of the Fathers,” Signs 21, no. 1 (Autumn 2002), 468. Ibid. By contrast, there were voices that saw the attack as ‘America’s chickens are coming home to roost,’ i.e., that US policies in the Middle East had stoked up the kind of anger and resentment that contributed to radicalizing Islam. The phrase originated with Malcolm X referring to the Kennedy Assassination, but was then applied to 9/11 by Obama’s former pastor, the Reverend Jeremy Wright, in a sermon entitled “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall,” delivered in Chicago on September 16, 2001. See the socalled “Jeremia Wright Controversy.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_ Wright_controversy (accessed March 3, 2020). Radstone, “The War of the Fathers,” 469. Todd McGowan, “Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and Its Vicissitudes,” Cinema Journal 42, no. 3 (Spring, 2003), 36. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology [1989] (London: Verso, 2008), 44. Ibid., 45. The pioneering studies are Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Routledge, 1982); Louise Spence, Watching Daytime Soap Operas: The Power of Pleasure (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 2005). Spence, Watching Daytime Soap Operas, 166. Ibid., 156. Spence labels the popular image of soap opera fans as unable to distinguish between fiction and reality the “Nurse Betty syndrome.” Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance, 92. Spence, Watching Daytime Soap Operas, 63. Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance, 92–94. Ibid., 93. Since a soap opera is never-ending, and there are no conclusions, it can sustain a sense of uncertain outcome, but also of endless possibilities. In this sense, too, it trains resilience. For a psychoanalytic take on melodrama and non-closure, see Joan Copjec, “More! From Melodrama to Magnitude,” in Janet Bergstrom, ed., Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 249–272. “Throughout, Nurse Betty plays this kind of juggling game. The central plot conceit of Betty’s fugue … is a latter-day take on amnesia, that reliable old standby of soap writers; and more than once, as we’re about to chortle at some especially crass line of dialogue, it’s revealed to be a quote from the soap-within-the-movie, A Reason to Love. Following soap-land’s penchant for providing running updates for new viewers, the film’s characters constantly define each other in neat encapsulations: Charlie talks of Betty as ‘sort of a wholesome Doris Day figure.’” Philip Kemp, “Nurse Betty,” Sight and Sound 10, no. 10 (October 2000), 53. Roger Ebert, “Nurse Betty. Movie Review and Film Summary” (September 8, 2000). https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/nurse-betty-2000 (accessed March 3, 2020). Script: Betty walks to the rail and gazes out at the canyon. Turning her head slowly, as if expecting it, she sees DAVID RAVELL leaning on the rail about twenty feet away, clutching a bouquet of roses. Betty starts toward him… he starts toward her… A magic

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41 42

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44 45

46 47 48

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moment… Shattered when a black sedan appears, inching its way along. She freezes. David vanishes, and… An ELDERLY MAN helps his wife out of the car and snaps her picture in front of the canyon. Betty moves away. Script: CHARLIE (reading from Betty’s diary), When I grow up I’m going to become a nurse or a veterinarian. I always want to help people and value all life, be it animal, plant or mineral … Script: BETTY: I’m not really who you think I am. CHARLIE: No one is, honey. Script: CHARLIE: Betty, I don’t wanna shrivel up alone in some stinking prison. No way. I’ve got some professional pride. And I don’t want anybody else to get the credit for taking me out … When a Roman general knew a battle was lost, he’d throw himself on his sword. The phrase was introduced by J. L. Austin. See Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1985). The authors provide an updated summary in “Relevance Theory,” UCL Psychology and Language Sciences (2002). https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/publications/WPL/02papers/wilson_sp erber.pdf (accessed March 3, 2020). Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 82, 85. A fan of the film puts it very well: “I especially enjoyed all of the scenes featuring Zellweger and Kinnear’s [George/David] characters playing off one another. These scenes featured some of the better double-entendres that I’ve heard in a while. One person talking about one thing, while the other person believes them to be talking about something entirely different. Pretty funny and extremely well-written and acted in this case.” International Movie Data Base, User. https://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0171580/reviews?ref_=tt_urv (accessed March 3, 2020). On structured ambiguity, see Thomas Elsaesser, “James Cameron’s Avatar: Access for All,” The New Review of Film and Television Studies 9, no. 3 (2011), 247–264. “Thrilling utopian idea to just ‘play on the keyboard of trauma,’ embracing all the post-traumatic symptoms like delusions, dissociation etc. What a world this would be …” Julia B. Köhne (personal communication). A paraphrase of Stein’s words in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899), chapter 20. The full passage reads: “A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns … The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up … In the destructive element immerse.” (Norton Critical Edition of Lord Jim [New York: Norton, 1996], 129.) Neil LaBute, who began as a playwright before becoming a director, did not write the screenplay of Nurse Betty. Asked why he made the film, he said: “Was I trying to say anything with the film? Make a comment about the way reality and fantasy can so easily bend to our will, or bend us to its will? Point out that sometimes we have to go a little crazy to find ourselves? Probably.” Cited in Bigsby, Neil LaBute (‘Introduction,’ ix). This is evidently a partly ironic nod towards the philosophical current known as ‘accelerationism.’ The term originated from the management guru Peter Drucker, but in the sense I am using it here, I borrow it from the German sociologist Dirk Baecker’s influential Studien zur nächsten Gesellschaft [Studies Towards the Next Society] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007).

6 SAVING PRIVATE RYAN

Retrospection, Survivors’ Guilt, and Affective Memory During the 1980s and increasingly since the 1990s, the genre of the biopic or the historical epic has changed in several ways, taking on darker hues and the more somber colors of doubt and defeat. But in parallel with re-enactments of famous battles having become popular pastimes for local communities, many historical sites have evolved into ‘theme-parks’ rather than memorials, to cater for tourists hungry for experience: this, too, provides an interface with Hollywood blockbusters. What is notable, however, even among such event-movies, is the degree to which such films tend to narrativize not recent historical events per se, but the emblematic photographs or documentary images these events have left behind. Whether one think of Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991 – utilizing the Zapruder footage, re-shot), Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima/Flags of Our Fathers (2006 – the [staged] Raising of the Star Spangled Banner) or Uli Edel’s Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (2008 – the Benno Ohnesorg photo, Rudi Dutschke’s shoe), it seems that major productions have become, to a surprising degree, a prime cultural site where an emblematically historical image or media memory is not only constructed and subjectively refracted through individualized protagonists, but simultaneously deconstructed, worked through, or narratively ‘processed.’ If history now survives thanks to its iconic images, taken by newsreel cameramen, agency photographers, or even at times, by amateurs, these images are not simply reproduced, inserted or re-enacted: they become newly contextualized, and bound into narratives. Sometimes they are explicitly shown as fakes or forgeries; or they have come down to us due to accident and mistaken assumptions. Yet what for a historian would undermine their credibility, and thus their value as record and evidence, merely seems to increase their fascination, their power to seduce, to capture

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our attention and to lodge themselves in our minds: their double layer of ‘refracted mediality’ becomes, as it were, a kind of symptom, marked by the compulsive return that Freud noted when individuals have to cope with trauma and loss. One might call this the ‘agency’ of images or the ‘performativity of certain public events, meaning thereby that they possess a special reality-status that exceeds the common distinction between fiction and documentary, without thereby constituting either a special ‘truth’ (the much invoked and much-lamented photographic indexicality), or a new ontology of the real (such as Jean Baudrillard’s ‘copy without the original’). Yet their epistemically uncertain character endows them with a special power, capable of generating a new kind of authenticity in and for the cinema in which they feature – but also of keeping alive a trauma yet to be ‘worked through.’ In what follows I propose to look at another of these films utilizing historical material, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) (hereafter, SPR), in order to examine what narrative, technical, visual as well as extra-textual resources a Hollywood blockbuster deploys, first, in order to create the kind of ‘authenticity’ that makes of such a film an affective memory for its spectators, and second, what sort of ‘trauma’ it recreates, in order to make this memory indelible, lasting, bodily present. The question will be: how are historical events of major cultural significance brought emotionally close to an audience: making them participants either in the mode of witnessing, or of ‘being there.’ while at the same time inscribing the events in a life-narrative relevant for the individual spectator at a given point in time? Several distinct, but interrelated entry-points suggest themselves, which I shall first summarize, before going into each in more detail.

How Does the Film Produce ‘Authenticity’? Assuming that ‘authenticity’ is one of the key affective components in the relation between film and spectator, is ‘authentic’ the feeling that there is a natural or demonstrable correlation between a person and an action, or an action and a situation? But, then, what sort of correlation: purposive, plausible or performative? If the latter, is it registered, in a war film, by the close-up of the suffering protagonist, whose ‘shell-shocked’ face looks straight into the camera?1 The direct look suggests that in this case, ‘authentic’ is the quality we ascribe to our experience as spectators, rather than to the logic of the events. What is at stake is less historically documented knowledge than a cinematically produced convergence between seeing, feeling, and embodied experience. As James Cameron said about Titanic: “I wanted to convey the emotion of that night, rather than the fact of it.”2 Or as Tom Hanks puts it in the bonus package (“Into the Breach”) that comes with the DVD of SPR: “we wanted to show the look behind the eyes of the men.”3 As almost every commentator pointed out, SPR proved innovative and intense in its depiction of the D-Day landing battle scenes by creating an extraordinary sense of presence, of the ‘now’ of battle, which ushered in a new understanding of the war film: what was felt to be ‘authentic’ was the atmosphere of chaos and

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total confusion, induced in the spectator by the absence of establishing shots, and of the usual visual hierarchy of size and scale that conveys to the spectator an orientation in space and place.4 Less often commented on is the fact that DreamWorks also tested another kind of authenticity in their promotion of the film. The film’s production company sought out the comments of veterans of WWII, who testified to its authenticity, with some even walking out of the film because it brought back too many memories.5 An oral history project reports the following exchange: The actual D-Day scene was noisy, that’s all I can remember. I don’t remember anybody saying anything I could hear. CHUCK HURLBUT: [Spielberg] tried to make it that way because that’s the way it was. JIM BURKE: That’s what I’m saying, it’s pretty typical. That’s what was so authentic about it, that’s all. CHUCK HURLBUT: The first half hour. If anybody asks me I say the first half hour was true …6 To this day, it is customary to show SPR on tv on Veterans’ Day in the US.7 JIM BURKE:

I recall that when the film was first shown in Amsterdam, the Dutch distributors offered free tickets to veterans from the Resistance, as a special homage to their deeds and sacrifices. After seeing the film, these veterans duly concurred that this was indeed what it was like. Presumably, their own memories of wartime had lost the fight against the films and photographs a long time ago, but by conferring authenticity on Spielberg’s film, they were able, retrospectively, to write their war experiences back into media memory, when members of their family had long ago tired of listening to their reminiscences. Authenticity is here generated by a double process of legitimation: the veterans legitimate the film’s constructedness (by endorsing its veracity), while the film legitimates the veterans’ memory (by making it once more newsworthy). Two ‘fictions’ (a narrative fiction and subjective memory) sustain each other, in order to create a new kind of ‘evidence.’8 SPR’s quasi-visceral response and bodily impact, however, owes more to the new generation of digital special effects than to either veteran’s memory or trauma.9 Previously deployed in the genres of horror, fantasy films, or animation, but not generally thought suitable in films of historical re-enactment and reconstruction, these digitally rendered scenes of spilled guts and bloody carnage have their own traumatizing force.10 Spielberg, while pushing the envelope of ‘graphic realism’ in the direction of the hallucinatory, the grotesque, the gross, and the disgusting, also played on more subtle, elemental registers: What made the battle scenes hallucinatory, for instance, was the way the soundscape included moments of total silence, the auditory correlative of either drowning under water (as we see in some of the most harrowing scenes) or having one’s hearing shattered by the blast of an explosion. An interior space is created that captures the spectator in mimetic helplessness and terror.

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How Does the Film Produce ‘Affective Memory’? Three notable strategies playing an equally important part in generating an affective memory are, first, symbolic rituals of commemoration, second, symbolic acts of generational transfer, and third, acts of substitution. The film is framed by an elaborate (if also quite enigmatic) ritual of commemoration, presumably depicting one of the 1994/5 visits by veterans to the Normandy cemeteries, in order to pay tribute to their fallen comrades on the 50th anniversary of D-Day. The commemoration, however, is itself part of a double displacement: first, SPR explicitly marks a generational shift, by emphasizing from this opening, framing scene, that here the war experience is being transmitted from a grandparent to his grandchildren.11 This makes sense, because it is the generation of the veterans’ grandchildren that composes the film’s target audience, with the generational ‘break’ occurring between 1993 and 1998, when the children of the ‘baby boomers’ entered adolescence. Other key films of cultural memory had been made a few years earlier, by Spielberg himself and one of his close associates: Schindler’s List (1993) and Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1993). SPR thus literalizes this transfer of generational memory in its framing story, by showing the audience to itself: the young are the bystanders, i.e., the audience in the film and of the film (grandpa and grandma, the daughter/son-in-law, grandchildren … the day out – to visit a Normandy cemetery/to watch a WWII movie). A mimetic doubling with a bodily aspect is being enacted, across a cascade of spatio-temporal breaks and continuities. The third shift is both temporal and representational. It is the transfer of wars: in SPR, WWII is seen through the (cinematic) rendering of the Vietnam War. Even though the story precedes the Vietnam debacle ‘in history,’ cinematically, chronologically as well as ideologically SPR as a WWII film of 1945 comes after Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), after Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986) and after Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987). It means that the parent generation is also included, as if in the United States, every generation has ‘its’ war, and Hollywood is in charge of these wars’ memory. The particular affectivity of the war in Vietnam (confusion, rebelliousness, loss, disorientation, defeat) is made to resonate in one of the previous ones, that of WWII: America’s last righteous, honorable, and victorious war. One wonders why? What is the purpose behind this move, and why does it work, why is it accepted?12 One answer is that in order to represent the by now unfamiliar (‘WWII’) through the familiar (‘Vietnam’) generates for a Hollywood production the appropriate ‘cultural memory’ for significant historical events, in the form of an ‘affective memory’ already in place. While for an earlier generation, historical blockbusters created cultural memory by adapting a popular novel (Gone with the Wind, From Here to Eternity) which generated the familiarity of the déjà vu on behalf of its cinematic reincarnation, contemporary audiences are provided with the appropriate cultural resonance through old genre films, grainy television footage, or in the case of SPR, agency photographs (Robert Capa’s D-Day landing photos). One might speak of a photographic uncanny: the migration of

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iconic/iconographic motifs from the archive to the screen smoothly effects the transfer that allows obsolete media to act as the familiar-defamiliarized prosthetics of media memory. Many of the blockbuster films dealing with recent wars or traumatic historical events, such as Vietnam films like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, the Kennedy Assassination in JFK, the Holocaust in Schindler’s List, the war against the Japanese in Pearl Harbor (2001), Letters from Iwo Jima/Flags of Our Fathers, the Somalia crisis in Black Hawk Down (2001) are thus cinematic essays of the photographic uncanny: they make familiar images once more strange, and bring distant events closer to home.13 What is remarkable is not only how many of the films seem to circle around one or two, or sometimes a whole series of well-known, familiar photographic images, now embedded in the narrative, embodied in the characters, and emblematic for the historical event. Equally noteworthy is the fact that such images are excessive in relation to photographic representation as well as for the purposes of realist cinematic narrative: they are the ‘traumatic’ kernel of media memory. In the bonus package of the DVD, which contains the already cited background feature ‘Into the Breach’ (written by Chris Harty, but clearly endorsed by the director), Spielberg explicitly combines the transfer of generations, the transfer of wars, and the transfer of Hollywood war genres, when he details at great length how it was his own father’s (Korean) wartime amateur movies, along with watching John Wayne as the hero of so many WWII films set in the Pacific that made him take an interest in WWII. Spielberg also points out that almost all his films feature segments relating to the 1940s, and that among his first movies as a teenager, two were directly inspired by what he heard and saw from his father about WWII and the Korean War. His father, too, is interviewed, explaining how they created special effects from dust-clouds to simulate explosions.14 What kind of narrative integration (in the sense of Erfahrung, as opposed to Erlebnis) does the film propose? (The Erlebnis belongs to history, the Erfahrung belongs to the family.) I recall leaving the cinema feeling that there was little, if any, sense of a triumphant ‘mission accomplished’ at the end. Rather it closed on a downbeat note, shot through with loss and grief, as well as leaving open a good many questions: moments, utterances and incidents that do not quite come together, that break the dramatic arc or prevent the spectator from experiencing full ‘closure.’ This unusual degree of inconclusiveness for a Hollywood blockbuster, with a narrative that was widely criticized for its ‘lame’ second act, deserves further comment. The frequent points of irritation, both within the film, voiced by the characters, who stage various kinds of dissent and rebellion, and by the audience, many of whom felt discomfited by an episodic, meandering plot, are not just the result of moral ambiguity about the place of heroism among such carnage, or the after-effects of shell-shocked survivors’ trauma translated into in- and re-action. Rather, these irritants might be called the film’s parapractic supplements as they surround the aims of the mission. Such parapractic supplements – performative moments of excess or incongruity – encompass the roundabout but repeated

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debates about the futility, the waste, and nonsensicality of the mission, where a group of men have to endure danger, hardship and mostly get killed for the sake of saving one private among tens of thousands, who – to cap it all – does not want to be saved. Felt by many of the soldiers to be either propagandist and self-serving, or demagogic and cynical, the mission and its purpose are openly questioned. But why does the film thematize this issue so insistently? Is it to create cognitive dissonance in the spectator? Is it to point to the absurdities of war in general, or is it an intimation of the asymmetrical warfare yet to come, when we think of Iraq and beyond, here projected back onto an earlier war? My suggestion is that we locate the reasons for parapractic supplements also in a highly ambiguous command, addressed to Private Ryan, and uttered by the dying Sergeant Miller: “Earn it!” Is this a call to action and valor? Is it a demand rather than a command, and thus an impossible burden? Or is it perhaps a curse? Certainly, in the framing scenes, we do see James Ryan look bent-down, burdened, and distraught, as if it was this phrase that resonated most on this day of commemoration, and about which he needs the reassurance of his family. Did he earn it? Did he live a good life? But what does it mean to ‘earn’ survival? Did he deserve to survive, when so many good men, like Sergeant Miller had to die? How can Miller’s and the others’ deaths be a heroic sacrifice, for the sake of one life, and the honor of the nation, if ordered under the cynical or ill-advised circumstances of this particular mission? At the affective level, therefore, we find a profusion of unexpectedly ‘downbeat’ emotions: guilt, regret, shame, confusion, and anxiety. Are these the affects for another, quite different entry-point? Could it be that the non-sequiturs and both ‘success’ and ‘failure’ of the mission are markers that respond to an implicit question that only the 1990s could put to WWII, with hindsight and in retrospect: not what and whom did we rescue, but also ‘what did we not rescue, whom should we have rescued?’ The film has to hide these questions, has to camouflage the ‘what if’ or ‘if only’ hypothetical structure of the film’s proposition, so as not to counter the overt message, which is to ‘honor’ the veterans and celebrate America’s selfless sacrifices. This would be the parapractic element, the interstitial narrative, manifest also in the odd ‘mistake” of a peculiarly pale and tattered flag, which flutters as pale as the old Ryan looks distraught. The overt message of the film – about honoring the surviving veterans, and remembering the dead – seems thus to be doubled or suspended by another narrative, which also has a literal, bodily instantiation, as well as leaving all kinds of other mental and moral traces. If historical memory is about commemorating heroism, in this case it might also commemorate defeat – but what kind of defeat? The film – coming shortly after the public and official celebration of 50 years D-Day and eventual victory over fascism – is itself conceived as a memorial. This is symptomatic, since in this day and age, memorials are rarely made of stone or marble, and more likely to be of celluloid, on video or digital. Yet it raises the question of what kind of memory/memorial is being constructed or preserved in SPR?15

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My argument will therefore be that SPR tells two stories in one, where the second neither quite confirms nor contradicts the first. Rather, it makes visible within the overt story, a hypothetical or virtual covert story, told in a different mode or aspect – that of ‘what might have been/should have been.’ Put slightly differently: the second story is the ‘conditional’ or ‘hypothetical’ of the first. Both stories are focused around rescue and redemption. Which is why it has to create a parapractic memory.

Framing the Introduction: Steven Spielberg and the Rear-View Mirror Film-buffs have long noticed that Spielberg has a scene with a rear-view mirror in almost all of his films. Yet to my knowledge, no one has so far commented on the scenes’ thematic significance. It began in Duel (1971) and Sugarland Express (1974) and can at least be traced to War of the Worlds (2006). Perhaps the best-remembered rear-view mirror scene is in Jurassic Park (1993) with the telling inscription ‘objects are closer than they appear,’ when we see one of the Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaurs ominously approach the car with its passenger: the mirror here encapsulates the ineluctability of the situation, framing the prehistoric past as both threat and future fate. Likewise, there is a strikingly elaborate rear-view mirror assembly at a crucial point in Saving Private Ryan. While it clearly has a narrative and a tactical function, this rear-view mirror lends itself to a number of metaphorical constructions: indicative – in a film that already has a very unusual flashback structure – not only of the retrospective view, of a past enfolded in the present, and thus, in the case of James Ryan, seeming closer (in memory) than it appears (in history), but also of a peculiar kind of agency.16 The rear-view mirror makes its appearance at a point in the film when Sgt Miller firmly takes command, the first scene where we can ‘identify’ the main protagonist of this story, after being initially misled – by way of a parapraxis – into thinking that it is the old man at the grave morphing into his younger self at the D-Day landing. Thus, the first decisive action taken by the character who is to become our main protagonist, played by the featured star in the film, Tom Hanks, is to peer into a rear-view mirror. This rather odd reversal of agency: it, too, a parapractic supplement?

Generating Affective Memory through Context and Substitute SPR bridges authenticity and ‘media memory’: both embed a past event in a present context. But they are also enacted in the film itself, which adds another dimension. On the one hand, the framing scene ties historical memory to family and kinship (even to procreation), thus generating an affective, as well as cognitive bond, through shared spectatorship: the film can give Erlebnis without Erfahrung. The fact that the affective bond contains shifts, sleights of hand, or what I call moments of both trauma and parapraxis, makes it the more efficient: cognitive dissonance and irritations ‘anchor’ and ‘stabilize’ recall. But as hinted, there may be a further agenda: the film

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conducts a sort of murmuring dialogue with itself around debt and obligation, guilt and gratitude, which while tied to the purpose of the mission (that of ‘saving’ Private Ryan) remains also floating and unsecured, never quite settling. The film itself thematizes memory and recall, pointing out that you need ‘context,’ i.e., ‘places’ (loci), in order to remember ‘faces.’ James Ryan has difficulty remembering the faces of his brothers, and Miller gives him an example of ‘context’: substitution creates context creates recall: a lesson in mnemotechnics, while Edith Piaf sings about the face of the man who left her. Thus, context for the film is not only the reception context, i.e., the transfer from granddad to grandchild, and one war for another: in addition, the film itself draws attention to the importance of context when it comes to memory, as if it was reflexively aware of its own function in creating a new type of contextual memory for WWII, and that it has an active stake in the ‘memory wars’ of the 20th century, and thus plays a significant part in ‘making history.’

Saving, Rescue, Sacrifice SPR is exemplary for the complexity of the rescue motif, a staple of American cinema, from The Searchers, via Taxi Driver to Apocalypse Now, Forrest Gump to Saving Private Ryan and beyond (Black Hawk Down). In most cases, these are stories of reluctant rescue, where the object of rescue does not want to be saved (the Vietnam village: “we had to destroy it in order to save it”).17 In Apocalypse Now, Kurtz doesn’t want to be brought back; in Forrest Gump, Forrest rescues his commanding officer who doesn’t want to be saved, but he fails to rescue his buddy, who dies; neither in The Searchers nor in Taxi Driver does the woman want to be rescued from her chief or pimp. In addition, an offensive war (e.g., Vietnam or Iraq) is represented as a defensive war. This indicates their complicated ideological position, and the importance of WWII which can be seen as America’s last defensive war (saving the world from fascism). Yet what becomes clear is that America can only go to war once it has persuaded itself that it is defensive (of national interest, of ‘democracy’). This is true of all modern wars (they are – humanitarian – interventions, and thus rescue missions): rescue of Bosnians or Kosovo, rescuing Iraq from Saddam Hussein, etc.: this ideological maneuver is condensed in the rescue scenario of so many American war films: not only SPR, but the ones listed just now: Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Blackhawk Down and – more recently – Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Also, in most cases, the rescue leaves out the causal context or crucially reverses agency. Rambo rescues POWs, while in Platoon and other Vietnam films it is suggested that saving the boys (‘no man left behind’) is what the war is all about. It conveniently forgets that the Americans were not asked by the Vietnamese to enter their country in the first place – nor for that matter, in Afghanistan or Iraq. In SPR, it is the whole purpose and context of the save and rescue mission that it is put in doubt, especially by the men who, one after the other, lose their lives in

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the action, which all of them see as absurd and unnecessary, and again, the person to be rescued doesn’t want to be saved. Both SPR and Schindler’s List are Spielberg’s redemptive rescue missions. Except that in SPR the rescue is more paradoxical and contradictory, and the redemption is ethically loaded (“earn it”). The writer Louis Menand has summed up the rescue scenario in Western mythology in general and in Spielberg in particular: There is nothing unconventional about this story [the rescue scenario in SPR]. It is possibly the most tried and true dramatic plot known to man: a life is saved. Spielberg himself has used it many times before. It’s the plot of both of his other big historical pictures, Amistad (Africans saved from slavery) and Schindler’s List (Jews saved from the Holocaust), but he’s used it in some of his big science-fiction entertainments, too, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind (persons missing and presumed dead turn up on board a spaceship) and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (alien dies and comes back to life, twice). It is a plot guaranteed to melt stone. It’s the little girl pulled safely from the well, the hostages’ release, the last-minute reprieve for the innocent man. It is Christ risen from the tomb. No audience can resist it. You may walk out of the theater rich with indignation at the shamelessness of it all, but you cannot get rid of the lump in your throat.18 Especially for Spielberg, rescue is a constant metaphor: in his films, he rescues even that which never existed (the extra-terrestrial, the Indiana Jones saga – see also below), while Sarah Harding is (reluctantly) rescued from once-existing dinosaurs in The Lost World. Schindler’s List is the ultimate rescue scenario, complexly coded both within Talmudic ethics (“Whoever saves one life, it is written as if he has saved all humanity”) and within generational succession (at the end we see how Schindler’s people had observed the biblical injunction ‘be fruitful and multiply’). Cinema as the redemption of historical reality in a new key is the thesis of Drehli Robnik, when he brings together Siegfried Kracauer and Steven Spielberg: As part of a national commemoration policy, intent on enforcing an interpretive hegemony over history, one can best understand this ‘rescue cinema’ as contributing to the reconstruction of a national ‘victory culture.’ damaged by the Vietnam trauma. Blockbuster cinema, which offers itself as a sort of intermedial miracle machine for memory formation – i.e., a reflexive reworking while simultaneously immersing itself in the affectivity and materiality of the past – regards the Second World War as fertile terrain for both reflecting on and making a spectacle of its own performativity. Reassessing the [nation’s] historical past implies a reflexive approach also to film history, especially to the history of the war film genre.19

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Kracauer’s idea of cinema as the ‘redemption of physical reality’ undergoes a significant shift, once the rescue motif becomes a license for rewriting history as redemptive, in the sense of writing back into it, also what might have been or should have been. However, finding a narrative, a genre or a style that allows the virtual to coexist alongside the actual should not be dismissed out of hand, especially if the intermediary stage involves the notion of ‘sacrifice,’ itself understood as redemptive. Sacrifice is a complex form of agency: ‘negative’ to the point of destroying the subject, but (retroactively) ‘positive,’ insofar as it endows this self-obliteration with a higher purpose. In the context of the war-genre, sacrifice reconciles the spectator to sad emotions and unhappy endings, providing a potent and pleasurable counter-force to loss and wasted lives. This is the thesis of Carl Plantinga and others, who claim a notion of self-sacrifice to be ‘hard-wired’ or ‘evolutionary’: it converts meaninglessness into meaning, first and foremost death itself.20 Freud’s ‘working through’ of loss and trauma can be translated into a cognitive ‘reframing’ of unpleasurable emotions and events, so that these come to be seen, in a different, more meaningful and satisfying context. A key example would be an accidental or unintended ‘death’ (say, through ‘friendly fire’) that can nonetheless be redeemed by recoding it a ‘sacrifice’ (for someone, for the nation, for the public good). This is the central cognitive conversion that often has to take place in war, after mass shootings or natural disasters. In Hollywood films, sacrifice is a way of returning agency to heroic individuals, but also a way of renewing the social contract, obliging disparate individuals to bond or to unite, or leading to a redefinition of the individual’s place and role in the community. What distinguishes SPR is that it refuses the heroic version of sacrifice, charting a more post-heroic path towards meaningless death, even in war. This post-heroic position would be one that shifts the terms, elevating rescue (of a comrade) and death (in the course of an unwanted and meaningless rescue mission) not to a sacrifice for a national cause, but endows it with the redemptive forces of memory and commemoration, addressed to the future – thereby also leaving open the possibility of rewriting as redemption, and thus inserting the space of the hypothetical into the actuality of events. A comment in a military review hints at such an opening, mentioning the bleached and tattered flag, even as it forecloses its more subversive message with an appeal to patriotism: How to square the understated mission (just get the job done and go home) with the patriotic zeal of the good war since 1945? Saving Private Ryan provides one solution: it links devotion to cause with [the revivifying powers of] memory. Critics of the film who find nothing new in its portrayal of Captain Miller’s squad are correct – it does evoke the mixed ethnic squads on lonely missions found in such classics as A Walk in the Sun and Battleground … However, where the film departs from its predecessors is in the memory scenes, when the aged James Francis Ryan visits the American cemetery at Omaha [Beach]. Critics who stress the thematic significance of patriotism are

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also correct (if sometimes overzealous): these scenes do convey something of the meaning of the war. “Earn this,” Captain Miller’s dying admonition to Private Ryan, the elderly Ryan’s entreaty to his family to tell him he was a good man, and the shots of a sun-soaked, almost colorless, American flag that bookend the film suggest that American soldiers fought to secure the chance for a good life for everyone, a life free from the evils of Nazism.21

From Rescue to Redemption: Retroactive Anticipation Thus, as with other Hollywood films, we have to see in SPR a purposively structured ambivalence in the rescue scenario, and interpret it within the multiple contexts of generating cultural memory through ‘event movies’ and blockbusters: At one level, SPR creates its own specific memory, by performing rituals of commemoration and enacting or literalizing the very process once more within the narrative. First, memory is enacted and encapsulated by gestures and acts of handing over, passing on, transfer and substitution. It starts in the opening of SPR, with the paradox of the eyes that were not present, as ‘our’ eyes, but also as the inner eye that needs to remember, thereby finding a metaphor not only for Tom Hanks’s words about seeing it ‘from behind the eyes of the men’ who were there, but also finding a visualization for the idea of transmitted as well as inherited memory (the ‘burden’ of memory). The eyes of the unknown actor playing the older Ryan merge into the recognizable eyes of Tom Hanks, thus confirming the logic of the substitute and delegation: Miller dies for Ryan and Ryan survives to compensate for the death not so much of his brothers, but for the squad and its captain. Cultural memory is memory by proxy, rather like ‘death’ and ‘survival’ in the film are figured by substitute and proxy. Second, memory is given ‘context’ – here in the form of objects (letters, dog-tags). These objects are shading into commodities and souvenirs (the Apilco milk jug, Edith Piaf’s voice, the espresso machine): the film is already preparing, as it were, the nostalgic site of the future, where these traumatic events we are witnessing in the ‘present’ can be commemorated. Even this somber setting is not free of the theme park and merchandizing aspects of the blockbuster as event-movie and physical re-enactment, aspects that Alison Landsberg elaborates as ‘prosthetic memory’22 and Marita Sturken discusses in her ‘Tangled Memories.’23 The temporality of the blockbuster or event-movie, I have argued elsewhere,24 is complex and multilayered, providing not only a kind of life calendar but also rescues Erfahrung in fetish form, or by way of ‘scripted spaces,’ protecting it, but also redeeming it from traumatic Erlebnis: the rescue missions make cinema not into ‘art’ (as in the first 50 years), but the substitute for history: by generating a particular forms of media memory, whose most typical temporality I would argue, is that of retroactive anticipation.25 As indicated, SPR was conceived as an ‘event movie,’ in the sense that it was a prestigious production, with a veritable campaign of publicity and pre-sell, in

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order to become a kind of memory implant for survivors and veterans, but also to subsequent generations. In addition, it was conceived of functioning in a wider context, that of the transmedia strategy of post-classical Hollywood, creating films that have their own life cycle and internal memory. Comparable to franchises like Toy Story or Shrek that percolate through the conglomerates, SPR gave rise to the Band of Brothers television series. Especially the historical or commemorative blockbuster has a particular relation to time and temporality: it binds a specific past to a present, by way of echoes and moments of recognition, while searching this past for premonitory signs of the present.26 It is therefore not surprising to discover that SPR is saturated with scenes and moment of the future anterior, or retrospective anticipation. Once again, in another verbal set piece, the film takes time out to comment on its own strategy of future anterior and retrospective anticipation. When James Ryan refuses to go home and says “these are the only brothers I have,” Miller’s sidekick Horvath says, “Half of me thinks he is right, but the other half thinks: ‘What if by some miracle we stay and actually make it out of here? Some day we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful shitty mess. If we do that we’ll all earn the right to go home.’” To once more quote Robnik: With this key monologue by Tom Sizemore’s Sergeant Horvath, Saving Private Ryan joins Hollywood’s ‘survivalist’ history films of the millennium; here the formation of memory pitted against the destructive forces of history appears as a problem, because dependent on the affirmation of the event as a singularity and sheer a-historical miracle - as a ‘miracle’ and above all as ‘the one decent thing …’ In the original English version of the film, the key scene of the monologue is even more pronounced, as the sergeant’s speech contains the title of the film.27 Is this a new ‘temporality’ between the future anterior and the future perfect? Are we witnessing the creation of a particular ‘memory-tense’ for the present, which is unique to the cinema? Possibly a version of the ‘time-image’ so typical of modern cinema, according to Gilles Deleuze, such retroactive anticipation corresponds neither to the ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ of psychoanalysis, in the case of loss and trauma, nor is it Aristotelian catharsis and the replacement of ‘negative’ emotions of sadness into ‘positive’ aesthetic values of pleasurable closure, as argued by Carl Plantinga, in the case of Titanic. Instead Sergeant Horvath’s monologue suspends individual agency, while handing it over to the futurity of collective memory. Tucked inside the words is also an acknowledgment that the conversion of meaningless death into ‘sacrifice’ has become all but impossible in the post-classical combat film, as wars (“this godawful shitty mess”) metastasize into never-ending conflicts between asymmetrical forces and combatants. What Spielberg manages to convey is that this WWII situation we

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are witnessing is in fact no longer a conventional (Hollywood) war: there is no battlefield as such, but the invisibility and constant proximity of the enemy: take the sniper as icon of such proximity, and the suddenly collapsing wall, with the Germans sitting behind it in a quasi-domestic scene, as the visceral index of a deadly intimacy. Wars are no longer about winning territory or defeating a specific enemy. The battle scene is the city, house-to-house fighting – this is the war as we now see it on television: five years before the second Gulf War (the first 1991 Gulf War was experienced under a different visual regime: smart bombs and bird’s eye view, mostly) Spielberg is already visualizing modern ‘total war’ and its spectatorial regime which oscillates between ignorance and disorientation, between embeddedness and immersion. To return to Sergeant Horvath’s scene: it is the clearest indication that SPR’s ‘heroic narrative’ of sacrifice is doubled, overlaid, and even subverted by another narrative, provisionally called the ‘post-heroic’ narrative of passing on, of deferring any possible meaning of history to the futurity of memory, in a gesture of retroactive anticipation. However, my further argument is that in SPR this transfer, this passing on, this obligation of re-enactment through future commemoration has a different, perhaps darker, but also more sublime and subliminal dimension, amounting to something like a second, counter-current narrative. The challenge Spielberg takes up in SPR is not only how to maintain the semblance that a series of stupid deaths can still be converted into sacrifice, but to create gaps and lapses, within which another, not just post-heroic but even shameful narrative has to become visible – all within the same overall story world and diegetic space. This second narrative is embedded in the framing narrative and crystallizes in the command “Earn it” – and it is conducted in what I have called the parapractic mode: scattering clues of retroactively meaningful ‘mistakes,’ irritations, non-sequiturs, reversals. In this scenario, the key paradox is that Ryan doesn’t want to be saved, but Miller dies saving him, so Miller enjoins on him to earn it – which we have to imagine as being readable also in reverse: a Miller needs to be saved, but isn’t, and a Ryan feels forever guilt and shame for not having saved him. How so, and why? On the surface, the older Ryan is visibly tormented by doubts about whether he ‘earned’ it? And the first answer is ‘yes’: by showing survivor’s guilt, and (as in Schindler’s List), by doing God’s command “go forth, be fruitful and multiply.” i.e., by producing a large number of offspring. These are two ways of affirming the particular community to which the other’s (i.e., Miller and the squad’s) sacrifice commits him.

The Second Narrative, the Conditional Tense, and Temporality of the First? Both the challenge and the answer take us to the second story that the film is telling, and which might be said to be the condition, as well as the conditional, of the first. One could start with the obvious, and obviously naïve question: if this film is an allegory of the beneficial role of America’s military might, using the

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moral high ground of the WWII’s fight against fascism, in order to create a new moral high ground (and political rationale) for America’s wars of the late 20th and 21st century, why does Spielberg use a mission (historically grounded in fact or not) that for all concerned is patently absurd, wasteful, an exercise in military ‘spin’ and propaganda? The mission is acknowledged as such by almost all concerned, and especially offset by the invocation of its Ur-scene: Abraham Lincoln’s letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby from Boston in 1864: itself surrounded by error, and suspected to have been a forgery?28 The clue, as indicated, lies in the opening scene (which, as mentioned, acts as a framing device), whose peculiarity and strangeness has, to my knowledge, never been fully explained.29 We follow (at a distance) a man with a loping gait, looking not that old but also definitely not young (he must be 70 years old). So what is going on? A traumatized man: what is he traumatized about? Not that he has lost three brothers, or that he fought in WWII, one of America’s finest wars. What he seems traumatized about, if one follows his words and body language, is that he has survived. His loping gait suggests the burden of having to live with the knowledge of the sacrifice of other men. As we only realize later, at the end of the film, what burdens him is the dying Captain Miller’s word “earn it” that haunts him like a curse. This man Ryan suffers from survivor’s guilt: a phenomenon we usually associate not with WWII combat – the last just war America has reluctantly fought – but with the Holocaust, an event in which the United States played a much more problematic role. Saving, rescue, as well as survival (and survivor’s guilt) in a historical context are now inextricably bound up with the fate of the Jews. When visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. (opened in April 1993), this is how the Holocaust is ‘framed’: by American troops liberating the camps. The fact conveniently forgotten in this narrative is that the Americans in WWII (nor their Allies) did not fight this war, in order to save the Jews, on the contrary: they were more or less indifferent to their fate, even though they knew about it. Phrasing it like this is, of course, to apply the wisdom of hindsight. The hindsight – or the war’s reconstruction, its gradual rewriting since the 1990s says that this war was fought against Nazism, and Nazism was evil because of the extermination policy against the Jews. Yet what Spielberg’s film does is much more interesting: it is not weighing up one truth against another (the ‘real’ aim of WWII versus the Holocaust Museum version, now the ‘truth’ with respect to the US’ guarantee of Israel’s safety, and its own complicated relationship to genocide on its own soil). Instead, Spielberg has found a story and a narrative form that can tell both stories simultaneously: one as it were, enfolded in the other, one visible in the hollows’ of the other, one absent, but present in the form of performative failure (the original meaning of parapraxis). This suggest that the opening of SPR is as much about the post-Auschwitz shift of our historical-cultural memory and the meaning and purpose of WW II, including America’s role in the modern world since, as it is about this particular battle, as horrific and senseless, or as heroic and world-making it might have

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been. Does the post-Auschwitz shift in our historical awareness not necessarily also imply the sense of shame and guilt of not having saved the Jews? What if the first part of SPR constituted the ‘performative re-enactment’ of the overt message of the mission (the heroic memorial to patriotism, bravery, and sacrifice), while – time-shifted, and with the hindsight of the 1990s – the second part embodied the knowledge of what was also missing in this war? This other scenario is indicated by the strange merger, at the end of the opening scene and the beginning of the flashback, of two perspectives: that of the eyes of the aged Ryan, and the eyes of the youngish Miller on the boat. Thus, as another dimension in all the seemingly futile discussions about what was the platoon’s mission, there is another message that remains bracketed out, but not forgotten.30

The Cinema Can Rescue What in History Was Abandoned SPR is itself part of the cultural memory of the WW II, and thus part of the mediated reality that Hollywood – and especially Spielberg – has passed off, and passed on, as history. Yet the film also performs, this is my argument, the failures of history, and it does so through gaps it opens up between memory, trauma, and history. Rather than presenting an agreed-upon version of the national narrative, it leaves traces and fragments of something else – which may explain why the story at the core of the film is such an enigmatic and deeply paradoxical tale of rescue and redemption. Over the past 50 years, WWII has been rewritten to figure the Holocaust as the central event of the war. The US did little to stop the Holocaust, and so, a film like SPR, inscribes this absence or omission indirectly, via a rhetoric of inversion: SPR, a film about the ‘wasteful’ mission to save Ryan, can be read as a film about a much more valuable rescue not having been undertaken: the saving of the Jews. What becomes visible in SPR, like a watermark or a palimpsest is Schindler’s List: The gaze that makes the subject of SPR visible as a new perspective on WWII is one filtered through the optics of the Holocaust, which is to say through the optics of Schindler’s List. What is offered to a mass audience as the meaning, across the paradigms of “rescue” and “survival.” has been pre-formulated: SPR presents the key event of the D-Day landing as the site of senseless mass-murder and exemplary for traumatic modernity.31 On one level, then, SPR is a ‘prosthetic memory machine’ for the heroic narrative of ‘sacrifice.’ On another level, it also figures a prosthetic trauma – the trauma of the non-rescue of the Jews. Yet the key to the film’s historical-memorial efficacy resides in what I have earlier called its capacity to re-traumatize through substitution. The missing and irretrievable referentiality of the Jews’ doubly tragic fate – sent to their death by the Germans, and abandoned by the Allies – can only be represented in and

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as ‘trauma’: trauma provides the necessary ‘absence as presence’ that can include the hypothetical and the ethical: the virtual in the actual can thus enter filmic discourse only via ‘parapractic media memory’ – more specifically, the survivor’s guilt of the aged Ryan, which is to say, the incomplete or even failed conversion of Miller’s death into sacrifice.

The Rear-View Mirror Once More The rear-view mirror is thus also the view from hindsight more generally, in the sense that it captures not only what was, but also what might have been and should have been. As a perceptive reviewer of Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can puts it: In an immensely elaborate shot, Frank looks at his mom, her husband, and her daughter through the windshield of the squad car. They pose like the holy family in their doorway, Christmas lights arching overhead. A red revolving light sits on the dash, to remind us that we’re in a police car. Frank’s crushed face is reflected in the rear-view mirror. They’ve got everything; he’s got nothing. They’re sitting down to turkey, he’s headed for Buchenwald.32 The question, why did we not ‘save’ the Jews?, is both a skewed question and a correct question, skewed because it de-historicizes the situation (‘fighting fascism’) and a correct one, in light of the fact that the Holocaust is now the event that ‘centers’ the 20th century, and thus brings WWII into its gravitational force field as well.33 The rear-view mirror closing the opening segment is thus a mise-en-abyme of two spaces, but also the prism in which are caught two wars and two imaginaries (German and American). Not so much a montage but a moment of allegorical suspension, like a ‘freeze frame,’ now functioning as another iconic ‘still’ image: this time one that Spielberg himself contributed to the WW II memory, because it is the explicit reference to the metaphoric mirror that the film wants and needs to be, if it is to save not just Private Ryan but the American Public’s National Memory.

Notes 1 Note the iconic role that Don McCullin’s photo by that title (“Shell-Shocked Soldier” [1968]), has played in Hollywood films over the past decades. See Hermann Kappelhoff, “Shell-shocked face,” Nach dem Film No. 7, Sept 2005. www.nachdemfilm. de/content/shell-shocked-face. 2 Carl Plantinga, “Trauma, Pleasure, and Emotion in the Viewing of Titanic: A Cognitive Approach,” in Warren Buckland, ed., Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies (Routledge: New York 2009), 238. 3 “Into the Breach,” in Saving Private Ryan, two-disc special edition (Dreamworks Video, 1998). 4 See Wikipedia entry on SPR: “This film is particularly notable for the intensity of the scenes in its first 25 minutes, which depict the Omaha beachhead assault of June 6,

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5

6 7

8

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1944. Thereafter it presents a heavily fictionalized version of a real-life search for a paratrooper of the United States 101st Airborne Division.” “Many veterans have been struck by the opening sequence, which shows the action from the point of view of a soldier landing on the beach. Some have turned to the Internet to talk about the movie. America Online has had 14,000 postings in chat rooms. At one point messages were coming in at the rate of 25 per minute, more than any time in AOL’s history, save the death of Princess Diana. A yet-to-be-constructed D-Day museum in New Orleans has been swamped with calls from veterans who want to donate everything from old combat boots to the flag from the USS Augusta. Because the movie has evoked vivid memories of the real war, the Veterans Administration has set up a hotline for veterans. So far, 172 veterans have called in.” PBS Newshour, August 3, 1998 (www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec98/ ryan_8-3.html) http://oralhistoryaudiobooks.blogspot.com/2012/07/five-d-day-veterans-talkin-saving. html “In observance of Veterans Day the Ipswich reCreation Department will present Steven Spielberg’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’ Friday, Nov. 9 [2012], 7 p.m. at the Ipswich Performing Arts Center, Ipswich High School, 134 High St. [Ipswich, Mass] Admission is free.” www.wickedlocal.com/ipswich/newsnow/x1831586865/reCreationDept-to-show-Saving-Private-Ryan-to-honor-vets#axzz2Q1g2BrBR A devil’s pact perhaps, of fabricating authenticity, but one where both sides book a gain, since the veterans, with their very survival and testimony, endorse the film, while the film endorses the meaning of their survival. Two quite different constructions of authenticity prop each other up, in an act of active cultural memory, whose embedded truth is that of a haunting return, and therefore intimately related to trauma – the limbo of images not laid to rest. “Saving Private Ryan is one of the most talked about movies this summer. However, counselors with the Department of Veterans Affairs worry that the movie will trigger post-traumatic stress in veterans.” (www.wral.com/news/local/story/127913/) “The landing-sequence of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) … plunges its audiences into a cinematic immersion in 20th century’s destructive materiality. It exemplifies a sensualist aesthetics which highlights some of the affinities between Kracauer’s and Spielberg’s conceptions of history, memory and film aesthetics.” Drehli Robnik, “Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence as Redemptive Memory of Things,” in Jump Cut. A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 45, 2002. www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc45.2002/ robnik/AItext.html We have to assume that James Ryan was 20+ then, and is 70+ now. WWII was forgotten, but became disinterred as a reaction to Vietnam War, when the US was ready to remind itself of its glory days as a military nation. By then, a shift from strategic questions to ‘experience,’ i.e., oral history, bottom-up history, witness history, everyday history: “By the 1980s, the atmosphere began to change in reaction against the 1960s and 1970s mentality of American self-criticism. The country became more open to the idea of past greatness, a trend personified in President Ronald Reagan, who went to great lengths to celebrate America’s historic successes, particularly during World War II. This is best exemplified in his ‘boys of Pointe du Hoc’ speech given in Normandy to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of D-Day. Both anniversary and speech helped spark a renewed interest in the war. At nearly the same time, historians began practicing the new military history, which highlighted the lives and experiences of common fighting men. Historians, archivists, librarians, museum curators, journalists, and history buffs started collecting questionnaires, interviews, and oral histories from thousands of World War II veterans, all to better understand the war they had fought. These efforts accelerated in the 1990s, as the war’s fiftieth anniversary approached.” Thomas A. Bruscino, Jr., “Remaking Memory or Getting It

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13

14 15

16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Right? Saving Private Ryan and the World War II Generation.” www.michiganwarstu diesreview.com/2010/20100302.asp “Put differently: The mark of confusion is now no longer just a feature of the transparent sign ‘Vietnam War’ – today, ‘confusion’ seems to apply to each and every ‘war experience’ (in the cinema), whether it is the Second World War, Mogadishu, Kosovo or Vietnam.” Jan Distelmeyer, “Transparente Zeichen: Hollywood, Vietnam, Krieg,” in Nach dem Film, no. 7: Kamera-Kriege. www.nachdemfilm.de/content/transparente-zeichen “Introduction by Steven Spielberg,” Saving Private Ryan, Disc 2, 60th anniversary edition (2004). “The role of SPR in justifying the Kosovo/ Serbian war (same year, and underlined by the fact that Spielberg received the highest non-military decoration from the military (The Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Public Service Award for his 1998 film Saving Private Ryan): Spielberg’s ‘masterpiece poignantly captured the stirring sacrifices of America’s World War II heroes, and paid living tribute to their indomitable fighting spirit,” Cohen stated in the award citation. The film is a “historic contribution to the national consciousness, reminding all Americans that the legacy of freedom enjoyed today endures in great measure because of their selfless and courageous actions.” Saving Private Ryan also prompted veterans to reveal personal war stories, Cohen said. “This film has not only provided an emotional catharsis for yesterday’s veterans, but a reminder to today’s soldiers that the ‘gift outright’ was many deeds of war, that blood and bone and soul was sacrificed so that a mechanized evil in Europe would not triumph and stamp out the fires of freedom,” Cohen concluded. Linda D. Kozaryn, press release, American Forces Press Service, December 8, 1999. The double frame of the film itself: commemorative ‘documentary’ – the visit to the graves in Normandy, the kneeling before the sacrifice, as America is about to celebrate the end of another war? The second frame is the one where the spectator is both disoriented and affectively assaulted: somatized and traumatized, along with the soldiers who tremble and vomit before they are landed – and are immediately killed. While reporting on the destruction of the Vietnamese provincial capital Ben Tre, the well-known war correspondent Peter Arnett quoted an unnamed US major in the Danville Register of February 7, 1968, saying “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Subsequently, variations of this quote were most often attributed to General Westmoreland. Louis Menand, “Jerry don’t surf,” New York Review of Books, September 24, 1998. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/sep/24/jerry-dont-surf Drehli Robnik, “Friendly Fire” in Nach dem Film, no. 7 (2005). www.nachdemfilm. de/content/friendly-fire Carl Plantinga: Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Bruscino, “Remaking Memory.” Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2004). Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Thomas Elsaesser, “The Blockbuster: Everything Connects, but Not Everything Goes,” in Jon Lewis, ed., The End of Cinema as We Know it: American Cinema in the Nineties (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 11–22. “The creation of empathetic, affective memory is the key role of popular cinema. Cinematic memory can wrest anecdotal ‘micro-narrative’ of rescue and survival from the grand narratives of history.” (Drehli Robnik, “Artificial Intelligence, Jump Cut). There is a special hubris attached to the media event and the Spielberg blockbuster:

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27 28 29

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Rescuing that which was Never Real … but this means it can also rescue what might have been or should have been real. Blockbuster production value and special effects allow both a ‘working on’ the collective memory, as well as its enactment, re-enactment (‘performance’), its instantiation and literalization (on the body). One might even call it a ‘re-traumatization’ in the sense of ‘prosthetic memory.’ The question is: does it preserve the idea of the ‘good war,’ celebrating victory culture, or is the affective and sensory overload, the creation of a visual and audio sense of ‘being there’ such, that the crucial media-effect is in fact to create a new type of memory: media-memory, working against narrative closure and instead, is itself ‘traumatic’ in its temporality, i.e., can be repeated, over and over again, perhaps instantiating what the cognitive sciences say about memory: that it is generated by constantly ‘refreshing’ a sense-impression, rather than ‘recalling’ an event? Drehli Robnik, “Friendly Fire,” in Nach dem Film, no. 7 (2005). www.nachdemfilm. de/content/friendly-fire www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/bixby.htm Since first publishing this essay in German, I have come across an article that does focus on the framing story: John Biguenet, “The false patriotism of Saving Private Ryan,” in The Atlantic, June 5, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/ 06/the-false-patriotism-of-saving-private-ryan/371539/ The Jewish themes and the Jewish soldier (Adam Goldberg) in SPR have not gone unnoticed. But comments are mainly focused on Stanley Mellish, the overtly Jewish character. He even has his own Wikipedia entry. See also Karen Jaehne, “Saving Private Ryan by Steven Spielberg,” Film Quarterly, 53, no. 1 (Autumn 1999), 39–41 Drehli Robnik, “Friendly Fire.” Alan Vanneman, www.brightlightsfilm.com/41/spiel.php See Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag AG, 2001).

7 PHILIP K. DICK, THE MIND-GAME FILM, AND RETROACTIVE CAUSALITY

The Power of the Posthumous It seems the family resemblance among so many of the films we label mind-games or puzzle films is no accident.1 Insofar as they have one common father, his name is unquestionably Philip K. Dick (PKD). Not only are some of the most absorbing cult films of the past three decades adaptations of Dick’s fiction (predominately short stories) – e.g., Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006);2 several other films revealing to their heroes that they are in fact living fake or manipulated lives, such as The Matrix (1999) or The Truman Show (1998),3 are like PKD clones, just as The Sixth Sense (1999), Vanilla Sky (2001), The Others (2001), Inception (2010), Dark City (1998), eXistenZ (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Looper (2012), to name a few, also have distinct PKD DNA: they all share his ‘what-if’ thought-experiment premises, are variations on his obsessions, or play riffs on his themes and motifs, such as “repressed memories, false pasts, strange doubles and simulated realities.”4 Such major direct and indirect influence on mainstream cinema seems particularly perplexing, given PKD’s outsider status during his lifetime, and his late recognition even as an exceptional sci-fi author: American author Philip Kindred Dick died in 1982 [at age 54], leaving behind an astonishing 41 novels and around 120 short stories. But despite his prolific output, and the success of the adaptations of his work – most famously Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report – Dick passed away in relative obscurity. Celebrated though he was in sci-fi circles, it was only in the 30 years after his death that his fame gradually grew – as of 2009, adaptations of his novels and short stories grossed an estimated total of $1bn at the box office.5

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As this passage implies, Hollywood was late in calling on his work, and only towards the very end of his life was Dick making anything like an income from selling his work. For “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” – the story that became Total Recall and in its original version (1990) grossed over $ 260 million – Dick was paid a derisory $1,000 in 1974. Though he negotiated a somewhat better deal over Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which became Blade Runner (1982), Dick had little time to enjoy these financial rewards: he died before the film opened. The enormous impact that Blade Runner and Total Recall would have on creating a special New Hollywood genre, the sci-fi noir thriller, raises the question in what particular sense PKD’s stories put him way ahead of his time and, in a manner of speaking, made him a “precog” (as the predictors are called in Minority Report), who, in the original story are ‘babbling idiots.’ For what strikes one is that both his reputation as a writer and his cinematic emulation, already during his lifetime, belonged to a special kind of afterlife: Comparable to a ‘serious’ writer like Franz Kafka, also specializing in ontologically precarious, liminal experiences, also virtually unknown during his lifetime and now instantly recognizable, Dick’s brand-name fame (his followers refer to each other as ‘Dickheads’) makes his a typical case of the posthumous. The condition of the posthumous, briefly described, implies a relation of the past to the present that no longer follows the direct linearity of cause and effect, or the genealogy of generational succession. Instead, it forms what can be called ‘a loop of belatedness,’ where the present rediscovers a certain past, to which it then attributes the power to shape aspects of the future that are now our present. I take my cue about the posthumous in part from Jeremy Tambling, who, referring to Walter Benjamin’s messianic conception of Jetztzeit or Now-time, explains the condition as follows: “The past is formed in the present, posthumously. It comes into discourse analeptically in relation to a present, and since it is read from the standpoint of the present, it is proleptic as well, in that it forms ‘the time of the now.’”6 In other words, we are in the temporality of the posthumous, whenever we retroactively discover the past to have been (possibly unknown to itself) prescient and prophetic, as seen from the point of view of some special problem or urgent concern in the here and now. My argument in what follows will be that not only Philip K. Dick’s fame and influence fall under the peculiar temporality of the posthumous: his whole work is an extended meditation on such loops of belatedness and retroactivity. To understand his work’s presence in contemporary cinema, therefore, it pays to analyze more closely the function of time and temporality in his work, not in order to add yet more words to the already enormous literature on PKD, but to try and understand this retroactive causality as symptomatic of our own situation, and as a clue to the nature of mind-game films and of their particular fascination for filmmakers and audiences. If I am right that such films embrace complex narratives and multiple temporalities in response to challenges arising from the cinema’s altered status in the digital world of the actual and the virtual, then the

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mind-game film as the brainchild or retroactively fathered bastard of PKD can be considered an especially creative solution, since flip-over switches from psyche into physis and physics into metaphysics are embedded in PKD’s literary genes, his lived life and speculative spirituality. He thus touched on something typical of our present (but in truth, perennial) predicament, namely the growing discrepancy between the belief in our central role (beneficial or nefarious) in the future of the planet, and our marginality to this future, in the face of the universe’s indifference to our species. Such awareness allows us to retroactively assign the gift of prophetic vision to Dick’s marginality, and why this lonely, and by all accounts deeply troubled, figure from the past now speaks to us in such a present (and prescient) way.

PKD in Hollywood In “How Philip K Dick transformed Hollywood,” Ryan Lambie recapitulates the first halting stages of Dick’s encounter with the movie industry, which actually began in a very un-Hollywood way, when Jean-Pierre Gorin – one part of the Dziga Vertov group, whose other half was Jean-Luc Godard – contacted Dick in 1974 to turn his 1969 novel Ubik into a screenplay. The finished script was never produced, although it was eventually published as a book in 1985. In the words of Lambie, the plot involves the “protagonist, Joe Chip … in a terrorist attack that appears to tear a hole in reality itself; everything is decaying at an accelerated rate, and time appears to be going backwards … Ubik deals with the subjects of dream-states and malleable perceptions of reality uncannily like Christopher Nolan’s Inception.” Besides ‘repressed memories,’ ‘false pasts’ and ‘strange doubles,’ the idea of ‘malleable perceptions’ encountering ‘holes in reality itself’ describes well the abiding preoccupations of Dick’s fiction, and fairly itemizes the ontological tremors that reverberate from his imaginative world into the mind-game genre. One should also note how different the directors – spanning the spectrum from mainstream to independent, and from maverick to art house – that Dick’s offbeat conceits, oddball characters, and post-apocalyptic worlds have inspired and appealed to. If it needed the combined talents of Ridley Scott, David Peoples and Douglas Trumbull to bring Dick’s universe to lugubrious life and give Blade Runner the wasted feel and run-down texture that has become the Dickean stock-in-trade in movie iconography, it should not be forgotten that Blade Runner, too, suffered its own belatedness and became only retroactively the touchstone and benchmark of sci-fi noir that its cult status now confirms. Yet Hollywood’s enthusiasm for Dick was not only tardy but also selective. None of the major novels has so far made it onto the screen (except Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), and the stories when adapted, often underwent decisive changes, showing the limits of what was deemed acceptable to audiences, as well as pointing up even more fundamental differences in what these stories were

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thought to be about. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that became Blade Runner, Dick leaves no doubt that Decker is himself a replicant or android, and it is this knowledge that gives his ‘inner life’ its poignancy and his actions and emotions their desperate air of futility. Total Recall takes from its source “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” only the first third and then various motifs, jazzing up the rest with chase scenes and weird locations. Dick’s story “The Minority Report” was also significantly modified from story to script to Hollywood blockbuster: The movie [Minority Report] departed significantly from the short story, which was a paranoia-soaked potboiler in which the police commander in charge of ‘pre-crime’ is framed by his new deputy, or his wife, or an ex-general, or all or none of the above. “I don’t think Phil was all that interested in the morality of pre-crime,” says Goldman, an executive producer of the film. But Spielberg was, and the movie ends with a ringing endorsement of the American justice system. “It’s very difficult to be true to Phil Dick and make a Hollywood movie,” Goldman observes. “His thinking was subversive. He questioned everything Hollywood wanted to affirm.” No matter. With the release of Minority Report, Dick became an A-list Hollywood scribe, a player, a member of the club.7 I will return to the differences between Dick’s story and its Hollywood adaptation at the end of this chapter, but with Paycheck, too, Hollywood held back: notably in the way it cast the relation between the company the hero works for and the US Government. The film modifies the original story’s allegiances: in Dick’s telling, Jennings is eventually aligned with the company which is trying to overthrow the (fascist, police-state) government; but in the film, he is on his own against the company; the FBI tries to help him, since both are working to expose the company. In other words, the enemy in Dick’s story is the government; in the film, it is the private company. For fans of Dick’s stories, the film adaptations of his works are thus a mixed blessing, with some sensing that the writer’s ideas have been betrayed or simply ignored, and others picking favorites (typically Blade Runner, Total Recall and A Scanner Darkly) and dismissing the rest.

PKD Themes and Their Topical Appeal Yet such picking and choosing should ideally be based on a reasoned assessment of what are Dick’s ideas and themes in the first place, and why they might be worth being faithful to. Fortunately, ever since Stanislaw Lem’s famous defense “Philip K Dick, a Visionary Among the Charlatans,”8 there have been many thoughtful and perceptive studies of his themes, such as, for instance, Carl Freedman’s summary: “the defining characteristics of Dick’s fictional worlds are commodities and conspiracies: for Dick, virtually everything in the socio-economic

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field is grotesquely (if sometimes humorously) commodified, while almost everything in the sociopolitical field is (most often terrifyingly) conspiratorial.”9 Put as tersely as this, Dick’s double-edged critique makes him a writer of interest to a Marxist scholar like Fredric Jameson, whom Freedman follows when arguing that Dick provides – in the vernacular idiom of pulp and sci-fi – a Californian version of Frankfurt School critical theory of late capitalism’s relentless reification of human relations. If consumer capitalism takes the final remnants of bourgeois interiority, including the emotions and conscience, into the realms of quantifiable value and monetary exchange, Dick’s brand of paranoia, as we shall see, can also flip over into its apparent opposite, a sullen acceptance of or total indifference to self-alienation (while still constituting a critique). For however paranoid they become, Dick’s heroes keep their own cool conduct,10 as semi-collusive culprits in their own zombified (‘android’) existence. Besides their ambitions and aspirations seducing them into Faustian bargains, as Jennings is in Paycheck, people in Dick’s world are willing to sell their dreams, their memories, and even future options on their own life. Alternatively (and this would be another flip-over), they have them stolen by government agencies or implanted (and erased) by ambitious high-tech companies. Such relentless reverse engineering of the human psyche makes Dick’s stories ring true to a later, Deleuze-Guattari-attracted and Foucault-fed generation, attuned to the shifts from disciplinary regimes to control societies, practicing their own post-Fordist performance-enhancing self-optimization, while fully cognizant of governmental and corporate data-mining, wire-tapping and intrusive surveillance techniques beyond even the wildest dreams of Dick’s drug-induced bouts of clairvoyant paranoia. To this post 9/11 generation, Dick’s cool is attributable less to his considerable predictive powers about the ubiquitous surveillance state, and derives more from the stoicism his heroes display in the face of all such enormities, and their resourceful matter-of-factness: they do not set out to change the world or rescue civilization, but simply try to stay alive, survive, and see another day.

Is Science Fiction (Our Only) History? Fredric Jameson has a double interest in sci-fi: as a Marxist, he has an investment in bringing about a better world, and therefore looks to science fiction as a genre that speculates about possible futures. But Marxists on the whole do not set much store by sci-fi, regarding it as ‘fantasy,’ rather than as reliable predictions of how we might, with our present actions, enable society to shape that better future. By contrast, Jameson has a greater faith in Utopias, as demonstrated in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), which contains three excellent chapters on Dick, where Jameson discovers in Dick, among others, a successor to novelists like Walter Scott, Manzoni, Stendhal and Balzac, creators of

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the 19th century historical novel.11 For Jameson, PKD’s brand of sci-fi presents the future as that vantage point from which we can understand and grasp our present as ‘history’ – an effect that previously I associated with the posthumous, but now placed in the future rather than the past, in order to critically envisage the present. As Jameson puts it: SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us ‘images’ of the future … but rather to defamiliarize [the] experience of our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization. (286) If the future is essentially a literary conceit, a thought-experiment on the present, so to speak, then Dick defamiliarizes the present mainly by making the future uncannily familiar:12 The conapts, autofabs, or psycho-suitcases of the universe of Philip K. Dick, all such apparently full representations function in a process of distraction and displacement, repression and lateral perceptual renewal, which has its analogies in other forms of contemporary culture. (286). Two assumptions come together: explicitly, Dick perspectivizes the present as the (pre-)history of a future that is already with us. Implicitly, Dick also shows up the systemic contradictions of what Jameson elsewhere refers to as the “untranscendable horizon” (of capitalism).13 These contradictions in turn fire up Jameson’s dialectic imagination, because they allow him to reveal an internal logic that both explains the structural constants of Dick’s fiction, and goes beyond them, making the fiction itself an analytical tool of our no-future/Utopia predicament, which besides the deadlocks, also signposts the escape route, thus extracting even from Dick’s generally dystopic stories a utopian kernel, or a Deleuzian ‘line of flight.’ In other words, Dick’s fiction confirms for Jameson that the world we inhabit is incomprehensible unless it is presented through (literary) means of indirection, subtraction, and displacements. These often take the form of ‘retrospective’ rewritings of experiences as ‘memories,’ making Marcel Proust the high modernist past master of such estrangement through memory.14 What Jameson calls ‘posthumous actuality’ aligns Dick with Proust, drawing attention in both writers to a temporality that shapes itself into a loop, whose repetitions and rewritings are humanized in Proust when given the name of ‘memory,’ and post-humanized in Dick as implants or hallucinations. The value of Jameson’s approach to Dick as the designer of such loops, slung into the future, in order for us to see ourselves both ‘in the present’ (“which is all we have,” in Jameson’s words) and ‘historically’ (which is to say, relationally and in context, and therefore enabled to act meaningfully), is that he can abstract from Dick’s asocial behavior, his psychological hang-ups, his private demons and public denunciations.15

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PKD and the Mind-Game Film Jameson’s undoubted achievement in his writings about Dick is that he reveals many of the structural constants and creative constraints that give the stories both internal coherence and polemical force as critical statements about society. However, it takes a mind as dialectically nimble as Jameson’s to see in Philip K. Dick a writer whose fiction supports one’s trust in purposive human action, or that the course of history is set in the direction of progress. When Dick casts a character who can see into the future, can see all possible outcomes of actions in the future, as he does in the short stories “Paycheck” and “The Golden Man,” the consequences are dire, for both the protagonist and for the world. Even his very personal blend of Gnostic Christianity and Buddhism is more Manichean than messianic, and devoid of the promise of redemption. As Dick once drily put it: “Probably everything in the universe serves a good end – I mean, serves the universe’s goals.”16 In fact, PKD’s bleakly parodic pessimism and Martian post-humanism is what contributes most directly to his affinity for the mind-game film (or the mind-game film’s affinity for Philip K. Dick: their relation of mutual ‘influence,’ in the mode of the posthumous, is strictly reversible). By framing the general argument as the productive tension between history and utopia, with the past serving as a perspective for the future, while the future provides a perspective on the present, Jameson is, however, an attentive reader of Dick’s peculiar looping effects that presuppose a complex causality and reversible temporalities, recognizing that they raise ethical questions about agency, accountability, along with the perennial philosophical conundrums of free will and determinism. The latter is usually at the center of time travel films, which have, in recent decades, become once more a major feature of mainstream Hollywood, with a predilection either for returning to the past (e.g., Back to the Future [1985]), rather than traveling to the future, or switching back and forth between past, present and future (as in the Terminator franchise).17 But films like Twelve Monkeys (1995), Donnie Darko (2001), The Butterfly Effect (2004), Source Code (2011), Looper (2012), About Time (2013) and others tend to use time travel as a shorthand for returning to the past, in order to ‘repeat.’ This is a constant of mind-game films, which often differ as to the motivations that make such repetition necessary: some repeat until the hero gets it right (self-improvement, self-reflexivity, a learning curve, as in Groundhog Day (1993)); others repeat in order to repair (retroactive rearrangement as in Source Code; oedipal guilt, trauma and loss, as in Twelve Monkeys, About Time); some repeat to indicate the contingency of our choices and the fragility of our actions (more European than Hollywood: Blind Chance [1987], Run Lola Run [1998], Sliding Doors [1998]); and yet others repeat as a ‘repetition compulsion’ indicative of an unresolved inner conflict that returns to the past in the form of ‘acting out,’ as in Back to the Future.18

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While none of the films just named is a Dick adaptation, several bear the marks of his imagination, most typically perhaps Source Code and Looper. Yet the question that Dick’s stories raise is both more general and more specific than those usually addressed by time travel. The more general one is ‘what if time does not exist?,’ not just in Aristotle’s sense of the present not existing because as soon as we can name it, it is already the past, but in the sense that while we mortals are subject to time’s irreversibility, the universe is not. The more specific question has to do with the micro-level of our moral being, where time is the medium of change and of our actions, but where the distribution of cause and effect, and thus the meaning of our agency, seems far from unequivocal. It is this latter issue, which under the name of ‘retroactive causality,’ that I want to probe further with respect to Dick’s filmed fictions, and especially Minority Report.

Retroactive Causality While time travel returns to the past, and time-warp self-encounters have become such sci-fi clichés that they scarcely receive a (pseudo-)scientific explanation, more intellectually stimulating temporal loops involve what is variously known as retrocausality, reverse time causality, retroaction, deferred action, Nachträglichkeit and après coup. At its most basic, these terms refer to the possibility of the future influencing the past, with effects preceding causes. Rather than accepting time’s arrow pointing in one direction only, retroactive causality allows for causal movement to occur in two directions, and not only from past to future. Common sense says that this is impossible, and most scientists agree, unless some stringent special conditions are put in place. But there seems room for debate: Retrocausality is primarily a thought-experiment in philosophy of science based on elements of physics, addressing the question: Can the future affect the present, and can the present affect the past? Philosophical considerations of time travel often address the same issues as retrocausality, as do treatments of the subject in fiction, although [time travel and retrocausality] are not universally synonymous.19 Clearly there is a significant difference whether the term is used in the context of a scientific experiment, a philosophical ‘what-if’ scenario, or as a literary device of ‘making strange’ in a novel, short story, or film script. But, then again, both Dick’s stories and several mind-game films might best be regarded as sub-categories or special cases of ‘thought experiments,’ which would bring philosophical speculation and fictional thought-experiments closer together. Dick himself has a very precise notion of how scientific and experiential notions of time can coexist while, as he puts it, standing in right angles to each other:

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I wish to add that Paul [the apostle] was probably saying one thing more than Plato in the celebrated metaphor of the cave: Paul was saying that we may well be seeing the universe backwards. The extraordinary thrust of this thought just simply cannot be taken in, even if we intellectually grasp it. “To see the universe backwards?” What would that mean? Well, let me give you one possibility: that we experience time backwards; or more precisely, that our inner subjective category of experience of time (in the sense which Kant spoke of, a way by which we arrange experience), our time experience is orthogonal to the flow of time itself – at right angles. There are two times: the time which is our experience or perception or construct of ontological matrix, an extensiveness into another area – this is real, but the outer time-flow of the universe moves in a different direction. Both are real, but by experiencing time as we do, orthogonally to its actual direction, we get a totally wrong idea of the sequence of events, of causality, of what is past and what is future, where the universe is going.20 Yet the concept of retroactive causality, which Dick refers to in all but name, entered the field of literary studies and film theory via another route. More specifically, retroactive causality came into the discussion of cinema and mindgame films in the first instance through Freud’s theory of Nachträglichkeit und its popularization through Slavoj Žižek, who not only invokes time loops but regards retroaction as one of the fundamental aspects in the identity formation of the subject: we are never fully present to ourselves, other than through the deferred actions where effects, in seeking their causes, actually generate them. Žižek, for instance, uses both time travel and a Lynch film to illustrate this broader point about psychoanalysis, as in the following passage where he highlights the mutually exclusive but interdependent dynamics of ‘drive’ and ‘desire’ in human subjectivity: [That drive and desire presuppose one another can be compared to] the time-loop in science fiction (the subject travels into the past – or the future – where he encounters a certain mysterious entity that eludes his gaze again and again, until it occurs to him that this ‘impossible’ entity is the subject himself, or – the opposite case – the subject travels into the past with the express purpose of engendering himself, or into the future to witness his own death … In order to avoid standard examples like Back to the Future [and La Jetée], let us recall David Lynch’s Lost Highway. A crucial ingredient of Lynch’s universe is a phrase, a signifying chain, which resonates as a Real that persists and always returns - a kind of basic formula that suspends and cuts across the linear flow of time … in Lost Highway, [it is] the phrase which contains the first and the last spoken words in the film, “Dick Laurent is dead,” announcing the death of the obscene paternal figure (Mr Eddy): the entire narrative of the film takes place in the suspension of time between

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these two moments. At the beginning, Fred, the hero, hears these words on the interphone in his house; at the end, just before running away, he himself speaks them into the interphone – so we have a circular situation – first a message which is heard but not understood by the hero, then the hero himself pronouncing this message. In short, the whole film is based on the impossibility of the hero encountering himself, as in the famous time-warp scene in science-fiction novels where the hero, travelling back in time, encounters himself in an earlier time …21 Retroactive causality also has its application and credibility in several other contexts. Philosophers presuppose retroactive causality when playing through ‘what-if’ scenarios intended to distinguish among different kinds of impossibility: physical (the laws of physics do not allow it), conceptual (we may be able to imagine it, but we cannot specify the conditions of its possibility), or temporary (it is impossible now but who know if it is so at some point in the future). Many of the classical thoughtexperiments, such as Schrödinger’s cat or Einstein’s elevator, imply non-linear causal connections. It indicates that retroactive causality is a logical consequence of certain versions of quantum physics, notably in the way light is defined as either wave or particle, a definition that can be taken retroactively.22 However, since for much contemporary physics, the very concepts of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ are inapplicable, retroactive causality, while theoretically possible, would not figure as a viable or useful concept. In cosmology and astrophysics, for instance, theories of the Big Bang and its (ultimate) reversibility would seem to imply retroactive causality: physicists like Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog [propose] a ‘top down cosmology’ that views the universe as having begun in every possible way, with the most probable pasts being determined right now.23 But this challenges the very concepts of time and thus also of cause and effect, suggesting that not only ‘time,’ but retroactive causality, too, has only a “brief history” in the minds of astrophysicists. Finally, retroactive causality makes its appearance in certain versions of Christianity, where the Fall of Man retroactively made it necessary to introduce Evil into Creation, i.e., it was the Fall of Man that created the Devil in the first place.24

Free Will and Determinism Many, if not all, of these different versions of retroactive causality have some bearing on the central preoccupations of Dick’s work, while one of his prime philosophical themes is the nature of free will, its fragility, its hubris and its self-delusions, thereby pointing to the limits of human beings as autonomous agents. Within the broader picture, it suggests that, in the Darwinian struggle for survival, human beings may

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not be the ‘fittest’ in the long run, superseded by forms of life and types of intelligence they themselves have helped to bring into existence – whether ‘beneficial’ or ‘catastrophic’ to humans themselves. A consequence of these thoughts about species survival and the limits of free will is the possibility that human beings are mere means to ends, rather than (as Christianity and European humanism would have it) ends in themselves. Instead of each man woman and child being God’s individual creatures, the human race may actually form part of a different ‘intelligent design’ for whom people are transporters and transmitters, i.e., the ‘useful idiots’ whose desires, dreams, and ambitions, along with their actions, are the subjective effects of being unwitting tools: fulfilling someone else’s plan, in which humans may or may not have the star turn. In one sense, this is a dissident, skeptical riff on the Protestant (and in this form deeply American) belief in Providence, i.e., that God has a special, benevolent plan for his ‘chosen people,’ even if ‘ye of little faith’ cannot see the contours, and therefore have to act ‘as if’ they did.25 In another sense, however, the same structure and dynamics apply, if the plan is malevolent rather than benign and providential, and instead of God, it is the government and its myriad of agencies, both overt and covert, that manipulate the people in the name of duty and patriotism, or corporations adept at using these same exalted values and sentiments to further their own ends.26 Films like Pelican Brief (1993), Enemy of the State (1997), Syriana (2005), Edge of Darkness (2010), The Ghost Writer (2010), not to mention countless television series, provide ample evidence that Hollywood is familiar – indeed comfortable – with such conspiratorial narratives: a genre to which, as Freedman implies, Dick is no stranger, given Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau, with the latter especially alert to the traps that can be sprung on free will, when it no longer spontaneously falls in line with societal norms and consensual conformism. Beyond conspiracy theories and paranoia thrillers, the ‘means to other ends’ view of the human race is a staple of science fiction, and as such almost a given of the genre. One can cite the novels of Kurt Vonnegut (especially The Sirens of Titan), or Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. In Dick, however, the notion is enriched with various forms of religious transcendentalism (‘Mercerism’) and heretic dissent, such as Gnosticism. It means that the critical (or merely cynical) version of human beings instrumentalized by multinational corporations or governmental agencies is both endorsed by Dick and placed within a more cosmic framework that in turn makes capitalism itself merely the instrument within another kind of ‘design’ – ‘benign for the universe,’ even more than for the capitalists themselves. Free will, however, is not only in jeopardy at the macro level by forms of instrumentalization, whether the external manipulator is some form of ‘divinity that shapes our ends’ (Hamlet 5.2) and imposes an invisible design, or whether human beings deploy their apparently inexhaustible capacity for using others for their own ends. Free will is also challenged internally by certain inherent

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contradictions, which, however, only become apparent, when mapped onto temporal sequentiality. It is at this juncture that retroactive causality takes on a moral significance, or rather, that its different meanings and uses prove to be relevant for understanding the paradoxes of free will in relation to human agency and autonomy on the one hand, and a state we might call post-human ‘distributed’ subjectivity on the other. What is at stake can be clarified by considering the difference between classical narrative causality and causality in mind-game films. Classical narrative usually works according to an explicit or implicit logic of linear causality, where unintended consequences are signaled, but then preempted by actions that eliminate their purported causes. Yet such linear narrative is, of course, itself constructed retroactively, with eventual closure for the audience effectively being the starting point for the makers, plotting backwards from effects to causes. Mind-game films often highlight these paradoxical features of linear narratives,27 but they may also involve multi-strand narratives, where several distinct narrative lines are woven together, run in parallel or become mutually entangled. These types of stories have been extensively itemized, analyzed, and subdivided.28 Yet, unlike multi-strand narratives, where the different strands indicate merely alternative paths or trajectories, each with its own consequences, but all within the same time-space continuum, in mind-game films narrative strands can, in addition, have their own reality status or ‘ontology.’ That is, representations are not merely divided between dream and reality, direct perception and hallucination, memory or déjà vu, but can be ontological distinct and even incompatible. Examples such as Source Code and Inception come to mind, as well as the films of David Lynch, already mentioned (and returned to in the next chapter). An underlying premise of such mutually embedded narrative strands with different reality status is that there is no unambiguous position outside, and that any observer is part of the observed. This is an insight shared by Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Heinz von Foerster as well as Niklas Luhmann, whose system theory is based on both ‘auto-poiesis’ (self-creation, self-reference, i.e., loops) and on ‘second-order observation.’29 For Luhmann, too, time does not exist, and is merely our human way of mapping repetition and difference, to which we add causality, in order to avoid having to experience our lived reality as contingent. It is ‘second-order observation’ that binds us back into the world. Certain mind-game or time travel films make the gap apparent: while presenting diegetic reality as ‘objective’ and ‘out there,’ they may include the protagonist twice over, as observer and part of the observed (as in Back to the Future), which explains why such protagonists tend to meet their doubles. With the observer position becoming part of the observed, mind-game films raise epistemological issues about the reliability of knowledge, as well as the knowability of reality, which can either lead to a form of constructivism (the world is ‘objectively’ unknowable, and all perceptual and sensory representations are mental constructs) or to a critique of constructivism (there are some hard realities out there which we ignore at our peril, i.e., which return to us as

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‘unintended consequences’). If mind-game films are, from an epistemological perspective, generally ‘constructivist,’ they can opt for a ‘paranoid’ version, where everything connects, and someone is out to get you, or for a ‘hysterical’ version, where you fuse with the world and abandon yourself to the forces you cannot master or control. In either case, ‘objectivity’ would be “a subject’s delusion that observing can be done without him.”30

A Scanner Darkly Such layered and entangled versions of reality as both constructed/delusional and resistant/consequential are straight out of Dick’s imaginative arsenal, and one finds both the paranoid and the hysterical type, each of which I want to examine with a film adaptation, beginning with A Scanner Darkly, which would be an example of the hysterical version, followed by Minority Report that fits the paranoid version. A Scanner Darkly is a detective story in the J. L. Borges tradition, which is to say that the detective eventually discovers that he is himself the person being sought. With variations, this closed loop in which external goal and internal target are shown to be continuous also forms the matrix both of Total Recall and Blade Runner, as well as several other Dick stories. As a narrative conundrum it is, of course, even older, given its resemblance to the story of Oedipus, with all its Freudian resonances. In A Scanner Darkly Dick complicates his Möbius strip storyline by introducing a post-world in which much of the US population is addicted to a powerful hallucinogenic drug, produced and distributed by a shadowy anti-government agency, which Bob Arctor, the detective and undercover agent, is assigned to infiltrate, by living with a hippie group of addicts and dealers. When reporting back to his superiors, Arctor is Detective Fred, and like his senior officer Hank and all other undercover officers, he wears a ‘scramble suit’ that constantly changes his appearance. Becoming himself addicted and romantically involved with Donna, a cocaine addict who is his supplier, Arctor finds himself under suspicion by both the hippies and the police. As Detective Fred he is ordered to spy on Arctor, and as Arctor he is denounced to Detective Fred by Barris, one of his housemates, who fails to recognize him in his scramble suit. In a further turn of the paranoia screw, Hank is revealed to be Donna, and Arctor is merely the bait to get Barris to incriminate himself. Partly due to these manipulations, and partly as an effect of the drugs, Arctor has a breakdown, which leads to him being sent to New Path, supposedly a rehab institution, but in actual fact a drug lab, using addicts to tend and harvest their crops. Arctor’s mental breakdown and brain damage was part of the police plan to infiltrate New Path. By the end, Arctor, now calling himself Bruce, battles to regain his sanity and smuggle out the ‘blue flower’ used to produce the addictive drug. However, it is unclear whom he reports to, and if there is still anyone out there he can trust or turn to.

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At one level, thus, the story as told by Dick is a case study of severe addiction, of beatific and terrifying hallucinations, of split personalities, of delusions of power and paranoiac persecution fantasies. At another level, and especially as filmed by Richard Linklater, A Scanner Darkly is a multidimensional, multilevel ‘thought experiment’ about the limits of identity, when under pressure from internal and external forces, which turn out to be versions of each other, when rehab and drug lab are the recto and verso, or the police are licensed crime syndicates mostly running undercover sting operations. Furthermore, Linklater’s rotoscope animation-live-action technique (in which animators trace over live-action footage, frame by frame) gives both the metaphor of scanning (as a particularly intense or invasive surveillance technique) and the scramble suits a vivid visual presence. It makes the audience as much part of the surveillance apparatus, since we constantly have to guess who is who in what guise, what role and to what purpose. At yet another level, A Scanner Darkly is a meditation on post-Cartesian notions of the self, where ‘drugs’ stand for the voiding of any interiority in the subject, replaced by media images and pop culture fantasies. Arctor is merely the point of intersection of different networks, working in tandem or at cross-purposes, generating intensities that produce bodily effects and affects, but play on a sensory surface, for which ‘scanning’ is the appropriate form of contact and interaction. Arctor and Fred are ‘scramble suits’ even before they put on any disguise, making the paranoid fantasies of control and manipulation seem almost nostalgic reminiscences of days when one could point to a central controlling intelligence or agency, manipulating us for their ends. Unlike Tyrell of the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner, Rethrick of Allcom in Paycheck and Lamar Burgess in Minority Report (film), there is no ‘enjoying super-ego’ father figure in A Scanner Darkly on whom to project rebellion, resistance, or revenge. Scramble suit characters would be the prototype for the distributed subjectivity, lacking the interiority of the bourgeois individual, and lacking even the ‘lack’ of oedipal identity (i.e., symbolic castration).

Minority Report: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and Self-Cancelling Causality Loop On this reading, A Scanner Darkly is Dick’s most far-reaching exploration of the collapse of boundaries, while nonetheless maintaining his dual perspective of reality and subjectivity, or as Jameson would have it: of history and psychology, ‘the twin fate of humanity.’ By the same token, Linklater’s film would count as the most successful adaptation, a view shared, for instance, by several commentators, including Dick’s daughter Isa.31 The work, however, that most deeply probes the question of retroactive causality in relation to free will and determinism, as well as politics and ethics, across closed loops of conspiracy and the open loops of paranoia, is Minority Report, especially when taking into account its two versions, Dick’s short story

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and Spielberg’s film. These are best considered not so much as the literary source and its filmic adaptation but as two distinct variations on a set of common themes, among which the most important would be: a) free will and determinism; b) self-fulfilling prophecy; and c) the self-cancelling causal loop, with – in Spielberg’s film – a fourth one added, namely that of personal trauma, as a psychic phenomenon typically associated with deferred action and unpredictable ‘returns,’ reviving feelings of guilt, and leading to actions that try to undo what cannot be undone, seek out the source that caused the originary trauma, or reconstruct a past scenario that might explain and justify present suffering. With regard to free will and determinism, Minority Report initially represents an ideal state of balance, since the purported full knowledge of the future perfectly aligns the protagonist and his actions. The underlying premise of (the thoughtexperiment that is) Minority Report is that preemptive action can create a virtuous circle: we are in a society where prophecies are so reliable that they can be used and acted upon by the police in order to eliminate crime. This is dramatically orchestrated by Spielberg in the opening scenes with John Anderton (Tom Cruise) in front of his magic screens, and then successfully preventing the jealous husband from killing his wife’s lover. The curved screens and sweeping hand motions, as well as repeated circular motifs (the circular terrace houses, the children’s merry-go-round) reinforce the idea of a virtuous circle but also that of closure, repetition, and the loop. None of this is in Dick’s story, where our attention is quickly drawn to another kind of loop. However successful the pre-crime program, it is too perfect, since anticipating an offense means that the crime was not committed. The (unintended but unavoidable) consequence is that society creates (and incarcerates) criminals that are innocent, thus acting immorally if not criminally. Here the loop, based on preemption and deterrence, represents a moral deadlock, with the vicious part cancelling the virtuous part, yet the system as a whole is ‘in equilibrium’ as any initial situation demands.32 In the film version, the disturbance occurs when Anderton, the officer in charge of the prevention program, discovers that he himself is the named suspect, about to murder, within the next 36 hours, a man who is to him a complete stranger. Knowing himself innocent of such intent, but also believing the system to be infallible, Anderton goes into hiding, in order to investigate this apparent inconsistency, suspecting foul play by a government agency that wants to discredit the program, but he is also on the run, since the program, knowing that he knows, is doubly intent on eliminating him. Eventually locating his supposed target, Anderton nearly fulfills the prophecy when he discovers evidence that points to the man who kidnapped (and probably killed) his 7-year-old son years before. What is he to do? Shoot the man, and thus prove the pre-cogs retrospectively right, by giving himself a motive he did not know he had? Spare the man, and thus let the source of his deepest personal tragedy go unpunished? Kill him, to ‘save’ the reputation of the pre-crime program in which he has invested his

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professional pride, even if it means going to prison? Or let him go, because the ‘evidence’ that points to him being his son’s murder may be fabricated and thus a trap into which Anderton’s enemies want him to step? If we accept that the precrime system is a closed loop, then Anderton’s dilemma is that of another closed loop, in which motivation, causation, and agency block each other, as each layer of possible explanation of the nature of this face-to-face encounter merely creates a denser web of hypothetical premises and unproven presuppositions, and thus the downward spiral of the vicious circle. Spielberg’s film finds several ways out. The man to be killed wants to be killed for motives of his own, and commits suicide with Anderton’s gun, thus fulfilling the prophecy. Full agency is restored to the hero, however, by a typical sci-fi noir conspiracy, headed by Lamar Burgess, a powerful political operator, Anderton’s boss and an Uber father figure, who frames Anderton for another murder, but whom Anderton eventually unmasks as the killer of Agatha’s mother, where Burgess used a discarded pre-cog vision as a cover-up and decoy. Faced with the same dilemma of either saving himself or saving the system, Burgess opts to kill himself rather than Anderton. While these neat repetitions and symmetries somewhat muddy the question of free will versus determinism, they set up the terms for a happy ending, where Anderton’s successful go-it-alone investigation not only leads to the shutting down of the pre-crime program (now seen as flawed), but retroactively compensates for not having protected his son, thus clearing the way also for reconciliation with his estranged wife. In Dick’s short story, the disturbance is of a different kind. Here, too, Anderton finds himself named by the pre-cogs as a future murderer, but is first kidnapped by Kaplan, the very man he is supposed to kill, thus introducing a politically motivated rival to the pre-crime program with the same foreknowledge, intent on manipulating Anderton for his own ends. A forcibly retired army general keen to re-establish military rule, Kaplan is quick to point out the moral flaws of the pre-crime program, as an agency that imprisons the innocent. However, a paranoid Anderton has already convinced himself that both his wife and a younger man – his professional rival – are plotting against him, which is why he agrees to go undercover, on behalf of Kaplan, and to reinfiltrate his old unit. Working both for himself (to rescue his life’s work and restore his reputation) and for Kaplan (determined to discredit the pre-crime program in order to bring down the government), Dick’s Anderton is in a different loop and double bind from his Spielberg namesake. Without detailing the convoluted turns in Dick’s story that lead to Anderton actually killing Kaplan in plain public view, the point to make is that the moves and countermoves that prove the pre-crime program prediction accurate after all follow the peculiar, successively self-cancelling logic of the Minority Report, which gives the story its title, but which in the film version is used mainly to introduce the Agatha pre-cog back-story, only to conclude that there was no minority report from Agatha on the Anderton prediction.

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The logic of temporal looping of the minority reports is, however, relevant for understanding how retroactive causality can take different forms: one tending towards recursiveness, the other to deadlock, each either self-fulfilling or self-cancelling. Whereas Spielberg’s version humanizes the formal-logical paradoxes of the system’s minority reports, by adding the personal traumata of Anderton, his wife and the pre-cog Agatha, and thereby opts for the deadlocks that necessitate the appearance of Burgess as the all-powerful super-villain (and deus ex machina), in Dick’s version the equivalent of the super-villain is both a good guy (he thinks the pre-crime system is morally flawed) and the bad guy (he wants a military take-over of government), which refocuses the story on the logic of prediction as such, and serves to highlight the recursiveness of the minority reports that tends towards infinite regress rather than deadlock. More specifically, the logic of the minority reports is such that any ‘leakage’ in the system, i.e., prior knowledge, or the interception of the pre-cogs reports, cancels the prediction, which generates by necessity another minority report, incorporating this cancellation, a process that potentially continues ad infinitum, if the subject has access to these reports and thereby invalidates them in the very act of reading them. One way to characterize the differences between Dick’s and Spielberg’s version would be to make a distinction between a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ and a ‘self-cancelling causality loop,’ two versions of the same conundrum, in that both problematize the status and efficacy of human agency, but looked at from complementary perspectives. A definition of the former would be that a “self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior” (from Wikipedia). By constantly introducing extraneous information (Burgess, the various back-stories, the trauma of the dead son), Spielberg maintains a regulatory gap (i.e., negative feedback) between belief and behavior, whereas Dick’s paranoid Anderton fully fits the positive feedback model. But through the minority reports (and Kaplan’s machinations) he is also part of self-cancelling causality loops, where the anticipated consequences of an action may preempt one kind of event, but where the action taken instead sets in train another series of events even more undesirable than the ones initially preempted, thereby effectively creating the vicious circle that leads to the totalitarian political take-over. In contrast to the deadlocks in the film, staged in the successive encounters with the victims, and resolved through the back-stories that act as ‘negative feedback,’ i.e., the outside interventions self-regulate the system, the successive minority reports in Dick’s short story are the consequence of ‘positive feedback,’ with the system’s own output (the minority reports) being constantly fed back as input, thus creating a permanent destabilization of both the hero’s identity and of the system’s power-relations. In Spielberg, the introduction of Burgess, and of the back-story of Agatha, the pre-cog, in other words, puts a stop to the inherent recursiveness and re-establishes the symbolic order, with Anderton initially the tragic oedipal subject, in the sense of being a detective forced to investigates himself, within the self-fulfilling prophecy

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frame of such classic tragedies as Sophocles’ Oedipus, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or Kafka’s parable “Before the Law.” A figure also found in Borges (“The Garden of the Forking Paths”), it is the mind-game variant on the Hollywood stereotype of the hunter hunted, and of the wanted man, pursued by the police and by the villains, as we know him from Hitchcock, Lang, and more recently, the Coen Brothers and Ridley Scott, adapting Corman McCarthy’s rather than PKD’s stories. Spielberg toys with the mind-game version of the dilemma, but opts for a more classical happy ending, with Anderton re-integrated into society under the law, a law now purged of its superego/super-villain ‘excess.’ Dick’s story leaves the outcomes of its various loops more open. Even though it also ends with the re-formation of the husband-and-wife couple, headed for some Dickean planetary ‘outer world,’ there is no doubt about the criminality and immorality of both the pre-crime system and of the proto-fascist order that overthrows and replaces it. As so often in Dick, the world has become ungovernable, due to the runaway consequences of actions taken in the past, and self-replicating systems in the present, which justifies the hero turning his back on society and making a run for it.

Conclusion What can we deduce from the two films (and the different versions of Minority Report) regarding the questions with which I started, namely Dick’s influence as ‘posthumous,’ and thus as an example of retroactive causality, now applied to his own person and work, while arguing that this work is itself a sustained analysis of retroactive causality? And what does Dick’s affinity for the mind-game film tell us about the mind-game film’s retroactive influence on the reputation and critical reception of PKD? One answer, I hope, is the one given in this chapter: both Dick and the mind-game film require us to think in terms of closed and open loops, with the possibility of either negative or positive feedback regulating the input and output. In this context, ‘input’ can be Dick’s writings, when adapted for the screen, with the films as “output.” yet these writings are also ‘output’ (with the films as ‘input’), given how the films have spawned both serious academic and equally serious fan writing about Dick the writer and visionary. The films have thus acted as ‘positive feedback’ for his reputation, even where they were bad adaptations, carrying Dick’s reputation into the virtuous circle of a ‘win-win’ loop. Similarly, if the mind-game film is a loose and possibly amorphous category of films that may involve time travel, chance encounters with unforeseen consequences, post-mortem characters, and ‘productive pathologies’ like schizophrenia, amnesia, autism, paranoia, and hysteria (not to mention the criminal intelligence of sociopaths and serial killers), then looping the mind-game film back to Dick’s Möbius strips that entwine present with future and vice versa, usefully identifies the genre less with these extreme characters and more with the

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complex relations of narrative to temporality, as the medium of change and human agency we call ‘history.’ History is, according to Jameson, the untranscendable horizon of our thinking even in Dick, but as contemporary experience also tells us – with Dick’s stories as especially topical testimony – this history is regularly being rewritten, in light of the exigencies of the present, anxiously trying to calculate the risks awaiting us in the future, as the unintended consequences of human actions in the past are taking ominous shape. The paradox of an untranscendable horizon constantly being redrawn is as good a definition as any of Dick’s physical metaphysics and the reality effects of mind-game films. Their multiple time schemes and time-frames – most of which run backwards and forwards – would therefore confirm these underlying anxieties, to which Dick’s stories give a brightly colored but coolly composed sheen, as if to reassure readers that even if the catastrophe has already happened, there still survives a mind to register and to describe it. This mind has migrated from Dick’s stories into the mind-game films, where its reflection is strong enough to illuminate a writer who, had he not existed, would have to be invented: to focus the energies that still emanate from him. [Previously published as “Philip K Dick, the Mind-game Film, and Retroactive Causality,” in W. Buckland, ed., Hollywood Puzzle Films (New York: Routledge, 2014), 143–164.]

Notes 1 Here and in what follows, I retain the term ‘mind-game film.’ For definition and specification, see my chapter of that title published originally in Warren Buckland, ed., Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), now Chapter 3 in the present volume. 2 One could add the less successful adaptations, such as Screamers (1995), Paycheck (2003), Next (2007), The Adjustment Bureau (2011), and the 2012 version of Total Recall. 3 “The Truman Show (1998) and The Matrix (1999) are both about relatively ordinary people discovering that the world around them is an immaculately-constructed lie.” Ryan Lambie, “How Philip K Dick transformed Hollywood,” September 28, 2012. www.denofgeek.com/movies/22766/how-philip-k-dick-transformed-hollywood 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Jeremy Tambling, Becoming Posthumous (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). 7 Frank Rose, “The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick,” Wired (December 2003). www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/philip.html 8 Stanislaw Lem, “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans,” Science Fiction Studies 2, no. 1 (March 1975). 9 Carl Freedman, “Introduction,” Science Fiction Studies, 15, no. 2 (1988), special issue on Philip K. Dick. 10 This is the title of the English translation of Helmuth Lethen’s Verhältnislehre der Kälte, a subtle analysis of the inner distance (and thus covert complicity) kept by many writers and thinkers during the Weimar Republic in the face of the rise of fascism. 11 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fiction Stories (London/New York: Verso, 2005), 281–295.

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12 Jameson, on his own admission, is indebted to Darko Suvin’s 1979 definition of SF as “the literature of cognitive estrangement” and ‘Utopia’ as “the verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis.” Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). 13 Jameson’s famous phrase is, of course, “History, as ground and untranscendable horizon,” but I am here conflating it with another famous Jameson saying, namely that humans seem to find it easier to imagine the end of the universe than the end of capitalism. See Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 14 See Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 287. 15 Dick’s paranoid and frankly perfidious behavior towards friends, fans and benefactors is described in sometimes hilarious detail by several writers. See especially Jeet Herr, “Marxist Literary Critics are Following Me: How Philip K. Dick Betrayed his Academic Admirers to the FBI,” Lingua Franca 11, no. 4 (May/June 2001). http://lingua franca.mirror.theinfo.org/print/0105/cover.html 16 Philip K. Dick, “Man, Android and Machine” (1975). www.philipkdickfans.com/m irror/websites/pkdweb/Man,%20Android%20and%20Machine.htm 17 Arguably, the convoluted Terminator plot is inspired by two of Dick’s stories: “Second Variety” and “Jon’s World.” 18 For an extended reading of Back to the Future, see Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 220–248. 19 “Retrocausality,” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Retrocausa lity&oldid=579958783 20 Dick, “Man, Android and Machine.” 21 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London/New York: Verso 2000). 22 On Schrödinger’s cat, thought-experiments and quantum physics, see www.informa tionphilosopher.com/solutions/experiments/schrodingerscat/ 23 Cynthia Sue Larson, “Retrocausal Reality Shifting: Adventures in the Fine Art of Changing the Past.” (2006). http://realityshifters.com/pages/articles/retrocausalrs.html 24 Paul R. Hinlicky, Divine Complexity: The Rise of Creedal Christianity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001). 25 Retroactive causality is also known as the predestination paradox, a term often used when discussing time travel in popular culture, and referring to Protestant doctrine. See John Calvin, 1998 [1559], “On Predestination.” www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/ calvin-predest.asp 26 On this kind of anti-government paranoia as a permanent feature of US political life, see Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1965). 27 “Paycheck,” for instance, could be considered also as a ‘metafiction,’ with the central character the writer himself, seeing into the future, then plotting backwards, and finally ‘erasing’ the ‘memory’ of this retroactivity. 28 Several chapters in Warren Buckand’s anthology, Puzzle Films, discuss multi-strand narratives, variously known as complex narratives, network narratives, fractal narratives, forking-path narratives, ensemble films, etc. See Buckland, Puzzle Films. See also Charles Ramirez Berg who lists some twelve different sub-categories. Berg, “A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying the ‘Tarantino Effect’,” Film Criticism 31, nos. 1/2 (2006), 5–61. 29 Niklas Luhmann, “Deconstruction as Second-Order Observing,” New Literary History, 24, no. 4 (Autumn 1993), 763–82.

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30 “Objectivity is a subject’s delusion that observing can be done without him. Involving objectivity is abrogating responsibility – hence its popularity.” Heinz von Foerster, in Bernhard Poerksen, The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), 3. 31 http://io9.com/5813130/how-will-michel-gondrys-ubik-live-up-to-philip-k-dicks-legacy 32 The Bush administration’s creation of extra-territorial preemptive detention at Guantanamo Bay is for its detainees a ‘Pre-Crime Program,’ a Dickean thought-experiment become political reality – and justified as a political necessity – some 50 years after the story was first published.

8 ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES Logics of the Mind-Game Film in David Lynch’s Los Angeles Trilogy

The Director as Auteur Today: Performative Self-Contradiction Remember the scene from a bonus item on one of David Lynch’s DVDs that went viral on the Internet: the director’s diatribe against watching movies on a mobile phone, which turned out to be an ad sponsored by Apple to promote the iPhone.1 The fact that this profanity-laced attack against the mobile phone is being used as a form of product endorsement for a mobile phone is a contradiction, since here the message is being framed by its opposite, creating a kind of double bind or cognitive dissonance. My proposition is that, in many ways, David Lynch is a director, along with other auteurs, notably Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier, whose authorial identity and creative authority – and the challenges these encounter in the 21st century – are negotiated by what I have called acts of ‘performative self-contradiction.’2 A performative self-contradiction is a term made popular by the philosophers Karl Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, in response to the speech act theories of Austin and Searle. Briefly put, one commits performative self-contradiction when one makes a claim that contradicts the validity of the means that are used to make it, i.e., which contradicts your performance of the claim. In other words, in a performative self-contradiction, there is a conflict between one’s presuppositions and conclusions. The best-known example goes back to the logical or semantic paradoxes of the Greek philosopher Epimenides, who famously claimed “all Cretans are liars,” while being himself a Cretan. The liar’s paradox has in recent years once more attracted attention, mainly for two reasons: first, it underlines how much of our communication – electronically mediated or not – takes place across a double framing, and secondly, it connects with much thinking about the reflexivity and self-reference of complex systems,

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when assessing how entities engage with their environment. Both these aspects are of direct relevance to David Lynch, in his films as well as in the persona he has so deftly crafted for himself, acting as a vehicle for self-presentation while also functioning as protective shield of self-erasure. In other words, the liar’s paradox can usefully buttress Lynch’s insider/outsider status within the Hollywood film and television industries, giving the reflexively self-contradictory aspects of his films, which I shall try to elucidate, both an ideological and an institutional raison-d’être.3 As to the relevance of Lynch’s self-contradiction for a theory of complex systems, a quote from a Niklas Luhmann-inspired blog may help make the point: it’s also noteworthy that the distinction between system and environment is paradoxical in that it is self-referential … [T]he distinction between system and environment is paradoxical because it purports to refer to something other than the system (the environment), while nonetheless it is a distinction that is drawn by the system and that does not exist outside the system. As Luhmann somewhere puts it, “the distinction between system and environment does not exist in the environment of the system” … At this first-order level, the distinction can simply operate without representing itself. In this way the paradoxical and self-referential nature of the distinction remains veiled or hidden. However, when a system strives to represent its distinction between itself and its environment paradox begins to come to the fore. Here the distinction has re-entered the system. The system not only distinguishes itself from its environment, but now represents the fact that it distinguishes itself from its environment.4 This perfectly encapsulates the way that the inside-outside distinction more generally breaks down in almost any field of communication and symbolic action, and it serves me here to argue that David Lynch can stand contradictorily – but quite credibly, boldly and explicitly – for the changing character and the current mutations of the cinema, perhaps more than any other filmmaker, precisely because he embodies many of its contemporary dilemmas. Not only is he, as indicated, the perennial Hollywood insider as outsider, he is also the preferred outsider as insider, when we think of his privileged status as one of the Cannes Film Festival’s beloved auteurs because he still stands for ‘the cinema as art.’ In another context, he is celebrated as a director of ‘the art of the real,’ and yet he does not hesitate to deploy for it the technologies of the virtual. Furthermore, in contrast to other cinephile directors, Lynch has been a pioneer on television arguably creating, with the already mentioned Twin Peaks, the very epitome of the cult HBO/AMC-type TV series (from Lost to Breaking Bad). That he has also struggled with television, and eventually despaired of television is thus part of ‘the art of the real.’ Yet despite – or because – of all these credentials, Lynch is an auteur whose presence is least noticeable in the cinemas, if one goes by box office

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success, or even by how easy it is to catch his films on the big screen, as opposed to buying them as DVDs: Lynch, by design or by default, is possibly most palpable on the Internet, where there is almost no one blogging seriously on the cinema who does not have strong views on Lynch either way, or who does not feel the urge to contribute to the debate on the ineffability of his personality, the peculiarity of his ‘religion’ and the weirdness of his films.

The LA Trilogy Lynch’s loosely termed ‘sunshine noir’ trilogy of films – Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire – has often been called his ‘LA trilogy.’ Whether this is an appropriate common denominator, I shall leave to others, except perhaps to point out how important the concept of the ‘trilogy’ is for European filmmakers – Bergman’s so-called ‘faith’ trilogy, Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, Antonioni’s ‘alienation’ trilogy, Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy, Lars von Trier’s Golden Heart trilogy, Michael Haneke’s ‘glaciation’ trilogy, Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy – so that the label ‘LA trilogy’ in some ways dignifies Lynch with the attributes of a typically European art house or festival director, even if he is a US-American through and through, and even if his esoteric religious or spiritual beliefs make him a typical Southern Californian. I shall – if only for the sake of argument – assume that the LA trilogy constitutes three highly reflexive pieces of filmmaking, or ‘meta-cinema,’ whose biographical, autobiographical, spiritual or even self-expressive dimensions concern me less than its reflexively self-contradictory aspects, which I have discussed under the label of ‘mind-game film’ – a label I shall come back to. Before doing so, I want to let Lynch speak on his own behalf, citing one of his frequently granted, but rarely revealing interviews, where he argues that his films – as far he is concerned – are about ‘ideas’ (and not about images or stories) and – as far as the spectators are concerned – should be about ‘experiences’ (and not about meaning). He is especially reluctant to explain either his characters or situations, so that ‘ideas’ (which come to him liked winged creatures and take him over) require the medium ‘film’ in order to divest themselves of meaning and become ‘experiences.’5 Still, the question arises: what are these ideas? Let’s start with the kind of reflexivity I noted and which can be explained or examined in several ways: One can read Lynch’s filmmaking as an ongoing cinematic experimentalism and a reflexivity about forms: Eraserhead was Lynch’s first deliberate experiment (reflecting his interest in surrealism and European avant-garde), but even more conventional films, such as The Straight Story or commercial flops like Dune, were conceived as experiments, culminating in the LA trilogy and its final part, Inland Empire, once more a very experimental film. Or one can read his experimentalism within the framework of Hollywood (the insider as outsider), where Lynch belongs among the American directors who successfully blend or cross-pollinate

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various genre conventions: horror, thriller, melodrama, as well as the various noir genres (sunshine noir, neo-noir, meta-noir, etc.) – a way of thinking with and within the cinema about the cinema, in the idioms that does not leave the fertile ground of the popular and the universally understood conventions that go with it. Lynch is a director who captures the attention of an audience because his incomprehensibility always stays so tantalizingly close to recognition, and his weirdness always has a brush with familiarity and even cultivates the cliché. But there is also a case to be made that Lynch’s LA films belong to the tradition of Hollywood’s characteristically sarcastic take on itself (Sunset Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Player, Los Angeles Plays Itself), where the dream factory reflects on itself, showing its more lurid sides, and the horror that always lurks just beneath the glamorous surface. One also gets the sense that Lynch is all too familiar with the gossipy and secret histories of Hollywood, supplying a running commentary on both popular and scholarly works on the movie colony, such as Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, David Thomson’s Beneath Mulholland, Daniel Fuchs’s The Golden West, not to mention the classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Last Tycoon) or Nathanael West (Day of the Locust). My own interest, however, is in another form of reflexivity – that of the mind-game film, which – among other aspects of style and narrative – also concerns the relation that exists between the production logic of Hollywood in the age of the Internet and the textual logics that can flow from this. Insofar as mind-game films are often, though not exclusively, signed by auteurs, I tend to read Lynch’s type of meta-cinema as a form of self-allegory about authorship, one that manifests itself as the performance of a self-contradiction. Again, before laying this out in more detail, I need to briefly indicate some other types of interpretation that the LA trilogy has solicited, and what common themes have generally been evoked to justify the label ‘trilogy’ in the first place. As already hinted at, the LA trilogy, both separately and as an identifiable corpus, have elicited a huge amount of comment on the Internet and as essay-topics for film students, mostly along four lines of argument: first, the recurring theme of psychogenic fugues and split characters; second, complex storytelling, twisted timelines and Möbius strips; third, intertextuality with reference to movies about movie-making in the post-noir neo-noir vein; intertextuality as Hollywood’s homage to European filmmaking and vice versa; and intertextuality as critique of television, via sitcoms, while also celebrating its strange otherworldly charms (e.g. The Rabbits in Inland Empire); finally, there is the fourth aspect, the occult or spiritual dimension, where his movies are seen as coded messages about transcendental meditation, and where the LA trilogy is interpreted as a kind of Divine Comedy or a Book of Revelations. There is a broad consensus that Inland Empire is the most puzzling but also the most promising film to speculate with, not least about Lynch’s mind-game mentality. Laying my cards on the table, as it were, I shall give a version of what I understand to be the ‘plot’ of the film, while bearing in mind that Lynch is not a

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plot-driven filmmaker, and considers films as pods that pop open and disseminate like pollen or seeds, rather than stories that develop sequentially. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that in his films, there are agents and actions, and these actions concatenate, have consequences and combine into storylines and recurring patterns. Hence my justification to point out a number of these narrative strands, and to indicate how I think they are braided or superimposed. Mostly, they are fractured and layered in such a way that they duplicate and mirror each other in both theme and trajectory, while also doubling back and foreshadowing along causal chains. The strands are all organized around central motifs such as love relations and sexual relations, marital infidelity and prostitution, which are in a sense also inverse mirrors of each other in terms of gendered dependency, power, and exploitation. First, there is the would-be (or come-back) actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), married to a rich and pathologically jealous Polish husband (Peter J. Lucas, who also plays Smithy, Susan Blue’s husband), while living in the gilded cage of a lavish LA mansion. Nikki is to play Susan Blue in a film called On High in Blue Tomorrows partnered by Devon Berk (Justin Theroux), an actor notorious for serially seducing his female co-stars. On High in Blue Tomorrows is based on a gypsy tale and carries a curse: it compels the protagonists to enact in real life the situations they are playing for the camera, thereby providing the guiding motif, namely the constant wandering in and out of ‘character’ in the film, as we lose our sense of what is the film-within-the film and what is the reality-within-the film. Predictably, Nikki as Susan Blue (her film-within-the-film character), allows herself to be sucked into an extramarital affair with Billy Side (played by Devon Berk/Justin Theroux), who also lives in a palatial home and is married to Doris (Julia Ormond), at one point claiming to have been hypnotized into killing someone with a screwdriver. The affair seems to bring out the worst also in Susan Blue: she turns into a bruised and abused, foul-mouthed and street-wise harridan, who confesses sordid episodes of sex, violence, and drugs to a private eye, shrink, or hired killer, living on top of a steep flight of stairs in a seedy office above a cinema. Why Susan is talking to him, and what connection if any this unsavory character has to the other men remains unexplained, but because played like a figure out of movies like The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown or LA Confidential, his presence requires little further motivation. These narrative threads have similarly structured prequels and sequels, or maybe even a framing narrative: one set in a wintry Polish city in the present, and involving the Lost Girl (Karolina Gruszka) and the Phantom Man (Krzysztof Majchrzak), another set in a Polish city in the past, and involving another couple, played by the same actors. In Los Angeles, much of the action revolves around the remake of a German film, originally left uncompleted, because of the curse and its consequences. The larger structural symmetries thus dictate that in each of the strands, a lover is murdered by the jealous partner of the other, across a switch of gender. These internal narratives are framed by the Lost Girl, who watches,

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tears streaming down her eyes, on a faulty television set, scenes from the film we are in the process of watching ourselves, while her pimp, lover, agent or people trafficker, who keeps her locked in the room with the TV set, turns up in Nikki’s life as the Phantom Man. He holds the reins or pulls the strings in several of the subplots: a clownish-cruel version of male authority who turns up in many of Lynch’s film, either as a mystery man (Lost Highway) and Cowboy (Mulholland Drive) or as a sort of Uber father.

Melancholy Female/Female Depression (Slavoj Žižek) Much is being made in the literature on Lynch about his misogyny, and the ordeals he usually has in store for his female protagonists – a projected accusation that Lynch shares with Lars von Trier. But while critic Amy Taubin has harsh words to say about what she calls Lynch’s “exceptionally crude and brutal (in form and content) wife-beating” fantasies, and Jonathan Rosenbaum speaks of ‘designer porn’ but concedes that “Inland Empire is full of good and bad girls,” a Lynch obsession given an “interesting spin by having most of them played by the same actress,”6 there are also a number of feminists who have come to Lynch’s defense, arguing that especially Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire are not in fact sorry tales of female degradation, schizophrenia or bipolar disorders, but can and should be read as parables of female empowerment. To quote: Obsessive-destructive desire, fantasmatic projections and paranoid-schizoid splittings of the female love-object into virgin/whore, ideal/nightmare pairs are central thematic concerns in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. However, Lynch not only orchestrates but in fact deconstructs these clichéd representations of women on the levels of content, form and narrative. While both Fred Madison in Lost Highway and Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Drive fail to obliterate their obsessions because they remain caught in a network of false fantasmatic conceptions, Nikki Grace in Inland Empire is able to liberate herself from the dark male forces who exercise power over her. Nikki thus also frees herself from the curse of binary male projections: in the beginning she is the embodiment of the ideal, the glorious movie star, while Sue Blue (her filmwithin-the-film character) is the ultimate incarnation of the male nightmare – the castrating, violent and abused white trash female. Nikki transcends both categories, she undoes the false split; in the end she is neither one nor the other but simply herself. Inland Empire is thus Lynch’s most explicitly feminist movie in this trilogy on the fatal dynamics of binary thinking.7 However, we owe the most thoroughgoing analysis of the role or status of women in Lynch’s films to Slavoj Žižek, who – building on some remarks by Michel Chion – has developed a wide-ranging hypothesis of causal inversion, around female melancholia: “at the center of Blue Velvet (and of Lynch’s entire

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oeuvre) lies the enigma of woman’s depression,” Žižek avers, a state to which he attributes profound consequences in the way it structures and reorganizes male impotence masked as desire; reaction masked as action; castration anxiety masked as macho violence.8 Žižek’s master trope is, of course, Jacques Lacan’s formulation about woman being a function of man and vice versa, each futilely relying on the other for identity and self-consistency, to which Žižek gives a further twist, by positing depression as the center of gravity that radicalizes male-female relations, and tipping the balance of power in the woman’s favor, and thus to some extent supporting the feminist emancipatory argument about Lynch’s film. Inland Empire can indeed be understood as having yet another deeply disturbed female character at the center of the narrative, underlined by the film’s tagline “A Woman in Trouble.” But while many of the Lynchian motifs of sadistic male power are evident, they play out differently; there are hints of the usual violent males of the enjoying superego in the mold of Frank Booth in Blue Velvet (1986), Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart (1990), or Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway also in Inland Empire: both Smithy and the Phantom fit the role, as does Nikki’s husband (Smithy by another name). Their violence is intimated rather than performed, allowing it to appear as reactive as well as manipulative. But what distinguishes Nikki/Sue from the troubled women at the center of the earlier films, such as Dorothy Vallens (Blue Velvet), Laura Palmer (Twin Peaks) and Renee Madison/ Alice Wakefield (Lost Highway) is that she is not stirred from depression by the pathological male, and rather works through her troubles in her own mysterious ways, by ‘traversing’ her various roles or fantasies. Yet one of the key points in Žižek’s argument is not only the changing male-female dynamics, or even the therapeutic working-through of fantasy-roles, but also the different articulation of time and causality – the famous deferred action or Nachträglichkeit – that centers on female depression, or rather: for which female depression and its creation of voids act as attractors, and therefore can provide the convenient and telling trope.

Complex Storytelling “A Woman in Trouble,” in other words, also touches on the matter that gives this chapter its title, namely ‘actions do have consequences – causality, implication and anticipation.’ Before discussing one of the two sequences where this phrase occurs, a reminder of what’s at stake here. Inland Empire, like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, belongs to a species or genre of film, which breaks with the rule that a story should have a beginning, middle, and an ending, preferably in that order. In Lynch’s films, the narratives are fragmented, people can be in two places at once, a story begins halfway through, characters split or double, scenes are taken out of any conceivable chronological sequence and presented to the viewer often in non-linear fashion. This can even include parts of the dialogue. In the by now notorious Rabbit sitcom segment of Inland Empire, the exchanges between the three humanoid rabbits are back to front, and some parts can indeed be re-arranged so as to make at least

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some sort of causal sense, insofar as they do appear as question and answer, rather than – as now – as answer and question. Lynch himself, when challenged, attributes this change in storytelling method and narration, to “the flow of life” itself, and at the same time, insists that, however fragmented his films may appear, “the pieces are all there.”9 Yet this narrative mode has become very common in recent years in films: some of them mainstream, some from the independent sector, some from European art cinema and from Asian world cinema: the titles range from Memento to Donnie Darko, from Run Lola Run to Sliding Doors, from Being John Malkovich to Adaptation, from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Amores Perros, from Old Boy to Infernal Affairs, from Tropical Malady to Inception. Film scholars have seized upon the phenomenon and come up with all manner of names for them: puzzle films, forking path films, modular narratives, twist films, optional films, smart cinema, multiple draft narratives, or complex storytelling. I myself entered the fray with a term and explanation of my own: I call them ‘mind-game films,’ by which I mean to point to a particular set of narrative properties that together form a new networked textual and para-textual logic, as well as comprising a set of themes or tropes concerning states of mind and body we usually call pathological, yet which in these films are often not only deemed normal but become peculiarly adaptive and productive. But mind-game films are also symptomatic, I want to maintain, of a changing production logic and reception context – one to which I will turn in the last part of this chapter.

‘Actions have Consequences’ One particular paradox of Inland Empire as a mind-game film is that at first glance, much of what happens in the film is disjointed, disconnected and random. And yet, early in the film, the one character, among the man mysterious ones, who may have special powers of foresight and insight, ominously pronounces, ‘actions do have consequences.’ The phrase, as is probably known, comes from the Old Testament, the Book of Solomon. In verses 8–19 of Proverbs chapter 1, Solomon impresses upon his listeners that our actions always have consequences, and that we need to be mindful, that is: try and anticipate, what the – intended and unintended – consequences are of what we do. Children, in Bible class, are usually taught these words of wisdom, thereby not only learning the physical laws of causality but also the moral laws that are said to mirror them. Indeed, it is often asserted that if you exempt individuals from the consequences of their actions, you are not only depriving them of free will, you are also denying their personhood. Interestingly enough, in an online commentary, a pastor has contrasted this important biblical proverb to the current situation in our media-saturated world: “Unfortunately,” he says,

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Solomon’s lesson is not conveyed today. In the movies and television shows that we watch, the exact opposite message is promoted. What we need to remember is that … the sitcoms, dramas and movies are not reality. The problem is that many in our society and culture want their lives to imitate what they see. [But] in real life, people get hurt, unplanned pregnancies occur, and problems don’t get fixed during a 30-minute time slot. The truth of Solomon’s words needs to be heard anew and shared with conviction – actions have consequences. In speaking to both youth and adults alike, I have heard them voice disappointment that their lives are not more like their favorite television show. ‘After all, no one on television ever suffers the lingering effects of their choices. So why do I have to?’ Solomon’s instruction is to think not short-term, but long-term and consider the consequences. Consider the laws of motion that say with every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. In other words, no action is void of a consequence.10 So even if the pastor wasn’t thinking of Lynch’s Rabbit sitcom, and even if his point is a more general one, the mind-game film as genre, and Lynch’s LA trilogy in particular, can be seen to demonstrate this lesson in the most effective way possible, namely as a performative self-contradiction: using the apparent inconsequentiality of his film fantasies, to argue against the ‘real’ inconsequentiality of media fantasies. We see actions in Inland Empire that seem to make no sense to us, but the film’s jagged trajectories, its parallel narrative strands, its schizo-characters and uncanny doubles, and especially its multiple diegetic worlds bleeding into each other, are actually lessons in ‘consequences,’ for which we may not yet know, or no longer know, or don’t want to know the actions or causes of which the characters now experience the consequences. Or, as the Polish neighbor puts it, whom Lynch makes the spokeswoman for this particular Sunday sermon or Solomonian oracle: “if today was tomorrow you wouldn’t even remember that you owed on an unpaid bill.”

Transgressing Parameters of Filmic Narration Put differently, what Lynch is demonstrating is that in a world where multiple identities, sitcom lives and self-empowering fantasies are part of the flow of the everyday (into which, not least thanks to movies, music, and other media, we are individually and collectively immersed), the laws and logics of consequence still obtain, albeit not necessarily in ways that the pastor might recognize. How then, does Lynch conceive of these different forms of causality and how does he persuade us of the consequentiality of his apparent inconsequentiality? I would argue that Lynch does so, by modifying three of the central parameters in narrative films: he transgresses the autonomy of character consistency, he transgresses spatial contiguity, and he transgresses temporal coherence and sequentiality, by not respecting time’s arrow. This could provide the premise for arguing

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that Inland Empire is all taking place inside the head of ‘Nikki Grace,’ that it is a subjective film but –given the lack of character consistency – without a unified or centered subjectivity. Hence inside and outside, before and after, perceived and imagined, actual and virtual constantly overlap and interpenetrate each other, either out of a sense of stressful anticipation (‘Am I going to get the role and make a come-back or not?’ – which links it to parts of Mulholland Drive) or guiltfeelings (‘I’ve cheated on my husband and I dread the consequences’), which recalls the jealous rage at the core of Lost Highway. The various diegetic worlds would then be the ‘playing through’ or ‘acting out’ of the different anxiety-and-guilt scenarios, which these states of mind entail, thus instantiating the phrase ‘actions have consequences.’ After all, at the end we return to Nikki Grace’s mansion: she is now sitting where the Polish neighbor predicted she would be sitting, and she is surrounded by a chorus of female performers, some of whom played bit parts in the film itself. Such a reading would fit with the psychological aspect of what I have called ‘mind-game’ films, indicative of the productive, or ‘liberating’ effect of certain pathologies: in this case, the power of paranoia to navigate a world where everyone seems to be inside someone else’s game (and mind), at once manipulator and manipulated, at once pulling the strings and puppet on a string, at once sinner and sinned against.

Mind-Game Film as Production Logic In keeping with what I suggested earlier, however, it is not the psychological aspects of the mind-game film that concern me here. The type of reflexivity I wanted to examine is more focused on the relation that exists between the production logics of Hollywood in the age of the Internet and the textual logics that flow from this. I therefore want to read Lynch’s metaleptic rhetoric and mise-en-abyme diegeses primarily in light of another hypothesis associated with the mind-game film, which concerns the different media deployed, and the reception contexts they entail. Inland Empire, even more than the preceding two films, plays endless variations on the cinematic apparatus and its different mutations, as it migrates and mingles with video and the digital modes of recording, playback, and storage. In fact, as Andrew Lison has pointed out, Inland Empire is something of a commentary on Friedrich Kittler’s media philosophy, in that the ‘subjective mode without subjectivity’ which Lynch puts on display (while allowing for the kind of psychologizing interpretation I have hinted at) is framed within what can easily be recognized as a form of Kittlerian technological determinism. The best example is opening of the film, which is like an homage to Kittler’s gramophone needle struck in the brain, with the phonograph the acknowledged media format best suited to the Lacanian register of the Real: “only the phonograph can record all the noise produced by the larynx prior to any semiotic order and linguistic meaning.”11 Thus, the film suggests, the recurrent themes that Lynch explores again here – adultery, sexuality, prostitution, fantasy,

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desire – are constitutive of contemporary subjectivity but this subjectivity now requires a specific material-technological support through which it is mediated. Indeed, the opening sequence includes allusions to all three analog technologies Kittler links to the Lacanian model: not only the gramophone/Real but the cinematic apparatus, which he aligns with the imaginary, and the typewriter, which he identifies with the symbolic. As Robert Sinnerbrink argues, when interpreting the film as memory-work of nostalgia and loss: “Gramophone needles, movie cameras, DV cameras, even the strange camera obscura using cigarette and silk screen that we see later in the film; all of these devices make possible this haunting capture of an absent presence, this ghostly presence of the past.”12 For Kittler, on the other hand, analog media become a specific focal point of interest precisely because of the rise of the digital, and not for reasons of regret: “Increasingly, data flows once confined to books and later to records and films are disappearing into black holes and boxes that, as artificial intelligences, are bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands. In this situation we are left only with reminiscences, that is to say, with stories.”13 The film’s explicit foregrounding of analog formats is thus aligned with a media archaeological perspective on the material supports of earlier forms of subjectivity in an age where, as cognitivists often claim, the brain now tends to be modeled after the computer rather than the film projector. By viewing Inland Empire’s treatment of analog media as distinct from that of prior forms such as the camera obscura and later ones such as hand-held video, as well as by foregrounding these (instant) recording and (permanent) inscription technologies from the vantage point of the digital (which simulates both and is neither), we can see the film quoting – but also straining to overcome – the Lacanian model of subjectivity (with its emphasis on optics and the geometry of vision/miscognition), without, however, altogether abandoning it. If we now add to this the changing reception context since the emergence of DVDs and the Internet, of which, as indicated, Lynch is both victim and beneficiary, it becomes clear to what extent Lynch participates in the strategies of the mind-game film. This genre or tendency in contemporary filmmaking, I would argue, is only possible because of an active willingness on the part of the audience to enter into these indecipherable worlds and play these undecidable games. Spectators on the whole do not mind being ‘played with’: on the contrary, they rise to the challenge. The fact that audiences are set conundrums, or are sprung ‘traps for mind and eye,’ that they are confronted with odd objects or puzzling details that do not ‘add up’ – even though the overall experience ‘makes sense’ – would indicate that mind-games are a phenomenon that spectators recognize as relevant to their own lives: they identify with worlds that are predicated on contingency, but where actions do have consequences, nonetheless. Yet mind-game films are also film forms and practices that suit the producers and respond to changing production conditions in the film business. For instance, on the side of the recipients, it is noticeable that the responses to mind-game films found on fan sites either ignore the fictional contract and treat the film as an extension of real life, to which factual information is relevant, or they

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tend to use the film as the start of a database, to which all sorts of other data – trivia, fine detail, esoteric knowledge can be added, collected, and shared. Given that these commentators are likely very savvy media-consumers, their disengagement with traditional strategies of interpretation, indicates the existence of an informal, yet common set of rules, which permit participation. Consequently, such films become part-text, part-archive, part-point of departure, part-node in a rhizomatic, expandable network of inter-tribal communication, but also indicating that this type of spectatorial investment sees the ‘Mind-Game’ film become the ideal product for DVD commodification, where multiple viewings and para-textual information are specifically supported. This is evidenced also on YouTube, where Lynch is a favorite for mash-ups, pastiches, and parodies.14 Mind-game films, we could say, break one set of rules (realism, transparency, linearity) in order to make room for a new set, and their formal features – whether we examine them from a narratological angle, a psychopathological, a spiritual or therapeutic perspective (for all of which the mind-game films of Lynch provide credible ‘entry-points’) – represent a compromise formation, which is itself flexible, adaptable, differential, and versatile. In addition, they highlight the material conditions of multiple entries, as well as of multiple platforms. To take just one example: for a feature film to be not only recordable, storable, and playable as a DVD, but in some sense, particularly ‘DVD-enabled,’ it would have to be a film that requires and repays multiple viewings; that rewards the attentive viewer with esoteric or hidden clues; that is constructed as a spiral or loop; that benefits from back-stories (bonuses) or para-textual information; that can sustain a-chronological perusal or even thrives on it. All these conditions chart the type of textual organization which responds to the conditions of distribution, reception, consumption, cinephilia, connoisseurship, and spectatorship appropriate for the multi-platform film in the digital age, which can seduce a theater-going public with its special effects and spectacle values, engage the volatile fan-communities on the Internet by becoming a sort of ‘node’ for the exchange of information and the trade in trivia and esoterica in social networking situations, as well as ‘work’ possibly even as a game. With this, I have described several salient features of the mind-game film, but now looked at from the point of production. Inland Empire is in many ways a pastiche, i.e., an exaggerated instantiation of this logic and its formal consequences, taken to extremes. To finally come back to my initial point: how does this alignment of Lynch’s films with the mind-game genre help us understand Lynch’s authorship as paradigmatic, in relation to the changes and transitional states that the cinema is undergoing, of which I claimed the mind-game to be both pathogenic symptom and provisional solution? My tentative answer is that the question of who or what is at the origin of the events and the actions, of who organizes experiences, encounters, appearances and disappearances, i.e., the question of authority and authorship, is posed throughout Lynch’s LA trilogy, but it finds different answers. Or at any rate, Lynch comes up with different strategies and configurations that attempt to clarify

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it, by performing the possibilities. If Hollywood in general and mind-game films in particular experiment with new ways of opening access to global audiences and thus engage highly diverse groups and constituencies, across different outlets, platforms, and screens – including those mobile devices with which I started – the producers (which includes the studio, the directors, the writers, the financiers) are just as intent on maintaining control: whether we call it control over the brand and the franchise, control over the intellectual property rights and their commercial exploitation, or in a more old-fashioned language, we call it ‘creative control.’ This means that between ‘access for all’ and ‘keeping control,’ there is either a constitutive contradiction, or something has to give. I see Lynch’s particular – and indeed radical – manner of conducting his mind-game films as his way of ‘opening up’ the film (to endless speculation on the Internet, and to the most diverse interpretations among critics and academics, myself included), while at the same time ‘keeping control’ (over the apparatus that is Hollywood picturemaking, over the suits and money-men, but also over the way that agency – ‘actions have consequences’ – manifests itself in the films themselves). Or to put it in my terms, I see Lynch’s films tending towards ‘performative self-contradiction’ at one level – let’s call it the promotional level, where he markets his weird personality as a brand – and towards ‘distributive agency’ at another level (that of the film as text, as narrative or as aural, visual and affective experience), where authorship and agency are thematized across the different diegetic registers of action and settings, and the nested as well as fractured identities of person, actor, character.15 But ‘distributed agency’ also applies to the scenarios of manipulators manipulated, of premonitions and anticipations, of curses and consequences. A curse is a curse only if there is someone to retroactively ‘recognize’ and ‘assume’ it. In Inland Empire, the ‘curse’ of the original film functions much the way that Louis Althusser’s ‘interpellation’ functioned: as a powerful vector of subjectification, which reorganizing past and present, making the effect or consequence seek its cause or origin, thereby inscribing the present into the past, or indeed altering the past, to the extent of inscribing one’s own responsibility/culpability into it. ‘Distributed agency’ applies with equal importance to the different media technologies and media forms: Polish folk tale, incomplete German film, women’s picture, sitcom, porn film, thriller, horror movie, as well as radio serial, gramophone recording, television screen, canned laughter, movie house, Hollywood sign, Hollywood set (Paramount Studio), Hollywood location (Hollywood & Vine), digital camera, big studio camera, lights, lenses, megaphone. In Inland Empire, in other words, authority, authorship, and agency are distributed and dispersed across different fields of human relations, but also object-relations and media-relations. At one level, they are concentrically organized around a love affair that is itself nested inside a love relation, i.e., a marriage, each of which are disfigured or decentered across prostitution and infidelity on one side, and doubled by another set of affective relations in which love and money also play a role, namely those that are necessary for filmmaking: the affective contacts and economic contracts that pass

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between director and his leading players, that exist among the actors, and must be sustained between the director and his producers, his agents, assistants, crew, and so on. At another level, they are dispersed across the different media, their distinctive materialities, properties and effects, alternating between television and cinema, episode and series, sound and image, analogue and digital, recording and reproduction. Yet cinematically, this distribution and dispersal is also realized and represented: this time through a contradictory rhetoric or style, which presents its narrative blocks or diegetic segments in terms of closed Chinese boxes and mise-en-abyme repetitions, but then traverses, intersects and opens them up thanks to pointedly directional compositions, to movement and editing, characterized by long tracking shots, hand-held camera work, mobile points of view, and an obsessive attention, both visually and verbally, to doors, portals, passages, alleys, corridors, gates, stairs, and other vectors of transition and transgression, along with deictic-indexical markers, such as the Polish neighbor’s outstretched index finger leading the gaze but also leading the camera. In a similar, but more paradoxical way, the hand-gun with which Nikki as Susan kills the Phantom, is what one might call a directional object, which here doesn’t so much kill the Phantom as it obliterates him with light (though only after several mutations and reverse transformations), by shooting a light beam at him, much like a flash-light, a spot-light, or the lights on the set, which the director of the film within the film has so much trouble having adjusted, despite wielding himself a directional object par excellence, the megaphone. It would certainly be instructive to go through the film and identify and itemize those instances, where such vectors of linear movement and moments of transit occur and how they are thematized. Thus, a special role in this renegotiation of agency and directionality is assigned to objects, in particular to objects that are both acted upon and capable of action or endowed with agency: notably sources of light (lamps), sources of sounds (stylus, megaphones, telephones), as well as a proliferation of nested locations, both three-dimensional and as mere sets, along with props, tools and totemic objects (e.g. the screwdriver, the hand-gun, the monkey), some of whom, like the characters, seem to be doubles and substitutes for another, in a chain or relay, where they can take on mysterious, uncanny or magic properties. You will recall that the Polish neighbor, after saying that actions do have consequences, completes the sentence, after a short pause, with “and of course, there is the magic,” meaning that there may be consequences without actions, since magic is usually defined as effects without apparent or natural causes. But in another sense, magic is performative action: saying so makes it so, and magicians are deictic agents – they point to and demonstrate the power of imagined and inanimate objects (think Silencio Club in Mulholland Drive), highlighting how things can not only have causes but be causes, just as human beings can be active agents when they seem most acted upon, which is the grace/case of Nikki Grace, who by letting go might appear to be losing

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control, but accepting her loss of control, also regains it, across the flow of movement through the different spaces, sites and situations. Nikki – activepassive agent par excellence of Inland Empire – is both the bearer and conduit of authorship, as she leads the camera and is led by it. It is as if the curse can and has become the cure, in the act of transfer: Something that has happened in the past and cannot be undone, is retroactively declared to be the express intention of the one no longer in charge – thereby regaining the initiative and retaining control. This is what happens in the scene with the Polish neighbor at the beginning of the film. The ‘magic’ of Lynch’s mind-games would then be how the director always finds new ways to shake up, play off against each other and asymmetrically distribute causes and consequences, actions and intentions, memories and anticipations: he makes it look as if no one is in charge and all the possibilities are open, while directing our gaze and attention to detail and instant, and thus keeping control over mood and moment – even as the world, the people and places are allowed to arrange themselves in ever different configurations. For as he so rightly says: “the pieces are all there, the pieces are all there.”

Notes 1 www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0 2 Thomas Elsaesser, “Performative Self-Contradictions in Michael Haneke’s Mind Games,” in Roy Grundmann, ed., A Companion to Michael Haneke (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 53–74. 3 On Lynch’s ambivalence about television, which after all, took him from insider reputation to world-wide fame with Twin Peaks, see Warren Buckland, “‘A Sad, Bad Traffic Accident’: The Televisual Prehistory of David Lynch’s Film Mulholland Dr.,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 1, no. 1 (2003), 131–147. 4 http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/the-paradox-of-the-two-identities/ 5 www.youtube.com/watch?v=QssleSenCz8 6 Amy Taubin, “In Dreams,” Film Comment 37, no. 5 (September–October 2001); Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Review of Inland Empire,” Chicago Reader, January 25, 2007. https://www. chicagoreader.com/chicago/hollywood-from-the-fringes/Content?oid=924162 7 Anna Katharina Schaffner, “Fantasmatic Splittings and Destructive Desires: Lynch’s Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 45, no. 3 (2009), 270–291. 8 Slavoj Žižek, “David Lynch, or the Feminine Depression,” The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 119. 9 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=klElqcIbGuE 10 Pastor Mark Hiele, “Actions Have Consequences,” February 12, 2010. https://www. chickashanews.com/community/lesson-no-actions-have-consequences/article_28161335628c-5e11-b4e0-ec7dbc98f3b5.html 11 The following paragraph is a summary of pp. 8–9 of Andrew Lison, “Lynch beyond Žižek: Inland Empire’s Media Mind Games” (unpublished paper, MCM 2120G, Brown University, 2012), written for my seminar “Film and Philosophy after Deleuze.” Lison here quotes Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 16.

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12 Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (New York: Continuum, 2011), 145. 13 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, xxxix. 14 www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaJUDYwrGdY 15 The term ‘distributive agency’ or ‘distribution of agency’ is generally used in connection with Actor-Network Theory and was first elaborated in Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. For further comment, see Bruno Latour, “On Actor Network Theory: A Few Clarifications Plus More than a Few Complications.” www.bruno-latour.fr/ sites/default/files/P-67%20ACTOR-NETWORK

9 ZERO DARK THIRTY Genre Hybridization as (Parapractic) Interference

How Zero Dark Thirty Came About Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT) is an American ‘action thriller war film,’ made in 2012 by Anapurna Pictures, an independent studio, and directed by Kathryn Bigelow from a screenplay by Mark Boal, both of whom also acted as co-producers. Released through Columbia Pictures in the US, and by Universal internationally, the film made $140 million worldwide, on a budget of $40 million. Zero Dark Thirty condenses into its 157 minutes running time the ten-year long manhunt for Osama bin Laden, the figurehead of Al Qaeda, held responsible by the United States for the attacks on September 11, 2001. The film’s tagline (in the manner of sensationalist newspaper headlines and 1930s style gangster films) was: ‘the story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man.’ The concerted efforts of the CIA, other spy agencies and the US Navy eventually led, after many false trails and near misses, to the discovery of Osama bin Laden’s compound not in the mountains of Afghanistan but in Abbottabad, a middle-class city in Pakistan. A daring and dangerous military raid on the compound, conducted by Navy SEALs in the dead of night, resulted in bin Laden’s being killed on May 2, 2011. Katherine Bigelow, and especially Mark Boal, had been wanting to make a film about the bin Laden hunt for several years, initially focusing on his almost-capture at the Battle of Tora Bora Caves, in December 2001, when bin Laden managed to slip away.1 Boal is a journalist, screenwriter, and film producer, who used to write investigative pieces for Rolling Stone, Playboy, and The Village Voice, including an article entitled “Death and Dishonor” (2004), which became the basis for the film In the Valley of Elah, written and directed by Paul Haggis, the director of Crash. Boal, thanks to his journalist work, had nurtured good connections to people inside the US military and the CIA.

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The Depiction of Torture: Justification, Neutral Description, or Condemnation? The main controversy, already prior to the film’s release in December 2012 and continuing throughout 2013, concerned the depiction in the film of ‘enhanced interrogation,’ the hideous euphemism used by the Bush administration for torture. Not unlike the opening of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, with its horrifically visceral battle scenes at Omaha Beach in June 1944, Zero Dark Thirty starts with some 30 minutes of graphically rendered harsh interrogation, sleep deprivation, verbal and physical abuse as well as the sexual humiliation of a human being, witnessed by the heroine, Maya (played by Jessica Chastain), a fresh-out-of-school recruit engaged by the CIA for its black operation field work in Afghanistan. Along with the anxious phone calls from the victims of 9/11 in the Twin Towers and the AA Flight just before their deaths which we have been made to witness in the dark as the film opens, the extended torture sequence is meant to affectively destabilize and morally disorient us, indeed to ‘traumatize’ the audience: making us experience the hunt for bin Laden as an emotionally extremely loaded quest. This, no doubt, also in order to counter all the information about 9/11 and bin Laden we already have in our heads, and thus to reboot our senses: to our agitation in the face of these horrific and haunting sounds and images, we can attach very different feelings: of dismay, revulsion and disgust, but also of fear, pity, anger, and revenge. The main arguments that arose from these torture scenes and their function in the film can be sorted into three categories: those who objected to the depiction of torture per se, seeing it as sensationalist and grossly manipulative, especially since Bigelow at no point has a character condemn the CIA’s interrogation methods as torture and thus as illegal; those who objected to what they saw as the causal link the film established between torture and the capture of bin Laden; and finally, those who felt that the entire debate about whether torture yielded results or not was wrong-headed, because it already implicitly endorsed the public acceptability of the fact that America tortured its detainees, thus neutralizing and naturalizing what is not only a crime by international law, but morally totally unacceptable, especially by and in a country that prides itself on its high humanist values and standards, and only too readily lectures others, indeed invades other countries because of their purported disregard for human rights and civilized behavior. In fact, the spectrum of opinion on the question of torture in Zero Dark Thirty was as diverse and partisan as it has been in the media and among politicians ever since the Bush–Cheney administration authorized it. For instance, the Guardian journalist and lawyer Glen Greenwald, who helped publish Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks, made the case against Zero Dark Thirty even before he had seen it, calling it ‘CIA propaganda,’ since so much of the action is seen from the perspective of the CIA operatives, one of whom is, of course, Maya, our main character. She may be headstrong and rebellious, but she is not a whistleblower.

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Another objection arose from Bigelow’s montage technique: cutting together of the desperate cries for help from the victims of the 9/11 attacks, with the harsh interrogation of Amar in an Afghan detention center six years later suggests a causal link, according to the post hoc ergo propter hoc logic: “The relationship created by this bit of montage – from 9/11 straight into ‘enhanced interrogation’ – is significant to the film; with a single cut, Zero Dark Thirty posits the War on Terror as an outgrowth of national trauma. By extension, the viewer – or at least an American viewer – is made complicit [with torture].”2 The official reaction to, and critique of the film, by members of the US Government and the CIA had clear political implications: for instance, Michael Morell, the acting CIA director, wrote the following memo to agency employees in December 2012, i.e., before ZDT had opened: “The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques … were the key to finding bin Laden. That impression is false.” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein and the two senior members of the Armed Services Committee, Democrat Carl Levin and Republican John McCain, co-authored a letter, accusing the movie’s version of recent counter-terrorism history to be “grossly inaccurate and misleading.” The senators said the film’s flaws have “the potential to shape American public opinion in a disturbing and misleading manner.”3 Both these statements seem to deny the effectiveness of torture, yet implicitly accept its actual existence and endorse the practice. But this in turn contradicts an earlier statement of another CIA director, Michael Hayden, the final CIA director of the Bush administration, who wrote that information gleaned from detainees both at Guantanamo Bay and at the various clandestine sites used for ‘rendition’ (another euphemism, this time for kidnap), proved “crucial to the search,” when these prisoners were “subjected to some form of enhanced interrogation.” In other words, in these statements, we see reflected the political divisions of the US: not, alas, with regard to torture per se, but with regard to party politics. Those who say that torture was not central to the hunt for bin Laden tended to be Democrats, to bolster Obama’s credibility, on whose watch OBL was located and killed, while those deeming it crucial or effective would be Republicans, who want to retroactively defend the use of torture during their periods in office. How then, out of this political tussle, does Zero Dark Thirty emerge? The fact is that even when Obama cancelled these harsh interrogation techniques immediately after his inauguration, none of the people involved in torture were ever put on trial by the Obama administration: something many of his supporters resented and criticized. In other words, a crucial part of the debate has remained displaced: torture was used on detainees, enhanced interrogation was a fact, rendition as kidnapping and bounty hunting was a regular tool and widespread practice, with many countries colluding in illegal US requests. The film, it can be argued, more or less falls in line with this cavalier attitude to extra-judicial imprisonment and killing, or at least does little to challenge it. Its most critical moment comes when the CIA man who conducted the enhanced interrogation that Maya witnessed,

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decides he has had enough, and says: “I don’t want to be the last man putting the dog collar on a prisoner when Washington cancels these programs,” implying that he expects Obama to make good on his campaign promise to outlaw the practice. If this is a critique, it comes from an opportunist. The sad truth is that Zero Dark Thirty could not have been produced in its present form if any of the officials who created and implemented US torture policy had been held accountable for what happened, or any genuine sunshine had been thrown upon it. In that case it would have been like making a film about a gangland murder as viewed by the police – a crime that in real life the police went after – but showing it in the film as if all the police on the scene had watched and done nothing. Such a film would stand exposed, and the falseness would draw general comment.4 However, it is equally possible, and some who defended the film made this point,5 to view the very cynicism and opportunism of the interrogator, and especially the way he chameleon-like shape shifts from bearded hippie, swilling beer and keeping pet monkeys in Afghanistan into a suit-and-tie CIA bureaucrat pacing the corridors of Langley with his blackberry, as in itself a very graphic depiction (and thus, if you like, a critique) of the callousness and indifference of those who carried out these appalling policies with apparent impunity.6 As might be expected, the issue that most agitated other parts of the world, notably Pakistan (which banned the film), namely the violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty during the actual raid on the Abbottabad compound, gets very little attention in the US discussion around the film – a discussion, incidentally, where it was not always clear whether it was the film that was put on trial or the Bush administration’s War on Terror and the policies used to conduct it. However, there were two additional points of contention aimed at the film, and they concerned Bigelow’s choices of a woman as the main protagonist, and the film’s status as a fictional narrative about a real-world subject. As to the gender of the protagonist – a topic to which I shall return – in an essay for Al Jazeera, entitled “Dark zero-feminism,” the US scholar and activist Zillah Eisenstein registers deep disapproval on feminist grounds: Do not now cleanse the wars of/on terror with the face of a white blonde female. Do not detract from the heinous aspects of the terror war by making it look gender neutral. My point: do not justify or explain US war revenge with a pretty redhead white woman with an ‘obsession’ to catch the mastermind of 9/11. This film is not [to be] made seemingly progressive or feminist [just] because it presents a female CIA agent as central to the demise of Osama. Nor should any of us think that it is ‘good’ that Maya is female, or that several females had an important hand in the murder of Osama. There is nothing feminist in revenge.7

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The second point concerns an apparent contradiction that Bigelow and her screenwriter faced over the status of the film, with respect to the sources used. On the one hand, Mark Boal all along prided himself on his journalistic credentials and intensive investigative research; on the other hand, when cornered about aspects of their story, such as the fact that several characters, including Maya, the main character, are ‘composites,’ i.e., they combine biographies, official roles and actions derived from several historical individuals, he retreats to the position that it is a fiction film, not only having to condense ten years of real time, but also needing to streamline complex events and multiple agents, locations, and agencies into a causally motivated storyline that can be followed even by people not familiar first-hand with either bin Laden or the internal workings of labyrinthine institutions like the CIA or even the US Government: Boal and Bigelow have offered two main responses to the criticism they have received. One is that as dramatists compressing a complex history into a cinematic narrative, they must be granted a degree of artistic license. That is unarguable, of course, and yet the filmmakers cannot, on the one hand, claim authenticity as journalists while, on the other, citing art as an excuse for shoddy reporting about a subject as important as whether torture had a vital part in the search for bin Laden, and therefore might be, for some, defensible as public policy. Boal and Bigelow – not their critics – first promoted the film as a kind of journalism. Bigelow has called Zero Dark Thirty a “reported film.” Boal told a New York Times interviewer before the controversy erupted, “I don’t want to play fast and loose with history.8 Bigelow at a certain point in January 2013 felt she had to defend herself and, in an opinion piece published by the LA Times, she offered a lengthy rebuttal of the charges brought against her film. Her first line of defense was that “depiction does not mean endorsement.” Her second argument claimed that it was impossible to decide whether torture was a key element in tracking down bin Laden, given that the details were still classified information. Yet to leave out torture would have been immoral: Experts disagree sharply on the facts and particulars of the intelligence hunt, and doubtlessly that debate will continue. As for what I personally believe, which has been the subject of inquiries, accusations and speculation, I think Osama bin Laden was found due to ingenious detective work. Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn’t mean it was the key to finding bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn’t ignore.9 However, she considerably weakened her argument, and certainly did do herself no favors among those who strongly opposed torture, when she concluded her

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piece with a ringing endorsement of the American military and the US secret services: Bin Laden wasn’t defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.10 It is evident that at this level of debate early in 2013, there was little hope in ‘resolving’ who was right, and if so, on what grounds. Justification both for torture, and for the film’s depiction of it, failed to settle on mutually acceptable terms, either aesthetically or politically. The relentless forwards drive of the narrative, coupled with the genre conventions of the thriller and the action genre, suggested a linear logic that made many viewers uncomfortable, even where their political positions gave them little option: no other basis seemed to exist for justifying the respective stances other than that they came down to personal opinion, backed by political belief. Some saw this as the strength of the film: “I don’t think anyone can say with any degree of certainty just how Maya feels about torture or about Osama’s death or about the ‘success’ of the mission. And that ambiguity is a strength of the film.”11 Others argued that by framing the debate in terms of whether ‘enhanced interrogation’ extracted useful information or equally often misled the CIA into false certainty and thus into wasteful investigations and even more egregious errors, already endorses torture as an acceptable instrument of government policy, letting one side define the terrain on which to do battle.12 For this reason, too, Slavoj Žižek gets himself into a somewhat muddled position, when he rejects the film’s depiction of torture altogether, on the grounds that to depict is to neutralize, and to neutralize is to endorse, comparing it to dispassionately depicting ‘the gas chambers’ and ‘rape.’ Žižek ends his article by exclaiming: Torture saves lives? Maybe, but for sure it loses souls – and its most obscene justification is to claim that a true hero is ready to forsake his or her soul to save the lives of his or her countrymen. The normalization of torture in Zero Dark Thirty is a sign of the moral vacuum we are gradually approaching.13

What the Genres Knew I may come back to Žižek’s remarks, but first I want to go a different route, and look more closely at the way the film, as an independent production, but nonetheless situating itself within the Hollywood mainstream, deploys, disturbs and possibly unbeknownst to itself, transgresses both the genre convention and the character formation of classical Hollywood filmmaking. As already indicated, in the public

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debate it was very difficult to make out whether at issue was Bigelow and Boal’s film, or the policies, first of the Bush–Cheney White House, and then those of its successor, the Obama administration. Is there another way to get at the issues, not just of the admissibility of torture in extreme situations, either to extract information or – even more problematically – to take revenge on the presumed perpetrators of 9/11, but also to probe more properly why and how the United States are so deeply split on this, their greatest national trauma in the 21st century? To answer the question, I need to state some of my own methodological premises and heuristic assumptions when discussing Hollywood films in general, and its genres in particular. On the one hand, I think it is perfectly reasonable, indeed mandatory, to allow for the possibility that even Hollywood films are more intelligent than their critics, and on some occasions, more insightful than even their makers – screenwriters and directors included. Already in the 1950s, Chris Marker noted that “the cinema knows more than filmmakers (le cinéma a plus de talent que les cinéastes),” and he was indeed referring to Hollywood, in the early days of the auteur theory. On the other hand, ‘intelligence’ is perhaps the wrong word to describe the way American film tries to tackle touchy and controversial subjects (which, by the way, it does regularly and with a seriousness and frequency that must shame most other national cinemas, German and French cinema specifically included). Better to stick to Marker’s ‘talent’ or, better still, invoke once more André Bazin’s ‘genius of the system’: The way that Hollywood films deal with (which is to say, develop rhetorical and aesthetic strategies of justification for) hot button topics, whether political, racial, or sexual, is to deploy two major strategies. One is classical and the other post-classical, but neither can be readily aligned with the usual critique of Hollywood, namely that it is simply making propaganda for the dominant ideology. The classical strategy is known as ‘structured ambiguity’ or ‘deniability,’ and one of its often-discussed examples is the apartment scene in Casablanca, when Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart have their first tête-à-tête after not seeing each other for several years. The film answers the question ‘did they or didn’t they?’ with literally a fade to black, which gives plenty of room to the spectator’s dirty mind, but leaves out any visible evidence, except a highly symbolic shot of a lighthouse tower, followed by an equally symbolic pair of lighted cigarettes. The post-classical version of ‘structured ambiguity’ is what I have studied most closely in recent years. I have variously analyzed it either in terms of ‘performative self-contradiction’ (as in James Cameron’s Avatar), or as examples of what I term ‘poetics of parapraxis,’ which also knows its counterpart in public life, where it becomes a ‘politics of parapraxis.’ Parapraxis is the Anglicized translation of Freud’s ‘Fehlleistung’ whereby it is of crucial significance to valorize fully the word’s inherent tension or contradiction between the meaning of ‘Fehl’ (fail), and of ‘Leistung’ (performance).

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Parapraxis allows for the expression, articulation, or manifestation of two or more contradictory states of mind, moral positions, wishes, and intentions, within the same utterance or speech act, or in our case, within a single fictional narrative. For instance, the so-called ‘Bushisms,’ i.e., the former US president’s frequent and revealing Freudian slips, are parapraxes, but what interests me are the rarer occasions, where such parapraxes turn out to be ‘successfully failed performances’ in the full dual sense of Fehlleistung, and I therefore want to propose to consider that Zero Dark Thirty – dealing as it does with exceedingly controversial subject matter (i.e., America’s self-understanding as a transparent democracy, against the perception not only of secretive, authoritarian illegality, but also of hypocrisy and double-standards) – constitutes a prime example of a film whose structured ambiguities also develop a ‘poetics of parapraxis.’ Yet this parapractic dimension of the narrative can best be located on two levels: first, in relation to what in my title I call ‘genre hybridity as interference,’ and secondly, in the form of what I discuss elsewhere (in Chapter 3) under the apparently self-contradictory heading of ‘productive pathology.’ In other words, with respect to classical and contemporary Hollywood, Zero Dark Thirty deploys both structured ambiguity and enacts a series of parapraxes: the former thanks to its unusually enigmatic central character, and the latter in that its deliberate, but also inadvertent use of genres and genre-hybrids, poses challenges of reading which – as I hope to show – use properly cinematic means to give body to historical dilemmas and politically unpalatable truths, all of which belong to the rhetoric of justification that inhabits Zero Dark Thirty, even if most spectators only sense these strategies in their conflicted, extreme, or frustrated reactions and responses to the film.

Productive Pathologies To start with ‘productive pathologies,’ a term I first introduced in the essay on “Mind-game films” (Chapter 3 in this volume): I see a certain radical ambivalence in the way mind-game films present their characters as suffering from particular pathologies, for – as indicated – mind-game films tend to revolve around mentally or psychologically unstable characters, whose aberrations fall into three major types: paranoia, schizophrenia, and amnesia. Even though some of the mind-game films identify them as ‘conditions,’ the fact that these characters’ point of view is usually privileged over all others (and thus functions as the spectator’s guide) is more than a ‘trick’: it points to a peculiar aspect of their mental state, namely that it suspends our usual categories of sane/insane, those of victim and agent … as well as the more specifically Freudian distinction between desire and drive. What we encounter is not an increase in “critical reflexivity [about the situation characters find themselves in], but instead a ‘lowering’ of self-reflexivity and a

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different form of recursiveness, by, in some cases, knocking out part of the conscious mind altogether, and replacing it with ‘automated’ feedback: this is signaled by protagonists [displaying symptoms of] various personality disorders, among which [besides schizophrenia, paranoia and amnesia] certain forms of autism are the favored means of signaling disordering identity and dis-associating character, distributing agency, and reinforcing motivation, and thus, as it were, programming a ‘reboot’ of consciousness and the sensory-motor system also on the part of the spectator.” How, then, does this definition of ‘productive pathology’ apply to Zero Dark Thirty and to its central protagonist, the rookie CIA agent Maya? Three things about her irritated the critics: that she is a woman, and a glamorous one at that; that she seems detached, cold, disinterested, and ‘neutral’; and third, that she seems so obsessively single-minded and fanatically determined. All three fit the personality profile of a ‘productive pathology’ – in her case combining elements of paranoia with a strong streak of autism – even though in general, productive-pathology protagonists (especially with autistic behavior-traits) tend to be male, rather than female. To contextualize the point, it is helpful to briefly cast one’s mind back to Bigelow and Boal’s first joint film project, The Hurt Locker, where we find a very good example of the male ‘productive pathology’ hero. There, Sergeant William James, serving with a US Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit during the Second Iraq War, is considered reckless and unpredictable in his behavior, to the point that one member of his unit is ready to kill him by deliberately triggering an explosion. But James turns out to be superbly attuned to his specialized job, sniffing out and dismantling IEDs (improvised explosive devices), which requires precisely those behavioral character traits that make his comrades uneasy. Once his tour of duty is over and he is sent home to his wife and young son, he gets bored, disoriented and feels useless as father and husband, eventually deciding to re-enlist. On the face of it, James’s inability to adjust to civilian life is a well-known veteran condition, but in The Hurt Locker, the causality is inverted: our hero seems a maverick and maladjusted to start with, and it is in the extreme war situation that this maladjustment turns out to be an advantage, precisely the situation I have been tracking in many Hollywood films of the last two decades as ‘productive pathologies’: a new kind of environment – here the asymmetrical, weaponized, and technologically sophisticated conflicts, somewhere between civil war, occupation, and guerilla combat, of which the Iraq War has become the contemporary template – requires a new kind of distributed subjectivity, variably focused, and post-Fordist, but nonetheless the opposite of the ‘affective labor’ or ‘multi-tasking’ subjectivities, now so often associated with the ‘network society’ and rhizomatic social ensembles. Nonetheless, productive pathologies are structurally related (in the form of proactive response, perhaps) to data overload, or as in the case of The Hurt Locker, to the unexpected, indeed, the ‘improvised’ and the ‘explosive,’ not only in a war situation.

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Interestingly enough, among the productive pathologies in American movies of the mind-game type, one not only finds such psychic disorders as amnesia, schizophrenia, paranoia, autism, but also cerebral palsy and obesity. Other movie favorites such as sociopaths, conmen, ‘jokers,’ traumatized supermen and serial killers seem to exert an equally ambivalent fascination as to their potential usefulness as symptoms, not only of the ‘moral vacuum,’ or our depravity, as Žižek would have it, but as mutants of our survival skills as a species, or at the very least, survivors of globalized capitalism. On the other hand, the promotion of pathologies as ‘productive’ and adaptive may itself be yet another last frontier that capitalism is closing, to more fully make affect and the body, after consciousness and the senses, the site of consumption and profit extraction. Quite tellingly, and somewhat ominously, the motto of The Hurt Locker is “the rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug” – and in this sense, this last frontier that online convenience capitalism is about to conquer is how to first make addiction socially acceptable behavior, in order then to monetize it. Which briefly brings me to a consideration of one type of addictive behavior that has recently caught media attention, namely ‘binge-watching’ television series like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or True Detective. Rather than a secret vice, an indulgence we should resist, binge watching has gone mainstream, and articles are beginning to appear that praise its positive sides, talking about its cathartic, or rather ‘restorative’ properties.14 The reason to bring up addictive viewing habits in the present context is that, apparently, the idea to make the main character in Zero Dark Thirty a woman came to Bigelow when she read about a female counter-terrorism CIA agent, on whose career the figure of Carrie Mattheson was based, the heroine and protagonist of precisely such an addictive television series, namely Homeland, where she is played by Clare Danes. Carrie Mattheson is again a very good example of a productive pathology, since the series insists that her bipolar mental disorder is both the source of some of her biggest breakthroughs as a counter-terrorism agent, and of the troubles she gets herself into. In addition, her mental instability is also used, at least initially to give her surveillance activity that seemingly unhealthy personal and obsessive trait which turns her object of prey into a love object. Therefore, when, in Mark Boal’s researches of the Osama bin Laden manhunt, a female operative by the name ‘Jen’ turned out to be involved (in the book, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden, by former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette), Bigelow and Boal were further encouraged to make their film about a ‘woman at war,’ a woman at the center of America’s War on Terror, meant to punish the perpetrators but also avenge national pride, and to set the action in a world wholly dominated by macho attitudes and masculine values. What makes the figure both productively pathological and fascinating for the viewer is precisely her ability to strike very masculine poses and show steely determination, to which Jessica Chastain gives her lithe, ethereal, and fragile body – almost as if she had indeed

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just stepped out of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. Another reading would be that she is a kind of Joan of Arc figure, convinced of a calling and possessed by a cause greater than herself (“I was meant to survive to complete the job,” she says at one point), which also means – like Joan or Antigone15 – she has to remain preternaturally ‘virginal,’ untouched by earthly desires. This has the additional virtue of making this extra-judicial killing seem ethical, because not motivated by self-interest, but somehow obeying a higher necessity even than the reasons of state. On several occasions, Bigelow deliberately plays with Maya’s gender-bending androgyny, such as in the by now iconic shot with wind-blown hair and aviator shades right out of Top Gun, and most memorably, in the verbal exchange with a profanity-prone Leon Panetta, then Director of the CIA: “And how close is the Pakistan Military Academy to the house?” MAYA: Four thousand, two hundred, twenty-one feet; it’s closer to eight-tenths of a mile. CIA DIRECTOR: “Who are you?” MAYA: “I’m the motherfucker that found this place. Sir.” CIA DIRECTOR:

Thus, the ‘motherfucker’ of Zero Dark Thirty – a singularly dedicated protagonist, but with severe professional deformations – has a lot in common with the main character in The Hurt Locker. Both require a certain aberrant personality, in order to ‘do the job’: they are the new kind of problem-solvers, they are the ones who concentrate themselves autistically, in order to stay focused, let loose their paranoia, in order to see connections that others have overlooked, or split themselves schizophrenically, in order to undertake tasks that must be done, but for which no moral or legal justification exists: precisely the kind of ‘sacrificial heroism’ that Žižek condemns as ‘obscene’ as if he was to compare it with Heinrich Himmler’s infamous Posen address to the SS Gruppenführer. Bigelow, however, has not only built structured ambiguity into Maya’s persona and sexual identity. The film ends on a note of remarkable ambiguity when she shows Maya, after having identified the body of OBL, tears streaming down her face, all by herself, looking totally lost. How are we to interpret this scene? One commentator sees it as a critique that retroactively changes how we evaluate her determination: The film’s final scene, which takes place a few hours before bin Laden’s death is officially announced, depicts Maya boarding a troop transport plane; she is told by a crew member that they have orders to fly her anywhere she wants, but as the closing close-up lingers on her face, what registers is a profound purposelessness—an unspoken ‘What now?’ – Maya begins the film as a ghostly figure lingering in the back of Dan’s interrogation shed. Recruited into the CIA straight out of school, she has no real friends and no inner life. Her obsession with finding Abu Ahmed speaks less to dedication

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or professionalism (the film establishes several times that she’s disliked by many of her colleagues) than to a need for purpose. Like Sgt. James, the protagonist of The Hurt Locker, she uses war to fill an emotional void; without the manhunt, she has nothing.16 Are Maya’s tears, then, tears of joy (mission accomplished), or tears of pity (a man in the middle of the night, shot like a rabid dog), tears of regret (of being an accomplice to acts that may have been commanded by a US president, but which in the eyes of the rest of the world, were not sanctioned by international law), or tears of self-pity, that she had lost her reason for being, her goal in life? We are not told, and unusual for a Hollywood film, there is no sense of closure, and the ending is both anti-climactic and distinctly post-heroic. A similar point is made by Matt Taibbi, in an essay entitled “Zero Dark Thirty is Osama bin Laden’s last victory over America”: “As for Maya’s tears, anyone who reads in regret or ambivalence there is doing just that: reading in. I saw that scene as being identical to the ending of The Princess Bride, when Inigo Montoya says, ‘I‘ve been in the revenge business for so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.’”17 If it is indeed just an emotional void that is no longer filled, then the idea of addiction as the new ‘motivation’ would have some traction. It would even give another twist to the notion of productive pathology, because it can now be seen as a response to the kinds of challenges coming from a networked world of 24/7 round-the-clock demands and data, fed into our brains and bodies by way of stimuli and sensations. However, the complaint of purposelessness can also be turned around, in that it is merely the conservative, old-fashioned humanist reaction to a purpose either not yet identified as such, or no longer within the human calculus of means and ends. For instance, the film provides many clues that what makes Maya so successful is her superior grasp of life as ‘data,’ to be gathered, processed, sifted, and interpreted.18 It is perfectly possible to read Zero Dark Thirty as a film about ubiquitous surveillance not just in a war-zone or among the intelligence communities of the CIA or the NSA, but as the transformation into ‘data’ of policy, strategy, and geography, of human beings and of human relations. After all, the CIA not only locate OBL’s courier through first tracking his cell-phone, and then the locations from where he makes his landline calls, but they deduct OBL’s presence in the compound not by way of ocular sightings, but on the basis of ‘calculated probability.’ The clearest evidence of ‘data over humans’ comes during the actual raid, when the SEAL team is ultimately more interested in bin Laden’s computers and hard drives than in his body and person. As many have noted, throughout the film, bin Laden’s face is never shown. Maya’s productive pathology would thus be the mirror image of a society moving towards ‘data-mining’ all its vital areas of social life and human existence. Her job as a CIA agent in pursuit of ‘the world’s most dangerous man’ merely provides the suitable metaphor for a generalized and generalizable ‘human

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condition,’ where data – even more than money – drives the world, and with it, human beings. Maya, in other words, is an addict: addicted to data: Torture, surveillance, and enemy action are all treated as data, which is then used to calculate probabilities. These probabilities form the bases for future actions, which yield more data. The cycle goes on and on and on … Warfare becomes data, and then data becomes the object of warfare, supplanting its original goals. When Osama bin Laden is killed in Zero Dark Thirty … no burden is lifted. The Navy SEALs quickly load him into a body bag. He’s just another corpse. They’re more interested in his computer hard drives – the data that will allow the War on Terror to continue.19 We could also phrase it even more succinctly, by saying that Zero Dark Thirty is a film where excessive bodies (i.e., both Maya and OBL) encounter excessive data.20

The Police Procedural This line of interpretation fits very well with the general consensus on the film’s generic identity, which sees it primarily as a ‘procedural,’ i.e., a film genre that devotes much of its action to the minute, step-by-step description of an investigation, usually by a single detective or a team, into a murder case or a conspiracy, tracking a serial killer or investigating a case of corruption and cover-up within an organization. The emphasis is thus on the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what,’ with the inner – often oblique, labyrinthine, or bureaucratic – workings of an institution becoming the main focus of suspense and interest. It is to the credit of Bigelow as an American filmmaker that she and Boal have crafted an exceptionally suspenseful ‘procedural’ out of a story whose main outlines and especially whose ending everyone in the audience knew in advance. In other words, Zero Dark Thirty combines the characteristics of a thriller with those of the police procedural, in order to shape a political thriller in the best paranoia tradition, as pioneered in the mid-1970s by Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, continued by Oliver Stone’s JFK and taken into the present by post 9/11 thrillers like Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana and David Fincher’s Zodiac. Such films start with a series of baffling events and enigmatic encounters, leading the hero deeper and further into a web of conspiratorial networks, into which he has to break or infiltrate, in order to work his way up to the source of evil or corruption, mindful that he will face setbacks, threats to his life and official obstruction. The template fits Zero Dark Thirty up to a point, and especially insofar as the political thriller and the police procedural both depend on the dogged persistence of a journalist or a detective. It confirms that the film is indeed fascinated by the conversion of human action into process and protocol, and into ‘the numbingly anonymous [accumulation] of

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Big Data.’ Yet precisely because the data-driven passion of the protagonist fits the genre of the procedural, such films run the risk of reviving hierarchical thinking, not least because the very structure of the procedural requires a super-villain at the top, to whom the chain of investigation ultimately leads: Zero Dark Thirty is the ne plus ultra of proceduralism, its ultimate expansion and reductio ad absurdum. It’s all about the well-nigh interminable process of searching for, and then eliminating, Osama bin Laden. The premise and initial impetus of this process is of course the mythological demonization of bin Laden, as the ultimate culprit responsible for Nine Eleven. But in the relentless proceduralism that the film presents to us, this goal or rationale is abraded away. The torture … is … part of this. But so is the process of painstakingly correlating irrelevant information, the accidental discovery of leads in years-old records, the repetitive tracking of the vehicle of the suspected courier, the endless bureaucratic meetings at which officials seek to decide if the information is valid and what should be done about it, and above all the military operation in the last thirty minutes of the film (has military action ever been depicted in the movies with such relentless a focus on operational techniques, in a manner that is utterly devoid alike of the horror of war and of the glory and heroism that are so often invoked to justify it?). The goal has been so absorbed into procedural routine that the ostensible climax of the film, the actual killing of Bin Laden, occurs offscreen; and we barely even get a glimpse of the corpse, zipped as it is into a body bag, which is to say treated entirely (and literally) according to Standard Operating Procedure.21 Steven Shaviro’s larger point in his intervention is the suggestion that the resurgence of the procedural is symptomatic of a more general failure in politics: the handing over of government to technocrats and committees, itself symptomatic of the paralysis that has overcome democratic liberalism: Zero Dark Thirty embodies the truth of liberal proceduralism as an organizing principle of all governmentality and all social life today. Embodying and testifying to a truth in this manner is not the same as offering a critique … Critique is important, but it isn’t everything … Embodying the truth of a situation, as I think Zero Dark Thirty does, has important aesthetic and political consequences, more important perhaps than those that come from making an accurate and moral judgment. Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t show us a way out from the nightmare of liberal proceduralism, but it makes this nightmare visible at a time when its sheer ubiquity might otherwise leave us to take it for granted and thereby ignore it.22

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From Structured Ambiguity to Parapraxis (as Interference) So much for the necessary relation between Zero Dark Thirty’s central character as an example of productive pathology, and the genre of the police procedural, whereby each redefines the other, or to borrow Shaviro’s terminology, each ‘embodies the truth’ of the other: the productive pathology lets us see the police procedural as the vehicle of a new kind of data-driven technocratic governmentality, while the obsessive-compulsive, autistic-addictive pathology of Maya’s dogged persistence reveals the ubiquitous surveillance behind all this data-gathering to be both a political tool, and an economic imperative, extracting data that models our innermost feelings, while implanting a motivation that has become indistinguishable from an addiction. Indeed, one could go one step further, and argue that what finally makes Maya such an uncanny character is this quality of the automaton, as if part of her personality had been wiped out, or locked up, replaced by what I earlier called ‘automated feedback’: the human face on the Turing machine. This ‘embodied truth,’ which Shaviro explicitly distinguishes from (and values higher than) critique, goes some way to vindicate what I have called the film’s strategy of structured ambiguity, typical of classical Hollywood. Contrary to Žižek and many other commentators, who so intensely disapproved of Zero Dark Thirty, this structured ambiguity partially relieves the film from the stigma of being Bush or Obama or CIA propaganda (or all the above, if Obama is to you a continuation of Bush). Zero Dark Thirty’s structured ambiguity merely confirms what Hollywood films have to do, in order to survive economically: namely, to provide ‘access for all,’ i.e., points of entry for very different kinds of spectators, abroad and at home, on the right and on the left, including those who have already in advance decided that a film that depicts torture must be bad. However, my initial point was that a post-classical, i.e., contemporary Hollywood film may also embody another kind of truth, besides leaving it to the spectator to make up his or her own mind. This strategy, which I have called the ‘poetics of parapraxis,’ and which may not be a strategy in the usual sense of the term, but instead either a necessary effect or an unintended consequence, would invert, complement, or aggravate structured ambiguity, insofar as it responds to a more conflicted situational ambiguity and unresolved ambivalence of feeling, whose inner truth lies in the simultaneous articulation of seemingly incompatible utterances or ideological positions. And my claim, which I now must make good, is that in the case of Zero Dark Thirty, parapraxis can be tracked along different fault lines that have to do with genre hybridity and genre interference. When speaking of the former, I am not thinking of the genre hybridity that scholars have noted in mainstream Hollywood filmmaking since the late 1970s, when B-picture genres or television formats received A-picture treatment (Jaws is the frequently cited example), or when film noir atmospherics were hybridized with everything from sci-fi thriller (Blade Runner) to horror (Twin Peaks, Lost Highway) to Western and beyond (think Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, Fargo, or No Country for Old Men). Rather, what I have in

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mind is genre interference, where elements or motifs from another genre make a sudden and unexpected appearance, much in the manner of a ‘Freudian slip.’ They thereby reveal a ‘truth’ hitherto hidden or disavowed: this truth, as in the case of a slip of the tongue, is not always one that the makers intended or would acknowledge – nor need the audience always be immediately aware of it. I am singling out three kinds of genre interference as parapraxis, each of a slightly different kind, and with a different sub- or inter-text, but taken together, hopefully sufficiently persuasive to warrant my claim that Zero Dark Thirty (which does not qualify as a mind-game film) nonetheless exemplifies my argument about the importance that parapraxis as a textual effect and as a rhetoric (of justification) plays in contemporary American cinema, usually in films that engage with US traumas, such as race, the Vietnam war and 9/11, or other issues critical to the United States self-image and its image in the world. Genres are the traditional narrative and formal vehicles by which nations or communities conduct their own internal dialogue with themselves and their members, testing the norms and limits of what is acceptable and what transgressive, thereby creating the sort of negotiated consensus which Claude Lévi-Strauss formulated as the function of myths, when he called them “the imaginary resolution of real contradictions.”

First Genre Interference: Romance (from the Internet Fan Community) The first genre interference comes from without, i.e., it does not emerge as such from the film itself, but is provocatively injected into it. However, it is internal to the film not only by what it reveals but by integrally belonging to the sphere of reception, which now means that a major film lives by its paratexts. Trailers, teasers, blog-rolls, DVD-bonus items, websites and other online activities, ensure that a film is both ‘text’ and ‘event,’ while still retaining a modicum of autonomy as the singular work, attributed to an auteur and yet enjoyed as a the big screen experience in a movie theater. This particular genre interference concerns Zero Dark Thirty’s trailer, and reflects the way trailers now find themselves re-cut, altered and ‘rogued’ by fans, friends, and foes.23 For instance, the fake trailer, called The Greatest Jihad Love Story Ever Told is obviously transgressive, but in very specific ways: it turns the action thriller/police procedural into a romance, giving the term ‘man-hunt’ a gendered, as well as ‘parapractic’ meaning. By ironically staging this ‘double entendre’ the trailer responds to several contentious issues that arose around Zero Dark Thirty, disambiguating them with a ‘romance’ interference: 

It once more highlights Maya’s relentlessness, by giving it a personalized, psychological and eroticized motivation, rather than a political or impersonal, data-addicted one. But by showing that there is something odd about Maya’s obsession, it is also pointing to the possibility that there was

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something odd – or even perverse – about America’s obsession with Osama bin Laden: a point to which I shall return. The romance trailer turns Maya from the uncanny ‘drive creature’ she so clearly is back into the more conventional Hollywood ‘desire creature,’ especially if we recall that classical Hollywood narrative always requires two storylines – the adventure plot and the romance plot – that are intertwined with each other, because each is needed to resolve the other, as they push each other forward towards the happy ending. It also disambiguates another contradictory complaint: that Maya is too glamorous for some, and too masculine for others – by making her more into the Ms. Congeniality that (negatively) hovered at the edges of Bigelow’s Maya and her real-life model.24 Maya’s love-sickness parodies, and by that very fact acknowledges, the pathological nature of Maya’s personality, even as it makes it ‘productive’ in ways quite different from mine. On the other hand, this purposive productiveness makes room for another point that fascinated critics, namely the extent to which Maya could be read as an auto-portrait of Bigelow, allegorizing the difficulties of women directors in the male-dominated world of Hollywood. Finally, the trailer makes explicit the uncanny parallels between Maya and the Al Qaeda leader, already mentioned, which requires it to show what the film carefully avoids, namely the actual face of Osama bin Laden. This has the dubious benefit of assigning a clearer, if one-dimensional meaning to her tears at the end. The fake trailer, by systematically reducing the film’s ambiguities – parodically but parapractically – renders them especially prominent, but thereby also points to the film’s political unconscious, which the other genre interferences highlight.

Second Genre Interference: The Heist Movie In the case of the second example of genre interference, my attention was drawn to the sequences that show the CIA team at Langley bent over mock-ups of the Abbottabad complex, reconstructed like an architectural model, built for display or a prospective client (in this case, the CIA director). It then struck me that one finds these models very often in classic Hollywood (and European) so-called ‘heist movies,’ where a gang of thieves or bank-robbers carefully plan how to enter the bank, divide up the tasks, and then break open its vault, while also meticulously rehearsing their entry-points and exit strategies. I might have repressed this transgressive association, had I not come across a very similar remark in the blogs, where a certain Alain noted the following: “your interesting piece reminded me of a couple of things – [Jules] Dassin’s noir/crime thriller Rififi and [Jean Pierre] Melville’s later part-homage Le Cercle Rouge, both with their immersive, patient, lengthy attendance to the physical work of the heist.”25

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Now, what does it mean, if the heist genre, iconically represented by Rififi, The Italian Job, and Oceans 11, now comes to interfere with the thriller-action-war movie? It confirms the procedural, yet instead of pointing to police work or the painstaking investigative work of the detective, it identifies such detailed attention as ‘criminal’ and ‘illegal’ even as we may enjoy the ingenuity and admire the chutzpah of the robbers and their mastermind. The second point that the parapraxis ‘heist movie’ brings to the surface is that the raid on the Abbottabad complex must have as its goal the stealing of a valued prize, a treasure: either the biggest diamond ever mined, or the most valuable painting the world has ever known (if it’s a museum, rather than a bank that is being targeted) or lots and lots of cash. All of these associations in turn ‘fit’ the case in hand, insofar as Osama bin Laden is indeed a ‘prize’ (certainly for President Obama), his portrait is at least as well-known as that of the Mona Lisa, and all the data the SEAL team take away is, as we already noted, more valuable than money itself.

Third Genre Interference: The Rescue Mission The third genre interference occurs during the last 30 minutes or so of Zero Dark Thirty, and concern the actual Navy SEAL’s night raid, complete with buzzing helicopters, night-vision cameras, breaking down doors, shooting bodyguards, etc. There, I immediately had the sense of being in another movie; it, too, a war movie genre, but in another country and under mirror-reversed circumstances – the genre of the Hollywood war movie as rescue mission. Before my eyes, Zero Dark Thirty became a remake of Black Hawk Down, which is a remake of Platoon, which is a remake of Apocalypse Now, which is not only a remake of Heart of Darkness, but also of John Ford’s The Searchers. Three points are peculiar and distinctive about the American war movie as rescue mission. First, it often involves someone who actually does not want to be rescued (this is the case in The Searchers, Apocalypse Now, and also applies to two other rescue mission films from the 1990s: Forrest Gump and Saving Private Ryan). The second peculiarity of the rescue mission war film is that it distills from a war of aggression or invasion an episode or incident that makes it seems a purely defensive operation; instead of talking about ‘getting in,’ it thematizes ‘getting out.’ And thirdly, rescue mission war films are always about ‘one of our boys’ either bringing him back because he has gone ‘native’ (The Searchers [our ‘girl,’ for a change], Apocalypse Now) or because of the Marines’ motto “we leave no man behind,” again emphasizing that we claim ownership to what we rescue. The association with Apocalypse Now, if not with the rescue mission genre, seems to have occurred also to a disgruntled blogger, who wrote: Zero Dark Thirty could be re-titled “Apocalypse New, The Bureaucrats.” In this version, Willard is a cocksure blank slate with a hunch-that-won’t-quit, asserting her way up a river of suits, Kurtz is reduced to evil blank slate, personified by a partial shot of a beard, and the air strike – a mere sweep-up

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operation in Coppola’s Apocalypse – is here a bloated exercise, fetishistic in its loving attention to irrelevant details and adoring, preciously lit shots of superior technology pitted against pajamas.26 Once again, however counterintuitive, ill-tempered or transgressive these associations might be, in the context of Zero Dark Thirty, all three characteristics of the rescue mission war film genre have an uncanny and – for the US – troublingly pertinent ‘fit.’ First, the actual raid already followed the Hollywood script, with one of the Blackhawk helicopters actually crashing and being ‘down.’ Second, we are certainly dealing with someone who did not want to be ‘rescued’ and had gone ‘native’; and thirdly – this is probably the most clearly ‘parapractic’ aspect – Osama bin Laden was indeed ‘one of our boys.’ It is no secret, but rarely as openly acknowledged as across the interfering genre associations, that OBL was the partial creation of the CIA itself, when it funded and trained his group as a terrorist unit, to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Not unlike Saddam Hussein, of whom Donald Rumsfeld, in the 1980s famously said that “he maybe a son-of-a-bitch, but at least he is our son-of-a-bitch,” Osama bin Laden was “our son of a bitch” (not to mention that Al Qaida’s initial target was the corrupt and authoritarian regime in Saudi Arabia, the US’ closest ally in the Arab world). The ‘shoot to kill’ policy underlying the Abbottabad raid, as opposed to capturing OBL alive, has often been rumored to have been a strategic decision, in order to make sure that a bin Laden on trial before a US court would not make public use of these incriminating or at least embarrassing historical details. Whichever way, the ‘Blackhawk Down/Apocalypse Now’ rescue scenario, interfering with the righteous punitive expedition, would seem to corroborate the old saying that many if not most of America’s monsters are self-created or confirm that other public parapraxis that nearly cost Obama the presidency, when his former pastor, the Reverend Wright, thundered after 9/11 from his Chicago pulpit that “America’s chicken have come home to roost”: itself a quote of a quote.27

Conclusion: From Structured Ambiguity to Self-Contradiction The question that arises for me from these perhaps over-extended, multiple readings and staged genre interferences of Zero Dark Thirty is twofold. How generalizable is the case of Zero Dark Thirty, even if one grants that the interferences I have pointed out do indeed parapractically reveal political dilemmas, ideological divides, and ethical ambiguities that constitute or embody an important truth about the United States, its self-image and its ‘political unconscious’ (a term that I have so far mostly avoided)? In this volume and elsewhere in my writings, I have discussed several prominent films from the 1980s onwards, such as Back to the Future, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, and Saving Private Ryan, which seem to consolidate my findings. While the classical Hollywood practice of deniability and structured ambiguity is evidently being maintained also in post-classical contemporary Hollywood, a shift is

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nonetheless also observable, whereby – in the face of the challenges that digital cinema and Internet platforms have put in its way – Hollywood has upped the ante, as it were, and turned structured ambiguity into ‘performative self-contradiction.’ This is the case with mind-game films, with their cultivated ontological doubts about the reality status of the diegetic world, their reversible temporalities, and the productive pathologies that have become the hallmark of their main protagonists. If performative self-contradiction is now Hollywood’s conscious strategy, in order to both provide ‘access for all,’ while still ‘keeping control,’ then the moments and instances of parapraxis, such as I illustrated them across deliberate or unintended genre interferences, become self-contradiction’s necessary but also mostly hidden ‘collateral’ supplement – a supplement which in turn becomes revelatory, wherever it gives tangible access to a hitherto disembodied, purely intellectual truth – thus reversing the very frame of reference within which the film appears as a ‘political’ or even at times, a ‘philosophical’ intervention. The question one is left with, and which I do not feel competent to answer, is whether either of the performatively self-contradictory modes I have been demonstrating, namely the productive pathologies of the characters and the parapractic slips of narrative lapses and genre interferences, would qualify as strategies of justification? Might they not oblige another reversal of frameworks, where we need to ask to what extent justification itself – as a political category – now depends neither on consensus nor dissensus, but on such parapractic performativities, as we see them in our media every day: pressured or provoked into, or inadvertently self-perpetrated by our politicians, pop-personalities, and public intellectuals on television, talk shows, Facebook, and Twitter?

Notes 1 Wiki, Zero Dark Thirty, citing http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/11/21/zero-da rk-thirty-bin-laden-movie/ 2 Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “The Monitor Mentality.” https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/ the-monitor-mentality-or-a-means-to-an-end-becomes-an-end-in-itself-kathryn-bige lows-zero-dark-thirty 3 Steve Coll, “Disturbing and Misleadin-,” New York Review of Books, February 7, 2013. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/disturbing-misleading-zero-dark-thirty/ 4 Karen Greenberg quoted by David Bromwich (www.huffingtonpost.com/david-brom wich/torture-zero-dark-thirty_b_2512767.html). Her essay: Karen Greenberg, “Learning to love torture, Zero Dark Thirty-style,” The Huffington Post, January 10, 2013. 5 See, for instance, the defense of the film by documentarist Michael Moore: “On Zero Dark Thirty & torture: Movie doesn’t condone enhanced interrogation.” www.huf fingtonpost.com/2013/01/25/michael-moore-zero-dark-thirty-torture_n_2552123. html to which David Clennon wrote a blistering reply: www.counterpunch.org/2013/ 01/28/michael-moores-repellent-defense-of-zero-dark-thirty/ 6 Others, by contrast, condemned the film precisely for showing this transformation. See Slavoj Žižek, “Zero Dark Thirty – Hollywood’s gift to American power,” The Guardian, January 25, 2013. 7 Zillah Eisenstein, “Dark zero-feminism,” Al Jazeera, January 21, 2013. www.aljazeera. com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013120121530123614.html.

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8 Coll, “Disturbing and misleading.” 9 “Kathryn Bigelow addresses Zero Dark Thirty torture criticism.” http://articles.latimes. com/2013/jan/15/entertainment/la-et-mn-0116-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty-20130116 10 Ibid. 11 Karen Jacobi (http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/can-monitors-monitor-the-moni tors-or-reality-as-an-extension-of-fiction-by-other-means). See also the following quote: “Known as a virtuoso of choreographed action-violence sequences, Kathryn Bigelow is making an anti-action film focusing on cognition, perception, and interpretation. Most startlingly, with this gut-twistingly visceral opening onslaught, Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal are always compelling the viewer to think and reflect about what lies behind – or beyond – the image, directing us to what is not seen, what is excluded, what is beyond the frame, beyond recognition, and ultimately outside the limits of the known and the knowable. Even as we are ‘sucked in’ in the most extreme way, we are at the same time pushed back and made to reflect.” 12 “As with discourse about climate change policy, the persistence of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other forms of argument about the value of officially sanctioned torture represents a victory for those who would justify such abuse.” Coll, “Disturbing and misleading.” 13 Žižek, “Zero Dark Thirty – Hollywood’s gift to American power.” 14 www.smh.com.au/entertainment/bingewatching-tv-series-is-becoming-more-accepted-th anks-to-the-internet-20140307-34cha.html#ixzz2vhtBsy00, see also: www.independent.co. uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/bingewatching-house-of-cards-and-breaking-bad-is-go od-for-you-9139146.html 15 For an extensive discussion of Maya as an Antigone figure, see Agnieszka Piotrowska, “Zero Dark Thirty – ‘War Autism’ or a Lacanian Ethical Act?” New Review of Film and Television Studies 12, no. 2 (2014), 143–155. 16 Vishnevetsky “The Monitor Mentality.” 17 www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/zero-dark-thirty-is-osama-bin-ladens-la st-victory-over-america-20130116#ixzz2vm5F6KqJ 18 When one of the CIA operatives says “we don’t deal in certainty, we deal in probabilities,” Maya is the one to increase the odds of probability from 50% to 100%. Until the end, it is left open wither this is the overeager zealot in her speaking or her computer mind that has run through the data a thousand times. 19 Steven Shaviro, “A Brief Remark on Zero Dark Thirty.” www.shaviro.com/Blog/? p=1114 20 This formulation emerged in a conversation I had on the film with Hito Steyerl in Berlin, May 2013. 21 Shaviro, “A Brief Remark on Zero Dark Thirty.” 22 Ibid. 23 Zero Dark Thirty Greatest Jihad Love Story (published on January 23, 2013). https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XO2xgRtQjk&noredirect=1Zero Dark Thirty footage taken from trailers and featurettes; Osama bin Laden footage from ABC News; music is suite from “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” by James Newton Howard; map taken from CIA website. 24 See “‘She’s Not Miss Congeniality’: Dark Clouds Hang over the Real Hero of Zero Dark Thirty.” http://wwwwww.entertainmentwise.com/news/98062/Shes-Not-Miss-Congenia lity-Dark-Clouds-Hang-Over-The-Real-Hero-Of-Zero-Dark-Thirty# qKDXwTC2ZFsMXWp1.99 25 Alain says (January 28, 2013 at 8:55 am): Shaviro blog, www.shaviro.com/Blog/? p=1114) 26 S. Beckner at www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1114 27 www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/americas-chickens-are-coming-home-to-roost

10 CINEMA AND GAMES Contingency as Our New Causality

There are three challenges that the ascendancy of games as the new default value of what we understand by a popular mass medium pose for those of us who have grown up on the movies and have made the cinema our professional preoccupation. First, the rise of games gives us a new perspective on the so-called death of cinema that is usually deemed to have occurred around 1995, and thus, as it happens, coincided with the same year as the cinema’s centenary. Does this particular death of the cinema – there have been quite a few previously – indicate the profound paradigm change some people claim, or can and should the two media, the two modes, the two ways of letting us ‘enter’ imaginatively into recognizable but fictional worlds exist side by side? Second, if we define computer games as ‘human interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback,’1 then this raises the question of agency, authorship, and authority, and by extension, it challenges us to redefine authorship in the cinema, given that films today are much more mediated and transmitted via various interfaces (if we treat the different platforms – movie theaters, laptops, smartphones, etc., as interfaces, but also if we treat the make-or-break opening weekend of a Hollywood blockbuster, the international film festival network, or iTunes and Netflix, as ‘interface’). Cinema is also tied into many more feedback loops than it was in its classical period, if we consider the intense marketing efforts of Hollywood, the franchising, the spin-offs into music and merchandizing, but also the blogs and fan sites, the individual film’s websites and Facebook pages as so many feedback loops that not only determine the economic fate of a film but also the way it is read, interpreted, and consumed. To give a brief quote:

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To help studio marketers get ahead of their customers, United Talent Agency and Rentrak, an entertainment data company, are introducing a service called PreAct. It joins an array of Hollywood upstarts offering ‘social listening,’ a growing field that uses algorithms to slice and dice chatter on social media. PreAct begins unusually early. It closely monitors marketing efforts at least a year before opening weekend. At any moment, studios using the service can log in to a portal and receive various charts that detail how consumers are responding to promotional efforts. PreAct essentially takes information that is culled continuously from Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, movie blogs and other sites and provides coming movies with scores in various categories. The system, for instance, looks at the size of the online conversation and how much of it is positive or negative. It also tracks how much activity is organic and how much is the result of specific studio efforts.2 The third area where the increasing proximity of cinema and games poses a challenge is in the competing but hopefully also complementary understanding of what is narrative and storytelling in the interactive environment and in the linear environment. But by extension, it also raises the issue of how these two types of storytelling affect or impact more general issues of causality, of chance and contingency. So, to start with the death of cinema: without going into detail, on the one hand, this is a non-issue (the cinema’s death has been proclaimed too many times – arrival of sound in the 1930s, arrival of television in the 1950s, introduction of the video recorder in the 1970s, and the switch to digital in the 1990s). Instead of death, each change of technology has been accompanied by a short hiccup, followed by a mutation and transformation of the cinema that made it seem healthier than before. But on the other hand, this time it’s for real, but not in the literal sense, i.e., that we soon won’t have any films being made, or even that all the film theaters will close. Rather, because this time the death – or as I would phrase it, the cultural demotion and ideological irrelevance of cinema – gives us an occasion and opportunity for a set of new questions. No longer the old question: ‘what is cinema?’ but different ones. People have come up with asking ‘when is cinema?,’ others want to define it by asking ‘where is cinema?,’ but the question that interests me is ‘what is or was cinema good for?’3

The Death of Cinema – An Opportunity to Ask: What Is/Was the Cinema Good For? There are various ways one might specify the question ‘what is cinema good for?’ in the sense of what it has contributed to culture and human civilization. Phrased even more anthropologically: how does cinema figure in humanity’s adaptation to their environment, what is cinema’s own ecology, so to speak? Several ‘answers’ have emerged, either implicitly or explicitly:

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1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

The famous French critic André Bazin proposed the notion that cinema is a way to defeat death, by preserving an imprint of life,4 like a cast or a mold, or like the envelope of a mummy. The sociologist Edgar Morin made the claim that the moving image answers to “man’s age-old desire for a double, a likeness,”5 a mirror in which mankind can reflect its deeds and vanities. An assumption implicit in theories of realism is that the cinema is a window to the world, and that the cinema has given us a disembodied eye, one that can go everywhere, knows no shame and no taboo, but also does not have to respect social barriers or physical obstacles. Moving images also have their share in making possible ‘acting at a distance.’6 Images (including maps, diagrams, and CGI) help to calculate and control the environment, to measure and to modify: this would embrace all the non-entertainment uses of the cinematic apparatus, for instance, in medicine, the sciences, in monitoring and surveillance, for the military and in space exploration, for weather reports and news coverage on television. Along the same lines, but now once more including fiction film, and extending its application to include computer games, one could trace the cinema’s role in ‘mastering’ life through simulation and play, which also has a scientific variant (almost all scientific experiments now require computer simulation, and films might come to be understood as thought-experiments, and not as representations, i.e., they are simulations of test situations).

In this way the cinema can be inscribed in the evolutionary arc of homo ludens: man at play, considered as both an ontogenetic (individual) and a phylogenetic (species-related) necessity: play is essential for the formation of a self, and organized play leads not only to sociability but also to adventure and experimentation, as well as contest and competition. After all, the modality of ‘what if’ or ‘make-believe’ is obviously a cardinal property of the cinema, even as – and perhaps because – the moving image also constitutes a particularly rich type of document and testimony of evidence.

Film as Thought-Experiment The consequences that I draw from especially these last possibilities are that digital media and interactive video games give us a unique opportunity to redefine ‘what cinema is good for,’ both from an anthropological longue durée perspective, and from a more contemporary media-philosophical comparative perspective. For instance, even before we get to the digital era or start comparing the cinema with games, and before we decide whether computer games have made the cinema obsolete, there are two other arguments that put the cinema in a precarious position vis-à-vis other media.

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Siegfried Zielinski, in his book from the late 1980s, Audiovisionen, came to the conclusion that the cinema amounted to an aberration in the long history of technical media, and that it was at best an ‘intermezzo’ or an ‘entr’acte.’7 William Uricchio has been equally radical and has called the cinema a ‘detour’ which significantly delayed the development of what should have been the medium of modernity already in the 1920s, namely television.8 For Zielinski, the considerations that assign such a minor role to cinema are determined by all those media that over millennia have tried to bridge distances, to connect what is separate, and to capture and preserve on a suitable material support what the human eye sees and the human ear hears – priorities more germane to television and the video recorder than to the cinema. Uricchio similarly considers bridging distance and connecting people as one of the key motors of modern media developments, but he regards ‘simultaneity’ and ‘interactivity’ as the ultimate driving forces behind many of the trends that have helped digital media achieve their dominance. For him, too, television is therefore the more foundational media machine than cinema, followed by games. Should we therefore start considering the cinema a sub-category of games, and make real time, interactivity and feedback the overarching concept for what Henry Jenkins has called ‘convergence culture,’ into which the cinema will have to fit itself after yet another period of mutation and transformation?9 In an essay first published in 2009 (and in the present volume as Chapter 3), I have offered what I consider to be one part of the answer, namely the rise of the so-called mind-game films or puzzle film. An indie-film genre, but also coming from the heart of Hollywood, if we think of Christopher Nolan’s films from Memento to Inception, the mind-game film constitutes precisely such an adaptive mutation to the new conditions of cinema having to survive within an ecology that it shares with several other forms of digital media, including games. I also argue that Hollywood has had to develop strategies of storytelling that not only play on different platforms but also repay several viewings and/or have the potential of being transformed and repurposed into video games. But there is another way that I think the cinema is adapting to the contemporary environment, and there I would consider the films under this heading to be the very antithesis of games to instead posit cinema as a philosophically informed response to games. This is what I have just called ‘film as thought-experiment.’ Film as thought-experiment strictly speaking, is neither a descriptive label nor does it have a prescriptive agenda. On the other hand, key to the thought-experiment is the hypothetical tense and the gesture of ‘what if’ – both stances that apply to many of the ways we now approach reality itself. ‘Let’s assume that …’ has become almost a default modus operandi, thanks to the technologies of probability, statistics, and the extraordinary advances made in mathematically modeling the physical world in real time. They allow for data-mining, pattern recognition, and risk assessment – practices that have turned out to be not only enormously profitable to companies owning these technologies (like Google) or that have access to big data to be mined

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(Facebook, Amazon, Netflix), but also form habits of mind and foster tacit assumptions that are transforming our notions of what is ‘history’: history is increasingly understood as data to be extracted or extrapolated from the past and projected along a linear trajectory into a future we thereby hope to predict, provide for and prepare for, but which is also a future we inadvertently empty of possibility, of contingency, and radical change (and therefore preempt and prevent). Film as thought-experiment in this sense situates itself between (but also engages with) digital humanities at one end of the spectrum, while at the other end it reflects (and reacts to) the increasing use of imaging techniques and datavisualization as deployed in the areas of science, medicine, the military, security, and surveillance, not to mention data-mining for tracking stock market fluctuations, weather predictions, or making purchase recommendations. Film as thought-experiment could even provoke the historical question whether the cinema has helped or hindered such developments, whether it is (from the perspective of interactivity, instantaneity, and ubiquity) an evolutionary dead end, which survives as an emergency break (standing for identification and empathy rather than interaction; turning absence into a form of presence rather than producing instantaneity, and insisting on the irreversibility of time’s arrow in the film experience, rather than giving us the possibly illusory power to rewind and replay – including the makeover [rewind and replay by another name] of – our lives). Or on the contrary, has the cinema acted as the accelerator in all this, having been an agent of modeling the world in its own image? For the reverse side of the cinema’s function as leveler and equalizer has been its role of relentless idealization and aestheticizing of the world. As Harun Farocki – to whose films and video installations I would readily apply the term ‘thought-experiment’ – once put it: “Reality is no longer the measure of the always imperfect image; instead, the virtual image increasingly becomes the measure of an always-imperfect actuality.”10 Games share one important trait with real-world risk-calculations and predictions in the field of politics, insurance, security services, which I just mentioned. They, too, have a tendency to predetermine or premediate or foreclose the future and therefore they are caught in ‘loops of belatedness’ and in self-referential bubbles. Games replay at a larger scale what critics have said about social media, namely that because of the power structures that underpin them, and the economic priorities that drive them, social media have become echo-chambers, where who or what reigns supreme is not the ‘sovereign self’ of the Enlightenment, but the ‘sovereign selfie’ of Facebook. The death of cinema, in other words, if we translate it into the terms of a loss of cultural prestige and political relevance, could also be seen as the consequence of Hollywood now having and wanting to cater for global audiences – many of whom have very complicated and conflicted views about America’s political power in the world, but on the whole are still fervently in favor of American soft power, as projected by the movies.

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Questions of Access and Control What does this imply for authority and authorship and how does one start with redefining authorship within a globalized media environment? An environment where a blockbuster or franchise film is designed for audiences with different cultural backgrounds and political systems, but also for audiences who access films on several different platforms? I follow the lead of those writers who have narrowed the question of authorship and authority in the cinema down to the issue of control. Control, of course, can be exercised in many different ways: organizational, financial, political, artistic, and intellectual, and many of these types of control are indeed involved in the making, marketing, distributing, and ‘owning’ of a film. Not all of these forms of control need to fall to the same physical individual, or indeed any individual, given the abstract nature of some of the controlling forces and functions at work. But I don’t think ‘control’ is enough which is why I have added another dimension, which I call ‘access for all,’ inspired by a popular Dutch Internet provider. In a book on contemporary Hollywood, I have argued that contemporary Hollywood should be understood within such an extended, dual strategy authorial dynamic of providing ‘access for all’ at the same time as ‘keeping control.’ Which is to say, Hollywood sets out to make films that are formally and intellectually accessible to as wide as possible a range of audiences, diverse in language, race, religion, region, and nationality, all the while trying to control not only legal ownership and property rights and all the possible platforms of distribution and exhibition, but also steering the scope of interpretations and forms of (fan-) appropriation thanks to a combination of (textual) structured ambiguity and (para-textual) feedback loops.11 By way of example, I examined the authorial persona of the director James Cameron and the narrative structure of his most successful film, Avatar (2009), arguing that both instantiate a convergence of these basically antagonistic forces of ‘access’ and ‘control,’ under the intensified conditions of a global market and an increasingly polarized political world- (dis)order.12 For instance, I pointed out that the film very carefully calibrated the anti-American, anti-imperialist sentiment, leading to people all over the world recognizing themselves as Na’vis – Indian miners, Palestinians on the West Bank, and Chinese villagers – but also left intact one of the most racist stereotypes, namely the figure of the White Messiah. One consequence to draw from this situation is that the author in the global context is both an artificial construct and a biographical person. Being a locus of agency (control) as well as a focal point of projection (access), s/he is positioned at the intersection of a theoretical impossibility and a practical indispensability. A figure of contradiction as well as of construction, the global author exists within antagonistic forces, whose effects need not work against each other, but can be harnessed so as to re-energize rather than block the different levels of circulation in play. It aligns

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authorship with other aspects of globalization, where multiple variables are simultaneously interacting with each other, where traditional categories of linear cause-and-effect chains have opened up to recursive network effects and where our idea of autonomy, i.e., single source, rational agency, is complicated by models of distributed agency, contingency, and mutual interdependence. These ‘rhizomatic’ tendencies are reinforced by electronic communication and the Internet, whose architecture is the very site of simultaneous, multi-directional, reciprocal, recursive, and looped interactions. Similarly ‘distributed,’ antagonistic and yet interdependent forces are typical of today’s cinema as a whole, thriving as it does between ostensibly incompatible identities of big screen spectacle, digital video disk, and download file, with viewers effortlessly switching between online viewing and visits to the local multiplex, and with the culture at large treating ‘the cinema’ as part of the urban fabric and ‘the cinematic’ as part of our collective memory and imaginary. In these contexts and definitions, the author does not seem to be crucial to the system, being only one of the pieces of information and markers of recognition by which audiences identify a film as worthy of their attention. I would be interested to know whether in the world of games, similar issues have arisen around agency and authorship, especially where the player is of course encouraged to view herself as author, and the game itself is regarded as ‘the world’ out there, rather than as a construct, but where nonetheless the gamer knows she is up against a force or forces that are out to impede, frustrate, threaten, and defeat her. One answer comes from a blogger specializing in games, citing my articles on Avatar and mind-game films and extending their argument: The control that is essential for any auteur theory is manifesting itself in a new way … Elsaesser argues that Cameron carefully systematizes control of the audience’s reactions by presenting mixed signals that induce cognitive dissonances. These dissonances “provoke the spectator into actively producing his or her own reading, in order to disambiguate the ‘mixed messages’ or to untie the knot of the double bind.” Each spectator, then, arrives at a reading of the text that is at once at odds with the film and with other readings but which results in a stronger “ontological commitment on the part of the viewer to his or her particular interpretation – a commitment that works in favor of the affective bond formed with a given film.” So what does this have to do with video games? It strikes me that this is essentially a description of how interactive media functions with their audience. The narrative contradictions that create this effect – dubbed ‘cognitive switches’ by Elsaesser – manifest themselves in games as player choice. The dissonance that a filmic auteur like Cameron can choose to create in his audience is inherent in all interactive media by virtue of the changing experience from play-through to play-through. While Avatar induces different experiences in the spectators’ minds, interactive media makes these differences literal in the text. While an author of interactive media may be able

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to achieve a level of control that fixes the number of available readings, the default mode of creating meaning is one of these cognitive switches because the player is forced to make ontological commitments toward a particular reading with every interactive choice. Game critics often compare interactive media to filmic media, and we often interpret games using cinematic modes of thinking. Game developers, too, clearly follow many cinematic conventions in structuring their games. Most commonly, this approach manifests itself as a straightforward discussion of narrative structure and visual presentation … But these methods are clearly inadequate for games, which require ludic approaches as well. In games, the spectator is empowered, so we cannot, either in design or interpretation, use only passive approaches in our thinking … What film critics like Elsaesser make clear, however, is that filmic media, especially within certain recent trends, also create meaning within an active context analogous to that of games. We see this spectator empowerment emerging prominently with the rise in popularity of ‘puzzle films’ or ‘mind-game films’ … We thus see that recent films activate the spectator by changing their artistic mode, and this style is partially driven by the multi-platform, database-like way by which we now consume media. Just as cinema has informed how we structure games, there is little doubt that games have changed how we consume cinema.13 The post concludes by pointing out that what mind-game films and games have in common is that they empower the spectators/players to become reflexive in relation to their own role and agency, by discovering rule-sets applicable to the respective ‘worlds,’ on the basis of which to make ‘ontological’ choices, and thus to narrow the gap not so much between cinema and games, but between active interpretation and consumption, between constraints and affordances in respect to a given reality.

Transmedia Narrative – Henry Jenkins and Convergence Culture More generally, in the discussions around contemporary cinema and media, where interactivity, non-linearity, navigability, scalability, spectacle, and scripted spaces have become the key terms by which to map the future of narrative across different platforms of digital media – ranging from television series, feature films and essay films, to interactive games, alternate reality games, animation films, comic books, graphic novels, and art installations – the term that is in the ascendancy seems to be ‘transmedia narratives,’ a phrase inaugurated by Henry Jenkins in his influential Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.14 Transmedia narratives, which are themselves a sub-category of what Jenkins calls ‘participatory culture,’ try to subsume some of the decades-old debates around intermediality and multimodality, i.e., the way that narratives have always had the tendency to migrate

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across media. Other new locutions such as ‘additive comprehension’ and ‘narrative world-building’ try to go beyond (narratological) categories such as ‘metalepsis” and ‘paratexts’ (Gérard Genette’s terms for narratives crossing textual boundaries),15 ‘expanded cinema’ (Gene Youngblood’s term for cross-media cinema in the art and avant-garde sector),16 or the idea of extended diegesis (the ‘here-me-now’ that I introduced into the debate a few years ago). Jenkins’s terms also want to address the questions of audience engagement and subject positions, of how to maintain narrative coherence across different platforms, the phenomenon of narrative expansion in serial formats, as well as how to differentiate between the ‘viral’ propagation of stories and video clips, and the promotion of brands and the marketing of commodities – all of which now takes place across social media as the channels of choice and the platforms of the widest reach and highest penetration. Jenkins has recently proposed to reframe his transmedia studies and participatory culture within the larger context of ‘media archaeology,’ which he sees as neither focused on specific types of technology nor determined by specific narrative formats. Instead, a media archaeology of participatory culture would elaborate and excavate what he calls “the 200 years of grass-root movements trying to gain access to the tools of cultural production” by tracking the cultural technologies that have enabled content (stories, images, ideas, etc.) to circulate by means of ‘systems of spreadability,’ which is his term for mechanical mass reproduction. Not surprisingly, the Gutenberg printing press and texts in the vernacular languages are among his examples, too, so that the printing press becomes (in his terms) “web minus 10.0.”17

The Case of Causality: Tools and Tasks Jenkins’s idea of media archaeology still operates for my taste with a rather naïve linear causality, except that it now works backwards. Yet the question of causality is intimately connected with narrative, and thus also has primary relevance to the function of the causal nexus in films and of the causal chains employed in games. In order to clarify this issue, and resolve some of the discrepancies, it may be necessary to take a more radical approach and ask whether our models of causality are hardwired, as it were, or whether they are mainly a function of the technologies we have at hand. Let us, for the sake of the argument, assume that the latter is the case. One of the key characteristics of all contemporary media that take their cue from digital media is the attempt to break with models of linearity, which also means challenging Newtonian notions of causality, where actions and events are plotted along a single continuum of cause and effect. A line of argument made famous by Friedrich Kittler – who extrapolated it from Michel Foucault – was to claim that a historiography that relies on chronological narratives merely reflects the cultural technology of writing and script, and thus is based on print as its primary medium, thereby proving itself not to be universal or hardwired, but historically determined.18 If historians have – until quite recently – been reluctant to accept as valid evidence material that could not be presented in the form of written documents or printed sources, this

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surely cannot be right for a media history that encompasses the opto-mechanical medium of cinema, the electric media of telephony and television, and the electronic-algorithmic media of the digital era. At first glance, then, a break-up of mono-causality would appear to be a liberating move, one that takes more accurate account of contingency in human affairs, and of actions having unforeseen consequences. However, by the same logic that tries to overturn linearity by pointing to its technological underpinnings, the case can be made that philosophical arguments that favor the idea that ‘contingency is our new causality’ are at least in part also the superstructural elaborations – the ideology, to use this old-fashioned term – of the technologies that are now in use and that we are increasingly dependent upon. On the other hand, such a charge of ideology can overlook the extent to which changes in our idea of causal relations are also due to different environmental challenges or may arise in order to meet specific practical problems. A change in media technology, so this extended Kittlerian argument would go, has always brought with it a change in models of reality, in models of the mind, and in the conceptual means by which we interpret both mind and reality. No concept of God as a watchmaker would have emerged without the invention of the mechanical timepiece; no Descartes could have divided the world into res cogitans and res extensa without the invention of the telescope. By the same reasoning it is plausible to argue that the contemporary preference for coincidence and contingency over linear cause-and-effect chains reflects and aligns itself with such eminently cinematic techniques as montage and the cut, indicative of the presence of the cinema, even where it is not explicitly invoked. Likewise, there are suggestive parallels between ‘repetition and difference’ as a way of deconstructing history (as both Gilles Deleuze and Niklas Luhmann have done), and the manner in which digital images do not follow each other in succession, but remain the same and are merely ‘refreshed.’ with only a portion of the pixels being replaced with different numerical values. The use of causally motivated narratives for rendering and representing the past in the form of ‘history’ is a relatively recent attainment,19 compared with the much longer prevalence of the memory arts, of history in the form of myths, allegories, memoirs, sagas, and chronicles – all of which often function in nonlinear ways or are conceived as ‘open forms’ that deliberately avoid mono-causal explanations or proof, in favor of enumeration, reversible causal relations, and the accumulation of emblematic events.20 There is thus more at stake than singular causality. Conventional notions of history as the most accurate accounts of what happened, how and why (or ‘who did what to whom, when, where and why’) are now in competition with probabilistic calculations, for which the past is primarily an accumulation of data that can be usefully analyzed for recurring patterns, which in turn are winnowed down and aggregated in order to calculate probable outcomes. Such post-positivist theories of history thus cut both ways. While they might appear at first glance to finally take serious account

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of contingency in human affairs, by seeking to control or contain it, the discovery of meaningful patterns nonetheless turns unforeseen consequences retrospectively into causal agents not only in order to eliminate what might have been, in favor of what has been, but also in order to predict and preempt the future, which makes probability studies or risk assessment a form of reverse-engineered history. On the other hand, looked at operationally, causation as we apply it to past events and dignify with the name of history is nothing other than an organizing principle. Therefore, it may well be dependent on models of the mind and conceptions of the world that are themselves dependent on both the tasks at hand and the tools at hand. If the nature of the phenomena, or the size and quantity of the material that an ordering principle is supposed to keep under control, changes dramatically, the ordering principle itself may have to be adapted or even be replaced altogether. Thus, given that the amount of data now gathered about the world by cameras, sensors, probes, telescopes, microscopes, and similar (digital) devices has risen exponentially, this poses precisely the problem of whether classical causality as an organizing principle is still adequate or appropriate. At the same time, because we can use computers as our organizing machine, we will use the computer as organizing machine – and computers, as the tools at hand, are better equipped than humans to deal with contingency and random access, with correlation and pattern recognition, when faced with such masses of data and information. But a change in organizing principle (in this instance, causality) is also a matter of the tasks at hand. In his account of causality in modern science, Robin McClintock argues that, up to around 1950, causal explanation dominated research: “Researchers looked for causes in an effort to predict effects, expecting thereby to gain an ‘if-then’ ability to produce desired outcomes. The results were wondrous in physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology and in their application through industry, technology, and medicine.” However, in the latter half of the 20th century, scientific research focused on more complex systems with complicated dynamics: “Here causes and effects are both bi-directional and manifold. The researcher recognizes that numerous phenomena are taking place simultaneously within an extended time and area.” The problem for the researcher becomes one of modelling this complex system, not only to understand its complexity but also in some cases to control it. McClintock lists the study of “ecologies, climate changes, environmental pollution, weather, macroeconomics, and large-scale social change” as prominent examples. He concludes that “[t]he human payoff of these studies is not in the ability to produce predictable effects through a given action, but the ability to anticipate complex interactions and to exert adaptive control within them.”21 Consequently, a theory of history or practice of narrative that starts from the heterogeneous, multidimensional, and multi-directional nature of agency and interaction, already reflects the likelihood that today it is easier to work with contingency than with mono-causal chains and that modeling multiple determinations – or ‘multiple variables in simultaneous interaction’ – is not only more plausibly part of the Zeitgeist, but it is also faster and cheaper.

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To return to my initial question: what is or was the cinema good for? It is more than likely that these new parameters of how we look at causality and contingency (and by extension, contiguity and constellations) will affect the practice of narrative across the board, i.e., across the different platforms, modes, and formats. But does this mean we should endorse, after all, the ‘death of cinema,’ or rather, accept its historical function as an intermediary – what Zielinski called ‘intermezzo’ and Uricchio a ‘detour’? Was cinema no more than an intermediary stage between the visualization of natural phenomena previously imperceptible to the human eye (which is what chronophotography did, as understood by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey) and the coding, compression, transmission of information no longer graspable by the human mind, and which therefore now needs an interface more like a game platform rather than a conventional narrative? The possibility may seem scandalous, for it would retroactively redefine narrative cinema as merely the historically contingent ‘database’ and ‘memory’ of our culture, superseded by new kinds of formatted memory. However, cinema would also be unique because it inscribed the perceiving observer into the impersonal data flow across a given timeline. This embedded observer implicates narrative cinema in the last major cultural shift in the larger default values of Western visual perception: the introduction of the central perspective, beginning in the 1450s in Italy, and generally identified with the European Renaissance. By the end of the 15th century it was the religious painters that acted as the mediators of the new ways of seeing: first depicting Heaven and the Almighty in altar pieces, and then far distant sights, producing a possibly unintended consequence; namely, that perspectival projection, which after all, had God as the vanishing point to secure the validity of representation, de facto contributed to secularization. Today, by contrast it is popular entertainment, games and the movie industry that act as a kind of collectively elaborated template or interface, inaugurating a paradigm shift, with perhaps equally unintended or at least unpredictable consequences. Consider the following: the extension of our spatially configured visual and aural environment, such as we experience it in data-rich augmented realities, is symptomatic of the rise of the surveillance paradigm, which – taken in its widest sense – is materially affecting our understanding and engagement with images and visual information offline and online: in either case, to see is to be seen, to act is to be tracked. Contemporary cinema, insofar as it participates in this hybridity of visualization, virtualization, and action, plays a duplicitous role. While it cognitively and bodily empowers the users and spectators, it also increasingly releases them from responsibility and consequence: an ethical challenge we are only beginning to become aware of. On the other hand, once images are no longer considered by our culture as views, i.e., something to be looked at or to be contemplated, but more like clues, i.e., as instructions for action, to be clicked at, then they undo something that Renaissance perspective accomplished, namely to banish the magic powers of

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images to act and be acted upon, which the Christian religion made ample use of, when the magic of the painted saints (to heal, to console, to intercede, and to protect) was a function of their fixture to an actual site, i.e., as murals and frescos in churches or monasteries. What is now being instrumentalized is a different kind of agency in images, perhaps no less magical (in their effects of mimetic embodiment, of viral proliferation, shock and horror). If this new regime of embodied vision, with the image as an agent or trigger for action, implies that we are once again – as in the Middle Ages – sharing the same physical space with the image and are no longer separated by a frame (whether functioning as window or as mirror), but rather by a door or portal, then notions of representation and projection, both key elements of Renaissance perspectival space, would have to be abandoned, in favor of an ontology of immediacy, presence and transition. We would indeed experience a shift in both paradigm and episteme, one for which the artist Hito Steyerl has coined the term ‘vertical perspective’: “Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground.” What in the context of the revival of 3D, I have elsewhere analyzed as a predilection for horizonless images, where floating and gliding are more appropriate than sitting down or standing upright, Steyerl radicalizes into the condition of ‘being in free fall,’ thus taking it from the aesthetic realm into the political. She argues that when we fall, we feel as if we are floating, or not moving at all, because: “falling is relational: if there is nothing to fall towards, you may not even be aware that you are falling … Whole societies may be falling just as you are. And it may actually feel like perfect stasis.” Steyerl goes on to explain: Our sense of spatial and temporal orientation has changed dramatically in recent years, prompted by new technologies of surveillance, tracking, and targeting. One of the symptoms of this transformation is the growing importance of aerial views: overviews, Google Map views, satellite views. We are growing increasingly accustomed to what used to be called a God’s-eye view. On the other hand, we also notice the decreasing importance of … linear perspective. Its stable and single point of view is being supplemented (often replaced) by multiple perspectives, overlapping windows, distorted sightlines, and divergent vanishing points.22 Vertical perspective inaugurates a free-floating presence, immaterial and invisible as well as ubiquitous and omnipresent. As symbolic form or as new episteme, however, it is as much a set of formalized conventions as was linear perspective, which implicitly pretended that the earth was flat and that man was the only creature that mattered in the eyes of God. Now the sense of ubiquity, simultaneity, and omnipresence compensates for us being a mere speck in the universe, enmeshed in networks of plotted coordinates, tracked and traceable at every point in space or time, and suspended in an undulating, mobile, variable inside, to which no longer corresponds any outside, however vast, rich, and connected such

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an inside (or online) world seems to be. The challenge would then be how to live in the bubble while still finding ways to prick and puncture it: will it be game spaces offering us multiple paths and several lives that can lead us beyond, or is it the cinema as thought-experiment that makes ‘mind-games’ out of the very condition of its own (im)possibility: teaching its audiences new rules while it is simultaneously learning these rules itself? Or just maybe cinema and games – assuming that one is translating images into actions, the other actions into images – are the recto and verso of each other, and headed for the same destination after all?

Notes 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game from 07.06.2017. 2 Brooks Barnes, “Hollywood tracks social media chatter to target hit,” The New York Times, December 7, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/business/media/ hollywood-tracks-socialmedia- chatter-to-target-hit-films.html?_r=0 3 For a more detailed discussion of these new questions, see Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2016), 21–26. 4 André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 9. 5 Edgar Morin, The Cinema; or, The Imaginary Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 30–31. 6 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 170–175. 7 Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisionen. Kino und Fernsehen als Zwischenspiele in der Geschichte (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989). 8 William Uricchio, “Cinema as Detour? Towards a Reconsideration of Moving Image Technology in the Late 19th Century,” in Knut Hickethier, Eggo Müller and Rainer Rother, eds., Der Film in der Geschichte (Berlin: Edition Sigma, 1997), 19–25. 9 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 10 As cited by Anselm Franke, “A Critique of Animation,” e-flux Journal, no. 59 (November 2014). www.e-flux.com/journal/59/61098/a–of-animation/ 11 Thomas Elsaesser, The Persistence of Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2013), 319–340. 12 Thomas Elsaesser, “James Cameron’s Avatar: Access for All,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 9, no. 3 (2011), 247–264. 13 Evan M. Tilman, “Films Are Interactive, Too: Spectator Empowerment in Filmic Media Should Inform Game Criticism,” at Thinking While Playing, September 11, 2012. www. thinkingwhileplaying.com/2012/09/films-are-interactive-too-spectator.html 14 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 15 Gérard Genette, Métalepse. De la figure à la fiction (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004); Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 16 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970). 17 Henry Jenkins and Joshua E. Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013). Cf. Fabrice Lyczba, “Conference Report: Contemporary Screen Narratives,” InMedia 2 (2012). http://inm edia.revues.org/482. Cf. Carlos Scolari, Paolo Bertetti and Matthew Freeman, Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 18 As Wolfgang Ernst puts it: “The crucial question for media archaeology, then, resides in whether, in this interplay between technology and culture, the new kind of historical imagination that emerged was an effect of new media or whether such media

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19

20 21

22

were invented because the epistemological setting of the age demanded them.” Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2013), 42. On the narrativization of historiography, besides Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1973), see Thomas Elsaesser, “A Comparative Study of Imagery Themes in Thomas Carlyle’s and Jules Michelet’s Histories of the French Revolution,” PhD Dissertation, University of Sussex, 1971. Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, 147–157. Cf. Wolfgang Ernst and Harun Farocki, “Towards an Archive for Visual Concepts,” in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 261–86. Robin McClintock, “Social History through Media History,” review of A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet by Asa Briggs, and Peter Burke, “A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot,” at robbiemcclintock.com, July 16, 2002. http://robbiemcclintock.com/shelving/E-02a-R-BnB-7-CivLife.html Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” e-flux Journal, #24, April 2011. www.e-flux.com/journal/in-free-fall-athought- experim ent-on-vertical-perspective/ Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, eds., (Dis) Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013); Phillip Schmerheim, Skepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

11 CONTINGENCY, CAUSALITY, COMPLEXITY Distributed Agency in the Mind-Game Film For Warren Buckland

Prologue In Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, a high-tech crime-prevention program can anticipate and thus preempt murders before they are committed. One day, the officer in charge of the prevention program, John Anderton (Tom Cruise), finds himself the named suspect of a future crime. Knowing himself innocent, but also knowing the system to be ‘infallible,’ Anderton has no choice but to go undercover, in order to investigate this apparent inconsistency of the precognition program. But when he finds himself face to face with the man who, some years earlier, had kidnapped and probably killed his 7-year-old son, what is he to do? Shoot the man, and thus prove the pre-cogs retrospectively right, by giving himself a motive he did not know he had? Spare the man, and thus let the source of his deepest personal tragedy go unpunished? Kill him, to ‘save’ the reputation of the pre-cog program in which Anderton has invested his professional pride (and which he suspects is being sabotaged by rivals inside the government), even if it means losing his job and going to prison? Or let him go, because the ‘evidence’ that points to him being his son’s murderer may actually be fabricated and thus a trap into which Anderton’s enemies want him to fall? If one accepts the film’s general premise, namely that the most obvious option – to arrest the man and take him to the police – is not open to him, given that he is a wanted fugitive, then Anderton’s dilemma is a case of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’: a deadlock, in which motivation, causation, and taking effective action mutually exclude and block each other, as each layer of possible explanation of the nature of this face-to-face encounter merely creates a denser thicket of hypothetical premises, ‘what-if’ risk scenarios and unproven presuppositions.

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Now compare this to a film like Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), made nearly 50 years earlier. There, one Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is also wanted by the police, for a murder he did not commit, and hunted by a gang of spies, for what they think he knows, but doesn’t. Deprived of identity (by being mistaken for Mr. Kaplan) and even of ontology (since ‘Mr. Kaplan’ turns out to be non-existent), he charms a young woman into becoming his helper, only to discover that his beautiful accomplice is herself in league with the criminals. Here, too, several layers of premises and presuppositions are progressively peeled away before the hero learns from ‘The Professor’ that he was more or less accidentally ‘set up’ by the FBI, that the woman is in fact a double agent, not only in league with the criminals, but also assisting ‘The Professor,’ and that both he and she are now bait, in order to trap the criminals. Rather than blocking agency, or suspending it, the double binds are here resolved through additional action, motivated by the hero being put in the know and asked to fully enter into the duplicitous game – with all the attendant dangers – from which he was previously excluded. These two examples give an indication of how Hollywood cinema – ‘classical’ and ‘contemporary’ (a placeholder term for a whole range of transformations) – ties and unties narrative threads, their complications, knots, and entanglements, around ‘agency.’ By agency I mean not only the ability to make choices and to engage with his/her environment, with society and with others. It also includes motivation and goals, the nexus of ‘free will’ and ‘determinism,’ the locus of ‘power’ and ‘authority,’ as well as their mutually retarding or reinforcing effects on the main character’s sense of identity and his/her capacity for purposive or meaningful action. Agency is both a key term for how I intend to reframe the debate about mind-game or puzzle films, and as a consequence, it is also the most problematic term, not least because the cinema’s many kinds of automatisms tend to be retroactively imbued with anthropomorphic intentionality. More specifically in film studies, agency recapitulates the long-standing debate around ‘actant,’ with narratologists like Propp and Greimas favoring actions (moves/countermoves) and functions (hero/villain) over agents,1 while Bruno Latour uses the term ‘actant’ in his actor-network theory to suspend the difference between human and non-human actors, and emphasizes their relational and interdependent function within networks. Both models are careful not to attribute actions (and their consequences) to the subjective realization of individual volition and intentionality. On the other hand, discourses of ‘empowerment’ have become prominent in cultural studies, identity politics and gender studies, where the term signals a shift from political militancy and community activism to a more narrowly focused emphasis on individual autonomy, minority representation, and group self-determination. Empowerment as a form of agency thus refers to self-empowerment and implicitly favors individual choice and decision, while covertly acknowledging the presence of external support or authority.

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What will emerge in my discussion of the mind-game film is that one of the functions of this ‘genre’ – besides generating moments of ontological ‘ungroundedness’ and epistemological doubt – is to introduce several multidirectional vectors of sequencing and spacing, of succession and causal chains, whose purpose is to open up individual agency – whether as character-centered causality or as subjective-collective empowerment – in the direction of more ‘distributed’ (diffuse at macro- but also antagonistic at micro-level) forms of agency and power (i.e., either decentered, or lacking any center whatsoever). This dispersal or redistribution of actantial roles and functions is made necessary by both sociopolitical and technological changes: changes in which cinema – in its wider sense as a heterogeneous dispositif of power and as an assemblage of multilayered relations – plays an ambiguous, ‘double agent’ role, for which I will borrow the term ‘pharmakon,’ made famous by Jacques Derrida’s re-reading of Plato. Hence, the emphasis in mind-game films on non-linearity in the narrative trajectory and the introduction of multiple temporalities. Along with retrocausality and deferred action, these features can be understood as elements or instruments for easing us out of our habitual (but clearly failing) subject-centered individualism. They encourage us into accepting, but also acting on, more complex dynamics of interaction and interdependency as viable forms of agency: neither should we feel paralyzed by a powerlessness that clings to victimhood as its only (reactive) subjectposition, nor defend its opposite, believing that only individual, direct action can salvage personal identity. Paradoxically, the pervasive re-emergence of superheroes in contemporary mainstream cinema is less a counter-example than proof of my argument about the crisis in agency, even as these films tend to dramatize and narrativize the problems – or dilemmas (see below) – of agency in ways different from the mind-game film: with the possible exception of Christopher Nolan’s rebooting of the Batman superhero franchise, where the eponymous hero is schizophrenically split (the usual strategy of problematizing individual agency in superhero movies) with the result that agency is critically blunted by childhood trauma and other inhibiting factors: factors which the hero – in a very classical manner – has to overcome internally and defeat externally. Classical cinema accommodates practically all of these narratological and culturalist definitions of agency. As examined elsewhere, it tends to favor individualized agents at one level, while organizing, at another level, the total narrative field more in terms of actions, interactions and functions, in both Greimas’s and Latour’s sense.2 In fact, the classical text is so layered (and has embedded so much ‘structured ambiguity’) that it also responds to psychoanalytic, deconstructivist, and cognitivist models of interpretation, none of which seem to exclude or contradict the other. With respect to agency, countervailing forces in classical cinema are usually embodied in a character: the villain, rivals, or a member of the opposite sex. They are personalized and given ‘a local habitation and a name’ – i.e., their own motives, intentions, and goals. Impersonal or abstract forces, such as accident,

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coincidence, contingency, or other ‘acts of God,’ also have their place in classical cinema, but mostly in order to be retroactively recovered and enlisted in the final plot resolution, as ‘causes’ that can be lined up in a plausibly linear sequence, once they have been matched with the effects (or consequences) they produce. As has frequently been pointed out, there is much in contemporary Hollywood cinema that repeats or retains features of classical cinema. Often, the basic dramatic structure remains the same: a problem to be solved, a crime to be investigated, a disaster to be averted, an injustice to be avenged, a missing object or person to be restored to its rightful owner; still prevalent is also the single protagonist, facing antagonists and relying on benevolent or ambiguous helpers – although a typical feature of multi-stranded, multi-character network narratives is what I call ‘distributed agency’; there can even be the double plot structure of romance and adventure, as well as several other classical features, such as unity of place and action, or – very frequently – an explicit countdown or deadline structure. In the present context, however, it is the difference from the classical model that interest me: I intend to read the complications of agency as symptomatic of wider changes in mainstream cinema, as well as in the world at large, paying special attention to an identifiable if diverse body of films within contemporary cinema – what I call the mind-game film. Returning to my two examples, one of the differences that can be highlighted is the nature and location of the counter-forces to individual agency: Roger Thornhill’s dilemma of agency is generated by two symmetrically matched antagonists, external to the hero, in a hierarchy of power, deception, and disguise: the FBI team, led by ‘The Professor’ on one side, and the villains, led by Vandamm (James Mason), on the other. Clearly, there is also an internal blockage, having to do with his ambivalence towards women, signaled by the invisible presence of his mother, but this too is symmetrically aligned with the external forces, the two ‘father figures’ in the oedipal constellation, with each narrative strand helping to resolve the other.3 John Anderton’s ‘choice of evils,’ by contrast, is self-generated from the start, coming from his own ambiguous or dual position within different power structures. These are the surveillance and control systems that Anderton himself helped to put in place, but also the self-monitoring of his conscience, signaled by the repressed trauma and the guilt he feels over the death of his son (as well as the consequent break-up of his marriage). Involving, as it does, his future as well as his past, the choice he is forced to make is not only a matter of understanding his own motivation and the consequences of his actions, or of making the moral decision to either serve or resist the powers that be. Rather, the preemptive, ‘closed’ universe in which he finds himself also challenges conventional notions of identity as an individual in time and space and thereby threatens the very possibility of being a purposive or autonomous agent, as we normally understand it. In many other ways, Minority Report – especially when compared to the Philip K. Dick story on which it is based (see Chapter 7 of the present volume) – is still a fairly classical film, ending

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with the death of a super-villain who turns out to be the locus of ultimate power and agency. It also has several interconnected deadlines, both met and missed, giving the film a linearity that allows Spielberg to tie up the narrative’s various threads, in order to bring the story to a satisfying closure.

Mind-Game Films: A Cinematic Genre or a Video Game Hybrid? In my earlier chapter, “Philip K. Dick, the Mind-Game Film, and Retroactive Causality,” I discussed Minority Report’s affinity with mind-game films more broadly, and I extended the scope of typical features beyond the narrative’s convoluted, mutually imbricated forms of agency. And while Spielberg’s film may not be the most typical example, Minority Report can stand, with respect to agency, for several of the films which, over the past two decades, have come under intense scrutiny by critics and scholars.4 These films have given rise to very different definitions, points of interest, and explanations, along with a bewildering variety of names and headings. Popular are labels such as ‘complex narratives,’ ‘multi-strand’ and ‘multiple draft narratives,’ ‘forking-path narratives,’ ‘network narratives,’ ‘modular narratives,’ ‘fractal narratives,’ ‘database narratives,’ ‘hyperlink cinema’: they indicate that often the primary focus has been on narrative and narration, story world and story structure. This is also true of the majority of essays brought together in two collections edited by Warren Buckland, who has opted for the designation ‘puzzle films.’ Puzzle films hint at a possible proximity of these films to games, riddles, enigmas, and intellectual exercises for their own sake. This makes good sense when applied to Minority Report: it has a number of features in common with video games, especially its intersecting and interdependent storylines, and several distinct subplots that are presented as ‘rules needing to be mastered’ before the main narrative can conclude. Or, to put it in some of the categories used by Buckland, Minority Report contains (a) serialized repetitions of actions, (b) multiple levels of adventure, (c) magical transformations (improbable sci-fi devices), as well as (d) immediate rewards and punishments. Little wonder that Minority Report, which was a major commercial success, gave rise to a video game as well as a TV series. What is ‘puzzling,’ however, is that both the video game and TV series were commercial failures, despite being based on a film that so much invites adaptation to other media formats, for instance, to successful surveillance video games like Watch Dogs or Need to Know, and to high-quality paranoia premium television series, such as Homeland or Breaking Bad. The same case – resemblance to a computer game – has been made for another prototypical and widely discussed mind-game film, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and with good reason. Warren Buckland concludes his analysis of the video game logic of Inception: Key to Inception’s video game logic, in addition to levels of play and violence, we discovered two in-game tutorials; the serialized repetition of action

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(especially in the way characters move to different dream levels, which constitute a space warp); immediate punishment for not mastering the rules of the game during gameplay (in which players either wake up or enter limbo); an emphasis on strategy and tactics (and the need to change strategy quickly); a successful balancing of the game and an increase in its pace, in which the tasks become harder and the risks higher as the game progresses; an emphasis on constructing the game’s environment (designed by Ariadne as labyrinths, with a mix of open and closed spaces); plus great significance conferred upon the limbo level, the equivalent of the video game’s sandbox mode. In addition, there is a game resource (Somnacin), a small use of disguises, and one use of an exploit.5 But here, too, there was no widely distributed adaptation of the film to an actual game, following Inception’s huge commercial and critical success. One wonders whether the very structural similarity of these films to video games almost precludes their successful adaptation, as if the correspondences were almost too obvious, indicative of the possibility that mind-game films have a different strategic relation to video games. For instance, mind-game films, well aware of their likely audiences’ intimate familiarity and expertise, already assume video games to be the default value of these spectators’ cinema experience rather than classical linear narrative.

Towards a Prototype Cinema Thus, filmmakers and production companies active in Hollywood over these past two decades are fully aware of both the economic power of video games, and of the special storytelling skills involved in crafting multiple-season TV series, while nonetheless continuing to make films for the cinema. Rather than direct emulation, video games’ presence on the industry’s artistic radar and commercial horizon has favored the emergence of a new kind of research-and-development prototype cinema, aimed at repositioning the cinema in a media world that now includes both interactive video games and – complex and addictive – television series. This prototype cinema translates some of the effects of games and television series, such as narrative complexity, ambiguously distributed agency, shape- and identity-shifting character constellations, looping storylines, and repetition – into the visual language, the platforms and the viewing habits of the contemporary cinemagoer. It therefore provides one useful explanation and description for the appearance of mind-game films: they are the research-and-development arm of the ever evolving, self-differentiating conglomerate that is Hollywood picture-making.6 A description is not a definition: beyond the institutional argument, there are other considerations: these make me continue to adhere to the term ‘mind-game films,’ in the face of several other contenders listed above. A puzzle implies that a situation is deliberately set up to have gaps or missing pieces, to be counterintuitive or pose an enigma, so that the task is to complete the design, recognize the

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underlying pattern or resolve the enigma: in other words, the term ‘puzzle film’ already assumes as given what might actually be the key stake at issue, namely whether we are dealing with a puzzle that has a solution, in contrast to, perhaps, a film posing a dilemma, for which there is no solution as such, and which can only be probed. Thus, solving a puzzle is quite different as a cognitive task or conceptual stance from probing a dilemma: I shall expand on this by putting up for discussion this crucial difference, and referring myself to an older debate about the nature of Hollywood storytelling quite generally. Just like classical cinema, contemporary cinema can be considered a species of mythological speech, whose (ideological, cultural) purpose is to provide ‘imaginary resolutions to real contradiction’: a formula that considerably complicates the ‘solution to a puzzle’ task, but also pushes further the apparent stalemate of merely ‘probing a dilemma.’7 Additionally, there is a related problem with the notion of mind-game films as complex narratives, namely that it presets the scope and boundary of the viewer—interpreter’s horizon of expectations: however convoluted the narrative, however enigmatic the motivation of the characters, the hermeneutic task is completed when one has unraveled and identified the different threads, added the missing pieces (of information) and basically succeeded in ‘straightening out’ the story. So why make a film rather than devise a crossword puzzle or a Rubik’s cube? Having succeeded in turning a film into a more linear and more conventional narrative, one has in fact merely reduced its complexity and normalized its abnormalities. This is not to say that figuring out the underlying structure of such a puzzling or bewildering narrative does not have its own genuinely aesthetic rewards, even revealing the beauty of simple designs generating complexity – as does mathematics – but this argument needs to be made explicitly, as Buckland does, for instance, in an essay on one of Michel Gondry’s music videos: Tension exists between structure (which is abstract, relational and immanent) and the photographic image (which appears to be immediate, singular and referential). Yet, visual elements within a photographic image – or a series of images – are capable of representing abstract concepts, to the point where they can constitute an autonomous conceptual structure. This is because images can generate abstract reasoning via structural relations between their elements … In a music video, as in a classical Hollywood film … images can be manipulated and conjoined to express elusive meanings and present implicit arguments. That is, the images in music videos have a structural autonomy. These images in turn are combined with two additional autonomous structures – music and lyrics.8 Without such a supplementary argument, the unraveling exercise has little to say about or explanatory use for the kinds of complexity that make mind-game films so interesting in the first place. Yet because complexity does play an increasingly crucial role in understanding (i.e., ‘following’) real-time, ‘live’ processes, such as weather patterns, the stock exchange, viral videos, or pandemics, it has considerable cognitive,

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economic, social, and political – and as I shall argue, pedagogical – value. In view of a potential learning exercise, such as ‘living with complexity and contradiction,’ solving a puzzle also does not allow for the possibility that the very efficacy in attracting audiences to some of these mind-game films consists in scrambling the temporal sequence, the spatial co-ordinates, and the binary logic in a more radical way, either in order to reorient the spectators’ sensory-perceptual-cognitive faculties in the direction of a different set of tasks and tools, or in order to chart a different approach to what I just called the purpose of mythological speech: instead of offering ‘imaginary solutions,’ the mind-game film highlights the ‘real contradictions’ (of a society, economic system or of ‘subjectivity’: see below). It does so, not in the manner of a Brechtian alienation effect or by deconstructing ‘narrative’ in the manner of the 1970s avant-garde, but by deploying inherently filmic means that make open-endedness and undecidability (as ways of staging the impossibility of solutions) both pleasurable and intriguing enough to keep the spectator engaged. On the other hand, it is true that there has grown up around these mind-game or puzzle films not only an ever-growing body of scholarly articles, books, and commentary, but also a community of fans who set themselves the task – and advertise their efforts via YouTube videos – precisely to unravel the complexities, fill in background information, point out deliberate clues, hidden exploits or accidental bloopers, or otherwise offer ‘helpful’ hints and clarifications. These amateur interpreters are, in this respect like other fan communities, already part of the ‘imaginary resolutions’ (i.e., the films’ ideological project, which seeks to solicit the active participation from viewers as part of their marketing strategy).9 It makes it imperative for the professional scholar to push further towards an understanding or uncovering of the ‘real contradictions,’ which the film itself may or may not be aware of. A related issue arises when our primary focus is on narrative. In much of the literature that examines narrative or narration in mind-game films, the key issue is whether the narrative is linear or non-linear, and what the relation is between fabula and syuzhet (the story world and the way of arranging it). Mind-game films often widen the gap, by foregrounding the act of narration to such an extent that it is almost impossible to form a coherent image of the story world and its internal consistency: Memento might serve as an example, as well as Inception, but Through a Scanner Darkly is also a case in point. From a narratological perspective, this raises questions about unreliable narrators (The Usual Suspects), focalization (The Sixth Sense), and several other intriguing technical problems such as the existence of multiple timelines. Edward Branigan, for instance, has examined films containing alternative possible timelines, such as The Butterfly Effect, citing it as an example of “a series of typical Hollywood plots arranged as alternative timelines.”10 Branigan points out that complexity does not emerge from each plot taken singularly, but from the combination of these incompatible plots in the same film. We shall see below that the interweaving of incompatible plots in the same film is partly what is responsible for creating ontological uncertainty.

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As will also become apparent, time, tense, and temporality are indeed important aspects of the mind-game film. However, once one grants these prototype films their symptomatic character, it is almost mandatory to bear in mind wider, more properly philosophical concerns about how ‘worlds’ – for Martin Heidegger a world is “a significant [i.e., sense making] network of relations in which humans exist”11 – are modeled through ‘story,’ and thus whether one can speak of worlds at all, without the kinds of time-space continuum, of actants and relations, that narratives typically provide. What happens when technological changes challenge the primacy of narrative: less a tool for world-making and more an ordering principle of data and information? For instance, narratives can also be considered under the aspect of storage, access and retrieval, which cover important dimensions of storytelling as mnemotechnic practice. It is these parameters which are being transformed by digital devices now emulating the human brain that vastly expand but also facilitate alternative ‘information processing’ techniques. What remains problematic, once narrative is regarded as primarily a durable, adaptable but nonetheless historically contingent cultural technology for putting sequential order into data, in the form of events, agents, and actions, is the position of the reader/viewer. Here narratologists have a strong point: how do ‘database narratives’ (or non-classical narratives such as mind-game films) generate modes of address that inscribe the viewer as the singular subjective consciousness s/he still feels herself to be? Providing a gap or space into which the viewer inserts or invests herself is one of the most important aesthetic, cultural, and ideological functions narratives can perform, discussed under such diverse headings as ‘narrative comprehension,’ ‘subject position,’ ‘identification,’ ‘viewer engagement,’ ‘empathy,’ ‘meaning-making.’ All this suggests that mind-game films covertly or overtly pose important questions about the cognitive and cultural function of narratives today, and about the feasibility of alternative ordering systems (such as database narratives) and other ways of worldmaking, such as computer games, given that these are widely used for practical, educational, and military purposes, as well as wildly popular as games and entertainment. Games in turn have made more active, interactive spectator/user/producer positions something closer to the norm: with the added consequence that agency has become ‘distributed’ (see below), character consistency dissolved, and linearity broken open and bent into recursive loops by random access, networked nodes, relational interactions, and feedback circuits. These broad and general considerations, arguing my choice of terminology, are one of the reasons for returning to the topic of the mind-game film almost ten years after first setting out what I meant to draw attention to. Second, I want to give a more philosophically inflected and conceptually interconnected account to what originally was mostly a symptomatic and sociological interpretation. And finally, I want to expand and correct my initial assessment, in light of the mind-game films made since 2009, as well as in consideration of the voluminous literature that the films have generated. I will briefly summarize my 2009 essay, included in the present volume as Chapter 3, before listing what seem to me 12

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key features, constitutive of the films that I group under the label ‘mind-game film.’ This list comes with the added proviso that as prototypes, mind-game films are neither a stable genre, nor can they be usefully assessed by their commercial success or evaluated by their critical reputation alone: a so-called failure can be more instructive than success when it comes to research and development. And because mind-game films seem to answer to a felt need or demand, without necessarily having fully captured or mastered the nature of this demand, many tend to end up as ‘cult films’ – a category where apparent failure or imperfection often counts as a special virtue for the initiated. Since I consider mind-game films to be one of the contemporary variants, extensions, and transformations of classical cinema into post-classical and beyond, they not only share features of the classical–post-classical paradigms: in order to be a prototype cinema, mind-game films also have to extend or exacerbate some of these features. They do so by often behaving as thought-experiments: taking to the limits, that is: to their logical or illogical conclusion, the inherent tensions and unresolved contradictions of both the classical and the post-classical mode. It means that some of them – Memento, for instance – can do without full narrative resolutions, or with a ‘cheat’ solution or ‘trick ending,’ as has been claimed for The Usual Suspects and I would argue is partly also the case with Source Code, when it suddenly introduces the existence of multiverses, in order to engineer a conventional happy ending. By aligning this prototype cinema also with ‘thought-experiments.’ I implicitly make another case for continuing to refer to them as mind-game films, even if I have to defer a more detailed discussion of what I mean by films as thought-experiments.12

A Brief Summary of ‘The Mind-Game Film’ In 2009 I published an essay, entitled ‘The Mind-Game Film,’ included in the present volume. There I claim that since the mid-1990s a tendency in filmmaking has emerged, both mainstream and independent, whose narrative construction, character identity, and character agency as well as audience-address differ from both classical Hollywood storytelling and the post-classical mode, the latter often typified by allusionism, knowingness or – as I called it – ‘classical-plus.’13 Characteristics of the mind-game films include a diegetic world that looks both realistic and has a high degree of verisimilitude, but turns out to consist of several parallel, disjunctive, and potentially incompatible universes. Films also feature multiple timelines, either quite separate from each other, or connected by inverted figure-of-eight loops in the manner of a Möbius strip. Narrators are a priori unreliable, either by design and with intent to deceive, or because they are themselves deceived. Such protagonists can appear to be rationally motivated agents but in the course of the action reveal themselves to have a mental condition or a psychic disorder, which, however, is not initially revealed to the audience, often obliging the spectator to retroactively revise the premises and assumptions about the reality status of the world depicted.

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Similar or corresponding cognitive shifts have to be made about the motivation of the protagonists, and about the causal nexus that holds the action together. Meaning-making for the audience of a mind-game film is not simply ‘following the story,’ but poses several kinds of challenges: to become actively engaged, and to sort out apparent inconsistencies, while trusting the film and its makers to be nonetheless in good faith – by introducing new ‘rules of the game,’ and thus disorienting or deceiving the spectator for a higher purpose: or at the very least, doing so in the name of the game. A mind-game film can encourage an audience to entertain hypotheses that turn out to be false or remain unproven even at the end. They have to willingly submit to a reshuffling not only of the temporal sequence of events, but be prepared to expand mental space altogether, as well as share a world where linear causality is suspended and effects can generate their own causes, in a reversal of agency and of power- relations – a feature that the mind-game film shares with the time travel film, discussed in more detail below. The body of work that by 2009 fell under the category of mind-game film was made up of some two-dozen titles. They constituted a rather disparate corpus, but one that most critics and commentators are nonetheless agreed upon: 

    

The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense, The Village, Vanilla Sky, The Truman Show, Donnie Darko, The Others, Fight Club, Memento, A Beautiful Mind (directors: Bryan Singer, Peter Weir, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, M. Night Shyamalan, Richard Kelly, Cameron Crowe, Ron Howard); Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation (written by Charlie Kaufman); Infernal Affairs, 2046, In the Mood for Love, Oldboy (Asian Mind-game films); Inception, Source Code, Shutter Island (major Hollywood productions); Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire (directed by David Lynch); Blade Runner, Minority Report, Through a Scanner Darkly, Total Recall (Philip K. Dick adaptations).

What is notable is the number of ‘auteurist’ works that fall under the label, with Christopher Nolan and David Fincher – next to David Lynch – the most prominent and certainly the most successful filmmakers to direct (and often write) mind-game films. Almost equally prominent is a single screenwriter: Charlie Kaufman, later turned director with Synecdoche, New York (2008) and Anomalisa (2015), written and co-directed by Kaufman. And finally, a single literary source has marked the mind-game film disproportionately and continues to do so: the sci-fi cult author Philip K. Dick. It is clear, however, that mind-game films have not sprung out of nowhere, nor are they simply a reaction to classical Hollywood narrative: they have precedents in the surrealist (and French) films of Luis Buñuel, they pay tribute to some of the films of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, and they are recognizably related to the films of Alain Resnais (Last Year in Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Je t’aime, je

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t’aime) of Chris Marker (La Jetée) and Nicholas Roeg (Performance, Don’t Look Now). This genealogy complicates too simplistic an argument according to which mind-game films respond to certain external changes (such as the economic and demographic conditions of Hollywood picture-making, or the switch from analogue to digital images and all that this implies). More plausible is to point to certain perennial philosophical concerns as they are traditionally formulated around the reality of other minds, the nature of perception and human consciousness, of the difference between simulacrum and fake, now rendered more contemporarily relevant through deconstruction at one end, and the so-called ‘post-truth’ condition on the other. Especially with respect to the latter, mind-game films can also take on a political dimension. Still, within the philosophical register, mind-game films pose problems of ‘ontology’ that the very existence of cinema since the late 19th century has given a new twist and urgency to. An element overlooked or under-emphasized in my 2009 essay was the nature of embodiment, indeed the very status of a (human) body in mind-game films. In particular, in light of what I hold to be their philosophical import, there is a case to be made that in mind-game films the mind–body hierarchy is inverted, or at any rate differently arranged. Often, the somatic body is privileged over the rational mind: this is the case in Fight Club, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Memento. Memento in particular is a film that instantiates the precepts of Michel Foucault and Friedrich Kittler: the body is an Aufschreibsystem, a mnemotechnic-somatic recording and storage system on the flesh and the body (especially when viewed from the vantage point of its supposedly superior AI successor). In Memento the amnesiac hero can be read as a ‘what-if’ thought-experiment, set up in order to test what happens when short-term memory is disabled: primed by both helper and antagonist (but which is which?) into a programmable ‘smart weapon,’ to execute a ‘program’ of revenge, of which he falsely thinks he is the sovereign agent, his deadly efficiency and singlemindedness is used by others for their own agendas. Paycheck also explores the ‘advantages’ of amnesia, as a way of disabling the mind but keeping the body not only functioning, but programmable: the protagonist’s body becomes a ‘prosthetic’ device made suitable to serve different ends: an intimation of the new white-collar subjectivities, or another instance of what I call ‘productive pathologies’? ‘Productive pathologies’ is the term I used in the 2009 essay to identify what is perhaps the most striking instance of how the mind-game film deals with the problem of the body, agency and the sovereign subject, without betraying it to an imaginary solution, but instead inventing an embodied contradiction. I list the many films that feature different mental-physiological states, such as schizophrenia, paranoia, autism, amnesia, bipolar, split and multiple personality, etc., and I go on to claim that these are ‘productive pathologies’ in the sense that the protagonists’ behavior may seem aberrant and even dangerous under ordinary circumstances, but in the narrative is not marked as a disorder or affliction (i.e., a case study), and instead turns out to be a particular skill-set that proves important if not crucial for a specific task at hand. Thus, when mind-game films feature

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protagonists whose view of the world is radically skewed, due to the nature of their physical condition or mental state, these ‘constraints’ reveal themselves to be enabling conditions in some other register, and in some other way of interacting with the world. Productive pathologies, then, are individuals who ‘live’ empowering and inhibiting conditions or personality traits in a manner that resolves the resulting problems of agency by staging them as paradoxical and apparently contradictory: psychological and physiological borderline states are strategically deployed for coping with a borderline environment, and things that may seem ‘bad’ for you turn out also to be ‘good’ for you, in the sense that what once was classified a disorder, turns out to be a survival skill. The day may not be far off when an affliction such as ‘attention deficit disorder’ is reclassified as ‘rapid reaction redeployment capability.’ just as software firms hire people with autism to write and debug code, because their attention can stay more minutely focused. By recalibrating the mind–body relations and acknowledging crises of agency, productive pathologies would be in the vanguard: not in the way one speaks of ‘mad geniuses’14 or the madness of visionaries or artists, but as harbingers of the ‘new normal.’ The world they find themselves in is also ours: making demands on the body, the mind, and the senses that humans are not (yet) equipped for. Information overload, formerly extreme environments such as highly technologized and media-saturated life-styles, or areas of mortal danger, like a war zone – the mind-game film implies – have become so normalized, or are so contingently omnipresent, that they require aberrant behavior, i.e., pathologies, in order to adequately perform, to function productively, or to survive in these abnormally normal environments. Yet productive pathologies also have other uses: for instance, they can model or format the ideal viewer of mind-game films, attentive to detail, good at picking up hidden clues, rapidly switch attention and thus initiate the ‘user’ vanguard that is emerging around computer games, fan cultures, vlogging, binge viewing, etc.15

Three Constitutive Properties of Cinema Crucial to the MindGame Film The task in the present chapter, then, is to complement my earlier symptomatic, sociological and economic reading of mind-game films with a reassessment of their status as a privileged (though minoritarian) object of study for contemporary cinema from a philosophical perspective. Such a perspective takes films to have an avowedly ideological function, but also a therapeutic and pedagogical dimension: in terms of psychoanalysis, films can have a fantasy function (i.e., sustaining a fantasy, in order to cope with reality) and may help a ‘working through’ (of trauma and loss). In terms of pedagogy, films can be active interventions, i.e., they create realities, rather than provide ‘representations’ (more or less accurate) of a given reality. Both the therapeutic and the pedagogical dimension join in the

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evolving dialogue that America as a nation has with itself in and through its movies, either because they address specifically American issues (of the national narrative, history, race relations, gender issues), or because they successfully present these topics to the world as perennial and universal problems, given America’s global reach in soft power, epitomized in Hollywood movies’ worldwide dissemination and popularity. In this perspective, mind-game films make up a vanishingly small contingent, but are nonetheless of special importance, precisely because the reality-creating, fantasysustaining function of popular cinema is explicitly highlighted (the protagonists’ gradually revealed delusions, the ontological switches, the multiple realities). The ideological function is also severely challenged by the perceptual irritants, leaps of logic and general undecidability that the spectator has to contend with and make sense of. The other task of this chapter is to update the analysis given in the 2009 essay, mindful that there have in recent years been a number of popular big budget films that qualify as mind-game films such as Inception (2010), Source Code (2011), The Revenant (2015), Interstellar (2014), Arrival (2016), as well as Batman – The Dark Knight Rises (2012) or Birdman (2015). Films like Triangle (Christopher Smith, 2009), Her (Spike Jonze 2013), Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) and Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014) also have elements of the mind-game film, as does Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2016) and Ghost in the Shell (a transnational, cross-media, originally Japanese anime franchise, turned into a 2017 Hollywood film, directed by Rupert Sanders). By contrast, a thriller with multiple twists, such as The Girl on the Train (2016) may look like a mind-game film, but is not, because the film does all the untwisting, straightening out, and disambiguating by itself. Thus, the fact that features of the mind-game film turn up across the genres – including thrillers, horror films, and romantic comedies – suggests we may be dealing with a phenomenon as intangible and ubiquitous as film noir, and similarly marked by extreme affective states such as we find in melodrama and trauma narratives. Mind-game films constitute a mode that transcends genre, comparable to, but not identical with melodrama, often said to be a ‘mode of feeling,’ a particular kind of ‘imagination’ and a ‘view of the world.’ Mind-game films might even be considered the ‘answer’ (or complement) to melodrama (ubiquitous as a problem-solving, equivalence-seeking, balance-creating mode, shorn of its once subversive potential) and to trauma films.16 Even in mainstream Hollywood, trauma is taken as the default state of the once sovereign subject, so that both personal and group identity tend to ground themselves on the ungroundedness of trauma.17 In this sense, the mind-game film as ‘prototype cinema’ and ‘thought experiment’ (terms are also chosen to avoid ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’) addresses in new ways both subjectivity and agency: key issues also in melodrama and trauma films. To give another indication of why ‘prototype’ and ‘thought experiment’ are crucial to my project: sustaining my interest in the mind-game film as a significant phenomenon is the belief that it is a form of meta-cinema, i.e., a reflection on cinema

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by means of cinema. There have been all kinds of meta-cinema in the history of cinema: experimental cinema in the 1920s, political avant-garde cinema, the postwar European (and Latin) New Waves, the New York avant-garde in the 1970s, Britain’s structuralist-materialist cinema, the cinema brut of Austria, etc. But mindgame films are different, in that – unlike some of the other meta-cinemas – they are neither anti-Hollywood, nor anti-narrative, but work with what I would consider the three constitutive features of mainstream cinema, properties that make cinema a phenomenon of modernity, as well as a legitimate object of philosophical inquiry. These three inherent qualities and constitutive properties are: first, movement, i.e., moving and being moved (the automatisms of motion and e-motion, suspending the difference between active and passive, animate and inanimate); second, the ability to generate fresh associations and establish unexpected new connections (‘montage’ or editing), and third, the appeal to the imagination, to fiction (in the case of mind-game films less the ‘as-if’ of make-believe and more the ‘what-if’ of the thought-experiment), which leads to sensory apperception as a valid alternative form of knowledge (‘intuitive understanding’ as opposed to deductive or inductive reason). These qualities are also what make cinema a popular (but epistemologically problematic) medium, at the same time as they consolidate its claims to be the expression of the ‘aesthetic regime,’ which according to Jacques Rancière defines political and philosophical modernity since the French Revolution and German idealist philosophy. To put it in more philosophical terms: cinema can be seen as the historical answer (in the sense of an acknowledgement and a response) to the dilemma of modernity: the realization that humanity is not only alone in the universe, but individually and preternaturally separated from the world (Descartes, Kant, Hegel), and therefore condemned to always ‘make meaning’ out of its meaningless existence – indifferent, contingent and finite (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy). How can cinema – or in my case, a meta-cinema like the mind-game film – be an answer to the modern wounds of radical skepticism or philosophical nihilism? How can it restore our trust in the world, when it is all make-believe, and dangerous or beautiful illusion? First, because its automatism acknowledges this rift between a world utterly indifferent to humans and the fact that these humans are nonetheless utterly responsible for this world, as Stanley Cavell has so cogently argued in The World Viewed.18 Second, if we express this rift in terms of the four ‘narcissistic wounds’ (inflicted by Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud), then humans are condemned to center their thinking on their own de-centeredness: a paradox for which they have invented the concept of ‘subjectivity’ – as a way of regulating self-awareness, consciousness, identity, personhood, when the world’s presence is foreclosed. Yet however much object-oriented ontology, post-humanism, the new materialism or speculative realism might wish to cut the Gordian knot and get rid of subjectivity, they still have to manage the unbridgeable gap between self and other, of ‘being in the world’ and yet excluded from it, of depending on a myriad of relations with others, just to be a separate entity, an individual. Cinema

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would then be the most advanced (‘modern’) prosthesis (or machine) for appeasing and managing the inherent paradoxes, internal contradictions, and aporias of subjectivity. As meta-cinema, the mind-game film is the form of cinema that renders these paradoxes and dilemmas explicit and manifest, implicitly arguing that they need to be renegotiated and updated, while remaining complicit with their continued functioning, because operating from within, rather than positioning itself (as a ‘critique’ from) outside. This explicit-implicit-complicit position is, I argue, an asset of the mind-game film, rather than a defect, and not only because it preserves its status as a thought-experiment and strengthens its uses as a prototype cinema. To indicate why operating from the inside is an advantage: mind-game films act upon the three constitutive properties of cinema in ways that help ‘restore’ our links to the world – what I just called the therapeutic and pedagogical dimensions – by freeing up movement, montage, and intuition and allowing us to forge ever new bonds, connections, and relations. Movement ensures becoming, process and passage (but also secures action and agency) in the medium of variable temporalities; montage, understood as renewing circuits and relays, allows for different form of causality, connection, contingency, as well as assemblages (modularity, sequencing, and series); while intuitive understanding reinstates the dignity of the everyday, the resistance of the material, the intimacy of the sensuous, but also gives the fleeting and ephemeral ‘evidence and presence.’19 Cinema thus becomes a form of apprehending the world: thereby complementing comprehension as legitimate forms of acquiring knowledge and adding ‘pathos’ to ‘logos.’ It is the combination and interaction of all three constitutive properties that make up the necessary conditions – against the backdrop of modernity’s wounds – for the kind of ‘trust in the world’ that philosophers now reclaim for the cinema (e.g., Deleuze, Cavell). This trust – within the conceptual scheme here proposed – amounts to a ‘learning to live with contradictions,’ instead of fixating on fixing them (i.e., resolving them at all cost) – whether with imaginary resolutions (Hollywood) or through direct action (political avant-garde cinema). In this way, the mind-game film reinstates the epistemic as well as pedagogic value of ‘as-if’ scenarios, at the same time as ‘what-if’ scenarios upend hard and fast distinctions between truth and lie, reality and illusion, the actual and the virtual.

Twelve Key Features of Mind-Game Films The 12 key features of mind-game films I am about to present are partly extrapolated from my 2009 essay, and partly they are my version of insights and arguments drawn from the broad discussion of these films over the past 10 years. The perspective from which they are presented, however, is new, insofar as it favors the notion of a prototype cinema as described above, referencing itself to the basic parameters of movement and motion (including cinema’s automatism), connections and associations (including linkages in multiple dimensions), and intuitive understanding (including leaps of logic, impossible devices or machines, and tolerance for both

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hypothetical ‘what-if’ and fictional ‘as-if’ modes). More specifically, the features as they appear in the films emphasize matters of temporality, causality, complexity, contradiction, recursiveness, and agency: (1) multiple universes, (2) multiple temporalities, (3) causality between coincidence and conjunction, (4) feedback: looped and retroactive causalities, (5) mise-en-abyme constructions, (6) the observer as part of the observed, (7) living with contradictions, (8) imaginary resolutions no longer dissolve real contradictions, (9) antagonistic mutuality under conditions of distributed agency, (10) agency – with the self, against the self, (11) time travel films as black boxes, (12) the mind-game film as pharmakon. Permitting myself a degree of abstraction and generalization, I would say that mind-game films gravitate around one central issue: dismantling both the sovereign subject and its antidote, the divided self of modern subjectivity, in view of accepting more complex but also self-contradictory, more limited but also more extended forms of agency. Hence: 

 



Agency is problematized – impeded or enabled/impeded as enabled – by forces not under the control of the sovereign subject (hence ‘productive pathologies’ as the appropriately paradoxical response to ‘losing control’). The mind-game film displays forms of agency in which the relationship between chance and contingency and between stochastic systems and predestination/predetermination has taken the place of free will, individual decision, and rational choice. As such, agency manifests itself as ‘distributed agency,’ often in a network not of cooperation and collaboration, but of conflictual relations that nonetheless produce ‘results,’ in a dynamic nexus of antagonistic mutuality. Several of the Coen Brothers’ films are mind-game films in this respect. Time is non-linear, reversible and knows different ‘speeds,’ which is why certain time travel films are close to mind-game films. Causation, which is usually tightly plotted in classical cinema, is in mindgame films much more indeterminate: incidents connect or follow each other through no immediately discernible causal nexus, and often causation is only retrievable or constructed via retroaction, projection and one’s own additional premises and propositions. Body is a key referent, but primarily in a non-Cartesian relation to the mind, reflecting new thinking about the embodied mind, so that the somatic body can take precedence over the rational mind, deploying energies and sensations, but also faculties and affordances not subject to either the mind–body split or to the classic hierarchy of mind over body.

This, as indicated, is one of the premises for ‘productive pathologies,’ i.e., physical, mental, or psychic conditions that may have seemed disabilities or liabilities, reveal themselves in certain – extreme or hazardous – situations as advantages and strengths.

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The conclusion I reach is a re-evaluation of these phenomena in light of positive feedback: typical of multipolar systems and hyper-networked relationships. As possible examples of positive feedback, the mind-game film and its post-classical narrative components amplify dissonance and aggravate contradiction, attaining a steady state of sorts through disequilibrium, duplicity, and embodied contradiction, for which I borrow Derrida’s term of the pharmakon (poison-as-cure, cure-as-poison). As pharmakon and positive feedback loop, multiplied at micro-level via antagonistic relations rather than self-regulated by the suppression of alternatives and self-replication, the mind-game film does not try to contain antagonism and contradiction, but reveals them as constitutive and generative.

(1) Spatial Relations: Multiple Universes and Unframed Ontologies Mind-game films set up a situation, a character constellation, and a dramatic conflict, where distinct narrative strands are intertwined and entangled, but where – unlike other multi-strand narratives – each narrative strand can have its own reality status (e.g., consisting of an unmarked mingling of ocular perception, dream, hallucination, memory: a film like Inception, for instance, plays with these different possibilities). Alternatively, each strand can represent a distinct ‘ontology,’ as in Source Code, which has several realities dependent on each other, yet at some level also incompatible with each other. The main protagonist, Colter, has bodily presence and degrees of agency in three distinct realities: his ‘actual’ existence as a war veteran with a mutilated body; his imaginary existence in the capsule, which is a projection; and a virtual/alternate existence on a train that no longer exists. The multiplication of ontologies installs at the very heart of the mind-game film a radical ‘ontological doubt.’ Mind-game films often have no horizon or orientational sight-lines to stabilize the viewing subject: the films of Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, Gravity) and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant) are typical in this respect, as is the playing with scale in the films of Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep); no ‘frames’: in the narratological sense (rendering moot the debates around the distancing effects of pastiche, irony, and parody in postmodern narratives); in the performative sense (i.e., modern theater’s ways of drawing attention to the stage as frame by removing it), and in Erwin Goffman’s ‘frame analysis’ (where a frame is a way of organizing and arranging experience from a specific viewpoint). Rather than ratchet up the levels of reflexivity and self-reference, mind-game films do their utmost to remove many of these kinds of frames, and to make their embedding invisible. In other words, mind-game films differ from films about memory, and other multilayered forms of mediated consciousness, by avoiding the forms of reflexivity typical for the ‘modernist’ films of Atom Egoyan, Wim Wenders, or Richard Linklater, where an obsolete medium serves as anchor and retrospective frame of reference.20 Mind-game films think media and technology

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in ways that are neither medium-specific nor technological: much the way Martin Heidegger discusses the ‘enframing’ of nature through technology as an attempt at domination that ends by making mankind its own raw material, at which point it either encounters only itself, or a new disclosure of Being becomes possible, so the mind-game film’s unframing is the result of a double or redoubled enframing.21 I would argue that if mind-game films break up accustomed ways of understanding time, perceiving space, living identity (and doubting reference), this break-up is also a prelude to the task of both furthering and undoing the work of media technology.22 In other words, an unframing of enframing offers a re-orientation, a realignment, readying us for another enframing, in the sense of new ordering systems that shift basic categories and their respective boundaries (foremost among which are the boundaries between what is alive and what is dead, what is matter and what is mind, and what is human and post- or non-human). Mind-game films make break-up and re-orientation pleasurably painful learning experiences (in the form of ‘games’), which is why they incite new ways of seeing the world and invite different hermeneutic strategies – part of what it means to play games. One can go further: if mind-game films are poised between amplifying ontological instability and critiquing its underlying causes, then they now appear within a new ‘political’ frame.23 Whereas they previously seemed unframed (while making us search for a frame), we can recognize that the destabilizing also acted as an early warning system – much like deconstruction in philosophy and literary studies – of a quasi-ontological shift already under way. The political frame would align mind-game films with what is no longer only the post-medium condition, but the post-truth condition: the world of ‘alternative facts,’ and the politics of the ‘reality-creating business.’24

(2) Temporal Relations: Multiple Time-Frames and Criss-Crossing Timelines Each narrative strand in a mind-game film may have its own temporality, including time running backwards (Memento), looped time (Groundhog Day), or time seemingly standing still or slowing down (Interstellar). Such variable temporalities may be extremely disorienting for the viewer, as in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, where very few clues allow one to reconstruct the chronological sequence of events, at least not on initial viewing. However, a film may also guide the viewer into feeling familiar with circular time and reversible temporalities, as is the case with Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. There, almost the entire subplot concerning the death of a child, and the foreknowledge the mother has of this devastating loss, is meant to give us a narrative and affective context for the strange new temporality that the alien Heptapods bring to mankind. In Inception, to cite another example, time slows down or speeds up, depending on which ‘level’ of each dream the protagonists find themselves in. Unlike the separate and incompatible timelines discussed above, here the weaving

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together of different temporalities serves less to create ontological doubt, but opens up a potential confluence and coexistence of different timelines. This applies to Interstellar (where two radically different time-scales and speeds enable an incest phantasy to form the loop that saves mankind) and to Dunkirk, where– apart from the different perspectives from land, sea, and air on the retreat, there are also three different temporal strata that combine to form a kind of symphony of sacrifice and overcoming, turning defeat into victory.25 It seems to make variable time a special feature of Christopher Nolan’s imaginative universe and adds a redemptive dimension to mind-game films.

(3) From Mono-Causality to Multicausality: Complexity as Interconnected Relations Closely aligned with unframed enframed ontologies and multiple temporalities of varying degrees of forward or backward momentum is the question of causality. Classical narrative usually works according to an explicit or implicit logic of linear causality: either through deadline structures that give forward thrust and whittle down alternatives, or by keeping to a strict question-and-answer logic that tightens the cause–effect nexus, all in an effort to make the ending seem at once natural and inevitable (and thus both pleasurable and persuasive). Thus, unintended consequences are prevented, by eliminating their presumed or purported causes, while open outcomes are anticipated and preemptively foreclosed. In mind-game films, by contrast, given the multiple and interconnected narrative strands, causality is based on a series of interdependent and thus interacting factors, each of which can be both cause and effect, taking us into the realm of retroactive causality. Minority Report is again a good example, and so is David Lynch’s Lost Highway, insofar as the first operates with a preemptive and a retroactive causality, and the second tells its story in the form not only of a loop, but of an inside-out loop, i.e., a Möbius strip, with the two lives of a single character intertwined. In Lost Highway the film actually starts somewhere towards the end of the story, but the audience is not given any clue that they are about to witness flashbacks. Nor are these really flashbacks, because we only gradually realize we are faced with a split character, and even then, we never quite know if it is Pete who imagines being Fred or it is Fred escaping into Pete. A film like Memento also goes quite radically against our sense of chronology and causality, and again, the challenge is to figure out that even if we get used to part of the narrative being told backwards, while another part moves forward, there is still the question: where does the film’s action actually begin, and why is it constructed as a loop? In Memento, one answer has to do with the nature of revenge – a relentless forward drive, which in this film is bent into a repetition compulsion – as if to say: classical Hollywood loves linear narrative and nothing is more linear by way of agency and motivation than revenge. But now that we no longer believe in such full agency (not even Tarantino, a director invariably

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relying on revenge, but also a master at bending it out of shape), how about presenting a hero who takes revenge but has no memory? This means he does not remember that he has already taken revenge, has reached his goal, but he starts all over again. On the one hand: a neat paradox, perfect for tying the viewer into hermeneutic knots, but on the other hand, such a looped narrative also emulates or promotes a certain spectator-engagement, namely insofar as Leonard’s over and over action in Memento resembles that of a gamer – but also of an addict.

(4) Feedback: Looped Causality and Retroactive Causality More generally, individual causal chains in the mind-game film can form (positive) feedback loops, so that it becomes impossible to differentiate between cause and effect, or when phenomena define themselves as effects in order to look for their causes. Almost every film that employs ‘time travel’ as a narrative engine resorts to such a retroactive ‘loop of agency.’ For instance, in Terminator II, it is the photograph of the pregnant Sarah Connor, which travels through time and makes Kyle Reese fall in love with Sarah, when in the photo, Sarah is already thinking of Reese and their as yet unborn son John Connor. A photograph (of a wounded Cole [Bruce Willis] in the trenches during WWI) acts as the cause/effect exchange in Twelve Monkeys, and another photograph (of Marty McFly and his siblings) plays a similar role in Back to the Future. In Inception, by contrast, it is the scene of a possibly unintended suicide that is both cause and effect, in Interstellar it is a watch that passes between father and daughter, and in Arrival it is the phone call placed to the Chinese General that function as the ‘object as agent,’ triggering retroaction: giving and receiving, active and passive, in other words, change their valence, and become gestures of transfer of authority and of looped agency.

(5) Mise-en-abyme Construction and Inside-out Narrative Architecture While ‘positive feedback,’ i.e., the amplification of an effect by its own influence on the process which gives rise to it, is the crucial mechanism of retroaction at the level of causality and temporality, there are other ways in which such self-referential but also self-empowering (or ‘bootstrapping’) tropes or processes can be put in play. One that situates itself on the visual-perceptual level can be a similarly disorienting factor by inducing not only perceptual groundlessness, but also a kind of ontological vertigo. I have in mind the mirroring and doubling process better known as mise-en-abyme. In mind-game films, characters are often either literally in front of mirrors, which reflect mirrors and thus create endless reduplication, or the self-mirroring mise-en-abyme becomes one of the structuring principles of the various narrative moves and countermoves.

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Mirroring, repetition, and symmetry are, of course, major structural resources of classical cinema, but are usually embedded in the deep structure, or disguised by characters acting as substitutes or surrogates for each other. In the mind-game film, on the other hand, mirroring effects are much more on the surface, revealing their uncanny power, and thus also deconstructing the classical use of mirrors and doubles. For instance, in Twelve Monkeys and Looper, the protagonist meets his own double from another ‘reality’ or ‘temporality,’ i.e., ‘travelling’ from the future to the present, or “returning” from the past to the present – depending on which perspective or point of view the film adopts at certain moments. In a key scene from Back to the Future, Marty meets his own self, taking off into the past, when he has just returned to the present from that self-same past. Usually, a crucial piece of information is imparted in these scenes of doubling, thus acting not only as a mise-en-abyme but also as a moment of selfempowerment through retroaction. In Inception, Cobb, in order to impress Ariadne, the young female architect, makes the city of Paris fold in on itself (a spectacularly memorable scene), while subsequently, Ariadne reflects two large mirrors into one another, disorienting our visual-perceptual register, as if to bring home the more narrative mirroring of film-genres that takes place in the various dream levels. Source Code would be an example of mirroring as repetition-with-slight-difference, as Colter returns to the train eight times – but each ‘return’ generates the train at a different point in time and space, thus effectively creating a new reality – and with it, alternate modes of analysis, detection, and action.26 Instead of an either-or forking-path situation (as in Sliding Doors, with its ‘what-if’ alternative trajectories and outcomes, or Adaptation, which explicitly features ‘twins’ played by the same actor), we have in Source Code a potentially endless series of possibilities, but nonetheless constrained by a principle of limited permutation of the self-same elements, attached to a more or less conventional deadline structure and the fiction of preempting and preventing something that has already taken place. The ending, then, opts explicitly and somewhat unexpectedly for positing not just alternate realities, but fully constituted ‘multiverses’ – mainly, it would seem, in order to generate a happy ending, thus ‘resolving’ some of the ambiguities and enigmas that its inspiration and predecessor, Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu left up in the air, or up to us the spectators, to figure out. A somewhat different but clearly related form of mise-en-abyme at the visual level is an Escher-like construction, where backward is forward, up is down, and inside is outside, also known as the Penrose stairs, and as such prominently featured in Inception. While such optical illusions are well known from Gestalt-psychology and similar to figure-ground reversals, the salient point about the Escher stairs syndrome, in relation to the mind-game film, would be the realization that especially ocular perception is always relative to the position of the observer.

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(6) The Observer Is Part of the Observed This brings me to the next – sixth – key feature of the mind-game film, namely the extent to which such films pose philosophical problems about the nature of perception in relation to knowledge (the epistemology question: how do we know what we know), as well as the existence of other minds (the subjectivity question: how do I know there is another, who is bodily different from me, and yet whose mind and motives are accessible to me by way of self-observation). These conundrums are taken into the mind-game film by way of the underlying premise of the mutually embedded narrative strands or causal chains, namely that there is or can be no unambiguous position outside, and that any observer is part of the observed. This is an insight shared by Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg as well as Niklas Luhmann, whose system theory was based on both ‘auto-poesis’ (self-creation, self-reference, feedback loops, mise-en-abyme) and on ‘second-order observation’ – a term introduced by Luhmann, who divides observation and the observer into ‘first order observation’ and ‘second order observation.’ The former observes things; the latter observes observation. For the second-order observer, interpretations derived by means of ‘re-entry’ (or repetition) are experienced as both paradoxical and contingent. Cybernetics also makes the same distinction: as Heinz von Foerster puts it: “In second order you reflect upon your reflections.”27 In mind-game films, reality, while presenting itself as ‘objective’ and ‘out there’ does in fact, as we saw, include the protagonist twice over, as observer and part of the observed, which provides another reason or rationale, why such protagonists tend to meet their doubles, as in the examples given above, of the protagonist encountering himself from another reality or temporality, in Twelve Monkeys, Back to the Future, and Looper. Or this is why a film like Lost Highway can credibly posit that the protagonist rings the doorbell outside and also hears it ringing inside. By making the observer position part of the observed, and thereby raising basic epistemological issues of ‘how do we know what we think we know,’ mind-game films either imply a form of Kantian constructivism (i.e., the world is ‘objectively’ unknowable, and all perceptual and sensory representations are mental constructs), or offer a critique of constructivism: there are some hard realities ‘out there’ which we ignore at our peril, i.e., which return to us as ‘unintended consequences,’ or as David Lynch puts it in one of the most enigmatically frustrating and fascinating mind-game films, Inland Empire: ‘actions do have consequences.’ Mind-game films are therefore, from an epistemological perspective, to a greater or lesser extent ‘constructivist,’ which in turn might lead to a paranoid constructivism, where everything connects, because someone is out to get you (as in several of the films inspired by Philip K. Dick stories), or to a hysterical constructivism, where you try to fuse with the world you cannot get a distance from (or assume an outside position), and you therefore abandon yourself to the forces you cannot master or control (Inception, Looper, Arrival). To everyone else, i.e., us ‘normal’ ones, applies another dictum of Heinz von Foerster: “objectivity is a subject’s delusion that observing can be done without him.”28

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(7) Complexity as ‘Living with Contradiction’ Continuing with the philosophical issues that the mind-game film raises, we can say that the mode proposes a logic of the both-and, rather than the either-or, thus flouting one of the basic premises of binary logic, that of the excluded middle (i.e., ‘tertium non datur’ – there is no third option). From the position of mind-game films, this Aristotelian binary logic of “either true or false” appears as an arbitrary (if necessary) reduction of the world’s complexity, incompleteness and therefore fundamental openness, introduced so that we as individual human beings can retain some kind of agency in the world and can believe in mastery over our fate and environment. As we saw in my initial example of Minority Report, both determinism and constructivism can lead to an inability to act: the former (determinism) because any individual human action is already predestined (premediated, anticipated) in advance, the latter (constructivism) because of the arbitrariness or better: indeterminacy of the phenomenal world, so that again, human initiative can be or will be overridden by external, ultimately contingent forces. While constructivism does not imply a solipsistic world view, it does put practical or procedural constraints on the human agent. In this situation, one way of mastering or overcoming the deadlocks of this binary world of the inside/outside observer is to operate systematic switches of perspective or of point of view, and to dissolve the either/or logic into a series of consecutive and cascading contradictions, none of which gets resolved, but merely interact with and follow each other: this cascade of contradictions is a recurring feature of Philip K. Dick’s method, and either attenuated or exaggerated in Dick’s filmic adaptations. In the realm of philosophy, one could say that Slavoj Žižek is the Philip K. Dick of sequencing flip-flops of perspective, in order to avoid either/or binaries and thereby to live productively with contradiction.29

(8) Imaginary Resolutions Do Not Dissolve Real Contradictions Such a course of action – exacerbating the entangled contradictions by leaving them unresolved – enables us to revisit point one, ontological instabilities. It acknowledges a Heideggerian groundlessness, possibly endorses the state of absolute undecidability (which we know to be the case from quantum physics, but must be careful not to transfer directly to the cinema), and explores the ‘what-if ‘condition that Hito Steyerl has called ‘vertical perspective.’30 It also implicitly challenges the terms of a realist world view, and the Aristotelian model of narrative construction that goes with it. Thus, while in practice, mind-game films can sometimes be read as merely adding a few baroque features to the classical narrative schema, or resorting to impossible but, thanks to genre-conventions, plausible devices such as time travel, a more productive reading is to accept that they actively court contradiction and display the resulting impossibility of the device, which becomes a kind of input/output black box.

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Alternatively – and this is what I argued in my original essay – any deadlock that the mind-game film generates, can also be understood as a pointer to some real contradictions – be it in the capitalist system, in society’s organization, in the human condition – for which we seem to have no solution, either imaginary or real.31 It is thus the very situation of a deadlock that the mind-game film strives to attain as it special kind of truth and authenticity: balancing on a knife-edge incompatible options, without deciding (or having to decide) in favor of either of them, while the spectator is put in a position, where (to quote myself from Chapter 3 in this volume) such films “oblige one to choose between seemingly equally valid, but ultimately incompatible realities.”

(9) Antagonistic Mutuality and Distributed Agency A strong rival to naming the phenomenon in question ‘mind-game film’ is the concept of ‘complexity narratives,’ which enjoys wide support and covers much the same corpus of films. Janet Staiger in her introduction to a special issue of Film Criticism (in 2006) on “Complex Narratives” takes her cue from David Bordwell’s The Way Hollywood Tells It, seeing product differentiation and the competition from television series as well as the manipulability of a film’s linear flow through DVDs’ random access as the reasons for what she calls the ‘torrent’ of complex narratives.32 Jan Simons, in an article in the New Review of Film and Television Studies sees complex narratives as the umbrella concept suitable for the whole range of terms, offering an analysis of the implicit presuppositions and underlying assumptions of each of the proposed labels, before inspecting the phenomenon from several theoretical perspectives: This paper brings together narratology, game theory, and complexity theory to untangle the intricate nature of complex narratives in contemporary cinema. It interrogates the different terms – forking‐path narratives, mind‐ game films, modular narratives multiple draft films, database narratives, puzzle films, subjective stories, and network narratives – used in current film theory to discuss complex narratives.33 Likewise, Maria Poulaki, in a Screen article from 2014 entitled “Network Films and Complex Causality,” herself refers to David Bordwell and Charles Ramirez Berg, arguing that in complex narratives, “causality, in the classical sense of a logical connection between the depicted events, appears loose. Using the film Burn After Reading (Joel and Ethan Coen 2008) as an exemplary case, and adopting a framework of analysis derived from complex systems theory and dynamic network analysis, I suggest that in network films causality is subordinated to the systemic organizing principle of emergence, and is a product of a dynamic loop that connects the anthropomorphic micro-level of characters with the macro-level of formal dynamics through the mid-level of agents’ complex interaction.”34

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The Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading is indeed an excellent test case for contrasting different approaches, and even a cursory reading can highlight the distinction that Poulaki makes between the micro-level in the characters’ distinct (self-) motivation, and their place and function in a larger macro-network of relations, i.e., what used to be called ‘the bigger picture.’ Except there no longer is a bigger picture, and these macro-relations are not hierarchically ordered, with power flowing top-down, but are rhizomatically distributed across all the protagonists, with micro- and macro-functions equally relevant, active, or interfering. The relations that characters have with each other may be marital, extramaritally sexual, professional, or a mixture of several kinds of familiarity and intimacy, but they can just as well be based on random encounters and the kinds of coincidence one finds in films like Short Cuts or Babel, which only make sense in retrospect. Yet while in the latter films coincidence is often given portentous significance with quasi-metaphysical overtones (revealing its role as ‘necessity’ or ‘fate’), what is most remarkable about Burn After Reading – unabashedly a comedy – is that stupidity (and vanity) turns out to be the most valuable and effective resources in creating a functioning dysfunctional network system. The second interesting feature from a network perspective about Burn After Reading is that the horizontality of the contingently connected nodes or encounters is what energizes the narrative and produces results that drive the action. Therefore, instead of ‘emergence’ or even ‘complexity’ I see a different dynamic at work, which is fueled by (micro-) antagonism more than by cooperation, but where the antagonisms, articulated at different levels and with different intensity, actually at another level complement each other, to form what I call a mutuality, with self-interest and ego-mania interlocking and amplifying each other, so that we have the effects of ‘positive feedback’: it makes the whole network hurtle into disaster – from which a single individual emerges victorious. A complementary way of approaching Burn After Reading is to think of it as a parody of a conspiracy thriller, which would be another way of highlighting features that connect it to the mind-game film, notably if we borrow from Fredric Jameson’s wide-ranging analysis of paranoia and conspiracy, which Jameson sees as a feature of late capitalism and, as a response to (as well as a symptom of) our growing inability to grasp totality, to reconcile our experience of a globalized world, in which everything seems connected, with our inability to understand that world via our traditional, now obsolete, notions of causality and agency – i.e., our failure at cognitive mapping. The simultaneously expanding and shrinking world we live in is no longer visualized in clear spatial terms (e.g., above and below) or in terms of the invisible/visible (e.g., exposing the secret conspiracy). The visual and narrative visibility of the conspiracy in recent films, which points to a denial or displacement of agency, has given rise to a new type of conspiracy, ‘conspiracy without conspiracy.’

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This type of ubiquity of horizontal conspiracy would then require paranoia as the proper response, bringing us back to the argument that the mind-game film generates forms of agency best filled by a character with a productive pathology, which in the case of Burn After Reading would be Linda Litzke’s preternaturally naïve stupidity – the opposite of paranoia – as the most effective action-reaction, making her the winner, in a world where paranoia is otherwise the very epitome of distributed agency.

(10) Agency – with the Self, against the Self This brings me to my tenth key feature, which repeats and reaffirms (i.e., loops back to) my starting point, the question of agency. Agency, we can now see as both inhibited and deferred, and as enabled and empowered in the mind-game film. But we are hopefully closer to understanding why it has this dual character, and why I refer to agency in the mind-game film as typically staged through characters with ‘productive pathologies,’ introduced earlier to explain why psychologically aberrant conditions (schizophrenia, paranoia, bipolar disorders, amnesia, autism) in mind-game films often have an enabling and empowering function, precisely because they can sustain contradiction. Mind-game films often highlight problematic agency also by suspending character consistency: whether by making the main protagonist a split personality, by giving him or her a double, or rendering him/her altogether post-mortem. Examples of ambiguous or outright self-contradictory motivation range from Memento to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, while breaches in character consistency include Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire, as well as A Scanner Darkly and Fight Club: all films that feature overt or covert doubles, while The Sixth Sense and The Others have post-mortem protagonists. This raises important general issues as well. As already mentioned with reference to the contemporary superhero, surprisingly racked with guilt and trauma: when problematizing agency, the mind-game film questions not only the ‘can-do’ posture of the action hero of classical Hollywood, but also the very notion of a ‘fully self-present,’ the autonomous individual, and thus re-appraises major tenets of Western philosophy as well as contemporary identity politics. An entire critique of identity, subjectivity and intersubjectivity can be developed around films that develop more ‘distributed’ forms of agency, e.g., network films like Short Cuts or Magnolia, and more problematic ones like Babel, Time Code, or Crash, while Being John Malkovich and Donnie Darko allow for a more complicated version of self-presence as schizo-presence.

(11) The Time Travel Film as Black Box Particularly striking examples, in respect to problematic agency, are time travel films, highlighted by their well-known paradoxes – the grandfather paradox and the causal loop paradox. In the present context they can be considered meta-narratives about

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filmic narrative: they re-examine the rules of narrative as they have migrated from the novel to cinema. For instance, time travel narratives often assume a kind of rewind or fast-forward mode, as if it required cinema’s malleable and multiple temporalities, and thus both movement and montage, in order to make time travel even thinkable. However, this is where a paradox emerges, insofar as time travel films are also symptomatic of the tendency of the late 19th and 20th century to ‘spatialize’ time, which would seem to be the opposite of movement. Yet the more we spatialize time, the more time becomes variable in speed and reversible in direction, creating a deadlock around two conceptions of time, one non-linear whose vectors extend in all directions, the other relentlessly reminding us that in our own lives’ time arrow is irreversible. It therefore seems as if time travel was invented, in order to deal with this deadlock or paradox, often by switching back and forth (spatial time), while nonetheless adhering to an underlying chronology (linear time). Considered as the imaginary solution to a real contradiction (omnidirectional vs. unidirectional time: the time of the cosmos vs. human time), time travel films exist so as to provide an easily understood narrative pretext for the exploration of one of the existential paradoxes that have emerged from (cinema and digital) technologies, which now give us (the illusion of) access to past, present, and future simultaneously and instantaneously. Thus, it is not the case that the famous paradoxes of time travel mentioned above are merely the inconvenient side effects of time travel, but rather: the real contradictions of time and finitude come first, and time travel is merely the fictional way of dealing with it, without pretending to resolve it. Following this train of thought, it is interesting to speculate how we square our knowledge that time travel is impossible with our ready acceptance of it in time travel films. One answer is that it fulfills a need, even more than it responds to an actual desire (to go back to the past or to visit the future). But what is the need? On the one hand, in movies time travel is a shortcut, and filmmakers do not necessarily have to explain its precise functioning (though some try, most assiduously Interstellar): it is a kind of black box, or even more bluntly, it is voodoo science supported by voodoo technology. On the other hand, the skepticism threshold is so low, because it is felt to be a fiction necessary to fulfill a task, making its practical impossibility a virtue, in that it reminds us of a vital truth for which no imaginary resolution is credible: however much our media technologies suggest otherwise, for us humans, time’s arrow is irreversible, and in this sense, time travel is a successful device, by keeping in place an existential contradiction. Another reason why time travel can be counted a successful device is that one of the needs it addresses is the lack of agency, the sense of being unable to influence events, which more and more feels like our daily fate. Time travel films, with which mind-game films share many characteristics, address above all the problem of ambiguous agency: too much and too little, energized and empowered on the one hand, impeded and frustrated on the other. It is an ambiguity which in time travel films is ‘resolved’ by what I have earlier described as the ‘loop of agency,’ i.e., a mutually delegated and transferred form of action

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or enablement that overcomes one of the logical paradoxes of time travel: the injunction that the traveler cannot change what has already happened. There is also a third reason why time travel is valued precisely for its impossibility, namely when the action revolves around attempting to prevent a catastrophe that has already occurred. Time travel highlights two aspects of such an action that gives it a certain moral gravity: when dealing with unfinished business in the past that haunts the present, and when there is a sense of regret over missed opportunities, or of roads not taken. Sustaining time travel, therefore, is the tense of the ‘if-only’ more than the ‘what-if’: of something that has to be redressed, redeemed, made amends for: thus, in films like Source Code or Déjà Vu, and even in the Terminator franchise, the ‘if-only’ is expressed in a manner that makes it seem as if time travel is ‘preventing’ something from taking place that has already happened, which by definition it cannot. It is the tragic version, in circumstances where Back to the Future is the comic one: making something happen that obstinately refuses to take place. Thus, whenever time travel entails the protagonist going back in time, the disparity between human knowledge and human agency is highlighted. Arrived in the past which is everyone else’s present, his or her superior knowledge of what has already taken place in the time traveler’s present empowers him/her and imparts a special agency. However, the various time travel paradoxes already mentioned severely constrain this self-same ability to act on this knowledge in ways that could change the future, which in fact no longer is one. All a time traveler can do is to insert him/herself into the predetermined course of events, exerting a peculiarly fatalistic but possibly also highly ethical form of agency, as it were, by actively helping to bring about that which has already come to pass: this is the case in Back to the Future, but it is also true of Arrival, where it is treated in a somber and ethically more demanding key. Retroaction (deferred action, Nachträglichkeit, après coup) can have several meanings, and it features prominently in the writings of Freud as well as Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. In one sense, it may simply state the obvious, that “memory is reprinted in accordance with later experience.”35 For Freud, an incident in the past, ordinary by itself, can become traumatic in retrospect (nachträglich). Slavoj Žižek glosses it as “once it is here, it was always already here” using a formulation made famous by Derrida.36 Jean Laplanche’s definition stays closer to Freud: “[après coup] is something that goes in the direction from the past to the future, [but] which I call the implantation of the enigmatic message. This message is then retranslated following a temporal direction which is sometimes progressive and sometimes retrogressive.”37 The ‘ethical’ dimension that I am hinting at in retroactivity, comes from the underside of trauma, as it were, namely the desire to undo something that has already happened but whose consequences can be anything between undesirable and catastrophic. This is also why James Gleick, in his book on time travel, can claim that “regret is the time traveler’s energy bar.”38

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Looked at from this perspective, time travel is both a gift and a curse, evoking Derrida’s commentary on Plato’s pharmakon (about which more below): in Arrival, the Heptapods’ all-important message is explicitly poised between a gift and a weapon, and in Twelve Monkeys, to know the future might seem like a blessing, but turns out to be deadly because being in the future makes Cole mistake the effect for the cause. In other words, time travel intervenes, when there is a choice of evils, when there are no good options, when you are up against either irretrievable loss, which you would like to have undone, or you find yourself not in an either-or world that you can act upon, but in a both-and world, which paralyzes you: time travel is what sequentializes and spatializes these unenviable choices. Another of these bad options has to do with how to maintain a workable notion of causality, in the face of an ever-greater awareness of risk and contingency as the fundamental forces of life. Making contingency our new ontological ground, as suggested by speculative realism, may be a cure more painful than the disease. This additional dimension of risk and unpredictability can also be captured under the heading of ‘trauma.’ As already mentioned, many contemporary blockbuster and mainstream movies have evidently traumatized characters as their main protagonists, as in Batman – The Dark Knight Rises, The Bourne Legacy, Déjà Vu, Shutter Island, Birdman, Source Code (IMDb lists under ‘trauma’ more than 130 titles for the years 1990–2017). The trigger trauma can have very different origins and external causal factors: childhood trauma of abandonment (Batman), witnessing violent death of parents (Batman), a severe war wound (Source Code), a traumatic killing (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk), the suicide of a wife (Inception) the loss of a child (Arrival), to name a few. Not all of these are mind-game films, of course, but if one considers mind-game films not only as meta-cinema but also as symptomatic of wider social, technological and ‘ontological’ changes, which contemporary cinema responds to (or intervenes in), then the frequency of explicit trauma narratives – in both mind-game films and blockbusters – takes on a special significance, to the point where one might ask: what is the contradiction or dilemma of which a trauma narrative offers itself as the solution? The answer might be the capacity for autonomous action and personal responsibility demanded by the dominant ideology, when up against the forces of distributed and yet incomprehensibly or antagonistically interlocking agency that make such autonomous action impossible. Conversely, the fiction of an intelligent software system (as in Spike Jonze’s Her) or of an alien sent to earth (Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin) can also serve as manifest impossibilities, introduced to draw attention to irresolvable contradictions: in these two cases, they are inherent in subjectivities that depend on an ‘other’ to overcome the very split between self and world that had made subjectivity necessary as a philosophical concept in the first place. While in Her, the uncanny effect is produced by the Operating System’s empathetic intimacy, in Under the Skin it is the uncanny lack of empathy (the drowning child observed impassively) that challenges what we understand by subjectivity.

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The two films in question qualify as mind-game films to the extent that they explicitly make the ‘other’ into an artifice, in order to reveal both intersubjectivity and empathy to be prosthetic constructs that fail to heal the wound that separates self from world. The implication I draw is that (the mechanics and physics of) ‘time travel,’ (the psychology and pathology of) ‘trauma’ and (the self-other construction of) ‘subjectivity’ in contemporary cinema are best understood as ‘devices’ (or ‘black boxes’ as I just called them) which allow the narrative to pose ‘real contradictions’ in ways that may provide – as Claude Lévi-Strauss claimed of myths – “a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)”39 but they do so by ‘exposing the device,’ i.e., making its nature as a construct visible and its function as a device foregrounded, not least to indicate that there are no logical models to overcome real contradictions other than formal, selfreferential, rhetoric, aesthetic, or ludic ones. What would need to be explored further is whether my use of contradiction as a shorthand that includes paradoxes, dilemmas, and antagonisms does not conflate logically distinct relations (it does), which is why narratologists prefer to refer themselves to Greimas’s semiotic square, where all possible relations can be mapped across three axes: contrary, contradictory, and complementary.40

(12) The Mind-Game Film as Pharmakon The main point to stress, however, is that whereas classical Hollywood sees the world as a set of problems, to which one applies solutions, the mind-game film is more likely to see the world as full of dilemmas, which one can explore and probe, but to which one cannot apply or even invent solutions, except by misunderstanding the nature of the problem or dilemma. The more appropriate response is to start ’living with contradiction,’ that is, by embracing them as generative and productive. Elsewhere I suggested that the dilemma/problem opposition was typical of the difference between Europe and America more generally,41 but one could also argue that mind-game films felicitously blur this distinction: they appear to invite a problem-solving mindset, but are actually about dilemmas that have no obvious solution, thus inducing the sort of onto-epistemological vertigo that one associates with the mind-game film. Mind-game films, by their very skepticism about reality, their paranoia about the powers that dominate and determine our daily lives, and their doubts about individual agency and identity, act as credible instances and veritable embodiments of the so-called control society, at the same time as they are also this society’s most vivid critique. This is because they are on the cusp of several – epistemic, historical, and technological – transformations. I began by arguing that mindgame films respond to pressures from within the film industry and from the global media culture, adjusting to the competition from several other media, not only from games in the specific sense of a rival medium but also from complex

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narratives in television and transmedia storytelling. Mind-game films engage with these transformations in the media-scape by way of producing prototypes that both enact and test the kinds of mutations, which accompany our increasing dependence on automated interfaces. And while these interfaces complexify and distribute, accelerate and inhibit agency, they also announce and retard transitions to the post-human. The paradoxes remain, which is why the explicit-implicitcomplicit position of mind-game films is necessary and a strategic advantage. As pedagogical exercises and learning processes – training new survival skills that deploy the body’s somatic responses and the mind’s ‘aberrant’ pathologies – mind-game films are by this very fact also disciplinary machines in Foucault’s sense, reformatting the body in view of tasks and affordances the control society requires from its dysfunctional functioning members. And while I have suggested that the types of distributed agency we see enacted in these films are a resource of liberation from failed individualism and can be a form of empowerment under conditions of antagonistic mutuality, it is equally plausible to argue that this same distributed agency is already the preferred instrument of dominance in the control society, which uses powerlessness and paranoia, resentment and fear as potent political instruments: relying on horizontal viral proliferation rather than requiring vertical discipline or coercion. The Janus-faced character of mind-game films thus underscores that they are ambiguous agents, possibly the double agents of some of the larger transformational processes of the contemporary world, which they instantiate and intervene in, and in each case, they do so from the inside, rather than assume an ultimately untenable position from outside. These processes, thanks to factors both human and technological, both specific and abstract, are modifying above all our sense of temporality: we experience time as instantaneous and simultaneous (too empty/too full) rather than as chronological or durational (chronos), and as traumatic and catastrophic (shock), rather than as messianic or teleological (kairos). Hence also the emergence of expanded models of causation, sequence, series and consequence, making contingency and indeterminacy our new causality. Also in the process of transforming, thanks to media technologies, are our modes of motor-coordination: between body and brain, hand and eye, vision and touch. Taken together as interlocking factors, the key features here identified for the mind-game film aggregate and focus these changes and transformations under the category of ‘agency,’ as one of the ways films mobilize the three constitutive properties of cinema – movement, montage, and intuitive understanding – in order to affect and effect, to educate and engage spectators at the level of their subjectivities as well as their senses and bodies, and thus renew – however tentatively and temporarily – the broken bond with the world. There is, however, another way to argue for mind-game films as situated at the cusp of epistemological and historical transitions. In Jacques Derrida’s reading of Plato’s Phaedrus he singles out the word pharmakon – which in Greek has multiple meanings, among which Derrida seizes on the apparently incompatible connotations of remedy and poison, deducing from them a more general semantic instability, and

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making it a concept of foundational philosophical indeterminacy, not dissimilar to the homely horror Sigmund Freud identified in the words heimlich/unheimlich i.e., the uncanny, or – to cite examples from the hard sciences – the ‘both particle and wave’ properties of light, or the uncertainty principle of quantum physics. In the Phaedrus, the pharmakon appears in the context of a ‘poisoned gift’ (itself a contracted contradiction across the English and German word ‘gift’): that of writing, to replace or outsource memory. Socrates’ prescription against writing as the pharmakon (remedy) for forgetfulness is in fact the pharmakon (medicine) for the pharmakon (unwanted gift): the “the living word of knowledge, graven in the soul.” For Derrida, the pharmakon is welcome proof of the ambivalence inherent in writing as both an emulation and a negation of speech, but at another level, the pharmakon is the very figure of similarity and difference, active and passive, affirmation and critique as not binary oppositions, but relationalities, which makes the pharmakon the movement, the site, and the play for the production of difference.42 If one adds René Girard’s elaboration that aligns the pharmakon with the pharmakos (scapegoat), and thus with the expulsion of something or someone too similar to the expelling agency to be tolerated (i.e., meaning that difference is “dissolved in [the] violent reciprocity” of ritual and sacrifice),43 then the object, concept or person in question does indeed contain and retain all the energies of unresolved oppositions in one contracted contradiction.44 I see the mind-game film as just such a contracted contradiction, situating itself as pharmakon – gift, poison, and outcast – in a world of rupture and transition, both conceptually (healing the rift between subject and world with the very means of disorientation, rupture and re-assembly) and historically (locating itself in the différance/deferral between cinema and computer games). The mind-game film can thus be read as an endorsement for cinema after video games while deploying the tools and resources of both. In another sense, mind-game films, as a Hollywood phenomenon, indicate an awareness – even on the part of popular culture – that moving images are not representations, but operate on a groundless ground which require the kind of ‘loop of agency’ discussed earlier, whose suspended reciprocity and retroactive anticipation is structurally related to Hegel’s (or Fichte’s) philosophical bootstrapping, the Setzen des Gesetzten, i.e., the supposing of a presupposition whose performative positing in and by itself makes it real, i.e., functioning. As a meta-cinema of prototypes, simultaneously unfinished and in progress, always already suffused with affective, projective, and otherwise doubled and mirrored states of body and mind, mind-game films therefore present a mode of experience and a world in action where networked connectivity tries to check the positive feedback loops in a last attempt to determine the determinants and observe the observer. This was John Anderton’s dilemma in Minority Report and it may only be resolved when the world as we know it and the laws that we think govern it, are once more turned inside out and upside down. It could make the mind-game film redundant, or at least release it from its current function as the placeholder for our next ‘Copernican Revolution.’

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[Previously published as “Contingency, Causality, Complexity: Distributed Agency in the Mind-Game Film,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 16, no. 1 (2018), 1–39.]

Notes 1 Algirdas Julien Greimas, “Actants, Actors, and Figures,” On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, translated by Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 106–120. 2 Thomas Elsaesser, “Classical and Post-classical Narrative: Die Hard,” in Elsaesser and Warren Buckland, Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 26–60. 3 For an extensive oedipal reading of North by Northwest, see Raymond Bellour, “The Symbolic Blockage,” in Constance Penley, ed., The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 77–192. 4 Charles Ramirez Berg, “A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying the ‘Tarantino Effect’,” Film Criticism 31, nos. 1–2 (2006), 5–61; David Bordwell, “Film Futures,” SubStance 31, no. 1 (2002), 88–104; Edward Branigan, “Nearly True: Forking Plots, Forking Interpretations: A Response to David Bordwell’s ‘Film Futures’,” SubStance 31, no. 1 (2002), 105–114; Warren Buckland, ed., Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Warren Buckland, ed., Hollywood Puzzle Films (New York: Routledge, 2014); Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Matthew Campora, “Art Cinema and New Hollywood: Multiform Narrative and Sonic Metalepsis in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 2 (2009), 119–131; Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, eds., Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013); Steffen Hven, Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017); Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen, Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Jan Simons, “Complex Narratives,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 6, no. 2 (2008), 111–126; Eliot Panek, “The Poet and the Detective: Defining the Psychological Puzzle Film,” Film Criticism 31, nos. 1–2 (2006), 62–88; Phillip Schmerheim, Skepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); George Wilson, “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (2006), 81–95. 5 Warren Buckland, “Inception’s Videogame Logic,” in Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy, eds., The Cinema of Christopher Nolan (London: Wallflower Press, 2015), 189–200. 6 This prototype cinema could be seen as the in-house version of the earlier model of Hollywood talent-scouting at Sundance, and a different version of the old indie habit of ‘one for the industry and one for me’ practiced by Steven Soderbergh, Richard Linklater, Darren Aronofsky and others. 7 A different attempt to break the stalemate ‘puzzle versus dilemma’ is the idea of the ‘impossible puzzle film’: impossible puzzle films are ‘narratively contradictory and logically incongruent’ and offer ‘no explicit resolution for this incongruence’ (Kiss and Willemsen, Impossible Puzzle Films, 62). But this approach still remains within the terms of narrative/ narration and utilizes a cognitivist frame of reference as explanatory tool. 8 Warren Buckland, “Visual Rhetoric in Michel Gondry’s Music Videos: Antithesis and Similarity in Deadweight,” Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 5, no. 1 (2015), 50; 51. 9 See Chapter 3 in this volume for further discussion.

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10 Edward Branigan, “Butterfly Effects upon a Spectator,” in Warren Buckland, ed., Hollywood Puzzle Films (New York: Routledge, 2014), 236. 11 Martin Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 143–212. 12 For a full discussion of the idea of ‘film as thought experiment,’ see Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 13 Elsaesser, “Classical and Post-classical Narrative: Die Hard.” 14 The film about the brilliant mathematician John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, is an interesting example, insofar as the first half approximates a mind-game film, by virtue of the protagonist’s productive pathology, while the second half dismantles his mental state into a case study with political conspiracy theory overtones. 15 It could also be argued that viewer behavior (for instance, obsessive-compulsive ‘binge’ watching) is translated back into the story world, in the shape of impaired bodies and other forms of limited agency, allowing the viewer to compensate by acquiring power in the register of the imaginary or the virtual, as is the case in Donnie Darko, but also applies to the paraplegic war veteran of Avatar and the near-corpse war veteran in Source Code. 16 Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Nick Browne, ed., Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 42–88. 17 Elsaesser, “Postscript to Trauma Theory: A Parapractic Supplement,” German Cinema: Terror and Trauma (New York: Routledge, 2014), 306–323. 18 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 19 Evidence and presence are key terms in contemporary aesthetic debates. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Kiarostami Abbas: The Evidence of Film (Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 2001); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). In a similar way, I have argued for a rereading of Kracauer’s Theory of Film that proposed an ontology compatible with contemporary film philosophy. See Elsaesser, “Siegfried Kracauer’s Affinities,” NECSUS (Spring 2014). www.necsus-ejms.org/siegfried-kracauers-affinities/ 20 These directors use the different media technologies of 16 and 35mm celluloid, camcorder home movies, grainy photographs, video footage, or digitally shot material as auto-referential signifiers of different layers of reality, by which to interface, combine, and contrast past and present, memory and history, private and public images, as so many distinct ‘frames of reference’ generated by the cinema through its own history. 21 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 307–41. 22 Mind-game films like Donnie Darko also use cinematic frames of reference and filmic allusions, but like art-house films and installation work, they construct archaeology of media technologies in order to comment on the increasing mediatization that our own autobiography, sense of selfhood, and public history has undergone. The materialities of this accented cinema, in its tactile, haptic registers, deserve – and increasingly receive – separate study, in relation to questions of subjectivity, epistemology, and the embodied mind. 23 The element of critique would be that mind-game films respond to what Rosalind Krauss with respect to contemporary art calls our post-medium condition. They acknowledge that in our perceptual-sensory environment just about everything we see, feel, and experience is mediated by technology that presents itself as ‘transparent’ and ‘intuitive.’ Yet mind-game films remind us that this intuitive transparency is an effect, over whose causes and mechanisms we have little or no control. Mind-game films are thus critical wherever they appear as film-philosophical elaborations of the double binds that social media put us in: promising us subject-to-subject interactions, while effectively delivering object-to-object relations, from which the corporations owning or operating social media platforms are able to extract usable data.

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24 “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ The aide told me [Suskind], ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.’” The unnamed aide was later identified as Karl Rove. Ron Suskind, “Faith, certainty and the presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times, October 7, 2004. https://www. nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-wbush.html 25 “For the soldiers embarked in the conflict, the events took place in different temporalities. On land, some stayed one week, stuck on the beach. On the water, the events lasted a maximum day; and if you were flying to Dunkirk, the British spitfires would carry an hour of fuel. To mingle these different versions of history, one had to mix the temporal strata.” Christopher Nolan, quoted in Jacob Stolworthy, “Dunkirk: Christopher Nolan reveals war film is Told through three perspectives, has ‘little dialogue,’” The Independent, March 1, 2017. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/ news/dunkirk-christopher-nolanworld-war-2-film-harry-styles-release-date-trailer-a 7605241.html 26 Brad Brevet, “Spoiler Talk: Is the Ending of Source Code Open to Interpretation?” (2001). www.ropeofsilicon.com/spoiler-talk-is-the-ending-of-source-codeopen-to-in terpretation/ 27 Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding (New York: Springer Verlag, 2003); James Gleick, Time Travel: A History (New York: Pantheon, 2016). 28 Foerster quoted in Siegfried J. Schmidt, ed., Der Diskurs des Radikalen Konstruktivismus [The Discourse of Radical Constructivism] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), 12. 29 Žižek’s most persistent rhetorical move is to posit a state of affairs, demonstrate its reasonableness, and then proceed to show that ‘far from it,’ in actual fact, ‘it is precisely the opposite’ that is the case. This strategy owes less to Hegel than it does to Feuerbach’s inversion method, turned by Žižek into a mise-en-abyme of deadlocks. 30 “Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground … If there is nothing to fall towards, you may not even be aware that you’re falling … Whole societies around you may be falling just as you are. And it may actually feel like perfect stasis.” Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” e-flux no. 24 (April 2011). www.e-flux. com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thoughtexperiment-on-vertical-perspective/ 31 Slavoj Žižek calls this the cynicism of our age: either we affirm ideology, or we cynically comment on it: either way, we maintain it. Similarly, Anthony Wilden has argued that “Positive or negative identification with or against the Other as the oppressor (or whatever) is politically and psychologically dangerous, for it entails an implicit ‘self-definition’ in relation to the code of values defined by that Other.” The solution is to transcend this negative identification with the Other: “In short, all dissent must be of a higher logical type than that with which it is in conflict.” Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, second edition (London: Tavistock, 1980), lvii (emphasis in the original). 32 Janet Staiger, “Complex Narratives: An Introduction,” Film Criticism 31, nos. 1–22 (2006), 2–4. 33 Simons, “Complex Narratives.” 34 Maria Poulaki, “Network Films and Complex Causality,” Screen 55 no. 3 (2014), 379–395; from the abstract. 35 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London: Faber, 1994), 33. 36 Slavoj Žižek, ed., Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), second edition (London: Verso, 2010), xii. 37 Jean Laplanche, Seduction, Translation, Drives (London: Psychoanalytic Forum, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992), 222. 38 Gleick, Time Travel, 207.

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39 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” Structural Anthropology, translated by C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 229. 40 A. J. Greimas and Francis Rastier, “The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints,” Yale French Studies no. 41 (1968), 86–105. 41 Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011). 42 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 1981), 103–110. 43 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 296. 44 The Wikipedia entry on pharmakon further extends the range of possible meanings and applications: “pharmakon has been theorized in connection with a broader philosophy of technology, biotechnology, immunology, enhancement, and addiction … Gregory Bateson points out that an important part of the Alcoholics Anonymous philosophy is to understand that alcohol plays a curative role for the alcoholic who has not yet begun to dry out … A more benign example is Donald Winnicott’s concept of a ‘transitional object’ (such as a teddy bear) that links and attaches child and mother. Even so, the mother must eventually teach the child to detach from this object, lest the child become overly dependent upon it … Bernard Stiegler claims that the pharmakon as transitional object is ‘the origin of works of art and, more generally, of the life of the mind’.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_(philosophy)

12 THE HISTORY OF THE PRESENT AS PARANOID MIND-GAME

There are a number of terms that keep coming up in our discussion of mind-game films which we use descriptively and to that extent, quite neutrally, such as nonlinearity (when we talk about narratives), destabilizing (when we talk about genres), alternative timelines, structured ambiguity (when discussing classical Hollywood), and undecidability or indeterminacy (when identifying how with mind-game films ‘the imaginary resolutions’ no longer resolve ‘real contradictions,’ but instead mark them either as imaginary or keep them suspended in undecidability). As we use these terms neutrally and descriptively, we actually give them implicitly a positive meaning, because we see them – and the mind-game films they describe – against the foil of classical Hollywood, which is still regarded as the epitome of convention and conservatism, where ‘classical’ is the opposite of both ‘modern’ or contemporary, and of avant-garde and experimental. So: what mind-game films do is to shake up, stir up, and bring new life into staid classical Hollywood, disrupting the routine of the 100-year-old dream factory. But think of the word ‘disrupt’: it is a term – along with some of the other word I’ve cited – that used to belong to the discourse of the counter-culture, of high French theory and the version of deconstruction we associate with Jacques Derrida, and the change of episteme that Michel Foucault became known for. Yet nowadays ‘disruption’ or ‘disruptive industry’ is the favorite term of neoliberal start-ups and entrepreneurs, whose goal in life is to develop or invent a disruptive industry, like Uber or Amazon – which kills jobs and devastates the regional retail business, goes IPO (Initial Public Offering), i.e., becomes a company traded on the stock exchange, making its inventors billionaires overnight. Disruptive, you might say, has not so much changed its meaning as it has been appropriated by another group of people altogether – but maybe it has also revealed a truth about its original use that had been hidden or overlooked. Maybe the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s were actually

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preparing the ground for the neoliberal tech-geeks, Harvard drop-outs, and Silicon Valley start-ups of the 1990s and beyond? And what was once regarded as the linguistic transgression connoting liberation is now the linguistic violence of oppression and coercion. This at least is one line of thought that we find in Adam Curtis’s film HyperNormalisation (2016), where he discusses the strange story of the Internet visionaries and pioneers, the dreamers and LSD users promoting altered states of consciousness alongside alternative life-styles and promoting the web as finally bringing the freedom of shared information to everyone; the story or ELIZA and the birth of the mirror/info-bubble algorithms that drive us further and further into isolation and into the far end of the spectrum: fear, anger, resentment. What is the lesson for us from this history, when using these words to describe the mind-game film? What does it tell us, if anything, about the political dimension of the mind-game film? How does it connect to the world of a) the Internet, and b) politics, and c) the economy? Is the mind-game film merely an extension of neoliberal capitalism, or is it its critique? Or is it symptomatic in some other, yet to be specified way?

Disrupting Renaissance Perspective: In Free Fall One of the ways we have been looking at the disruptive effect and disorienting function of the mind-game film as a specific mode of visual representation was to argue that it disrupts Renaissance monocular perspective, and it does so by involving us in situations or environments where there does not seem to be a stable horizon that orients and regulates not only the depth perception and spatial dimensions of the world but also the position of the viewer (namely no longer at the center of the pictorial space). This means we no longer have a firm sight-line and we also find it difficult to evaluate size, scale, distance, proximity, and maybe not even up and down, inside and out (think of certain scenes in Inception, or the opening shots of Fight Club, taken from supposedly inside the brain). Once we are no longer in a pictorial space regulated by the rules of perspective, we also no longer can consider the cinema as a ‘window on the world.’ It either surrounds us, as if inside a sphere or globe, or – as in the example with ELIZA, the computer-playing therapist – it becomes a mirror into which we project ourselves, but do not realize that it is ourselves: that’s how identification works in the cinema: it’s effectively a mirror, except it doesn’t literally reflect our image but instead gives us our image but in the body of another/ of the other: more beautiful, stronger, more likeable, more successful, more desirable than our own. We can indulge our narcissism and voyeurism, without being ‘outed’ or having to be accountable. However, now that the cinema is wholly embedded inside digital culture and digital media, even this mirror function has become more complicated: we think we look into the world, but in fact we only see ourselves, yet while we see ourselves, someone/something is seeing us

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discovering the world/seeing ourselves: what I called – not entirely accurately perhaps – the two-way mirror configuration of contemporary cinema: whenever we watch we always already being watched in turn. What does it mean more generally? At one level, we are being spied on or we are being deceived. But we don’t know that, or if we know it, we forget it, because the convenience of having the world (the world as us) at the fingertips of our keyboard or at the click of the mouse is too tempting, too irresistible.1 On the other hand, you could also say the disorientation is a liberation from the narrow geometry of the visual cone or even prison that is perspective, in so many ways a total construction, with all kind of biases and privileges built into it, and certainly not universal, because there are highly developed and sophisticated visual cultures that never adopted the Renaissance – i.e., the Western-perspectival point of view. Considered as a liberation, disrupting the rigid geometry of monocular vision can induce a nice feeling to be floating, to be suspended, and no doubt, some of the pleasure of the mind-game film comes from this sense of light disorientation, the levity of having the realist rug pulled from under you – the sort of disorientation you experience when the punchline of a joke shows how you’ve been mistaken about where this story was going, or the feeling of being freed from gravity on a roller coaster. So a moment of vertigo, but also of weightlessness can be one of the trick or twist effects of mind-game films. This is being ‘in free fall,’ and, in that respect, I quoted in the previous chapter Hito Steyerl, and her “Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” where she says: Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground. Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness. We cannot assume any stable ground on which to base metaphysical claims or foundational political myths. At best, we are faced with temporary, contingent, and partial attempts at grounding … Paradoxically, while you are falling, you will probably feel as if you are floating – or not even moving at all. Falling is relational – if there is nothing to fall toward, you may not even be aware that you’re falling. If there is no ground, gravity might be low and you’ll feel weightless. Objects will stay suspended if you let go of them. Whole societies around you may be falling just as you are. And it may actually feel like perfect stasis – as if history and time have ended and you can’t even remember that time ever moved forward … New types of visuality arise. This disorientation is partly due to the loss of a stable horizon. And with the loss of horizon also comes the departure of a stable paradigm of orientation, which has situated concepts of subject and object, of time and space, throughout modernity. In falling, the lines of the horizon shatter, twirl around, and superimpose.

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This would be our philosophical take on disorientation and disruption, of which the discussion of post-Renaissance perspective was the aesthetic or art-historical one. Since Nietzsche and Heidegger, but also Darwin and Freud there is no firm grounding to our identity as humans or indeed as beings grounded in reason. At the same time, living in the 21st century, and living in the West, it is both a little bit scary and yet not at all unfamiliar, this idea that we might all be falling without realizing it, because somehow we know that we are. But what about if we translate what initially in our mind-game example was an aesthetic of free-floating, and for which Steyerl has added a philosophical dimension – what if we add to this an economic dimension and the economy’s political correlative?

“America Defies Gravity, because it is Gravity” During the economic crisis of 2008, the then top economic adviser to Barack Obama, Timothy Geitner said in an interview that the United States over the previous 20 years had ‘defied gravity’ in its economics, but that it was now facing the real-world economy and making a crash landing. America defied gravity, mainly because of the dollar being the world’s reserve currency, and because America was the world’s biggest and strongest economy both in terms of international trade – importing goods from China – and in exporting software, knowhow and soft power (fast food, soft drinks, movies, and music). However, as a British economist pointed out, Geitner’s analogy was slightly flawed because precisely thanks to the dollar being the world’s reserve currency and the Federal Reserve Bank being able to print as much money as the US Government wanted/needed, without devaluating the currency, effectively in economic terms America was gravity.2 In other words, “America defied gravity, because it was gravity”: it defined and embodied the gravitational center of the (Western) world. But now with the crash rippling through the world’s economies – and devastating the economies especially in Europe – we had proof that the world economy was not grounded in anything real or solid, but functioned mainly because of dubious financial instruments, such as selling short (i.e., betting that a stock would fall or crash), credit default swaps, or collateral debt obligations, i.e., bundling bad US housing loans and selling them to Indonesian or Italian investors. Once the real economy was in the hands of hedge funds and stock market speculators, we found ourselves in a completely topsy-turvy world, where indeed the laws of physics (‘gravity’), the rules of rationality and reason, the principles of good governance, the ideals of the common good or the ethics of ordinary human decency just did not apply. Algorithms, rumors, high-speed trading, planted stories, hunches, big data, bonuses, buybacks, etc., etc., had created a system that nobody controlled and very, very few even understood: an irrational, sociopathic monster of global proportions, because completely interlinked and interdependence, but also more or less completely uncoupled from the

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lives of ordinary people. Hugely volatile but also highly dynamic, the world economy became more like a Grand Las Vegas casino with a very few players taking obscenely large profits, simply by moving fictitious money around the globe at the lightning speed of electronic communication. Films like The Big Short, or The Wolf of Wall Street partly try to emulate both the exuberance and the recklessness, the counterintuitive logics of the present systems of financial speculation, emphasizing greed, fraud and excesses of sex, drugs, and alcohol, but they still try to contain it within genre formulas and character-centered causality and agency. These are not mind-game films, even though the protagonists play mind-games – con-games – with small-time investors, house-owners, and people depending on their savings. Instead of showing the systemic side to these abuses – the role played by abstract forces (mathematics, algorithms, and big-data analysis), the ‘black box’ devices are the crazy conmen, such as Jordan Belfort played by Leonardo di Caprio in The Wolf of Wall Street or the brilliant, eccentric Michael Burry, played by Christian Bale in The Big Short (‘productive pathologies’). One euphemism that was used for this state of affairs was ‘constructive instability’: a term initially introduced by military aircraft engineers when they started to design fighter planes that were aerodynamically constructed in such a way that they couldn’t actually be flown by a pilot – unless a whole bank of computers constantly calculated and recalibrated all the flight parameters and adjusted them in milliseconds: in other words they were so unstable in the air that they couldn’t actually fly. But the advantage was that they could very quickly change direction, be super-fast to maneuver when taking evasive action against the enemy: dive or climb, turn left or right. When looking up ‘constructive instability’ I came across a website called “Utopia” and I found there the following quote: Thomas Elsaesser used the term constructive instability to describe the aerodynamic properties of fighter jets that gain decisive advantages by navigating at the brink of system failure. They would more or less ‘fall’ or ‘fail’ in the desired direction. Similarly, our current economic system utilizes failure, deriving profit and power from compromises made in moments of crisis. Advanced capitalism is running efficiently by its own economic measures, but there are resources that it utilizes but cannot quantify — I’m speaking namely of natural and human capacities. Capitalism has pushed these limits to the brink, creating global conflict and disorder that can only be projected to intensify in the next 25–50 years. [But] This is [also] a period of constructive instability in which individual and collective action will have a greater impact and far more rapid effect on determining the future than has been possible for hundreds of years. These natural and human limits that capitalism so poorly gauges are utopia’s very own inspirations and elements. As capitalism continues to push these to the

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brink of failure, utopia is all the more powerful as a constructive device by which we rehearse for the fall, directing it in the desired direction. This spectacular failure anticipated is perhaps the most utopian notion of all, and by this measure, we are living in perhaps the most utopian moment ever.3 So here you have once more two sides to the same coin. On the one side the term describes the precarious and dangerous volatility of the world we currently inhabit, where power is incredibly unevenly distributed, not by default but by design, and on the other side, the term holds out the hope that this same volatility may one day allow for radical change, prepared for by the fluidity, indeterminacy, and unpredictability of the capitalist system’s constructive instability: hence the idea that this radically destabilized contemporary condition might be ‘the most utopian moment ever.’ Again, for the purposes of our argument, we can see that the horizonlessness in the representational field, is paralleled by an unpredictability in the economic field: both are – to use Hito Steyerl’s phrase – ‘in free fall,’ but without a particular direction of ‘falling towards.’ In one sense, then, the multi-perspectival way that certain Hollywood films now operate – epitomized and rendered explicit in the mind-game films – is both a response to, and a reflection of these systemic conditions, to which we have become accustomed as the new normal. This situation has another parallel – or rather, a precursor – in the political realm. Adam Curtis’s HyperNormalisation, the narrative of how the ‘Contemporary World took on its Present Shape,’ starts its story in 1975, with the grandmaster of American foreign policy during the Nixon years, Henry Kissinger. Especially in dealing with the Middle East, Kissinger developed a strategy that he termed ‘constructive ambiguity.’ It was his term for the balance of power in the Middle East, and its aim was to prevent the major countries of the region – notably Iran, Iraq, Syria, The Palestinians, Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf States, and Saudi Arabia – forming a single bloc against Israel and the United States. Kissinger, according to Curtis, saw the world as an interdependent and interconnected system, with antagonistic forces that had to be kept in a kind of multilevel balance or equilibrium, which required a divide and rule policy, implemented by persuading Egypt and Jordan to conclude a peace treaty with Israel, but not consulting another close neighbor, namely Syria. I’m not a political expert, so I don’t know to what extent Curtis’s historical analysis is correct in its assessment – that Kissinger’s sidelining and possibly deceiving of Syria’s leader Hafez al Assad led to radical Islam and suicide bombing – but what interests me, again, is the term used by Kissinger, ‘constructive ambiguity,’ since it seems close to ‘structured ambiguity’ as we know it from classical Hollywood, and to ‘constructive instability’ as it became briefly the political strategy of the so-called neo-cons, during the first presidency of George W. Bush, and notably his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. As Robert Satloff summed it up:

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Historically, the pursuit of stability has been a central feature of U.S. Middle East policy. In other regions of the world, U.S. strategists debated the wisdom of stability – should the United States reach a modus vivendi with the Soviets or seek to roll-back the Soviet empire? but George W. Bush was the first president to argue that stability was itself an obstacle to the advancement of U.S. interests in the Middle East. Triggered by the events of September 11, the administration has since pursued what can be termed a policy of ‘constructive instability,’ based on the notion that the protection of U.S. citizens and the security of U.S. interests are best served by fundamental change in Middle East regimes.4 Thus, we have another convergence of terms that align the aesthetic, the philosophical, the economic and the political around systems of meaning, reference, and agency that are deliberately made unstable, ambiguous, and volatile – on the one hand, on the assumption that it makes them more flexible, responsive, and agile, but on the other, also to deceive, to discombobulate, and to disorient the adversary. Curtis’s HyperNormalisation, however, does not stop there. Around 1975, there opens, he argues, a parallel narrative – the alternative timeline, if you like – to the constructive ambiguities and constructive instabilities of American foreign policy, notable in the Middle East. This narrative concerns the relationship between politicians and the banks, and by extension, the shifting power-relations between Western neoliberal democracies on one side, and the financial institutions and multinational companies on the other. Using the case of New York, Curtis claims that around 1975, the city’s politicians, faced with bankruptcy, handed over power to global capital and its speculators, among whom – for New York – Curtis singles out one Donald Trump. But the wider picture is the more important one: ever since the oil crisis, the deregulation of the financial markets, and the privatization of public assets, politicians were no longer in charge of politics: they increasingly became the managers of the social fallout of neoliberal economics, tasked with merely redistributing the diminishing tax revenues, as multinational corporations found loopholes and offshore tax havens, in order to pay as little tax as possible. The extent to which this shift of power away from elected politicians and in favor of banks and big business affected ordinary lives is not only noticeable in the ‘race to the bottom’ in the labor market – the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, the de-skilling of the working class, the rise in unemployment – but also in the arms race, notably the selling of arms to the oil producing countries in the Middle East, in order to recoup some of the billions of European and US petro-dollars that had gone to Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf States, Iraq, and Iran. Besides the US, almost every European country became an arms manufacturer and arms exporter – notably France, Britain, and Germany, but also countries one didn’t expect to find on the list of top ten arms exporters, such as Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Czech Republic.

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The level of corruption that this produced is well documented, and Johan Grimonprez’s 2018 film Shadow World gives a dishearteningly vivid and depressingly acerbic picture of the damage inflicted on a nation’s image, and the deep involvement of politicians, if only because one of their remaining jobs is to protect and preserve jobs, and in all the countries just named the arms industries are not only major employers but also the recipients of huge government contracts for the country’s military. There is thus something of a vicious circle around the arms business that is hard to break open. However, the story does not end there either. The politicians, devoid of either power or vision, needed some justification for their continuing existence and relevance, and – according to Curtis – they began to tell stories, make up narratives that increasingly became more and more detached from reality. They were unable – or – unwilling to tell their people just how complicated things had become, in a world that globalization, social inequality, local wars, ethnic and religious strife had made ever more opaque, but also ever more corrupt and criminal, especially at the top, where the 1% was reaping most of the benefits of new technologies and of exporting and selling to an expanding Asian and Latin American middle class, avid for German cars, French luxury brands, and holidays in Queen Elizabeth’s England. So the politicians became more like fairy-tale uncles, telling the people bedtime stories either to frighten them or to reassure them. They became the unreliable narrators of our realities, and had even taken their countries to war under false pretenses, when claiming that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or arguing that Afghanistan was responsible for Al Qaida, when it was the Americans themselves that had initially funded Osama bin Laden, and that most of the 9/11 terrorists came from Saudi Arabia.5 The most egregious example in HyperNormalisation of the United States and Britain making up stories, concerns Libya and Colonel Gaddafi, who – depending on expediency and international circumstances – was re-cast several times from being a brutal dictator and arch villain to hero and reform-minded supporter of democracy, and then, during the so-called Arab Spring, back again to villain, whose country the US, Britain, and France attacked, bombed, and then abandoned. By the time of the Great Crash of 2008, so much power was with the financial institutions, with their global web of interdependent networks (and above all with their – and our – Information Technology infrastructure owned and operated by the FAANMG’s – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Google) that politicians became merely managers of complexity, or if you will, complexity-reduction managers, spinning either simplistic or totally fake versions of reality, stage-managed by playing on people’s fear, anger, and resentment (the Far Right playbook). Adam Curtis’s case is thus – more generally – that the handover of power and decision-making to global finance and multinational corporations has turned Western political systems into risk-and-disaster avoidance management operations on the one hand, and into pantomime theater on the other. This pantomime

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theater that representational democracy has become is a charade because it is such a carefully curated version of reality.6 Tony Blair and George W. Bush are the two leaders especially singled out for spinning the facts to fit the simplistic axis-of-evil (‘you’re either with us or against us’) narrative. However, one can argue that it is not just make-believe, but with a constantly shifting narrative, with new heroes and especially new villains, it could be seen as a kind of mind-game, in which – just as I argued for unreliable narration – only the narration is real, not the reality it purports to describe or to analyze. Except that nobody believed it. It is at this point that another strand of Curtis’s own narrative has to be introduced: the role of Russia and of Vladimir Putin. The very term hypernormalisation7 is taken from Russian during the time of the Soviet Union, and it refers to a situation, where the Party leaders would realize that socialism wasn’t working, but that they could not or would not admit it. As the narration puts it: The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no-one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it “hypernormalisation.” You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal. One might have thought that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new realism would emerge, but instead, a pervasive cynicism took hold, and the new Russian elites – the oligarchs and former KGB officers – soon realized that power meant not just military power and economic power, which Putin once more concentrated in the hands of a small autocratic clique – power also meant control over the narrative, which is why Putin made sure that the media – newspaper and television – were firmly under governmental control. But according to Curtis, it was Russia under Putin that actually managed to turn the international political glove puppet show into a full-blown mind-game: in Russia, there was a group of men who had seen how this very lack of belief in politics, and dark uncertainty about the future could work to their advantage. What they had done was turn politics into a strange theatre where nobody knew what was true or what was fake any longer. They were called political technologists and they were the key figures behind President Putin. They had kept him in power, unchallenged, for 15 years. Some of them had been dissidents back in the 1970s … Twenty years later, when Russia fell apart after the end of communism, they rose up and took control of the media. And they used it to manipulate the electorate on a vast scale. For them, reality was just something that could be manipulated and shaped into anything you wanted it to be.

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Foremost among these political technocrats was one Vladislav Surkov, a former theater producer, avant-garde artist and short-story writer who for a time was one of Putin’s closest political advisers: so much so that in the West he used to be referred to as ‘Putin’s Rasputin’ – the evil power behind the throne.8 Now, what was it that made Surkov into the master of the mind-game? In Curtis’s words, Surkov’s aim was not just to manipulate people but to go deeper and play with, and undermine, their very perception of the world so they are never sure what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theatre. He used Kremlin money to sponsor all kinds of groups – from mass anti-fascist youth organizations, to the very opposite – neo-Nazi skinheads. And liberal human rights groups who then attacked the government. Surkov even backed whole political parties that were opposed to President Putin. But the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing. Which meant that no one was sure what was real or what was fake in modern Russia. As one journalist put it, “It’s a strategy of power that keeps any opposition ‘constantly confused’ – a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable ‘because it is indefinable.’” Consider the situation under George W. Bush, when Karl Rove, Bush’s deputy chief of staff, is said to have told a journalist that US policy wasn’t just aiming at regime change in the countries they did not like, or that were hostile to the US: We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, we will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.9 In other words, for Rove (although he’s since denied being the author of that quote), America was in the reality-creating business, imposing its will on others through establishing new ‘facts on the ground’ as the saying goes. This contrasts with Surkov, whose aim was to keep everyone “constantly confused, [with] a ceaseless shape-shifting that was unstoppable because indefinable.” In other words, Surkov takes the mind-game strategy to a whole other level. Power now resides not in creating reality (whether through force of arms or by controlling the dominant narrative), nor is it the power to define what is true and what are facts (the narratives of political spin-doctors), but the power to make you doubt your very ability to distinguish between true and false, and then to make you decide or conclude that it didn’t matter anymore whether what you see or hear was fake. What, however, both the United States and Russia had in common was so-called ‘perception management.’ In the US it also began in the 1970s, when the Air Force was testing new types of aircraft and missiles (part of Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’

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defense program) which they did not want the public to know about. So they actively encouraged individuals living near the tests sites to report these strange objects in the sky as ‘UFOs’ – unidentified flying objects – thus fueling any number of “alien invasion” conspiracy theories. An Air Force colonel told Curtis: One of [the people] chosen was called Paul Bennewitz who lived outside a giant air base in New Mexico and had noticed strange things going on. Years later, I sat down with Paul at dinner and told Paul exactly that everything we did was a sanctioned counterintelligence operation to convince him that what he was seeing was UFOs and that what we didn’t want him to know was that he had tapped into something on the base and we didn’t want him to ever disclose that. We kind of planted the seed in Paul that what he was seeing and what he was hearing and what he was collecting was, in fact, probably, maybe, UFOs. As Curtis sums it up: What the Reagan administration were doing, both with Colonel Gaddafi and with the UFOs, was a blurring of fact and fiction but it was part of an even broader program. The president’s advisers had given it a name - they called it ‘perception management’ and it became a central part of the American Government during the 1980s. In the case of the Russians, perception management became part of military strategy, first in the Chechen Wars of the 1990s, then in the Ukraine, and most recently in Syria. And, as we might expect, Vladislav Surkov gives it a mind-game twist, calling it ‘non-linear warfare.’ So another of our key terms – ‘non-linearity’ in storytelling and narrative construction – makes its appearance in an apparently wholly unrelated field or area of application: armed combat. In the case of the Syrian Civil War, the Russians had kept out of it, until the United States, under Obama more or less withdrew, also on the diplomatic front around 2015. Here is Adam Curtis again: Suddenly, the Russians intervened [in Syria]. President Putin sent hundreds of planes and combat troops to support Assad. But no-one knew what their underlying aim was. They seemed to be using a strategy that Vladislav Surkov had developed in the Ukraine. He called it non-linear warfare. It was a new kind of war – where you never know what [you or] the enemy were really up to. The underlying aim, Surkov said, was not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilised perception. It is this ‘constant state of destabilized perception’ of course, that the Russians successful created in 2016 during the last Presidential Election in the US, and

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more or less at the same time in Britain, during the run-up to the Brexit vote.10 And you can see – from the Mueller Report and the ongoing mess of the Brexit negotiations – just how hugely successful this mind-game strategy turned out to be. But it also explains why the Mueller Report, with all these facts and timelines – this classical piece of linear storytelling, with its multiple cast of characters, its thriller elements, its horror stories, its comic interludes, its sex, lies, and audiotapes – has had practically no impact whatsoever. Why this tremendous anti-climax? Because the current resident of the White House [editors’ note: Trump at the time of Thomas Elsaesser writing this] is a consummate master at destabilizing perception and non-linear warfare: his shadow-boxing with the press, his manipulation of the Democratic Party, and his domination of the Republican Party and of world-opinion – we all wake up every morning and wait with bated breath for the next Twitter storm, scandalous speech or 180-degree policy turnaround.11 And his followers love it: Trump may have been telling lies one after the other, but to these followers he ‘tells it how it is.’ In other words, there must be a truth underneath the lies, and this truth is parapractic (the dog-whistle as Freudian slip). Trump said so himself, when he pointed out that Joe Biden “makes gaffes, so do I. But when I make gaffes they are intentional, his are because he is stupid.” If Putin is the stone-face covering for the shape shifting of his troll farms and super-trolls (Surkov), then Trump is the shape shifter in plain sight: no collusion, no obstruction, because complete convergence.

Positive/Negative Feedback To come to a provisional finale: the dominance of speculative financial markets (volatility, unpredictability, boom/bust cycles), initiated by deregulation and confirmed by the retreat of government in areas of social services and common goods (notably by outsourcing health, welfare, and education – and even the military) to private contractors and thus to ‘the market’ was – in the new century and after the 2008 crash – belatedly countered by (failed) political attempts at regulation, as well as an increase in surveillance. These attempts at control, i.e., ‘negative feedback,’ merely underlined the new role of politicians as either managers of the resulting structural instability (the EU’s Brussels technocrats on one side, the new generation of autocratic strongmen in China, Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, the Philippines, etc.) or as instigators of more chaos and more instability (Trump, the Brexiteers in the UK, other populist leaders in Hungary, Poland, as well as in France and Italy). Given how inherently unstable the world system had become, the US and the West assumed that nothing could be allowed to further destabilize it, with the result that with every crisis, another layer of surveillance or control had to be introduced, with the effect of making the system even more unstable. Or in terms of a different vocabulary (familiar from our mind-game discussion): In the face of so much ‘positive feedback’ that could not be

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controlled coming from the (financial-tech-industrial) ‘environment,’12 most politicians implement some sort of ‘negative feedback’ (at one end the European Union, at the other, autocratic governments). But there were also some (Rodrigo Dutere in the Philippines, Donald Trump in the US) who went with the positive feedback and amplified the disturbances and interferences. Both are responses to an essentially ungovernable reality, and who can say with certainty at this point, which is the better one? Mind-game films, then are ‘symptomatic’ and in this sense they are ‘critical’ in both senses of the word: they speak of crisis, and the speak from a meta-position of reflexivity, if not resistance. Their relation to what they speak about is special, in that it condenses, exposes, highlights and mirrors the world in which we find ourselves: the mind-game film in its ideal form is the allegorical mise-en-abyme of the contemporary world (its oblique repetition at a different scale and at multiple levels). But this world of ours is itself at the cusp, turning or tipping point of a major epochal or geological transformation, whose symptoms we see everywhere, but whose treatable causes are too many (globalization, social injustice, migration, the wealth gap, ethno-religious conflicts, racism, political polarization, populism, authoritarianism) or too enormous (capitalism, climate change, ‘too big to fail’ tech companies and banks, the post-human of bio-engineering and artificial intelligence) to either face or to forget.

Notes 1 Editors’ note: in square brackets, Elsaesser refers to “Foucault panopticism” here, obviously intending to reference or build on the French thinker’s work on surveillance-society. 2 Adam Tooze (discussing Geitner) in a talk, “American Power in the Long 20th Century.” https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2020/09/adam-tooze-american-power-in-long-20th.html 3 Editors’ note: the Utopia website appears to exist no longer. 4 Robert Satloff, “Assessing the Bush Administration’s Policy of ‘Constructive Instability’ (Part II),” The Washington Institute, March 16, 2005. https://www.washingtoninstitute. org/policy-analysis/view/assessing-the-bush-administrations-policy-of-constructive-insta bility-part5 Among the Islamists tactics were divided, and after 9/11 a more asymmetrical warfare prevailed. As Curtis points out: “Al-Suri, a former associate of bin Laden, thought that bin Laden had been wrong to attack the West head-on [as with 9/11], because it created a massive military counter-offensive. Instead small-scale terrorist attacks in Europe and elsewhere [were needed] to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt.” But it is doubtful whether without the fall of the twin towers, Al Qaeda (or ISIL) could have recruited as successfully as they did. 6 In this respect, Hollywood is far less ‘out of touch’ even in its blockbuster action-adventure spectacles: “In HyperNormalisation, [Adam Curtis’] mashup of pre-9/11 disaster movies, a genre that arrived at a time when our popular culture spent billions of dollars imagining the worst that could happen even as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that ‘the end of history’ was nigh, and that the West stood triumphant over communism, is perhaps the most breathtaking sequence in his storied career. It stands as a testament to the grim possibilities of modern Hollywood storytelling and an heir to the legendary sequence of explosions that ends Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point.” Brandon Harris, “Adam

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7 8

9 10

11

12

Curtis’s essential Counterhistories,” New Yorker, November 3, 2016. https://www.new yorker.com/culture/culture-desk/adam-curtiss-essential-counterhistories In the Soviet Union “everything was a make-believe world: a fake world taken for real because you could not imagine an alternative. This was called hypernormalisation.” Russia played the looking-glass war – nobody knew what was true or fake, and the government used disinformation to devastating effect as documented in the Strugatsky Brothers sci-fi classic Roadside Picnic which served Andrej Tarkovsky as the source for Stalker and The Zone (possibly the originary mind-game book/film). After the fall of communism, the fans of the Strugatsky Brothers took over the media and manipulated public opinion: the result was Vladislav Surkov. See Peter Pomerantsev, “Putin’s Rasputin,” London Review of Books 33, no. 20 (October 20, 2011). https://www.lrb.co. uk/the-paper/v33/n20/peter-pomerantsev/putin-s-rasputin Ron Suskind, “Faith, certainty and the presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times, October 17, 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certa inty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html “It is the fashion these days, in certain circles, to see the hand of Moscow behind all of the political turbulence of the present moment: Brexit, Trump, the rise of the European right. John McCain once even suggested that Russia’s real aim in Syria was ‘to exacerbate the refugee crisis and use it as a weapon to divide the transatlantic alliance and undermine the European project.’ Vladimir Putin must be delighted. Setting aside the question of the extent to which Russia is actually pulling the strings (Robert Mueller will soon tell us what he thinks about the Trump presidential campaign; the arguments around Russia’s role in Brexit rage on), the very fact that people believe in his power to drive massive population movements, bewitch electorates and divide allies is a win for the Kremlin. It is a form of hypnosis in its own right, and Russia tried it out on its own population first before exporting it abroad.” Trump defeated serious journalists because while they tried to ascertain the truth and expose lies (fact checks) truth had become irrelevant (‘fake news’). Liberals were outraged, and they continue to express their outrage online and in print, but Facebook’s algorithms and the clickbait logic of newspapers (i.e., keeping Trump in the headlines) made sure that these liberals were increasingly talking only to those who already agreed with them, while rescuing the New York Times and the Washington Post, because ‘angry people click more.’ So anger became the fuel on both sides, and it didn’t matter whether it came from the right or the left, because either way it was feeding the system of corporate (or authoritarian) power already in place, merely making those in charge richer and more powerful. “The Internet now resembles the dystopian ‘cyberspace’ of William Gibson novels, one in which a small handful of entities use our networks as a means to spy on everyone and also control the ideological limits of popular discourse by selling ourselves back to us, reinforcing our own preexisting ideas by making sure we don’t encounter anything in social media or in e-commerce that pierces our algorithmically curated world view.” Brandon Harris, “Adam Curtis’s Essential Counterhistories.”

INDEX

1%, the 304 9/11 terrorist attacks 17, 19, 50, 50–52, 155, 225, 226 A Beautiful Mind (2001) 61–62, 93, 94, 100–101, 294n14 About Time (2013) 138, 193 access for all 250–252 actant 261 action-hero genre 81–82 actions, and consequences 215–216, 221–222, 282 Actor-Network Theory 223n15 actuality-decoupling 43 Adaptation (2002) 25 addiction 43, 199–200, 238; fostering 39, 233 Adjustment Bureau, The (2011) 197 affective labor 107, 157–158, 158 affective memory 185–186n25; generating 174–175; production of 171–174 affective-somatic effects 78 affective–turn, the 147 Agamben, Giorgio 65, 76 agency 8, 18–19, 20, 54, 63, 64, 73, 122, 130, 255, 261; and causality 36–37; character-centered 302; countervailing forces 262–263; definition 80, 261–262; distributed 2, 8, 64, 262, 263, 291; distributive 220–222, 223n15; external 68n38; images 169; as limit 80–83; locus of 250; loop of 287–288, 292; modes of

80; problematic 276, 286, 286–287; renegotiation of 221; and time travel 141, 142, 286–288; and trauma 143 alienation 15 Althusser, Louis 220 ambiguity 46–47, 58–59, 110–111, 303–304 American heroism 17–18 American ideology, critique of 12 amnesia 6, 98, 102, 233, 271 Anger, Kenneth 211 animation 26 Anthropocene, the 117 anticipation 123–124 anti-imperialist sentiment 250 Apel, Karl Otto 208 Apocalypse Now (1979) 54, 241–242 apparatus theory 72–73 Arab Spring 304 Argo (2012) 17–18, 52–54 Arnett, Peter 185n17 Arrival (2016) 141, 142 A Scanner Darkly (2006) 21, 187, 199–200, 267, 286 assumptions, revision 24 asymmetrical warfare 309n5 audience 31, 218; demographics 38; disorientation 95; engagement 253; expectations 45–46; meaning-making 270 audience-address 92 augmented realities 256 Austin, John Langshaw 161, 208

312 Index

auteurs 25, 208–210 auteur theory 230, 251 authenticity 74, 169–170, 184n8 authority, authorship and 219–220 authorship 2, 245, 250–252; authority and 219–220 autism 233 automated feedback 232, 238 automatisms 261, 274 autonomy 251 avant-garde art 76 Avatar (2009) 45, 51, 230, 250–252 Azerbaijan–Armenia war 21–22 Back to the Future (1985) 18, 118–119, 121–126, 131, 132, 134–135, 137, 138, 142, 242, 280, 281, 282, 288 Baecker, Dirk 167n51 Bal, Mieke 39 Barthes, Roland 31 Bataille, Georges 76 Batman franchise 59, 262 Bauman, Zygmund 41, 68n45 Bazin, André 247 Being John Malkovich (1999) 4, 23–24, 25, 30, 31, 38, 40, 151, 163 Belgium 42 Bellour, Raymond 80–81, 119 Benjamin, Walter 6, 72, 73–74, 78, 82, 84, 85, 104, 105, 146, 147, 188 Besson, Luc 31 big data 26, 237 Bigelow, Kathryn 224, 226, 228, 230, 234–235, 236, 244n11 Bigger Than Life (1956) 100 Big Short, The (2015) 302 binge-watching 39, 233, 294n15 biopower 6, 65 Black Hawk Down (2001) 54 Blade Runner (1982) 135, 187, 188, 189, 190, 199, 200 Blair, Tony 305 Blanchot, Maurice 76 Blind Chance (1987) 138, 193 Blow Up (1966) 95 Blue Velvet (1986) 213–214 Boal, Mark 224, 228, 230, 244n11 body 26, 85, 271, 276, 291; damaged 82; as limit 77–78; and mind 59, 271–272 body artists 78 body-based performance art 78 body-genres 77 body-swapping 23

Bordwell, David 24, 26–30, 31, 39, 41, 44, 64, 66n6, 80, 95–96, 108–109, 284 Boss of It All, The (2006) 89 Branigan, Edward 39, 68n43, 109, 267 Brexit 308, 310n10 Buckland, Warren 31–33, 39, 42, 44, 48, 55, 66n2, 67n22, 264, 264–265, 266 buddy films 26 Buñuel, Luis 95, 270 Burn After Reading (2008) 284–286 Bush, George W. 303–304, 305, 306 Bush, Vannevar 97 butterfly effect, the 61 Butterfly Effect, The (2004) 193, 267 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (1919) 94 Caché (2005) 99 Cameron, James 45, 117–118, 169, 250–252 Camus, Albert 164 Capra, Frank 33 Carroll, Noël 77 Caruth, Cathy 149–150, 165n12 Casablanca (1942) 230 Catch Me If You Can (2002) 151, 183 causal chains 6 causality and causation 7, 8, 36–37, 64, 80–81, 117, 123, 142, 232, 255, 276, 289; character-centered 302; classical narrative 198; complexity 279–280; and free will and determinism 196–199; inverted 96; linear 253–254; loops 201–204, 280; Lynch and 216–217; in mind-game films 198–199; network films 284–286; organizing principle 255; retroactive 194, 200–204, 206n25; suspended 92, 270; technological underpinnings 253–254 causal loop paradox 131–132, 133, 142, 144–145n12 Cavell, Stanley 37, 274 cerebral palsy 233 chaos theory 20, 61–66 Chatman, Seymour 39 Chechen Wars 307 Chion, Michel 213–214 cinema brut 274 Clarke, Arthur C. 197 classical cinema 73–74, 75–77, 108–109, 143, 261, 262–263, 266, 269 Clover, Carol 77 Coen Brothers 284–286 cognitive-epistemic loop 22

Index 313

cognitive shifts 270 cognitive switches 251 Coherence (2014) 42 coincidence 253–254 commemoration, symbolic rituals 171 commodification 219 communication: felicity conditions 161; successfully failed 160–162 Comolli, Jean-Louis 50, 69n75 complexity 61, 266–267, 283 complexity theory 62 complex narratives 23, 266–267, 284–286 complex storytelling 94–96, 214–215 computer games 26, 97, 105–106; see also video games connections 274 Connor, J. D. 35–36, 44, 45, 59, 62 Conrad, Joseph 167n48 consequences, and actions 215–216, 221–222, 282 conspiracy 285–286 conspiracy theories, creative potential 99–100 constructive ambiguity 303–304 constructive instability 21, 302–303 constructivism 282, 283 contemporary cinema 261, 263, 266, 300 contextual memory 174–175 contingency 62–64, 142, 254, 255, 289 contradictions 267, 283–284 control 250–252, 308; and discipline 104–107 control society 65 convergence culture 248, 252–253, 253 corruption 304 counterfactual history 127–128 critical theory 76 Cronenberg, David 100 crossovers 96 cult films 269 cult status 111 cultural capital 45 cultural exchanges 125 cultural memes 37–38 cultural studies 72 culture wars: 49 Curtis, Adam 21, 298, 303–308, 309–310n6, 309n5 Dark City (1998) 92–93 Dark Knight series 19 dark state, the 51–52 database, and narrative 97–98

data-mining 20, 235–236, 249 Day, Doris 46–47, 160 deadlock 283 death 78; self-sacrifice 18–19; symbolic 17 death-drive 83 deconstruction 297 deep remixability 33 Déjà Vu (2006) 19, 23, 51–52, 137, 139–141, 142, 281, 288 Deleuze, Gilles 6, 65, 73, 81, 84, 105, 179, 254 de Man, Paul 149 Demme, Jonathan 90 demystification 95–96 deniability 230 depression 213–214 Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (2008) 168 Derrida, Jacques 262, 277, 288, 291–292, 297 destiny 128 determinism 127–130, 132, 135, 193, 196–199, 201–204, 261, 283 Dick, Philip K. 8, 21, 66n5, 93, 187–205, 270, 283; brand of paranoia 191; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 188, 189, 190; earnings 188; and free will and determinism 196–199, 201–204; in Hollywood 187–188, 189–190; influence 187–189, 204; Jameson on 191–192, 193; and the Mind-Games 193–194, 204–205; perspective of reality 199–204; and retroactive causality 194, 200–204; status 187; themes 190–191; “The Minority Report” 190, 200–204; Ubik 189; “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” 188, 190 Die Hard (1988) 11–12 digital filmmaking 56–57 dilemmas, unresolvable 9 disavowal 103–104, 154, 154–156, 160 discipline, and control 104–107 disorientation 300; audience 95 disruption 297–298; of perspective 298–300 disruptive industry 297 distributed agency 2, 8, 64, 262, 263, 291 distributed subjectivity 21 distributive agency 220–222, 223n15 Donnie Darko (2001) 4, 23–24, 39–40, 42, 92, 93, 95, 101, 104, 126–130, 136, 193 double binds 261 double coding 46–47 double displacement 171 double occupancy 11

314 Index

DreamWorks 170 drones 22 Drucker, Peter 167n51 dualism 24 Dunkirk (2017) 55, 279, 295n25 DVD 25, 26, 46, 110, 219 Dziga Vertov group 189 Easter eggs 46 Eastwood, Clint 168 Ebert, Roger 160 echo-chambers 249 economic crisis, 2008 301–302, 304 economy of experience 17 Eco, Umberto 42 Edel, Rudi 168 EdTV (1999) 151 effort justification 43 Einstein, Albert 282 Eisenstein, Zillah 227 embodied truth 238 embodiment 10n12, 73, 271 emergence theory 62 emotion machine, cinema as 73 empowerment 104, 252, 261; and trauma 147 epistemic horizon 24 Eraserhead (1977) 210 Erfahrung 73–75, 75, 77, 78, 84, 86, 147, 172, 174–175 Erlebnis 73–75, 75, 77, 84, 86, 147, 172, 174–175 Ernst, Wolfgang 258–259n18 Errando, Palao 68n44 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) 23–24, 25, 39–40, 63–64, 137, 271, 286 event-movies 168 eXistenZ (1999) 4 expanded cinema 253 experience 72, 168; definition 75, 76; as limit 83–86; of limits 75–77; limits of 75–77; modalities of 76 experimental cinema 274 explicit-implicit-complicit position 275 fabula 39–40, 120, 137, 145n25 Fairfax, Daniel 2 fan communities 89, 103, 107–108, 218–9, 267 fantasy 154–156, 163 fantasy genres 60–61 features 5–6, 23–24, 89–92, 92–94, 189, 262, 264, 265–269, 269, 269–270, 275–292

feedback 8, 61, 280; automated 232, 238; negative 203, 308, 309; positive 47, 204, 277, 280, 292, 308–309 feedback loops 45–46, 59, 61, 66n6, 245–246, 292 Feinstein, Dianne 226 Fellini, Federico 56 female empowerment 213 female melancholia and depression 213–214 feminist cultural studies 157–158 feminist readings 50 Fifth Element, The (1997) 31 Fight Club (1999) 4, 23–24, 30, 31, 38, 39–40, 51, 65, 93, 95, 102–103, 104, 271, 286 film as thought-experiment 247–249 film noir 17, 26, 82; time and temporality 79–80 film, philosophy of 13–15 film-spectator contract 7 Film Theory through the Senses (Elsaesser and Hagener) 13 financial markets, dominance of 308 financial speculation 301–302 Fincher, David 25, 40, 66n5, 90, 270 First Gulf War 50 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 211 Flight Plan (2005) 93 Fludernik, Monika 39 foreign policy 21, 303–304, 306 Forgotten, The (2004) 93, 125 forking path narratives 95–96 Forrest Gump (1993) 83, 171, 241, 242 Foster, Hal 78, 83, 84, 85 Foucault, Michel 6, 65, 76, 104–105, 253, 271, 291, 297 frame analysis 277, 294n20 frameworks 13 franchise movies 39 Freedman, Carl 190–191 free will 19, 34–35, 64, 127–130, 132, 135, 193, 196–199, 201–204, 261 Freud, Sigmund 79, 83, 146, 148, 149, 161, 195, 292 Fuchs, Daniel 211 Fuller, Sam 12, 13 Gaddafi, Colonel 304 game: definition 7; emphasis on 24, 90 game construction, rules 31 Game of Thrones (TV series) 60–61 game playing 89–92

Index 315

Game, The (1997) 30, 31, 90 game theory 62, 65, 93–94, 97 Geitner, Timothy 301 gender (roles and relations); see also ‘sexual difference’ 26, 49, 91, 119 generic identity 25–27 Genette, Gérard 253 genre-infiltration 26 genre-mixings 15 genres 12, 273; affinities with 91; heist 240–241; historical context 79; hybridity 33, 42, 151–152, 224, 231, 238–243, 264–265; police procedural 236–237; rescue mission 241–242; romance 239–240 Gilliam, Terry 131, 136 Girard, René 292 Gladwell, Malcolm 106–107 Gleick, James 64, 113, 288 global finance, handover of power to 303–305 globalization 251, 304 Gnosticism 197 God 197 Godard, Jean-Luc 189 Goffman, Erwin 277 Goldman, William 60 Gondry, Michael 266, 277 Gordon, Andrew 121 Gorin, Jean Pierre 189 Gorky, Maxim 114 Gramsci, A. 15 grandfather paradox 129–130, 286–287 Greenwald, Glen 225 Greimas, Algirdas J. 31, 261, 262 Grimonprez, Johan 304 Grodal, Torben 80 Groundhog Day (1993) 4, 23, 31, 33–38, 41, 46, 48, 64, 138, 193, 278 Guantanamo Bay 207n31 Guattari, Félix 105 Habermas, Jürgen 208 Hagin, Boaz 3 hallucinations 199–200 Haneke, Michael 208 Hanks, Tom 169 Hayden, Michael 226 Hays Code 46–47 Heidegger, Martin 115, 268, 278 Heisenberg, Werner 282 heist genre 240–241 helplessness 82

Hermann, Martin 34 heroic rescue mission trope 54–55 historical redemption 17–18 history 149, 205, 206n13, 254–255; iconic images 168–169; rewriting 52–54 Hitchcock, Alfred 77–78, 80–81, 100, 261, 270 Hollywood 16, 18, 25–27, 44, 248; classical 24, 297; Dick in 187–188, 189–190; dominant mythologies 12; film production 108–109; hegemony 48; ideological critiques 50; keeping control 44–48, 48, 59–60, 220, 250–252; minding 11–15; performative self-contradiction 243; persistence of 11–12; political function 48–49; reflexivity 211; revival of 125 Hollywood Puzzle Films (Buckland) 8 Holocaust, the 84, 182, 183 horror films 77–78 human/ machine interface 5 humor 105 Hurt Locker, The (2008) 232, 233, 234 Hutcheon, Linda 41 hybridity 33, 42, 151, 224, 231, 264–265 hypernormalisation 21–22 HyperNormalisation (2016) 298, 303–308, 309–310n6 identity 5, 96, 220; and causality 36–37; change 23; crises of 64–65; formation 118; split 132 identity politics 49 ideology and ideological function 15, 107, 156 images: agency 169; iconic 168–169 imaginary resolutions 8, 9, 143, 267, 275, 283–284 imagination, appeal to 274 immersive sense 14 impossible puzzle films 41–43, 293m7 Inception (2010) 19, 23–24, 32–33, 45, 55–60, 63, 69–70n83, 137, 189, 198, 267, 280; ambiguity 58–59; Buckland's analysis 67n22, 264–265; as meta-cinema 56–57; mise-en-abyme 281; narrational strategies 55; narrative construction 55, 58, 67n22; parallax displacement 58; plot 57; plotting 56; spatial relations 277; time and temporality 278–279 indeterminacy 26, 65 individualism 262 Inglourious Basterds (2009) 53

316 Index

Inland Empire (2006) 41, 210; actions and consequences 215–216, 282; agency 220–222, 286; and causality 217; directionality of objects 221; genre 214; male-female dynamics 213, 214; plot 211–213; production logic 217–222; Rabbit sitcom segment 214–215, 216; reflexivity 210–212, 217–222; themes 217–218; treatment of analog media 218 instrumentalization 197–198 interactive environment 246 interactive media 252 interactive narratives 30 Internet, the 103, 310n12 interpretation 107–108 interpretative moves 26–27 interpreters 38–39 Interstellar (2014) 114, 135, 137, 278 intuitive understanding 14, 275 Iran hostage crisis 17–18, 52–54 It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) 33, 37 Jacobi, Karen 244n11 Jameson, Fredric 16, 50, 144n10, 191, 191–192, 193, 200, 205, 206n12, 206n13, 285 Jenkins, Henry 248, 252–253, 253 Jeong, Seung-hoon 128–129 JFK (1991) 168 Johnson, Steven 105–107 Jonze, Spike 25 Joyce, James 115 Jünger, Ernst 76 Juul, Jesper 42 Kafka, Franz 104, 188 Kaufman, Charlie 25, 270 Kennedy Assassination 50, 166n24 Kissinger, Henry 303 Kiss, Miklós 41–43, 44 Kittler, Friedrich 104, 217, 218, 253–254, 271 Korean War 50, 172 Koselleck, Reinhart 149 Kracauer, Siegfried 176–177 Krauss, Rosalind 294n23 LaBute, Neil 167n49 Lacan, Jacques 214, 288 La Jetée (1962) 130–131, 135 Lambie, Ryan 189 Landsberg, Alison 178 Lang, Fritz 270

Laplanche, Jean 288 Latour, Bruno 223n15, 262 LA Trilogy 210–222; and causality 216–217; complex storytelling 214–215; female empowerment 213; as meta-cinema 210; misogyny 213–214; performative self-contradiction 220; production logic 217–222; reflexivity 210–212, 217–222 Lem, Stanislaw 190 Letters from Iwo Jima/Flags of Our Fathers (2006) 168 Levin, Carl 226 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 9, 12, 48, 119, 290 liar’s paradox, the 208–209 Libya 304 limbo, temporality of 17 liquid modernity 41, 68n45 Lison, Andrew 217 literary studies 39 literature 94 Looper (2012) 46, 138, 193, 194, 282 loops of belatedness 249 Lord of the Rings 60–61 Lost Highway (1997) 4, 23, 41, 92, 93, 210, 213; agency 286; and causality 217, 279; genre 214; male-female dynamics 213, 214; time and temporality 278 love, power of 135 Lover Come Back (1961) 46–47 Luhmann, Niklas 254, 282 Lynch, David 14, 25, 40–41, 66n5, 195–196, 198, 208–222, 270, 282; and causality 216–217; complex storytelling 214–215; credentials 209; LA Trilogy 210–222; magic of 222; misogyny 213–214; mobile phones attack 208; performative self-contradiction 208–210, 216, 220; production logic 217–222; recurrent themes 217–218; reflexivity 210–211, 217–222; status 209 Lyotard, Jean-François 149, 165n9 McCain, John 226 McClintock, Robin 255 McGowan, Todd 58, 155 McHale, Brian 41 Malcolm X 166n24 male-female dynamics 213–214 Mamet, David 94 Manovich, Lev 32, 33 Marker, Chris 130–131, 135, 136, 230, 271 marketing 103

Index 317

markets 109 masculinity 124–125, 132; crisis in 119 Matrix, The (1999) 81, 92–93, 95, 163 May, Joe 92 media archaeology 253, 258–259n18, 294n22 media environment 1, 25, 26–27, 44–45 media platforms 109 media, state-created 21 media technologies 134 melodrama 74, 78, 79, 273 Memento (2000) 4, 23–24, 31, 39–40, 65, 83, 85, 92, 95, 99, 102, 102–103, 104, 151, 267, 269, 271, 278, 279–280, 286 memes 37–38 memory 102, 178, 186n26; affective 171–174, 174–175, 185–186n25; contextual 174–175; estrangement through 192; outsourced 292 Menand, Louis 176 mental illness 100–101 meta-cinema 25, 44–48, 56–57, 210, 273–275, 292 metalepsis 253 meta-narratives 120, 286–287 Middle East, the 303–304 mind: and body 59, 271–272; definition 7; emphasis on 24, 90–91 mind-games 16–17, 89–92; relevance 14 Minnelli, Vincente 13 Minority Report (2002) 30, 93, 99, 187, 197, 200–204, 260, 263–264, 279, 283, 292; hybridity 264; “The Minority Report” 190 mise-en-abyme 8, 97, 98, 217–222, 221, 280–281, 309; Inception 55, 57; Nurse Betty 158–160, 162 Mittell, Jason 94 mobile phones 208 modernity 73–74, 274 modernization, crises of 73 Modleski, Tania 157–158 montage 275 Morell, Michael 226 Moretti, Franco 78–79, 80 Morin, Edgar 247 Motion Picture Production Code 46–47 mp4 files 26 Mueller Report 308 Mulholland Drive (2001) 4, 23–24, 41, 210, 213; agency 286; and causality 217; genre 214; male-female dynamics 213 multiple entry points 109, 110, 110–111

multiple viewings 46 multi-strand narratives 198 multi-tasking 6 Murray, Bill 33 myths 9, 12, 48, 119, 143, 290 Nachträglichkeit 194, 195–196, 214 Narboni, Jean 50, 69n75 narration: mode of 26; puzzle films 38–41; strategies 55; unreliable 40–41, 41–43, 94–95, 267 narrative 246, 267–268; classical 279; complex 23, 266–267, 284–286; and database 97–98; deep-structure 131–132; function 268; limits of 97; multi-strand 198; new forms of 97; non-linear 23; structuralist theories of 30–31; transmedia 252–253, 291; trajectories 95–96 narrative comprehension 268 narrative construction 55, 58, 67n22 narrative integration 74 narratological perspective 39–41, 95 narratological problems/puzzles 94–95 narratology 95–96 narrators, unreliable 40–41, 41–43, 94–95, 267 negative feedback 308, 309 Nelson, Ted 97 neo-femme fatale 26 neoliberalism 21, 65, 158 neo-noir 17, 26, 83–84 Netflix 26, 39 network films 284–286 network society 99 networks, of concepts 8–9 New Hollywood 13 New Waves 274 New York City 303 Nolan, Christopher 19, 25, 32, 40, 55, 59–60, 65–66, 66n5, 69–70n83, 85, 114, 189, 248, 262, 270, 278–279, 295n25 Noll Brinckmann, Christine 74, 77–78 non-linear warfare 307, 308 non-structural complexity 33 norm-deviancy model 74 North by Northwest (1959) 261, 263 Nurse Betty (2000) 31, 147, 151–164, 167n49; auto-reflexivity 159; Betty’s altered state 152–153; criticism of 146; genre 151–152; lesson of 163; mise-en-abyme 158–160, 162; protagonist 20; soap opera 153, 156–158, 159–160,

318 Index

164, 165n17, 166n37; storyline 151; successfully failed communication 160–162; surface meaning 153; trauma 148, 150; traumatic incident 152–154 Obama, Barack 226–227 obesity 233 objectivity 198–199, 207n30, 282 observer, as observed 8 observer position, the, as part of the observed 282 obsessive-compulsive behavior 43 Occam’s razor 30 oedipal identity formation 118 Others, The (2001) 286 Paio, Ivan 47 Panek, Eliot 55–56 paradoxes 6–7; causal loop 131–132, 133, 142, 144–145n12; grandfather 129–130, 286–287; liar’s 208–209; predestination 206n25; time-loop 6, 117–120; time travel and time travel films 116–117, 117–120, 121, 122–123, 129–130, 131–132, 133, 142, 144–145n12, 286–287, 288 parallax displacement 58 parallax view 47–48, 68–69n69, 131 parallel universes 93 parallel worlds 95 paranoia 6, 43, 50–52, 99–100, 191, 217, 233, 290 paranoid woman’s films 99 parapraxis 1–2, 17, 230–231; importance 239; poetics of 238–239 parasite-function 26 paratexts 253 participatory culture 253 paternity 124–125 patriotism 197 pedagogy 272 Penley, Constance 117–120, 120, 121, 126, 130–131, 144n10, 144n11 perception, and knowledge 282 perception management 306–308 perceptual premise, mistaken 93 performative contradictions 46 performative re-enactment 182 performative self-contradiction 208–210, 216, 220, 230, 243 Persistence of Hollywood, The (Elsaesser) 44 perspective 256, 256–257, 298–300 Phaedrus (Plato) 291–292

pharmakon 8, 277, 290–292, 296n44 phenomenology, 147 philosophy 30, 76 photographic uncanny, the 171–172 Pillow Talk (1959) 46 Plantinga, Carl 177, 179 Plato 58–59, 65; Phaedrus 291–292 plausible impossibilities 46 play-drive, the 44 play pleasure 38 plotline structure 27; three-act 29 plot twist argument 68n44 point of view 39–40, 92–93, 95, 99 Polanski, Roman 100 police procedural genre 236–237 political avant-garde cinema 274 political function 48–49 political message, hidden 51–52 popular culture, purpose of 48–49 pornography 79 positive feedback 47, 204, 277, 280, 292, 308–309 Post-9/11 action thrillers 19 post-catastrophic redemption narrative 18 post-cinematic media 16 post-classical cinema 4, 81–83, 86 posthistoire 149, 164–165n9 post-medium condition 294n23 postmodernism 41 post-truth 16, 22, 24–25, 43, 44, 65–66, 271 Poulaki, Maria 284, 285 power-relations 24, 55, 59, 104–107 Pravadelli, Veronica 3 Predestination (2014) 23, 46 predestination paradox, the 206n25 Preisrätselfilme 92 Primary Universe 126–127 Primer (2004) 42, 46 Princess Bride, The (1987) 235 problem-solving 143 problems/puzzles, narratological 94–95 production logic 217–222 productive pathologies 1–2, 6, 8, 11, 64–65, 98–104, 163, 204, 243, 271–272, 276, 286, 294n14; amnesia 98, 102, 233; autism 233; cerebral palsy 233; disavowal 103–104, 154, 154–156, 160–161; as empowerment 104; obesity 233; paranoia 99–100, 217, 233; risk 102–103; schizophrenia 98, 100–101, 233; Zero Dark Thirty 231–236 propaganda 225

Index 319

questing male hero myth 12

Repulsion (1965) 100 rescue motif 175–176, 181; heroic’ rescue mission trope 54–55; and redemption 126–137; time travel and time travel films 126–137, 137–141; Zero Dark Thirty 241–242 resilience 158 Resnais, Alain 270–271 resolutions, imaginary 8, 9, 143, 267, 275, 283–284 retroactive anticipation 8, 178–180 retroactive causality 18, 194–196, 200–204, 206n25 retroactivity, 288 Rice, Condoleezza 303–304 risk 102–103 Robnik, Drehli 176–177, 179 Roeg, Nicholas 271 romance genre 239–240 Rosenbaum, Jonathan 213 Rove, Karl 306 Run Lola Run (1998) 138, 193 Rushdie, Salman 43 Russia 305–306, 307–308, 310n8, 310n10

race relations 124–126 Radstone, Susannah 150, 155 Rain Man (1989) 100 Rambo (1982) 54 Rancière, Jacques 274 Rashomon (1950) 95 Ray, Nicholas 12, 13, 100 Reagan, Ronald 306–307 Reaganite revisionism 124 realism, theories of 247 reality 16, 20, 40, 41, 57, 92–93, 111, 148, 153; facing 154–156; layers of 294n20; redemption of 176–177; skepticism about 290 recognition, shock of 42 redemption and redemptive action 132, 139–141, 176–177 reflexivity 44–45, 210–211, 217–222, 277–278 regret 143–144 relevance 107, 111 religious transcendentalism 197 remediation 32 remembering 123–124 Renaissance, the 300 repeat viewing 39 repetition compulsion 193 representation, symbolic systems of 97–98

sacrifice 177–178, 179–180 Satloff, Robert 303–304 Saving Private Ryan (1998) 54–55, 168–183, 241, 242; acts of substitution 171–172; affective memory 185–186n25; affective memory generation 174–175; affective memory production 171–174; authenticity 169–170, 184n8; context 175; D-Day landing 169–170, 183–184n4, 184n5, 184n10, 225; double frame 185n16; generational transfer 171–172; historical-memorial efficacy 182–183; immersive sense 14; Jewish themes 182–183, 186n30; legacy 185n15; message 173; narrative integration 172; nonsensicality of the mission 173; opening scene 181–182, 183; oral history project 170; parapractic supplements 172–173; parapraxis 17; performative re-enactment 182; rear-view mirror assembly 174, 183; rescue motif 175–176, 181; retroactive anticipation 178–180; and sacrifice 177–178, 179–180; second narrative 173–174, 180, 180–182; symbolic rituals of commemoration 171 Schindler’s List (1993) 17, 171, 182 schizophrenia 6, 98, 100–101, 233

Propp, Vladimir 31, 261 protagonists 5–6, 20, 31, 65, 92–93; dead men 83; mental condition 102–103; motivation 270; neo-noir 83–84; pathologies 6; point of view 92–93; post-mortem 286; Source Code 28, 51; Zero Dark Thirty 20, 227, 232, 233–236 Proust, Marcel 115, 192 psychoanalysis 72, 195–196, 272 psychoanalytic film theory 72 psychoanalytic text analyses 16 psychological realism 24 psychological thrillers 26 Pulp Fiction (1995) 4, 151, 242 Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) 151 Putin, Vladimir 21, 305–306, 310n10 puzzle films 4–5, 9, 16, 24, 26, 27; disorienting 42; features 66n2; functions 43; impossible 41–43, 293m7; narration 38–41; types 41–42 Puzzle Films (Buckland) 5, 23 puzzles 24, 265–266

320 Index

Schrödinger’s cat 196 science, faith in 20, 63 sci-fi 26 Scott, A. O. 46–47 Se7en (1995) 90 Searchers, The (1956) 241 Second Gulf War 50 self-delusion 93 self-fulfilling prophecy 203 self-possession 73–74 self-reference 44–45 self-representation 134 self-sacrifice 18–19 semiotics 72–73 sense making 42 senses, trustworthiness of 5 sexual difference 79, 81, 119, Shadow World (2018) 304 Shaviro, Steven 237, 238 Shklovsky, Victor 145n25 Shutter Island (2010) 24, 40, 68n47 Shyamalan, M. Night 25, 40 Silence of the Lambs (1991) 90 Simons, Jan 284 Sinnerbrink, Robert 218 Sixth Sense, The (1999) 4, 23–24, 40, 93, 104, 107, 267, 286 Sliding Doors (1998) 138, 193 sliding signifiers 47 Sloterdijk, Peter 104 Smith, Murray 77, 96 soap opera 147, 153, 156–158, 164, 165n17, 166n36, 166n37 social media 249 soft power 48, 249 software studies 32 solutions, lack of 9, 283–284 Source Code (2011) 19, 23–24, 35, 46, 64, 138, 193, 194, 198, 269, 288; Bordwell's analysis 27–30; Buckland's analysis 31–33; mise-en-abyme 281; protagonist 28, 51; spatial relations 277; structure 28–29; suspense 28–29; thematic resonances 51–52; as video game 30–33 Soviet Union 305, 310n7 Spain 42 Spanish Prisoner, The (1997) 94 spatial relations 277–278 special effects 170, 186n26 spectator-engagement 91 spectatorial identification 145n22, 145n25 spectator positions 7, 91–92

spectator-screen relationship 110 spectatorship 75, 109 speech act theory 161, 208 Spellbound (1943) 100 Spence, Louise 157–158 Spider (2002) 100 Spielberg, Steven 30, 136, 170, 172, 174, 176, 179–180, 202, 203–204 spiritual meaning 38 Staiger, Janet 284 Stewart, Garrett 29, 52, 57 Steyerl, Hito 257, 283, 300, 303 Stone, Oliver 168 storytelling 6–7, 246, 248; classical 24; complex 94–96, 214–215; and game theory 97 structuralism 74 structuralist-materialist cinema 274 structuralist theories 30–31 structured ambiguity 46–47, 229, 234–235, 238, 242–243, 262 structured undecidability 47, 47–48 Studying Contemporary American Film (Elsaesser and Buckland) 4 subjectivity 5, 16, 274; distributed 21 subject-position 7 Sundance 293n6 superheroes 26, 39, 65, 143, 262 Surkov, Vladislav 306, 307 surveillance 140, 235–236, 308 surveillance society, emergence of 51–52 surveillance state, the 8 suspense 28–29 suspension of disbelief 91–92 Suvin, Darko 206n12 symbolic blockage 80 symbolic death 17 symptomatic reading 48–52 symptomatic value 65–66 systems theory 198, 282 syuzet 39–40, 120, 137, 145n25 Taibbi, Matt 235 talent-scouting 293n6 Tambling, Jeremy 188 Tangent Universe 126–127 Tarantino, Quentin 25 Taubin, Amy 213 techno-noir 118 television 35, 66n7, 94, 105–107, 233, 246, 248, 265, 291 temporal development 74 temporality. see time and temporality

Index 321

Terminator, The (1985) 117–118, 130–131, 132, 142, 144n11, 280, 288 terminology 11, 265–269, 297–298 terrorism 17, 19, 50–52 therapeutic perspective 219 Theweleit, Klaus 104 thinking, mechanisms of 13 Thompson, Kristin 26–27, 33–34, 37, 96 Thomson, David 211 thought-experiments 16–17, 22, 247, 247–249, 269, 273–274 three-act structure 29 time and temporality 64, 73, 205, 267, 268, 276, 278, 278–279; experience of 114–115; film noir 79–80; of limbo 17; as limits 78–80; linear 116, 287; non-linear 116, 287; and retroactive causality 194–196; reversible 135; spatialization of 114–116, 139–140, 287 timelines 23 time-loop narratives 33–38 time-loop paradox 6, 83, 117–120 time travel and time travel films 8, 18–20, 23, 51–52, 53, 64, 113–144, 193, 280; and agency 122, 141, 142, 286–288; and anticipation 123–124; appeal 118, 119; attraction of 133–134; background 114–117; as black box 137–141, 286–290; causal contradictions 120; and causality 123; ethics of 117, 129, 134–135, 140, 141; function 127; fundamental assumption 134; impossibility 121–122, 137, 287; logic of 130; as meta-narratives 120; paradoxes 116–117, 121, 122–123, 129–130, 131–132, 133, 142, 144–145n12, 286–287, 288; redemptive function 129; and regret 143–144; and remembering 123–124; repeat, return, and rescue 137–141; rescue and redemption 126–137; scientific underpinnings 114; sleights of hand 124–125; time-loop paradox 6, 83, 117–120; trauma 289–290; understanding 137; see also individual films Titanic (1997) 169, 179 torture, depiction of 225–229, 230 Total Recall (1990) 132, 134, 187, 188, 190, 199 trailers 239 transformational processes 291 transmedia narrative 252–253, 291

trauma 146–164, 273, 289–290; and agency 143; coping strategy 153–154, 154–156, 160–161, 162–163; and crisis 147; definition 84; and empowerment 147; healing 154; historical 17–18; as limit 83–86; new forms of 2; Nurse Betty 148, 150, 151–164; as placeholder 148; in the popular media 147–148; significance 147; as solution 146, 163–164; and successfully failed communication 160–162; the traumatic incident 152–154; unsolvable 17; working through 49 trauma theory 103, 148–150, 165n12 Triangle (2009) 42 trilogy, importance of concept 210 Truffaut, François 90 Truman Show, The (1998) 90, 93, 151, 163 Trump, Donald 21, 303, 308, 309, 310n10, 310n11 TwelveMonkeys (1995) 4, 18–19, 130–137, 138, 142, 193, 280, 282, 289; ambiguousness 136–137; causal loop paradox 131–132, 133; deep-structure narratives 131–132; ethics of 134–135; framing narrative 132–133; location 131; mise-en-abyme 281; timeline 134 UFOs 307 undecidability 47, 47–48, 48, 60–61, 61 Under the Skin (2013) 47, 289 unintended consequences 199, 279, 282 United States of America: foreign policy 303–304, 306; as gravity 301–302; moral high ground 180–181; national fantasy 155; perception management 306–308; political power 249; political unconscious 242; Presidential Election, 2016 307–308, 310n10; public humiliations 124; self-analysis 49; self-image 48; unfinished business 144 unresolvable dilemmas 9 Uricchio, William 248, 256 Usual Suspects, The (1995) 24, 40, 94–95, 267, 269 verbal-symbolic representation 98 vertical perspective 257–258 Vertigo (1958) 81 Victorian Gothic 99

322 Index

video and computer games 26, 34–35, 38, 55, 96, 265; construction rules 31; definition 245; empowerment 252; familiarity with 23; features 30–33, 264–265; interactive environment 246; loops of belatedness 249; opportunity of 247; rise of 245–246; role 248 video streaming 25 Vienna Actionists 78 Vietnam War 17, 50, 84, 171–172, 176, 185n13 viewer behavior 294n15 viewer orientation 39–40 viewers, sense making 42 Village, The (2004) 93 Villeneuve, Denis 141 vision, embodied 257 visual cues 96 visuality 75 visual-mimetic representation 98 von Foerster, Heinz 282 Vonnegut, Kurt 197 von Trier, Lars 89, 91, 92, 103, 208, 213 Wag the Dog (1997) 53 War on Terror 19, 52, 226; see also Zero Dark Thirty Watergate 50 Wearing, Gillian 37 Weber, Max 128 Weir, Peter 90 Wells, H. G. 113, 115, 120, 128 Westerns 26 West, Nathanael 211 what-if risk scenarios 260 White, Hayden 149

Wilden, Anthony 295n31 Willemsen, Steven 41–43, 44 Williams, Linda 77, 78–79 Wilson, George 108 wish-fulfilling fantasy 52–54 Wittenberg, David 120, 121, 122, 145n25 Wolf of Wall Street, The (2013) 302 Woolf, Virginia 115 World War II 54–55, 84, 184–185n12, 185n13; see also Saving Private Ryan Youngblood, Gene 253 YouTube 38, 219 Zemeckis, Robert 109, 125 Zero Dark Thirty (2012) 224–243; background 224; Bigelow's defense of 228–229; Bushisms 231; depiction of torture 225–229, 230; embodied truth 238; ending 234–235; fake trailer 239–240; gender of protagonist 20, 227, 232, 233–236; genre hybridity 15, 224, 231, 238–243; as heist movie 240–241; parapraxis 230–231, 238–239; performative self-contradiction 243; proceduralism 236–237; productive pathologies 231–236, 243; as rescue mission 241–242; romance 239–240; sources 228; status 228; strength 229; structured ambiguity 229–231, 234–235, 238, 242–243; tagline 224 Zielinski, Siegfried 248, 256 Žižek, Slavoj 63, 68–69n69, 108, 127–129, 131, 155, 155–156, 162, 195–196, 213–214, 229, 234, 238, 283, 288, 295n29, 295n31