The first thing we see is not a thing, a subject, but an action, a process. Movement, blur, breathing, violent strokes. A young man strikes vigorously, repeatedly, savagely, at a tree with the blur of an axe disassembled by flight–but the camera is so placed that little distance is erected, and we feel as if the axe were striking directly, hacking away, at our own body. Rhythmic breathing, the vague sensation of cold in a wintry wood, the vaguer sense of disoriented rawness. But above all the violence, force in a pure crystalline form, projects from a screen mutilated by tremors and lacerations. A cut as brisk and instinctive as the opening shot gives us an unsteady picture (the camera continues to tremble) of the young man’s face–he looks contemplatively up to a tree-canopied sky. He resumes axe-work. Eventually the task is completed: we see a tall pine waver and fall with a heavy thud in a snow-carpeted forest. The young man leads a horse that drags the heavy felled pine out of the woods, across the snow, leaving tracks, or the sound of them. But his progress is halted…something monstrous and indefinable approaches, something like a mood or lysergic throb, a sinister wordless change in the atmosphere, charges the air. An extreme closeup of the young man’s face, his eyes white slits, contorts, vibrates–the camera shakes with him, or his kinetic face shakes it as it latches onto the unstable surface of his face. He is having a seizure. His epileptic body carves out a cavernous space in the snow–he continues to convulse. Deep freeze sets in. When he is released from his bruising contact with nature, he lies there, half in shock and tears, half in exhausted relief–and looks up into the apparition of a pitiless sky.

What have we just experienced? For those familiar with the cinema of Philippe Grandrieux it is the signature disruption and distortion of conventional cinematic space–the magnification of faces and the out-of-focus liminality of limbs and muscles and elements and eyes–that typifies the Grandrieux experience. Sombre (1998), Grandrieux’s first feature-length, is a masterpiece of mood and concealed gesture–a treatise on what Bataille would call the “flash of destruction,” the “enigma of sacrifice” in which “what attracts us [to] the destroyed object (in the very moment of destruction) is its power to call into question — and to undermine — the solidity of the subject.” We follow a man whom we gradually learn is a serial killer–and who seems incapable of sexual satisfaction outside of the acts of violence and murder. He comes across as a Francis Bacon anatomy (Bacon’s work is consistently referenced in Grandrieux’s films), an abstraction from human form, a monster disguising itself as a man: partially face, partially contortion, he is frequently out of focus, or caught in dim recesses, or, even when we see his outline clearly, he is clouded in a fog of thought that presents itself as inarticulable.

Sombre sets the stage for Grandrieux’s style: contemplative schemes, scenes of “nature” and landscape ornamented by rhythmic or atmospheric silences, are often exploded by violent or occult trajectories that slice through and deface the scene and seeing subject. (Seeing not as a seeing merely but as an embodiment that sees its own seeing–a vision replete with the stench of inhabitation.) A somnambulant car ride into twilight hills and the incremental dark of woods is suddenly shattered by the screams of children. (Screams of delight, we learn, that blast and confound what is normatively understood by “pleasure” and “pain”; terror formulates its own pleasures, and our childhood is marked by this irresolvable confrontation.) In Grandrieux’s world, the cruel light of death fascinates–because it is nearly always followed by a far more savage stillness, an obscene repose that mocks the usual vertigo and maddened genuflection felt at the brink of an abyss that stretches over the monuments left behind by decay. (The oppressive godliness of an evacuated body; the sublime invocation of altered, mutilated, disrupted states.) Our gaze can endure “neither sun nor death” without being eventually obliterated. Grandrieux does not cruelly test us in this respect (he is no mere sensationalist in the manner of some of the auteurs belonging to the so-called “New French Extremity” school)–but he does engage our visual agility by harnessing gothic surfaces and chiaroscuro topologies that resist our gaze.

La vie nouvelle (2002) pushed the Grandrieux aesthetic further, into thermic implosion. Rather than placed in a suburban and rural France anatomized into caliginous hotel rooms, serrated country roads, and funereal car interiors, we are set down in an Eastern European zone (by some indications, Sarajevo) split up into lurid hotel rooms, sparse country fields, and crimsoned brothel corridors. An attempt, in Grandrieux’s words, “to open the body’s night” from where a “vibrant, disturbed materiology” emerges as the controlling logic of the film’s fractured sensorialized images. A young american G.I. visits a brothel during wartime (in this world it is always wartime even when no ostensible signs of carnage or war are visible)–falls in love with a prostitute, becomes infatuated, journeys into the underworld of sex trafficking–a katabasis from which no one emerges fully human. When he finds her she has metamorphosed into an infrared panther, bloodied and on all fours, in a block of darkness photographed from inside by “the animal warmth of […] bodies which imprints itself on the celluloid.” This encounter with a physiology blasted out of all shape and contained only by degrees of temperature brings to mind the Burkean notion of the sublime as an experience not of joy in beauty but of primal terror at the obscure and the incomprehensible. An experience of a foreign and terrible power in excess of form–a formlessness that presents itself as form.

Un lac (2008), whose opening scene I attempted to transcribe above, may be considered Grandrieux’s “purest” feature, his third. Elemental and minimal, the film returns to the Burkean sublime without the social troposphere that informs the settings of Sombre and La vie nouvelle. It is a “natural” sublime which Un lac cultivates from the ground up–an organic sublime that emerges from landscape, from the peripherality of a cold lake crowned by mist and mountainside. There is no world that exists outside of the lake–only strangers, interlopers, alchemical figures suggested by nightfall. Grandrieux’s taste for fabulistic structures remains consistent in all three films: in Sombre we gaze at the werewolf; in La vie nouvelle we regard Orpheus and Eurydice; in Un lac we glimpse the constitution and mitosis of the primordial family unit. A blind matriarch, magnetic and tactile, lives in forest wilderness with her three children, an epileptic son, Alexi (the tree feller from before), a daughter, Hege, with whom her brother appears more than infatuated, and a young boy, Johannes, who studies from afar the sacraments of love, life, and death, pondering in childish silence, while the father is away, momentarily unknowable. The germinal family’s livelihood appears to be supported (as the father/daughter unit was in Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse) by a singular, symbolical gray horse, who is ritually brushed, worshiped with human hands, adorned with soft breath and gazes. The family’s evenings are passed in what seems to be an amorphous cavernous domestic space in which they eat and speak few words or, when they do speak, recite from unopened books, sing songs of generation and passing, wash their hands, sleep, breathe–a womb of collected and hearth-warmed consciousness. The division between Outside and Inside–Sky and Shelter–Weather and Ritual–typifies their daily exchanges, their passing into and out of domesticity or elemental exposure.

In one of the film’s few dialogic moments, Alexi recites a few words that postulate a philosophy for the way of life depicted in the film: “As men die, so do beasts. There is only one soul. No man has dominion over the wind.” Alexi does not read from a text, as his blind mother presumes him to be doing, but rather holds the book she handed to him, pressed to his chest, as he recounts from memory, or improvises his own version of the book, symbolically, orally. (Homo symbolens before homo sapiens.) Tactility leads to insight, memory emerges from the collective, knowledge is animal. As Grandrieux’s previous films showed, there is little that separates humans from animals when confronted with the sublime: the human sensorium, like the animal sensorium, is one equally vulnerable to obliteration, to extinction at the sight of that which is pre-language and post-body. Viscerality, materiality, resume their precedence, out of necessity. The eye of vision–vision in the holistic sense–is complicated by this site of limitations, the body, from which it arises and to which it recalls itself–no different than the mouth or the hands or the flesh, the eye dissolves into an affective consciousness unable to sever its seeing from the seen/scene, from its being seen, from its sense of embodiment. Merleau-Ponty: “The enigma [of vision] is that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the ‘other side’ of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself.” The body is the only shelter from the sublime, yet it is also the site of limitations that makes the sublime possible–the physical confrontation with a total and form-effacing power, a force that chews the flesh, axes the limbs, digests the memory.

For Grandrieux, the viscerality of the camera–in a zone where frame and shot are no longer parameters for the seen, but deconstructed transparencies for the unseen–becomes a sensorial appendage to the spectatorial body. Desiring to generate “a pure block of sensations, passing from one to the other with enormous suddenness,” Grandrieux accelerates the camera–in similar fashion to the blur of the axe operated by the tree-feller–to a point of cellular kinship with the spectatorial eye. It is no longer the intellectual distance of the eye which is erected, but the caustic proximity of the body–an embodied eye that gropes and is groped, that finds and is found. Rodney Ramdas, following Lyotard and Laura Marks, calls this an “acinema” in which “haptic materiality” replaces the “haptic gaze”: “…the images master not just our sight but our bodies: what we experience with Grandrieux is the erasure of sight, or more precisely, the disappearance of the haptic gaze.” We may label this cinema, more generically, a sensorial cinema, one in which the human sensorium is pushed to its sensuous extremities–or, if failing that, a cinema that collapses the distance of pictorial repose and the conventions of artificed scenery in favor of a severe proximity to other molecular bodies and material processes, an accelerated intimacy that projects an afterlife for film at once sublime and defamiliarized. Of what this sensorial cinema might consist I will revisit in a second post.

Un lac, currently unavailable on dvd, is available for streaming at Vyer Films.

In “Year Zero: Faciality” (A Thousand Plateaus [1980]), Deleuze/Guattari assert that “since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system.” Contrary to the belief that faces–human faces, animal faces–project the semblance of the individual and authentic, “faces are not basically individual; they define zones of frequency and probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations […] The face itself is redundancy.” The face is surface, above all, a surface of “facial traits, lines, wrinkles,” but it is also a map, a codification, a system that oscillates between internal signification and external signature. “The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code–when the body, head included, has been decoded and has to be overcoded by something we shall call the Face.”

There is, in this disturbing removal of the head from the body, a beheading (or what Deleuze/Guattari might call the “signifiance” of the empty, the black hole puncturing the white wall) that tyrannically extracts, absorbs, and erases the animal, the motor-sensorial, from the human organism, making of the headless body an inhuman signifying machine–an ideological construct. The face swallows the body whole, does not allow it to muscularly express itself, reduces the body to a surface which is also a facialization, a white wall/black hole system that abstracts the human/animal organism and makes of it a processing machine, a screen upon which single-track theologies, epistemologies, scientologies play out their centripetal landscaping and pathmaking, the construction of creeds and crosses (to which, crucially, bodies are nailed) and the production of disciplines and disciples. The face, as redundancy, is the clearing away (or the setting apart) of the singular, the physical, the corporeal; whereas the body is that which makes its presence felt through difference as opposed to sameness, and which automatically posits a spatial obstacle to the ideological project of facialization. The Body makes of the Face a head (an extension, a mind-place, a techne), and the Face makes of the Body a face (a scriptum, a doctrine, a subject)–yet both possess the semblance of mastery which may or may not carry the same function.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012) opens, appropriately enough, with the Face, Joaquin Phoenix’s Face, helmeted, eyes peering over a rampart, gazing and uncertain. It is a single shot (reminiscent of the cover of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line [1998]) that accomplishes much using only very little screen-space, transcribing the barest and most necessary information: the scene is wartime (we figure), probably World War II (or we would have read as much), and Joaquin Phoenix is in the thick of it, an enlisted soldier, his eyes filled with a furtive apprehension at what lies before him, in a field that lies off-screen, the unseen. The unseen/off-screen, the in-effect un-facialized, presents itself here as the traumatic–Freddie Quell (played by Phoenix) returns home after the war, alongside thousands of other discharged soldiers, with what might be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (or what was ambiguously labeled in that time as “peacetime neurosis,” as opposed to “battletime neurosis”). Psychoanalytic tests are run, Quell is asked to interpret Rorschach inkblots–he answers “pussy” and “asshole” to nearly all of the patterns, seeing only orifices, juices, and sex acts, failing to see faces or even the Face in general, because he is body-oriented, of the body and its pores and passageways, a procreative, multiplied, lascivious thinker. Just prior to this libidinally charged decipherment, we see Quell, disturbed, solitary, carving and chopping away at coconuts on a tropical beach (we make out he and his fellow navy soldiers are sailing back from a finished Pacific campaign)–elsewhere, he’s masturbating quite publicly on the beach, or fucking a sandcastle woman-figure, prominent breasts and vulva and all, to the amusement of the male shipmates who architected her. Starved for flesh (for animate flesh–because he had seen, we assume, corpses), Quell (apt name) cannot quite contain the libidinal charge that seeks to strangle, to suffocate, the off-screen images he had viewed on the unseen field of the first shot. The off-screen site of trauma mutates or gives birth to the carnal pornographic body that Quell emphatically puppets and parades across the screen. Quell is all body, and Phoenix’s performance registers through its contortions and pained expressions something of the massive fury that bubbles at the surface of an evidently tormented, disturbed young man.

Oddly enough, Quell returns home only to become an Image-Maker: a department store photographer trained to assemble and take 50s-era fashion/family/holiday photos. In a sense, Quell captures the collectivized Body, only this time adorned in the advertised fashions of the period, and renders it Image. Body is replaced by Image, or as we would have it, becomes Face; the face of a new American imaginary, the capitalist phantasy of store-purchased semblances. Quell cannot last in this situation: his robust alcoholism generates problems (and not just in the civilized, high society, Mad Men way of getting plastered, but far worse and more primitive: wood alcohol, torpedo fuel alcohol, photo-lab chemical alcohol) and Quell becomes unstable in the social order of things. He loses one job, shifts to another, moves from landscape to landscape, an aimless intoxicated bullet. (Anderson directs these mesmerizing transitions in Quell’s life with all the vigor of his current “mature” style, still exultantly in that historical modus first introduced in There Will Be Blood [2001].) If Walter Salles had not already directed On the Road (2012), Anderson would have been an even better choice for director; Quell reverses the order of desire, he is Dean Moriarty in search of his Sal Paradise.

Eventually Quell meets his “master”: Lancaster Dodd (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman). “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all I am a man…a hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.” A man, in other words, of many faces, who controls each face with aplomb–a measured man, a man of measurement. Immediately offering the dialectical half to Quell’s Dionysian vagabond, Dodd embodies (though he is ostensibly less body and more cerebrum) the Apollonian perambulator. Both men are vagrants, travelers, but of fully antithetical sensibilities. Dodd, like L. Ron Hubbard–on whom the character is only partially based–is a seafaring man, like Quell, a man who seeks the ocean as Melville’s Ishmael did, as a way of “driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.” Yet there is this odd friction between Dodd’s love for boat-life and oceanic fluidity (i.e. sexual release) and that of the sublimated psychoanalysis (or, more dubiously, anti-psychoanalysis) he comes to call “The Cause,” a system of beliefs only superficially based upon what appears to be a proto-version of Scientology, namely those practices surrounding and arising from the 1950 publication of Dianetics. In formulating a path toward psychical liberation, Dodd appears to be conflicted between his libidinal self and his self-controlling “Master” image; the pictures don’t coincide. Nevertheless, the Master image (the Face of the Master) prevails, and Dodd builds up a small but devoted following of believers and practitioners. Dodd’s ownership of his own image–the many-faced man, the book-writer, the entrepreneur, the founder of systems, etc.–sharply calls to mind the torso (octave) of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94:

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.

As philosopher-philanthropist (or even as cryptic Scientologist), Dodd assumes the belief that he has the power to heal and, by extension, the power to harm as well (the harm arriving through the suppression or withdrawal of healing, or what the Cause-follower might call the necessary obfuscation of “technology”–only those willing to learn and heal are those who receive the “tech”). During their first on-screen interview, Quell’s face fascinates Dodd: “You seem so familiar to me.” Quell’s face reminds Dodd of the Face: a white wall/black hole codification which he has to “decode,” if only to prove that he can decode anyone or anything using the methods of The Cause. It isn’t until the end of the film, during the “Slow Boat to China” sequence, that we realize Dodd is decoding (perhaps) his own homoerotic attraction to Quell, but also, and more importantly, decoding or attempting to decode the techne of the Body itself, the locus of desire, or more simply, Desire in and for itself.

Dodd’s “Cause” becomes something of a failure (Anderson suggests this during a heated moment Dodd has with one of his more fervent acolytes, Helen Sullivan, played by Laura Dern)– but it has less to do with a failure of philosophy than with the success of a virtualized/vicarious existence; we learn that Dodd is all face, in the same way that Quell is all body, and as such Dodd falls prey to the image-making of which Quell–who puts his Sears photography skills to use–is himself the master. By returning to and placing focus on the Body (that is, by letting its desire-circulation flow centrifugally), Quell gains a (kind of) mastery over, or a resistance to, the ideological faciality/facialization that imprisons and delimits Dodd’s suppressed carnality–denying the face of things their due, Quell “husbands nature’s riches” without expense, that is, through a fruitful and deterritorialized dis-inheritance and all-around naturalness. Quell is at home in the world, moving from one locus or landscape to another, from one body of desire into another. (Which is not to say that The Cause does nothing for Quell: it in effect leads toward the exorcism of one failed romance and potentially introduces another; it gives him perspective [the possibility of mastery] from outside his own body.) Dodd’s final destination, on the other hand, turns out to be a massive desk in a forbidding catechistic office in England, peripherally presided over by his domineering wife, Peggy Dodd (played by Amy Adams), and left to “write books” and assemble a whole social mechanism designed primarily to ordinate, coordinate, and, incidentally, live off the desires and repressions of other people.

“Faciality is always a multiplicity.” Hence, “owners” rather than one owner, “faces” rather than one face. Deleuze/Guattari remark on the multiplicity of the black holes that grasp and puncture a surface, thus making it a face, a face covered in black holes/eyes. Sonnet 94 quite consciously plays on the proliferation of eyes (which is to say, minds, outlooks, mental perspectives) that play on the white wall/black hole structure of the “lords and owners of their faces”. Similarly, when Deleuze/Guattari write that faciality allows for “the despot or his representatives [to be] everywhere,” we glimpse this very same fact in the sonnet: “They are the lords and owners of their faces, / Others but stewards of their excellence.” The Others are both the non-“White Man face” (or the non-Christ face) that Deleuze/Guattari describe (“If it is possible to assign the faciality machine a date–the year zero of Christ and the historical development of the White Man…”) and they are also the ideological reflection of the Owners’ collective Face: the “Others” have been peremptorily facialized, and serve only as stewards to the facial code, the white wall/black hole system of The Cause, the Owners’ ideological apparatus. One face, and its systematic excellences, have been reproduced by imperializing the heads and bodies of others.

Ultimately Dodd places Quell (gives an hour and location to where he met Quell in a past life) in some fanciful past age only a fantasy writer would make up (they were guild members in the Renaissance, or they were militia men about to storm a tower, I forget which), strategically reifying the homosocial order he desires to cultivate with Quell, but more importantly, ascribing to Quell’s Dionysiac body a fantasy-fiction of Apollonian doctrine-making. Quell, formerly the “steward” of Dodd’s “excellence,” assumes the mantle of “Master” by the end, in the same way that Sonnet 94 calls into question the quality of “mastery” that the “cold people” (as William Empson calls them, in the book that brought Sonnet 94 back into popularity, Some Versions of Pastoral [1935]), seem to exert, in the legs (sestet) of the sonnet:

The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

Empson capitalizes the importance of the sestet in a way which ties neatly into the conclusion of the film: “Yet this may be the condition of the flower and the condition for fullness of life; you cannot know beforehand what life will bring you if you open yourself to it, and certainly the flower does not; it is because they are unnatural and unlike flowers that the cold people rule nature, and the cost may be too great. Or the flower and the cold person may be two unlike examples of the limitation necessary to success, one experienced in its own nature, the other in the world; both, the irony would imply, are in fact stewards.” Both are stewards, none are masters. Or Freddie Quell is the master, in himself, yet (more importantly) as himself in the physical, rather than in the bureaucratic, doctrine-making, facialized world; whereas Lancaster Dodd approaches a mastery which can only be conceivable in the far-out phantasy world he invents, a world which lies, necessarily, outside the time and space he inhabits in the body he denies.

I’m drawn to the American actor and action hero Bruce Willis. But I’m drawn more precisely to Bruce Willis drawn into himself, in that fantastical simulacrum known, conventionally, as film. I’m talking sci-fi Bruce Willis. 12 Monkeys Bruce Willis, now Looper too, and even the late Chris Marker’s La Jetée, featuring–through a leap of the imagination–a dazzling flight across time, space, and logic: Bruce Willis. But what interests me most in these films is the temporality of love, and how the genre of the time traveling sci-fi film ventures maddeningly into this crisis.

The voice over at the very beginning of La Jetée–Marker’s 1962 photo roman, on which 12 Monkeys is modeled–reminds us that moments are only made memorable by the scars they leave. Which moment, then, has scarred our protagonist, referred to only as “the man”? Does the man return to his only pure memory before World War III destroys Paris and most of the inhabitable world, the war which sends all survivors to settle underground, where the alleged victors perform scientific experiments on the empire of rats over which they preside? Or did he invent this memory as protection from the disaster that wrecks time, reducing it effectively to unconnected moments brought together in a sequential series? Although these questions persist, we must probe the wound as far as it will go.

For the man pursues this moment, just an image of a woman’s face, made into a memory because of the scars it left deep within his flesh. Indebted to this memory, he tries to trace the edges of its conception, give it life, bring forth whatever truth lies within it. And by the strike of a strange contingency that erupts out of the desolate stillness captured so painfully in Marker’s photo montage, he soon realizes that he’s already in love.

But how? An absolutely unexpected and troubling event. His love grows, and he remembers more. He walks with her in a museum, they lie in bed, they laugh. They put in time together. Though he arrives, falls, returns, and disappears sporadically (as he’s from the future and liable to the probing whims of the scientists); he cannot persist in the past. She calls him lovingly her ghost. She is already mourning his imminent death. We wonder whether we too could love a specter who slips endlessly from our grasp.

So the origin of this love is traumatic, a gaping wound that cannot be filled or understood. A great pouring of temporality rushes out of the wound as if existence itself had been punctured with holes. Some adventurous viewers would go as far as to call the man a traumanaut. Only his memory of love bears the mark of this traumatic event, whose unfolding introduces the radical possibility of the unexpected, a chance, and a play.

What we see is not the flight of a man lost in nostalgic memories or sentimental flutterings of the imagination, but his escape from the cruelest conditions that he can no longer bear. Suddenly the still images dissolve into a time-sequence, a moving picture, bringing forth an abrupt awakening of life. Love emerges, tearing apart everything else.

Perhaps we shouldn’t call Marker’s work a photo roman, but with Maurice Blanchot, a récit, for the film itself steals us away into a traumatic event that hides something unspeakable, a shattering secret, and so falls away from any conventional narrative structure. Blanchot writes in “Le Chant des sirènes“: “The récit is not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen–an event that is yet to come and through whose power of attraction the récit can hope to come into being too.” Although the event is already here, it withdraws from us, and opens a future that sings for our return. Who can watch La Jetée only once? 12 Monkeys reproduces this logic. Bruce Willis reenacts its rhythm.

In 12 Monkeys, another future is shown–a future that no longer proffers the possibility of any utopia, any dream. The future is reduced to the same. Called to travel the future by his guards, the man returns with a powerful technology that would jump start a new source of energy, the rebuilding of Paris, and the healing of the world. But time in the future is programmed, cut into mechanized points frozen onto a camera. They are moments tailored to a numerical scheme, liable to be reproduced, on the one hand, and formed in advance from the very conditions of reproducibility, on the other. The principle of repetition shadows any attempt of escape. Only his love discloses a world that is ferociously contingent, unimagined. Madness.

But one of the striking points of these time travel films, and I return here again to Bruce Willis, is that the lightning flash which brings forth the light of love cannot last once we succeed in attributing meaning to its origin. Once the effects of love neutralize its cause, then all love is lost, banished to the wastelands, thrown like so much meat to the dystopian fantasy whose constipated digestive system has no room for traumatic wounds, especially those which exceed the bounds etched out by its prison bars. In La Jétee, the man is snuffed out by one of the scientists, since the present no longer has a use for him. “He had played his part, and now they would liquidate him, together with his memory of a time twice-lived.” No, even in love, we cannot escape time.

Yet the paradox remains, rendered so clearly in 12 Monkeys. Bruce’s childhood memory of his love’s face corresponds with the image of the death of the man–his own death. He would have never fallen in love otherwise.

This brings me to Looper (and I must warn of possible spoiler details included below). In the strand from La Jétee to 12 Monkeys, we can trace the problematics of a loop hole in time, inaugurated by love. What a loop hole does is smash projects; it undermines the programs planned out by process-driven scientists, and explodes the expectation of time through the wound of love that addresses its lovers with a debt of infinite mourning and loss. The loop hole makes available the scrambling, rescrambling, and reliving of time.

But in Looper, Bruce makes a mistake. He returns to the past in order to establish the conditions that would guarantee the security of his love in the future. By doing so, the film relies on the conceit that the younger Bruce falls in love with another woman by the stroke of chance. It’s a bit sloppy, but I think the film gets it right when he has to kill himself. Not because he needs to sacrifice himself for the sake of a child gifted with extraordinary telekinetic powers, and for whom perhaps the future holds great promise only if he is raised right by a good mother (as if ethical life itself could dispense with chance), but because Bruce destroyed the conditions under which the contingent flow of his love could occur. He thus eliminated the reasons for which he would even be there.

When the man returns to his beloved image in La Jetée and in 12 Monkeys, he doesn’t know and cannot know that he is also witnessing his own death. These conditions of misrecognition are precisely what makes the contingent advent of love possible. You have to lose yourself in order for time to ruin your world and give birth to another one. Again, Bruce fails in this regard in Looper. You cannot sedate the risk undertaken in love and still have love. You have instead plain old death that is in principle reproducible on any scale, without the extraordinary romance belonging to “time-twice lived.”

In a time as bureaucratic, gentrified, and programmable as our own, the trauma of love still bears a tremendous responsibility for introducing the chance of the unknown, unexpected–for introducing the fragile duration by which the lover tends to the trauma born by his beloved. A mother’s love may just as well count here. As a mother’s love, or any parent’s, rather, is passed down to the next generation. We cannot know whether the child marked by superhuman powers will grow to be evil or good; but that is the gamble undertaken by love, a throw of the dice, and a maddeningly irrational hope holding on to the fantasy that things will be otherwise than they will have been.

* * * * *

La Jetée, Chris Marker (1962)

Portrait of the artist as a young man

Author’s Note: the following paragraphs are excerpted from a longer work on the cinema of Hollis Frampton. The remaining two sides of the pentagram have been omitted for reasons of length…and magic.

I.

In “The Myth of Total Cinema,” Andre Bazin writes that “the guiding myth…inspiring the invention of cinema, is the accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less vague fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality in the nineteenth century, from photography to the phonograph, namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time.” Total cinema—i.e. a cinema capable not merely of embodying the physical structure and multi-dimensionality of the world in all its immanent complexity, but of also developing and evolving at a pace equal to the infrastructural drift, the rise and fall, of its social spheres, its discursive zones and intersubjective layers—would remain a “myth” until film practices had advanced far enough in time to undertake the massive project of replicating nature at the axiomatic level of the real: “The real primitives of the cinema, existing only in the imaginations of a few men of the nineteenth century, are in complete imitation of nature. Every new development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema has not yet been invented!” Bazin’s essay, written in 1946, was something of a response to the aftermath of a War which had permanently scarred the psychogeography of Europe and drastically altered the stakes for artistic production in the wake of mass death, socio-historical collapse, and psychic alienation. If Total Cinema had not been invented yet, it had certainly been derailed for the time being.

Hollis Frampton's monogram signature

Twenty-five years later, and only one year after completing his masterwork, Zorns Lemma (1970), Hollis Frampton would obliquely revisit the myth of total cinema in his discourse on the “infinite film”. For Frampton, film was “a machine made of images,” but the borders conventionally limiting the machine of film to the technical boundaries of the camera, projector, and screen had considerably widened: “We are used to thinking of camera and projector as machines, but they are not. They are ‘parts.’ […] Since all the ‘parts’ fit together, the sum of all film, all projectors, and all cameras in the world constitutes one machine, which is by far the largest and most ambitious single artifact yet conceived and made by man (with the exception of the human species itself). The machine grows by many millions of feet of raw stock every day.” Film, in Frampton’s eyes, was “the Last Machine” because it had so “utterly engulf[ed] and digest[ed] the whole substance of the Age of Machines (machines and all), and finally supplant[ed] the entirety with its illusory flesh. Having devoured all else, the film machine is the lone survivor.” To the end that the film machine was composed of every projector, every screen, and every filmstrip in the world (a theory which Frampton would later adjust to include video technology and, by implication, television, laserdiscs, DVDs, media files, Youtube, etc.), Bazin’s myth of total cinema re-emerged in Frampton’s theorization of the infinite film: “The infinite film contains an infinity of endless passages wherein no frame resembles any other in the slightest degree, and a further infinity of passages wherein successive frames are as nearly identical as intelligence can make them.”

The myth of total cinema, thus, would shed its mythical skin not necessarily through the progressive advancement of image technologies (though the polyvalent reach of the screen-image had certainly made the cinematic omniverse more salient) but, rather, through the steady and patient aggregation of the film image itself; rather than basing the concept of total cinema on a perceptual and technological approximation to the substance of the real, Frampton grounds the infinite film on the possibility of its total replacement of what we, as spectators, have come to believe is real.

Elsewhere, writing this time on the “photographic agony,” Frampton “postulates an Atlantic civilization that expended its entire energy in the making of photographs.” Like Borges’ labyrinthine mirror-copulating history of Tlön, Frampton’s Atlantis shapes a massive allegory on the substitutional logic of language, specifically on the photograph’s shamanic displacement of the real:

Briefly described, [the ‘Supreme Artifact of Atlantis’] consisted in nothing less than the synthesis, through photographic representation, of an entire imaginary civilization, together with its every inhabitant, edifice, custom, utensil, animal. Great cities were built, in full scale and complete to the minutest detail, by generations of craftsmen who dedicated their skills to the perfection of verisimilitude: these cities existed only to be photographed. But the ambitions of Atlantis went far beyond this concern for mise en scène.

What was missing, of course, was precisely that, the mobile mise en scène of the camera, the expressive kinema of the image which the perceptual boundaries of the frame promised. Beyond the mere staging, the closed field, of the frame lay what Deleuze calls (in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image) the immanent “out-of-field” realm of the Open: “All framing determines an out-of-field. […] In itself, or as such, the out-of-field already has two qualitatively different aspects: a relative aspect by means of which a closed system refers in space to a set which is not seen, and which can in turn be seen, even if this gives rise to a new uneven set, on to infinity; and an absolute aspect by which the closed system opens to a duration which is immanent to the whole universe, which is no longer a set and does not belong to the order of the visible. […] In one case, the out-of-field designates that which exists elsewhere, to one side or around; in the other case, the out-of-field testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to ‘insist’ or ‘subsist,’ a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogeneous space and time. Undoubtedly these two aspects of the out-of-field intermingle constantly.” This out-of-field yielded the possibility of a duration spreading across multiple infinitudes, and these infinitudes hinted at an eternal chess movement of the camera across a cosmic checkered board, the whole closed system of the immanent frame—what could not be seen could be imagined, and what could be imagined came exponentially into view as the not-yet-seen.

Still from "Poetic Justice" (1972)

In any case, a universal library of motionless photographs threatened stagnation, would become obsolescent, because temporality kept intervening in the reception of the illusory photographic image; such a library had to account for the rates of change and stages of erosion that eat away at buildings and flatten mountains and hills into a hundred, a thousand tablelands, had to allow for the gravitational pressure and metabolic processes that consume human bodies, vegetable structures, city skylines, calcified social masses. Thus, “walls had to be gradually dirtied and effaced; buildings demolished or burned, repaired, rebuilt. Illusory machines were gradually refined. Celebrities were made to age. A sprinkling of wars, natural disasters, and social upheavals were staged with the utmost care.” Each of these molecular motions of change was documented in photographs, and the photographs, when they were assembled and placed in particular sequences, would hint at primitive animatronic manipulations. But a library containing the sum of photographic artifacts constituting the Universe could not properly call itself “the Universe” unless it was animate, unless it could be screened on a 70mm screen in technicolor, an infinite roll of film, like musical perpetuum mobile, fed into the omnivorous mouth of the film machine:

If we are indeed doomed to the comically convergent task of dismantling the universe and fabricating from its stuff an artifact called The Universe, it is reasonable to suppose that such an artifact will resemble the vaults of an endless film archive built to house, in eternal cold storage, the infinite film.

Frampton writes, “There is nothing in the structural logic of the cinema filmstrip that precludes sequestering any single image. A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema.” In the parable of Atlantis, or in Bazin’s vision of 19c entrepreneurial monomaniacs dreaming of three-dimensional “moving pictures” (in which, for instance, blue-colored avatars of real people prance through imaginary computer-generated worlds), the still photograph persists in burning on the retina the latent afterimage of its mythic import. To this effect, “cinema could already claim—from within the same nexus—a complementary feat [to that of photography]: the resurrection of bodies in space from their dismembered trajectories.”

Resurrection from the death that the photographic image inscribes on the subject doomed to terminal immobility. Resurrection from the still image through the mobile image; a revival similar to that of Tim Finnegan, in the ballad bearing his name, from a death caused by drunkenness, through the sacred spirit-restoring power of a spilled drop of whiskey. The Image kills (because it intoxicates, generates illusion)—but it also resurrects.

“Gloria!” (1979), from The Death of Magellan

II.
Metahistory (n.): 1. A rational, complex fiction assembled from the parts of disparate, unrelated, nonintersecting facts; 2. The Eisensteinian technique of vertical montage, or its effects, predicated on the horizontal plane of history; 3. The practice of historiography at the level of cinematic construction, employing the latter’s toolkit to bring to sequential or narratological order assymetrical, anachronic data, figures, images, tropes, idioms, etc.; 4. A tradition or consolidated set of forms and practices which a critical apparatus will fabricate using the psychic or literary wreckage of a previous age or any such hodgepodge of chronologies: “These fictions were what we may call metahistories of event. They remain events in themselves” (Hollis Frampton).

The metahistory, properly speaking, does not exist because it is always in the process of being invented. It is a film; the “infinite film.” What function do metahistories perform, per Frampton? “First of all, they [metahistories] annihilate naive intuitions of causality by deliberately ignoring mere temporal chronology. And then, to our own cultural dismay, they dispense, largely, with the fairly recent inventions we call facts.” Answer: metahistories erase facts by systematizing them, by putting them in such an order that the “facts” disappear, or appear to reappear as parables, stories, rational fictions, spliced filmstrips, composite images, such that they manage to clarify or illuminate existent (and frequently obscure) chronotopologies. An alchemy of the singular—of the discarded literary fragment, the jagged sun-warmed shard of glass, the mute and impotent datum—into a (chemical) condensation, the fluidic revelation, of the whole, of the filmic Open.

Fables, then, are a decisive part of the art of metahistoricizing, and Frampton is a consummate fabulist, the metahistorian by definition. Let us glance at such a one:

The first side of “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative” (1972) replicates the incidents of a recurrent nightmare that a friend describes to Frampton. (The reader is encouraged to click the link immediately above, read the first section, then skip to last sentence of the present paragraph—my summary does the fable no justice.) In the nightmare, Frampton’s friend lives through two entire lifetimes; the first is spent living out a “long, active, and passionate life,” except on the condition that it be captured entirely, moment to moment without a single instance of privacy, by an omnipresent film crew (think of The Truman Show). In the second lifetime, after experiencing death in the first, the dreamer reincarnates only to find himself forced to watch the completed film of the first life, every single minute, hour, day, and year of it, in its monstrous omnitude. Naturally, watching the cinematic events of the first lifetime completely consumes the time and subjectivity of the second—the snake winds up eating its tail, and the circle of narrative closes in on itself. But this clever Borgesian fable—its humor nevertheless disguising the doom and pith of something like Kafka’s Great Wall of China—forms only one section of Frampton’s “pentagram.” Indeed, the pentagram works as it was designed: it immediately conjures up yet another narrative, of another dream, one which a friend of my own had recounted to me many years ago, involving the revenant of James Joyce.

James Joyce, when he was not a ghost

In the dream my friend is in a car driving at a frenetic pace toward…somewhere. Next to him, seated on the passenger seat, is the finished (and, presumably, successful) screenplay adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses. The passenger side windows are turned down, the wind is racing, and the pages of the screenplay are flying out of the open window in limitless profusion; but it doesn’t matter, the screenplay remains complete, and, for whatever reason, the full body of the script remains intact and irreducible, despite the problem of the pages continuing to fly out of the car. Looking into the rearview mirror, suddenly, he notices a man racing in pursuit of his vehicle: it is Joyce. He is running madly, a superhuman with no apparent need for the velocity of an automobile. It seems Joyce has no legs: he is either floating, flying in blinding speed after him, or running so swiftly that his kinematic legs appear in a blur. In a flash Joyce is side by side with the car, on the passenger side, and the eyepatch is fixed menacingly on the offensive screenplay; as the pages fly out, Joyce’s hands—now assuming the numerosity of the arms of Avalokitesvara—collect the flying sheets and tuck them into his pants, down the crotch side, down his arse end. Joyce is furious, he demands the screenplay (or his blackly creased eyepatch demands it)—in any case he is mute, and his spectacled cyclopean eye, blinded in some vague spasm of wrath, is all that’s necessary to tell him so. It is silently understood that the Dubliner categorically refuses that any film adaptation should be made of his book. (My friend at that time was unaware that a reasonably faithful film adaptation of the novel had been made in 1967.) The dreamer remembers protesting, crying out in fear, but then it is too late: Joyce malevolently enters the vehicle (my friend remembers vividly that Joyce’s movements become bizarre at this point; the Irishman begins to move as if a penetrating strobe light had caught and interrupted the progress of his body, in a hideously mechanical rhythm like that of stop-motion animation). Joyce  proceeds to sit down next to him, lifts up his spectacles, fingers the eyepatch, and then…the dreamer wakes up. Almost instantaneously he thinks to himself, “That would make a good movie.”

III.
It could be averred that the trajectory of Frampton’s career covers the entire ground of the history of art—or, at least, it has retraced, and usefully abridged, the significant challenges and permutations which the perennial problematic of aesthetic perception, and the coeval relationship it shares with the technologic imagination, have posed during the 19th and 20th centuries. It could be proposed, on the other hand, that Frampton’s blip on the radar of history represented a fruitfully inverse correlation to the encroaching apparatus of postmodernity, so that his work-of-days came to evince the symptoms of a decidedly premodern condition; Frampton’s mind, after all, was characterized by a predominantly medievalist taste for mathematical graphs, astronomical charts, calendrical systems, Lullian computational machines.

Born in Ohio in 1936, Frampton was from the get-go a poet of verbal inclination. His early formative years were said to begin when he started writing letters to Ezra Pound in 1956, when the former was a university student, and the latter an illustrious resident at the “funny farm.” Frampton spent the years of ‘57-’58 waiting in line just to see Pound, or at least sit down by the feet of the elderly lion-maned statesman, who at that time was working on Thrones de los Cantares, 96-109, at St. Elizabeth’s. In events similar to Valéry’s encounter with Mallarmé, the younger, self-aware poet was inevitably, albeit temporarily, persuaded to take up another hobby. He moved to New York, took up painting for a time; abandoned it out of a professed distaste for “smearing gooey substances over flat surfaces”; was later compelled to chide any wayward comparisons of painting to photography (or to film for that matter, on the superficial basis that each involved the optical equipment of the eye)—as akin to “confusing the humane disciplines of cooking and dentistry because the results of both are appreciated by the mouth.” He became amorously involved in a long-standing, but conflicted, relationship to photography. Motionless photography, however, would prove inadequate to his formal ambitions: he began to imagine “sequences of photographs that were time-regulated,” in which the spectator’s optical literacy would increase with the mobilization of complex, intertextual, genre-splicing sequences. Film arrived in the form of various apprenticeships in film processing laboratories; the presence of a New York coterie of filmmaker friends—Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, and later, Paul Sharits—along with the trailblazing examples of filmmakers as diverse as Kenneth Anger, Jonas Mekas, and the “master of Rollinsville” himself, Stan Brakhage, amplified Frampton’s conviction and immersion. The seventh art would be his permanent, though not exclusive, locus. He eventually came to the realization that film and photography were not genealogically related but were ontogenetically distinct; rather than being two halves of the same operation, film and photography were “both parts of something for which we do not have a name at the present time […] which thing, once it is fully constituted, will […] constitute a kind of counter-machine for the machine of language.”

Where has the letter "A" gone?

“Zorns Lemma” (1970)

Frampton himself provides us with a characteristically self-effacing, suitably jocund autobiography, en précis:

Hollis Frampton was born in Ohio, United States, on March 11, 1936, towards the end of the Machine Age. Educated (that is, programmed: taught table manners, the use of the semicolon, and so forth) in Ohio and Massachusetts. The process resulted in satisfaction for no one. Studied (sat around on the lawn at St. Elizabeths) with Ezra Pound, 1957-58. That study is far from concluded. Moved to New York in March, 1958, lived and worked there more than a decade. People I met there composed the faculty of a phantasmal ‘graduate school’. Began to make still photographs at the end of 1958. Nothing much came of it. First fumblings with cinema began in the Fall of 1962; the first films I will publicly admit to making came in early 1966. Worked, for years, as a film laboratory technician. More recently, Hunter College and the Cooper Union have been hospitable. Moved to Eaton, New York in mid-1970, where I now live (a process enriched and presumably, prolonged, by the location) and work…

In the case of painting, I believe that one reason I stayed with still photography as long as I did was an attempt, fairly successful I think, to rid myself of the succubus of painting. Painting has for a long time been sitting on the back of everyone’s neck like a [sic] crept into territories outside its own proper domain. I have seen, in the last year or so, films which I have come to realize are built largely around what I take to be painterly concerns and I feel that those films are very foreign to my feeling and my purpose. As for sculpture, I think a lot of my early convictions about sculpture, in a concrete sense, have affected my handling of film as a physical material. My experience of sculpture has had a lot to do with my relative willingness to take up film in hand as a physical material and work with it. Without it, I might have been tempted to more literary ways of using film, or more abstract ways of using film.

The act of ridding oneself of the “succubus of painting” paralleled the act of “unlearning” one’s psychic, aesthetic, formal influences. (To reach the oily black heart of mechanism, one had to be in the belly of the medium after all.) Sculpting in time precluded the static, literary, slavishly historical function of writing in time—in this respect, the originary materiality of film (grounded in the thermoplastic film substrate of its organism) helped to “unlearn” the illusory aspect of its flat-surface paper-like images. In Frampton’s eyes, the psychic plasticity of the filmic image was coterminous with the physical plasticity of its sequence-molding mechanism. Plastic (i.e sculptural) expression prevailed over a false understanding of the image as exclusively graphic or mental. But an acceptance of its primordial illusion—of the fable or rational fiction it unavoidably crafted, for instance—was necessary toward a working acceptance of what the film machine was capable. From Pound Frampton learned that unlearning what one learned was the commencement of real work, of authentic composition. (He recalls, at this point, the balladic leitmotif of “Finnegan’s Wake”: whiskey kills but it also resurrects; the illusion of pure appearance deceives but it also enlightens.)

Since the learning, the understanding of an art consists in the recovery of its axiomatic substructure, we can begin to say that the “unlearning” that Pound cites as indispensable to new creation consists in the excernment, castigation, and transvaluation of that axiomatic substructure. New composition, then, may be seen as an activity synonymous, if not coterminous, with the radical reconstitution of the embedding code.

There are two modes of learning the code of composition, per Frampton: “reading,” and “misreading.” Concomitantly, there are four modes of reading: substitution, constriction, augmentation, displacement. Each of these four modes represents, paradoxically, the possibility of a misreading which leads toward an unlearning (a recombining) of any given work’s axiomatic structure:

But if we examine words, whether as a system of marks ordered upon a surface, or a system of sounds disturbing the air, we can discover no difference between the manner in which they denote and the manner in which they connote. It is possible, then, to view the denotation of a word as no more than that particular term in a series of connotations which has, through the vicissitudes of history, won the lexicographical race. In a word, a denotation is nothing more than the most privileged among its fellow connotations. In Finnegans Wake Joyce, while implicitly accepting the assumption that words are made up of parts, displaces the privilege of the denotation, making of the word a swarm of covalent connotations equidistant from a common semantic center. Which such connotations will be identified with the notation, then, is decided in each case not within the cellular word but through interaction with its organic context.

One may read the above as yet another definition—in a series of denotations dueling with competitive connotations—of what metahistory sets out to do. Joyce’s displacement of “The Ballad of Finnegan’s Wake” (which is to say, his reading/misreading of it) assumes the size and order of the novel Finnegans Wake, sans apostrophe, an ownerless entity that furnishes new readings with each change in reader; similarly, Frampton displaces a single corollary from the set theory proposition of “Zorn’s lemma” (“Every partially ordered set contains a maximal fully ordered subset”) and generates a reading/misreading that assumes the size and order of the film Zorns Lemma, sans apostrophe, an ownerless entity that furnishes new readings with each change in spectator. (Another example: one pentagram leads to the spatial construction of another less soluble, if you turn it upside down.)

“A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face.” In response, Frampton tests the veracity of an axiom he dubs “Brakhage’s Theorem” (in recognition of Brakhage’s role in establishing its axiomatic nature); the theorem describes the third inevitable condition for the production of film art, narrative, the first being the physical limitation of the frame itself, the second being the “plausibility” of the image (or its ability to generate a visually sustainable illusion by recalling to mind an existent or imaginable referent in the real world).

BRAKHAGE’S THEOREM: For any finite series of shots [‘film’’] whatsoever there exists in real time a rational narrative, such that every term in the series, together with its position, duration, partition, and reference, shall be perfectly and entirely accounted for.

Which is to say, narrative is inevitable and unavoidable, so long as there are pieces that can be grasped, arranged, and retrieved by either the frame, the image, or the spectatorial mind. (A Coleridgean idea perchance?) For every still photograph, there are an infinity of frames behind it, and an infinity of frames in front of it, lying in narratological ambush; equally, for every displaced literary fragment or ripped-out page of text, there is an eternal library in which a dust-clogged book happens to be missing a page. What can be critically apprehended can be materially and psychically re-adjusted, re-placed, re-positioned. Frampton reasoned that if narrative self-generates through the mere appearance of matter (since matter, according to Grosseteste, is inseparable from form/narrative), then the metahistory of film provided a viable solution in concretizing the immaterial specter of narrative. The tyrannical machine of language (whence originated the specter of narrative) would no longer pose a problem so long as there was a counter-machine to meet it at the other end.

Autobiography, the first and last narrative, was, alas, an inescapable condition. If we were to shoot an odyssean arrow through the small hoops that outline Frampton’s career, we would start at the verbal origins of all art, at poetry, and continue into the sphere of painting (nearly as old), then progress through the recently discovered continent of photography, take a long and winding turn at the electric circle of cinema, and complete a final volta back to poetry, i.e. to a freshened rhetoric of images that has, by this point, engulfed the verbal anachronisms of language. The impossible arrow would thread a robust and imperfect circle, a Magellan-like circumnavigation of the overlapping worlds of language.

What remains of nostalgia

 “(nostalgia)” [1971] from Hapax Legomena

To be continued…

“I think that redemption, or enlightenment, or some sort of truth is found very close to destruction,” said director Benh Zeitlin in a recent interview in The Atlantic, referring to his wildly popular indie film, Beasts of the Southern Wild. “It’s in the most extreme situations where you find this, where you get this abandon that allows you to understand yourself or understand other people. It’s part of what fascinates me about Louisiana.”

In these remarks, Zeitlin hits on some of the more challenging questions raised by Beasts. What does apocalypse reveal? How would the ruins wrought by an apocalyptic story uncover anything but the hopeless trace of their own disaster? Why would Sodom reduced to ashes uncover anything? Or another civilization flooded out by a vindictive God’s wrath — only for a lone Ark to preserve civilization, and bring it some promise of renewal?

Hollywood, of course, is obsessed with the destruction of the world. Usually these films are an excuse for extravagant special effects and awesome bouts of catastrophe, or at least scenes of Bruce Willis demonstrating his insurmountable cinematic sacrifices. But sometimes they take eschatology fairly serious, following in the tradition of religious and poetic texts struck by visions of the end, or historical events in which particular catastrophes resemble the end on a macrocosmic scale.

It makes sense that now, during the Great Recession, in a period during which it is no longer surprising to talk about the decline of America, or the imminent collapse of a post-Fordist capitalist economy, and, yes, our inevitable march into global climate change–including drought across the Mid-West precedented only by the Dust Bowl–that stories of the end would tear right into what we fear most. So despite whatever critiques apply readily to these films, I’m still turning over in my head both Beasts and, on the opposite side of the Hollywood funding scale, Christopher Nolan’s final chapter to his Batman Trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. But to get anywhere into the meat of these films, I’m afraid I’ll have to spoil something of their plots, so consider yourself forewarned.

* * * * *

In the final scenes of Beasts, our pint-sized protagonist, Hushpuppy, finally confronts the mythical gods of destruction, monstrously large hog-like creatures called the Aurochs. After being frozen in the polar ice caps for thousands of years, the Aurochs have been released by powerful forces unbeknownst to Hushpuppy. Running and stampeding from even farther south, the Aurochs approach the Bayous of Louisiana.

We never know for sure whether these beasts of the southern wild are only figments of Hushpuppy’s imagination, her way of coming to understand the destruction and loss all around her. But once Hushpuppy hears of their legendary past from an elder, she cannot shake them. The waters are rising in her mythical bayou home, “The Bathtub”–a town filled with a resilient and self-sufficient people who celebrate more than they labor, even if many would call their lives impoverished and indecent. There they live, on the “wrong side of the levee,” where many refuse to leave, even if their home cannot last, even if a disastrous hurricane nears. Hushpuppy’s father demands the strength from her to preserve, to sustain herself when everything is thrown into the balance.

So the Aurochs shadow Hushpuppy’s survival of the flood; they precipitate her search for an absent mother whom she has never known; and they haunt her struggle to negotiate the disease that rattles her father to his death bed. The destruction of Hushpuppy’s world resembles how we would imagine the end of the world: the loss of family, of social bonds, of all there is that gives life meaning and value, holds it together. This imagining–the myth or legend of prophecy–brings about real effects, slowly uncovering from the detritus whatever it is that we are all running from. Hushpuppy’s small world located on the fringes of America seemingly has consequences that reverberate, penetrate the marrow of the land, and linger with you.

Yet, when Hushpuppy encounters these gods that stamp out human life wherever they go, she is not afraid. She is not angry. And she does not pick a fight. Instead, she says, strangely, with a wavering confidence: “You are kind of my friend.” And with that, the Aurochs regard each other cautiously, and then retreat.

* * * * *

Another mythical city is on the verge of destruction in The Dark Knight Rises. Gotham, the modern city, even the great city, is in decay, induced to structural collapse, systematic dissolution. It’s contaminated yet again by a poison from both the outside and inside. At a pivotal moment where Gotham’s fate seems sealed, our brutal villain, Bane, abandons Bruce Wayne/Batman in an abyssal prison located somewhere in the deserts of “a more ancient part of the world.”

Behind bars, a defeated Batman must watch the live broadcast of Gotham’s annihilation. Since he doesn’t fear his own death, as Bane growls through his crablike metal mask in one of the films many extended explanatory dialogues, Batman must be tortured in this way. Only thereafter, purged of his purpose, shall he finally have Bane’s permission to die. Batman’s punishment here is admittedly quite cruel. Failing to fulfill his impossibly demanding debt to save the city–a debt assumed so many years before upon the murder of his parents–Batman would be ultimately consumed by his debt, his world torn asunder. What does he fear now? The answer is one of impressive self-sacrifice, even absolute self-renunciation: Rotting in his prison cell, not being able to save Gotham.

Yet Batman’s prison guards provide the hope of an old legend: A child born into what they call “hell on earth” once scrambled up the rocky walls and escaped to freedom. So against all odds Batman takes to push-ups and pull-ups, preparing his body for the climb out of darkness. After a couple failed attempts in an unlikely scene with a climbing rope, he gives up on the support, and rekindles his fear of death. His fear is not to be mastered nor overcome, but brought into play. And just like the child, he finally climbs out of the void, spit back into the suffocating desert.

We soon learn that it was not Bane who made this escape but his partner in the villainous project of world destruction, Miranda, who was born in the pit and protected by Bane as a last symbol of innocence. That innocence was soon lost. After escaping, she seeks out her father, who in one of those lovely Nolan twists, turns out to be the mercenary whose own exploits to purify Gotham were thwarted in the first film. They had joined the League of Shadows, but Bane had become too monstrous and was cast out, followed by his beloved. Like Batman, Miranda had daddy issues, too. Upon her father’s death, she assumes his guilt: The world must be wiped clean. Gotham destroyed. A horizon of renewal only possible within the ashes of a civilization brought to burn because its decadence was so excessive that nothing could save it. Miranda, happy to die with the destruction, doesn’t care much for contributing to the alleged dawn after the darkest hour of the night.

Christopher Nolan finds no room for friendship with the forces of destruction in The Dark Knight Rises. Once social structures fail Gotham, the police banished to the sewers, the law rendered null, and politicians stripped of their operative power, Bane’s reign of terror plagues the streets. Only an unidentified masked hero, a vigilante propping up the normal apparatuses of the city, can save its people from the horrors of this terrorist state, masquerading as an anarchic gesture: to give the power back to the people. Since the people congregate within the inoperative city only under the threat that a nuclear explosion will wipe them out if they don’t stay within its limits–despite a couple scenes of rich Gothamers being robbed and thrown out into the wintry streets–there’s not much revolutionary fervor in the air.

Batman’s last act of redemption ultimately embodies something at the very heart of the myth belonging to the American super hero. The contamination is expunged; institutional frameworks of law and policing re-established; the market economy stabilized. What the story reaffirms for us is that, in Gotham, social structures fumble because of the greed and corruption of its duty-bound functionaries, or the episodic madness of its citizenry, or, finally, the “necessary evil” it comes to endure at the hands of misguided terrorists, who despite all appearances of outsider status, are in fact citizens. In short, Gotham disintegrates only because of ethical aberrations, not any systematic injustice immanent to the city’s life itself. In the myth of Gotham, corruption is therefore fundamentally an ethical issue. Cleanse the city of organized crime, give the judiciary, governing, and police apparatuses teeth to fight criminals, and you’ll establish the ordered conditions for decent people to lead decent, even inspired lives.

Whatever we make of Hushpuppy’s friendship with the gods of destruction in the Bathtub–that majestically peripheral American city exempt from those social institutions whose functions regulate, form, and enforce–it is something quite unlike Batman’s tremendous effort to not overcome his fear of death, but to use it to his favor. What I mean is that Batman taps into his fear of his own death, and the fear of death tied to his own mythical identity–the undoing of Gotham–in order to become ever more powerful. He puts his fear to work. And this labor reinvests the city with a meaning that defends its livelihood, and purpose. The city being in crisis justifies the need for Batman’s vigilante work, on the one hand, and contributes to re-establishing the well-founded order of the social institutions underlying the city, on the other. What is disturbing is that Batman’s decisions in Gotham’s perpetual state of emergency make all the difference. And, in this case, that difference is just to get rid of the bad guys.

Another way of putting it, in the simplest terms possible, is that the police win. I’d echo the Joker’s plea here from the second film: Gotham deserves a better class of villain.