NARRATIVE MORTALITY

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NARRATIVE MORTALITY
Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas

Catherine Russell

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London
Copyright 1995 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

"Wim Wenders: Film as Death at Work" was previously published in

slightly different form as "The Life and Death of Authorship in Wim
Wenders' The State of Things," Canadian Journal of Film
Studies/Revue Canadienne d'Etudes Cinematographiques; reprinted
with permission. Parts of this book were also previously published in
Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film,
ed. Christopher Sharrett (Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press,
1993); reprinted with permission of the publisher.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Russell, Catherine, 1959-
Narrative mortality : death, closure, and new wave cinemas /
Catherine Russell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Death in motion pictures. I. Title.
ISBN 0-8166-2485-2 (he: acid-free paper)
ISBN 0-8166-2486-0 (pbk: acid-free paper)
PN1995.9.D37R87 1994
791.43'654—dc20 94-17542

The University of Minnesota is an

equal-opportunity educator and employer.
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Narrative Mortality 1

1. Beyond Pleasure: Lang and Mortification 31

2. Wim Wenders: Film as Death at Work 67

3. Oshima Nagisa: The Limits of Nationhood 105

4. Jean-Luc Godard: Allegory of the Body 137

5. American Apocalypticism: The Sight of the Crisis 173

Conclusion: The Senselessness of Ending 209

Notes 227

Bibliography 253

Index 263

v
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M any people have been extremely helpful in the development of

the work that has become this book. I cannot thank Ivone Mar-
gulies enough for her constant support, her attentive reading, and her
generous criticism. Bill Simon and Bob Stam at New York University
encouraged me to pursue a research project that was both ambitious
and idiosyncratic. The generous, perceptive, and creative readings
by Bart Testa and Paul Arthur helped me enormously to focus and
structure the study. Dana Polan's input was also instrumental at an
early stage in the project. Biodun Iginla at the University of Minnesota
Press took an interest in the manuscript at a critical point, and both
David Desser and Tom Conley offered perceptive readings. In addi-
tion, several anonymous readers provided me with helpful readings
for which I am very grateful. I would also like to thank my family,
my friends, and my colleagues at Queen's University and Concordia
University for their support and assistance. Thanks also to Joanne
Sloane, Alison Cuddy, and Angela Fong, who provided excellent as-
sistance in preparing the manuscript.
Some of the following material has been previously published in the
Canadian Journal of Film Studies and Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic
Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film, edited by Christopher Sharrett.
The book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother, Jean
Russell, who died at the age of ninety-two in 1991.

vu
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INTRODUCTION

NARRATIVE MORTALITY

For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less

intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which
produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the
withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our
modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of
ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. — ROLAND BARTHES

D eath may once have been "tamed" by social representations, but

it is now indisputably "wild," a signifier adrift in the cultural image
bank. Death remains feared, denied, and hidden, and yet images of
death are a staple of the mass media. As medical and health technolo-
gies continue to battle mortality with as little success as ever, news
broadcasts prioritize stories according to the number of deaths in-
volved. Such is the paradox of the absence of death from daily lived
experience on the one hand and its omnipresence in the media on the
other. Rather than regard this as a problem, though, we should be pre-
pared to understand this wildness as an opening up of representation.

1
2 Introduction

At the end of a feature film, where death is expected by viewers

and consistently supplied by filmmakers, death is still often "tamed"
by the sense of an ending. At other times it is not. This book is con-
cerned with a cinema in which death and closure come together with
difficulty, with vengeance, and with a strong sense of historical dif-
ference, a cinema that grasps death as a discourse of temporality, rep-
resentation, and the body. The paradox of death—its spectacular and
taboo status—will not be thereby "explained," but explored as a po-
litical terrain.
It was during the international overhaul of cinematic conventions
of the 1960s and 1970s that this terrain was mapped out. The various
"New Wave" cinemas of North America, Europe, Japan, and Brazil had
distinctive stylistic and cultural programs, but the spectacle of death
consistently overwhelmed narrative closure and destabilized repre-
sentation. This book is about the ways that films of the French Nou-
velle Vague, as well as the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s, and the
American genre revisionism and New German Film of the 1970s, en-
gage with the fatalism of classical representation in radical and pro-
ductive ways.1
The term "narrative mortality" refers to the discourse of death in
narrative film. It is a discourse produced by reading/viewing as much
as it is by writing/filmmaking; it is both a critical method and a dis-
cursive practice. Narrative mortality is an "undoing" or "reading" of
the ideological tendency of death as closure. It is a practice of resis-
tance, with aspirations toward a radical politics of filmic narrativity.
Narrative mortality is a method of understanding the function of nar-
rative endings in the politics of representation, a means of moving
beyond formalist categories of "open" and "closed" endings, as well
as mythic categories of fate and romance.
The films that have been chosen for textual analysis span four de-
cades, mapping a course through a highly intertextual and intercultural
film history within which the New Wave cinemas flourished. These films
are Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Fritz Lang, 1956), Lightning Over Wate
(WimWenders, 1980), The State of Things (Wenders, 1982), Cruel Sto
of Youth (Oshima Nagisa, I960), Boy(Shonen) (Oshima, 1969), LeM s
(Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), Pierrot lefou (Godard, 1965), and Nashville
(Robert Altman, 1975). These texts have been chosen for method-
ological reasons, as the exemplary means of indicating the scope of
 Introduction 3

narrative mortality, as well as its different cultural and historical per-

mutations within the various contexts of narrative and psychoanaly-
sis (Lang), realism and authorship (Wenders), politics and national-
ism (Oshima), intertextuality and genre (Godard), and spectacle and
sacrifice (Altman—as well as Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah).
Mortality in these films does not provide a means of wrapping
things up, but more often, a violent means of condemning "closure"
as a narrative and historical event. The conventions of cinematic nar-
rative, as they were developed out of the bildungsroman tradition of
literary narrative, codified the desire for meaning as a desire for mean-
ingful death, and the desire for ending was formalized as a desire for
death.2 The isomorphism of life and narrative in the bildungsroman
tradition collapses history onto identity.3 In an era of atomic weapons,
multinational capitalism and sociocultural heterogeneity, neither "iden-
tity" nor history can be so neatly parceled out. The films in question
here consistently split death from closure, and prevent meaning and
ending from fitting neatly together. While the death of a protagonist
may often be interpreted psychologically as the loss of an ideal, the
spectacular representation of violent death suggests that loss is also
articulated on the level of the image and the very language of repre-
sentation. Narrative mortality is thus an allegory of the limits of rep-
resentation, an allegory produced through an interpretive reading of
the texts in question.
Since the Second World War, narrative mortality has become an
allegorical structure with a range of possibilities. The separation of
death from closure has been a key means by which filmmakers have
represented the social transformations of the second half of the twen-
tieth century—from cold war divisiveness, through the antiauthori-
tarianism of the 1960s, the "death of myth" in the 1970s, and the "death
of the subject" in the 1980s. The analysis of narrative mortality en-
ables us to theorize these cultural discourses within the spectacular
and temporal terms of cinematic representation. As terrorism, tele-
vised war, and transportation accidents have so greatly revised mor-
tality on an international scale, narrative strategies conventionally in-
formed by metaphysical and organic notions of mortality have also
undergone revision.
From the explosive radioactive flashes at the end of Kiss Me Deadl
(1955) and Dr. Strangelove (1963), and the extended slow-motion
4 Introduction

embrace of a dead killer by his brother at the end of The American

Soldier (Fassbinder, 1970), to the afterlife of Raoul Ruiz's Life Is a
Dream (1987) in which everyone sits around bleeding from head
wounds, the coincidence of death and closure takes place on the site
of a fragmentation of the filmic illusion of reality. During the second
half of this century, filmmakers have exploited death in film as a
privileged point of potential destabilization. The cinematic preoccu-
pation with violence is not coincidental, and not simply historical.
Both death and film are negotiations with absence: just as film is
nothing but images, death is nothing except its various representa-
tions. Death is little more than the discourses around it (funeral, legal,
and medical languages), and the historical and fictional narratives in
which it is inevitably included.
Pulling apart death and closure is symptomatic of a larger ten-
dency within critical theory to "deconstruct" the process of significa-
tion and place the necessity of referentiality in question. The key theo-
retical tools for the present project, which is at once a process of
textual exegesis, historiography, and redemption, are provided by Wal-
ter Benjamin's diverse body of writing. For Benjamin, death is the
emblem of historical transience, of irreversible change, and also of
the singularity of historical experience. Moreover, it is in photographic
reproduction that this discourse is most significantly inscribed. Ben-
jaminian deconstruction will be developed here as a freeing of his-
torical time from the mythic time of human mortality. Benjamin's no-
tions of mortification, allegory, historiography, memory, and cultural
practice are not, however, liberationist principles. Nor is his conception
of redemption, which is above all a theory of historical imagination
founded on the "ruins" of modernity, on decay and fragmentation.
Although this book draws on many of Benjamin's texts, the key
source for his theory of mortality is The Origins of German Tragic
Drama. This study of Trauerspiel, which was never accepted as a
thesis by the faculty at Heidelberg, was written during the Weimar
Republic.4 Benjamin's challenge to Romantic literary theory was writ-
ten under the sign of modernity. In his subsequent study of Baude-
laire and the Paris Arcades, the theory of allegory was further devel-
oped within that modernist context. Finally, in his 1936 essay on
Nicolai Lescov, Benjamin comes to understand death in narrative as
the sign of history. His conception of modernity is a theory of mourn-
 Introduction 5

ing, but not one of nostalgia: "The epoch in which man could believe
himself to be in harmony with nature has expired." This is the point
at which "death is either the leader or the last wretched straggler."5
Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory presumes a theory of history
in which the "temporal index" of the past is embodied in the ruin, in
the photograph, and in allegorical representation.6 If, for Benjamin,
historical possibility lies in the articulation of dialectical memory, the
basic structure of the cinema — in which the past (the existence of
the profilmic) and the present (the time of viewing) are in continual
collision—might be fundamentally allegorical. As repetition becomes
a dynamic passage through history, it is emblematized in the repre-
sentation of death. As a "ruin" of the performance of the body, the
image is radically split between the sign of death and its referent—
an idea tacked onto a body: a presence and a past. The cinematic allu-
sion to the profilmic moment is therefore the key to historical redemp-
tion in narrative film. Narrative mortality engages the representational
capacity of the cinema as a threshold of loss and redemption.
Jiirgen Habermas has referred to Benjamin's historiography as a
"rescuing critique," but he is skeptical of Benjamin's antievolutionary
conception of history. The critique of "progress" from the perspec-
tive of historical materialism undermines the process by which social
transformation might "realistically" come about. Habermas comments:
"Shock is not an action, and profane illumination is not a revolution-
ary deed."7 The importance of Benjamin is not the anticipation of
historical catastrophe, however, but the ability to comprehend catastro-
phe as an allegory of history. "The notion of a present which is not a
transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop,"8 is
only available through the mortification of teleological thought. To
blast open the myth of fate is the only means of producing a dialec-
tical image of history—an allegorical image of the impossibility of
visualizing that which has yet to become history.
Habermas himself offers a way out of his own critique when he
suggests that it is as criticism, as redemptive mortification, that Ben-
jamin's thought might be reconciled with "a materialist theory of social
evolution." Benjamin's "differentiated concept of progress opens a per-
spective" in which "the idea of the revolution as the process of form-
ing a new subjectivity must ... be transformed."9 In contrast to ideo-
logical critique and consciousness-raising, the Marxist cultural theories
6 Introduction

to which Habermas compares Benjamin's radical theology, "rescuing

critique" enables the redemption of a cultural history that is not sim-
ply one of "affirmative culture," but that preserves the secret of his-
torical difference necessary to Utopian thought. Rather than a new
subjectivity, the revolutionary moment depends on the mortification
of subjectivity as the model of historical temporality.
The interpretation of films as allegories of narrative mortality is
intended to realize a politics of representation implicit in the cinema
of the last half of the twentieth century. Fredric Jameson has theorized
the allegorical reading of culture as criticism that seeks to transform
the historical real that lies outside the textual object itself.10 He has
defined allegory as the intellectual grasp of
phenomena about which we are at least minimally agreed that
no single thought or theory encompasses any of them....
Allegorical interpretation is then first and foremost an
interpretive operation which begins by acknowledging the
impossibility of interpretation in the older sense, and by
including that impossibility in its own provisional or even
aleatory movements.11

As a critical strategy, then, narrative mortality is an interpretation of

texts that mortifies ostensible "meanings" in order to grasp their mean-
inglessness as semantic energy.
Cinematic mortification refers to the killing of the "eternal present
tense" of cinematic realism, and is both an act of critical viewing and
a stylistic effect of filmmaking. Narrative mortality refers to the effect
of mortification on the construction of desire and temporality in nar-
rative cinema. I will argue that it allows for forms of desire other than
those institutionalized in patriarchal commodity culture to emerge:
forms of historical temporality other than those closed by the unified
subject or heterosexual couple. It allows cinematic narrative to move
beyond the pleasure of "meaning" and toward other pleasures that
lie beyond representation, beyond the end of the film and the known
limits of history.
A familiar closure device in narrative film is the montage of images
that precedes, follows, or is intercut with a character's death. The
images, drawn from the narrative that has just unfolded, effectively
 Introduction 7

bind the viewer's memory with the character's summing up of his

or her life at the moment of death. Another conventional means of
achieving this is the familiar narrative structure that opens with the
death to which the narrative will return.12 These are only two of the
more familiar ways in which, at the end of a film, death has an osten-
sible authorization of "meaning," uniting the film's imagery into a
single figuration of identity.
If the threat of death is a threat of disappearance, loss, and absence,
the disavowal of death is a confirmation of presence, mastery, and
meaning. Narrative mortality involves the return of the repressed fear
of death, often in the form of excessive violence, outside of the para-
meters of "meaning," outside the existential quest for meaning. The
sight of the corpse, as well as the corporeality of film—its materiality
and historicity—become markers of the transience of history and
the impermanence of both the "self" and the present tense.
The allegorical historiography of narrative mortality understands
the textual form of history to be not only imagistic, but structural, giv-
ing shape to temporal imagination. To argue that history takes tex-
tual form in the various relations between death and ending is not to
say that history is an "absent cause" of textuality.13 The text itself must
be understood as historical, as should its interpretation, and yet the
methodology of allegorical criticism presented in The Political Un-
conscious remains a valuable means of negotiating historical determi-
nation and textual openness. Jameson's three stages of criticism take
the critic from (1) the "act" of the text, the way that it articulates so-
cial contradictions, through (2) its status as a socially consumed
"ideologeme," to (3) the identification of an ideology of form. Jame-
son's methodology provides an excellent model for the different lev-
els on which narrative mortality operates as a cultural, textual, and
critical phenomenon.

The Denial of Death

As a symbolic act, the representation of death in film upholds the

law of the text: the believability of the image. Insofar as this belief
depends on the denial of the film's celluloid status, its twenty-four-
frames-a-second "mortal" state, the illusion of reality sustains itself
8 Introduction

through a strict censorship of this reminder. The denial of death is

likewise a cornerstone of social institutions and practices. The con-
temporary denial of death is coextensive with the depletion of myth-
ical assurances of its meaningfulness. In so many stories about victims
and criminals, this meaninglessness has been codified as failure in a
culture devoted to "progress."14
Philippe Aries has identified five grand historical variations in the
Western, Christian world in which fear and denial emerge only toward
the end of the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, "society
no longer tolerates the sight of things having to do with death, includ-
ing the sight of the dead body or weeping relatives. The bereaved is
crushed between the weight of his [sic] grief and the weight of the
social prohibition."15 By the late twentieth century, this contradiction
has taken on the monstrous proportions of medical technology and
media violence that push the mortal body and the rhetoric of mourn-
ing out of the realm of the visible.16
The displacement of death into discourses of excess and hysteria
is a familiar strategy of melodrama, a narrative form that was refined
on the nineteenth-century stage and institutionalized in Hollywood
film. The "denial of death" also gives rise to existential notions of
mortality as a failure of mankind to "tame" or be reconciled with na-
ture. Ernst Becker argues that the repression of the fear of death is a
repression of humanity's "creatureliness," or mortal participation in
nature. For him, the denial of death is the primary stimulant of cre-
ative consciousness, the motive force behind heroism and genius in
Western culture.17 In this mind/body theory of mortality, confronta-
tion with death is only meaningful within the convention of denial.18
The "denial of death" is a model of repression and liberation not
unlike that which Michel Foucault has analyzed in terms of sexuality
in the nineteenth century.19 A new theory of mortality is only possi-
ble through the deconstruction of the conventions of denial. Today,
in the medical industry as well as the printed and visual mass media,
we have an obsession with death that corresponds to the confes-
sionals and institutional regulations of the Victorians regarding sex,
and likewise challenges any theory of its repression. Today sexuality
is represented fairly freely, and death (actual as opposed to enacted)
is the stuff of pornography.20 It is hidden in the sociologists' meticu-
 Introduction 9

lous counts of murder on prime-time TV as much as it is in the snuff

film. Alongside the "pornography of death" is the legitimized discourse
of its denial and obfuscation.
The taboos that mark the discourse of death are symptomatic of
the way that its denial authorizes forms of empowerment. In "The
Ideology of Death," Herbert Marcuse argues that "ontological neces-
sity" has been historically grafted onto biological inevitability to the
point at which the natural, organic, and individual event of dying
has been entirely "appropriated":21

Death is an institution and a value: the cohesion of the social

order depends to a considerable extent on the effectiveness
with which individuals comply with death as more than a
natural necessity; on their willingness, even urge to die many
deaths which are not natural; on their agreement to sacrifice
themselves and not to fight death "too much." ... The
established civilization does not function without a
considerable degree of unfreedom; and death, the ultimate
cause of all anxiety, sustains unfreedom.22

In Marcuse's model, the teleology of capitalism, no less than philo-

sophical existentialism and theological redemption, alienates individ-
uals from their own deaths. What Marcuse refers to as "ontology"
and "essential necessity" in the context of the metaphysical appro-
priation of death is most basically the way death is situated in dis-
course— its various signifiers. Death is rendered as failure and sacri-
fice only through the narratives in which it is inscribed; narrative is
the means by which Thanatos is "appropriated" by social forces. In
this sense, mortality poses a major threat to medical technology and
the ideology of progress that subtends it, as recent euthanasia debates
have suggested.23
The premise of Marcuse's theory is a theology of freedom, a Utopian
conception of Thanatos in a nonrepressive society, and his neo-Freud-
anism ultimately falls to Foucault's critique of the "repressive hypoth-
esis."24 Although it would be easy to dispense with Marcuse's thought
in a post-Marxist and post-Christian world as illusory countercultural
rhetoric of the 1960s, the concept of Utopia is important to retain as a
sociohistorical form of desire. Jameson endorses a "hermeneutics of
10 Introduction

freedom" as a historical dialectic that "keeps alive the possibility of a

world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a
stubborn negation of all that is."25 Utopian forms of historical desires
were in any case vital to the aesthetics and politics of many New
Wave filmmakers.
The symbolic act of death as closure mystifies Utopian thinking in
the form of memory, grounding the idea of Utopia in the "memory
of gratification"26 (e.g., the matching of opening and closing imagery
in film narrative). Its force is due to the combined mythic paradises
of maternal and Edenic pleasures. Mortality is, of course, not "liber-
ated" from discourse by the binding of Thanatos to Eros in originary
myths of the mother or nature, any more than it is in Marcuse's
Marxism. But even if there can be no freedom from discourse or cul-
tural forms, as Foucault insists, I believe there can be a discourse of
desire that is also a discourse of mortality. Narrative mortality is the
allegorical means of wrenching memory and the structure of histori-
cal difference implicit in Utopian thought from their mystification. It
is not only made available in the fragmentation of narrative closure,
but is written across the co-optation of desire in the commodity cul-
ture of postindustrial society.
As Marcuse's liberationist sociology was written within the histori-
cal specificity of the postwar "culture industry," Walter Benjamin's
historiography was a response to the emergence of consumer culture
in nineteenth-century Paris and the rise of fascism in Europe between
the world wars. Benjamin's theories of allegory and mortification
provide the means by which Utopian ideation might be separated
from the technocratic myths of progress and development that be-
came reified in the twentieth century. In the world exhibitions of the
last century, Benjamin identifies the commodity as a "dead object."
As the exchange value of commodities was privileged over their use-
value, the Utopian element of industrial culture becomes legible as
fashion, which, he says, "represents the rights of the corpse":27 ma-
terial objects allegorically separated from their symbolic function.
Benjamin's theory of history involves a grasping of mortality, not
in response to its cultural repression and disavowal but to its mystifi-
cation; he provides the critical tools for releasing the death drive and
the power of repetition from their symbolic function in representa-
tion. Whereas repression theories of mortality are based on an onto-
 Introduction 11

logical distinction between nature (the mortal body) and conscious-

ness, Benjamin's theory of mortality recognizes their common forms
of memory and desire. Utopian imagination, which Marcuse conceives
of as a liberation from the closure of mortality, is for Benjamin a desire
for the closure of mortality along with the knowledge of its impossi-
bility. His emphasis on fashion, novelty, and commodity fetishism
locates this structure of Utopian imagination squarely within the phan-
tasmagoria of modernity, of which the cinema is emblematic. The
revolutionary potential of dialectical images, the shock of awakening
from the dream of technology, involves not a memory of gratification
but the memory of transformation, transience, and change.
As a symbolic act, the representation of death in film has two basic
parameters, the political and the aesthetic, which will be introduced in
chapters 1 (Lang) and 2 (Wenders), respectively. They come together
through the themes of "believability" and denial. In Lang's Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt, death will be seen to be legislated by textual and
judicial paternal authorities, taking place offscreen, between frames,
and just outside the frame. As the sign of censorship and repression,
death figures divisively, separating individuals from society and its
discourses of containment. The exclusion of the criminal/communist/
delinquent from "society" is accomplished in this narrative through a
radical repression of subjective desire in the repetitions of the status
quo. Social and textual contradictions between viewer and text, indi-
vidual and society, are apparently resolved in the instantiation of death
as closure in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. But at the same time, be-
cause the believability of the image is placed in question, a mortal
gap is opened that lays bare the implicit strategies of containment.
A similar "act" will be identified in Oshima's film Boy, in which
death mediates the individual's social construction and negotiates
the believability of the social order. In the different perceptual appa-
ratus of Boy, though, and within the different politics of representa-
tion in Japan, the inscription of subjectivity through the phenome-
nology of vision has a different status. Narrative mortality in this film
yields a discovery of absence, not as negation but as a subject of and
in discourse, and a means of resisting the process of interpellation that
suicide in Japan traditionally embodies.
Oshima's protagonists learn how to die, and in doing so, their
deaths become a mark of resistance produced by narrative mortality.
12 Introduction

The enactment of narrative mortality, then, is not simply the repres-

sion of a narrative pleasure principle but its transformation. It articu-
lates a discourse of power (death as closure) that, following Foucault,
produces its opposite. In both Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and Boy,
narrative mortality is articulated through repetition and stasis, specif-
ically through the incorporation of film stills, freeze-frames, and pho-
tographic images into the film's flow. Death in film narrative can
therefore be a "symbolic enactment" of the social contradictions of
authoritarian societies: Lang's cold war America and Oshima's post-
war Japan. In each of these films, a distance is acquired from the
systems and structures of power, precisely through the production of
an allegory of narrative mortality.
The aesthetic aspect of the symbolic action of narrative mortality
is closely related to the photographic basis of the cinema and the
believability of the cinematic illusion. In Wenders's two films about
filmmaking, death negotiates the myth of authorship in postmoder-
nity, working out the contradiction between the temporally and his-
torically finite status of the film object and the subjective investment in
the art object as an eternal vehicle of coherent identity. While the
Bazinian paradox of "change mummified" is unpacked in Lightning
Over Water, in The State of Things mortality is understood as a defin
ing feature of narrative, irreparably separating fictional and docu-
mentary representation in the cinema. Death informs both realist
styles, guaranteeing the "lie" of the former and the "truth" of the latter.
The illusionist impression of reality in the cinema is, in this sense,
narrative's disavowal of its own mortal condition as a series of dis-
crete photographic images.

The Difference of Death

As a symbolic act, narrative mortality negotiates the contradictions
between the coherent subject of "the artist" and the economic and
mediated status of culture, but also between an eternal homogenous
present tense and temporal heterogeneity. On the second interpre-
tive level, as an "ideologeme" it represents these relationships in
terms of loss. The director's "vision," Wenders's subjective invest-
ment in the profilmic, is sacrificed for narrative storytelling as a nee-
 Introduction 13

essarily mediated endeavor. Wenders's loss of his romantic ideals of

authorship to the industrial enterprise of filmmaking is articulated
through the work of death in narrative. Narrative mortality, for Wen-
ders, cuts film off from "life." The preservative ontology of the cine-
matic defense against death cannot be sustained in the age of mechan-
ical reproduction, which inevitably situates the film text under the
aegis of historical time.
On the level of cinematic representation, narrative mortality points
to a lost ideal of transparency. This is perhaps most clear in Godard's
and Wenders's relationships with film history and its promise of "total
cinema." The struggle between narrativity and documentary realism
in their work is an attempt to rescue cinematic transparency from its
modernist debasement. Narrative mortality is the allegory of this pos-
sibility, insofar as it is at once a representation of time and of media-
tion. A sense of loss is absolutely central to the theories of both Bazin
and Benjamin, and yet in Benjamin's and Godard's work it is ori-
ented slightly differently than it is for Bazin and Wenders.
In the latter cases, it is specifically categories of subjectivity and
identity that are represented as lost. For Bazin and Wenders, mortal-
ity and representation are the means by which consciousness is at
once threatened and preserved in its ideal status as identity. For
Wenders, especially, it seems to be fundamental to the existential
preoccupations of a European "art cinema" of auteurs. However, the
recovery of lost unities of subjectivity and society is equally crucial
to the "thirst for redemption" that characterizes so much of American
cultural production, as Rick Altman has argued for the film musical.28
In the triumphant formation of the couple, society itself is redeemed
as a Utopian collectivity. Although the narrative figure of death is
clearly a key signifier for the coupling of loss and promises of rebirth,
in the work of Godard and Benjamin it also yields a critique of this
ideology of loss, recovery, and return.
Benjamin's theory of allegory is not one of resurrection, but it im-
plies the acquisition of a critical perspective from which to view lost
unities. The work of both Godard and Oshima involves a recourse
to the generic forms of popular culture as discourses of resistance.
In the heteroglossia of Cruel Story of Youth, Pierrot le fou, and Le
Mepris, various myths are "emptied out" and rendered inadequate,
14 Introduction

and yet the structure of the mythic imaginary is retained in narrative.

Chief among these myths are those of romantic love, destiny, and
heroism. In the Japanese context, especially, where suicide is mythi-
cally bound to both love and heroism, it is a complex structure that
Oshima challenges. The final shots of these films, Godard's harmo-
nious blue oceanscapes and Oshima's graphic fragmentation of nar-
rative space, both function as allegories of redemption. They retain
something of the promise of Utopia in reserve, holding out the pos-
sibility that the death of the subject is the long-awaited death of the
bourgeois subject, holding out, indeed, the possibility of thresholds.
As a threshold, death figures in narrative mortality as an ideolo-
geme closely related to the theory of cultural loss that Jameson calls
"ressentiment." A theory of loss and redemption, "ressentiment" binds
morality to modernity in the isolation and relativity of the present
against the divine right of the past.29 Narrative mortality provides the
discourse of resistance to "ressentiment": a threshold of discovery,
on the brink of repetition, but also the threshold of cinematic repre-
sentation. Catherine Clement describes the end of the opera as a
"work of mourning,"30 and leaving the movie theater involves a simi-
lar cathexis with the dead. Benjamin's understanding of allegory points
to the fundamental relationship between this threshold that death
represents, and the very process of representation.
As an ideologeme, the myth of total cinema is bound to the time
of subjectivity, the "life" time that is mythically unified in and through
death. Cinematic narrative mortality involves the look of time, but it
has two faces, two appearances: the binding memory that brackets
the time of the subject, the narrative, and the film from history, delim-
iting it as the only time; and an image of time as difference, in which
the temporal index of memory links a multiplicity of times. Death as
closure is mythic in Roland Barthes's semiological sense, "naturaliz-
ing" history by codifying death as language, as the form of closure:
the means by which everything can return to whence it came. Narra-
tive mortality, as a resistance to this mystification, recovers a histori-
cal sense of death outside language, risking perhaps a remystifica-
tion of mortality as transience and change. Barthes in fact advocates
such a strategy: "Truth to tell, the best weapon against myth is per-
haps to mythify it in its turn, and to reproduce an artificial myth:
 Introduction 15

and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology. Since myth

robs language of something, why not rob myth?"31
Narrative mortality heralds the return of the repressed denial of
death in order to redeem cinematic realism. Allegory, for Benjamin,
is a discursive mobilization of the "fall" of language from symbolic
representation. If film theory has been preoccupied with realism
and its "other," allegory intercedes as a theory of ironic representa-
tion: realist discourse that knows itself to be dead. It can no longer
deny its status as mechanical reproduction, but neither can it aban-
don the "real" of photographic indexicality. In this sense, narrative
mortality runs parallel to "apparatus theory," mortifying the ideal
spectator locked into the transcendental gaze of a subject 'without a
body.
In apparatus theories of the cinema, the only locus of presence/
absence, lack and disavowal of lack, is sexual difference. Apparatus
theory takes as its premise the privileged place of the phallus, which
becomes the signifier of meaning, and castration the threat of mean-
inglessness.32 However, if Lacanian theory is understood as existen-
tialist as well as masculinist, the ideal subject is not only male but
also mortal, and is that much closer to extinction. For Lacan, mortal-
ity is like the threat of castration in that it represents the subject's
annihilation: "The phantasy of one's own death, of one's disappear-
ance, is the first object that the subject has to bring into play in this
dialectic [in the discourse of the Other]."33 In his discussion of "the
gaze," the difference between life and death is actually the founda-
tion of signification, and only secondarily is it the phallus, which sig-
nifies this difference.34
Once we distinguish between the subject and the body, the mythic
and the historical might also be wrenched apart. Teresa de Lauretis
has described the project of semiotics as "a mapping of how the
physical properties of bodies are socially assumed as signs, as vehi-
cles for social meaning."35 Narrative mortality is a means of shifting
film-theoretical discourse away from the space of the subject to that
of the body. One means of accomplishing this shift might be to con-
ceptualize "the subject" as a mortal subject, with a correspondingly
limited—as opposed to universal — relation to history. Although "the
body" is typically mystified as feminine (as material support for male
16 Introduction

consciousness, and as the human reproductive link to nature), the

mortal body is not gender-specific.
Helene Cixous has argued that, because the otherness of woman
is predicated on an epistemological dualism, it is as important for
feminist theory to deconstruct the death drive of psychoanalysis as
its phallocentrism. She speaks of "the couple" of patriarchal culture
as a dizzying series of hierarchized oppositions in which "death is
always at work," separating nature from culture and women from men.
Meaning "only gets constituted in a movement in which one of the
terms of the couple is destroyed in favour of the other."36 Mortality
and the threat of "decapitation and execution" are, for Cixous, the
feminine counterpart to castration anxiety. It is imperative that women
resist the economy of return and exchange that is predicated on loss,
a loss that can only be a loss of life for women in patriarchy. They
have nothing else to lose. Resistance consists of an "affirmation of dif-
ference" and the production of a textual body "without ending." "A
feminist text goes on and on and at a certain moment the volume
comes to an end but the writing continues and for the reader this
means being thrust into the void."37
Given the maternal imagery of Benjamin's historiography, it would
be a mistake to read him as a protofeminist,38 and yet in conjunction
with a feminist critique, his work might help theorize a historiogra-
phy of the future. His theory of memory and his critique of progress
may take the form of nostalgia, but they also involve a recognition
that "there is not one moment that does not bring with it its own
revolutionary possibility—it only wants to be defined as a specific
one, namely as the chance for a totally new resolution in view of a
totally new task."39 Like Cixous's radical strategy of laughter, Benjamin
advocates a "meeting of the forces of the mythical world with cunning
and high spirits."40 Cixous advocates a feminist praxis of taking up
"the challenge of loss." As a hermeneutics of historical difference, nar-
rative mortality does precisely this: it allegorizes loss as a form of his-
torical necessity.
In shifting the emphasis of narratology from the pleasure princi-
ple to the death drive, and from the phallus to the body, there is a
danger in fetishizing the body as yet another phallus. "Mortification,"
however, is very specifically a theory of the dead body, the corpse.
Benjamin writes that
 Introduction 17

the allegorization of the physis can only be carried through in

all its vigour in respect of the corpse. And the characters of
the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that
they can enter the homeland of allegory. It is not for the sake
of immortality that they meet their end, but for the sake of the
corpse.41
The key difference between the corpse and the phallus, as privi-
leged signifiers, is that the dead body is distinguished by its lack of
symbolic unity. Its threat to cultural norms is precisely its status as
an empty signifier of subjectivity, its designation of the void upon
which the self is written. This is the cultural space across which the-
ories of gender must be articulated, and the corporeality of the mortal
signifier deauthorizes language and dismantles its phallic symbolic
status.
This book is not about women's filmmaking, but about men's. In
rethinking these filmmakers' existential anxiety as a problem of rep-
resentation, the difficulty of representing desire repeatedly circulates
around the bodies of women. The focus here is not, however, on this
institutional victimization but on its effects on the (de)construction
of male subjectivity as a discourse of desire. Reduced to allegories of
fetishistic and scopophilic pleasures, the male gaze sees itself seeing
in many of these films, in which desire is forced to renew itself in
order to redeem cinematic vision. In the mortification of the male
erotic gaze, a space is cleared for other forms of desire, which may
yet include that of women.
In "What Is an Author?" Foucault claims that "where a work had
the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to
become the murder of its author."42 It is not only the convention of
antiheroism, but the very writerliness of modernist narrative by which
masculinist subjectivity has performed its death throes. Maurice Blan-
chot has perhaps best eulogized this loss in such essays as "Litera-
ture and the Right to Death":
Death works with us in the world; it is a power that
humanizes nature, that raises existence to being.... But to die
is to shatter the world; it is the loss of the person, the
annihilation of being; and so it is also the loss of death, the
loss of what in it and for me made it death ... when I die, by
ceasing to be a man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer
18 Introduction

capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me

because I see it as it is: no longer death, but the impossibility
of dying.43

We will see how this modernist fantasy informs a filmmaker like Wim
Wenders, and also how it can open up a space in cinematic repre-
sentation through the mortification of the immortal "I." As an ideolo-
geme of loss, narrative mortality is instrumental to the redemption of
desire in new discourses of identity.

The Excess of Closure

The threshold figured in narrative mortality is rarely actually crossed,

however, and the "look of time" is inevitably the time of a repetition
that goes nowhere. Memory secures the myth of progress from out-
stripping the limited teleology of capitalism, and the third stage of
interpretation, the "ideology of form," can be described as the spec-
tacle for consumption that violent death is either transformed into
(in the case of news reports, snuff films, and documentaries) or pro-
duced as (in contemporary film and TV narratives). On this level of
interpretation, "formal processes" are grasped as "content in their
own right."44 The commodification of the visible and the techniques
of visibility are crucial components of the ideology of the spectacle.
What Linda Williams has described as "the frenzy of the visible" in
the context of hard-core pornography compensates for the invisibil-
ity of female sexual pleasure.45 The frenzy of violence likewise opens
up the possibility of resistance in its excessive overcompensation for
the unrepresentable, unknowable, and invisible event of death. And
yet, the potential of narrative mortality to open up the passage to a
different historiography is, more often than not, limited by the reify-
ing spectacle of violence.46
Allegory has a regressive tendency, which Benjamin identifies in
Baudelaire, whose "destructive impulse ... is nowhere interested in
getting rid of that which declines."47 A similar tendency will be iden-
tified in the nostalgia of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which involves a
resurrection of the image along with a mystification of the past. The
"progressive tendency of allegory," on the other hand, articulated
imagistically in the baroque emblems of skeletons and skulls, is to
 Introduction 19

smash false appearances, to "transfigure" and bring into visibility new

possibilities of the material world. For Benjamin, it was the corn-
modification of this material world that had emptied historical expe-
rience of its desire by designating the new as the always-the-same.48
In the second part of Benjamin's century, the politics of visibility
and commodification have converged in the form of the spectacle.
As Guy Debord put it in 1967, "The spectacle, as the present social
organization of the paralysis of history and memory, of the abandon-
ment of history built on the foundation of historical time, is the false
consciousness of time!'49 The difficulties encountered in a criticism of
violence through its representation are amply demonstrated in Bon-
nie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch (1969), in which excess blood
spills over into the jouissance of visual pleasure, and in Nashville it
is precisely this circuit of the spectacle that is addressed. When the
interpretive allegory of narrative mortality is short-circuited, and there
is no spatial or temporal elsewhere besides the spectacle itself, the
redemptive potential is overwhelmed by "the myth of resurrection."
The closure of the spectacle is also a trap for historicity, closing off
the possibility of social transformation. The allegory of narrative mor-
tality is a means by which this commodification of history might be
undone.
Benjamin's theory of allegory is not coincidentally based on
baroque emblems and theater, and the "phantasmagorias" of late
nineteenth-century Paris. The language of allegory finds its potential
in the image world of mass culture. Narrative mortality is likewise
most legible in the cinema in the challenge that death poses to visual
representation, rendering signification a temporally fragmented pro-
cess. We shall see how death in film can become a form of writing.
Godard's tableaux of burning cars and strewn corpses in Weekend
(1967) speak volumes about modernity, precisely in their artificiality.
In Prenom Carmen (1983), terrorists and their victims are felled by
automatic rifles, only to immediately rise and rejoin the melee. Death
in fiction film always belongs to the regime of the fake, marking the
very threshold of the "illusions of reality" and the myth of "total cin-
ema": the pathos and irony of representation.
Narrative mortality may in fact be an imaginary solution to the
"contagion of violence" that characterizes postwar history. While the
image of apocalypse approximates the instantaneity of death as an
20 Introduction

allegory of discovery, it is also an allegory of necessity. The coinci-

dence of death and closure is a ritual of desire, embodying the plea-
sure of return and the myth of fate, whereas accidental violence iso-
lates the moment of death in historical time. Death in film has the
potential of radical ambiguity precisely because it can encompass
both historiographies at once and can disperse violence into a dialectic
of difference and the same. The history of the future is a discourse
of necessity divorced from destiny and, as will be seen in Le Mepris,
the representation of accidental, "nonnatural" death can be an alle-
gory of destiny, a representation of history as fragmented rather than
holistic time. Its necessity is guaranteed by the natural history of decay
rather than the myth of fate.
Benjamin enables us to acquire historical and critical distance from
the classical thematics of fate and destiny that tend to bind form to
content, and meaning to structure. As "the leader," death becomes
the dynamic sign of historical transience. Narrative structures of ori-
gins and development, growth and inevitability, maturity and deca-
dence are modeled on the organicity of the human body. The body,
as the index of these structures, is in the process disavowed by the
"eternal" truths that such discourse authorizes. The sense-making
mechanism of death as closure—the expectations of meaning that
are always anticipated, if not always delivered, by narrative—is above
all a cultural strategy of coping with the contingency of daily exis-
tence. The surplus of unordered detail that is history without discourse
is also the story without ending and the (dead) body without an
identity. The decay of the present tense is redeemed in narrative
mortality as a historiography of memory and transience.
Narrative mortality is a recovery of the body in narrative cinema,
and an illumination of the fragments of history perceptible in the
ruined myths of cinematic desires. We shall see how cinematic vio-
lence potentially redeems the body from its mystification, and how
violence "mortifies" cinematic representation. Equally important to
the present study are the aesthetics of realism. Narrative mortality is
a discourse of temporality that takes very specific forms in the cin-
ema as a medium that quite literally "takes" time. If the isomorphism
of narrative and mortality has conventionally assumed a teleological
representation of time, the dismantling of this relationship produces
forms of temporality other than the progressive historiography of
 Introduction 21

modernism. Temporal aesthetics are therefore as crucial to the vari-

able relations between death and closure in the cinema as are the
mythologies of desire.
In what is perhaps the most systematic treatment of narrative clo-
sure, Frank Kermode distinguishes between chronos—"passing time"
or "waiting time" — and kairos, which is "the time of the novelist" or
"the season, a point in time filled with significance, charged with a
meaning derived from its relation to the end."50 Using the model of a
clock's ticktock, he says that narrative has "to maintain within that
interval following tick a lively expectation of tock" because "all such
plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the
whole duration and meaning" (p. 46). Insofar as time is equated
with mortality in Kermode's model, it is based on an ontology of
death. He notes that it was the "divine plot" of Christ that accom-
plished the transition from chronos to kairos as the dominant sense
of temporality in Western culture, establishing "the End" as that which
"changes all and produces, what in relation to it is the past" (p. 47).
The necessity of mortality is, for Kermode, constitutive of "the hu-
man mind." The limitations of his theory, belied in his denunciation
of Robbe-Grillet and the American Beat writers, as against his val-
orization of La Nausee, are due to his assumption that contingency,
which he equates with reality, is insufficient for narrative fiction.
Contingency must always be balanced or dialectically conjoined with
form, "a humanly needed shape or structure."51 Kermode's idealist
teleology of form precludes consideration of the durational strat-
egies of "waiting" that informs so much postwar international cinema,
especially Bresson, Antonioni, Ozu, Tati, Wenders, Hou, and Akerman.
Within this range of "documentary" and real-time aesthetics, the mor-
tality of the human body takes on a materiality, a corporeality, quite
remote from the sense-making mechanisms of dramatic closure.
As Roland Barthes suggests in Camera Lucida, photographic images
are themselves a form of mortality,52 a death that is easily "hidden"
in the cinematic appropriation of photography. The mortality implicit
in photography is often exploited in international postwar cinema as
a means of countering the teleology of Kermode's notion of narra-
tive. Although narrative mortality is produced within narrative struc-
tures common to other media besides cinema, its allegorical poten-
tial derives from the nature of cinematic specificity and the specific
22 Introduction

relations between image and historical time constitutive of cinematic

representation.53 The indexicality of cinematic representation involves
an order of temporality that is absent from literary representation, a
difference between the time of shooting and that of viewing. This is
one of many orders of difference that cannot be "closed" without
ideological consequences.
The modernist tendency toward open-endedness, which Kermode
describes as the "modern apocalypse," suggests that "our age" {The
Sense of an Ending was written in 1965) is one of "eternal transition,
perpetual crisis": "The fiction of transition is our way of registering
the conviction that the end is immanent rather than imminent; it re-
flects our lack of confidence in ends, our mistrust of the apportion-
ing of history to epochs of this and that" (p. 101). The analyses of
films made between 1956 and 1982 should clarify the historical para-
meters of this form of apocalypticism, but significantly, despite the
"lack of confidence" during this period, endings become endowed
with an increased burden of meaningful meaninglessness. Both "the
sense of an ending" and the representation of death retain a certain
authority despite the relentless deconstruction of classical, conven-
tional, and homogeneous textual practices.
The emblematic "open" endings of Antonioni's L'Awentura (I960),
Blow-Up (1967), and The Passenger (1975) are exemplary of the pr
sure of mortality in open-ended narratives. Death may not necessar-
ily "close" a narrative but in innumerable films, including Paisd (Ros
sellini, 1946), Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich, 1955), Accatone (Pasolini, 1961
Mouchette (Bresson, 1967), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman, 1971),
Fox and His Friends (Fassbinder, 1974), and Being There (Ashby,
1979), it "opens up" a text by way of closure. One of the aims of this
project is to compensate for the inadequacy of the terms "open" and
"closed" as descriptive aesthetic vocabulary.
Using mainly David Bordwell's Narration in the Fiction Film as
the basis for a formal model, Richard Neupert has distinguished four
categories of film endings that he claims to be exhaustive and to cor-
respond to four cinematic types, or modes of production: the Closed
Text (classical Hollywood), the Open Story ("art cinema"), the Open
Discourse (theoretically possible but practically/historically nonexis-
tent), and the Open Text (avant-garde).54 By maintaining the story/
discourse separation, however, Neupert cannot address the ideological
 Introduction 23

consequences of the simultaneity of "resolved" story and invisible

discourse.55 He cannot address the effects that discourse has on the
story it tells, or vice versa, the effect that an inconclusive story might
have on an apparently illusionist narrative voice (its potential to "crack
it apart").
The "effects" of discourse are precisely the parameters of an ide-
ology of form. The open/closed distinction becomes somewhat irrel-
evant if we introduce the idea of an excess of closure, which is per-
haps the most appropriate description of narrative mortality in
international postwar cinema. Whether this excess takes the form of
meaningfulness {Citizen Kane, 1941) or meaninglessness {L'Avven-
tura, I960), beauty {Imitation of Life, 1959) or ugliness {Eraserhead,
1978), the difficulties of closure tend to be displaced onto a dis-
course of visibility and spectacle.
If the apocalyptic mythology that Kermode identifies as constitu-
tive of narrative closure has taken on spectacular proportions, it is not
incidental to the violent potential of the medium itself: its rhetoric of
shooting, cutting, and "putting in the can." The representation of vi-
olent death in film constitutes a special crisis of believability, a thresh-
old of realism and its own critique. Enacted death, bodily violence,
and corporeality (such as surgical operations) are privileged points at
which realism makes a firm break with the real, as the bullet-ridden
corpse is at once the height of artifice and of horror. When the art of
the makeup and special-effects departments is assimilated by the
filmmaker, the point at which "document" and image part company
is both championed and obfuscated.
The spectacle of violence produces a body in excess of subjectiv-
ity, identity, and meaning. It is an actor's body, but also the textual
body of the film that is potentially in excess of the aspiration to real-
ism. The excessive closure of international postwar cinema delineates
a precarious balance, a split desire for meaningful containment and
a desire to transcend the known limits of history. The notion of nar-
rative mortality that will be developed in this book is, in keeping
with the work of Walter Benjamin, unapologetically idealist in its
emphasis on redemption, renewal, and social transformation. It is a
historiography of transience, and to this extent is grounded in the
materiality of the cinematic signifier and the indexicality of the cin-
ematic referent.
24 Introduction

As a double pleasure, or as a potential crisis, the representation of

death in film is an uncanny mixture of fear and pleasure, the strange
and the familiar. It is the fundamental ambiguity of the uncanny that
gives narrative mortality, as an ideology of form, the potential of
fantasy, transgression, and shock. The coincidence of image and real-
ity that occurs in the representation of actual death is a harbinger of
mortality, marking the transience of history. But it is also, at the same
time, a means of disavowing this recognition. Unlike the still photo-
graph, once historical specificity is taken up in moving images it is
reanimated and revived, and death is effectively denied. Enacted
death that is believable thus fixes the fiction film's "performance of
time," which is what Stephen Heath describes as the "crime of the
good film."56

Film History

In the 1960s, with the simultaneous development of mass-media crit-

icism and social activism, the uncanny parallel between the shooting
of guns and the shooting of cameras became a discursive axis of the
rhetoric of violence. For Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino in
Argentina in 1971, the equation of gun and camera is crucial to a
conception of "guerrilla cinema," a politicized "Third Cinema" in which
both filmmaking and film viewing are modes of political praxis. Theirs
is a metaphor of violence, perhaps, but one in which death is situ-
ated as the "other" of bourgeois/neocolonial representation.57
In Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (I960), on the other hand, the
alignment of camera and weapon is erotically charged in their direc-
tionality and intentionality. The female body is overdetermined as
the "other" of the patriarchal social, psychic, and cinematic appara-
tuses. The scopic and physical violation of women in Peeping Tom
oversteps the limits of realist representation, and the phallic gaze is
finally mortified.58 The "mortifying gaze" of the rifle sights or the
armed camera of Peeping Tom situates the perceived, the seen, the
gazed at as being in one's discourse.59 When the apparatus emerges
as a discursive operation, a mere allegory of empowerment, the threat-
ened violence becomes a violence of representation, and a potential
political tool.
 Introduction 25

The fatal shooting and the mortifying gaze are points in cinema at
which the "narratological converges with the grammatological," once
the apparatus is taken to be the structure of filmic grammar. The
spectacle of violence, in its combination of pleasure and pain, charges
the phenomenological difference between viewer and spectacle with
the power of discourse stripped to its most visible form. The other-
ness of the object seen and the otherness of the violated subject in-
dicts the transcendental subject of vision within the causality of de-
sire. The exclusion of the spectator is aligned with the exclusion of
the dying person from the representable world. Violence draws one
line between life and death and between spectator and spectacle, a
line that is at once final and intangible, irreversible and fluid, a rhetoric
of difference and sameness that is also the logic of desire.
During the 1960s and 1970s, as film studies developed as a field
of study, "the apparatus" began to be sketched out as a mechanism
of ideological control. At the same time, filmmakers began to articu-
late various forms of sexual and political desires within self-conscious
forms of cinematic representation. Death figures as a key narrative
event in many of these films, as an articulation of loss, despair, and
failure. But at the same time it is the vehicle of an antiauthoritarian
challenge to the discourses of control. And we shall see that this
occurs as a function of representation as much as, and in concert
with, narrative event. The mortification of the apparatus produces a
spectator who is beside himself or herself, doubled as the constructed
subject of narrative desire and the mortal, historical body outside the
text.
Narrative mortality is a means of engaging with narrative closure
in such a way that spectatorship is accounted for as a pluralist, active,
and political activity. The art of "mortification" is a lesson learned from
filmmakers working within specific sociohistorical contexts, with a range
of different motives, interests, and concerns to articulate. The critical
discourse on the New Wave cinemas has always stressed the Brecht-
ian alienation effects, which encourage spectators to "participate," or
at least formulate their own readings. More recent discourse about
spectatorship in the cinema has tended to historicize and localize the
plurality of readings that any text potentially inspires. If the cinema of
the 1960s and 1970s paved the way for this crisis of meaning, it may
26 Introduction

also provide some clues as to the textual determinants of an "other"

theory of spectatorship.
This book may be about a cinema of crisis, but it is not about
apocalyptic historiography. The films have been chosen and analyzed
in such a way as to understand "crisis" as a threshold of history: an
articulation of change, transience, and transformation. By understand-
ing the complexity of the relationship between mortality and narra-
tivity, we may be able to transcend the mythology of loss implicit in
the notion of crisis and be able to appreciate what is gained in terms
of historiography and representation. The imminence of apocalypti-
cism, the sense of impending catastrophe, takes on an immanence
of historical import once narrativity recognizes itself as historical. In
the New Wave cinemas, "the fiction of transition" is not a formalism
but is embedded in social criticism. Although the New Wave core of
this book consists only of Godard and Oshima, in the films of many
of their international contemporaries (e.g., Pasolini, Rocha, Fassbinder,
Shinoda, Truffaut) narrative mortality emerges as a politics of redemp-
tion and a desire for social transformation, articulated within the
terms of specific cultural concerns.
The limits of the New Wave cinemas stretch deep into film his-
tory. If intertextuality is fundamental to these filmmakers' revisionist
projects, many of their techniques can be traced to the cinema that
preceded them. In Weimar cinema, in French poetic realism, and in the
silent American "art" cinema (e.g., Broken Blossoms [1919] and Greed
[1925]), one can see death becoming more than a form of narrative
closure, but it is not until the emergence of independent cinema in
the wake of film noir that it becomes legible as a politics of repre-
sentation. It may be argued that, since The Electrocution of an Ele-
phant (1903) and the Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1895), real
and enacted death have been a mainstay of cinematic language.
The work of Dreyer, Bresson, and Bergman provides further evi-
dence of the pervasiveness of mortality as a cinematic discourse. These
directors' preoccupation with death may have had a great influence
on the New Wave, but mortality only becomes a discourse of history
and representation once their existential and religious thematics have
been exhausted. As Stanley Kubrick demonstrates in Dr. Strangelov
the pleasures of war were dangerously eroticized in cold war visual
culture. After the Second World War, visual discourses of power and
 Introduction 27

pleasure entered art cinema as allegories of mortality, having lost their

"innocence" to the visual knowledge of war (e.g., John Houston's Bat-
tle of San Pietro [1945]).
Although the textual analyses in this book will not follow a histor-
ical chronology, it will become clear that the critical gesture of mor-
tification becomes increasingly irrelevant over the twenty-five years
it covers. The difference between Beyond a Reasonable Doubt in
1956 and The State of Things in 1982 is a difference between a cinem
that is unable to articulate its anxieties other than "unconsciously"
and one that incessantly and consciously performs its own mortifica-
tion and therapy. Wenders in fact dramatizes the very theory of nar-
rative mortality himself in Lightning Over Water and The State of
Things. It may even be argued that he takes modernist cinema to a
limit that he himself has been unable to go beyond in his subse-
quent work. Narrative mortality might therefore be periodized as a
threshold of the postmodern, a transitional allegory that may date as
far back as 1941 in Citizen Kane and that continues to be legible in
a film such as Derek Jarman's Edward II (1991). Through the strat-
egy of anachronism, Jarman deploys seventeenth-century dramatic
technique in a melancholic elegy to AIDS in gay culture.
Between Lang and Wenders we find the Brechtian cinema of Go-
dard and Oshima, as well as post-Vietnam American genre revision,
both of which treat myth, fate, and narrativity as national and histor-
ical discourses. Violence figures in these cinemas as an apocalyptic
allegory of history. If narrative mortality is the interpretation of this
allegory, it may be perceived as being somewhat specific to the
twenty-five years of this study. However, beyond the limits of the
New Wave cinemas, in the "ultraviolence" of the 1980s and 1990s,
narrative mortality has been intensified and concentrated in a very
different mode of international independent cinema. In the conclu-
sion, I will examine the more fully allegorical cinema of David Lynch
and Peter Greenaway, for whom realism and violence are more radi-
cally separate. In the two serial-killer films that I will look at, Henry:
Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) and Man Bites Dog (1990), violenc
is more systematically stylized, and believability is no longer an issue
of morality, politics, or representation. In this postmodern cinema,
the threshold of narrative mortality virtually disappears.
At the other extreme, before 1956 one can find numerous Holly-
28 Introduction

wood films that lend themselves to mortification. Douglas Sirk's melo-

dramas, Anthony Mann's Westerns, films noirs, the films of Nicholas
Ray and Sam Fuller—all may be read as allegories of narrative mor-
tality, engaging in genres that are just on the edge of losing their
credibility. Although Beyond a Reasonable Doubt cannot be con-
strued as representative of this rich period of Hollywood history, it
will be considered in the context of Cahiers du Cinema film criti-
cism and cold war America.
The most familiar signifier of narrative mortality may in fact be
the invocation of "rosebud" at the end of Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941).
Rosebud signifies Kane's identity by closing it, completing the circle
of his life, and at the same time, rosebud is only a sign on a sled, a
sign that fails to suture the wound of death, and fails to give mean-
ing to either the life or the film. It merely signifies the attempt, coin-
cident with the end.60 Citizen Kane is neither the first nor the last
film to represent such an ambivalence, although it is a tendency far
more prevalent in postwar than prewar filmmaking. Among the many
stylistic and narrative disruptions of Hollywood film of the forties61
that are announced in Citizen Kane, we have to include an ambiva-
lence about the security of the coincidence of death and closure. It
may even be argued that such ambiguity formed the backbone of
RKO production throughout the 1940s, right up until the studio's final
production, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.
The limits of the New Wave cinemas can be delineated through
the theory of "ressentiment," the articulation of the modern in ethical
terms, which enters cinema most emphatically after the Second World
War and begins to be recognized as such in the mid-1950s. The loss
of affirmative mythical structures unleashes a violence that was once
contained. In the eradication of a fixed morality, violence acquires a
new expressive capacity, as the Cahiers du Cinema critics recognize
in the mid-1950s. But even for the Cahiers critics, film noir involve
a mise-en-scene of violence, a spectacular manifestation of social dis-
solution, a revolution of the image:
Violence has no other purpose, once the ruins of conventions
are reduced to dust, than to establish a state of grace, a void,
in the midst of which the heroes, completely unfettered by
any arbitrary constraints, are free to pursue a process of self-
interrogation, and to delve deep into their destiny.62
 Introduction 29

As their criticism was for the most part unconcerned with lived his-
tory, or any determinants beyond the text and its auteur, so also was
their violence contained within the limits of the screen. It was resitu-
ated and made safe as the prerogative of authentic heroism and film-
making. It remained authorized as destiny. Twenty-five years later,
the secret desires of heroic and antiheroic identity may survive as alle-
gorical discourses of social repression (e.g., Boyz 'n the Hood [Single-
ton, 1991], Malcolm X [Lee, 1992], Menace II Society [Hughes Brothers,
1993]), but the "natural history" informing genres of romance and
destiny has long since been debased.
Godard may well be said to emerge as the focal point of this study
for several reasons. The parallels between his project and Benja-
min's—or, more precisely, Benjamin's Baudelaire—are striking.
They serve to underline how Godard figures the end of cinematic
modernism. His cynicism, however, on the brink of the postmodern,
grasps the loss of cinematic "innocence" as the threshold of historical
redemption. Although the obsession with Godard in film studies has
by now fortunately waned, it is time to return more soberly to the
politics of representation embedded in his early, genre-inflected films.
An appreciation of the fakeness of violence and death in narrative
film is one of the ways that Godard mortifies the auratic experience
of classical Hollywood cinema. In Godard's films of the early 1960s,
narrative mortality lies within the fissures between classical romance
and a modernist contempt for symbolic, realist representation. The
excessive violence of the American cinema of the late 1960s and early
1970s does not quite challenge the believability of the image, and
thus limits belief to the visible. If narrative mortality is motivated by
the belief in a different future, based in the memory of a different
past, it is invoked in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Wild Bunch (1969
(both discussed in chapter 5), and Nashville without its radical poten
tial being realized.
It is through Benjamin's diverse body of work that the method and
the subject of this project come together. The theory of history as
transience, the effect on culture of photographic representation, and
Benjamin's hermeneutic method of criticism are all "theological" en-
deavors. Derived from Cabalist scholarship, his method searches "for
hidden meanings that could not have been known at the time of
their writing and rejects the historicist approach of interpreting texts
30 Introduction

in terms of authorial intent."63 The relationship of this veritable archae-

ological method to photography is best characterized by his quota-
tion of Andre Monglod:
The past has left images of itself in literary texts that are
comparable to those which light imprints on a photosensitive
plate. Only the future possesses developers active enough to
bring these plates out perfectly.64

In the allegory of narrative mortality, from the perspective of the last

decade of the twentieth century, the past appears as a history of dead
desires, attracting memory like a magnet to its fragmentary residues
subsisting in film narrative. As a redemptive form of criticism, narra-
tive mortality will be read as the "writing" of death in a history of
cinematic representation. If death "itself escapes representation, narra-
tive mortality, like the apocryphal flashing of one's life before one's
eyes ("like a film") at the moment of death, is the allegorical compen-
sation for that lack. Once that lack is conceived as an allegory for
other historical/moral/social/sexual "lacks," an allegorical vertigo en-
sues. Narrative mortality may be simply a rhetorical means of halting
that vertigo with a name.
ONE

BEYOND PLEASURE
Lang and Mortification

Our own death is indeed unimaginable, and whenever we make the

attempt to imagine it we can perceive that we really survive as
spectators. — SIGMUND FREUD1

D eath has acquired a certain authority in narrative cinema as it en-

dows film after film with a weighty burden of meaning. However,
death can endow cinematic narrative with another kind of authority,
one that extends beyond representation to the historical "real" of its
production and reception. When Walter Benjamin refers to the author-
ity of death for the storyteller, he makes a distinction between novel-
istic and storytelling narrative forms. In the "novelistic" mode, the indi-
vidual reader warms his/her "shivering life with a death that he reads
about."2 For the storyteller, on the other hand, death is the sign of
the transposition of history into narrative. It anchors the story in a
reality that extends far beyond the time and place of its telling, and
limits the narrator to the memory of others' deaths. Whereas the
" 'meaning of life' is really the center about which the novel moves"

31
32 Beyond Pleasure

(p. 99), the storyteller's authority derives from the fact that a per-
son's "real life" "first assumes transmissible form at the moment of
death" (p. 94).
Benjamin's distinction may not be immediately applicable to cin-
ematic representation, which always separates the story from its teller.
However, it offers a model for the deconstruction of the binding pro-
cess of mortality in cinematic narrative. Benjamin's "novelistic" evokes
the closure of representation enacted by death, the closure of tem-
porality, subjectivity, and ideology, the eternal present tense of the
universal subject of narrative identity. Narrative mortality, on the other
hand, like "storytelling," refers to the discursive rendering of death
as a sign of historical transience, an undoing of the novelistic that
takes place in texts themselves, but also in the reading of texts. Both
death as closure and narrative mortality are "ideologies of form," the
former in the service of the status quo, the latter in the interests of
historical change and transformation.
This chapter will address the emergence of narrative mortality
within the classical Hollywood style as the "cracking" of the authori-
ties of closure and realism. It might be considered a transposition
from the "novelistic" to "storytelling," which occurs as much by way
of the film criticism of Cahiers du Cinema as through an oppositional
film practice. Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, a film that
takes authority and death as its central figures, was described by
Jacques Rivette in 1957 as "the antithesis of entertainment." Referring
to Lang as a "storyteller" in a review entitled "The Hand," Rivette de-
scribes it as an antihumanist reduction of guilt and innocence to
"mere appearances."3 The analysis of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
will introduce the key themes of narrative mortality, situate them in
relation to psychoanalytic apparatus theory, and illustrate their par-
ticular configuration within cold war American studio filmmaking.
Although one may find many of the techniques and effects of nar-
rative mortality in films made before 1945, the allegory of narrative
mortality is much more readable in the cinema after World War II. It
emerges as a consequence of a great range of cultural transformations
indirectly linked to international militarization and its global strat-
egies of death and destruction. World War II constituted an overwhelm-
ing experience with death that caused many national cultures to re-
examine some cherished principles and prejudices. Because of the
 Beyond Pleasure 33

institutionalized ideology of the Hollywood studio system, these shifts

are writ larger in the American context, and ideological contradictions
that surfaced all over the world may be most vivid within the American
cinema.
The scope and scale of the war, and the diversity of its effects in
different parts of the world and different social sectors, are large
enough and heterogeneous enough to prevent mystifying World War
II as a singular causal event. Fundamental changes to the economic
structures of national film industries took place, along with develop-
ments in technologies of representation and communication (e.g.,
TV and lightweight cameras). Moreover, in the context of the shared
experience of mourning and guilt over the European and Asian holo-
causts, film culture was "internationalized" in ways that exceeded
the stereotyping of war films and the patriotism of national cinemas.
In addition to the emergence of several international film festi-
vals, most notably Cannes, which was first held in 1946,4 the disci-
pline of film studies received an important boost in the work of Andre
Bazin and Cahiers du Cinema? The extent to which these writers
appreciated American and Italian film is well known, as is the role
of their criticism in the subsequent Nouvelle Vague and radical Euro-
pean film praxis of the 1960s. What has not been recognized is the
extent to which Bazin's film theory is based on a disavowal of mor-
tality, on the one hand, or, on the other, the discourse of violence
that the younger French critics and filmmakers appreciated in the
films of their auteurist pantheons.
Bazin's theory of realism, which will be developed more exten-
sively in chapter 2, is a theory of the preservation of subjectivity that
he derives from Egyptian practices of mummification. Bazin's evolu-
tion of the history of the cinema is toward the fulfillment of the an-
cient desire to substitute the permanent image for the impermanent
body.6 The illusion of realist cinema on which his aesthetics are based,
and to which his "great" directors aspire, is an illusion of immortal-
ity. Filmmakers such as Renoir, Welles, Rossellini, and Visconti pre-
serve something of themselves, their vision and subjectivity, along
with the objectivity of the photographed world, in the immortal per-
manence of celluloid. Bazin's writing on Italian neorealism, the key
European film movement of the immediate postwar period, which
he was largely responsible for critically endorsing and intellectually
34 Beyond Pleasure

sponsoring outside of Italy, is informed by existentialist phenome-

nology.7 Read in conjunction with Bazin's essays on the ontology
and history of the cinema, the Italian filmmakers' "art of lying" con-
sists precisely in the substitution of an illusion of transcendence for the
limitations of "authentic reality" and its mortal claims on subjectivity.8
Benjamin's conception of mortification offers us the repressed text
of Bazin's historiography, and encourages us to grasp the disavowal
of mortality for what it is: an ideological construction that holds his-
tory prisoner in the grip of realism. Historiography as mortification
proceeds by blasting open the myth of total cinema, but in such a
way that the secret of historical difference hidden within Bazinian
ontology might be released. Bazin's "sons" or successors at Cahiers
du Cinema? the critics who were to become the French Nouvelle
Vague and set off a flurry of highly innovative, politically and formally
radical international filmmaking in the early 1960s, began the "blast-
ing" process in their reevaluation of American and Italian cinema.
By the mid-1950s critics such as Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette
had transformed Bazin's anxiety of mortality, the structuring absence
of his film theory, into a discourse of mortality. Rivette, for example,
in arguing that Rossellini's Voyage in Italy is a "metaphysical essay,"
an "incessant movement of seizure and pursuit," and a "conquest" of
reality, notes also that the film involves "an intimate mortification of
reality."10 The mortifying potential of filmic discourse, once it becomes
unmoored from an illusion of reality, is most explicit in the Cahiers
writing on American film of the 1950s. The modernity of filmmakers
such as Sam Fuller, Nicholas Ray, and Fritz Lang is consistently linked
to the representation of violence. Rivette writes of these films that
violence is never an end, but the most effective means of
access, and those punches, weapons, dynamite explosions
have no other purpose than to blast away the accumulated
debris of habit, to create a breach—in brief, to open up the
shortest roads.11

Throughout the Cahiers essays of the 1950s, violence is closely asso-

ciated with a conception of "the modern" as something new and differ-
ent. The fakeness of this violence, its departure from realist conven-
tions, is not simply reflexive but points to the transience of Hollywood
realism.
 Beyond Pleasure 35

The modernity of American cinema for the Cahiers critics of the

1950s consisted in formal stylization and an excess of representation,
which was a departure from the limited codification of Hollywood
illusionism, but these formal traits were closely linked to narratives
lacking a moral center. The famous Cahiers phrase, "Morality is a
question of tracking shots,"12 suggests that this discursive expressivity
takes place within an unstable moral framework. Moullet, for example,
says of Fuller:
For many directors, movements of the camera are dependent
on dramatic composition. Never so for Fuller, in whose work
they are, fortunately, totally gratuitous At the end of Steel
Helmet, for example, that slow tracking of the camera as,
under the passionate bursts of machine-gun fire, the enemy
soldiers sink to the ground in a rhythmic musical pattern.13

Violence remained linked to subjectivity for these critics—that of

both the auteurs and the characters—but it was a freedom of expres-
sion that had its dangerous side: it existed in a void of conventions,
both moral and discursive. Film noir, which emerged in the United
States in the 1940s, was an especially rich terrain of discursive expres-
sivity, excessive violence, and moral ambiguity in which anxiety-
ridden male protagonists met their fates in shadow-torn environments
of crime and dangerous women. But, as the example of Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt should demonstrate, the very notion of fate de-
mands some analysis in these films, which are strictly neither tragedies
nor melodramas.
If the post-1968 Cahiers du Cinema criticism is exemplified in the
editorial essay on John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, violence remains a
central critical category. Here it refers to the violence of representa-
tion—the excesses of textuality that belie the contradictions of ide-
alized law and mythic historiography.14 More recent criticism has
returned to postwar American film as symptomatic of the contradic-
tions that informed postwar American society. Genres such as the
woman's film, the war film, and science fiction, along with film noir,
Westerns, and family melodramas of the 1950s, display a certain
amount of textual instability that points to the contradictions and
nonconsensus of a society intent on denying its inner fragmentation.
Dana Polan has described the films of the 1940s in terms of their
36 Beyond Pleasure

discourses of power and paranoia, in which "power" refers to the

unifying discourse of wartime unity, carried over into the homoge-
nizing tendencies of consumer culture and mass media. The power
of narrative closure and realist representation is, however, counter-
balanced by an equally prominent anxiety provoked by the violence
of war, cold war paranoia, the alienation of urbanization, the relative
emancipation of women, and the difficulties of individualist expres-
sion within corporate capitalism and cold-war politics.15
Polan's historiography is indebted to Michel Foucault, for whom
"power" is everywhere but originates nowhere except in the multi-
ple discourses in which it is found. Power, in this theory, produces
the possibility of its own resistance, its own misreading, which is how
classical Hollywood cinema—once viewed as a repressive ideological
state apparatus—can also be construed as the very writing on the
wall of American hegemony. The failure of so many postwar Holly-
wood films to wrap things up, to completely close representation off
from the vicissitudes of contingency, and their failure to contain their
excesses, become legible as a resistance to the limitations and con-
strictions of the many codes that inform Hollywood cinema — codes
of patriarchy, realism, and free enterprise as well as the generic myths
of romance and destiny. "Narrative mortality" is, in this context, con-
stitutive of the paranoia of postwar American film, produced within
the terms of death as closure, the fatality that is the authority of
death in narrative.

A Film That Does Not Believe in Itself

The textual and ideological contradictions of Beyond a Reasonable

Doubt are, to some extent, grounded in the antagonism between
Lang and RKO over the production of the film in 1956. Not only was
it Lang's last American film, it was also the last film produced by
RKO, and it represents well the aesthetic and moral exhaustion of
some of the best studio filmmaking of the classical period. Lang him-
self says that he could not "make an audience love Dana Andrews for
one hour and thirty-eight minutes16 and then in the last two minutes
reveal that he's really a son of a bitch and that the whole thing was
just a joke. But thanks to my agent's mistake I was contractually
bound to shoot the producer's original script."17 Lang's solution to
 Beyond Pleasure 37

the contradictory script was, apparently, not to let us feel anything

for Dana Andrews, who goes through the film like a somnambulist.
Identification is made impossible and the viewer is forced not only
to "read" the images, but to mortify the very idea of a hero, which is
something quite different from a "loss of heroism."
Lang is an important figure for the Cahiers du Cinema critics and
New Wave filmmakers, and of course his emigre status partially ex-
plains his perspective on American social institutions. Authorship
and auteurism, however, will be less important here than the analy-
sis of the film's narrative structure and style. Although the film does
not end with death (the final execution is not shown at all), nor in-
clude any remotely realist imagery of death, it "borrows its author-
ity from death" by way of the conventions of the murder mystery,
detective fiction, and film noir. Its treatment of the "issue" of capi-
tal punishment, moreover, aligns the absolute authority of the law
with the authorization of images, resulting in a mutual mortifica-
tion. It is crucial that this textual deconstruction takes place without
ironic self-consciousness; its invalidation of transcendental ideals of
justice and representation is constitutive of the historical context of its
production.
The film becomes "a documentary of its time"18 by relinquishing
any claims to transparency, a conversion that takes place on several
textual levels, of which the representation of death (and its repres-
sion) is central. Mortification, in Benjamin's Origins of German Tragic
Drama (1928), refers most immediately to the conversion of symbol
to allegory, the critical practice of distinguishing sign from signifier
in such a way that the signifier is a ruin of the once unified sign.19
For Benjamin, decay and transience are the emblems of a nonteleo-
logical sense of historical change. The impermanence of the present
tense is registered in the failure of past, present, and future to be
united in representation. It is a recognition of the historical differences
in arguing that Rossellini's Voyage in Italy is a "metaphysical essay,
"Mourning Play"—the German title of Benjamin's book), Benjamin
focuses on the memento mori and the theatrical tableaux of violent
death. "In the very fall of man the unity of guilt and signifying emerges
as an abstraction. The allegorical has its existence in abstractions; as
an abstraction, as a faculty of the spirit of language itself, it is at
home in the Fall."20
38 Beyond Pleasure

Benjamin's words can be applied to the imbrication of guilt and

signification in the film noir mise-en-scene generally, but also to the
"fall" implied in the "badness" of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, its
failure as entertainment. Benjamin's thought is particularly important
to a critique of the mythologies of "loss" that tend to be linked to
the representation of death. He enables the critic to read narrative
mortality as a discourse of historical difference, transforming the loss
of mythic forms of meaning into a more radical theory of historical
temporality. Melancholia is, for Benjamin, an immersion in a historical
situation in which transcendent ideals are invalidated. Narrative desire
is frustrated, despite a textual linearity, and the "illusionist intention"
is minimized to the point that "intrigue takes places like a change of
scenery on the open stage."21 With no irony or discursive distance
attained by the text, the critic/historian has the privilege and obliga-
tion to read the text as the language of history.22
An example from early American cinema might illustrate the rele-
vance of this theory to film history and representation. In The Great
Train Robbery (Porter, 1903), the man who is dramatically thrown
off the engine of a moving train is instantly transformed into a sack
of sawdust. Although this representation of death may have been
convincing to audiences of the time, it is much less so to today's
audiences. The image is mortified and the film is no longer "good"
but is the ruin of the realistic film it once was. (Of course, it may not
have been convincing at all to 1903 audiences, who probably did
not have the same expectations of realism. The image then registers
the historical transience of signifying practices.) Whereas the skulls
and bones of Benjamin's baroque emblematists registered the inade-
quacy of myths of transcendence, the representation of death in fic-
tion film can become the emblem of performance and the inade-
quacy of narrative cinema to be reality because it is always the
character and never the actor who dies in fiction film. Death becomes
such an emblem from the perspective of historical difference, of which
it is a potential sign, but also in the stylized performances and mise-
en-scenes of film history.
Mortification is an allegorical discourse that is both found within
texts and read into them. As a hermeneutic method, it is crucial to
this book's method of textual analysis as a productive discourse in
and of itself. Various critical terms, such as the "symptomatic text,"
 Beyond Pleasure 39

"reading against the grain," "countercinema"—terms that cannot quite

decide if the text at hand is "progressive" or not—might be sub-
sumed by the notion of a text that is dead, ready to be redeemed by
a different viewer. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is precisely such a text,
one that sacrifices itself, offering its images as the ruins of the classi-
cal Hollywood style of realism.
Implicit in the very notion of narrative mortality is that the mean-
ing of a film is produced by an encounter of reader and text. This is
not to relativize truth or locate it entirely with the ethnohistoricity of
the viewer, or to render culture meaningless, but to mobilize the de-
centering of representation that reception theory has accomplished.
Radical viewing, the reanimation of "dead" texts, reading against the
grain, and so on are not necessarily privileged readings but empow-
ered readings. Narrative mortality redeems the belief in representa-
tion as a belief in historical possibility.
The melancholy nature of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is evident
in the film's inability to believe in itself. It begins as a critique of
capital punishment and ends with its protagonist, Tom Garrett (Dana
Andrews), being sentenced to death for the murder of his estranged
wife. The end matches the film's opening, which is a scene of an
anonymous prisoner being led from his cell to the electric chair. Al-
though Garrett, who witnesses this opening execution, is led off in
the final shot of the film to his own execution, the "rhyming" of begin-
ning and end is destabilized by the fact that he was supposed to
have been the protagonist, the film's moral authority.
The opening critique of capital punishment, voiced by Garrett's
prospective father-in-law, Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer), is epis-
temological, not moral, based in the relativity of circumstantial evi-
dence. Garrett and Spencer test the believability of circumstantial evi-
dence by planting false clues to indict Garrett for an unsolved murder,
photographing their activities to prove (through a faith in the image)
Garrett's innocence. Garrett reenacts the crime in order to be arrested,
and is jailed and tried according to plan. But Lang strategically with-
holds Garrett's criminal activity and his history, setting him up for
the viewer (and for the Spencer family) as a morally respectable
and empathetic character, only to reveal in the second-to-last scene
that he did in fact kill Patty Gray. The film sets out to denounce the
subjection of a man's fate to "objects" (circumstantial evidence), but
40 Beyond Pleasure

proceeds to objectify the protagonist himself and reduce him, by

means of a panopticonic mise-en-scene, still photography, and a
perversely restrained acting style, to one in a series of inert signs, a
puppet with little control over either his destiny or his personality.
The final scenes of the film are especially saturated with a melan-
cholia, which may become irony to the historian but, within the genre
framework of studio production, are symptoms of an impossibility of
closure. Although the guilty party is punished and a new heterosexual
couple is formed (Susan [Joan Fontaine] and Lieutenant Kennedy [Ed-
ward Binns]), the restoration of law and order leaves something over,
a "supplement" that is the cinematic and narrative apparatus. Beyond
a Reasonable Doubt is marked by a series of bizarre narrative turns.
The arbitrary elimination of Garrett's key witness, the miraculous dis-
covery of Spencer's testimony (a letter that signifies in written lan-
guage what we thought only existed in the destroyed images), and
then the discovery that our hero, between scenes, murdered a wife
of whose existence we were unaware renders the preceding narra-
tive retrospectively meaningless, a pure process of specularity.23 Al-
though both realist representation and an ideal of social justice are
mortified in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, narrative mortality allows
us to read this process not as a loss but as a gain, a movement beyond
invalidated symbolic forms.
The particular melancholic attitude of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
concerns the cinema itself and the believability of its images. Imme-
diately after witnessing the opening execution (the sight is withheld
from the viewer), Spencer says to Garrett (they are in a witness box
in the execution chamber), "After you've seen one ..." and he is in-
terrupted. The implication that an unequivocal indictment of capital
punishment is only possible by seeing it makes its way into the film
inadvertently, by the perverse concealment and strategic speculariza-
tion of death. Garrett's death is necessitated by the narrative text, an
authority that has cheated the viewer by concealing a key event:
Patty Gray's murder. Moreover, the law that the narrative was to ques-
tion is, in the end, upheld without question. The first duplicitous act
singles out the authority behind the second, linking the techniques of
narrative cinema with those of capital (death penalty) law in the re-
gime of the visible.
 Beyond Pleasure 41

Austin Spencer's accidental death midway through Garrett's trial is

vivid and explosive, in contrast with the mainly flat, banal mise-en-
scene of the rest of the film. Spencer removes the photographs, Gar-
rett's alibi, from his wall safe as a radio announces that the jury's
verdict will be announced that very morning. He places the pho-
tographs beside him when he gets into his car. As he backs out of
his garage, a truck hits the car broadside. The only witnesses to
Spencer's death are anonymous passers-by and a suddenly omniscient
camera, which, waiting outside Spencer's garage, seems almost to
have staged the accident. Lang uses a gamut of audio and visual
techniques—screaming, music, rapid cutting, close-ups, a canted cam-
era, and a flash of light. No corpse, but rather a car radio engulfed in
flames, concludes the brief scene. The authoritative announcement
of the continuation of the trial issues from the wreckage, marking
the lost locus of patriarchal authority in this mid-narrative death at a
crossroads.
Whether one wants to describe Lang's technique here as "expres-
sionist" or "stylized" in the mode of film noir, the excess of violence
underlines the narrative break of Spencer's arbitrary death. But it
also displaces the character's mortality onto the film itself, which
erupts in an attempt to signify this death. Just as the limits of the father
function are suddenly revealed in the character's mortality, the film's
limits are also suddenly exposed. The scene intimates that realist
representation potentially breaks down with the representation of
death, which it cannot fully represent.

Semiosis: The Discourse of Photography in Film

The most telling emblem of the failure of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
is the brief scene in which Susan Spencer and Lieutenant Kennedy
examine the charred remains of the photographs that have been
destroyed in Austin Spencer's car accident. Because they were taken
with a Polaroid camera, there are no negatives. They are the ruins of
Garrett's alibi that are enough to convince Susan of his innocence.
However, as Kennedy points out, "they could be photos of anything."
As photographic ruins, they mark the reduction of the image to an
objective "creaturely" status: carbon garbage. Nowhere is the mortifi-
42 Beyond Pleasure

cation of cinematic presence more vivid than in this scene, which,

along with the awkward dialogue about "real evidence" and "belief"
in Garrett, is truly melancholic.
The inclusion of still photographs within narrative film underlines
the mortifying potential of photographic representation, jeopardizing
a film's illusion of movement by acknowledging its status as still
frames.24 The photos in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt are not freeze-
frames, but they flirt nonetheless with the masquerade of presence
upon which the fiction of the narrative is predicated. They repeat the
narrative action in imagistic form, and as fetishized objects they are in-
tended to return (to be reproduced by Spencer) in order to absolve
Garrett, but instead they seal another fate when they are destroyed
in the car accident. Of the photographs in Beyond a Reasonable
Doubt, Raymond Bellour says, "Both before and after the accident,
they haunt the film, creating a sort of two-way mirror. The photo,
shimmering in memory, plays with the truth of cinema."25 They allow
the viewer that time for reflection that the succession of film images
normally denies — a time in which the viewer "adds" to the image.
He or she adds precisely the knowledge of the image and its absent
referent.
The referent in this case is doubly removed, or doubly duplicitous.
Intended to establish Garrett's innocence, the photographs instead
mask his guilt. The man in the pictures, Dana Andrews, is neither
guilty nor innocent, but merely a man posing for a photograph. Lack-
ing negatives, the Polaroid photographs are images without "depth,"
and they haunt the film as the elusory traces of the truth guaranteed
by photography. The film, which relies on that guarantee for its nar-
rative security, becomes in turn a free-floating ghost of a film.
Moreover, an identification is obliquely established between the
authorization of images (outside the text) and the legal and patriar-
chal authorities (inside the film) insofar as all the photographs are
either taken by Spencer or published in his newspaper. Spencer's
death and the coextensive destruction of his photographs simply enact
a transferral of narrative authority. Spencer has taken pains in his pho-
tographs to be absolutely accurate, including newspapers with dates
and his own reflection within the frame, but when the photographs
turn out to be an elaborate lie, Spencer's responsibility as enunciator
is usurped by the enunciative strategy of the film itself.26 Along with
 Beyond Pleasure 43

the prosecutor, all the viewer has left are the images of the film, im-
ages that have been designed, planned, to condemn Garrett.
It is precisely through this extensive use of photographs—which,
as Bellour suggests, haunt the film with their absence, even when
destroyed — that the film's systems partially break down. The strate-
gic duplicity that the film enacts upon its spectator is at odds with
the "supplement" that the photograph encourages the viewer to con-
tribute. The instability of the narrative's final embrace of capital pun-
ishment is due to the extension of the questioning of "evidence" to
the film's own evidence by virtue of the photograph, which cannot
construct a spectator. Bellour's observation that "when film looks
at itself, it never sees itself as it does in the photograph," points to
the means by which narrative mortality in Beyond a Reasonable
Doubt involves an uncanny recognition of the film's own fictional
status.
The production of photographs within the text of Beyond a Rea-
sonable Doubt is responsible for a very specific form of doubling, an
uncanniness that is crucial to the film's narrative mortality. In the pro-
cess of doubling, the repetition of images from film to photograph insti-
tutes a chain of signifiers in which none are originary. The anxiety of
the uncanny is precisely the sense of loss implied in doubling. The
transformation of the work of death in narrative film from authoritative
"meaningfulness" to the radical work of textual praxis involves a recog-
nition of the "ontology of the cinema"—its photographic basis—as
a grasp on history. This "grasp" is, in a sense, the very possibility of
mortification, which, even in Benjamin's writing, is closely linked to
the mechanical reproduction of images.27
For Freud, although the double might have been originally con-
ceived as a protection against death (by primitive societies), in the
modern psyche it is also a "ghastly harbinger of death."28 This, he
says, is because of the "reminder" it contains of the "inner repetition-
compulsion" that is the motivating principle of the death drive (p.
44). Freud further points to the effacing of the distinction between
"imagination and reality," or "when a symbol takes over the full sig-
nificance of the thing it symbolizes," as an example of the uncanny
(p. 44). Film is uncanny in that it may preserve life in its indexicality,
but at the same time it "murders" reality by mimicking it, repeating
it, making it into an object.
44 Beyond Pleasure

The uncanny describes the effect of cinematic representation that

fails to repress the reminder of the absent referent and the void that
narrative realism sutures over. This effect is created in Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt by way of the discourse of photography, but also,
as we will see, by discourses of repetition and character doubling.
These devices may not necessarily produce "fear" in the spectator,
especially without the spectacular and iconographic conventions of
the horror film, but they might well produce a split spectator, one
who both believes and disbelieves in the film's moral and aesthetic
ideals. Freud indulges in his own form of literary criticism when he
chastises the writer who invokes the uncanny: "he deceives us into
thinking that he is giving us the sober truth, and then after all over-
steps the bounds of possibility" (p. 57). The uncanny is implicit in
the themes of coincidence and fate in which the contingent real be-
comes subject to the powers of nature and narrative.
The uncanny "harbinger of death" offers a key tool for reading
the mortality of representation. The term "semiosis" is a related means
of theorizing the mortality of the body, and its transformation through
decay, as a structure of representation. Although semiosis can refer
to the physical transformation of the body,29 for Charles Sanders Peirce,
it is a human signifying activity, the means by which chains of refer-
entiality ultimately lead back to an " interpretant and ground of rep-
resentation."30 The semiosis of narrative mortality is therefore the
sign of history as decay within the cinematic signifier, which is to
say the indexicality of time linking the image to history, if history is
the singular (past) time in which the image was produced (shot).
Mortification involves a violence against the referent of the film image,
killing it and making it stop. Every film image and every filmed mo-
ment becomes a "ruin" of history and an allegory of the desire that
once informed its present tense.
In Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, even the very ground of semiosis,
the profilmic moment, is a fiction. And, of course, for Umberto Eco,
semiosis refers to the infinite play of referentiality in which there is
no "ground" that does not itself deconstruct or decompose.31 The alle-
gory produced here is one of a radical decentering and deflation of
photocinematic authority. Garrett posing with a dated newspaper
and a lighter he will subsequently toss into the bushes at the "scene
of the crime"; Garrett holding a nylon stocking in the front seat of
 Beyond Pleasure 45

his car—these are moments that already stop the action of the film,
repeating scenarios of desire in the presence of the father-in-law/
photographer/newspaper owner and editor, Austin Spencer. In the
banality of these images, the narrative of desire is already in decay,
subject to the mortifying gaze of the critic. The spectator of the film,
offered the Polaroid snapshots as well as the newspaper photos and
all the subsequent television images, sees a film that is always uncan-
nily seeing its own fiction.

Death and Power

The historical analysis of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt as a "dead

text" involves a mortification of its imagery and narrative desire, but
also a recognition of its specific deployment of capital law. Lang's
treatment of capital punishment in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, as
well as his mise-en-scene and narrative logic, are described by Rivette
as a "proliferation of denials," of which the denial of the sight of
death is emblematic. The repression of this image is balanced by an
overdetermined representation of power: the imagery of the judicial
system, paternalistic characters, and the power of (and over) photocin-
ematic representation. The power of narrative itself is displayed as a
violence against the spectator.32 In Jacques Rivette's words, "We are
plunged into a world of necessity, all the more apparent in that it
coexists so harmoniously with the arbitrariness of the premises; Lang,
as is well known, always seeks the truth beyond the reasonable, and
here seeks it from the threshold of the unreasonable."33 By enacting
the denial that governs mortality in capital-ist discourse, the narra-
tive apparatus "exposes" itself and its limits. If capitalism and capital
punishment mutually reinforce each other in the context of cold war
American policy, they become legible here as fictions of power and
paranoia.
In Hollywood film of the 1950s, violence became a crucial means
of transforming genre narratives into more complex historical docu-
ments. Ideological closure, whether through the successful solving
of a crime or formation of a couple, or both, was in turn destabilized.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is in this sense only one example of
how, in the internal destruction of genre cinema that took place in
the 1950s, death became a representation of doubt and anxiety. This
46 Beyond Pleasure

is not simply a question of the imagery of violence, but is bound to

the power of the representation of death. The ability to produce the
spectacle of death is both a discourse of control and one of potential
transgression. An uncanny conjunction of crisis and possibility, narra-
tive mortality delineates the threshold of the representable.
The discourse of power is inscribed in the production history of
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt in terms of censorship. The studio would
not allow Lang to represent the opening execution "more realisti-
cally." Lang claims that he did shoot it "the way I myself had seen it:
how they drag the man in, how he struggles and doesn't want to
go,"34 but he was prevented from including this scene in the final
cut. The lack of "realistic" representations of death in 1950s Holly-
wood is due in part to censorship,35 although it seems that death itself
is censored from the original Hays Production Code, where only
"the technique of murder," "brutal killings," and "revenge" are listed
as taboo under the heading of "Crimes Against the Law," subsection
"murder."36 The one other proscription against representing death in
the code is listed under "Repellent subjects": "1. Actual hangings or
electrocutions as legal punishments for crime."
This partially explains why Lang was not allowed to make the
opening execution "realistic," but it also indicates that the institutional
guilt that is demonstrated in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is shared
by Hollywood. Implicit in this taboo is the realization that to see
capital punishment is to condemn it. The capitulation to capital law
must be at the expense of its visualization, and in Beyond a Reason-
able Doubt, through the appropriation of authoritative discourses by
patriarchal law, the optical apparatus of the cinema is perversely
equated with "the chair."
Spectatorship, conceived as the chair in the cinematic apparatus,
is a highly volatile element in the Langian system. Jean-Louis Comolli
and Francois Gere have argued that Lang's films take the spectator on
a "journey of mortification" in their systematic annihilation of secure
ideological and scopic positioning. In Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
this "journey" is a process of entrapment that effectively mortifies
the moral/ideological pleasure of the viewing experience. This is es-
pecially evident in three short single-take scenes distributed through
the second half of the film. In the first of these, immediately after
 Beyond Pleasure 47

Spencer's death, Jonathan Wilson, Garrett's lawyer, visits Garrett in

jail. The shot is framed in a fourth-wall composition, with the back
wall comprised of bars, behind which a guard's face is fixed at the
vanishing point of the image. Except for one imperceptible dolly back
to reframe Garrett, the camera is static. The lack of an envisioning
subject in a narrative so obsessed with looking is conspicuous, espe-
cially since the composition is repeated twice more. One might com-
pare this minimal but tightly structured image to Las Meninas, inso-
far as the guard's distant face is, as Foucault says, "addressing itself to
what is invisible both because of the picture's structure and because of
its existence as painting."37 Because the guard is fixed, like the spec-
tator, "on the other side" of the image, he is like the mirror in Las
Meninas, figuring the representational apparatus within the text38
(figure 1).
The figurative place constructed for the spectator in the death-row
shots is one of surveillance and control, not that of the imprisoned

Fig. 1. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. In the panopticonic gaze at death row, Gar-
rett (Dana Andrews), standing, is told by his lawyer that his execution is sched-
uled for the morning.
48 Beyond Pleasure

man. The camera placement identifies the gaze with the forces of
empowerment that have imprisoned Garrett, and as such constitutes
a cinematic version of the panopticon, in which the source of the
gaze of power is itself invisible. Foucault describes the panopticonic
structure of imprisonment, which was refined in the eighteenth cen-
tury, as a mechanism comprised of "so many cages, so many small
theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and
constantly visible Visibility is a trap."39 Not only does this per-
fectly describe Garrett's situation in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, but
if the major effect of the panopticon is to "assure the automatic func-
tioning of power," Garrett is likewise entrapped in the drama of his
indictment, the judicial mechanism that leads inexorably to his death.
The very structure of the panopticonic apparatus, reproduced in these
prison scenes of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and in the cinematic
apparatus itself, is organized around the containment of death.40
Capital law in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is the abstract form of
the apparatuses of execution and the cinema, equated in their tech-
niques of witnessing, exclusion, and irreversibility. In Beyond a Rea-
sonable Doubt, Garrett is subjected to a series of overlapping pater-
nalistic, institutional, and representational discourses, from Spencer
and Thompson the district attorney (who, along with Garrett's lawyer,
Wilson, resemble each other), to the court and the state, represented
by the judge and the governor (who also resemble each other, one
generation older than the first set of fathers), to photographs, televi-
sion screens, cameras, newspapers, and a huge microphone that is
foregrounded in the shots of him on the witness stand.
The three panopticonic "death-row" scenes have serious ramifica-
tions for the spectator of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. The guard re-
turns the viewer's gaze passively, but fixes it nonetheless in a "tran-
scendental," centrally privileged, spectatorial position—one that
condemns Garrett to be the object of the gaze at the two moments
of his self-realization of his death sentence. The spectator's place
within the text is thus rendered highly contradictory. After Spencer's
death, Garrett is the viewer's ideological or moral surrogate, but at
the same time, point of view is structured around Garrett's condem-
nation. For Comolli and Gere, Lang's spectator is made to "pay for
his place";41 in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, the viewer's ultimate
 Beyond Pleasure 49

rejection from the text with "the end" is rendered scopically and ide-
ologically from the moment of Spencer's death.
The prison scenes cast the spectator's impossible position as a
death-within-the-text, short-circuiting the momentum of desire in the
representation of a closed visual and ideological system. However, it
is not necessarily a positioning that takes place, as apparatus theory
might have it, because the assigned position of power is uncomfort-
able. The representation of so many witnesses, spectators, and juries
within the film suggests that the justice system is—as Foucault already
implies—more of a show, spectacle, and theater than a closed struc-
ture. The journey of mortification noted by Comolli and Gere is not
necessarily a dead end, but may open up a space for a redemptive
reading.
If the deus ex machina of Garrett's guilt retroactively casts the
film as a "fiction" produced by a disillusioned and cruel auteur, it is
an allegory of belief. Beyond a reasonable doubt, there is the state
and the law, which, like the allegory of resurrection, rob allegory of
"its arbitrary rule in the realm of the dead."42 It is the necessity of the
law that produces the film's discourse of mortality, and because it
remains discursive (the sign of Garrett's indictment is the governor's
hand replacing a pen in its holder, with a blank "Pardon" document
in front of him), it remains readable as a discourse. By showing his
own hand with the deus ex machina and Spencer's freak accident,
Lang reveals this discourse of necessity to be entirely arbitrary. The
viewer's belief in Garrett's character, and in the film itself, is cast as a
desire to believe in representation; if the cinema is as unreliable as
circumstantial evidence, it is potentially freed from the tyranny of
the law. Beyond a reasonable doubt, there is also the blank space of
Utopian ideation.
Narrative mortality in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a discourse
of power, in which incrimination can be read as a framing of individ-
ual destiny within the contours of state power and paternal authority.
Garrett's death sentence, which hangs over the film as both its goal
and its threat, might be regarded as symptomatic of the particular
historical juncture of the cold war. The executions of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg in 1953 had brought the issues of capital punishment and
political transgression into public debate.43 Capital punishment became
50 Beyond Pleasure

the deployment of absolute power in the name of democracy. It could

only be demonstrated, however, with evidence of resistance: the cir-
cumstantial evidence marshaled against the Rosenbergs. Lang's story
about capital law opens with the execution of an anonymous crimi-
nal, and eventually provides a subjective criminality that can only be
produced within a discourse of resistance.
Garrett, it turns out, is playing the institutions of the press, the legal
system, and the state off against one another, but in doing so he cannot
be identified with any one of them. As an innocent man, he is narra-
tively and literally framed by the disciplines that extend even to the
"hand of fate" that kills Spencer. But the fact that he is actually guilty
testifies to the means by which the power to punish produces the fig-
ure of the transgressor. Crime as social transgression, as nonnormative
behavior, and the idea of a class of criminals are produced and main-
tained in the exclusionary apparatuses of power. If the judicial appara-
tus "always gets its man," the narrative of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
painfully produces that man, and it is not the spectator, or anyone
with whom the spectator is inclined to identify. We may watch Gar-
rett meet his destiny in the last scene with some sympathy, but it is
of a highly intellectual order: that of the witness, not the lover.
The spectator who is framed here, forced into the witness box
and denied the usual securities of narrative cinema, can be located
historically. Foucault argues that the power to punish produces an ille-
gality labeled delinquency, a term that, of course, enters common par-
lance in the 1950s, through a discourse of the family generated from
popular Freudianism. Juvenile delinquency, in this context, is the nam-
ing of, and the attempt to accommodate into the "discipline" of the
family, a segment of society that tended to fall through the ideologi-
cal fissure between self-determination and "the aggressive expansion
of corporate capitalism."44 The delinquency that is so perversely pro-
duced in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt lacks the rebelliousness and re-
sistance that characterizes some other contemporary films (e.g., Rebel
Without a Cause), and remains a virtually abstract term of domestic
deviance: the brutal murder of an invisible wife.
Within the historical context of cold war paranoia and the produc-
tion of delinquency, narrative mortality may be read in the very styl-
istics and narrative instabilities of film noir, especially the "second
 Beyond Pleasure 51

phase" of the genre, which for Paul Arthur corresponds to the sociopo-
litical isolation of communism "as the sole agent of domestic and inter-
national unrest."45 The rise of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the entry
into Korea in 1950 effectively institutionalize the shift from which
point "conflicts between personal and institutional demands and val-
ues" become central in the film noir text.46 In this sense, Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt may not be as idiosyncratic as it appears, and its
allegory of narrative mortality might be more legible as a disbelief in
affirmative cultural institutions.
The tensions between individual and institution, paranoia and
power, subjective doubts and objective norms are frequently narra-
tivized in film noir through the representation of death. Arthur sug-
gests that the ambiguities of identity in film noir are typically regis-
tered in an experience of death of one kind or another:
The objective status of death in film noir narratives is often
convoluted, confusing, opaque. People don't just die; they can
be understood as dead then suddenly return {Laura); they
can, due to circumstances in which they should have died, be
considered "resurrected" {Kiss Me Deadly); they can spend
nearly the entire film with irreversible physical injury
CD.O.A) Given the mutability of personal identity in film
noir it is not surprising that there is a constant horizon of
death—represented through explicit verbal reference,
narrative action, and overall narrative structuring—and that
this horizon is fraught with considerable ambiguity: who will
die, and will that injunction be a final or a transitive state? No
other group of films in Hollywood history treats this subject
with such pervasive concern or with such emblematic
uncertainty.47
The "death-row" shots of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt might, in
this respect, be regarded as typical of a purgatorial style of represen-
tation in which death becomes a discursive figure in American cin-
ema. In this film it becomes particularly clear how the representation
of death potentially links the power of cinematic representation with
other forms of empowerment. Narrative mortality involves the real-
ization of this process as potentially reversible, as predicated on social
and historical difference.
52 Beyond Pleasure

Beyond Pleasure

If narrative mortality is to be understood as an allegorical form of

desire, a mortification of institutionalized desires, and an opening up
of historical, Utopian desires, it remains to situate this discourse in
relation to psychoanalytic film theory. What has become known as
apparatus theory may have been instrumental in deconstructing the
logic of male desire that informs so much film narrative, but at the
same time the phallocentrism of the theory itself limits its usefulness
as a critical tool. Narrative mortality provides a means of decentering
psychoanalytic film theory by emphasizing the difference of mortality
over that of sexuality. The point is not to undermine the discourse
of gender that informs a film like Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, but to
amplify a feminist critique in such a way that a position of analysis
and critique might be identified within the film's own discourse of
desire.
Psychoanalytic film theory may be able to account for the film's
panopticism and its oedipal trajectory, but it is notoriously unable to
theorize a spectator who witnesses, reads, or maintains some kind of
"difference" from the text at hand. A psychoanalytic analysis of Be-
yond a Reasonable Doubt would identify the constitution of male
subjectivity as the film's logic of desire and difference. Certainly the
three central women in the film are the terrain across which the pro-
tagonist's trajectory is traced. Insofar as Garrett is both "murderer"
and "author" he encompasses a split between unconscious desire
(transgression of the patriarchal law) and conscious repression (iden-
tification with the symbolic father). When Garrett says "Emma" instead
of "Patty," he reveals his guilt by acknowledging his (sexual) history.48
(Emma is Patty's real name, and it is because Garrett accidentally uses
it that Susan deduces that he knew her and therefore killed her.) That
he reveals his double identity with a slip of the tongue indicates the
Freudian dimension of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.
Susan Spencer, Garrett's fiancee, becomes the sign of the replace-
ment of father by son, representing castration in her domineering,
sophisticated behavior and attire, in her explicit threat to Garrett's
work, and in her brief usurpation of her father's place at the office.
Garrett's excessive concern to keep her at a distance is his "accep-
 Beyond Pleasure 53

tance of the threat of castration from the father," the condition of entry
into the symbolic order.49 Garrett's encounters in the Club Zombie and
its dressing rooms establish him as a desiring subject, but it is above
all his relationship with Patty/Emma that constitutes his disavowal.
Unseen except for a single highly "contained" newspaper photo
of her body, Patty's absence from the text is overdetermined when
Lieutenant Kennedy shows her publicity photo to the barman in Mi-
ami, but it is not shown to us. Patty's punishment for eroticism is
commensurate with her very (invisible) presence in Beyond a Rea-
sonable Doubt, a variation or condensation of the woman's place in
film noir: it is her "guilty secret" that the film is in quest of, and her
punishment is extremely sadistic. The only image of her that appears
is an abstract arrangement of body parts in a newspaper beside an
empty landscape labeled "scene of crime" (figure 2). In a revealing
interview, Lang describes Patty/Emma as an "unscrupulous black-
mailer who is after [Garrett's] money with egotistical singleminded-
ness and without a moment's thought for the possibility that she is

Fig. 2. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: The textual repetition of the imaginary, dead
woman in Austin Spencer's newspaper.
54 Beyond Pleasure

ruining his whole career and his future life."50 He has to supplement
the absent character of Patty/Emma in order to defend Garrett; he
has to amplify the femme fatale who lurks behind the film.
Between these two "symbolic" (Susan) and "imaginary" (Patty/
Emma) women is Dolly, who stands in for Patty in Garrett's re-creation
of the crime. As her name suggests, Dolly is a narrative fetish, repre-
senting both Garrett's desired relationship with women and a threat:
she, like Susan, turns him in to the law. The film's misogyny under-
lines the contradictions of Garrett's oedipal trajectory, which is by
definition a master plot that excludes women from subjectivity and
desire. Without question, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt lends itself to
a feminist critique of the logic of sexual difference in the film's system.
Within the tenets of apparatus theory, though, the critique would have
to locate spectatorship within that logic of desire and exclude female
pleasure entirely.51 Identification would rest entirely with male sub-
jectivity. And yet there is surely a pleasure involved in the critique,
in the reading itself, as well as a temptation to claim that the oedipal
logic is subverted by the film's excesses of representation. Female
subjectivity may not be entirely contained by a text that is so clearly
troubled by it. The symptoms of textual instability may be the traces
of a troubled culture, but it is difficult to reconcile such a reading
with a psychoanalytic analysis. Narrative mortality may provide a
means of transforming a symptomatic psychoanalytic reading into a
redemptive reading.
The discourses of sexuality and mortality may be seen to coincide
in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt in such a way that the family romance
converges with the panopticism described earlier. The incoherency of
the film's ending points to an excess of regulation and control that
extends beyond imprisonment to the normative codification of post-
war American society. If Garrett can be considered to be an oedipal
protagonist, he is one who fails to successfully enter the symbolic
order, represented as high society (Susan Spencer's world) and is
cruelly excluded from it. The cruelty of the film, including Lang's
duplicity against the spectator, marks the text as unpleasurable, as
"beyond pleasure," arbitrarily cutting off the possibility, for Garrett,
of social mobility and a normalizing marriage. For the spectator, it
also curtails the desire for entry into this society built on power and
repression. In the dissociation of the pleasure principle (Garrett's
 Beyond Pleasure 55

desire and the spectator's desire) from closure (the invocation of cap-
ital law against Garrett), the text does indeed move beyond a certain
kind of pleasure: that which is inscribed in the oedipal master plot.
The mortification of desire is registered in the scopophilic gaze at
the female body, which is transformed into a melancholic gaze. In a
purely gratuitous scene in the Club Zombie dressing room, one of
the dancers (Terry, also a key witness) undresses behind a screen. A
mirror placed directly behind her, however, allows Garrett and the
film's viewer a voyeuristic glimpse of her in her underwear. This ex-
tremely crude mise-en-scene, along with several scenes of bad bur-
lesque performances, circumvents pleasure with objectification as the
women are cruelly reduced to the status of "circumstantial evidence."
Patty's body is signified by "Foster's number nine body makeup"
(another piece of evidence) that once again overdetermines its ab-
sence. Lang's melancholia, therefore, may be the result of the lack of
scopophilic pleasure inscribed in his sexist gaze, and the film's re-
demptive potential is precisely in the deadness of this look.
In other words, a psychoanalytic reading may be called for by
this text in which socialization of the male subject is constituted in
and through language and female sexuality. However, it is a reading
in which the systemics of psychoanalytic theory are fractured through
the excessive strategies of regulation. It is not a desire for the Other
that motivates the narrative; nor is it simply a desire for closure, but
a desire for images and the representation of a crime. From the
lengthy trial scene, when Garrett is "fixed" physically and scopically,
the second half of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, like the second half
of Oedipus Rex, abandons the proairetic code for the hermeneutic.52
Moreover, the conclusion of the investigation, which establishes that
Garrett himself is the criminal, is similar to that of Oedipus's recogni-
tion of his own guilt. But the more appropriate classical model for
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt may lie "beyond Oedipus": perhaps Gar-
rett's trajectory, from the moment of Spencer's death, is no longer
that of Oedipus, but that of Oedipus at Colonus.
The continuation of Oedipus's story involves, above all, the retell-
ing of the story of Oedipus Rex. Shoshana Felman writes, " Oedipus
at Colonus is about the transformation of Oedipus's story into his-
tory: it does not tell the drama, it is about the telling (and retelling)
of the drama. It is, in other words, about the historization of Oedipus'
56 Beyond Pleasure

destiny, through the symbolization—the transmutation into speech—

of the Oedipal desire."53 Felman demonstrates that, for Lacan, Beyond
the Pleasure Principle "holds the key not just to history or to trans-
ference but, specifically, to the textual functioning of signification,"
which is "a replaying of the symbolic meaning of the death the sub-
ject has repeatedly experienced." For Lacan,
Oedipus at Colonus, whose entire being resides in the speech
formulated by his destiny, concretizes the conjunction
between life and death. He lives a life which is made of death,
that sort of death which is exactly there, beneath life's
surface.54

In Lacan's discussion of Hamlet, we can find further clues as to the

function of death in narrative. "Something," says Lacan, "has changed
since classical antiquity in the relationship of the hero to his fate."55
This turns out to be knowledge, specifically, for Hamlet, that he
lives "in the hour of the Other," that he has "an appointment," which
is the hour of his destruction.56
The relationship between castration anxiety and the fear of death
was, for Freud, one of analogy, although the former was undoubtedly
the prior phenomenon in the psyche.57 It has been argued that Freud in
fact tended to place death to the side, to subordinate it to matters of
sexuality, as is most evident in his treatment of Laius's murder in the
Oedipus myth, and in his neglect of Oedipus's own death in Sophocles'
Oedipus at Colonus.58 Lacan's reading of Freud, however, accepts
existential element of castration anxiety as fundamental. Stuart Schnie-
derman suggests that the dead occupy that elusive category of the
real that subtends Lacan's conception of language and subjectivity:
The dead also are real, not merely because death creates holes
in the real. The gods and the dead are real because the only
encounter we have with the real is based on the canceling of
our perceptual conscious, of our sense of being alive: the real
is real whether we experience it or not and regardless of how
we experience it The concept of the real implies the
annihilation of the subject.59

In applying psychoanalytic theory to narrative, one is in perpetual

danger of imposing the metaphors of patriarchy onto a text, a danger
 Beyond Pleasure 57

epitomized in Lacan's reduction of all objects — including Ophelia —

into manifestations of the phallus.60 "Hamlet," says Lacan, stakes "pre-
cious objects"—the paraphernalia of dueling (for Shakespeare), the
trace of the phallus (for Lacan) — "against death" (p. 30). However, by
noting the strategic occurrences of death in narrative, as indices of the
loss or lack of the real, against which the narrative is "staked," Lacan-
ian theory might itself be read as an allegory of narrative mortality.
In Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, the story of Garrett's trajectory as
surrogate criminal is told first by Spencer and then by Lang, in images.
With Garrett's confession at the end, another story, hitherto buried,
is revealed. Significantly, this story constitutes the "truth" (the factual-
ity, against which the film has been mere fiction) but remains untold,
either visually or verbally. "In the Langian system, the truth is what
kills, what condemns to death,"61 but in this case at least, the slippery
signifier Patty/Emma reveals the truth as a void upon which the film
has concealed its fiction. Like the Oedipus story, Beyond a Reason-
able Doubt is above all about father-son relations; in Laura Mulvey's
words, it is a "timeless stasis" of paternal authority that lies far beyond
pleasure. But it is also about this fiction of patriarchy, and about the
ways that it becomes myth (representation) insofar as sexual desire
is radically suppressed, relegated to a "riddling spirit of the Sphinx
[which] activates questions that open up the closures of repression."62
Patty/Emma, dead from the outset, belongs to the category of the
sphinx and the real—excluded from a narrative which nevertheless
flirts with her, and the real, as the elusive category of "truth." Possibly,
as a woman, she can be said to represent "the lack," that wound
which classical narrative is said to suture with its narrative operations.63
But she is also clearly identified with death: she is her death. The
film itself is revealed finally to be a series of false clues, mere signi-
fiers, a narrative told selectively and seductively, only by virtue of a
lack, an ellipsis: the omission of the murder scene and Garrett's par-
ticipation in it.
The viewer is left at the end of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt with
the disturbing feeling of wondering why this film has taken place.
What was it that Lang wished to show and tell? Despite the melodra-
matic turns of Susan's betrayal, the film is utterly lacking in moral
stakes; there is no sympathy generated for the protagonist/murderer,
or for his punishers. Garrett's death is "a decadent form of the Oedipal
58 Beyond Pleasure

situation"64 insofar as his desire, organized around sexual difference

(its recognition and acceptance as a symbolic order), is appropriated
by another desire. A "metanarrative" subjectivity assumes his death,
as he assumed Patty/Emma's, for its own practice. Garrett's ostensible
goal — to marry Susan and construct an alibi — is replaced by that of
Lang, to tell a story, a story that is not about death but thoroughly
underscored by the death of the subject, in the film and of the film.
As the desire to narrate is reduced to its pure form (Lang, remem-
ber, did not wish to tell this story), mortality takes precedence over
castration as the term of difference in signification. The film's ending
not only agrees with the district attorney's stated objective, to "uphold
the law of this state," but it also fulfills Spencer's comment early in
the film that "Thompson [the district attorney] wants to reach the
governor's chair over the bodies of executed men." Garrett's death is
demanded simply by the desire of the logic of the text, which is left
with his body as an extra term, a supplement to the restoration of
the couple (Susan Spencer and Lieutenant Kennedy), a signifier that
must be returned to the nothingness from whence it came.
What Rivette recognizes in his critique of Beyond a Reasonable
Doubt is that this triumph of reasonableness is the production of a
knowledge outside the film, an address to the spectator, indeed a
quest for reason in an unreasonable world.65 The object of mourning
in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt—the trust in law and order, the belief
in social justice — is potentially redeemed beyond the strict logic of
the text, but it is so only as a nonrepressive form. The failed logic of
desire that we have traced in terms of the Oedipus complex can also
be described as an uncanny destabilization of the death drive, in
which repetition and return become principles of redemption.

The Uncanniness of Repetition

If the key strategies of Thanatos in narrative representation are repe-

tition and doubling, an important technique of narrative mortality in
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is the overdetermination of Thanatos.
The extremes to which the techniques of repetition and doubling
are taken in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt are the means by which
desire takes on historical dimensions. The film's excess of control
 Beyond Pleasure 59

and regulation (e.g., the recurrence of father figures) finally separates

fiction, doubt, and belief from truth, law, and knowledge. The inscrip-
tion of Thanatos in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is overdetermined
by the abundance of verbal and visual repetition, working against
the desire for the happy ending—the generic expectations of the
solution of the crime and the winning of the girl. The "narrative im-
pulse" of the death drive completely transcends the ostensible dis-
course of oedipal desire; what is attained (the legitimation of capital
law) is not what was wanted (a critique of capital law). The film ends
with a very literally unfulfilled desire for social transformation.
Freud's conception in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a dynami
interplay between desire for difference and change (Eros) and desire
for repetition and a return to "the same" (Thanatos), taken as a model
for narrative process and limits, provides a theory of plot as "the inter-
nal discourse of mortality."66 The Freudian notion of "repetition com-
pulsion" as the manifestation of the death drive can be mapped onto
strategies of repetition, rhyming, and binding that characterize narra-
tive texts. The death drive is a dynamic of repetition and return that
threatens the sovereignty of sexual desire in the Freudian psyche,
and, for many theorists, "gives it form": the metaphoric counterpart
to the metonymy of desire.
One might also argue, however, that Thanatos is never reconciled
by Freud with the pleasure principle. In the fort/da game, it is the
death drive that binds desire to representation, but it does so with-
out necessarily ending, closing, or limiting representation to identity.
Freud witnesses a child throwing and retrieving a toy, saying "fort"
[gone] and "da" [there], a game that Freud interprets as an allegori-
cal compensation for the mother's absence through a compulsively
repetitive dialectic of loss and fulfillment (Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple, pp. 8-11). The open-endedness of the game, the play of pres-
ence and absence, may be fundamentally a structure of fantasy. Jean-
Francois Lyotard observes that
beyond the pleasure principle what Freud is surely trying to
conceptualize is 'the eternal return of the same', as it manifests
itself in the child's game, in the symptom, in the transference,
but what he is trying to get at is not the same, but the return.
What strikes him is not the law of repetition, but recurrence.67
60 Beyond Pleasure

In Lyotard's analysis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the death drive

is a different desire than "the law of desire" that regulates sexuality
and representation. It is a principle of "unbinding," which for D. N.
Rodowick is an "uncanny recurrence of phantasy [which] always rep-
resents an attempt to restage the Oedipal drama of desire and iden-
tity, to rewrite it and to have it conclude differently."68
Rodowick points out that psychoanalytic film theory has conven-
tionally assumed that pleasure in the classical cinema text is contained
and closed by the principle of repetition. As long as the death drive
is conceived as a binding force, limiting desire to the law of the
symbolic order, spectatorship can only be conceived of as a comple-
tion of the text, an instrumental part of the closed system of the tex-
tual apparatus. If Thanatos is conceived of as a different dynamic that
overwhelms the desire for closure, that grasps the absence of repre-
sentation and ending as a threshold of the desirable, it is revealed as
a discourse of fantasy and Utopia. For Rodowick, this is crucial for a
psychoanalytic theory of critical reading, which
would watch and listen, with the floating attention of the
analyst, for silences, equivocations, evasions, denials, and
contradictions. It would understand the recurrences of form
not as a desire fulfilled in signs, but as the dream of unfulfilled
desire; repetition not as a drive toward ending, but towards
new beginnings.69

Although the rhetoric of "gaps" and equivocations is a familiar

film-critical paradigm, in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt the systemic
form of such ambiguity is laid bare. In her critique of the "progressive
text" argument, Barbara Klinger stresses that "the text, 'in practice', is
an intersection at which multiple and 'extra-textual' practices of sig-
nification circulate."70 Narrative mortality is precisely an attempt to
stress the practice of the text, rather than its "true" political value or
ideological position. The contingency of the "extra-textual" violently
interrupts Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, not as a documentary materi-
alism but in the disturbance of compulsive repetition. Narrative mor-
tality yields a politics of representation in what might be described
as a "regressive" text.
The film is indeed compulsive in its repetition. The plot itself is
narrated by Spencer before being "acted out" by Garrett, whose ob-
 Beyond Pleasure 61

served behavior turns out to be itself a repetition of earlier (unseen)

actions. The various pieces of evidence are each mentioned and im-
aged repeatedly in the trial and in the events that lead up to it: the
murderer's hat, coat, and car seen by one of Patty's friends and ac-
quired by Garrett; a bottle of body makeup and a stocking; a gold
lighter given to Garrett by Susan. The scene of the crime is photo-
graphed and then returned to twice, once to photograph it and then
to reenact the crime. The proliferation of photographs and headlines
reduplicates narrative events. Many words and phrases, such as "rea-
sonable doubt," "suspects," "dancers," "belief," "facts," and "fiction,"
recur again and again in the dialogue. In typically Langian fashion,
these elements are used to link consecutive scenes and to establish
rhyming patterns throughout the film. Photos held in the hand,
newspaper headlines, and even the charred remnants of Spencer's
photos are objects that as often as not open scenes (from dissolves),
and from which the camera will always pull back to reveal who is
seeing.71
These objects, images, and phrases enact a series of "correspon-
dences" through the text, provoking a memory of details that are
never insignificant. The necessity implied by the montage destabi-
lizes the "normal functioning" of textual repetition, preventing these
details from becoming mere "memory traces" that, in being repeated,
might evoke the pleasure of quiescence and stability.72 Instead, the
obsessive repetition of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt instills a system-
aticity that deadens narrative desire, or seems to. In fact, the end is
even more strongly desired. Peter Brooks observes that
the paradox of the "dead desire" is of course that it continues
very much to live, but in displaced and unrecognized form, as
desire that cannot speak its right name ... yet for this very
reason continues as a force in the present, driving the
discourse of the subject forward in the word-to-word
connections of metonymy, extending the desiring subject
forward on those "rails" that figure the necessary dynamic of
desire, a motor insisting — as narrative ever does — toward the
unnamed meaning, the name that could be recaptured only in
a recapitulative movement starting from the end.73
At the end of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, with the closing of the
trap, the spectator finds himself or herself "named" as the meaning
62 Beyond Pleasure

of the text, as its dupe and its witness. The awareness of gaps, of
that which was not revealed, stimulates one's memory to recapitulate
and thus complete the text differently.
The repetitive details of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt that are even-
tually rallied as "evidence" in Garrett's trial are commodities: replace-
able and infinitely repeatable. The coat, the hat, the car, the lighter,
the body makeup, and the silk stocking are hardly used for their
designated purposes, but are the stage properties that, as in Benja-
min's Trauerspiel, propel Garrett toward his fate. A truly "objective"
mise-en-scene, as Rivette puts it, co-opts memory as an inert series
of signifiers: details that lack illustrative or decorative value. They
are also exemplary of a certain automatism of the text, a force of
repetition by which the trauma of "the real" is ironically alluded to.
For Lacan, the tuche is "the real as encounter—the encounter in so
far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed en-
counter."74 Whether this is the missing mother of the fort/da game,
the trauma of castration, or, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the
trauma of war experiences, repetition is the means by which this
"reality" functions in discourse "automatically." In Beyond a Reason-
able Doubt, the missing murder, as well as the viewer's own histo-
ricity (as the analyst in psychoanalytic transference), emerge as the de-
termining traumas {tuche is borrowed by Lacan from Aristotle's "search
for cause") of the textual automatism. "Repetition demands the new"
for Lacan, insofar as it characterizes "the same" as lacking.
The physical similarities between the multiple father figures evoke
another level of uncanny repetition, as does the figure of Garrett's
double, Lieutenant Kennedy, who retraces Garrett's steps through
the Spencer family and through the burlesque halls of Garrett's "other
life." The hero function is split, finally, into the law-abiding romantic
hero and the socially deviant criminal. The uncanny parallels between
the two, however, point to the arbitrariness of the division. The sense
of doubleness, recognition, and repetition implicit in the Freudian
uncanny is precisely the momentary coincidence of the transience of
self (mortality) and the fantasy of self (immortality): one's identifica-
tion with the physical world of things coinciding with the quest for
autonomous identity. Although Freud theorizes the uncanny by way
of the doppelganger of German literature, its "secularized" form in
film noir retains the sense of fantasy linking criminal and cop.
 Beyond Pleasure 63

A split identity (which is really no identity at all) is likewise un-

cannily inscribed in the spectatorial address of Beyond a Reasonable
Doubt. As in Lang's wartime propaganda films, the text at first assumes
a spectator who is "humanist, democratic and liberal, and necessar-
ily assumed so since it is on the basis of these ideological qualities
that he is to be mobilized against [capital punishment or] Nazi bar-
barism and inhumanity."75 But this fantastic identity of the morally
superior spectator who recognizes his or her humanist values in the
film's opening address is taken away and replaced with the enforce-
ment of law and order along with a discursive rendering of specta-
torship ("the look rendered visible," in the words of Comolli and
Gere). With the uncanny return of the criminal to the execution cham-
ber, those humanist ideals are doubled with their representation.
And as the spectator becomes a witness, he or she also becomes a
nobody, excluded from representation, a voyeur.
Lacan speaks of "a trap for the gaze" in relation to Hans Holbein's
The Ambassadors, in which the imagery of sixteenth-century mercan-
tilism and vanitas is foregrounded by a perceptually distorted skull.
In this picture, Lacan identifies the phallic ghost and annihilation of
the subject with the disappearance of the gaze itself. By making the
geometrical optics of anamorphosis visible in this painting, Lacan
implies that Holbein produces a fascination with that which escapes
the gaze. "One thinks it is a question of the geometral eye-point,
whereas it is a question of a quite different eye — that which flies in
the foreground of The Ambassadors."16 A different perspective is
likewise inscribed in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt through the very
visibility of the laws of narrative, perception, and subjectivity at the
vanishing point of their articulation, at their limits. The allegory of
narrative mortality in this film is neither a subversion of a textual
system nor a "misreading," but a different form of desire than that
inscribed in apparatus theory. Its inscription is akin to Holbein's dis-
torted skull. It is a desire for something other than the symbolic order,
oedipal sexuality, and law of desire that govern this text with such
vengeance.
But it is precisely this vengeance and the extreme violence of the
plot itself that potentially redeem the text. The authority of death in
this film is not the vise grips of destiny but the means of moving be-
yond character to storytelling itself, an opening up of representation
64 Beyond Pleasure

in a distinctively temporal mode. This is how Benjamin redeems the

Trauerspiel, through the hindsight of a historiography that mortifie
the past in order to redeem its unfulfilled desires. In a text as dead
as Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, one may glimpse the raw structure
of Hollywood's dream of closure: the solution to a crime, the consti-
tution of a couple, and the restoration of law and order. The lack of
pleasure achieved despite the necessity and rationality devoted to
their ostensible accomplishment is indeed melancholic. In the absence
of ironic self-awareness, however, critical spectatorship is invited to re-
deem the film as a discourse of history. As Benjamin says of the story-
teller, it makes it possible to "see a new beauty in what is vanishing."77
Perhaps a similar redemption takes place in a film such as Le
Mepris, in which, as we shall see, the latent melancholy of Lang's
impossible dramas of destiny is recognized and drawn out by Go-
dard. But in Benjamin's analysis of the inadequate Trauerspiel, deat
"frequently takes the form of a communal fate, as if summoning all
the participants before the highest court ... in death the characters
of the Trauerspiel lose only the name-bearing individuality, and no
the vitality of their role" (p. 136). The theory of fate that emerges
from his analysis is one of nonconfidence, of a destiny that is doubled
with a defiance that is not yet aware of itself, which is precisely the
kind of fate that unfolds in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. "The Ger-
man Trauerspiel was never able to inspire itself to new life; it wa
never able to awaken within itself the clear light of self-awareness"
(p. 158) — and the same might be said of Hollywood in the 1950s.
Like many films, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt displays symptoms
of instability, incoherence, and "perversity." And yet, to label it a
"progressive text" is to attach a modernist aesthetic valorization onto
a film that was neither produced nor received within such a context.78
The problem is not so much one of authenticity (is it or is it not
"art") as one of epistemology. The authority of the label "progressive
text" and the dubious implications of "progress" betray a cultural
criticism locked into a limited dualism of good and bad texts. "Morti-
fying" the text is a means of engaging with the transience of history as
it is registered in cinematic representation. This is a film that demands
that belief be suspended for historical rather than formal reasons.
Belief in the image depends on an ideologically invisible author-
ity, not one who wields his power over viewers and characters with
 Beyond Pleasure 65

the audacity that Lang does in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Once in-
visibility is understood as empowerment, cinematic authorship within
the phenomenology of the apparatus can only be an act of mortifi-
cation. The impossibility of authorizing images in Hollywood in the
1950s lies at the heart of Lang's modernist anxiety. Narrative mortal-
ity is the means by which epistemological and moral belief systems
are jointly ruined in postwar American culture. The moral vacuum of
the film's ideological contradictions is specifically aligned with the
unreliability, the virtually unreadable status of the film's own images.
If it was "un-American" to disagree with the verdict reached in the
Rosenberg trial in 1953, and if Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is read as
a deconstruction of symbolic power structures that depend on exclu-
sion, then the film's uncanniness can also be traced to the historical
traumas of the period.
Lang's disappointment with American institutions of law and image
production may have left him without anything to believe in in 1956,79
but the redemptive counterpart of the mortification and melancholia
of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is already supplied by the Cahiers crit-
ics. Resistance to the oppressive discourses of power and authority in
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt does not take the form of paranoia, mad
ness, or unchecked desire. Instead it emerges as the void upon which
the film's belief systems falter, an empty space waiting to be filled.
It is precisely the discourse of Thanatos—repetition, doubling, and
return—that takes the film beyond the pleasure of the police thriller
or crime story and brings the exercise of capital law into uncanny
alignment with the techniques of narrative cinema. The displacement
of narrative desire, opened by the film's lack of self-confidence, is a
space of mortification and redemption waiting to be realized by cre-
ative spectatorship.
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TWO

WIMWENDERS
Film as Death at Work

Death is one of the rare events that justify the term "cinematic
specificity."—ANDRE BAZIN1

T wenty-five years after Lang's last American film, Wim Wenders

crossed the ocean from Germany to make Hammet at Francis Ford
Coppola's Zoetrope studio in Los Angeles. Over the five years that
this $10-million film was in production, Wenders made four indepen-
dent films, among them the two features Lightning Over Water (1980)
and The State of Things (1982). Both films can be read as allegories
of narrative mortality, but the parameters are quite different from
those discussed in chapter 1. In this case, narrative mortality is produced
as an auteurist signature, an investment of subjectivity in cinematic
representation that is cognizant of the limits of that investment. Wen-
ders will stand here as an exemplar of a realist cinematic aesthetic
that struggles with death as a narratological problem.
The fact that Lightning Over Water and The State of Things were
made after the other films that will be discussed refers to a certain

67
68 WimWenders

crisis of the European art cinema that developed in the 1980s. Emer-
gent Third World cinemas, home video markets, and American inde-
pendent filmmaking are a few of the factors contributing to the in-
creasing commodification of art cinema. In critical discourse as well
as distribution and festival practices, it began to be perceived as a
mode of film practice among many others. Although this context will
not itself be developed in this chapter, narrative mortality in The
State of Things and Lightning Over Water engages, on different levels,
with a variety of modes of film praxis, including documentary, exper-
imental, Hollywood features, independent filmmaking, and video.
Within a fragmented cultural landscape, narrative mortality allegorizes
the mortality of a certain ideal of realist European art cinema.
It is significant that Wenders is working after Godard especially,
because Wenders's narrative mortality is in part an allegory of the
failure of the filmmaking promised by the French New Wave. The
stylistic freedom of Godard's early filmmaking is honed by Wenders
into heavily premeditated stylistic decisions and problems. My read-
ing of these two films approaches them as theses or discursive essays
on filmmaking in which the techniques and strategies of documen-
tary realism are played off against narrative storytelling. The difference
between the representation of death in documentary and fictional
modes becomes a means of negotiating between documentary and
fiction as aesthetic and economic practices.
Narrative mortality is the allegory of the dialectic of cinematic real-
ism and narrativity, but it is also — in Wenders's cinema — an allegory
of the identity of the male filmmaker who searches for himself in
both the production of images and the telling of stories. Narrative
mortality is produced in the futility of this search, and, depending
on one's reading of this situation, the effect is either melancholic or
redemptive. The conception of the auteur, which Wenders is bent on
salvaging from the commercialization of "art cinema," is a mythic
one. His attempt to resurrect those myths of subjectivity and cine-
matic representation (which we have seen to be already mortified in
1956) is articulated within the terms of cinematic representation. Re-
demption is inevitably allegorical for Wenders, and its failure is marked
more strongly than its realization, but it nevertheless signifies a desire
for a cinema with all the aura of Bazinian realism. For Wenders, nar-
 Wim Wenders 69

rative mortality is an allegory of the myth of total cinema, the ruin of

its ideals.
The conjunction of documentary and narrative forms, and the con-
flict between them, which informs Wenders's version of narrative mor-
tality, are specific to the contradictions of New German Cinema. The
emphasis on documentary realism was necessary to a film movement
intent on distinguishing itself from Hollywood illusionism for a more
politicized approach to contemporary German society. The narrative
impetus toward visual pleasure was also necessary, however, to com-
pete with Hollywood for German audiences.2 Questions of cinematic
representation cannot be distinguished from economics, and narra-
tive mortality is, for Wenders as much as for Lang, a function of the
industrial constraints on feature filmmaking. The American coloniza-
tion of postwar German culture, symbolized by the loss of Lang to
Hollywood, is a pervasive theme in Wenders's work.3
Wenders's intense anxiety of influence vis-a-vis Hollywood involves
an adherence to la politique des auteurs,4 which remains for him, in
1980, an equation of vision and consciousness that survives the cru-
elties of the film industry. Moreover, he is at once attracted to and
alienated from the classical mode of storytelling that Hollywood direc-
tors apparently achieve so effortlessly and guiltlessly. For his part,
from his earliest films through The State of Things (1982), Wenders
refined a restrained, descriptive narrative style born of such diverse
influences as Peter Handke and Ozu Yasujiro; that is, Wenders em-
ploys an aesthetic of reality in which "nothing happens" to a greater
or lesser extent in each of his films.
The event of death poses a narrative threat to such an aesthetic, a
threat that is met head-on in Lightning Over Water and The State of
Things. Both films were fairly spontaneously conceived with (rela-
tively) lower budgets than Hammet. They are extremely self-conscious
struggles with the act of filmmaking, the first with the more meta-
physical aspects of the medium, the second with its institutions and
economics. Intrinsic to the highly personal nature of Lightning Over
Water and The State of Things is an exploration of mortality and nar-
rativity as dual, defining characteristics of the medium.
It has been suggested that Wenders used directors to play the
murderous gangsters in The American Friend because "gangsters and
70 Wim Wenders

directors both manipulate others."5 Wenders himself says that "the

only men that conduct their lives like the mafia are directors. Samuel
Fuller killed an actor and two stuntmen during a shoot because he
had them do something that was too dangerous."6 Wenders has given
Fuller roles in three of his films. Like Godard, Wenders's auteurist
pantheon is headed by the Lang-Fuller-Ray triumvirate, but Wenders
also sees himself as the oedipal son of these Hollywood fathers.
Mortality and the representation of death are thus a means of work-
ing out his different aesthetic of temporality, and, at the same time,
his auteurist anxiety.
Beyond the parameters of intertextual homage, authorial anxiety,
and cinematic bravado, Wenders's use of documentary engages sev-
eral issues of cinematic representation of crucial importance to the
notion of narrative mortality. Death can be represented in two ways
on film: the actual documented death of films such as Dying (Michael
Roemer, 1976), Gimme Shelter (David and Albert Maysles, 1970), The
Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (Brakhage, 1972), and Le Sang des
betes (Franju, 1949); or by an actor pretending to die. How does one
know the difference, though? Death in film is constitutive of the
epistemological relativity of phenomenological representation, mark-
ing the limits of visual knowledge and representation. It is impossi-
ble to document death, since it looks the same as life, and so death
challenges representation with the invisibility of nonbeing; death pre-
sents an excess over visibility and representation.7
The inclusion of documented death in many fiction films consti-
tutes another order of realism, which in some instances constitutes
an intrusion of history into fictional narrative. The World War I footage
in Jules and Jim (Truffaut, 1961), the holocaust footage in Marianne
and Juliane (Von Trotta, 1981), the Sino-Japanese torture scenes in
The Last Emperor (Bertolucci, 1987), although they have very differ
ent narrative functions, introduce an entirely different order of rep-
resentation into the fiction. Like the killing of animals in film, this is
an indexical order of signification in which the referent is historicized
and given a "presence" that iconic and symbolic signification lack.
Paradoxically, performed or enacted death also has a certain author-
ity in fiction film, enhancing the illusion of narrative realism. Holly-
wood, as an industry devoted to illusion, spends a good deal of its
resources on the special effects that represent violence and death.8
 WimWenders 71

Actors can do anything on film (although stuntmen often do it for

them) except die. Although narrative may indeed tend to contain the
"ferocity of death,"9 it does so at the limits of representation. Vio-
lence in the cinema may not necessarily fix the spectator's belief,
but it does set the limits of "disbelief," the boundary at which reality is
displaced, because there can be no death in fiction. The "suspension
of disbelief" is placed on trial in the representation of violent death,
and the viewer is confronted with the double pleasure of complete
loss of critical faculties and the appreciation of the simulation.
Wenders embraces this paradox as the site of a cinematic drama
in Lightning Over Water, which poses a danger to the viewer in offer-
ing up the uncanny spectacle of death. In The State of Things, the para-
dox comes to stand for a kind of paralysis of film aesthetics and pol-
itics. Although all film images may well be ruins, signs of transience
and decay (their photographic basis being a mortification of reality),
the imagery of death is especially so. In the representation of actual
death the body becomes the sign of difference and an other time, of
which the cinematic signifier is merely a ruin. It underlines and poten-
tially exposes the allegorical nature of cinematic representation, the
disjunction between sign and referent, casting that disjunction as a his-
torical displacement. Benjamin's claim that "allegory is in the realm
of thought what ruins are in the realm of things"10 is borne out by a
dialectic of documentary and narrative cinematic representation that
Wenders hinges on the representation of deaths
We shall see that in Wenders's cinema mortality constitutes a cer-
tain threat to the eternal verities of identity and patriarchy. The poten-
tial of narrative mortality, the potential to open up a space for a dif-
ferent reading and a different kind of viewer, one who takes pleasure
in the detachment of critical viewing, is not fully realized. The analy-
ses of Lightning and The State of Things in this chapter are intende
to demonstrate the grounds of this potential in the dialectic of docu-
mentary and fictional cinematic realisms.

Lightning Over Water. The Death of the Director

Nick Ray has a small part in The American Friend, as a painter wh

pretends to be dead in order to forge, or repaint, his old works for
resale. This character resurfaces briefly in Lightning Over Water in
72 Wim Wenders

Ray's verbal proposal for the film.11 Wenders rejects it, saying, "Why
make the detour of turning him into a painter?... It's you, Nick. Why
take the step away?" There is a sense in which Lightning is an elabo-
rate exercise on Wenders's part in negotiating this detour, the in-
evitable "step away into representation."12 In the literal rendering of
the expression "film as death at work,"13 the mortal temporality of
the dying Nick Ray is almost aligned with narrative temporality, poten-
tially closing the gap between the (documentary) Real and its narra-
tive representation.
The gap is never closed because the film is not only a documentary
about Nick Ray dying of cancer but also a story of Wim Wenders's
consciousness of that process, of Ray, of himself, of the film project,
and of the other people involved in the filming of death-at-work.
This film is characterized by a Romantic dialectic of body and con-
sciousness. The finite, mortal empiricism of the body is pitted against
an eternal, or nontemporal, consciousness that might be preserved
in the transcendent values of art and beauty. Moreover, this concep-
tion of subjectivity is played out over the two bodies of two direc-
tors. Wenders's "anxiety of influence"14 in Lightning is not only con-
cerned with the creative work of himself and Nick Ray, but also with
physical presence, delineated through the parameters of performance.
The symptoms of Wenders's anxiety of influence can be read on
the level of cinematic representation, as the death of the father is
also a loss of transparency and of the "full" signification with which
Ray worked in Hollywood. The struggle of the film to "represent"
Nick Ray, to circumvent the act of presentation, is a struggle with
the fear of death, the source of which is in Wenders far more than in
Ray. This fear is precisely a fear of articulating temporal finitude (mor-
tality), a fear of representing the "temporary" presence of Ray's dying
body. In Lightning, the recovery of the transparent cinematic signi-
fier cannot, ultimately, disguise its status as a disavowal of mortality.
Wenders's commitment to narrative is expressed in the use of con-
fessional voice-over, the structuring of the film around his concern
to make a film with/about Ray, the decoupage in which scenes are
invariably shot from two or more camera positions seamlessly edited
together, and in the staging of performances within the film. From
the opening shots there is a discrepancy between Wenders's claims
to spontaneity through the verite style of performance, and the shot
 Wim Wenders 73

setups that anticipate his arrival in Soho and in Ray's loft. The dis-
crepancy is itself accounted for by the sounds and images of action
outside the film takes that are recorded on Tom Farrell's videotape,
which Wenders has liberally intercut with his own 35 mm images.
Given the cost and presence of the fifteen-odd member crew,
which causes Wenders so much anxiety, there is a certain irony in
the use of the video footage.15 At one point, he says, "I was more
and more under the pressure of making 'a movie,' and found myself
stuck and preoccupied with the work itself and the sheer mechanics
of setting up shots and deciding upon schedules, rather than being
concerned with Nick." Especially in conjunction with Wenders's film
images, the handheld, blown-up video image is "co-opted as the
'truth' or underside of filmmaking."16 It is as if Wenders wants to
document Ray and himself, their relationship, and Ray's dying, but
must leave it to someone else, as he, like Ray, is committed to narra-
tive. Farrell's video discourse supplies the sign of an "immediate" alter-
native to Wenders's far more mediated practice. Video is coded as
"more real" than film in Lightning.
Farrell's videotapes include fragments of dialogue in which Ray
asks Wenders, "Does it seem like acting, Wim?" Wenders answers,
"Not at all," but later we "overhear" him directing Nick to "turn your
head toward the camera " On yet another level of representation,
several theatrical interludes are explicit fictionalizations of characters'
relationships to one another. In Wim's "dream sequence," he is lying
on a hospital bed while Tom shoots him with his video camera and
then strangles him, acting out their ostensible rivalry as two aesthetic
heirs of Ray. Toward the end of the film, Ronnee Blakley and Ray
play Cordelia and Lear intercut with lingering close-ups of Wenders
and Susan (Nick's companion) observing the scene.
All of these trappings of fiction cannot efface the physical deterio-
ration of Ray's body. The film, says Ray, is about "a man who wants
to bring himself all together before he dies," but as he says this, his
video image threatens to disappear in an underlit, unstable shot on a
monitor. The fallacy of this quest, the impossibility of identity, is dis-
placed in the split subjectivity of the film, Wenders's conscientious-
ness taking up where Ray's body fades out. Ray's implication that
the cinema is up to the task of his unification is never in doubt, except
that his spiritual survival is explicitly a filmic one. The blue-sailed
74 Wim Wenders

Chinese junk, which Ray conceived as a vessel to carry him to the

cure for cancer, is the film's most powerful sign of transcendence. It
sails out of New York harbor, shot from a transcendent, swooping
helicopter, and displays on its deck a huge Mitchell camera and a
moviola from which ribbons of filmstrip flutter. The funeral urn is
prominent on the boat's cabin, from the credits that follow the "arrival"
prologue to the final epilogue, indicating the postmortem exercise
that the film really is.
Timothy Corrigan has deployed a Lacanian model to demonstrate
the imbrication of auteurist anxiety and narrative mortality in Light-
ning. He describes the dialectic of mortality and consciousness in
Lightning in terms of "narrative murders." If the work of narrative is
a violence against reality, the "priority" of the father and "posteriority"
of the narrating son, according to Corrigan, constitute a killing of the
Symbolic in an attempt to recover the lost unity of the Imaginary.
The son "narrates in the name of Death for the father's corpses"17
insofar as narration is only made possible through the father's sym-
bolic law of difference; the knowledge of the disavowal necessary
for narrative presence and homogeneity takes the form of violence.
Because Corrigan collapses the terms father/son and reality/narra-
tive, he can conclude that Lightning witnesses "a conversation which
for once allows the son to speak for himself and to look directly at
the physical reality of the father/auteur" (pp. 15-16). The killing of
the father is the mythic (oedipal) strategy of recovering a unity with
the mother. Indeed, Lightning ends with Wenders reading the words
from Nick's diary, which are superimposed in Ray's handwriting over
a long shot of the junk: "I looked into my face and what did I see?
No granite rock of identity. Faded blue, drawn skin, and wrinkled
lips. And sadness. And the wildest urge to recognize and accept the
face of my mother."18
For Corrigan, any narrative is a murder designed to recover a loss,
but the film noir trajectory from one (opening) murder to another
(final one) is explicitly so. The killing of the father in the oedipal
drama of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt might stand as a thematization
of such a theory of representation. Bernardo Bertolucci observes that
Wenders, in Lightning, resembles "a killer out of a thriller who would
find out, by one of those poetic licenses only allowed to B films,
that his client and his victim are one and the same person."19 Corri-
 Wim Wenders 75

gan suggests that Ray, the auteur/client, "escapes his role as the vic-
tim of his son's narrative which he has bequeathed and which always
embodies his relationship to his son."20 For Corrigan, whereas "innu-
merable" films are structured as narrative murders, the achievement
of Lightning is its therapeutic stance vis-a-vis this strategy, transpos-
ing the theoretical into the physical, articulating a filmic unconscious.
It is, for him, a "healthy" film, which suggests that the film's perfor-
mances, as an acting out of personal and narratological relationships,
are a form of therapy.
The notion of "narrative murders" offers a productive model for
theorizing the relationship between auteurist anxiety and the func-
tion of death in Lightning, and yet Corrigan cannot account for the
difficulty of representation that characterizes this film. Ray is far more
than an "allegory for the entire film," and Corrigan's psychoanalytic
framework has the same limitations as Wenders's medium in its in-
ability to go beyond representation. How does Ray's cancer fit into
a description of the film as narrative murder? If the film is a self-
conscious act of murder, why is there no representation of death?
How does Ray's natural death structure the antagonism between doc-
umentation and storytelling that so thoroughly pervades the film?
Wenders does not, after all, murder Nick, but watches him die —
without, however, seeing the actual event. This absence is not sim-
ply a matter of discretion, but of explicit elision. Nick himself says
"cut" to end the last shot of himself before the ensuing black leader
and the epilogue, in which the film crew holds a wake on the junk.
Nick finally utters the direction to cut after an extremely long take in
which he displays his physical debilitation. His threat of sickness, of
puking on Wim, on camera, is a displacement of his threat to die on
camera, in sight. This, indeed, would be a narrative murder: Wen-
ders allowing Nick to "pass away" while the film continues to roll.
Wenders's avoidance of representing actual death on film is a re-
pressive gesture in recognition of the risk of an "ontological obscen-
ity."21 This is a term introduced by Bazin in an essay on La Course
de taureaux in which he points out that death and the sexual act are
distinguished from all other instants in that, when filmed, they are
endowed with the potential for repetition, which, in life, they onto-
logically lack.22 The "supreme cinematic perversion" is the reversed
projection of an execution. "One cannot die twice. Photography hasn't
76 Wim Wenders

this power of film, it can't represent the dying or the corpse, nor the
imperceptible passage from one to the other."23 Although the mata-
dor's death is a singular moment in time, "on the screen, the mata-
dor dies every afternoon." It is an ontological obscenity because of
the contradiction between two temporalities: one that takes place in
time (narrative and the mortal body) and another that contains time
(the film object, capable of infinite repetition).
Real death in film is obscene for Bazin because of the grounding
of his film theory in what has come to be known as "the mummy
complex." Philip Rosen has pointed to the imagery of embalmment
and preservation that underscores Bazin's key essays on the ontology
and evolution of the cinema. He points out that Bazin's conception
of realism is not only indexical but assumes a relationship between
image and referent that is inevitably temporal.24 Like the mummy
that preserves the substance of a past life, the filmic image contains
the trace of a past event to which it is indexically related:
Bazin's Egyptian mummies reveal a universal, unconscious
human need which cultures must confront through ritual,
religion, art or in some other way. This is the need for some
fantastic defense against time. For any human subject, the
passage of time is the approach of death, the ultimate material
limitation on subjectivity, (p. 20)

In "Mort tous les apres-midi," Bazin distinguishes between the

subject of awareness and the objective time of things, between which
death is a "frontier." As a singular instant, death belongs to the sub-
jective pole, but as a representation "in the can" it would explode
the basic, illusory premise on which the medium depends for its ca-
pacity as "defense strategy." The "creation of an ideal world in the
likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny,"25 would crumble
under the mortal sign of human temporality.
Bazin does not address the difference between real and enacted
death on film, although in this particular essay he is indubitably con-
cerned with la mort reelle. The enacted deaths in Rome Open City
and Paisa do not appear to threaten the "factuality" of Rossellini's
style for Bazin. What strikes him about the bullfighting film is the
conjunction of spectacle/theater and death, which, when recorded
 Wim Wenders 77

on film, mars its status as an "objective replica of memory." The im-

plication is that the suspension of disbelief necessary for cinematic
illusionism is coextensive with a suspension of the knowledge of the
spectator's own mortality. Actual death on film would therefore short-
circuit the defense mechanism on which Bazin's ontology is based.
Rosen argues that Bazin's phenomenology is not simply a subject-
object split but a subjective investment in the image in which tem-
porality, rather than referentiality, defines the pole of representation:
"Time passing, duration and change, are exactly what Bazin's onto-
logical spectator is driven to disavow, for they raise the problem of
death." For Bazin, "change mummified" is "the image of duration,"
so that realism, as subjective engagement with that sense of time, is
"an act of heroism," a struggle against temporality as an irreversible,
historical process.26 "If 'no more cinema' is the goal of the myth of
total cinema ... that slogan implies a subject no longer alienated and
threatened by objectivity ('death') but rather in perfect communion
with it" (p. 21).
Bazin's imbrication of phenomenology with romantic Catholicism
situates subjectivity as perceptual self-definition (the artist as witness),27
which is also an "irrational leap of faith."28 Only by retaining many
of the central categories of nineteenth-century thought can Bazin
conceive of film as a "death mask." The filmed subject survives in
the objective, material status of the film, a survival that depends on
the repeatability of the profilmic instants, in which death cannot, on-
tologically, be included. Film does not conceal an absence, as post-
structuralist thought (Barthes, Corrigan) would have it, but preserves
a temporal relationship between image and referent. The guarantee
of this relationship is the intentionality of consciousness and the myths
and institutions of authorship as personal vision. Bazin is fully cog-
nizant that the mechanical reproduction of images offers the lure of
a triumph over time, while also taking place in time, registering its
transience and objective difference from subjective consciousness. It
is "obscene," however, to allow this difference to be perceived: it
betrays a lack of faith in cinema's realist potential.
This dialectic of temporal difference and its disavowal is exempli-
fied in a scene in Lightning, remarked on by most writers on the
film, in which the sixty-seven-year-old, cancer-ridden Ray walks past
78 Wim Wenders

a movie screen on which is projected an image of himself, approxi-

mately ten years younger, from his own film We Can't Go Home
Again (figure 3). The man on the screen has a wild head of white
hair, a plump red face, and an energy that the thin man shuffling to
the bathroom lacks. This image might also be described as "change
mummified," but it radically subverts Bazin's ontology of preserva-
tion, for it preserves two different times, situating "duration" as his-
tory. It foreshadows Ray's death, and does so at the expense of any
temporal relation with the profilmic, for it is an other time, an other's
time, that these images record. Realism as a subjective "obsession"
with temporality is superseded here by an inscription of temporal
difference.
Wenders's voice-over throughout the film itself constitutes a dou-
bling of temporality by casting the whole image track onto a narrated
past, marking the film as a post mortem exercise. The present tense
of the image track, as a realist "preservation" of life, is constantly be-
lied by that other present tense of reflection recorded on the sound
track. Wenders's flirtation with the "ontological obscenity" of the rep-
resentation of death reaches its apotheosis in the last long take of

Fig. 3. Lightning Over Water. Nick Ray watches his younger, healthier self in his
film We Can't Go Home Again.
 WimWenders 79

Nick in the hospital, in which Nick argues playfully but threateningly

with Wenders about who should say "cut" and when. The medium
close-up of Nick, held on-screen for almost five minutes, becomes
an icon of the film itself; duration, or the representation of time, is
specifically related to the irreversible temporality of history and mor-
tality. Like Bazin, Wenders escapes the "truth of death" only by par-
taking in it.29
The extended duration of this shot of Nick has a destabilizing effect
in its articulation of presence; Nick ceases to perform himself and
"brings himself together" finally but briefly in a collapse of real and
represented time. The identity of representation and event erupts in
the performative order to "cut" in which the profilmic (Nick) acts
upon the ordering and editing of images. (The performative is a de-
vice that, in written discourse, consists of words that act.) As Ivone
Margulies puts it, "The reality of the profilmic acts upon the film's
body" such that "the filmic body is for once dangerously and fasci-
natingly confused with the subject's image."30
And yet the film finally proposes "the elimination of the body as a
troubling presence." The abrupt curtailment of Nick Ray's image with
the directive to cut is "an eruption of performance" in the fiction of
transparency.31 In other words, the body is finally eliminated at one
and the same time as the break between presentation (Nick's direct
address) and representation (its position in the decoupage of the film)
is enunciated. The discrepancy between the unified self and the frag-
mentation of identity in language is thereby crystallized. Authorship
is designated as the control embedded in the editing process, and
despite the fact that it is Ray whose subjective presence is thus enun-
ciated, Wenders emerges from the scene as enunciator. It is he who
cuts to a long shot of the junk in New York harbor.
In his voice-over narration, Wenders expresses his anxiety regard-
ing his representation of mortality: "Like a very precise instrument,
the camera showed clearly and mercilessly that his time was running
out. No, you couldn't really see it with your bare eyes, there was
always hope. But not in the camera. I didn't know how to take it. I
was terrified." Wenders's fear is not simply of Nick's death, but of his
narrativization of that dying. Insofar as he is not photographing but
filming, capturing the body's existence in time, the Bazinian paradox
of "change mummified" is laid bare. The attempt at a unified repre-
80 Wim Wenders

sentation of identity (a man bringing himself all together) is system-

atically challenged by the image of Ray's own body.
The tension between drama and document in Lightning is not
only a question of realism, but more fundamentally one of perfor-
mance. Narrative mortality is in this instance an allegory of the body
of the film as it coincides with the body of the person/actor. The onto-
logical obscenity toward which the film veers is, after all, produced
by the conflict between the indexicality of the bodily presence of
the man, Nick Ray, and the insertion of that body into narrative lan-
guage. The tension evoked by Ray's performance involves the tem-
porally finite body (biology) of the actor and the construction of the
character of "self," a split that is constitutive of performance and is
conventionally disavowed in the play of identity. Unlike most movies,
the discourse of the body is enunciated in Lightning, and is articu-
lated against the discourse of self.32
In this sense the filming of "death-at-work" is also a deconstruc-
tion of the precepts of method acting (in which the "self" is appro-
priated by the character), exhibited within the context of Lightning
in the film clip of Robert Mitchum in Ray's The Lusty MenP In this
wordless sequence, Mitchum travels from an abandoned rodeo to an
abandoned house where he finds a stash he presumably hid under
the house as a child. This scene of return and recovery evokes very
powerfully (as "wenders says to Ray) the sense of returning home.
But the narrative containment extends to the performance style that
is in such contradistinction to the film we are watching, in which
self and body are in continual oscillation. Mitchum may not be the
best example of a method actor, but in this particular sequence, in
which he does not speak, he creates a character "realistically" through
gesture, facial expression, and gait, completely collapsing biology
(physical presence) and subjectivity. Ray's "genuine behavior" in Light-
ning shows up the "bad faith" of Mitchum's performance.
Mitchum's return home in The Lusty Men had already been evoked
by "wenders in a scene in Kings of the Road, so the homage is also to
himself as cinematic heir, for whom homelessness, identity, and return
are intimately bound together. As Kathy Geist puts it, "Lightning im-
plies that death is home for the homeless and at the same time the
end, perhaps even the fulfillment of the search for identity, the quest
for self-realization."34 Ray's last film, the one that he walks past as it
 Wim Wenders 81

is screened in his loft in Lightning, is, of course, called We Can't Go

Home Again. The question of performance in Lightning, construed
as a question of temporality, is posed in terms of the narrative dynam-
ics of repetition and desire. The film demonstrates the way in which
return, repetition, and reproduction in the cinema are inevitably coun-
tered by the different temporality that marks the unfolding of narra-
tive and life. Insofar as the desire for return is inevitably countered
by the desire for difference, we cannot, in fact, go home again; sub-
jectivity is always in transit. Lightning thus approximates the contra-
dictions of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the uncanny.
If the trajectory of Lightning Over Water toward Ray's death takes
the form of storytelling, fiction, and performance, the "film surface" is
a performance of time. But unlike most such narratives, "the strategies
of completion that mask heterogeneity"35—containment and closure—
fail. This performance is cruelly undermined by an impossibility of
return; time is not "performed" but spent. The biological changes
that we witness posit a unidirectional temporality that no amount of
narrative repetition can completely "figure out" by making safe. This
is precisely the danger posed by the film, a danger of a film that
cannot fulfill its own goals.
Wenders's narrativization of Ray's death is ultimately signed in the
richly colored imagery of the Chinese junk, its blue sails and red
woodwork moving slowly across the glittering blue water, the camera
swooping in from a bright sky. Opening and closing the film, these
shots supply a visual image for the film's title, and become the mark
of closure, a guarantee of narrativization through repetition, bound
with the authority of "beauty." Images of the junk sailing across New
York harbor are also intercut twice into the body of the film, photo-
graphed from various angles passing under bridges. The symbolism
of river, boat, and bridge, together with the "transcendent" helicopter
photography and "sublime" sense of space, coalesce in a discursive
strategy very different from the confining close-ups of Nick Ray dy-
ing in the hospital.36
In the transition from Ray's debilitated body to the wake on the
junk, in which crew members restore an identity to the man verbally,
Wenders attempts to restore the transparent "preservative" ontology
of the film image. The cut away from that excruciatingly long take of
Ray's direct address hides the dead body, repressing its threatened
82 Wim Wenders

visualization, and replaces it with a symbol of transcendence. The

boat is charged with the poetic significance of Nick's immortality: a
symbol of an endless trajectory through time, but also of his desire
to go to China for a cure. If Bazin's phenomenology is marked by a
Romantic gesture of transcendence, it remains a gesture (a "myth" of
total cinema). The instability of the immortalizing, preservative sign
which is, for Bazin, the film image —is indicated precisely by his
recognition of ontological obscenity. Wenders's substitution of the
erotic illusion of transparency for the difference constituted by Nick's
mortality is in keeping with Bazin's denial of death, not only in the
desire for transcendence but in the allegorical, displaced status of its
achievement (figure 4).
The presence of the camera, moreover, in the monumental Mitchell
on the junk's deck, and the reflexive acknowledgment of the heli-
copter camera position link this transcendence to the artist or film-
making auteur, a concept to which the film has, after all, been de-
voted. The fetish made of the cinematic apparatus is a means of
reasserting the power of the image over the threat of mortality. But

Fig. 4. Lightning Over Water. The Chinese junk sailing out of New York harbor
carrying Nick Ray's ashes.
 Wim Wenders 83

again, it takes the form of allegory. The inclusion of the camera in

the image defeats this power at the same time as it states the desire
for a total cinema that might transcend the threat of mortality. An
"aesthetic of reality," not reality itself, finally triumphs over the nar-
rativization of mortality.
As the title Lightning Over Water suggests, the film adopts alle-
gory as the work of mourning. The inability to "sum up" a man in a
film, and the inability to know death any better by confronting it
head-on, haunt the film as an evacuation of meaning, a loss of confi-
dence in cinematic realism and technology. The apparatus comes to
replace or stand in for the body, not to preserve it for eternity. For
Freud, melancholia is the pathological form of mourning in which
an identification takes place with the lost love-object. The lost object
is normally a person, but Freud readily admits that it may also be
"the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one [per-
sonl, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal, and so on."37 At stake in
Lightning is the secure place of the subject, not only on the level of
Nick "bringing himself all together," but also for the subject of vision,
who is first and foremost Wenders himself.
In Paul Virilio's words, "Today, directors (and politicians) have
lost all prominence, and are swallowed up in technical effects, rather
like Nicholas Ray in Wim Wenders' Lightning Over Water"5* But Wen-
ders himself is equally lost in the film's technologies of representa-
tion, and deliberately so. The work of the film is like the mechanism
of melancholia, which consists of a libidinal cathexis of the ego with
the lost loved object. In the Freudian scenario, the melancholic is
unable to fully distinguish between self and other, and is in effect
mourning a part of his or her self as lost. "After this regression of the
libido the process can become conscious; it appears in conscious-
ness as a conflict between one part of the ego and its self-criticizing
faculty."39 This conflict is indeed staged in Wenders's double role of
performance and voice-over, in which he is both immediately "there"
on-screen and removed into another time offscreen, often comment-
ing on the loss of time figured in Nick's decaying body.
A similar split occurs in the spectator, who is at once bound to
the "pleasure" of the text through its narrative and performance strate-
gies and acutely aware of the "crime" of the film—its appropria-
tion of finite (unrepeatable) time for this (repeatable) film object.
84 Wim Wenders

Wenders's spectator is lured into a Bazinian obsession for total cin-

ema, but as the gap between reality and image is narrowed, that re-
ality is at the same time dying, revealed as temporary. And yet the
death of cinema, staged as the death of auteurism and the death of
the "myth of total cinema," is perhaps more in the mode of a
"mourning play" than Freudian psychoanalysis can fully accommo-
date. The allegorical mode of the baroque Trauerspiel (mourning
play) was produced within a void of meaning, after the fall of lan-
guage from the immediacy of speech to the doubleness of writing.
Wenders's allegorical mode likewise mourns the death of a realist
cinema with which he himself identifies closely.
Wenders's mortification of cinematic realism is staged among the
ruins of modernism. Video fragments rupture the surface of the film,
disfiguring its organicity, and may in themselves be interpreted as
exemplary of a postmodern accumulation of the "ruins" of represen-
tation. One of the last video sections of Lightning is Wim and Nick's
confessional conversation in the hospital (in which the announcement
of John Wayne's death from cancer is heard on the radio), shot almost
entirely in close-up. Wenders observes in this scene that "the film,
whatever we did, looked very clean, pretty—like licked off. And I
think that is a pure result of fear." And yet, shortly after this sequence,
about three-quarters of the way through the film, the video disappears.
It disappears because it inscribes a different temporality within the
film, a discursive heterogeneity that threatens the possibility of tran-
scendence, a desire that from this point will be challenged only by
Ray's own filmed presence.
Wenders uses and exaggerates the difference between film and
video, capitalizing on their different ontological properties.40 The tele-
visual referent does not necessarily belong to a different time; its in-
dexicality does not necessarily embody a historical relationship be-
cause it has the alibi of "liveness" available to it. Video might be said
to lack "aura" in Benjamin's sense, but in Lightning it also lacks that
obsessive drive that governs Wenders's project, his anxiety of author-
ship and his obsession for a "total cinema" without mediation. Even if
the liveness of the video discourse is only hypothetical in Lightning,
it serves to highlight the complex mediation and subjective invest-
ment implied in Wenders's narrativization of Ray's last weeks. The
graininess of the video image is the polar opposite of the transcen-
 Wim Wenders 85

dent "aesthetic of reality" of Wenders's final 35 mm shots of New

York harbor. The video images offer a past tense to the eternal present
of a film that finally tries to escape the claims of time by a recourse
to beauty.
Farrell's ability to shoot everywhere all the time at close range
gives his video discourse a spontaneity and intimacy unavailable to
Wenders's authoritative structuring of Nick Ray's demise. Farrell's foot-
age may be more "truthful" in its verite style, but it is nevertheless
contained by Wenders's dominant 35 mm discourse in an effort to
repress its articulation of difference. Wenders's dismissive attitude to-
ward video is expressed most blatantly in Room 666(1981), in which
sixteen filmmakers attempt to answer the loaded question, "Is the
cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?" in a hotel
room with a television set behind their left shoulders. It is as if Wen-
ders takes seriously Godard's analogy (in Sauve qui peuf) between
the film/video relationship and the Cain/Abel relationship. As Ray's
competing sons, Wenders and Farrell confront each other in Light-
ning with the two tools of representation and their respective truth
claims. Wenders's victory over Farrell is only at the cost of disavowal;
the film's resolution in favor of full-fledged cinematic transparency,
and its capacity for the preservation of life, are tinged with the ironic
knowledge of the other ontology of video.
A cinematic ethic (the suppression of temporal difference) thus
slides over a social ethic (the disavowal of death), transposing the
difficult terms of "decency" into those of language. One critic of
Lightning, Jon Jost (whose intentions may be less than objective as
he too wanted to make a last film with Ray but was ousted by Wen-
ders with his more solid financial backing), writes that "in his last
months ... what Ray needed was love. Instead he got a crew who
seemed to perceive life only through the mechanical devices of film.
They rolled over him with a movie-making machine, and now they
even choose to display the carnage."41 Jost claims that the filmmak-
ing activity hastened Ray's death, but even without such extratextual
suspicions, the film does evoke a sense of horror for many viewers.
Even before the titles roll, Wenders tackles the social taboos about
death by confronting Nick with the subject of his own death as the
subject of the film: "I wanted to talk to you Nick," to which Nick
replies, "About what? Dying?"
86 Wim Wenders

Among the taboos against death in contemporary society, cancer

has been described by Susan Sontag as being especially "obscene."42
Wenders's aesthetic treatment of Nick's cancer has, perhaps, more
affinities with the nineteenth-century mystification of tuberculosis than
modern denial or clinical detachment. Sontag says that, "starting in
the early nineteenth century, TB became a new reason for exile, for
a life that was mainly traveling The Romantic view is that illness
exacerbates consciousness."43 Although the details of the work of
the cancer within Ray's ravaged body are not withheld from the
viewer of Lightning, this crude biology is finally eliminated with Ray'
"last directorial assertion": to cut the long take. An act of conscious-
ness, an aesthetic choice, thus sublimates the cancerous body. The
cancer, however, affects the images themselves, which can only reg-
ister the desire and not the achievement of such transcendence.
If, in Lightning Over Water, Nick Ray tries to "find himself" before
he dies and Wenders's narrative is structured as an investigation into
the filming of death-at-work, the film follows a familiar film noir
course. Wenders's stay in New York with Ray is a form of passage in
which death figures prominently as an ambivalence: is Nick already
dead or is he dying in the course of the film? (Which is to say, is the
film a document or a narrative?) Whereas, in the American noir texts
of the 1950s, such a dead/not-dead ambivalence registered the du-
plicity and reversals of cold war politics, for Wenders it is closely related
to the American/German-European dialectic that informs so many of
his films. The noir protagonist's search for identity becomes, for Wen-
ders, a quest for a self-image within an international cultural context.
Wenders's melancholia is directed everywhere except at post-Nazi
Germany, and yet the persistent discourse of "home" as impossible
narrative goal of his films is itself symptomatic of what Eric Santer
has described as the "tasks of mourning" for the second and third
generations in postwar Germany.44 Although the German context of
Wenders's cultural melancholia may be most overt in Kings of the
Road, the traumatic memory of national history is no less pertinent
to Lightning and The State of Things. The themes of exile and trave
and the abandoned child—which Elsaesser describes as "the key
figure" of the New German Cinema45—are the signs of a generation
struggling to be reconciled with its parents' history. "The dead souls
of Germany" haunt Wenders's cinema both as a function of represen-
 Wim Wenders 87

tation and as an oedipal nightmare in which Hollywood directors

become surrogate father victims in fantasies of patricide.
The scrawled passage from Nick's diary, expressing a fear and de-
sire to identify with his mother, as the last gesture of the film, finally
exposes the limits of Wenders's narrative mortality. As in much of
Wenders's work, women can only function as an idealized source of
originary unity, and are thus equated with both home and death.46
This particular passage is striking in its display of the symptoms of
the film's oedipal anxieties, as the woman's body provokes that Un-
heimlicheit that Freud identifies as one source of the uncanny:
Whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to
himself, still in the dream, "this place is familiar to me, I have
been there before," we may interpret the place as being his
mother's genitals or her body. In this case, too, the
unheimlich is what was once heimlich, home-like, familiar;
the prefix "un" is the token of repression.47

After going through an exhaustive series of equivalents for the Ger-

man word heimlich, the first and most familiar of which is "home,"
Freud notes that " heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops
towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite,
Unheimlicheif (p. 30). The Bazinian "mummy complex" is itself a
manifestation of the Freudian uncanny.48 The narrative mortality of
Lightning exploits this uncanniness as a melancholic allegory of cin-
ematic realism and the myth of oedipal subjectivity harbored within
its impossible realization.
Wenders's images of Nick Ray evoke his death in their depiction
of temporal difference and the physical trajectory of mortality, but at
the same time, that death is eluded. In the elision of actual death
and the fetishization of the image and cinematic technology, Ray is
finally immortalized in celluloid. Through the repression of the differ-
ence between image and referent, Wenders ultimately disavows that
mortality which he has struggled to understand in the terms of cin-
ematic specificity. Capitulation to an allegory of redemption in the
celebratory imagery of cinema only barely masks the film's failure
either to confront the ruins of the body of the director or to embrace
the transformation of cinema beyond the "myth of total cinema."
In The State of Things, Wenders pursues these issues into the hea
88 Wim Wenders

of the beast of Hollywood. Documentary and narrative realisms

again collide in a mortifying relationship, but in this film, "storytelling"
takes up where, in Lightning, "slick images" and preconceived se-
quences leave off. Again, narrativity is confronted with the mortify-
ing challenge of its photographic basis in the historical real.

The State of Things: The Death of the Real

One of the last lines of dialogue that we "overhear" from the crew at
Nick's wake at the end of Lightning Over Water is "Would you kill
somebody for a great shot?" The conflation of the shooting of guns
and shooting of cameras comprises the uncanny dimension of The
State of Things. A relation of doubling exists between Wenders and
the protagonist, Friedrich Munroe (Patrick Bauchau), a German direc-
tor making a film in Portugal with American backing. When Fritz is
suddenly killed by unseen, anonymous gangsters at the end of the
film, an image shot by Fritz's super-8 camera survives him, suggest-
ing, once again, an allegorical redemption of the auteur.
Although this film is as "international" as Lightning in its locations,
casting, and financing, the "self" that is constructed—or rather, pur-
sued—across this post-Godardian landscape is symptomatic of New
German Cinema and its preoccupation with authorship and interna-
tionalism. Thomas Elsaesser argues that within the context of the
wide range of cultural and economic funding measures that supported
independent filmmaking in Germany in the 1970s, filmmakers were
obliged to identify themselves as self-employed entrepreneurs as well
as craftspeople and artists. "The author became a necessary ideolog-
ical fiction," if for no other reason than to give a certain coherency
to the diversity of film praxis that was to be subsumed under the na-
tionalistic label of New German Cinema.49
Moreover, the difficulties of a national cinema in an international
marketplace were epitomized in the New German Cinema and Wen-
ders's place in it. Romanticism, from this perspective, becomes at
once a nationalist trait and a militant discourse, in keeping with the
political radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the New
German Cinema was struggling to define itself.50 By 1982, when an
"art cinema" could no longer be comfortably distinguished from com-
 WimWenders 89

mercial cinema, a Romantic conception of the visionary auteur in-

forms The State of Things as a lost mythology, but also as the axis o
difference between European and Hollywood filmmaking. For Wen-
ders, this difference pertains to the role of authorship and the com-
promises demanded by larger audiences. It also pertains, in his cin-
ema, to the different roles of mortality in the different forms of film
narrative associated with commercial and "art" cinema. Narrative mor-
tality in "Wenders's films becomes the allegory of this difference,
which cannot be convincingly sustained in the 1980s.
Wenders visited Chilean filmmaker Raoul Ruiz's set for The Terri
tory on the coast of Portugal during a three-month hiatus in the
shooting of Hammett in 1981. There he discovered the ingredients
for the expression of his thoughts on the state of the art. Ruiz's pro-
duction had temporarily halted because of lack of film stock and
other supplies that had been cut off by his American financiers.51
Wenders was thus supplied not only with cast, crew, and location,
but also with the narrative premise for a film about filmmaking. Hav-
ing more resources at his disposal than Ruiz, Wenders rounded up
additional cast members and writers, film stock, and salaries, plus a
distribution setup, and in under two weeks began shooting a film
that had only the barest definition buried deep in the director's mind.
The State of Things was intended from the outset to be a proces
of discovery, a film that would make itself and be about its making,
starting with even less of a script than Lightning?2 Wenders and
Robert Kramer generated scenes and dialogue night by night during
the shoot. Interviews with the cast indicate a good deal of tension
created by this spontaneous production method.53 Wenders describes
the project as "therapy," a "psychoanalysis of the cinema itself,"54 a
claim that is indicative of his personal stake in the state of the art.
The film that emerges is a veritable thesis on time and narrative film,
cinema, and storytelling, written across a double axis of cinematic
realism and the economics of filmmaking. The thesis defended by
the film (stated bluntly several times by Fritz himself) is that films
need stories and stories need death. This necessity is not aesthetic so
much as economic. Insofar as Fritz's American funding is conditional
on it, death is posited at the nexus of film style and financing.
The necessity of death is, furthermore, a necessity of plot. The
90 Wim Wenders

film comprises three very different narrative styles, beginning with a

science-fiction film-within-the-film called The Survivors. This generi
melodrama with a touch of epic is set in a postnuclear landscape,
and is based partly on Ruiz's aborted film The Territory, and also o
Alan Dwan's 1961 film The Most Dangerous Man Alive. After four o
five minutes, a painted backdrop, then a director, then a crew are
revealed by a sweeping camera movement that seems to answer the
final shot of Le Mepris. Whereas Godard's film ends with a pan awa
from a film crew shooting Ulysses, out to a Mediterranean oceanscape,
Wenders moves in from the restless Atlantic to a set similarly located
on a cement, plateau-like structure beside the sea.
The bulk of The State of Things concerns the cast and crew of Th
Survivors waiting for film stock to arrive so they can complete the
picture. Two actors, two actresses, two little girls, a director of pho-
tography, a scriptwriter, and the director Fritz and his wife mope
around the deserted hotel without money, without motivation, and
without any connective story line. This setting, as well as several
particular shots in the hotel bar, recall Fassbinder's Beware the Holy
Whore (1970), which ends in melodramatic death. Fritz periodically
tries to telephone Gordon, his producer in Los Angeles, who has cut
off the supply of film stock. Set in the Portuguese hotel and town of
Sintra, this part of the film in 'which "nothing happens" aspires to the
narrative minimalism of directors such as Antonioni, Akerman, Warhol,
Ozu, and Wenders's own early films.
Finally, Fritz flies to Los Angeles, and finds Gordon driving around
in a Winnebago, on the run from some mysterious gangsters to whom
he owes money. Set mainly in vehicles, with references to film noir
littering the dialogue, this section of the film acquires its relatively
rapid pacing, to some extent, from Los Angeles itself (figure 5). (Wen-
ders claims that the "imagery of L.A." was something that "happened
to the film, like a capsule of speed.")55 In the final sequence of the
film, Gordon, the producer played by Allan Goorwitz, and the direc-
tor Fritz make explicit the opposition between American and Euro-
pean filmmaking, the difference that the film has illustrated by way
of sets, shooting styles, and narrative events. It is worth quoting this
final dialogue, set in the back of Gordon's mobile home, the streets
of Los Angeles moving past the windows like film screens:
 WimWenders 91

Fig. 5. The State of Things: Fritz (Patrick Bauchau) is overwhelmed by the stylish
photography of Los Angeles. Publicity still courtesy of Cinematheque Quebecoise.

GORDON: ... I tried to show dailies to these two loan sharks—

They thought it was a joke—what's the matter with the color?
[laughs] In a funny way, those fuckin' sharks aren't crazy.
We're the ones who're crazy They're not lookin' to kill me.
They just wanted a fuckin' story. They had a hundred grand
they were willing to shove out if I had a story. And I told
them I had a story, it's about survival. We're all tryin' to
survive, right? "The Survivors." If I'd 'a shot the same film with
an American director and American cast, in color, I'd be sittin'
on top of the world in six months— Without a story you're
dead. You can't build a movie without a story. Ever build a
house without walls? It's the same. A movie's got to have
walls
FRITZ: Why walls? The space between the characters can carry
the load.
GORDON: You're talkin' about reality. Fuck reality. Cinema is
not about life going by. People don't want to see that.
92 Wim Wenders

FRITZ ^ G O R D O N face the camera from the back bench of

the van, Fritz leaning on film cans, the big window behind
their heads like a screen; Gordon sings and Fritz talks at the
same time.
GORDON: Hollywood, FRITZ: I made ten movies ...
Hollywood, people never had ten times, same story I was
it so good What do you doing. In the beginning it was
do with your days, my friend? easy because I just went from
What do you do with your shot to shot,
nights, my friend? In But now in the morning I'm
Hollywood, in Hollywood. scared. Now I know how to
Never been a place where tell stories. Unrelentlessly. As
people had it so good. What the story comes in, life sneaks
do you do with your wife, my out. Life sneaks out ...
friend? What do you do with Everything gets pressured
your life, my friend, in into images. Mechanism.
Hollywood? etc. What did Birth, as all stories can end,
they do with your head? all stories are about death.
When did you learn you were
dead, my friend? In
Hollywood, in Hollywood.
GORDON: Death, Fritz. It's what it's all about. It's the biggest
story in the world. Second best only to love stories.
Exterior shots of mobile home, Fritz's car in parking lot, music
up. GORDON exits with small dog in his arms, FRITZ follows
with super-8 camera; billboards, palm trees, and a huge cutout
of a G.I. in background of parking lot.
GORDON: Time for all good survivors to say good-bye, eh?
As they embrace GORDON is shot in the back. Cut to a tilted,
grainy image of'GORDON falling to the ground. FRITZ holds his
camera like a gun, rising slowly from a crouch by Gordon's
body. Cut to the super-8 footage panning around the empty
parking lot. FRITZ, turning with camera, is suddenly shot and
falls. He props himself up on Gordon's body, still holding the
camera in both hands. The super-8 image pans right to a truck.
 WimWenders 93

Close-up of Fritz's and Gordon's hands, the dog leash, and the
camera. Cut to a canted fixed shot of the asphalt; a car pulls
out and turns as the camera tilts down. Fade out.

The implication in this last scene of the film—that "films about

the space between characters" are antithetical to storytelling—is
more than a narrative opposition. It is also, and perhaps most cru-
cially, a question of realism. Earlier in the film, Joe, the director of
photography played by Sam Fuller, says that "life is in color, but
black and white is more realistic." Indeed, Wenders's subtitle for the
film is "Almost a Documentary."56 The entire Portugal section in-
volves actors passing the time in such quotidian ways as bathing,
drinking, reading, playing music, painting, mainly by themselves in
their hotel rooms. In the film's own terms, this is "more real" than ei-
ther The Survivors or the Los Angeles ending, not because it is in
black and white (the whole film is), but because of the unstructured
nature of time. The demystification of the glamorous world of film-
making involves a blurring of the boundaries between actors and
characters in the performances of waiting.
Implicit in Fritz's death is a capitulation to storytelling. His revela-
tion that "all stories have to end, so all stories are about death" is
clearly Wenders's own discovery. Fritz's death situates the film finally
in the realm of fiction because, with very few exceptions, it is always
the character and never the actor who dies in the cinema. Death
marks a boundary between fiction and documentary, at the limits of
the claims that each makes to realism. If the documentation of actual
death—such as that which is threatened in Lightning Over Water—
cuts itself off from narrative fiction, the most convincing perfor-
mance becomes just that in the representation of a character's death.
Perhaps it is not entirely fair to describe the ending of The State
of Things as a capitulation to narrative, because there is a sense in
which Wenders attempts to reconcile fact and fiction in the final shots.
In interviews, Wenders has said that the film incorporates three kinds
of images: one he calls "grammatical"—those that are necessary for
the telling of a story, images that are not really new but have been
seen before; second, there is a kind of image that precedes the shoot-
ing, "profound" images that Wenders stores at the back of his mind,
such as those of the desolate hotel; and third, there is a category of
94 Wim Wenders

"found images" discovered while shooting.57 This third type is an im-

possible reconciliation of the first two, and lies at the heart of Wen-
ders's filmmaking: the attempt to reconcile the contingent "found"
image with narrativity. The representation of Fritz's death, in which he
goes down filming, can thus be read precisely as such an attempt at
reconciliation. As in Lightning, the desire to close the gap between fil
and reality is mystified through the narrativization of mortality. In this
case, "storytelling" becomes an equally pressing desire, as the "gram-
matical images" are those of urban terrorism and film noir fatality.
Although Benjamin's distinction between story and novel cannot
be mapped onto Wenders's distinction between story and real life, it
exposes the irony implicit in Wenders's dilemma. For Benjamin, "The
stuff that stories are made up of is real life," which the storyteller has
experienced. "Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller
can tell," says Benjamin, insofar as "it is natural history to which his
stories refer back."58 A similar attitude can be detected in Wenders's
privileging of the contingent, in his rhetorical embrace of a cinematic
realism that lies outside psychological narrative. In Benjamin's larger
project of reconciling aesthetic contingency with Marxist determin-
ism, the historical forces that have overcome storytelling make it
possible "to see a new beauty in what is vanishing."59 The theory of
the "found" image, which is always lost as soon as it is seen and
photographed, may be the cinematic variation on this theme (which
will be discussed again in chapter 4, on Godard).
Wenders's conception of "story" in The State of Things is something
quite different than this, and is actually much closer to Benjamin's
category of "the novelistic." His hero's experience, for example, ap-
proximates a tragic fall, as Fritz is brought down from his status as
director to become an anonymous victim of urban crime. Wenders
abandons his role as (Benjaminian) storyteller with the shift to Los
Angeles and the isolation of Fritz from the ensemble of characters
that carries the first three-quarters of the film. Wenders's conception
of storytelling is laden with myths of heroism, "home," and teleolog-
ical closure. Narrative mortality serves him as an allegorical means
of reclaiming these myths without sacrificing the ideal of realist cin-
ema free of narrative constraints.
A clue to Wenders's conception of storytelling, which he claims to
 WimWenders 95

have discovered in making The State of Things, might be found in

his designation of the film as "a psychoanalysis of the cinema itself."
His search for the cinematic repressed, the primal scene of film his-
tory, arrives finally at the violent death of his protagonist at the lim-
its of fictional and documentary realism. Of all the intertexts laced
through The State of Things, The Searchers is privileged as a means
of investigating the truth of cinema. References to John Ford's film,
as well as the book by Alan Le May from which it was adapted, occur
throughout the film.60 In The Searchers, Ethan, played by John Wayne,
is a homeless Confederate veteran wandering in the desert, reading
its signs, in the form of Indian messages, searching for values in the
post-Civil War American West (and 1950s America). The dialectic be-
tween home and wilderness is overdetermined by Ford's mise-en-
scene, in which the enclosed darkness of interior spaces is cut off
from the bright white rectangles of desert glimpsed through cabin
windows and cave openings. (The composition in the back of the
mobile home described earlier is very similar.) The wilderness in
The Searchers is already allegorically mortified, represented as a mythic
space of desire.
The Searchers therefore embodies a narrative of investigation that
mimics both the cinematic apparatus and the psychoanalytic model
of conscious and unconscious processes. The security of the home,
which begins and ends the narrative, depends on an investigation of
the realm of desire, of unharnessed drives, of the Indian and of the
woman, and ultimately of the Western frontier. "Home" is the pole
of consciousness, complete with its repressions and anxiety, and the
wilderness is the unmapped region marked only by signs and symp-
toms, which must be read and interpreted for complete recovery of
domestic stability. In the repeated use of the inside/outside compo-
sition, this duality is mapped onto the spectator's "safe" position in
the dark, versus the open space of the screen. After the opening
massacre of Ethan's family, a point-of-view shot from the dark space
of the ravaged homestead is menacing because it is from the per-
spective of the dead (who only Ethan can see — the spectator, like
Martin, Ethan's part-Indian nephew, is repeatedly refused the sight
of corpses). The trajectory of the film is thus toward a recuperation
of this grave to its original status as "home."
96 Wim Wenders

The intertext of The Searchers illuminates, above all, the discours

of survival in The State of Things. Gordon's last words are "It's time
for all good survivors to say good-bye," but the only survivors are
thousands of miles away, still stranded in Portugal. In Ford's version
of The Searchers, a second family is formed and everyone survives
except the Indians, who are massacred, their chief scalped by Ethan,
who, after internalizing their savagery, returns alone to the desert,
leaving the other characters safely embraced by the homestead. Like
the hero of The Searchers, Wenders internalizes the savagery of th
enemy in The State of Things by learning how to kill, but after shoo
ing his protagonist/double, he will follow John Wayne back into the
wilderness.
And here we must recall Wenders's ongoing experiences with Cop-
pola and Hammett. His desire to make films in Hollywood was not
simply financially motivated, but was an opportunity to exercise an
auteurist anxiety: to indulge in the milieu of Dashiel Hammett and
the men who adapted his work to the screen. The industrial struc-
ture and budgetary scope of Zoetrope studio, symptomatic of the
Los Angeles mythos and Hollywood style, was hardly a surprise to
Wenders, for whom American film is something of a personal wilder-
ness.61 From this perspective, the four films that he made during the
production of Hammett (besides the two discussed here, Wenders
also made Reverse Angle [1982, 17 min.] and Room 666 [1982, 45
min.]) constitute a complex response to this foray into the unknown.
From Wenders's book of color photographs, Written in the West,
collected while shooting locations for Paris, Texas, it is evident that
the American West is for him a myth available only at one remove.
The photographs represent a linguistic landscape of gas stations and
motels, a West that has been thoroughly civilized but that is never-
theless big, beautiful, and flat, something very different from anything
in Europe. In The State of Things, the wilderness, specifically the
American West, is thus a metaphor for desire, untempered form, a
myth that cannot be sustained by contemporary Los Angeles, where
the narrative and the aesthetic ideals of the visionary filmmaker meet
their end. In Los Angeles the image is at the service of the narrative
demands of the film industry. The possibility of the filmmaker pos-
sessing his own images in Europe is, for Wenders, a lost ideal he
seems determined to survive.
 Wim Wenders 97

The discourse of survival is one of redemption, but it also implies

a reactionary response to crisis, a perpetuation of subjectivity beyond
the crises of postmodernism. Certainly the film's fatalism is an ironic
recourse to a familiar narrative structure. In the equation of narrative
realism with a teleological discourse of mortality, the death drive is
the principle of repetition and return, binding narrative desire, the
momentum of difference, to a point of stasis and closure. This seems
to be the basis of the conception of narrative in The State of Things.
Story is opposed to life; story is a force acting against life. The final
death is another narrative murder, supplying an end to the film's
search, defining the goal of that search.
In keeping with this model of narrative closure, Wenders also
wants to understand death as closure as a "coming home" to the cin-
ema of Lang, Fuller, and Ray, auteurs of classical Hollywood who
are generally understood to have sustained some kind of integrity of
vision within the constraints of the industry. (Fritz stops at Lang's
"star" implanted in Hollywood Boulevard.) Thus the "unconscious"
of The State of Things is comprised of two forces that might be calle
reality and fiction, which are translated into a dialectic of life and
death. But this tension is overlaid with Wenders's own struggle with
the commercial demands placed on the cinematic auteur. "Author-
ship" is effectively aligned with documentary realism as a visual plea-
sure principle of the auteur as witness. Insofar as the fictional de-
mands of the industry are represented as inevitable and necessary,
they are correspondingly aligned with the death drive.
Although "life" is characterized at the end of The State of Things
as the survival of the economic demands and commercial compro-
mise of filmmaking, in the Portugal section of the film, it is some-
thing quite different. "Life" there is synonymous with reality; actors
playing actors with nothing to do places notions of performance,
pretense, and fiction in question. Gordon is their producer, but he is
also the only truly fictional character in the film, and Fritz's descent
to his world, to Los Angeles and to his death, is also a movement by
Patrick Bauchau from actor to character.
In his speech to the assembled cast and crew in the Sintra hotel,
Fritz says, "Stories only exist in stories, whereas life goes by in the
course of time without the need to turn out stories," a phrase that is
referred back to by several of the actors in subsequent scenes.
98 Wim Wenders

Although Fritz endorses nonnarrative temporality as "life," a "life"

that he subsequently tells Gordon "sneaks out" as the story comes
in, within the extended Portugal section of the film life also "sneaks
out" through a complex discourse on representation and time. In
fact, Fritz's and Wenders's "lesson" involves the realization that rep-
resentation in time (filmic representation) is necessarily a represen-
tation o/time, and is in itself a mortifying process.
The scenes in and around the Sintra hotel that move apparently
randomly from one character or couple to another, are marked by a
range of comments on and representations of photography, paint-
ing, film, and video. The two little girls take Polaroids and shoot
videotapes of the whole group in the hotel restaurant; Kate (Viva
Auder) subsequently analyzes her child's photos in a tape-recorded
letter to a friend; she also draws pictures of Fritz asleep, one of
which she places on top of his prostrate body. Fritz's wall is covered
with Polaroids. Anna is seen briefly in front of a trompe l'oeil of a
Mediterranean villa; Joe/Fuller has a row of filmstrips hanging over
his bed. The viewfinder of a still camera is reproduced several times
over the image, targeting people's faces. Various conversations are
virtually pedagogical analyses of painting, black-and-white film, and
framing.
This discourse on representation reaches a kind of apotheosis in
the reproduction of images from The Survivors generated on a com
puter by Dennis (Paul J. Getty III), the American screenwriter who, it
is eventually revealed, has financed the extant shoot himself for his
first screen credit. The final image that he prints out is a close-up of
a hand, and it is this particular image that seems to provoke Fritz, fi-
nally, into traveling to Los Angeles to find Gordon. In many of these
instances, the filmic representation in/of time is played off against
the static images that freeze actions and bodies in time.
Furthermore, often in conjunction with this discourse on repre-
sentation, "the passing of time" is repeatedly characterized as repeti-
tion. Julia's (Camila Mora) metronome, which she uses to practice
her violin, continues to tick while she sleeps, and in one of her angry
phone calls to an unidentified lover or family member, she says, "I
just get stuck ... always the same taste in my mouth." To Mark (Jef-
frey Kime), Anna says, "Nothing new can happen between us if it al-
ready starts with that feeling of deja vu." Lying in bed smoking, Joe
 Wim Wenders 99

listens to an electronic voice issuing from his alarm clock speak the
time every minute. The rhythm of Wenders's decoupage of this part
of the film, with many single-shot scenes, long takes, and fixed frames
that move into slow-sequence shots, plus a repetitive, dirgelike sound
track that punctuates many of the long shots of landscape, further
characterizes the "passing of time" as uncanny in its repetitions and
returns.
Under the graphic target of Mark's viewfinder, Anna says, "I'm
glad the movie stopped. Now we have some time." This time, how-
ever, turns out not to be free of stories or death, for it is still a
movie, and as representation, an uncanny doubling of life and image
remains. Jerry, the Californian actor who tells a long and funny tale
about his ugly childhood, tells Fritz, "Life without stories just isn't
worth living." Fritz's "lesson" is that insofar as film takes place in
time, it is going to be narrative, and unless one harnesses the death
drive implicit in repetition and reproduction, the treasured "life" will
inevitably become a discourse of mortality: the "passing of time" is
also a passing away of life and time. Joe's wife's natural death (which
Joe/Fuller hears about over the telephone) may be a fictional event,
but in this context it underlines the implicit "harbinger of death" that
lurks in this part of the film. The "waiting" element of de-dramatized
performance is itself uncanny in terms of its temporal repetition and
doubling of actors/characters.
Wenders's conception of "life" is further suggested by his empha-
sis on "found images," which, far more than sexuality, define the cat-
egory of desire in the Portugal section of The State of Things,62 Among
the cast and crew of The Survivors, several amorous relationships
exist, but they are all extremely ambiguous, to the characters them-
selves as well as for the audience. The individuals appear to be alien-
ated and bored within their couplings. Moreover, the insomnia and
masturbatory isolation of many of the characters create not only a
desultory mood of pent-up frustration but also one of narcissistic
self-absorption. Anna covers the mirror in her room in an attempt to
circumvent it, but as a cliche of actors' personalities, Wenders draws
on narcissism to further define the nonteleological, anti-"story" aes-
thetic of contingent realism. Observed in their hotel rooms by a cam-
era that becomes explicitly voyeuristic in one high-angle shot of Julia
naked on her bed, the characters perform their boredom.
100 WimWenders

If narcissism consists in "the subject's acquisition of an image of

himself founded on the model furnished by the other person—this
image being the ego itself"63—it is an internalization of desire not
unlike that which takes place in melancholia. The treatment of one-
self as an object, which Freud identifies in both the masochism of
melancholia and narcissism,64 also structures the uncanniness of the
doppelganger. Although the cathexis of the libido to an "other" under-
scores the conventional narrativization of cinematic desire in fetishis-
tic and scopophilic forms, Wenders articulates another kind of plea-
sure. The pleasure of contemplation, the appreciation of framing, is
a structure of self-cathexis, a pleasure in the look itself, rather than
in the image or an other's look. Indeed, the shot-reverse-shot struc-
ture of the cinematic suture occurs only occasionally in The State of
Things, where "the look" is specifically attributed to the directors in
and of the film. It is a gaze that is at once melancholic and narcissistic.
Although Wenders's photography of actresses Isabelle Wiengarten,
Viva Auder, and Camila Mora involves an inordinate amount of nu-
dity, the erotic potential is displaced onto the cutaways of carefully
composed landscape, waves crashing on cement bulwarks, an aban-
doned Volkswagen, long shots of the coast, and so on. Wenders's
desire for these images is a desire for a certain kind of filmmaking.
The women, objectified like landscape, are not only inaccessible,
separated by the scopophilic mediation of the camera, but are also
undesired. The erotic potential of the many bedroom shots is essen-
tially killed by the accompanying discourse on photographic repre-
sentation. No one really wants anything in The State of Things except
to make a film; all other desires are turned inward. It is to this desire
for image making that the final super-8 image of the film refers back.
Even in The Survivors, the leader of the beleaguered, endangered
group has a video camera with which he captures the desolate land-
scape, the low-definition footage blown up to reproduce his vision.
This discourse of vision is informed by a desire to be identified by
one's look, by the images one possesses, and is in contradistinction
to the desire for the Other. The images of abandoned cars, in both
The Survivors and in Portugal, inscribe the sign of death in this desir
to see what lies beyond the pleasure principle.
The category of "the real" is thus defined as the passing of time—
in which life itself becomes a sign of death—on the one hand, and
 WimWenders 101

the valorization of the director's personal vision on the other.65 This

is perhaps the central contradiction of the film, which it is Wenders's
project to confront and survive. Finally, instead of turning away from
death in a nonviolent form of filmmaking, which is in fact thoroughly
informed by mortality, Wenders embraces death in a redemptive return
to fiction. What is repressed in the narrative structure of The State of
Things's capitulation to teleological narrative is the redemptive po-
tential of that "dead" part of the film in Portugal. The image that sur-
vives Fritz's violent death is a sign of the subject of vision, the reverse
shot of the look of a singular, dying protagonist; and it evokes, in its
emptiness, the Portuguese part of the film.
The bullet that kills Fritz has no source (his assassins are Gordon's
creditors, but insofar as they are never seen, they are also mythic in-
habitants of the Los Angeles landscape), but the final super-8 shot
is likewise unsutured. The lack of a cut back to Fritz's body or eye
behind the camera signifies his death in its absence. As the cam-
era keeps rolling, the frame drops down to the ground, suggesting
that "found" images must be found by someone because they are
not just images, but indices of vision, and must cease with Fritz's
death. Insofar as there cannot be any "found images" independent of
subjectivity, consciousness is thus privileged over empirical reality.
And, moreover, the representation of the artist, Fritz, who not only suf-
fers and dies but whose individuation is designated as the beginning
and end of narrative (as the surrogate director of The Survivors, hi
vision also opens the film), situates Wenders's conception of story as
that of Benjamin's novelistic, with temporality limited to the life of
an individual.
Wenders's Romantic conception of the artist, transposed to studio
filmmaking, is crucial to the final dispossessed image of the film.
The canted super-8 shot of the Los Angeles parking lot survives the
director, who is slain by economic forces, thereby linking the death
of the author as subject with a vision of life freed from the structures
of narrative, a recuperation of the real. The category of the real, of
the space between characters, the found image, is redeemed by virtue
of a transcendentally ironic gesture. The irony, of course, is that we
are still in the realm of fiction, which, given the nature of the medium,
no amount of "realism" can completely overcome. Both conventions
of realism are effectively banished in this apocalyptic closure; neither
102 Wim Wenders

narrative nor mortality can be completely eliminated from cinematic

representation.
Wenders's psychoanalysis of film history is thus overlaid with his
own repressed desire to be, perhaps, John Wayne. The "pleasure
principle" against which narrative as death defines itself in The State
of Things is scopophilic, but the death drive itself is characterized by
Wenders as economic and technological. Gordon and Fritz are, after
all, killed by the gangsters who lent Gordon money to finance Fritz's
film, a film that did not guarantee anyone a return on their investment.
The irony here is that The State of Things (in black and white—by th
film's own logic, a sign of noncommercial viability—and denounced
by most American critics as extremely boring) was not only financed,
but the eight hundred thousand-dollar budget was underwritten very
quickly, Wenders's name being enough of a guarantee for financiers.
The value of Wenders's treatise on storytelling and cinema lies here, in
the delineation of an economics of narrative that has determinants in
the two spheres of representation and funding. His distinction between
America and Europe may be a facile one and his self-conception as
auteur may be a little overbearing, and yet his observation that the
narrative structure organized by a "death drive" pays with the "found
image" is an important one to retain.
The commercially produced film is made, as Stephen Heath has
said, to be seen once and once only,66 and is thus a "struggle against
time." This teleology of the novelistic is what Wenders himself is
concerned to survive. However, he can only do so by insisting on
the status of the image as a subjective phenomenon, and the very
substance of artistic vision. But when he eliminates (or at least re-
duces) teleology, "story" as a form of mortification remains in the
mechanical reproduction of images. And it is not a Bazinian ontology
of preservation that Wenders discovers in documentary realism, but
an even closer proximity to death. His "found images" record the
passing of time, and, like Benjamin's storyteller, Wenders's cinematic
ideal remains authorized by mortality precisely because "everything
is pressured into images."
The specter of Raul Ruiz and The Territory, which was complete
once Ruiz got back his appropriated cast, crew, and location, shows
up the limitations of Wenders's perspective. Ruiz's film, about canni-
balism among vacationing campers, starts with death as the limit of
 WimWenders 103

the fictional, but evidently takes it beyond the marketable, as the

film has virtually disappeared. The State of Things, on the other han
won the Golden Lion at the 1982 Venice Film Festival, and has been
released in the United States for home video, suggesting that Wenders
has indeed "mastered" the art of storytelling. And although "Germany"
figures in the film only as Fritz Munroe's nationality (overdetermined
by the allusion to Murnau), the anxiety of authorship is clearly equated
with cultural identity, both of which are tenuous myths in Wenders's
vision of international filmmaking.
Both The State of Things and Lightning Over Water begin and e
with the representation of death, and the nonnarratives between them
are agonizing detours and discourses on their necessity. Fictional
death is the apotheosis of the "grammatical image," and the contin-
gency of the documentary ideal lies elsewhere, in another film, on
another lost continent, which was Europe. In the narrative econom-
ics of the cinema, which can perhaps be described as its "uncon-
scious," the representation of death has a price, which is the claim
to represent something called real life. For Wenders, the image of vio-
lent death is the cinematic repressed—its primal scene, if you will—
and the uncanny parallel between the shooting of film and the shoot-
ing of guns has the weight of truth.
In both Lightning Over Water and The State of Things, the allego
of narrative mortality refers to the mechanical reproduction of real-
ity, or the relationship of film images to the profilmic referent. If mor-
tification is the discourse of history in representation, in Wenders's
films it involves a complex dialogue between documentary realism
and narrative fiction. Whereas narrativity strives toward "home," mean-
ingfulness, and a unified, coherent expression of identity, the docu-
mentary impulse inscribes a challenge of the contingent, mortal, and
transient singularity of the historical profilmic. The perpetual displace-
ment effected by this slippage may well be an expression of anxiety
experienced by Wenders's generation. The desire to renew German
culture while acknowledging German history can only occur as a form
of mortification.
Eric Santer observes that postwar German cinema is preoccupied
with "the constitution of the self" within the "psychic mechanisms
beyond the pleasure principle"—those of mourning and melancho-
lia.67 Wenders's doubling of himself in both Lightning and The State
104 WimWenders

of Things with directors-in-the-texts is constitutive of these films' nar-

rative mortality. As Wenders's representative within the film, Fritz's
desire is much like Nick's in Lightning, to "bring himself together"
through a film. Moreover, the only real reference to German culture
in The State of Things is Fritz's fictional filmography, which comes
up on the computer screen.68 Its parallels with Wenders's own fil-
mography suggest the allegorical nature of Fritz's character, and the
impossibility of his assuming an identity of his own.
In Lightning Over Water the body of the film flirts with the body
of its auteur-subject, only to be irrevocably and irreversibly sepa-
rated from it. Closure can only be achieved ironically, and Wenders
is unable in either film to close the gap, finally, between the eternal
film image and the historically limited referent. Narrative mortality is,
for Wenders, a negotiation of loss. The unities of self, of art, of a
German cinema defined in opposition to Hollywood, are mythic cat-
egories available in the 1980s only as allegories of desire. Wenders's
mortification of these myths takes the form of a melancholia in which
the dead objects are not completely relinquished.
Wenders's cinema is not in ruins despite the fact that he exempli-
fies Benjamin's observation that "the only pleasure the melancholic
permits himself, and it is a powerful one, is allegory."69 History in
Lightning Over Water and The State of Things is stranded in the pre
sent tense, as the loss of an unspeakable past does not give rise to a
history of the future. Wenders may not return to the Nazi period as
so many of his contemporaries have done, but the difficulty of his-
tory nevertheless informs his filmmaking as a form of narrative mor-
tality. Utopia remains bound to the fetishes of home and maternal
origins, and "survival" pertains not to the barren landscape of The
Survivors but to the ability to reproduce oneself in images. For the
radical potential of narrative mortality, we must turn to Wenders's
predecessors in the 1960s, and a generation of auteurs that is signifi-
cantly repressed in his personal history of the cinema.
THREE

OSHIMANAGISA
The Limits of Nationhood

We know that once we are conscious of it, we have to react to the

desire ingrained in us to overstep the limits. We want to overstep them,
and the horror we feel shows to what excesses we shall be brought,
excesses which, without the initial horror, would be unthinkable.
— GEORGES BATAILLE1

O ne of Oshima's best-known films, Death by Hanging (1968), might

be considered the repressed text of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt,
laying bare all the contradictions of the two institutions of cinema and
capital punishment, analogizing them and mutually indicting them.
The space of the imaginary is opened up by exploiting that very
doubt in the believability of the image that causes so much anxiety
in Lang's film. As in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, the body of the
"guinea pig" is at first that of an automaton, and, like Garrett's, it is
given memory, history, crime, and guilt, under the threat of execu-
tion. For Oshima, however, narrative mortality involves the deliber-
ate production of transgressive desire within the very specific cultural
and historical terms of Japanese cinema.

105
106 Oshima Nagisa

Oshima claims that every filmmaker secretly craves "to record on

film someone actually dying."2 His fascination with this transgression
is manifest in his representation of death, his narrative deployment
of it, and his conception of mortality as a limit to be overcome.
What makes Oshima's work especially pertinent to the present study
is the sociohistorical determinants of these limits in his work. The
Japanese New Wave, a radical moment in a highly distinctive national
cinema, deployed violence and sexuality for overtly political ends.
In Oshima's films, the representation of death is stylistically and nar-
ratively linked to a historical conception of nationhood: the desire
for a new Japan.
In his writing on cinema, Oshima insists on subjective expression
as a stylistic strategy of challenging traditional Japanese cinema. The
different configuration of aesthetics and politics in Japanese culture
also involves a different valorization of subjectivity; narrative mortal-
ity functions as a means to this end. In a I960 essay, Oshima chastises
Japanese directors for their lack of any inscription of self in their
films, and he cites Godard's Breathless as a model to emulate.3 In
another essay, he introduces a term of "active involvement," which,
he says, can only be realized by the negation of those "hidden meth-
ods of self-restraint" that have "penetrated" Japanese filmmakers them-
selves.4 The politics of desire that inform narrative mortality in Oshi-
ma's 1960s films must be understood within this framework and
distinguished from the discourse of individualism in Japanese cin-
ema of the 1950s (e.g., Kurosawa's bourgeois humanism), and also
from the paranoia and anxiety of American melodramas of the period.
Oshima's subjective intervention ultimately takes the form of mor-
tifying the dynamics of Japanese melodrama, marking the historical
thresholds beyond which they might be rearticulated. The ideologi-
cal task was to define a radical Japanese subject position that would
be neither the universal humanism of the 1950s nor the imperialist/
conformist passivity of traditionalist ideology. This process is accom-
plished by way of two techniques: a documentary sociological real-
ism, and a revision of Japanese narrative conventions, especially their
codes of mortality. These two strategies, along with a highly stylized
representation of death, come together in Oshima's allegory of nar-
rative mortality.
 Oshima Nagisa 107

Oshima's fictions are consistently articulated through a "reality prin-

ciple" of historical specificity, which is inscribed in his films by three
principal means. The first is through the use of the Japanese flag,
onto which the body is mapped in many different ways. The round,
red sun becomes circumscriptive, circular and closed, and the body
is inscribed within its singular dimension, a strategy that is most ex-
plicit in the mapping of the child's round head onto the round sun
of the flag in Shonen (Boy) (1969). Allegorical sunsets figure promi-
nently in Death by Hanging (1968) and The Sun's Burial (I960); and
flags drape the sets of many of the films. In the last scenes of Cruel
Story of Youth (I960) Mako wears a bright red dress with white sun
on it, and dies wearing this dress.
Second, Oshima's narrative material is consistently derived from
popular news stories, coextensively representing two levels of real-
ity: historically specific events, and the tabloid journalism that they
spawned. At the end of In the Realm of the Senses (1976), for exam
ple, Oshima's final voice-over notes the popular support that Abe
Sada (the prostitute who killed and castrated her lover) received
from the Japanese people, "who largely sympathized with her, sug-
gesting that her expression of desire, violently linked to the body,
does ultimately have some significance to the body politic. Third, a
stylistic documentary impetus exists either in a verite-style technique,
location shooting, or direct address, often in Oshima's own voice at
the beginning or end of the narrative, as in Death by Hanging, In
the Realm of the Senses, and Boy.
The iconography of Japanese nationalism is so central to all of
these films that the problem of the subject is perpetually that of the
Japanese subject. The designation of historical limits and their trans-
gression occurs within Oshima's characters, but also within the address
to the spectator, who is not necessarily assumed to be Japanese. In a
1975 interview, Oshima said that "our generation cannot rely on the
congeniality of our all being Japanese to communicate,"5 a critique
of ethnographic essentialism that is thoroughly carried out in his
films. His challenge to consensus society produces an international
audience (indeed, Oshima's films may be more widely known outside
Japan), and yet his formal and narrative strategies, despite their Brecht-
ian influence, are not easily abstracted from the Japanese context.
108 Oshima Nagisa

Although Oshima's spectator may be transnational, plural, and cru-

cially divided in both cultural and psychic ways, the represented sub-
ject is very much a unity, anchored in the body. Alongside the the-
matic and visual imbrication of body and flag, the body, in Oshima's
films, is used in continually innovative ways as a means of survival.
Especially in Cruel Story of Youth {I960), The Sun's Burial (I960), and
Boy (1969), it is sacrificed, drained, and battered by and for economic
ends. Characters existing on the margins of industrial capitalism have
only one asset—their bodies—and it is a political, historical reality
in which the bodies of these protagonists circulate. Prostitution, as a
grand metaphor for the interpellation of the personal into the politi-
cal in Japanese society, as Oshima represents it, extends to the mor-
tality of the body.6
Social attitudes toward death in Japan, from the heroics of hara-
kiri (seppuku) to the romance of double suicide, are an extreme in-
stance of an ideological discourse of death. In keeping with Marcuse's
theorization, the bodily, biological fact of death tends to be suppressed
(as "pollution" in Shinto doctrine) in favor of the social significance
of death. The samurai or yakuza (gangster) dies with his lord or
master; lovers express a socially unacceptable love in their joint deaths.
Ian Buruma notes the inherent contradictions in these practices:
"Death is a release from the dictatorship of the group, while at the
same time preserving it death, in other words, may be the ulti-
mate freedom and the pinnacle of purity, but it is also the final and
most important debt to pay."7
Certain parallels exist between Oshima's filmmaking and Marcuse's
social philosophy, both generated in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse claims that the "performance prin-
ciple" of human civilization, "the prevailing historical form of the re-
ality principle," has been appropriated by Thanatos, and that a Utopian
vision involves precisely a championing of Eros over Thanatos. The
development of a new reality principle free of the delimiting repres-
sion implicit in the priorization of mortality involves a liberated sex-
uality, as well as a liberation from the "instinctual goal" of death.8
Two of Marcuse's emphases—the appropriation of the death instinct
by the Nirvana principle in a repressive static society, and the pri-
mordial (Freudian) role of the father—make his thesis particularly
apt to a discussion of Japan. The rituals of double suicide and bushido
 Oshima Nagisa 109

(the code of the samurai), as well as the emperor system, are key
components of the sociological reality principle in Japanese ideology.
Marcuse notes that "the relegation of real possibilities to the no-
man's land of Utopia is itself an essential element of the ideology of
the performance principle."9 In Oshima's films, Utopia is only occa-
sionally depicted as a fleeting moment in the context of apocalypse.
The imagery is parodic in Cruel Story of Youth (Mako and Kiyoshi o
a beach, complete with sunglasses and designer swimwear) and alle-
gorical in The Sun's Burial (the surviving heroine finally runs from
the burning slum, through a huge archway into a magnificent sun-
set). The limits beyond which a Utopia is possible are, however, sys-
tematically represented in and through the image of and desire for
death. Often it is an eroticized image, linked to the characters' sexu-
ality. In this way the melodrama of desire that Marcuse articulates is
transformed into the writing of an allegory of desire, which is, for
Oshima, the ability to imagine a new and different Japan. Whereas
Marcuse implies a "release" of Eros from Thanatos, Oshima's politics
of representation involve a rewriting of Thanatos as Eros, a discursive
rendering of the desire to die (e.g., sacrifice) as the desire for a radi-
cal alteration of reality.
If hara-kiri and double suicide are particularly Japanese ways of
dying, it is imperative that "Japaneseness" be recognized as an ideo-
logical construction. Western criticism has tended to misrecognize
Japanese formalism as "progressive" modernism, and "Japaneseness"
has tended to mean "otherness" vis-a-vis Western bourgeois realism.10
Given the nonillusionist tradition of bourgeois aesthetics in Japan,
the Brechtian strategies adopted by Godard and his European con-
temporaries in the 1960s did not, in themselves, provide radical rep-
resentational tools for Japanese filmmakers. The formal task of the
Japanese New Wave involved a conversion of presentational aesthet-
ics into a "theatrical sign"11 or a move through realist representation
to the other side, to "ruin" both Japanese ideals of cultural authenticity
and Western aesthetic ideals.
Narrative mortality emerges as a crucial deconstructive strategy for
the Japanese New Wave in its imbrication of formal and thematic con-
ventions. If the "theatrical sign" is not simply Brechtian, it is because
it is deployed in narratives that are anchored intertextually in Japanese
cultural history and the imagery of nationalism. Narrative mortality is
110 Oshima Nagisa

also a crucial critical tool for non-Japanese film criticism if it is to move

beyond formal analysis and into the domain of ethnography. It enables
a mortification of exotic "otherness" and a recognition of the nation-
alist character of Japanese ethnography and aesthetics. The degree to
which social practices are institutionalized in cultural forms is made
explicit in the forms death assumes in Japan.
The absence or lack that resides at the core of Western anxiety
and is figured in death as in castration has a slightly different sta-
tus in Japan, 'where a proximity between the living and the dead is
maintained in various ways. In both Zen Buddhism and Shintoism, the
two dominant (and nonexclusive) belief systems in Japan, the "bound-
ary" between life and death is perceived as fluid. The role of ghosts
in Japanese literature, and especially in the Noh drama (in which the
living and the dead mix freely), is indicative of the extension of
community to the realm of the dead. Zen Buddhism, with its ideals
of asceticism and aesthetics, involves a sense of "oneness" with the
world, an experience of undifferentiation or continuity with nature
achieved through satori, or enlightened selflessness by means of con-
templation and/or meditation. The Nirvana principle as the goal of
life thus institutionalizes death as the fulfillment of such a practice.
The sign for mu, or emptiness, engraved on grave stones, designates
mortality as "nothing": neither transcendence of "this world" nor even
departure, but participation in the continuity of being. The lack or
absence upon which Western representational strategies of disavowal
are based is also the foundation of Japanese aesthetics—not as some-
thing to be disavowed, however, but as a desired state of being.
Disavowal presupposes difference, and it is this presupposition that
Oshima's dialectics in Boy and Death by Hanging redeem by discover-
ing ego on the verge of its extinction.
Nonillusionist, presentational stylistics are incorporated into Oshi-
ma's films, but the disjunction between signifier and signified refers
in his work to the gap between subject and object. If vision in Zen
aesthetics is a means of identifying self with other/object in the pur-
suit of satori or enlightenment, its subversion must be a splitting of
the subject and object of vision. The separation of subject from ob-
ject, the gap that is fetishized for the voyeur, has a radical orienta-
tion in Japanese culture. Stephen Heath claims that Oshima's repre-
sentation of "seeing" is "a disphasure of look and sight,"12 but the
 Oshima Nagisa 111

Japanese spectator can be described as having always been "divided,"

confronted with many-voiced discursive operations.13 Oshima's dis-
covery of the Japanese subject is a politicization of the body of the
person, mortally limited and disjunct from the realm of eternal nature
and objects.

Death and Desire in Double Suicide

Two films of Oshima's stand out because of the intertextual relation

to the specific ways that "tradition" has been accommodated into
cinematic representation by Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu Yasujiro. Death
is a central trope of both of these directors' narrative modes and is
crucial to their nationalist appeal, as well as to their melodramatic
strategies. In Cruel Story of Youth, Oshima goes so far as to allude t
the Christian thematics of transcendence that inform Mizoguchi's films.
In Boy, his shooting style changes dramatically to mimic the formal
stasis of Ozu's family dramas. In both cases, the stylistic and thematic
imitation is developed into a complex revisionism in which familiar
narrative strategies are mortified in order to redeem the desires that
inform their narrativity.
Cruel Story of Youth was the centerpiece of what was promoted
as the Japanese New Wave in I960. The trilogy of which it is part
might also be seen as a three-part response to Kurosawa's 1946 film
No Regrets for Our Youth. Despite the promise that Oshima repre
sented to Shochiku studio of a revitalized film culture (ostensibly
modeled on that blossoming in France), the films were bitter expres-
sions of political impotence in the face of the renewed security treaty
of I960 and the continued military alliance of Japan with cold war
America.14 Cruel Story is about a teenage couple who support them
selves by extortion and pimping, living a life of back alleys, bars, hitch-
hiking, motorcycles, and prison. Their cruelty extends to each other,
their families, and their aborted child, and yet, in true melodramatic
fashion, they are the victims of a fragmented, unforgiving society
that finally drives them to their deaths (figure 6).
The discontinuities of the final scenes of Cruel Story are as dra-
matic as those of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, but where they lead
fatalistically in the latter film to an inevitable death, here they build
to a kind of narrative exhaustion. After their release from jail, Mako
112 Oshima Nagisa

Fig. 6. Cruel Story of Youth: Kiyoshi (Yusuke Kawazu) and Mako (Miyuki Kuwano)
seeking violence and sexual freedom on the road to a new Japan. Publicity still
courtesy of New Yorker Films.

and Kiyoshi literally cannot escape from the social forces that inhibit
their relationship. Kiyoshi finds himself economically bound to his mis-
tress and pursued by jealous thugs. He is bound to the underworld
as tightly as Mako is to her moralizing family. After their failure to
escape from Kiyoshi's mistress, the couple walk along a crowded
street. On extreme screen right they walk into a shakily backtracking
camera while people swarm around them on the crowded sidewalk
and traffic roars beside them. The unsteady camera and the charac-
ters' lack of ideas (they say they have "nowhere to go") threaten a
lack of closure, suggesting that they will simply be swallowed by the
city and the image will disintegrate, the film having nothing left to
show.
In their final dialogue, Kiyoshi says that both men and women
are mere "tools of society" and he cannot take responsibility for him-
self, much less for Mako too. He suggests that they "call it quits," and
when Mako asks him what he means, the convention of double sui-
cide, which would be called for by Mizoguchi or Chikamatsu Mon-
 Oshima Nagisa 113

zaemon at this point, is underlined. But Oshima refuses them this

possibility of transcendence, and after Kiyoshi exits right he cuts to
Mako walking alone, at extreme screen right in relief against the un-
focused red, white, and blue neon background. The stylization of cos-
tume and mise-en-scene that the film has incorporated throughout is
finally divorced from narrative content. Mako's echoing footsteps are
all that can be heard; her isolation against the diffused representa-
tion of the city and the iconography of her red-and-white dress in-
troduce the allegorical level on which the film will close.
The double suicide motif alluded to in the dialogue is reinforced
in the representation of the actual deaths. The ambiguity of Mako's
accidental fall from a moving car, her telepathically triggered response
to Kiyoshi's death, the car in Kiyoshi's alley (which may or may not be
the same car that Mako falls from), the rapid crosscutting between the
two events, and the final split-screen composition are all means by
which the specifics of these two individual deaths suggest a nonma-
terial connection between them. Mako's sudden sensing of Kiyoshi's
death invokes the mystical ontology of double suicide, that a socially
impossible love could be realized on a different plane of existence,
outside of history.
As if it were tacked on arbitrarily to the end of the narrative, the
final death sequence is of a different discursive order than the rest of
the film. The melodramatic mode gives way to the allegorical through
a strategic refinement of the narrative stylistics that characterize the
film. The zengakuren demonstration,15 which Mako and Kiyoshi
watch in the second scene of the film, follows an insertion of black-
and-white newsreel footage of a student demonstration in Korea:16 a
historical mimesis is translated into cinematic terms. To Mako and
Kiyoshi, joining such a militaristic, highly organized demonstration is
only another form of conformism, against which their desires are ex-
plicitly cast in relief, beginning with their dialogue about sex on
the sidelines of the demonstration. Instead of joining the students,
they rent a speedboat, go out to a logjam where Kiyoshi rapes Mako,
and then fall in love. The last few shots of the zengakuren are not
only very short, fragmenting the mass of people into close-ups, but
shaky, taken by an obviously handheld camera. Similarly, the final
sequence of Cruel Story, in which the mise-en-scene is again predom-
inantly red and white, opens with a repetition of this exaggerated
114 Oshima Nagisa

handheld technique (the image moves up and down, rather than be-
ing simply unsteady). Mako and Kiyoshi, emerging from Kiyoshi's
room, begin their michiyuki, or lovers' walk to death.
The michiyuki is a vital convention of double-suicide plays, usu-
ally covering a succession of bridges, and it is signaled most overtly
here by the melodramatically ominous soundtrack.17 The repetition
of the shaky handheld camera work in the michiyuki is, on the one
hand, a crude realization of Oshima's desire to represent his own
volition in the image, and, on the other, a transposition of the unrest
of the zengakuren onto Mako and Kiyoshi. Since the couple remains
to the end of the film very much outside the political sphere, this is
a crucial means of situating their deaths in a historical-political regis-
ter. The michiyuki itself and the final split-screen composition of the
film, in which Mako's and Kiyoshi's lifeless faces are placed side by
side, are equally explicit interventions of Oshima onto the narrative.
The crosscutting between the two scenes of Mako's and Kiyoshi's
deaths is Oshima's penultimate intervention. He manages to take con-
trol of the fatalism of double suicide and exploit that discourse of
control—the subservience of characters to narrative—for a politics
of desire. More than a deromanticization or demystification, narrative
mortality operates here as a deconstruction of the closure of love-
and-death, and an opening up of sex and violence as different dis-
courses of desire. It is a transposition from "natural" to "cultural"
forces, and a transposition from melodrama to allegory.
In terms of both style and narrative, Cruel Story evokes the melo-
dramatic cinema of Mizoguchi. The film is constructed as a series of
tableau-like scenes, each with a strong sense of unity achieved in part
by the extensive use of long takes and by the sometimes awkward
ellipses between them. Moreover, the emphasis on Mako as a hero-
ine whose oppression is represented by way of rape also recalls Mi-
zoguchi. Mako's fall from a moving car echoes a similar incident in
Sisters of the Gion (1936), in which a woman is violently thrown fro
a moving car and breaks her leg. Mako's march into the camera near
the end of the film recalls the way that Ayako, the heroine of Mi-
zoguchi's Osaka Elegy (1936), suddenly walks into a close-up at th
end of that film. Mizoguchi abruptly cuts off the long-awaited emer-
gence of Ayako's subjectivity, and, while it is as brief in Cruel Story
 Oshima Nagisa 115

this subjective presence is finally killed by men in the film, lifting

Mako's desire onto an allegorical plane.
In stark contrast with Mizoguchi's feminisuto "worship," or ideal-
ization of female sacrifice,18 for Oshima and his contemporaries, fem-
inine sexuality is in itself an allegorical discourse of political desires.19
The sadomasochistic form of sexual relations in the film speaks of
the contradictions implicit in a political discourse that appropriates
female desire without politicizing female subjectivity. Rape stands as
a sign of the weakness of Oshima's male characters, and its annihila-
tion of female desire remains repressed in many of his films as well
as his writing.20 The contradiction is certainly symptomatic of Japan-
ese culture, and can perhaps be read in the film's abrupt shift from
melodrama (in which Mako's repressed desire is written boldly) to
allegory (in which her desire becomes that of the nongendered his-
torical subject). The failure of romance is also a failure of sexual re-
lations in the film, and both Kiyoshi's aggression and Mako's passiv-
ity are signs of this failure.
Oshima's revision of Mizoguchi is accomplished by what seems to
be an appropriation of the Hollywood melodramatic style of the
1950s.21 Certainly the use of Eastmancolor Cinemascope in itself con-
stitutes a radical gesture in the conservative production system of
Shochiku-Ofuna.22 The use of color in costumes and sets and the ex-
pressive use of objects and locations are strategies of displacement,
the means by which "the unspeakable" is represented in the text.
Peter Brooks's description of melodramatic resistance would seem to
be eminently applicable. Desire emerges as
a victory over repression. We could conceive this repression as
simultaneously social, psychological, historical, and
conventional The melodramatic utterance breaks through
everything that constitutes the "reality principle," all its
censorships, accommodations, tonings-down. Desire cries
aloud its language in identification with full states of being.23

The "manifest material" of the mise-en-scene of Cruel Story includes

such things as liquor burning in glasses, brightly colored telephones,
close-ups of shoes, orange-and-blue mise-en-scenes, close-ups of burn-
ing cigarettes, and construction sites. This rich plethora of "modern,"
116 Oshima Nagisa

"Western" signifiers far surpasses the linguistic content of the film

and supplies a dynamic level that is utterly lacking from the perfor-
mances.
The bright colors and loud noises of sexuality, violence, thrill seek-
ing, and dancing are means of expression to be substituted for empty
political rhetoric. This is particularly true of Mako. The inexpress-
ive performance of Kuwano Miyuki is betrayed by her flamboyant
(brightly colored, full-skirted) dresses and her tinted and teased hair-
style.24 Her introduction to sexuality is channeled into strategic social
deviance, as the couple make their living by amateur extortion, pros-
titution, and pimping. The expressionistic "triumph of desire" is ac-
tually realized in the brief beach scene in which Mako and Kiyoshi,
wearing bright colors and sunglasses, reconcile their differences. But
this image of consumerist Utopia is parodic; in the second shot of
the scene, Mako is wearing the red dress with white suns on it that
she will wear to the end of the film and eventually die in. The brief
glimpse of a romantic setting sun is immediately followed by their
arrest upon returning home. Closure is deferred.
Although melodrama seems to be the dominant construction of
death in Japanese film, and informs this national cinema as a meta-
genre to the same extent that it does Hollywood film, a number of sig-
nificant differences between Japanese and Western melodrama need
to be addressed.25 Western melodrama, as it has been theorized by
Peter Brooks and Thomas Elsaesser, is an expression of latency and
interiority, an eruption that takes place on the surface of discourse
and points in its very excessiveness to something that escapes repre-
sentation.26 Roland Barthes observes that Westerners cannot under-
stand Japanese puppet theater (bunraku) because, for us, "to attack
meaning is to hide or invert it but never to 'absent' it What is
expelled from the [Japanese] stage is hysteria." In the presence of
the puppet manipulators on stage, "work is substituted for inward-
ness ... the inside no longer commands the outside."21 He claims
that "excess is given only within the very code of excess ... the signi-
fier cunningly does nothing but turn itself inside out, like a glove."28
In Chikamatsu Monzaemon's bunraku plays of double suicide, the
couple is generally doomed from the outset, their love proscribed by
their social commitments, and the narrative is simply an elaborate
detour toward their desired goal.29 The Japanese "moral occult"30 is
 Oshima Nagisa 117

played out through the dual concepts of giri and ninjo, terms that
embody a range of polarities, but refer most immediately to the con-
tradiction between obligations to society—including one's family,
village, class, trade, or business (girt) — and individual, "authentic"
human feelings (ninjo). Interdependent, symbiotic moral principles
of exteriority and interiority, giri and ninjo, sometimes interpreted
as restraint and emotion, are forever at war within the Japanese melo-
dramatic psyche, and only in death can the struggle be overcome.31
A lovers' suicide is unquestionably a performance, a display of giri,
obligations to each other, and ninjo, rejection of the social forces
(class, especially) that conspire to keep the lovers apart, suspended
in perfect harmonious balance.
Often the decision to die, in both samurai films and melodramas,
is an expression of ninjo, the realm of "emotion" described by many
commentators as being incomprehensible to the non-Japanese.32 In
Ian Buruma's popular ethnography, "every Japanese is equipped with
a non-verbal emotional transmitter which functions only with other
Japanese,"33 and the silence of death is the ultimate expression of such
nationalist communication. Ninjo, for Mizoguchi, is closely tied to
woman's desire, but it is neither suppressed by nor triumphant over
giri. A perfect balance between giri and ninjo is what is desired and
often attained, with the effect of emptying the violence of melodra-
matic death of its potentiality. The "struggle" that informs Western
melodrama is eradicated in Japanese melodrama by the laws of na-
ture and divine providence; the pleasure of suffering is the pleasure
of fulfillment in death.
Ninjo remains "incomprehensible" to non-Japanese, according to
ethnographic film criticism (e.g., Sato, Buruma), in the same way that
Japanese melodrama is for Barthes. It becomes a means of protect-
ing the "meaninglessness" of the nonrealist traditional forms, which
are virtually impossible to maintain intact within narrative realism: it
endows them with the "meaning" of Japaneseness. The theatrical
styles and narratives that inform classical Japanese film melodrama
are built upon a "moral occult" that has no hidden meanings or
Manichean struggles between desire and repression. Emotion is pro-
duced not by the unseen, but by the visibility of forms: the beauty of
balance, the poverty of means, the perfection of technique, and other
categories of Japanese aesthetics. Transposed to the cinematic medium
118 Oshima Nagisa

of presence and absence, representation and invisibility, tradition itself

is produced as the "unspeakable" that cannot be articulated within
the realism of a photographic medium.
A central strategy of the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s was a
recasting of melodramatic desire so that the principle of ninjo be-
comes a discourse of resistance, while giri is recast as social oppres-
sion. That this involved a recourse to Western melodramatic forms
does not necessarily belittle the project. In Cruel Story of Youth (an
other films, including Shinoda's Double Suicide [1969]), Western and
Japanese melodramatic forms come together to produce an allegori-
cal mode of representation in which "stylization" becomes a writing
of historical desire.
The formal and narrative engagement with traditional Japanese
melodrama situates the narrative desire for death on an allegorical
plane. Cruel Story of Youth exhibits an indulgence in the excesses o
cinematic representation in order to go beyond the realism on which
traditional melodrama falters. The signifier is no longer an empty glove
but an empty glass, waiting to be filled by the realism that is just be-
yond its grasp. Hysteria returns, not to characters but to discourse it-
self. In this way, Oshima's Japanese melodrama does not become its
"opposite"—Barthes's psychological Western melodrama—but it be
comes allegory. Moreover, the national allegory implicit in classical
Japanese film melodrama is brought to the "surface" of the text as a
discursive production of Japanese subjectivity.
Suicide in Japanese history and culture is a central trope in the con
struction of national allegory, but it would be a mistake to believe
that it always referred to the same constellation of ideas. Indeed, the
famous suicides of the twentieth century—from General Nogi (1912)
to novelist Dazai Osamu (1948) to Mishima Yukio (1970)—are a his
tory of shifting nationalist desires. Despite the notoriety outside Japan
of Mishima's "theatrical suicide," it elicited a great deal of contempt
and consternation within Japan, a great change from the respect that
was generated by Nogi's patriotism and loyalty to the dead Emperor
Meiji fifty-eight years earlier. Alan Wolfe compares Mishima's seppuku
to Dazai's "schizophrenic" jisatsu (self-destruction, murder of the self,
to be distinguished from the codified militarist act of seppuku), accom-
plished only after several failed attempts:
 Oshima Nagisa 119

Whereas Dazai represents a "fragmented, schizoid" subjectivity,

and his suicide a prototypically modern alienated variety,
Mishima's seppuku stands for an effort to revive a "coherent"
premodern notion of the individual subject, one connected with
the romantic notion of a "nobility of failure" extending back to
Japan's protohistoric age. As a metaphor, then, Mishima's
seppuku projects a desire for control, whereas Dazai's jisatsu
infers an inability to master the modern situation.34

None of Oshima's characters actually commit suicide, but many of

the deaths are desired in the schizophrenic style of Dazai. When char-
acters die at the hands of others (e.g., Kichi in Realm of the Senses),
the terms are significantly expanded beyond the limits of Dazai's ex-
istentially alienated subjectivity. Melodrama provides the vehicle for
an expansion of the narrow terms of jisatsu onto the terrain of the
family and society. Psychology, fetishized in the literary tradition of the
Japanese "I"-novel,35 gives way to national-historical allegory written
in its own terms, not those of the suicidal self. As national allegory,
literary and historical suicides tend to evoke "some sense of a need
for a spirituality thought to be lacking in the contemporaneous era,"36
and in this sense they are fundamentally melodramatic, pointing to
that which is lacking. Narrative mortality in Japan involves grasping
the desire implicit in the allegorical act of suicide as historical, rather
than spiritual, possibility.
From the michiyuki on, Cruel Story is allegorical in the sense of
its status as writing, in the different discursive level that the text quite
suddenly acquires. Unlike melodramatic representation in which ex-
cess of expression makes up for the limitations imposed on language
and symbolic systems, in allegory that excess is rendered as language
itself. Walter Benjamin points to the mode of address in allegorical
representation and its fundamental relation to mortality:
If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of
melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and it
remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed
to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power. That is to
say it is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or
significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires
from the allegorist.37
120 Oshima Nagisa

The emblem is the model of allegory for Benjamin, because in it "the

essence of what is depicted" is "dragged out before the image, in writ-
ing, as a caption" (p. 185). "At one and the same time [it is] a fixed im-
age and a fixing sign" (p. 184). This is partly accomplished in the final
scene of Cruel Story by way of the sudden burst of music that accom
panies the split-screen display of the two bodies, but the stylization
of the entire coda and its formal disjunction from the narrative point
to the role of the allegorist.
Maureen Turim has noted that Oshima's images are emblematic in
their "presentation of themselves as signs."38 His use of the sun in the
1960-61 trilogy and the Japanese flag itself (as we will see in Boy)
is perhaps exemplary of this strategy, and in the scene in question,
Mako's dress with white suns on red is an instance of what Audie
Bock describes as Oshima's "dead flag fantasies."39 Where the ex-
pressionism of melodrama diffuses the signified into a realm of excess,
allegory directs signification into a specific schema. At the allegorical
end of Cruel Story, the flip side of transcendence is realized: the ma
terial or biological pole of death that melodramatic representation
ordinarily displaces onto spiritual or sexual desire.
The seventeen-second static shot of Kiyoshi in medium close-up
on the ground with blood and multicolored ooze coming out of his
mouth—shot in a rich orange light—especially places the emphasis
on the biological fact of death. And yet the lovers' deaths take on a
historical significance which may be described as the inverse of pun-
ishment or moral allegory. Mako and Kiyoshi become martyrs for so-
cial criticism, their deaths emblematic of exclusion and the failure of
a renewed Japan. At the same time, Oshima's use of these images, his
intervention and control of them (film as "camera-stylo"), establishes
his subjectivity outside the closed circle of melodramatic pathos, out-
side the object, not contemplating but repulsed.
Benjamin insists that "the body comes into its own" in death no less
than the spirit does, and the baroque dramatists' emphasis on the
"physis" was not only "a question of reflection about the end of their
lives" but an obsession with the body and its signifying properties
(pp. 217-18). The corpse is the "pre-eminent emblematic property"
because allegory fills out and denies "the void in which its objects are
represented" (p. 233). Melodramatic death, such as Miyagi's in Ugest
Monogatari or Plato's in Rebel Without a Cause, avoids the sight of
 Oshima Nagisa 121

the corpse and allows for a thematic reconciliation of the surviving

characters, precisely through allegories of resurrection, something that
Sirk succinctly ironizes in Imitation of Life. Melodramatic death creates
a void that, when filled, effects closure. Allegorical death is cruel be-
cause the void remains empty.
The representation of the body itself, drained of life, is a privileged
signifier for the allegorist. Like the death's head, or skull, in baroque
culture, the bruised and bleeding body is, for Oshima, the site of writ-
ing, a writing that places demands on the reader or viewer. Where the
allegory of the crucifixion (and likewise double suicide and seppuku/
hara-kiri) sublimates the body into the symbol, the allegory of hell
displays itself "as allegory" and the body is separated from its mean-
ing. The allegory of damnation signifies transitoriness and, for Ben-
jamin, the subjection of humanity to nature—not to God.40
Since, in the Japanese tradition, "god" is nature, and transitoriness
is redemption, there is not the same legacy of allegory as in the West.
Benjamin describes allegorical expression as an "oriental rhetoric"
that only becomes "profound" when combined with the Western "doc-
trine of the fall of the creature, which brought down nature with it"
(p. 224). The redemption in nature of the Japanese body, the conti-
nuity of the self in the natural world (as ashes rather than as a corpse),
mystifies transitoriness as repetition and return. The subjection of hu-
manity to nature does not imply decay, transformation, and "mortal-
ity" in Japanese eschatology, but the rule of divine fate. The allegori-
cal emblem is not a "ruin" in traditional Japanese aesthetics, because
it lacks that sense of loss that Benjamin identifies in the splitting of
representation from meaning. Oshima's strategic use of this Western
form in Cruel Story, at the specific juncture of I960, signifies the su
jection of humanity to itself, rather than to nature or divine fate. The
transitoriness of the subject as a historical subject is portrayed as cruel,
arbitrary, and therefore changeable.
There is no question that Kurosawa preceded Oshima in the strate-
gic representation of violence in the Japanese cinema (e.g., Throne of
Blood and The Lower Depths, both 1957), but Oshima's exploitatio
of the corpse as political allegory was a crucial means of employing
discontinuous signification for Brechtian purposes. The discourse of
melodrama in the body of the text of Cruel Story specifies this signi
fied content as subjective, inward, as "desire," but the abrupt transition
122 Oshima Nagisa

to allegory embodies the subject as mortal and therefore vulnerable

to violence and to the repressive, familial forces that society repre-
sents to the individual.
The New Wave movement had pretty well exhausted itself by the
time of Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses (1976), a film that mark
the limits of the political duality of desire and repression. It encapsu-
lates the futility of desire in narrative as radical praxis by mortifying
the very limit of the End, beyond which desire must go to be real-
ized. Sada and Kichi move from one windowless boudoir to another,
making love throughout the entire film, and while flags and soldiers
are omnipresent in their brief excursions outside, the action of the film
is explicitly set off from the 1930s militarism in which the narrative is
set, or set off from. Desire as resistance becomes simply escapism and
an impotent political force. Insofar as Kichi's death is achieved as a
heightened form of sexuality, it is an overwhelmingly literal render-
ing of the mortal erotics of narrative. The final high-angle shot of
Kichi's body, inscribed with bloody characters saying "Sada and Kichi
forever," is another abrupt shift into an allegorical mode of represen-
tation. Sada, moreover, after castrating her dead lover, wanders around
Tokyo "carrying what she had cut off." The convention of double
suicide is again subverted, and Sada is not "liberated" by her trans-
gression but returned to the historical "real," the newspaper stories
from which the story came.
For Stephen Heath, In the Realm of the Senses "comes near the
limit of the historical function of the subject" because repetition does
not lead back in this text, but perpetually forward to a terminal point
of death. A key to the rearticulation of desire and mortality in In the
Realm of the Senses and Death by Hanging is a redirection of repeti-
tion away from the sameness of death and toward the difference of
historical time. Dana Polan points out that "the possibility of a new
form of repetition" is predicated on "the divided inclusion of the spec-
tator."41 Oshima's Brechtian approach involves a harnessing of a politi-
cized alienation effect to produce a theatrical sign that allegorizes
Japanese "tradition." Rituals, including execution and intercourse, are
repeated in Oshima's narratives so as to preclude the possibility of
return. Oshima's desire to film an actual death, like Sada's murder of
her lover, is a desire to leave things permanently unfinished. The onto-
 Oshima Nagisa 123

logical obscenity of filming death and thus repeating the unrepeat-

able, is cast here as a politics of representing desire in and through
mortality.

The Boy and the Flag

Oshima's films have often been described by Western critics as an illus-
tration of an inside/outside conflict, usually referring to the relation-
ship between the personal and the political, the individual and soci-
ety.42 However, the articulation of difference in Oshima's films can only
be fully appreciated within the context of the conventions of differ-
ence in Japanese culture. An inside/outside dialectic has traditionally
distinguished between the authentically Japanese and the foreign.43 If
the interiority of ninjo corresponds to the essential Japaneseness of
the Japanese character, unknowable to the outsider, ninjo and giri
do, in fact, correspond to an inside/outside relationship, but it is not
a self/other distinction so much as one between homogeneity and
heterogeneity.
The relationship between the individual body and institutions of
power is the obverse side of what Foucault calls "bio-power."44 The
deployment of death as one of the main techniques of biopower in
Japan is made explicit in Boy. For this film, based on an incident that
generated widespread sympathy in Japan, Oshima borrowed the actual
newspaper headlines about a family of atariyas, or traffic-accident
extortionists. The family's occupation in Boy is a continual flirtation
with death, and the father who orders his wife and child to jump in
front of moving cars says that he's "died once already in the war,"
bringing into play the ideology of sacrifice that underwrote Japan's
military endeavors in the Pacific war. This leads the boy to say that
he "doesn't know how to die."
The absolute lack of pathos in Oshima's treatment of the story
is due in part to a critical distance maintained, again, through a
tableau structure with multiple ellipses and minimal point-of-view
editing. But this time Oshima's use of traditional forms is very de-
liberate, and is bolstered by the fact that Boy partakes of a genre
in which Ozu worked extensively, that of the tendency film or con-
temporary family melodrama. Oshima uses it to further implicate the
124 Oshima Nagisa

exploitation of the body into the Japanese ethic of girt or duty, oblig-
ation, and loyalty.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this film is that almost
every shot of the wide-screen mise-en-scene of Boy is designed as a
metaphor for the Japanese flag. In much of the narrative, the mother's
red sweater or her hair, which she dyes red halfway through the film,
is center-screen. Oshima does the same thing with Ozu's "painterly"
use of red in the interior decor and exterior environments, repeat-
edly placing a small area of red lacquer, plastic, cloth, or building
center-screen. The analogy of this composition to the flag is encour-
aged by the omnipresence of Japanese flags throughout the film, lit-
erally drenching the boy's environment and often placed center-screen
themselves. Every shot, therefore, is allegorical: each scene is an alle-
gory of Japan, and each shot is a signifier, its composition a form of
writing, obliquely cut off from "full" realist representation.
The boy's round head is established in the film's first two shots as
itself isomorphic with the round sun of the flag, suggesting that the
boy's manipulation and oppression by his parents are a metaphor for
the more general construction of the Japanese subject. Thus the un-
named boy protagonist of this film is literally inscribed as a sign in a
narrative constructed as a series of signs. In other words, subjectivity
is "contained" and closed off on two levels: as the boy is to the fam-
ily, psychoanalytically and ideologically, so the individual is to Japan.
But the third level, the relation of the subject to the narrative, remains
unsutured until the final shots of the film. Again, it is the limit of these
relationships that the film ultimately delineates by aligning death with
a "reality principle" outside of representation and leaving the boy
precisely at the point of its transcendence.
The ideological critique of death is accomplished in Boy by a nar-
rative that splits apart the two principles of process and unity, met-
onymic change and static repetition. Because the family is continu-
ally on the move, there is no repetition of place; every scene is in a
new location. Interiors of inns and restaurants may be similar, but they
are never the same; the roadways, parks, fields, and trains are never
returned to. We see the family eating again and again, but never in
the same place. Likewise, the boy and the mother repeat their little
drama many times, but never in the same place with the same car. The
 Oshima Nagisa 125

only repetitive visual constant is the flag and its analogues in the
mise-en-scene (figure 7).
"Home" thus becomes a crucial locus of desire for the boy, figured
in a folk song from Koichi, where his father comes from and where
he was presumably born. But when the boy runs away alone to visit
his grandparents, he can only afford to take the train to a town with
the same name as theirs, where he enacts an imaginary reunion by
himself. Toward the end of the film, when the boy, his little brother,
and their mother are finally enjoying the first domestic scene of the
film, the police break in and arrest the father as he enters the house.
The boy's occupation of throwing himself in front of cars is the
means by which a "death wish" is substituted for the comfort of home.
Oshima translates the masochism of this found story into a narrative
propelled by a conception of death that is at once heroic and escapist.
Although the only "returns" in Boy are to the rehearsal of dying and
to the omnipresent design of the flag, there are two levels of mem-
ory operative in the film. One consists of stills and freeze-frames of

Fig. 7. Boy: The boy (Abe Tetsuo) with his parents (Koyama Akiko and Watanabe
Fumio) and younger brother surrounded by flags. The mother's sweater in this
shot is red. Publicity shot courtesy of Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.
126 Oshima Nagisa

images from inside and outside the diegesis inserted at two strategic
points in the narrative; the other consists of the boy's voice-over and
a short series of flashbacks in which he recalls a death that he wit-
nessed. Each of these configurations of memory consists of a princi-
ple of "return," by which the film redefines mortality in terms of a
politicized subjectivity.
The first series of stills occurs about halfway through the film,
commensurate with the second instance of the boy's voice-over.45
None of these stills are repetitions of images from the film, although
several are of the boy himself, and the black-and-white ones are
clearly from an entirely different order of representation. A shot of
the boy in his underwear lying on a white sheet is inserted into the
series as he says, "Since it really hurts now, I don't have to lie to the
doctor. Even an ordinary child can say that it hurts." His skin is very
pink and he looks into the camera silently, lying on his side.
In this sequence, the stasis of the cognate photo (the still that fills
the frame completely) is particularly important because of the tension
created between the photographs and the shot of the body on the
bed. The latter is equally unrelated to the preceding and succeeding
scenes, is equally unsynchronized with the sound track, and is equally
static. The boy does not move, but blinks, indicating that the image,
the film, is moving. Time passes in a "present tense," whereas the
black-and-white photos relate to a past, even if it is a time outside,
between the scenes, of the film we are watching.
The tight framing of the boy's exposed body, together with his
first admission of pain, is the first intimation in the film of his mortal-
ity. The color stills of him lying on the street could be of his imag-
ined future death, or they could be single frames of his masquerade
of injury. But like the black-and-white stills, they stop the film and
mark its illusion of presence; surrounding the shots of the boy on
the bed, they threaten movement with stasis. As the film has inter-
nalized the relentless traveling, the unceasing motion is threatened
graphically by the photograph at the same time as the threat to the
boy's body is made explicit. His mortality is thus analogized with the
movement of the film.
Another cognate photograph is included toward the end of Boy
following a series of newspaper headlines that read "Shakedown
ring ... Couple used child; Suspected couple indicted; Discovered
 Oshima Nagisa 127

through photographic I.D." The black-and-white photograph is of

the family on the street in a location where we saw them previously
enact one of their crimes and where they were photographed by
journalists. As the image is held on the screen, a man's (Oshima's)
voice-over reports journalistically the details of the family and their
activity. In the final scene on the train, the family sits with plain-
clothes policemen. The image is suddenly frozen and the voice-over
gives us a detailed biography of the father, under which seven stills
in black and white and color, taken from the film itself, are presented.
After another still shot of the family, seven more stills of the mother
accompany a similarly detailed biography of her.
Although this series of stills provides the film with a memory, uni-
fying its discrete moments by way of repetition, it is not a subjective
flashback. The memory, rather, pertains to a history outside the film.
Although the images of the mother and father are obviously enacted,
the biographies, as they are authoritatively enunciated by Oshima,
have the weight of documentary truth. The death of the film, the
end of the narrative, is thus taken up by a return to a lived history in
the mode of Benjamin's storyteller, whose "wisdom" is derived from
experience.46
But this is not the end of the film. It is followed by a short sequence
in which the boy finally emerges as a subject of discourse. Whereas
the trajectory of the film has been linked to the boy's mortality through
the still images and the static mise-en-scene, in the last shots the
boy's memory, vision, and desire are represented through the con-
trasting metaphor of a moving train. Until this point, the boy's only
conception of transcendence, of a different reality, is through a cul-
tural co-optation of his imagination by fantasy narratives. When the
police interrogate the boy, they show him a photograph of himself.
He says, "That's a man from outer space."
However, in the very last shots of the film, when a policeman
asks the boy whether he likes the sea and whether he liked being
on a plane, the boy, who has until now denied being an atariya,
defending his mother and father by refusing to indict their criminal
activity, finally says, "Yes. I went to Hokkaido" (the northernmost
part of Japan), an admission that constitutes a confession. Before he
answers, a shot of the train tracks from the front of the moving train
is followed by a close-up of the boy, a reverse shot of his look out
128 Oshima Nagisa

the train window, another close-up of him, and four flashback images
that comprise the second level of memory mentioned earlier, this
time an explicitly subjective one.
The four images that the boy perceives in flashback on the train
are of a girl's lifeless face with bright red blood on her forehead
(from two different angles) and a red boot in the snow (the second
time as a snowman's nose). Connected by dissolves, the series goes
girl, boot, girl, boot. These images all derive from earlier scenes set
in Hokkaido. When the family travels to this northern snow-covered
island by plane toward the end of the film, they have traversed all of
Japan. The boy looks across the sea in a blizzard to a distant horizon
that is "not-Japan." On a snowy road, a family fight is followed by a
freak accident shot in black and white. The boy's little brother runs
from the father's violence and a jeep swerves to avoid hitting him.
While the mother, father, and baby flee, the boy remains watching
while the driver and the young girl in the jeep, who have been killed
by the abrupt stop, are taken away by ambulances.
The girl's boot falls off and the boy takes it home. He subse-
quently uses the red boot as a nose for his snowman, which he vio-
lently demolishes. The composition of that mise-en-scene, in which
the bright red L-shape of the boot is set against the homogeneous
white landscape, indicates the semiotic reading that the narrative de-
mands. Insofar as the red-and-white mise-en-scene matches the design
of the flag, the shape of the boot points simply to otherness, to the
not-Japan that the boy has pointed to on the boat.
Although a number of interpretations of these scenes and the mem-
ory they produce have been offered by critics,47 the boy's possible
sense of responsibility for the death—his psychological response to
it—is less important than the pure phenomenology of seeing death.
He does say to his parents, "Maybe I killed her," but the freak acci-
dent is never referred to again or explained. Because the girl is the
first female of his own age that he has encountered, his fascination
with her image is a fascination with the other sex as much as it is
with her death and a vision of not-life. These indices of otherness
mark for the boy the limits of his social construction, barriers he
transcends in his final confession. Instead of the death that he has
desired, Oshima leaves the boy on the verge of identifying himself
 Oshima Nagisa 129

as something more real than "a man from outer space." Through the
image of another's death, inserted arbitrarily as a completely fictional
event in this "true story," the boy attains a sense of himself as a per-
son independent of his parents, free of his masochistic dependency.
In the boy's flashback images of death, a number of narrative
tropes coalesce to give the film a retrospective, retroactive structure
that allows the boy to overcome his desire for death. These images
of the girl's face and the boot are, like the previous shots of the
boy's naked body, static but filmed: representations of stasis. Further-
more, they are repetitions of earlier images and, on another level,
repetitions of the red-centered mise-en-scene, emblematic of Japan-
ese nationalism. Like the series of stills accompanying the parents'
biographies (the "dossier of the film itself in stills"),48 this short series
of remembered images fills the convention of narrative binding or
unifying, but the effect of the repetition is not one of closure.
The four shots differ from the Oshima-narrated stills in their cru-
cial relation to the boy's memory, finally producing a discourse of
subjectivity. They supply a visual counterpart to the three instances
of the boy's voice-over, a subjective register of vision that has been
previously designated as a locus of antagonism. The boy's memory
of the accident is bound to his point of view although the accident
scene itself is shot in the "objective," distanced style of most of the
film, with no reaction shots or eyeline matches. Not even the cutaways
to the girl's face or the boot in the snow are sutured by the boy's
look. There are only four instances in Boy in which the boy's point
of view is represented, all of them overdetermined, and in two of
them he is punished for looking.49
The inscription of point of view and coextensive identification of
a subject of vision is finally established by the glance out the train
window, a moving point-of-view shot. Finally, a dialectic of metaphor
and metonymy that has been entirely lacking in the preceding
scenes is realized. The boy "disappears" into the field of the other,
becomes the "Absent One" of Oudart's suture theory, not to reach
the limit of his historical construction—his death—but to go be-
yond it by way of his vision and memory of death. At the same time,
the boy's admission that he went to Hokkaido is motivated by an
identification with specific symbols of otherness. His difference from
130 Oshima Nagisa

his parents, his opposition to them, is predicated on the sign of dif-

ference: the not-circular, the not-male, the not-living, and the not-
Japanese.
Boy is perhaps the ultimate expression of Oshima's "dead flag fan-
tasies." The stasis that is rendered in Boy explicitly conjoins the ideo-
logical stagnation of the child's inability to criticize or renounce his
parents with Japanese aesthetic formalism. The repetition of the red-
centered composition, as a self-imposed aesthetic structure, mimics
this formalism, specifying both its nationalistic and its static character.
Moreover, the implication of Ozu in Oshima's revisionist formal-
ism, referenced specifically by the family drama and the use of red,
can be extended to the status of Ozu's films as chains of signifiers.
Ozu's frontal symmetrical compositions and virtual disregard for con-
tinuity editing emphasize the presentational character of each of his
short shots.50 In Boy, Ozu's style, with all its traditional connotations,
is subjected to implicit criticism by analogy to the repressive nation-
alistic and patriarchal conditions in which the boy is situated. Oshima's
use of Ozu's "presentational" film aesthetics involves a flattening of
the image; he drains it of its illusionist potential of full signification
and makes it an emblem of death.
The image of the girl's face on the 'white snow with bright red
blood on her forehead is an "excessive" gesture, narratively gratu-
itous but crucial to the film's representational politics: it aligns the
lack of life with the inertness of signification. The flag itself becomes
an emblem of mortality, as do the rituals of family life that Oshima
has theatricalized to the point of excess. The girl's death is, in a sense,
a sacrificial gesture that enables the boy and the spectator to tran-
scend the limits of the knowable, rational world. If, for Bataille, sac-
rifice "reveals what normally escapes notice," namely, "the continu-
ity of existence" beyond individual "discontinuity,"51 the Japanese
context reverses the terms. The heterogeneity of individual mortality
is revealed beyond the national allegory of homogeneous duty-bound
dying. Nevertheless, Bataille's main point, that sex and death share
an erotic component in the dialectical equation of sameness and dif-
ference, remains a fundamental tenet of Oshima's deployment of nar-
rative mortality.
The case of the "atariyas who used their child" was not an iso-
 Oshima Nagisa 131

lated incident of traffic-accident extortion, but it was unusual, Oshima

says, because of the role of the family unit and the fact that they
traveled all over Japan. He was attracted to the story because of its
"tourist" aspect as well as the "theatricality" of the crime.52 And in-
deed, as important as the travel undertaken by the characters is the
ethnographic quality of Oshima's observation of his actors, especially
the "nonprofessional" orphan, Abe Tetsuo. Nationhood in Japan has
been historically founded on an ethnographic conception of the Japan-
ese character, a "nativism" that also informs the privileged content of
melodramatic ninjo. Narrative mortality in Boy can be read across
Japanese nativism or indigenous ethnography, particularly since this
discourse informs the specificity of Ozu's stylistics. In his essay on
Boy, Oshima even quotes from the ethnologist Yanagita Kunio: "Re-
ality is infinitely more profound than the world we have access to in
reading books or listening to stories."53
The interdisciplinary Japanese study of Japanese identity, which in
Japan is called nihonjinron, has been traced by many commentators
to Kunio's early twentieth-century ethnography. Nihonjinron is basi-
cally a decadent form of kokugaku, or the discourse of Japanese na-
tivism that began to be written in the Tokugawa period (1600-1867).
Emerging with the rise of the bourgeoisie, it was originally a radical
narrative, challenging "the entrenched domination of Chinese culture
in Japanese life," which the ruling Edo oligarchy manipulated as an in-
strument of power. According to H. D. Harootunian, Kokugaku involved
the "elimination of culture itself as a category," and the terms of be-
ing Japanese were derived from experience, work, and worship:

Nativism, in its Tokugawa incarnation, rescued daily life,

custom, and "household duties" — the alterity of an official
discourse that privileged mental over manual labor—and
converted them into the content of discursive knowledge. This
move made the center equivalent with what hitherto had been
alterity and removed the [cultural] center to the place of the
Other this new form of knowledge presupposed closing all
distances between subject and object No difference was
supposed to intervene between what humans did and made
and what they could possibly know; practice and
hermeneutics became the same thing.54
132 Oshima Nagisa

The political strategy of kokugaku effectively backfired with mod-

ernization, as cultural praxis, far from being banished, came to super-
sede political praxis in the formation of a hegemonic order of cultural
identity. Harootunian argues that when the identity of "the ordinary
and abiding people" became the privileged subject of kokugaku
(through the ethnography of Yanagita Kunio), the zen of daily life
became linked to nationhood (p. 417). The elimination of phenome-
nological difference went hand in hand with a dissolution of "histor-
ically determinate classes into the larger category of a folk unmedi-
ated by history." This effectively "identified the Subject with the
Other in order to repress otherness as the heterogeneous place of
language and desire" (p. 437). Moreover, in the context of a rapidly
industrializing and urbanizing Japan, the signified content of the ahis-
torical "folk" is inevitably absent and the discourse becomes one of
"incurable nostalgia."
The radical project of Boy is a redemption of the Japanese subject
within the language of desire. Narrative mortality operates here as a
mortification of the aesthetics of Ozu, the cinematic exemplar of ni-
honjinron. The performances and the mise-en-scenes of Ozu's nar-
ratives arguably involve a rigorous aestheticization and politicization
of daily life. They are indeed melodramas in -which the absent signi-
fied refers to an egolessness of Japanese history, the privileged content
of nihonjinron. Especially in Ozu's postwar work—family melodra-
mas of arranged marriages, generational differences, and dying patri-
archs— the perfect balance of girt and ninjo that is achieved con-
tains an attitude of melancholy toward a changing Japan.
Interiority in twentieth-century Japan has tended toward a category
of insularity and of loss, and "otherness" belongs specifically to his-
tory and "the repressed alterity of a more authentic life."55 The melo-
dramatic structure of Japanese nationalism is one in which authentic
emotions are inexpressible because they belong to the past, but also
because they belong to experience, not representation. Closure in
Ozu's narratives is always resignation to the death of desire and to
the impossibility of Japanese subjectivity after the "fall" of Meiji,56
resignation not only to Westernization and modernization, but to re-
alist representation as well.
Oshima's narrative mortality involves a recovery of the Japanese
subject from his or her nationalization, and the emphasis on experi-
 Oshima Nagisa 133

ence in the form of historical materialism may be perceived as a dia-

lectical return to kokugaku. The immediacy of documentary style in
Boy functions as a "corrective" to the fictional escape from daily life.
The narrative is anchored in "experience" through ethnographic im-
petus and journalistic authority. By leaving the boy unnamed in the
film, the distinction between actor and character breaks down. It is
Tetsuo's mortality (the boy who plays the boy) rather than the fic-
tional events he performs that the spectator is finally alerted to.57 A
similar confusion takes place in Ozu's casting of Ryu Chishu and Hara
Setsuko in similar roles throughout their careers, which is perhaps
the strongest discourse of nativist representation in his work, and in
contrast to Boy, it constitutes a mystified ethnography.
In Boy the allegorical potential of death is exploited in order to
designate, once again, another space beyond the film, beyond repre-
sentation, beyond the "historical limit of the subject." Death in this
film is at once the emblem of ideological and representational stasis,
and of otherness. The boy's transcendence in the final shots of the
film is most simply a transcendence of the conception of death as
the goal of life; in this sense it is a redemption of subjectivity. The
narrative does not stop arbitrarily "in the banal," or even in the "doc-
umentary" of the family. It stops at the point at which the boy Abe
Tetsuo becomes a subject of vision and memory, a point that is con-
ventionally located at the point of death. Again, through strategic
mixing of Japanese and Western representational styles, Oshima de-
ploys narrative mortality for a politics of the existential individual.
The film demonstrates that, within the specific cultural and histor-
ical dynamics within which Oshima was working, the disavowal of
death can become a progressive political strategy. This is in keeping
with Marcuse's politics of mortality, but it also takes place within a
politics of representation. The difference between the Real (history,
including the presence of the spectator) and the representations of
the subject gives rise to an imaginary space beyond narrative, after
the knowable end. Through the discovery that death is an excess of
the Real, a point beyond history, and his own existence, the boy is
freed from the constricting bonds of the family. Death is situated as
a sign masking a void, its repetitions leading nowhere, but its em-
blems everywhere in Oshima's Japan of the late 1960s. Radical praxis
consists in imagining that space as a history of the future.
134 Oshima Nagisa

In Oshima's films, narrative mortality is a key means by which the

nostalgia endemic to nihonjinron is transformed into a more radical
historical discourse. American styles of narrative, costume, and indi-
vidualism in Cruel Story of Youth and Boy are deployed in the Japan-
ese context not to signify a "loss" of traditional modes but to show
up the stagnation of Japanese traditionalism. Oshima's politics are no
less "nationalist," but the representation of the nation is constructed
on the ruins of nihonjinron. Narrative mortality involves a redemp-
tion of the Japanese subject in representation, on the other side of
his or her melodramatic exemption from discourse. Desire comes into
play not simply as a discourse of sexuality and individualism, but as
a Utopian thrust beyond the limits of representation, narrative, and
history. Narrative mortality may be once again described as a poli-
tics of spectatorship, as Oshima addresses a historical viewer outside
representation.
The address of the spectator, anata mo, is the culmination of an ex-
tensive splitting of representation.58 Harootunian suggests that the in-
stitutionalization of Zen aesthetics, and its collapse of representation
in bourgeois culture, nullified the radical potential of nativism:
The unification of subject and object not only reaffirmed the
centrality of culture as a privileged category of perceiving the
world, but the process annexed politics to its authority. The
ensuing arrangement made it increasingly difficult to imagine
politics as a semi-autonomous space for pursuing forms of
plural or diverse interests.59

If the "separation of a knowing subject from the object of knowl-

edge" became necessary for political activity, narrative mortality be-
comes an important wedge to pry them apart. The distinction between
addresser and addressed pertains to a division between reality and
imagination, history and subjectivity, that originates on the site of the
body. In the Japanese New Wave cinema, difference is resurrected
in forms of spectatorship, gender, and mortality for a radical politics
of otherness in the context of 1960s Japan.
The representation of death—its allegorical potential and its des-
ignation of a threshold—is exploited by Oshima as a radical alterna-
tive to the totalizing closure of Japanese "traditionalism." His inter-
textuality ensures that this is not simply a capitulation to "Western"
 Oshima Nagisa 135

representational practices, but a complex rewriting of Japanese ide-

ologemes. The interiority of nihonjinron is transformed into individ-
ual expression so that the lost secret of Tokugawa nativism (koku-
gaku)— that lived experience is itself aesthetic and political — is
recovered on the other side of its cinematic representation, beyond
narrative.
The Japanese New Wave embarked on a crucial project of allego-
rizing indigenous representational strategies, of politicizing them for
a discovery of history and difference, and defining spectatorship as a
dialectical rather than contemplative category. As Takeo Doi points out,
"For the Japanese, freedom in practice existed only in death, which
was why praise of death and incitements towards death could occur
so often."60 In Oshima's films "the desire for the freedom of Japan" is
given concrete forms of expression that necessarily engage with the
desire for death in a radical way. What is often carelessly described
as "nihilism" in the Japanese New Wave is in fact an allegorization, a
mode of writing in which the spectator is offered a place outside the
closed circuits of ritual and repetition to understand "freedom" as
historical difference, as material change, and as otherness.
In his conclusion to Eros Plus Massacre, David Desser analyzes
three films that mark the decline of the movement: The Inferno of
First Love (Hani, 1968), Eros Plus Massacre (Yoshida, 1969), and O
ma's The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970). In all three, he note
"the deaths of filmmaking protagonists is the death of cinema, the
death at least, of a politically radical cinema.... That there is nothing
to film, that the will to film leads to the death of film, is a function of
fading political aspirations."61 In 1969, Boy anticipates this demoral-
ization through its oppressive stasis and excessive containment. The
leap of imagination needed to break out of cultural homogenization,
conformism, and nationalist ideologies of sacrifice is truly heroic. Even
in Cruel Story of Youth, the recourse to allegory is produced within
framework of resignation. The Japanese subject in Oshima's films
cannot be renewed without a struggle. By the time of In the Realm
of the Senses in 1976, that struggle has been mortified. In its ruins,
sexual desire is channeled strictly into sex, producing one of the
most futile deaths in film history.
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FOUR

JEAN-LUC GODARD
Allegory of the Body

The greater the significance, the greater the subjection to death,

because death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between
physical nature and significance.—WALTER BENJAMIN1

I n a 1965 interview, when asked about all the blood in Pierrot lefou,
Godard responded, "Not blood. Red."2—indicating that for him, as
for Oshima, the representation of death is a form of writing in the cin-
ema. This treatment of death allows for a carnivalesque, ironic atti-
tude toward mortality in which the bonds of pathos are broken with
laughter. At the same time, though, in the throes of his ongoing cri-
tique of film language in the 1960s, Godard maintains an attitude of
melancholy in the face of the loss of illusionism. The representation
of death is always and inevitably allegorical in his films, oscillating
between these two contradictory impulses toward discovery and loss.
Because Le Mepris (1963) and Pierrot lefou (1965) demonstrate mos
clearly Godard's tendencies toward the melancholic and the car-
nivalesque, respectively, analyses of these two films will form the
substance of this chapter. It should be stressed, though, that the two

137
138 Jean-Luc Godard

attitudes are dialectically engaged in a singular project of threshold-

ing between the modern and the postmodern, and between resigna-
tion and expectation.
Certain real parallels exist between the projects of Godard and
Wenders, for whom, as we have seen, narrative mortality also involves
a melancholy attitude toward cinematic representation. For both direc-
tors, a pantheon of Hollywood auteurs is a crucial locus of the lost
possibilities of the cinema, possibilities remote from their own help-
lessly self-conscious engagements with representation. For Godard,
however, the representation of death belongs to a discourse of ma-
terialism, a historical project that is absent from Wenders's more sub-
jective endeavors. Narrative mortality is produced as an allegory of
consumer society grounded in the transience of the cinematic signi-
fier—that very transience which Wenders disavows.
The analysis of narrative mortality in Le Mepris and Pierrot lefo
will demonstrate the role of death and closure at a crucial moment
in film history and criticism. In the mid-1960s, as Cahiers du Cinema
was moving from auteurist cinephilia to a critique of representation,
Godard was working with Hollywood genres, but moving toward a
more politicized mode of filmmaking. Narrative mortality provided a
strategy of mortifying a classical cinematic heritage while redeeming
the Utopian character of generic romance and adventure. Narrative
mortality takes the form here of an "allegory of the body" in which
actors and actresses perform as documentary subjects, and thus as
indices of a lived, experiential history that intersects with the morti-
fying discourse of cinema. The bodies of actors—most famously Jane
Fonda, but, as we shall see, Bardot, Karina, and Belmondo as well—
animate representation and at the same time expose its limits.
Compared to his Maoist-inflected films of 1967-72, "politics" in
the early part of Godard's career is downplayed; there is, nevertheless,
a politics of representation that is closely linked to the contemporary
discourses of Marxism and existentialism. The intellectual climate in
France in the 1950s and early 1960s was one in which Marxists disillu-
sioned with Stalinism, and existentialists (such as Sartre) seeking to
reconcile phenomenology with social commitment, found themselves
on common ground. Historical materialism became a discourse of the
quotidian in Henri Lefebvre's revisionist Marxism, and at the same
 Jean-Luc Godard 139

time accommodated the priority of "existence" (over essence) in exis-

tentialist discourse. Mark Poster's succinct description of the basic
affinities between Marxism and existentialism is that "both accepted
Hegel's early attempt to define reality as unfolding in time, as an es-
sentially temporal phenomenon. Consequently, Marxism and existential-
ism posit the primacy of life over thought."3
The existentialist slogan "Existence precedes essence" finds form
in Godard's idiosyncratic conception of "life," a faith in the documen-
tary verities of image production, derived from neorealism and Ba-
zin's film aesthetics. "Life" comes to refer to the representation of his-
toricity and experience, in which psychological characterization and
"meaning" take second place. "Death" becomes the ironic authenti-
cation of this discourse of "life." Godard's improvisational method of
filmmaking flows, as Jean Collet has remarked, "from the will to ex-
press the instant." Collet's monograph on Godard, first published in
1963 (and updated in 1968), highlights the existentialist dimension of
Godard's early filmmaking, and the related role of mortality: "An in-
stant of life acquires its particular value when one is conscious
of death. For Godard, to capture life is, more precisely, to capture
death One must therefore work quickly. Filming is a pursuit. All
of Godard's work takes place under the sign of speed."4 Indeed, it is
the car accident that becomes the emblem of death in Godard's films.
Death in the early films tends to be highly stylized, never realistic
or psychological. It tends to happen quickly, violently, and inevitably,
at the end of the film. Of his scripting-while-shooting method in 1962,
after Vivre sa vie, Godard admitted, "What caused me a lot of trou
ble was the end. Should the hero die?... Finally I decided that as my
avowed ambition was to make an ordinary gangster film, I had no
business deliberately contradicting the genre: he must die."5 Deaths
at the end of the films that precede Le Mepris and Pierrot lefou tenda
to separate (at the last moment) the means of representation (discours)a
from the narrative plot (histoire). Generic conventions are thereby
foregrounded, but neither completely discarded nor respected. The
two main strategies by which this is accomplished are through styl-
ized performance and displacement onto the sound track. Susan Son-
tag describes the effect of these techniques: "There can indeed be
no internally necessary end to a Godard film, as there is to a Bresson
140 Jean-Luc Godard

film. Every film must either seem broken off abruptly or else ended
arbitrarily—often by the violent death in the last reel of one or more
of the main characters."6
In A bout de souffle, Belmondo's stylized death scene underlines
the generic necessity of his demise, which is above all a performance
for the American girlfriend. Arthur (Claude Brasseur) likewise under-
goes protracted death throes at the end of Bande a part, flailing and
stumbling far beyond the calls of genre, only to emphasize the role
of genre and narrative convention as the very cause of death. Arthur's
death is offset by the happy ending of his partners in crime, Odile
and Franz, who romantically sail off to Brazil for equally generic rea-
sons. The tragedy of Bande a part is not death, but the limited
choice of generic endings. Although Godard uses them both, the
"happy" and the "unhappy," both are empty of consolation and clo-
sure. In Vivre sa vie, despite Nana's independence and autonomy
she becomes a victim of urban crime; the world "chooses" her partly
because, despite Godard's freewheeling film praxis, stories still have
to end.
In Godard's genre revisionism, the representation of death con-
tributes to a mortification of genre and its mythic dimensions. In the
case of Le Mepris, this involves an emptying out of the symbolic as
sumptions of genre and a retention of its structure of desire. To be
told of a central character's death, but not to see it (which happens
at the end of Le Petit Soldat, Les Carabiniers, and Masculin/Feminin),
is to be cheated of that pleasure of closure that even the most tragic
narratives offer. As with the stylized deaths, Godard might be said to
have his cake (maintain his reflexive, modernist style) and eat it too
(end with death). Even before Godard introduces "red" ("not blood")
and car accidents into his films, the representation of death is instru-
mental to his deconstruction of cinematic representation and narrative.
The phenomenology of death in these films places in question its
visibility, and also its relation to subjectivity. The Godardian charac-
ter who dies spectacularly, discursively, and intertextually is a subjec-
tivity constructed purely from signifiers and refers finally to the Godar-
dian subject who "cannot return to the world," who cannot represent
a "self as a meaningful totality, because subjectivity continually evades
him in the status of the image. In Mikhail Bakhtin's remarks on death
 Jean-Luc Godard 141

in Dostoyevski (which, he says, is usually violent and, unlike Tol-

stoy, often unnaturally caused by murder and suicide), he makes the
following distinction:
Death from within, that is, one's own death consciously
perceived, does not exist for anyone: not for the dying person,
nor for others; it does not exist at all. Precisely this
consciousness for its own sake, which neither knows nor has
the ultimate word, is the object of depiction in Dostoevsky's
world. This is why death-from-within cannot enter this world;
such death is alien to its internal logic. Death in Dostoevsky's
world is always an objective fact for other consciousnesses.7

The point of view of the dying person is completely alien to Go-

dard's allegories, in which death, as a mode of writing, is a form of
communication from which the dying person is excluded.8 Death
takes on the objective form of the spectacle. This is a phenomenol-
ogy of death that recalls not Sartre so much as Maurice Merleau-
Ponty. In "The Film and the New Psychology," Merleau-Ponty says
that "the movies are peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of
mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the
other."9 The antithesis between being and consciousness that under-
scores Sartre's philosophy was bridged by Merleau-Ponty in order to
describe social reality in terms of perception. For him, subjectivity is
a conjunction of self-perception and perception of the self by others;
thus behavior, worldly existence, cannot be separated from conscious-
ness. As Poster puts it, "Merleau-Ponty held up the body as fulcrum
of being-in-the-world, facilitating a reconciliation with Marx's concept
of the 'sensuousness' of human action."10 Although Merleau-Ponty
included no critique of representation in his program for the cinema,
for Godard the problem of representation was a given, and he placed
the problem of the body as subject at the center of his work.
Thus we will find in the discussions of Le Mepris and Pierrot l
fou that the two sides of Godard's deployment of narrative mortality,
the melancholic and the carnivalesque, are linked through a discur-
sive self-consciousness that recognizes that "all is discourse," but
also that this is not a dead end for political desires. Within discourse
are desires that might be animated "on the other side," if you will, of
142 Jean-Luc Godard

the alienation produced by discursive reflexivity after the "fall" of

representation, within the historicity of the profilmic. The phenome-
nology of spectacle and photographic reproduction that radically
separates objective and subjective veracities is balanced by a narra-
tivity that struggles to reconcile them through the conventions of clo-
sure, romance, and destiny.
If Utopian truth-values are dependent on the believability of the
future, in Godard's narratives the essence of the image, its intimate
inscription of life, its verite, is in a continual process of being lost and
found. Mortification and the disjunctions of allegorical representation
are the means by which this duality is inscribed. Whereas in Pierrot
lefou it takes the form of irony, and death is the discursive sign of
thresholds and temporality, in Le Mepris allegory is limited to the ruin
of classicism. The myth of fate is painfully deconstructed in this film
only to reveal the naked fragments of the believability of cinematic
representation.

Le Mepris: The Myth of Fate

The chief intertexts of Le Mepris are Homer's Odyssey and Alberto

Moravia's // Disprezzo 04 Ghost at Noon), a novel about interpreting
The Odyssey that Godard took for the basis of his screenplay. Fritz
Lang plays himself in Le Mepris as the director of a film of The Odyss
and the narrative revolves around the attempt to make this film. Paul
Javal (Michel Piccoli) is a reluctant screenwriter, on the job only for
the money, and is vaguely analogous (less vaguely in Moravia's text)
to Ulysses. His wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot), for whom he is trying
to earn money, is likewise related to Penelope. The first half of the
film, set in interiors in Rome, deals largely with their marital troubles,
their lack of communication, and their encounter with Prokosch (Jack
Palance), the pretentious American producer of The Odyssey, wh
identifies quite explicitly with "the gods." The second half of Le Mepri
set in the vast exteriors of Capri, is an indulgence on Godard's part in
wide-screen color film, but the rift between husband and wife is deep-
ened (figure 8). Paul allows Camille to be seduced by Prokosch, and
while he sleeps they are killed in a car accident. The film ends with
Lang and Paul (and Godard, as Lang's assistant) shooting Ulysses' re-
turn to his Mediterranean homeland.11
 Jean-Luc Godard 143

Fig. 8. Le Mepris: Paul (Michel Piccoli) and Camille (Brigitte Bardot) carry on their
"boudoir drama" in the epic setting of the Mediterranean. Publicity still courtesy
of Photofest.

The car accident is rendered with a mythic and tragic resonance,

but, at the same time, it is merely discursive and allegorical. It thereby
emblematizes the film's two themes of classicism and language. Clas-
sicism is invoked through the Greek intertext, but it is also linked to
the classicism of Hollywood cinema through the role of Fritz Lang.
Language in Le Mepris is consistently cast as arbitrary, limited, an
quite distinct from the fullness of classical representation; Francesca
144 Jean-Luc Godard

(Giorgia Moll), Prokosch's interpreter, has to constantly help the other

characters negotiate the abysses between Italian, French, German, and
English. The limited primary colors of the characters' clothing and the
interior decor are likewise distinguished from the rich natural tones
of the Mediterranean landscape.
The invocation of Greek epic poetry and tragic drama reveals some
striking parallels with Walter Benjamin's diverse writing on moder-
nity and representation. Benjamin wrote The Origins of German Trag
Drama (where the theory of allegory was first broached) in Capri in
1924, and the conception of nature and history in that work is in-
debted to the Mediterranean landscape and its mythic status in Occi-
dental thought. Benjamin's theory of "auratic" experience, allegory,
and historiography is grounded not only in the early modernism of
Baudelaire's mid-nineteenth century but in the experience of the rise
of fascism in the 1930s. This is why it is important to distinguish the
promise of history from the aestheticization of politics. As the "Work
of Art" essay concludes:
Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of
contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its
self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can
experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the
first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is
rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.12

The aestheticizing potential of totalizing narrative is crucial to the

production pressures of Le Mepris, pressures that Godard himself ex
perienced from his producers, Joe Levine and Carlo Ponti.13 The spec-
tacular version of The Odyssey envisioned by Prokosch is cut off fro
history precisely by its gesture of realism, its pretentious mimeticism.
Le Mepris produces its politics within the ruins of the mortified aes-
thetic realm of Greek epic poetry, and Benjamin's ideas are key to
the reading of this allegory. In fact, I hope to show that the film illus-
trates the pertinence of those ideas to narrative mortality in the cin-
ema in a broader sense. For this reason, a short detour through some
of Benjamin's ideas is in order.
Benjamin's two theories of storytelling and allegory might be seen
to be related to the notion of myth (although it would be a mistake
to assume a totalizing coherence to Benjamin's thought, which evolved
 Jean-Luc Godard 145

over two decades). Just as storytelling is defined by Benjamin in op-

position to the novel, allegory is defined in opposition to the sym-
bol. The "fatedness" of the novel, as well as the unified totality of the
symbol, are mythic entities that are no longer viable in modernity.
Corrupted by capitalism, they possess an "aura" that is still desirable
for its relationship to belief and collectivity. Story and allegory acquire
their historiographic significance by pointing to that which is lost. Like-
wise in the cinema; although mechanical reproduction has eclipsed
"aura" (itself a myth),14 the illusion of reality contains a hint of lost
aura: "the sight of immediate reality has become the 'blue flower' in
the land of technology."15 Death figures in Benjamin's thought as the
sign of historical difference—the sign in narrative of the eclipse of
closed circuits of repetition, myth, ritual, and fate—but at the same
time holds within it the possibility of a recovery of the mythic.
Allegory breaks apart mythic structures by virtue of its different
temporal form, which is "progression in a series of moments,"16 as
opposed to the mythic eternal recurrence of the same. The mythic
characteristic of eternal recurrence is, for Benjamin, "an attempt to
link two antinomic principles of happiness with each other: namely
that of eternity and that of the yet once again."17 The breaking apart
of myth is therefore a question of realizing the threshold between
repetition and discovery, a threshold crystallized in death as a singu-
lar event that is nevertheless inevitable. In the Greek epic, he identi-
fies a privileged site of divergence between myth and tragedy: "the
tragic hero enters upon the threshold of a new time," in which the
laws of destiny and fate are not so much transcended as rendered
visible.18 If this evokes Godard's narrativity, Benjamin also stresses
the role of the body in this process: "It is the achievement of his physis
alone, not of language, if he [the tragic hero] is able to hold fast to
his cause, and he must therefore do so in death."19
The distinction between story and novel, moreover, extends to a
theory of memory, which is best expressed in the following brief dis-
cussion of The Odyssey.
The perpetuating remembrance of the novelist [is] contrasted
with the short-lived reminiscences of the storyteller. The first is
dedicated to one hero, one odyssey, one battle; the second, to
many diffuse occurrences. It is, in other words, remembrance
which, as the Muse-derived element of the novel, is added to
146 Jean-Luc Godard

reminiscence, the corresponding element of the story, the

unity of their origin having disappeared with the decline of
the epic.20

These two kinds of memory are further defined by way of Proust:

remembrance is "voluntary"—infused with consciousness, or inten-
tional— and reminiscence is "involuntary"—stimulated by images
and correspondences that embody experience (Erfahrung). "Only
what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has
not happened to the subject as an experience, can become a com-
ponent of the memoire involontaire.'m Where the former (memoire
volontaire) is "mythic" and therefore inert, the latter has access to
"aura." In Benjamin's Arcades project, he derives an "accidental" the-
ory of historical materialism from this contingent notion of memory,
a sense of inevitability that is different in kind from the immanency
of teleology and destiny: "this project—as in the method of smash-
ing an atom—releases the enormous energy of history that lies bound
in the 'once upon a time' of classical historical narrative."22
The link between Proust's memoire involontaire (the taste of a
madeleine that takes one back to a corresponding point in history)
and the shock of montage that provides film with its revolutionary
potential is the idea of "the dialectical image." Waking as the telos of
dream, the moment wrenched from the continuum, and the Utopian
vision articulated as memory are all thresholds on repetition and dis-
covery, and are likewise analogues of death as the sign of both in-
evitability and difference. As Winfried Menninghaus puts it,
Benjamin's theory of myth seeks a blasting apart of myth but
at the same time does not want to relinquish the whole
potential of its forms of experience. These forms include, even
more than language, the image, and that is why the theory of
dialectical images, too, bears witness to the field of tension in
Benjamin's reflections on myth. The dialectical image, on the
one hand, tends to break up the mythical power of images ...
and, on the other hand, it implies that the genuine form of
knowledge itself is, at least in part, based on images and
thereby on myth.23

Benjamin's notion of "aura" is intimately connected with his mimetic

theory of language.24 The experience of modernity involves, for Ben-
 Jean-Luc Godard 147

jamin, a fall of signification from an identification between word and

thing, a "non-sensuous correspondence" or an indexical relation-
ship, to a pervasive splitting of signifier from signified:
The direction of this change seems definable as the
increasing decay of the mimetic faculty. For clearly the
observable world of modern man contains only minimal
residues of the magical correspondences and analogies that
were familiar to ancient peoples. The question is whether
we are concerned with the decay of this faculty or with its
transformation.25

The "blue flower" of the cinematic illusion is thus, for Benjamin, an

example of the transformation of the ancient identification of lan-
guage and reality, available in modernity only as "second nature," or
allegory. Miriam Hansen has described Benjamin as being "less inter-
ested in a critique of ideology than in redeeming the reified images
of mass culture and modernity for a theory and politics of experi-
ence."26 The same might be said of Godard's early films, with their
emphasis on spontaneity, location shooting, and intertextuality within
the context of generic narrative forms. Both Benjamin and Godard
derive from Brecht a critique of catharsis; they are also both concerned
with representing an experience of modernity, a conception of "life"
in historical-materialist terms.
Le Mepris articulates a fall of the cinema from myth to allegory, from
image to language, from the unquestioned mimeticism of Hollywood
and neorealism to the discursive self-consciousness of the French
New Wave. In the light of Godard's cinephiliac film criticism of the
late 1950s, Le Mepris can be read as a treatise on the disappointing
discovery that illusionism is such an elaborate deception. The aura of
Hollywood is alluded to as a mimetic naivete that is ostensibly out-
side the limits of genre, commodification, and ideology: a certain be-
lief in representation that the self-conscious, "modern" filmmaker is
alienated from. Godard can only refer to it allegorically.
Narrative mortality emerges as an allegorical means of glimpsing
an immediacy of representation within the ruins of classicism. At stake
for Godard is not simply the forms of representation, but a mimetic
simplicity prior to film language. On one hand, this involves the
Marxist-existentialist nexus of "life" and contingency, a discourse that
148 Jean-Luc Godard

is perhaps more relevant to Pierrot lefou. On the other, it involves the

Utopian promise of genre, the unquestioned teleology of genre film-
making toward romantic transparency, fulfillment, and transcendence.
Voyage in Italy (1953), the film that Paul sees "foLe Mepris articulates a fall of the cinema from myth to allegory, fromr inspiration
Mepris, is also set partly in Capri and engages fairly directly with an
cient history. The moment in Voyage in Italy when the plaster cast
of the couple buried under the ruins of Pompeii (a man and a woman
who "found death together") are uncovered is perhaps an example
of a dialectical image in which history is suddenly crystallized. In the
context of Rossellini's narrative, the redemptive potential of the image
is channeled into the romantic reconciliation of the couple (Ingrid
Bergman and George Sanders). As an intertext of Le Mepris, it points
at once to the role of genre in the truth-value of the cinema and to
the intrinsic relationship between historiography, as an ability to relate
experientially with the past, and communication. Neither is possible
for Godard's characters, and so accidental death replaces Rossellini's
miraculous recovery of love.
In Le Mepris itself, two myths are mortified—destroyed under th
auspices of melancholy. The first is that of marriage and its concomi-
tant objectification and fetishization of female sexuality; this is the
discourse of Bardot. The second is that of Fritz Lang and the myth of
the auteur. Crucial to Benjamin's theory of myth is the distinction be-
tween the content of myth and the function or status of myth itself,
and it would be hard to claim any redemptive potential in the resur-
rection of either of these myths of patriarchy or authorship. They are
both "emptied out" in the fatal car accident, with the hope of recov-
ering the mythic status of the image in the final shot of the film, a pan
out to sea. By analyzing the two symbols of Bardot and Lang as they
function as mythic discourses in Le Mepris, a third myth that inform
the film will emerge: that of narrative closure attained through recon-
ciliation (love) and fate. It is this that is finally mortified in the tragic
car accident of the ill-fated couple.
Godard appreciates Bardot as a tabula rasa: "She is all of a piece
and must be taken as such." Comparing her to Anna Karina, he says,
"With Anna I could have shown that the character believes some-
thing other than what we actually see. With Bardot, that wasn't pos-
sible. She has another truth to her."27 In Godard's earliest films there
 Jean-Luc Godard 149

is a consistent, if ironic, attempt to "get inside" the actor or actress,

especially Karina, to reach the soul through the image,28 while his sub-
sequent highly critical analyses of Jane Fonda in Tout va bien and
Letter to Jane (both 1972) recognize the very coded nature of film
performance.29 Bardot in Le Mepris remains precariously balanced
between these two conceptions of female performance. Despite the
equation of vision and love in the opening scene ("I see all of you,
therefore I love all of you" are the film's opening words), the charac-
ter, Camille, cannot be penetrated to reveal any essence of Bardot.
She dissolves only into "fashion model" or "movie star." The real
Bardot is inaccessible precisely because, like Jane Fonda (the two were
both promoted as sex kittens by Roger Vadim), she has already been
taken up into culture; she is already "written" and therefore cut off
from experience.
The famous opening scope-size shot of Bardot's naked body may
parody the producers' demand that Godard include Bardot nude, but
the scene becomes, retrospectively, the locus of a full or complete
ideal of representation. The subsequent breakdown in communica-
tion is already ironically alluded to by the mediating use of colored
filters. This breakdown is itself conveyed as an inability to "possess,"
or to "know," Bardot (on either Paul's part or Godard's). A series of
images is inserted into the film that censors Camille and Paul making
love on the sofa. These images separate the image of Bardot's body
from the narrative role it ostensibly fills. The images making up this
sequence are both diegetic and nondiegetic, and are from no coherent
spatial or ideological point of view. Compared to the opening shot
of Bardot, the nude and fashion images register a loss of "aura," while
the other shots — outtakes, flash-forwards, and flashbacks — are of
the order of a memoire involontaire (and not a "dossier of the film
itself in stills"). Bardot's look directed at the camera, which silently ac-
companies her voice-over, echoes Benjamin's observation that eyes
that have "lost their ability to look"30 are an allegory, or loss, of
"aura." This gaze is reduplicated in the painted eyes of the statues of
gods in Lang's film of The Odyssey. "To perceive the aura of an ob
ject we look at," says Benjamin, "means to invest it with the ability
to look at us in return." And yet, "Baudelaire describes eyes of which
one is inclined to say that they have lost their ability to look."31
150 Jean-Luc Godard

The female body is, for Baudelaire as for Godard, the object of
the melancholy gaze (which of course belongs to the poet, critic, or
filmmaker) and the locus of the blank stare. Miriam Hansen notes
that Benjamin's conception of experience and memory "hovers over
and around the body of the mother," fetishizing the uncanny idea of
"home" as the imaginary memory of the womb.32 Baudelaire's women,
who fail to return the poet's look, are, for Benjamin, analogous to the
photograph and the cinematic apparatus itself, in which the distance
between spectator and screen is also a temporal, historical distance
between the profilmic past and the viewer's present:

In so far as art aims at the beautiful and, on however modest a

scale, 'reproduces it', it conjures it up (as Faust does Helen)
out of the womb of time. This no longer happens in the case
of technical reproduction What was felt to be inhuman,
one might even say deadly, in daguerreotypy was the
(prolonged) looking into the camera, since the camera records
our likeness without returning our gaze.33

Bardot's unseeing eyes overdetermine her commodification and short-

circuit any claims to beauty or truthfulness that either Paul or Go-
dard might want to make via her body.
The outtakes, flash-forwards, and flashbacks of Bardot, on the other
hand, break up the fixity of narrative, the mythic time of desire, and
point to a more radical role of the image. They provide a passage
through time, dialectically relating past, present, and future instants,
not through the subjectivity of flashback, but through the allegorical
gaze that wrenches discours from histoire. Bardot in these shots be-
comes Bardot acting as Camille, isolated at several of the instants of
the shooting of Le Mepris, a time outside the historicism of narrative
She may be no less fetishized, but she is briefly freed from the struc-
tures of classical narrative film that have been designed to contain
the threat of the feminine.34
If Baudelaire, according to Benjamin, saw a detachment of sexus
from eros in the unseeing eyes of his would-be lovers, Godard sees the
promise of romance eclipsed by pornography and the fetishization
of femininity. At one point in Le Mepris Paul notes that naked women
only appear in the movies. Paul can no more possess Camille than
 Jean-Luc Godard 151

the spectator can the image, but what should be emphasized here is
not Godard's particular brand of feminism,35 but the allegorical stance
toward femininity and its consequences for closure. Temporality and
historicity become functions of "distance" in the look at the woman,
who remains only a token of desire under the melancholy gaze of
allegory; and it is a distance that cannot be closed in narrative.
A similar deflation of scopophilic pleasure was noted in the discus-
sion of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Godard's melancholia is more
self-conscious, taking into account the commodity fetish that Bardot
represents 'within a star system that precedes Godard's use of her.
Lang's more formalist inscription of gender within the apparatus of
the cinematic gaze is more rhetorical than ironic. Neither Godard nor
Lang is concerned with challenging or deconstructing the objectifica-
tion of women in film narrative. For each, narrative mortality is a
means of redoubling misogyny. The feminine serves as a symbol of
romantic, Utopian desires ("a cinema in accordance with our desires,"
as Godard quotes Bazin at the opening of LeMepris), but a symbol tha
has "fallen" in cinematic representation to the sign of that possibility.
Neither offers a critique of the representation of women, although their
melancholia may open a space for such a reading.
Godard does extend his mortification of voyeuristic scopophilia
one step further than Lang (and several steps further than Wenders,
in retrospect) in linking the desire to possess with the desire to rep-
resent, and situating his own narrative discourse at one remove from
the realization of these desires. It is only insofar as this is a historical
difference that Godard's narrative mortality can be conceived as a
radical praxis. The desire to possess women through representation
is mortified with the necessity of historical decay. The mediated gaze
of exploitation is still present in the film, but it is a commodified gaze,
aligned with the dead classicism of the film's imagery. In its ruins
one can glimpse the "shock of the new" in the brief outtakes of Bar-
dot in that "other time" of the shooting of the film. The character of
the "other woman" Francesca/Giorgia Moll, who may be said to evade
commodification through her knowledge of language and through
Godard's more oblique treatment of her, is also associated with the
historical specificity of the production of the film in the opening shots
of her with cameraman Raoul Coutard.
152 Jean-Luc Godard

The redoubling of discourse attached to the representation of Bar-

dot also applies to the figure of Fritz Lang in Le Mepris. He repre-
sents both the full symbolic possibilities of classical Hollywood cinema
and the allegorical, written modernism of his Weimar heritage. He
combines, for Godard, the mythic qualities of narrative film, ground-
ing them in a history that goes beyond Hollywood, and a vision of
their ideological limitations and Utopian possibilities. If Benjamin's the-
ory of allegory was developed in the 1920s with Weimar Expression-
ism in mind, then Lang's modernism—the formalism of his mise-en-
scene—might be regarded as itself allegorical, with respect to German
Romanticism. The "exaggeration" of the arts of this period was, for
Benjamin, an "expression of desire for a new pathos."36
The duality of mythic classicism and allegory in Le Mepris is a for-
mal distinction implicit in the narrative structure. It is perhaps more
evident in the source novel's distinction between two interpretations
of The Odyssey. The two theories, in Godard's adaptation, corre-
spond visually to the two parts of the film: the Roman interiors and
the Mediterranean exteriors.37 The former corresponds to the "boudoir
drama," which is one interpretation of The Odyssey put forward in
Moravia's // Disprezzo. This is countered by the classical interpreta-
tion, that the events in the Homeric epic are to be taken at face
value. The "modern" theory that Ulysses left Penelope alone for so
long in order to test her faithfulness with potential suitors offers a
plausible parallel between Ulysses and Paul, whose delayed arrival
at Prokosch's villa allows Camille to spend time alone with Prokosch.
Paul's story that his taxi had an accident is unconfirmed, thus intro-
ducing the possibility of deception and also a revisionist psychologi-
cal interpretation of The Odyssey, one in which "secret second mean-
ings" are ferreted out from the "uniform illumination" and "fully
externalized description" of the Homeric poems, in which "nothing
is hidden."38
These two interpretations of The Odyssey are in fact related to
Benjamin's distinction between the novel and the storyteller's tale.
Insofar as it is grounded in the experience of the storyteller and has
an indexical relation to history, the auratic element of the story in-
volves the adequacy of language to account for reality, and therefore
corresponds to the Homeric discourse in Le Mepris. The novel, on
 Jean-Luc Godard 153

the other hand, separates meaning from life and becomes a "struggl
against time."39 Benjamin is indebted to Lukacs's Theory of the Novel
for this distinction, which, for Lukacs also, is originally located in the
Greek epic as it is transformed into tragedy. "This indestructible bond
with reality as it is, the crucial difference between the epic and the
drama, is a necessary consequence of the object of the epic being
life itself."40 "The 'meaning of life,' the center about which the novel
[derived from the drama of tragedy] moves," not only insists on a rad-
ical separation of inward subjectivity and historical experience, but
situates their desired unity as the telos of narrative.
Narrative mortality in Le Mepris invokes both narrative modes,
which are distinguished stylistically as well as structurally. Fritz Lang
is both the "director of destiny and fate" and the classical auteur. Bel-
lour says that Godard's treatment of Lang in Le Mepris is "two-faced,"
pointing to the idealism that Lang espouses but cannot realize.41
Lang's film, or all we see of Lang's film in Le Mepris, consists of low-
angle shots of classical sculptures with painted eyes and scenes en-
acted by overly madeup actors in quasi-Greek dress. They perform
speechlessly in front of blank walls and expansive Mediterranean land-
scapes. The epic that Lang wants to make is not the mythic spectacu-
lar that Prokosch envisions, but an allegorical production that is highly
reminiscent of Trauerspiel. One sequence screened in Prokosch's stu-
dio suggests that Ulysses kills one of Penelope's suitors. There is a
ritualistic aspect to Lang's faithfulness to Homer's original, a "cult
value" that is reinforced by the insertion of the shots of gods into the
narrative of Paul and Camille, marking critical moments in their rela-
tionship (e.g., the ill-fated ellipsis between the studio and the Roman
villa in which Paul says he had a taxi accident).
Of the baroque dramatists, Benjamin remarks that without allegor-
ical interpretation "in an unsuitable, indeed, hostile environment ...
the world of the ancient gods would have had to die out, and it is
precisely allegory that preserved it."42 The redemption of The Odyssey
and its Greek deities occurs with great difficulty in Le Mepris, despite
the allegorical structure of the two interpretations. As the agent of
the rescue, Lang is severely limited by the hostile environment of
Prokosch's crude commercialism. More than the conventional auteurist
mythos of Hollywood tension between auteur and industry is at stake
154 Jean-Luc Godard

here, however, given Lang's particular preoccupation with the theme

of destiny, which is referred to repeatedly in the film—by Lang him-
self and by quotations from Cahiers critics on Lang's oeuvre.43
The redemptive strategy at work in Le Mepris involves a transposi
tion of the idea of "the gods," the power over reality, the myth of
destiny, to that of the filmmaking auteur. It is a strategy doomed to fail,
because the difference between divine omniscience and filmmaking
is precisely the difference of representation. Over a shot of a huge
camera with eyelike lights protruding from it, an offscreen voice an-
nounces "the Cyclops scene." Godard makes the parallel explicit: "I
filmed a spiritual odyssey: the eye of the camera watching these char-
acters in search of Homer replaces that of the gods watching over
Ulysses and his companions."44
Lang provides the fulcrum for the parallel between omniscience and
authorship. Godard's casting of Lang is a principal means by which
he alludes to the lost ideal of the classical cinema. In 1962 he wrote:
"I would like to compose shots that are magnificent in themselves
like Fritz Lang, but I can't."45 Some of Godard's shots of architecture
in Le Mepris (the Javals' apartment building, Prokosch's Roman an
Mediterranean villas) echo the monumentality of Lang's Die Niebelun
gen,46 and yet the style is also visually parodied in the kitsch shots of
Lang's gods, which are always accompanied by the melancholic sound
track. Early in the film, Prokosch asks Paul what interests him about
The Odyssey. Although Paul answers, "to go back to the traditions o
Griffith and Chaplin. Back to the time of the old United Artists," equat-
ing myths of authorship, origins, and classicism, neither he nor Lang
is able to realize this desire.
The camera, in Le Mepris, retaLe Mepris are "survivors of the shipwreck of modernity,"47 they sur-ins the omniscience and determin-
ism of divine destiny, but struggles to acquire the mythic potential of
such a schema. Godard is not Lang, lacking his faith in the image, but
neither is he Benjamin, whose philosophy of history is profoundly
messianic. The future that is to be found in the past is one informed
by faith, which is, above all, a faith in language. If the characters in
Le Mepris are "survivors of the shipwreck of modernity,"47 they sur-
vive only as representation.
The camera is responsible, according to Benjamin, for the perva-
siveness of the memoire volontaire in modernity. The camera, a
"deadly" device that fails to return the gaze, "gave the moment a
 Jean-Luc Godard 155

posthumous shock."48 The melancholy tone of Le Mepris is perhaps

directed ultimately toward this "already written" or mediated inter-
face implicit in photographic reproduction. In the final car accident,
the discourses of Bardot and Lang are crystallized in the emblem of
death. Narrative desire and fatalism are jointly mortified in an image
that finally abandons "realism" altogether for an allegorical rendering
of tragic fate.
The accident scene begins when Paul wakes up, leaning against a
rock. In a cut from long shot to medium shot, an ellipsis in which he
has slept (and during which Camille has been apparently more active
than we have seen her in the entire film) has passed. As he awakes,
finds the note she has left for him, and reads it, Camille says in voice-
over, "Dear Paul, I took the bullets out of your revolver. Since you
don't want to leave, I'm going myself. Jeremy Prokosch is driving to
Rome, so I'm leaving with him. I'm going to live in a hotel alone. Je
t'embrasse ... adieu ... Camille." A brief scene with Camille and
Prokosch in a gas station follows, and a close-up of the handwritten
words "Je t'embrasse" is inserted before they pull out onto the high-
way. Another close-up of Camille's "adieu" accompanies the sounds
of honking and metallic crashing. The lateral pan over the handwriting
continues with a cut to a stainless-steel tanker truck until the crum-
pled red Alfa Romeo is center-screen. The shot then closes in on Cam-
ille's body draped over one side of the car, with Prokosch's to screen
left.
Georges Delerue's background score comes into its own in this
scene. Throughout the pan over the smashed vehicles and the fixed
thirteen-second shot of the bodies dotted with blood, it rises and
groans. In the mise-en-scene, the redness of the Alfa Romeo, a redness
that has also been prominent in the Javal apartment's furniture and
towels, is extended to the blood splashed over the windshield, Pro-
kosch's sweater, a blinking light, and a trickle down Camille's exposed
white neck. Instead of the violent action of the crash, Godard offers
a tableau of its aftermath.
Far from an aestheticization of death, the stylization of the car ac-
cident points to the absence of death. The profilmic is still limited to
Brigitte Bardot, actress: we have seen that white neck before. Com-
pared to the speed and light of Lang's car accident in Beyond a Rea-
sonable Doubt in which there is no body, compared to the accident
156 Jean-Luc Godard

that Belmondo/Michel carelessly witnesses in A bout de souffle, the

representation of this accident involves what Benjamin says was, in
the seventeenth century, "a contemplation of bones." Godard describes
the characters in Le Mepris as "cut off," "shipwrecked," but in fact
this sense of alienation extends beyond the characters to the under-
mining of the mimetic capacity of the film itself to penetrate exis-
tence to essence. The car may be ruined, but Bardot is only acting.
Bardot and Palance were not required to act but simply to "be in"
the narrative of Le Mepris,,49 As corpses, their status as mere signs
characters is made explicit.
The car accident also subverts what we might call the novelistic
version of Le Mepris—the mythic narrative in which Paul would kill
Prokosch, and thereby mimic The Odyssey and the scene we have al-
ready seen of Ulysses killing Penelope's suitor. The earlier apartment
scene ends with Paul taking a revolver out of its hiding place. Camille's
and Prokosch's accidental deaths thus explicitly replace Paul's hypo-
thetical action. The narrative would have then been, indeed, one of
the individual struggling against his circumstances. Paul's character,
whether it is marked by modern neurosis or classical hubris, would
have taken on a truly tragic aspect. Epic remembrance would have
closed the representational gap between Paul and the mythic Ulysses.
Instead, the narrative of Le Mepris exerts an unrelenting control
over the trajectories of these characters, culminating in the arbitrari-
ness of the final accident. The thematic of contingency is, however,
undermined by the intentionality of the cinematic process. In narra-
tive cinema, the profilmic can never be contingent (of the status of
Benjamin's "reminiscence") because of the photographic basis of the
medium. Godard cannot "in good faith" represent a car accident in a
present tense: if it is in a film, it has always already happened. The
representation of accidental violence becomes, in a sense, an ontolog-
ical obscenity. The accident scene equates written and cinematic lan-
guage and situates the film, finally, in the camp of the allegorist, for
whom myth is inevitably second nature, accessible only at one re-
move, a story for the teller of tales. The dissolution of the filmmak-
er's vision as an autonomous and viable category is at once a loss
of truth and a loss of the possibility of mythic narrative in the cinema,
and so the dissolution of matrimonial bliss is accompanied, in Le
 Jean-Luc Godard 157

Mepris, by a dissolution of the mimetic capacity of film language. Th

mortification process is completed with the final gesture of the film,
the pan out to sea.
In the emptiness of the last shot the mythic qualities of aura and
experience are nevertheless realized outside the second nature of the
spectacle. With Ulysses' presence in the frame, a performance of hero-
ism, history is a "petrified landscape" holding no possibility of renewal.
Ulysses returns home as he has returned home since the dawn of
Western culture, but the camera pans past him to the Mediterranean
horizon. Precisely in its placement at the end of the narrative, after
the scenes of death and return, the shot articulates the hope for tran-
scendence and discovery of eternity in the image. It is an empty frame,
though, suggesting the limitations of nature and history beyond their
subjection to death. Narrative, too, decays, and in the process its im-
ages, like the ruins of the profilmic, are robbed of their "accordance
with our desires." The shininess of the glittering ocean at the end of
Le Mepris, like the shine of the commodity, may return our gaze
unlike the actors—but its "freedom from equipment" is only a ges-
ture, and it too is a mechanically reproduced image: an image of end-
less space and time and the "eternally the same." The film thus ends
on the threshold that Benjamin envisioned, bringing together in one
dialectical image the new and the dead: "It is the appearance of the
new [that] is reflected like one mirror in another in the appearance
of the 'always-the-same.'"30 If the shocklike segments of empty time
in Baudelaire's poetry constitute a challenge to the historiography of
progress, a similar sense of being stranded in an infinitely open his-
tory completes Le Mepris.
It is crucial that Godard's allegory of classicism does not succumb
to nostalgia, but evokes a passion for the unknown and the new.
"For people as they are today [19391," says Benjamin, "there is only
one radical novelty—and that is always the same: Death ... To one
filled with spleen, it is the entombed person who is the transcenden-
tal subject of history."51 A historical threshold is finally realized in the
fully ambiguous closing shots of Le Mepris. Through the allegorica
structure of narrative mortality, the auratic ideals informing both the
telos of destiny and the mythos of femininity are split from the dis-
courses informed by them and rendered dead. Beyond the melancholy
158 Jean-Luc Godard

of this film is the craziness of Pierrot lefou, which takes the mod-
ernist ressentiment or binarist conception of history (the romantic past
versus the "new" present) into the more apocalyptic, crisis-oriented
aesthetic of the postmodern.

Pierrotle fou: Carnival of Closure

Pierrot lefou can be plotted on two crucial grids of Andreas Huyssen'
map of the postmodern. On one hand, it demonstrates the temporal
imagination of the "historical" avant-garde that resurfaced with the
1960s exhaustion of modernism. And it also indulges in that sense of
loss which characterizes the poststructuralist recognition of "mod-
ernism's limitations and failed political ambitions."52 It is a film, viewed
from a twenty-five-year distance, in which discursive heterogeneity
becomes a historical and cultural threshold of postmodernity.
This threshold, as it is manifest in Pierrot lefou, allows us to trace
the movement beyond modernism in film history. Narrative mortality
provides a means of analyzing this transition in terms of a transfor-
mation from an existential anxiety (in which death figures as a sub-
jective quest for meaning and identity) to a cultural anxiety (in which
death figures as the voiding of universal humanism). This is a film that
emerged, in 1965, out of Bazin's anxieties of realism and the Cahiertf
Hollywood cinephilia, and began to transform that theory and criti-
cism into a radical cultural politics.
Ferdinand's (Jean-Paul Belmondo) final gesture in the film's last
scene is to paint his face blue, wrap his head with yellow and red
dynamite, and blow himself up. In his adventures with Marianne
(Anna Karina), bloody corpses are discovered littering apartments and
landscape, and as the pathos conventionally associated with images of
death is consistently subverted, so also is its narrative function of bind-
ing and totalizing. The adventures of Marianne and Ferdinand are built
upon an archaeology of modern art and literature, with visual and ver-
bal quotations from a gamut of sources, including Joyce, Baudelaire,
Celine, Picasso, Faulkner, and especially Rimbaud. At the same time,
there are multiple allusions to Hollywood gangster and noir films, as
well as the ostensible source novel, Lionel White's Obsession^
The interpenetration of intertexts from both "high" and "low"
 Jean-Luc Godard 159

sources points to the intrinsically carnivalized nature of the film. For

Bakhtin, "carnival" refers not simply to the authorized transgression
that such festivals are devoted to, the "turning upside down" of social
norms of decency and respectability, an incursion of the margins and
underclasses into the cultural center, but above all, "a sense of the
world." As such, it can be identified outside the designated perfor-
mances of community from which carnival originates; Bakhtin discov-
ers it, for example, in Dostoyevski.
An important aspect of carnival is a conception of death as re-
newal, which involves, for Bakhtin, both reversal (ambivalence, nega-
tion, etc.) and corporeality (scatology and the "bodily lower stratum").
The body in carnival becomes a source of laughter. "Ritual laughter
was a reaction to crises in the life of the sun (solstices), crises in the
life of a deity, in the life of the world and of man (funeral laughter).
In it, ridicule was fused with rejoicing."54 The specific form of "laugh-
ing at death" that Bakhtin finds in Rabelais derives from Menippean
satire, a genre dating back to ancient Greece and canonized in the car-
nivalized dialogues with the dead of Lucian (ca. A.D. 120-80).55 Bakhtin
lists fourteen characteristics of Menippean satire,56 which are all strik-
ingly apparent in Pierrot lefou.
These include comedy, a "freedom from plot," a "slum naturalism,"
a depiction of an underworld (a mixture in this case of Rimbaud's
"Une Saison en Enfer" and the gangster genre), an experimental fantas-
ticality ("musical" digressions), insanity, madness and doubleness (i.e.,
Ferdinand/Pierrot's double name), violations of etiquette (directed here
at bourgeois society), juxtapositions of disunited things, references
to Utopia, and generic multiplicity. The Bakhtinian Menippean narra-
tive is about "the adventure of an idea or truth in the world"; it is a
genre of "ultimate questions" that articulates a new relationship to
the contemporary world and the material of representation. This is
precisely the project of Pierrot lefou, although the film also has a
sense of impending crisis that is lacking in Bakhtin's description.
The Menippean character of Pierrot lefou is an extensive play with
cultural and textual conventions that has the effect of situating Ferdi-
nand's anxiety of identity (a typically modernist subjectivity) as a symp-
tom of, rather than a response to, cultural pluralism. The Menippean
crisis of representation is specifically linked, as Bakhtin suggests, to
160 Jean-Luc Godard

a destabilized notion of heroism and selfhood. The Menippean apoc-

alypticism that is finally delineated in Pierrot lefou's carnival of closure
is achieved through a radical treatment not only of modernism, but
also of the ongoing war in Vietnam, of gender, and of the romance
genre.
On one level, these references to Vietnam inscribe a "refusal to for-
get" political reality into the film, a refusal to divorce fiction from lived
experience, particularly lived oppression. But within the Menippean
context of Pierrot lefou, the inscription of Vietnam is parodic. In the
case of Karina's performance of a chattering Asian peasant, it is ex-
ploitative, perhaps even surrealistically transgressive. The references
to the Vietnam War stress its distance and its exoticism, but the at-
tempts at representation can only fail to actually locate it. The marines
in the movie theater disappear into a tropical jungle; Marianne com-
ments on the daily body count on the radio: "We know nothing.
They just say 115 dead. It's like photographs. They've always fasci-
nated me."
The representation of death and the references to the war are in-
strumental to the film's quest for "poetry," a "metaphysical material-
ism" that conjoins representation and desire.57 The poetry of Pierrot
lefou is to be found beyond pathos and the myths of harmonious
mimeticism and romance, and must be dialectically wrenched from
the continuum of images and history. Marie-Claire Ropars Wuilleu-
mier has written eloquently about the tension in Pierrot lefou be-
tween the movement of narrative progression and the search for a
poetic means of expressing "totality" and "essence" in an instant.58
Given the intimate relationship between narrative and historical tem-
porality, the poetic ideal "represents the impossible image of [a] stop-
page of time, of [a] projection into a world that escapes, once and
for all, from history."59 Moreover, the film ends, after Ferdinand's sui-
cide, with Marianne's and Ferdinand's voices whispering Rimbaud's
poem "L'Eternite" over the closing shot of sea and sky:
Elle est retrouvee!
Quoi?—L'Eternite.
C'est la mer allee
Avec le soleil.
 Jean-Luc Godard 161

Georges Bataille has best explained the resonance of this particu-

lar poem, which he also quotes in L'Erotisme.
Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism—to
the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to
eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity.
Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.60

The violence of the poem consists in its dissolution of difference, a

violation taken up in the very perversity of Marianne and Ferdinand's
meeting in the afterlife. The juxtaposition of Ferdinand's spectacu-
larly meaningless suicide with the romantic quotation of the Rimbaud
poem is perhaps the most succinct example of the dialectical edge of
narrative mortality.
The apocalyptic dimension of Ferdinand's death (which echoes the
fireworks over Paris that occur after he has turned a cocktail party
topsy-turvy) recalls Benjamin's advocacy of a "blasting out of the his-
torical continuum." This is the secret promise of dialectical images
and the passage through time of the memoire involontaire. If histor-
ical hope is grounded in the image of the past, rather than the tele-
ology of progress, "the utilization of dream elements upon waking is
the canon of dialectics."61 The narrative of Pierrot lefou proceeds by
way of montage, interruption, and episodes, and so the final death
cannot be read back into any logic of causality; myths of fate and
destiny abound in Pierrot lefou as stories told mainly by Marianne,
from which Ferdinand stands aloof. For Benjamin, "modernism must
be under the sign of suicide." The modernist suicide is "not a resig-
nation but a heroic passion. It is the achievement of modernism in
the realm of the passions."62 The carnival that Ferdinand, the flaneur,
makes of his death at the end of Pierrot lefou is precisely the image
of such a passion, but its excess is also the terms of its irony, and
Ferdinand's heroism is likewise displaced by Marianne's dream of
closure: the whispered Rimbaud poem.
The void opened up at the end of the film follows the total de-
struction of Ferdinand's body, a sight withheld from the viewer but
nevertheless shocking to the imagination. If, for Benjamin, "the only
good body is a dead body," for Bakhtin "carnival involves above
all a pluralizing and cathecting of the body ... a vulgar, shameless
162 Jean-Luc Godard

materialism of the body."63 For both writers, the body enters into
language, becomes a discursive element of cultural signifying prac-
tices, when it is most radically divorced from categories of subjectiv-
ity: the corpse for Benjamin, the "bodily lower stratum" for Bakhtin.
Only in the work of the surrealists, according to Benjamin, do "body
and image so interpenetrate that all the bodily innervations of the
collective become revolutionary discharge."64
Surrealism, "the death of the last century through comedy,"65 like
carnival, desacralizes the body and brings it down to earth. Likewise,
in Pierrot lefou, the numerous bodies dripping with red paint, includ-
ing Marianne's own, prevent the "sphere of images" that the film is
in search of from spiraling off into idealism. If "for Benjamin and
Bakhtin, images are material, and matter—the body above all—imag-
istically constructed,"66 for Godard the materiality of images consists
in their documentary and "nonillusionist" qualities. The absurd rep-
resentation of violent death is instrumental, in this respect, in main-
taining a duality of performance; it is always the body of an actor,
not a character, that is found slathered in blood.
Narrative mortality involves more than imagery, style, and philos-
ophy; it also pertains to the narrative deployment of death. Narrative
in Pierrot lefou evolves as a dialectic between the stasis of poetic
imagery and the movement of adventure and desire, a dialectic that
is coded in terms of gender. Ferdinand says toward the end of the
film that all he wants to do is to "stop time." Marianne, on the other
hand, calculates the number of seconds in an individual life. She is a
classic "femme fatale" insofar as she plays upon Ferdinand's attrac-
tion to her in order to lead him more and more deeply into a crimi-
nal world, leading him inexorably away from "poetry." As they reen-
ter the gunrunning adventure in the Midi, Marianne tells Ferdinand a
story about a man who tries to escape his death in Paris, travels to
the Midi, and dies in a car accident, a foreshadowing of Ferdinand's
and Marianne's own deaths. But the notion of "fatality" extends to
the narrative momentum that Marianne generates with an extremely
high energy level.
In, or against, the frenetic movement of the film from one place
to another, from one vehicle to another, even from one discontinuous
shot to the next, Ferdinand is repeatedly found sitting, stationary,
 Jean-Luc Godard 163

either writing, reading, watching movies, eating, or simply waiting.

As a flaneur, Ferdinand allows the world to move by him; the "crowd"
of discursive voices flows around his watchful, meditative posture.
In his musings, death has an immanent meaningfulness that is lack-
ing in Godard's disrespectful representations of corpses. For exam-
ple, on discovering a midget executed bloodily in an apartment, Fer-
dinand says: "such a beautiful, magnificent death for such a little man."
The disparity between the magnificent death and the little man en-
capsulates this attribution of significance and anticipates Ferdinand's
own spectacularly explosive death, which compensates visually for
its existential meaninglessness. His spoken and written introspective
commentary on mortality is an obsessive musing that is out of keep-
ing with the garish and casual world of Marianne.
The movement of the film toward a "mingling" of these two char-
acters' voices suggests that they represent a discursive difference that
the film dialogizes. Marianne may be closer to the popular culture
intertexts (she is introduced reading the comics) and Ferdinand may
have more affinities with his high-modernist heroes, such as Joyce
and Picasso, but there is an important difference between their re-
spective affinities. While Ferdinand desires to write better than Joyce,
while he wants to see Marianne as "Renoir's" Marianne, and while
he imagines himself as a Celine or Verne protagonist, Marianne lacks
this distance from her intertextual sources. The immediacy and
spontaneity of detective novels that Marianne embodies turn out to
be exactly what Ferdinand is looking for in a literature that is "better
than Joyce" because it is "not about people's lives but about life itself."
Godard describes Pierrot lefou as a film that is "about the adven-
ture rather than the adventurers," and invokes Sartre to explain this:
"It is difficult to separate one from the other. We know from Sartre
that the free choice which the individual himself makes is mingled
with what is usually called his destiny."67 This "mingling" is repre-
sented in Pierrot lefou through the convention of popular romance,
in which Marianne, the femme fatale with the "line of luck," seduces
the anxious modernist protagonist. But although the film may well
fall into the modernist trap of feminizing popular culture,68 the tex-
tual seduction that takes place produces an exemplary marriage of
existential "knowledge" with the Utopian truth-values of romance. If
164 Jean-Luc Godard

the courtship ritual that informs the American film musical is consti-
tutive of a redemptive impetus in American popular culture, "a sort
of secular religious feel, a sense of restoring Eden in a fallen soci-
ety,"69 it might be argued that Godard recognizes and attempts to ex-
tract precisely this "auratic" experience from the romance genre.
One of the central characteristics of narrative mortality is irony, a
specific form of allegorical representation that has been noted in dis-
cussions of Lang and Wenders, and even in LeMepris. The more over
recourse to comedy in Pierrot lefou allows for a more extensive the
orization of irony in relation to narrative mortality. As carnival is sanc-
tioned disruption and authorized dehierarchization, and as auratic
experience is only available as allegory, so also is the "triumph of
desire" in Pierrot lefou profoundly ironic. Belmondo/Ferdinand sur-
vives only as voice. In this way the ironic consciousness that has
been developed over the course of the film is maintained by the
gesture of detachment from mythic existence.
Reworking the categories of existentialism in terms of representa-
tion, Paul de Man argues that
the prevalence of allegory always corresponds to the unveiling
of an authentically temporal destiny. This unveiling takes
place in a subject that has sought refuge against the impact of
time in a natural world to which, in truth, it bears no
resemblance.70

In his discussion of Romantic poetry, de Man makes a distinction be-

tween allegory and irony, defining irony as a language in which the
self-consciousness of the "doubleness" of humanity, its lack of unity
with nature, becomes a tenet of self-definition: "The ironic language
splits the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of inau-
thenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that
asserts the knowledge of this inauthenticity" (p. 213). De Man's point
is that consciousness is neither mythic nor eternal, but is language/
representation that unfolds in time. Ironic narrative thus strives to
move "beyond and outside itself," but is always aware of the impos-
sibility of doing so.
De Man's distinction between allegory and irony is drawn in part
from Baudelaire, whose comments on a pantomime performance (that
includes a Pierrot) indicate the temporal form of modernist irony:
 Jean-Luc Godard 165

[The characters] make their extraordinary gestures, which

demonstrate clearly that they feel themselves forced into a
new existence And they leap through this fantastic work,
which properly speaking, only starts at that point—which is
to say, on the frontiers of the marvellous.71

For de Man, irony is unlike allegory in its "madness" or recognition

of the nonconscious status of language and representation; the pas-
sage suggests to him that "irony is unrelieved vertige, dizziness to
the point of madness" (p. 214). Both allegory and irony "pertain ulti-
mately to a subjective experience of time." Irony is "essentially the
mode of the present, it knows neither memory nor prefigurative du-
ration, whereas allegory exists entirely within an ideal time that is
never here and now but always a past or an endless future" (p. 220).
Benjamin's theory of allegory embodies both of de Man's structures
of allegory and irony in a dialectical relationship. Both Benjamin and
de Man define allegory in opposition to symbolic representation, as
a recognition of the nonunity of image and referent, which in the nine-
teenth century extended to the relationship between man and nature.
It is precisely the romantic disavowal of mortality that is unveiled in
Benjamin's allegory, the temporal structure of which is most elo-
quently described in terms of decay: "Allegories are, in the realm of
thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things."72 Benjamin's Baude-
laire is far from mad, and sees in the pantomime figures (dead ob-
jects, which, like puppets, imply dead conventions) the past and the
present combined dialectically to produce a historically different fu-
ture. It is above all in the commodity that Benjamin's Baudelaire con-
fronts the new "just as the seventeenth-century allegorists confronted
antiquity." For Benjamin, "The devaluation of the world of objects
within allegory is outdone within the world of objects itself by the
commodity."73
In Pierrot lefou, the gender duality represented by Marianne and
Ferdinand also corresponds to two experiences of temporal rhetoric,
which are carnivalized, or mingled, in a quite different narrative time
than the novel (where de Man finds them linked). Whereas Ferdinand
may indeed be a Baudelairean flaneur, for whom alienation becomes
an authentic experience of inauthenticity, the figure of Marianne and
the role of allegory function in a more Benjaminian, that is, historical,
166 Jean-Luc Godard

way. Sam Fuller's cameo appearance in the film as the director of

Fleurs du mal indicates that it is not "nature" but Hollywood that is
allegorized, mortified, or lost in Pierrot lefou. Marianne is like the
pantomime figures that Baudelaire describes, moving freely within
and beyond the genre conventions of Hollywood musicals, gangster
films, and melodramas. For Godard, intertextuality is a historical struc-
ture with which he excavates auratic experience among the ruins of
modernist and popular culture. While he derives his archaeological
method of irony from the "high art" sources, the qualities of Holly-
wood at stake here are those of mimeticism and closure—precisely
the symbolic orders of Romanticism that both Benjamin and de Man
find relinquished in allegory.
The final shot of Pierrot lefou, the "empty" image of sea and sky
with the whispered Rimbaud poem about eternity, is an allegory of
transcendence, a recognition of its own inauthenticity. The freedom
of the film is not, therefore, a freedom from history. It is unlike
the silent spectacle of sea and sky at the end of Le Mepris, in whic
language is drained by narcissism and melancholia, and it is not a
"dream of disappearance" or terminality. If it is the shot that is not
shown but described at the end of Bande a part as a "horizon with-
out limits or contradictions," the excess of "harmony" and transcen-
dence echoed in the voices from the afterlife is what constitutes its
irony.
What is "mingled," finally, in the carnival of closure is the existen-
tial consciousness of Ferdinand—free but anxious, wise to his inau-
thenticity but restricted to his own, mortal experience of time — and
Marianne as an intertextual access to romantic disavowal, desire, and
imagination. Together they create an image of Utopia, its naivete brack-
eted through irony, but its historical promise grounded in allegory. If
the last half hour of the film conveys that randomness that Godard
insists informs it ("Two shots which follow each other do not neces-
sarily follow each other. The same goes for two shots which do not
follow each other. In this sense, one can say that Pierrot is not really a
film"),74 then an astonishing teleology is restored with the final dou-
ble deaths.
The cathartic surprise of this "goal" of the film's end is partially
due to the extraction of Eros from the myth of romance; but equally
important is the role of Thanatos, violence, and death, the privileged
 Jean-Luc Godard 167

signifiers of narrative mortality. In this respect, Sam Fuller is not just

any Hollywood filmmaker but one whom the Cahiers du Cinema
critics appreciated especially for the excessive violence of his films.75
Fuller describes cinema as a "battleground," and it is indeed through
the representation of death that the film engages questions of phe-
nomenology and spectacular representation in a way specific to the
mid-1960s intellectual climate. The existential "freedom" of Pierrot l
fou is achieved through violence, a violence of historical discontinuity
(Benjamin's "shock" effect), as much as it is through the imaginary
of eternity.
Blasting himself out of the momentum of narrative, the continuum
of history, and the finitude of existence, Ferdinand also blows himself
out of representation. There is no corpse, no body at all to organi-
cally "reenter the world" because, of course, it would not be a dead
body at all, but Belmondo acting dead. The "renewal" of this carni-
valized death is not organic but spectacular. Throughout the film,
death is at once ironic, spectacularly "fake," and yet instrumental to
the film's momentum, driving the couple on to further adventures, re-
versing expectations, generating action: a crucial decoration of the un-
derworld that Ferdinand traverses. Finally, a sense of rebirth per-
vades the couple's own deaths. Ferdinand shoots Marianne, perhaps
by mistake, as they are running through some complex geography,
or perhaps because she double-crossed him (figure 9). He carries
her limp and bloodstained body into a villa and she repeats a line
she has said at least once before — "It was the first, it was the only
dream"—before dying on the bed. The film's apocalypse is the awak-
ening from this dream.76
That this is also an "awakening" from a certain kind of modernist
anxiety can be illustrated by comparing the end of the film to Rim-
baud's poem "Une Saison en Enfer." Ferdinand's response to Mari-
anne's enigmatic words is to paint his face blue, phone home, cite
Balzac, and wrap his head in yellow and red dynamite. His attempt
to frantically put out the fuse before the final cut to a long shot of
the explosion is taken in part from Rimbaud:
No! No! at present I rebel against death! Work seems too
easy for my pride; my betrayal to the world would be too
brief a penalty. At the last moment I should strike out right
and left ...
168 Jean-Luc Godard

Fig. 9. Pierrot le fou: Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) shoots Marianne (Anna

Karina) at the end of their adventure. Publicity still courtesy of Cinematheque
Quebecoise.

Then—Oh! — dear, poor soul, would eternity not be lost to

us!

And, from the last "chapter" (like Pierrot le fou, Rimbaud's prose
poem is divided into short subtitled sections), called "Adieu":
It is necessary to be absolutely modern.
No canticles: hold to the step you have gained. Sore night!
The dried blood smokes on my face, and I have nothing at my
back but this horrible bush!... One advantage is that I can
laugh at the old, false passions, and put to shame those lying
couples,—I have seen the hell of women down there;—and
it will be legitimate for me to possess the truth in a soul and
body.77

Besides the many other imagistic allusions to "Une Saison en En-

fer" in Pierrot lefou78 Rimbaud's prose poem provides Godard with
the attitude of laughter directed toward those structures of language,
behavior, and narrative from which the film is in flight. As in "Une
 Jean-Luc Godard 169

Saison en Enfer," the necessity to be modern is accompanied by a

desire to be whole, a unified entity of consciousness and world, an
existentialist quest for an "authentic" union of action and choice. In
keeping with Rimbaud's misogyny, Ferdinand's bourgeois marriage
and adventures with Marianne are both "hells" characterized by a
loss of mastery over willful women. His escape from his particular
hell involves the death of the woman, Marianne, but also the inter-
mingling of his voice with hers after death. And this is perhaps where
Godard moves beyond Rimbaud's modernism, in a movement be-
yond subjectivity as an autonomous category, toward the romance
of intersubjectivity.
The absurdity of Ferdinand's suicide, followed by the resurrection
of the self "outside of this world" is at once a renunciation of the
empirical self and a concession to the linguistic construction of sub-
jectivity. It is precisely the stylized, excessive violence that enables
the film to transcend Rimbaud's modernist conception of mortality.
Rimbaud may "write himself" against the void of death,79 but for Go-
dard it is a void of representation, figured in death, against which sub-
jectivity is "written."
Moreover, subjectivity in Pierrot lefou takes on a temporal struc-
ture. "Authentic subjectivity" is relegated to the flaneur and his pos-
ture of aloof nonparticipation in the teleology of modernity. This pos-
ture may be rendered inadequate, but it nevertheless resonates in
the film's "poetry." Consciousness is finally radically separated from
mortality in the cut from the close-up of Ferdinand's hands groping
for the fuse wire on the ground to a long shot of the explosion on
the hillside. The death is structured metonymically, displacing the ex-
perience of death from the spectacle of death, making it "an objec-
tive fact for another consciousness."80 Rather than metaphorical mean-
ing, we get a performance. Again, one of the key effects of narrative
mortality is the inscription of temporal/historical difference between
the profilmic and the eternal present tense of the narrative.
Before wrapping his head with the dynamite, Ferdinand says to
the camera, "I just wanted to say ... I am stupid ...", a final instance
of the Brechtian theatricality of Pierrot lefou. The frequent instances
of visual and voice-over direct address maintain a constant, if sporadic
and somewhat one-sided, dialogue with the spectator. Comedy and
heteroglossia likewise inscribe a plurality of voices into the text in a
170 Jean-Luc Godard

cacophony of consciousnesses rendered as languages. The carnival

of closure in Pierrot lefou does not produce an idealized image of
Utopia, an alternative representation to the sterile world of bourgeois
cocktail parties, nor an anarchist rejection of reason, but a fragmented
image of existence and essence, body and consciousness, things and
words, material reality and Utopian imagination. None of the film's
various binaries are irrevocably divided in death, but, like Ferdinand
and Marianne, they are ironically and comically dialogized, so that they
might be recombined differently, in a future that lies beyond the
film—in the viewer's mind, in eternity.
Godard's "allegory of the body" is precisely a matter of subjectiv-
ity construed as perception. The sustained duality of Belmondo/
Ferdinand and Karina/Marianne, achieved through voice-over, narra-
tive, direct address, and performance, is carried through to the char-
acters' deaths, which are shocking precisely because we have been
drawn inside the characters in spite of all the strategies employed to
keep us outside. Like the baroque dramatists, Godard's obsession with
death "would be quite unthinkable if it were merely a question of
reflection about the end of their lives." The corpse, arrayed in tableaux
of the ruins of late capitalism, is, for Godard, "the pre-eminent em-
blematic property,"81 because in it is registered the limitations of cin-
ematic language to realize the image of authentic experience, the
inability to reach the soul through the image, and the inability to "cap-
ture life."
Within the particular intellectual climate within which Pierrot le
fou was produced, Godard's carnival explodes the categories of ex-
istence and essence to take from death the knowledge of their di-
alectical possibilities of history and desire. As the threshold of dis-
covery and repetition (the always-the-same), the ruin of the body is,
in a flash, a renewal. The mourning of immortality and mimeticism
that takes place in Le Mepris is transformed in Pierrot lefou to an
legory of desire. The closing shots of the Mediterranean horizon are
the same in the two films, but the mortals in Le Mepris are embroile
in language; the discourses of myth and cinema have them thoroughly
enmeshed. In Pierrot lefou, "the forces of the mythical world"—and
the limits of representation—are indeed met "with cunning and with
high spirits."82
 Jean-Luc Godard 171

At the limits of modernism, transcendence can only be perceived

in the form of loss from the perspective of history as itself a form of
mortality. The dialectic between the immortal and the mortal is situ-
ated by Benjamin on the plane of representation, between symbolic
correspondence (mimeticism) and the signifying processes of lan-
guage. The Mediterranean is a privileged site of the ruins of history,
demonstrating the submission of history to nature, which for Benjamin
is "always allegorical":
In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And
in this guise history does not assume the form of the process
of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory
thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in
the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.83

If the "death's head" is the baroque emblem of nature's claim on

history, for Godard the car accident performs a similar role in the
twentieth century. The wrecks of cars will never entirely return to na-
ture, but will mar eternity with their rust. One technique of baroque
allegory as a ruin of history is "to pile up fragments ceaselessly,
without any strict idea of a goal,"84 and indeed, highway death is
likewise contingent; the subjection of travel to death transforms the
temporality of progress, in an instant, to that of decay. Equally im-
portant, however, is the status of the automobile as a commodity. If
the allegorization of Bardot involves the distantiation of her sexual-
ity, the melancholy gaze is equally directed at the fetish of the shiny
red Alfa Romeo. The disjunction implicit in allegory between signi-
fier and signified is a historical one, inscribing a difference in histori-
cal moments; but the commodity, too, is allegorical. "Just as in the
17th century allegory becomes the canon of dialectical imagery, so
in the 19th century does novelty."85 Under the melancholy gaze, the
commodity, separated from its use-value, becomes, like the baroque
death's head, a signifier of a transient signified—in this case, the cult
of the new.
The detritus of capitalism, its ruins and discarded commodities —
represented, for example, in the wrecks of smashed cars that litter
Godard's films of the late 1960s (e.g., Weekend [1967])—are thus al-
legorical; in them is fixed the erotic charge of novelty—the illusory
172 Jean-Luc Godard

totality of the fetish—now separated from its rusting material basis.

Thus the "death's head" and the commodity become one in the final
car accident in Le Mepris, and, moreover, the melancholy gaze belong
to the camera. The transience registered in this allegory is less the
face of nature than that of the profilmic because, in the twentieth cen-
tury, the spectacle as emblem has itself been commodified.
Just as Benjamin's and Bakhtin's theories of cultural Utopias were
conceived within the totalitarian nightmares of Europe between the
wars, in the fading light of the avant-gardes of the 1920s, the thresh-
old delineated here also has its dangers, many of which (as we will
see in the final chapters) have been realized in postmodern cinema.
From Le Mepris to Pierrot lefou, the sense of loss begins to be lost,
process that is instrumental to the radical potential of narrative mor-
tality. And yet it has to be recognized that postmodern apocalypti-
cism and intertextuality carry with them the threat of historical am-
nesia. Memory is crucial to the potential of narrative mortality to "ruin"
crisis and transform it into the desire for a different future. Redemp-
tion is simply the structure of radical memory that may be identified
within the dialectical relations between these two films, even if it is
not fully developed in either one of them.
It may well be that the carnival of Pierrot lefou was Godard's last
laugh; certainly his subsequent films adopted a more resigned tone.
The apocalyptic Made in USA is a full-color allegory of Hollywood
but without the ironic existentialism of the Ferdinand character; it is
a film only about a loss of vision, which may make it more "postmod-
ern," but it lacks the exhilarating speed of a film going nowhere. In
Pierrot lefou, one finds the traces of modernism still potent, instill-
ing a memory of materialism, the hint of a historical referent inform-
ing its apocalypse. But what is perhaps most intriguing about the
threshold that is delineated in Pierrot lefou is that it also anticipates
the crisis of historical vision of the postmodern apocalyptic and allows
us to situate that crisis within the philosophical, political, and aes-
thetic framework of the Nouvelle Vague and the Cahiers du Cinema
critics' "necessity to be modern."86 The spectacle of death and the
poetry of eternity are finally separated from each other with the cut
away from the protagonist's explosive body, and it is perhaps in that
cut, in that which is not representable, that the future of the society
of the spectacle might be hidden.
FIVE

AMERICAN APOCALYPTICISM
The Sight of the Crisis

The disaster is separate; that which is most separate. When the disaster
is upon us, it does not come. The disaster is its imminence, but since the
future, as we conceive of it in the order of lived time, belongs to the
disaster, the disaster has always already withdrawn or dissuaded it;
there is no future for the disaster, just as there is no time or space for its
accomplishment. — MAURICE BLANCHOT1

V iolence to the body, represented in ever more vivid anatomical

detail, through the use of ever more special effects, has come to
signify death in contemporary American narrative film. As the sub-
stantial lived body is wrenched apart, it is anatomized through
wounding and ejaculating blood, and becomes the producer of it
own excess. This strategy involves a shift of emphasis from the more
abstract sense of the individual to a biological, organic sense of the fi-
nite self. Moreover, it represents a very different fear of death, replac-
ing the existential anxiety of the European "art" film with a fear of
"unnatural" and abrupt curtailment of life.
We have already encountered this distinction in our discussion of

173
174 American Apocalypticism

The State of Things, in which the pressure of mortality suggested by

ticking electronic instruments in Europe is banished with the transi-
tion to an American road movie. The fear of violent death, which
hangs over the last scenes and which is eventually realized, is not a
"metaphysical" fear but a fear of discontinuity. It is not a sense of time
that contradicts consciousness, but a fear, simply, that there will no
longer be a body, a subject, or a film.
It is within the breakdown of genre within the American cinema
that apocalyptic violence terminates films that can no longer end in
the safety of "home." This process of disintegration might have be-
gun after the Second World War, and maybe even in the 1930s gang-
ster genre, but it becomes ironically perfected in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Apocalyptic closure might be defined as a terminal form
of closure in which the narrative has traveled somewhere, but not to
where it began. In the alterity of space and time of the road movie,
which has been described as Hollywood's most "desperate genre,"2
"identity" cannot be secured, despite the isomorphism of death and
closure. Spectacular violence often becomes an attempt to restore a
sense of ending to narratives that travel beyond the securities of
genre.
In the preceding pages, death has been discussed as something
quite separate from violence. And indeed, in film as in life, death is not
always violent—although it certainly is so more often in film than in
life. The moral objection to violence in the mass media, raised since
the earliest days of the cinema, does not often speak of death per se.3
Although numbers of murders per televisual hour have been dutifully
tabulated by sociologists since the 1950s, death in the sociological
discourse is a heightened form of violence, and not a phenomenon in
itself.4 A possible explanation for this tendency is that violent action
and death have a similar narrative function in advancing plot, a func-
tion that should distinguish them from lived violence and actual death.
In content analyses, however, they advance yet another plot: the dele-
terious effects of the mass media on "society."
More pertinent perhaps than quantification is the question of why
so much narrative discourse revolves around violent action and death.
The development of narrative codes in early American film takes place
in stories that involve both the speed and the drama of opposed
 American Apocalypticism 175

forces, symptomatic of violent action. Porter's The Great Train Rob-

bery, Griffith's Birth of a Nation, and the plenitude of early films
based on chases and rescues often depend on violent action and the
threat of death for the deployment of those innovative formal strate-
gies for which they are generally known.5 This is something that Eisen-
stein appreciates in Griffith, and indeed Eisenstein's early theoriza-
tion of montage was derived from the representation of violent death
on the steps of Odessa.6
The prevalence of violent death in the mass media is thus imme-
diately attributable to the demands of the medium: speed and spec-
tacle, but also to the melodramatic desire to "see the unseeable." It
has been pointed out that violence gives death "a perceptible form,"
endowing the mysterious transition from being to nonbeing with the
dynamics of movement, color, and sound.7 Paul Virilio has rewritten
the history of cinema as a history of military technology designed to
transform the enemy into a system of representation. In the "logistics
of perception," visibility effectively becomes a form of violence.8 In the
late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, when narrative clo-
sure becomes synonymous with spectacular death in the cinema, a
discourse of apocalypse appropriates the violence of visibility as the
end of history.
The reliance on the star system and on realist performance styles
in this cinema insists on metaphors of psychology and desire, giving
back "the sense of an ending" to historical allegories. The bodies of
American movie stars cannot be sacrificed as documentary or ethno-
graphic subjects. In the genre revision of the late 1960s and early
1970s—the cinema of Coppola, Scorsese, Penn, and Altman — narra-
tive mortality emerges as an allegory of the debased myths of Ameri-
can culture. The argument of this chapter is that the excessive repre-
sentation of violence reinstates the mythology of death as closure
within the allegory of narrative mortality; that is, the potential morti-
fication of genre is curtailed by the resurrection of the spectacle in
the excessive closure of this American apocalyptic cinema.
From Kiss Me Deadly (1955) to Apocalypse Now (1979), a rash o
films from a revived Hollywood of auteurs repeatedly end with spec-
tacularly violent multiple deaths. The films under discussion in this
chapter—Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967), The Wild Bunch (Peckin
176 American Apocalypticism

pah, 1969), and Nashville (Altman, 1975) — are in this respect exem
plary of a group of films that also includes The Godfather, Night Mov
Taxi Driver, Dirty Harry, and others. The analyses of these films
should demonstrate the parameters of narrative mortality as a dis-
course of apocalypse in the Vietnam and Watergate periods of Amer-
ican history.
The New Testament Apocalypse of Saint John, renamed the Book of
Revelation, is about catastrophe and revelation couched in the terms
of vision. Visions of the end of the world are generally produced dur-
ing periods of social upheaval and accelerated change, and the his-
tory of false predictions is a history of social anxiety.9 The "modern
apocalypse" differs from previous anticipations because it is informed
by the dread of uncompassionate science and technology, but, like
other mythologies of ending, it is both "transforming and concor-
dant";10 that is, it is a means of understanding the experience of his-
tory, an anticipation of the future within the limited terms of present
experience.
To the extent that the mythology of apocalypse implies a theory
of history, of social change (to a future of either heaven or hell, par-
adise or suffering),11 in the society of the spectacle "neither death nor
procreation is grasped as a law of time. Time remains immobile, like
an enclosed space."12 That which might be described as the post-
modern apocalyptic vision effectively turns in on itself, curtailing both
the promise and the threat of apocalyptic historiography. Rather than
lamenting the dystopic scene of terminality a la Baudrillard,13 the im-
potent apocalyptic vision of this cinema can be analyzed in terms of
cinematic realism, excess, and history. Key differences between the
three films Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Nashville demo
strate the range of relations between apocalyptic violence and his-
tory in this period. While the "fracturing of the male subject" implied
in the term "impotent" is a key feature of the disintegration of genre
cinema,14 we shall see that it is also the failure of the white Ameri-
can subject that is allegorized in these films.
In American apocalypticism, narrative mortality is the allegory of
a crisis of historical vision. In the secular world of late capitalism, apoc-
alyptic discourse points, in most cases, to a loss of social consensus,
but the "loss of myth" that informs Godard's work is figured quite
differently in American genre revisionism, which generally fails to
 American Apocalypticism 177

question the status of the image in its deconstruction of myth. Death

and closure converge more teleologically in the American apocalypse,
as crisis is institutionalized as commodified spectacle. Although the
excesses of the representation of death and violence point to an anx-
iety provoked by the "loss of myth" involved in genre revision, this
loss tends to be mystified once more as "meaningful loss." This apoc-
alyptic cinema spearheaded by auteurs is itself the redemption of an
American "art" cinema, its national character ironically guaranteed
by the generic discourses of the Western, the musical, and the gang-
ster film. Narrative mortality assumes an anxiety or hysteria that will
be defined in terms of sacrificial crisis.

Dances of Death

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969) were particu-
larly "shocking" to contemporary audiences. It is instructive to ana-
lyze the representations of death in these films because they are
symptomatic of the tendency of the American mythos of "regenera-
tion through violence" to disintegrate into an aesthetic discourse of
"excess." Stylization takes up where coherent belief systems dissi-
pate, and death, likewise cut off from those metaphysical, religious,
and melodramatic discourses in which it had been "tamed," explodes
in a violent destruction of the body. However, the two films also dif-
fer in important ways. Narrative mortality in Bonnie and Clyde suc
cumbs to a circular, self-referential myth of American history, whereas
in The Wild Bunch it becomes more allegorical in the Benjaminian
sense, opening onto a discourse of historical transformation. A "gang
ster" film and a "Western," both films are also exemplary road movies,
traveling physically and geographically to their narrative goals of death
and destruction.
Bonnie and Clyde includes scenes that were described at the time
as "the most brutally violent ever filmed,"15 mainly because of the
amount of blood involved.16 Most spectacular of all is the last scene,
in which Bonnie and Clyde are machine-gunned to death in a complex
montage of very short shots. Crosscutting between Clyde (Warren
Beatty) falling and rolling on the ground in front of the car and Bonnie
(Faye Dunaway) hammered into the front seat with bullets and fi-
nally dropping headfirst onto the running board, to the accompaniment
178 American Apocalypticism

of a loud machine-gun rattle, the scene consists of thirty shots in one

minute. The film ends immediately after the police emerge from the
bushes and drop their guns to their sides.
This is an entirely different order of violence from Pierrot lefou.
Godard uses great amounts of red on static, motionless bodies to sig-
nify death, as well as the impossibility of signifying death. Penn uses
codes of motion and movement that represent life in its last vestige
of being, a violent movement through which the body is transformed
from subject (facial expression) to inert and lifeless object. The se-
quence moves from four extreme close-ups alternating between Bon-
nie's and Clyde's faces, suddenly realizing the gravity of the situa-
tion, to Bonnie's limp hand finally signifying death. (The emphasis
on the weight of the bodies is a familiar Hitchcock technique.) As
Penn explained to an interviewer:
I wanted to get the spasm of death, and so I used four
cameras, each one at a different speed, 24, 48, 72 and 96, I
think, and different lenses, so that I could cut to get the shock
and at the same time the ballet of death I wanted two
kinds of death: Clyde's to be rather like a ballet, and Bonnie's
to have the physical shock We put on the bullet holes—
and there's even a piece of Warren's head that comes off, like
that famous photograph of Kennedy.... [I asked the actress]
simply to enact the death, to fall and follow the laws of
gravity. Faye was trapped behind the wheel. We tied one leg
to the gear shift so that she would feel free to fall.17 (Figure 10).
The fact that the film ends immediately after the stoppage of bod-
ily movement delimits representation to subjectivity. It is a classic in-
stance of death as closure. In Bonnie and Clyde's deaths, the empha-
sis on movement and the last energetic spasms of life as it is reduced
to automatic reflexes may be an example of an attempt to represent
death from within: the special effects of slow motion and the use of
close-ups distend the mimesis of subjective experience. Despite the
use of these effects, however, in conjunction with the crosscutting and
blood, the scene is very much a stylized spectacle for a viewer: an-
other instance of death from without. Bonnie's silent scream "answers"
the first death in the film, a man whose bloody face is fixed in a
silent scream (Potemkin-style), framed by a car window. The simul-
 American Apocalypticism 179

Fig. 10. Bonnie and Clyde: Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde (Warren Beatty) and
their dead car at the end of their adventure. Publicity still courtesy of Photofest.

taneity of the two modes, death from within and death from with-
out, is crucial to the naturalization of the spectacle, legitimating the
pleasure in violence and codifying its excess as "expression."
Penn may have drained the myth of its romantic impetus in the
physical depiction of the bodies, but the spectacle of blood is exces-
sive rather than allegorical and the legend remains intact. Whereas
allegory points to the doubleness of representation, excess, in Roland
Barthes's words, "sterilizes" not only meaning, but metalanguage
and criticism as well.18 What he calls "the third meaning," beyond
denotation and connotation, is "obtuse" because it opens the field of
meaning "totally, that is infinitely." Where allegory "mortifies," ex-
cess "liberates." The antiauthoritarian stance of Bonnie and Clyde
is ultimately diffused in its violence, displaced from history onto the
"liberation" of the image itself. The narrative collapses under the
weight of a violence that strains the codes of realism that the film has
so faithfully upheld. Significantly, unlike the Eisenstein film that Barthes
180 American Apocalypticism

discusses {Ivan the Terrible), this rupture occurs only at the end of
Bonnie and Clyde.
Moreover, both subjectivity and the film are abruptly curtailed in a
dead car. Bonnie and Clyde drive even more cars across this film than
Ferdinand and Marianne do in Pierrot lefou. The terminal nature of
the final stoppage of the car is accentuated by the union of Bonnie's
body with the driving apparatus. At the end of the film's journey,
there is really nothing but the characters' deaths. The lack of desti-
nation, which has haunted the narrative throughout, is finally eradi-
cated in the spectacular eruption of blood, as if this were the end of
the road of desire and not just the end of the road. At first the beau-
tiful bodies of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway survive the ugly
deaths of the Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons characters. The hor-
ror of Bonnie and Clyde is finally the destruction of their lovely faces.
The body of the film, its smooth surface, its very coherence and con-
sistency, are synonymous with the smooth skin of Faye Dunaway's
cheeks. Like the shiny surfaces of the period cars that are riddled
with bullet holes throughout Bonnie and Clyde, but are continuall
replaced with new cars, the film itself is a body that suffers and fi-
nally dies.
Once Dunaway and Beatty are irreparably punctured, torn, and
bloodied, the film too is finished. This is why the excessive rupture
of violent death can happen only at the end of the film. If the frag-
mentation of the film's spatial and temporal unities through the mul-
tiplicity of speeds and focal lengths is a literal disintegration of the
image, the failure of subjectivity and desire is also the failure of rep-
resentation. When it can no longer signify anything, the film signi-
fies itself within the very code of excess (as Barthes has said of Japan-
ese melodrama),19 but it does so only at the end. Violence here does
not become a form of "writing" because it says nothing, except that
this is the end. The desire repressed in the narrative (Clyde's impo-
tence) is finally realized in the desire for closure, for these deaths that
were anticipated all along. The telos of the myth of fate is celebrated
in the excesses of representation, which give to the spectator pre-
cisely what was missing when Bonnie and Clyde went offscreen, out
of frame, to make love.
Pauline Kael ended her long and enthusiastic review of Bonnie
and Clyde with the observation, "Maybe it's because Bonnie and
 American Apocalypticism 181

Clyde, by making us care about the robber lovers, have put the sting
back into death."20 It is precisely this "care" that distinguishes Penn's
ending from that of Lang's You Only Live Once (1936) (to which Kae
quite rightly compares it), in which Sylvia Sidney dies in Henry Fon-
da's arms while a burst of light and heavenly music accompany the
couple to "freedom" and they are ushered into the netherworld by
the voice of a dead priest. Partly because Lang's characters are car-
toon characters from the outset, their deaths are inherently allegorical.
His film does not ask us to believe in the characters or the image, but
in something else, beyond representation. Against Lang's allegory of
transcendence, in 1967 Bonnie and Clyde preserve in their deaths a
belief in the image on the screen; the "sting," as Kael puts it, is born
of an intense identification with the image and/as the characters on
the most libidinal level, which is suddenly broken. With the punctur-
ing of its skin/illusion, the film becomes an object, subject to the
laws of gravity and narrative.
It may well be argued that the heightened realism of Bonnie and
Clyde gives a strong Utopian thrust to the gangster genre's conven-
tions of antiheroism. The rupture of identification in the melodra-
matic ending can, and often does, make the viewer cry, which may
be understood psychoanalytically as the restaging of an originary ex-
perience with the mother. According to Steve Neale, the pleasure of
tears provoked by melodrama is bound up with the belief that "there
might be an Other capable of responding to them." Following Peter
Brooks, Neale observes:
The cry and the gesture indicate 'a kind of fault or gap in the
code, the space that marks its inadequacies to convey a full
freight of emotional meaning.' Tears very often come in this
gap One of the reasons instances of this gap can be so
moving is that they mark a form of failure of the fantasy of
union.21

Neale notes that this "gap" is often produced by the noncoincidence

of points of view and knowledge—for example, the viewer's prior
knowledge of Bonnie and Clyde's imminent deaths. In melodrama it
is "always too late" because the film is always finished before it is
screened; and it is this situation of powerlessness on the part of the
viewer to control or alter the destinies of those on-screen that is so
182 American Apocalypticism

often restaged in melodrama. Tears, however, preserve the fantasy of

possibility and the reality of desire.
The "unhappy" ending, especially, says Neale, "may function as a
means of satisfying a wish to have the wish unfulfilled—in order that
it can be preserved and re-stated rather than abandoned altogether"
(p. 21). If Bonnie and Clyde were to live happily ever after, there
would be no more legend to replay, no fantasy to indulge in. The
"mythical, legendary, balletic ending" (Penn's words) preserves the
failure of desire that the narrative has enacted, and thus the possibil-
ity that "the loss can be eradicated"—the loss of "the Other," but also
the loss of history. It is precisely this resurrection of history that dis-
tinguishes Bonnie and Clyde from both The Wild Bunch and Nashville.
Corrigan aptly historicizes the circularity of this film:
If Bonnie and Clyde is based on a historical account, it is more
accurately a historical account of modern perception,
perception that in the sixties is already beginning to reduce
history to the material of images, material in which a culture
must obsessively act itself out in order to displace the return
of more threatening histories.22

Several parallels exist between Bonnie and Clyde and Cruel Stor
of Youth. In both narratives, the young couples are criminals outside
the law of the state and the law of the family, betrayed by fathers
and father figures. In both cases, their love for each other cannot be
contained by a corrupt society, and they die bloodily and separately,
subverting the possibility of a transcendent, Utopian realization of de-
sire. The key difference between the two films is their settings. Oshi-
ma's redirection of the politics of death from social submission to so-
cial opposition is accomplished through a demystification of history.
Where Oshima's narrative is set in a highly stylized yet historically
specific contemporary Japan, Penn's is set in a never-never land of the
1930s.
Depression America is represented as a timeless zone of poverty
and social ills in which Bonnie and Clyde will die over and over again.
That mythic time when gangsters were the heroes of the underclass,
a New Deal America in which "the people" were a viable unified
collective (however impoverished), is preserved as a fantasy outside
 American Apocalypticism 183

the irreversibility and cruelty of history. In the displacement of the

melodramatic excess of unfulfilled desire onto the bodies of the ac-
tors, and the body of the film, desire is turned back on itself. It be-
comes a desire for the fantasy of coincidence, timelessness, and return.
Despite the emphasis on vision and catastrophe, this apocalyptic end-
ing curtails the very possibility of historical anticipation, displacing
teleology onto visual pleasure. In Penn's imaginary return to history,
the historical alterity of future and past are transformed into the phe-
nomenological and terminal space of the screen. There are so many
markers of the couple's fate that the narrative is, in Penn's words, a
matter of "waiting out history."23 If this is historiography, Penn's nar-
rative mortality allegorizes the wait for the spectacular end of history.
If Bonnie and Clyde was the "first" film to represent death in
anatomical detail, opening the "bloodgates" of American film, The
Wild Bunch is the mythic initiator of a "celebration" of violence.24
Although such a historiography of cinematic "firsts" is undoubtedly
suspect, it is worth comparing the two representations of violent death.
In comparing the two films, Robert Kolker is typically moralistic.
Peckinpah's sensibility is "vicious," and The Wild Bunch is "a film
to admire and despise simultaneously." His condemnation of Peck-
inpah's misogyny is certainly apt, as is his observation that his "nar-
ratives require more and more exploding flesh to prove that [his]
male bond[ing] cannot succeed past its repressions."25 However, the
narrative and historiographic form that these cruelties and contra-
dictions take is illuminating. Even for Kolker, Peckinpah's violence
"permits one to be excited by dynamic movement and offers ... a
vicarious thrill.... More than the violence itself, the image is impor-
tant, the fact that one is permitted to see the unseeable" (p. 56). In
fact, this is also true of Bonnie and Clyde, but Peckinpah pro-
longs the spectacle, adding temporal duration to the excesses of rep-
resentation.
The apocalyptic violence in this instance really does overwhelm
its narrative function. Stylistic excess takes on a particularly ambiguous
function in The Wild Bunch, an ambiguity that is crucially related to
the representation of history. In this film, as well as in Nashville, eth
nic difference enters into the mythology of Americana, and narrative
mortality allegorizes an inability to "return home" to homogeneous
184 American Apocalypticism

cultural nationalism. The end of the road of this Western, like that of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, lies outside America, in Mex
ico, only here it is less a "foreign" country than an extension of post-
colonial American economic imperialism.
The Wild Bunch is about a group of outlaws who have run out of
opportunities to exercise their heroism in the late nineteenth century
American West. The frontier has closed, and there is little geographic
or ideological space for their particular brand of individualism. They
meet their deaths with an attitude of nihilism that is nevertheless
marked with the pride of adhering to a code of fraternity and outlaw
ethics. In the complexity of the film's historical setting, however, the
romance of heroism encompasses a Utopian vision of social transfor-
mation and the apocalyptic finale, with all its visual excess, does not
completely overwhelm historical possibility.
The group's decision to take on a Mexican village and the army
that occupies it is initiated by Pike (William Holden), who simply says
"Let's go." The response, "Why not?" is the only verbalization of the
unspoken agreement among the four men to avenge the cruelty that
the Mexicans have committed against their buddy Angel. Angel's
"crime" was to have skimmed a box of rifles from the military loot
that the bunch has just sold to Mapache, the Mexican general who
runs the village. The 'weapons were for Angel's "people"—Mexicans
oppressed by Mapache. The bunch is complicitous with Angel's guer-
rilla action, if not enthusiastic about it, appreciating the nobility of the
act more than the cause for which it is perpetrated. Mapache slits An-
gel's throat, upon which the Americans shoot the general in front of
his entire entourage. The ensuing shootout between the four mem-
bers of the bunch and the hundreds of armed Mexicans "answers"
the shoot-out between the bunch and a small American town, whose
railroad office they rob in the opening scene of the film. As in Be-
yond a Reasonable Doubt, an initial death is rhymed by a final death,
although in this case both are virtual massacres, and where death was
invisible and offscreen in the 1956 film, visibility supersedes narra-
tive in 1969.
Both battles in The Wild Bunch include individual confrontations
of point-blank shooting, isolated in the mise-en-scene by the camer-
a's adoption of rifle sights. In the final shoot-out, the heroes are each
 American Apocalypticism 185

shot several times, falling back from the force of the bullets again
and again, while the Mexicans fall mainly in slow motion waves of
men (figure 11). The scene lasts five minutes, beginning with the slit-
ting of Angel's throat and ending with a close-up of Dutch's (Ernest
Borgnine) bloody face calling the name of his buddy Pike, who dan-
gles by his finger from the machine-gun with which he has slaugh-
tered dozens of Mexicans. As in Bonnie and Clyde, the Wild Bunch
shoot-out is filmed from multiple perspectives with a variety of lenses,
speeds, and distances. One cutaway to Thornton (Robert Ryan) in the
hills with binoculars suggests a diegetic witness to the carnage, but
his long shot of scurrying men and puffs of smoke bears no relation
to the medium close-ups of slow-moving bodies that dominate the
sequence. This is less a celebration of death than of the male body,
displayed acrobatically. Again, it is "ballet" that is often evoked by
critics to describe the sequence.
Lawrence Alloway has suggested that in the Westerns of the 1950s,

Fig. 11. The Wild Bunch: Butch (Ernest Borgnine) and Pike (William Holden)take
a breather in the middle of the massacre. Publicity still courtesy of Cinematheque
Quebecoise.
186 American Apocalypticism

"the witty athleticism of stunt men defends the audience from dismay;
the shock of life's extinction is overwhelmed by admiration of the
gymnastics."26 Alloway goes on to observe, "However, as the motives
of Westerners have become more naturalistic, death has become more
a physical fact and less a form of play." He cites "the impact of bul-
lets and their exit on the other side of the body" as evidence of this
naturalism, but this is precisely what Robert Kolker points to as a
lack of realism.27 Since notions of realism are inevitably historically
determined and each writer here assumes a different definition, we
might do better to look at specific instances of the relation between
death and violence. Since the mid-1960s, the body has become the
site of a violence that, in the 1950s, was more often directed against
locations and objects: the cracked mirrors of The Lady from Shang-
hai, the scores of ransacked apartments, the car crash in Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt.
Once death is represented as a violence to the body, a destruc-
tion of the skin that holds body and soul together, the look of death
becomes potentially repulsive. One of the conventions by which
the gruesomeness of this form of death is "contained" in narrative is
slow motion, also a key means by which violence can be construed
as ballet.28 As an analytical dissection of the moving image into con-
stituent parts that approximate the condition of individual frames (even
if they do not achieve that condition), slow motion fails to jeopar-
dize the illusion of reality when it is used to represent death, pre-
cisely because of the affinity of these "still" elements with the state
they portend to represent. In other words, although slow motion is
"less real" than twenty-four frames per second, when used to depict
death, it achieves a degree of realism. Furthermore, the distinction be-
tween death from within and death from without also breaks down
as the spectacle assumes the codes of subjectivity, as in Bonnie and
Clyde.
Rarely, if ever, does one find a slow-motion death scene that ends
with a freeze-frame of the corpse. The photo finish is reserved for
the body caught in a posture that is virtually caused by the force of
the bullet. And yet the principle involved in slow motion and the
freeze-frame is similar. Garrett Stewart writes of the "arrested bodies"
of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Parallax Vie
(1974), and Gallipoli (1981):
 American Apocalypticism 187

Stop-action does just what its name suggests; within the

textual system, it stops the narrative action itself, not just the
representation of movement. Hence the totalizing force of the
freeze-frame in such closing death "scenes," its power to
subsume narrative entirely to graphic figuration.29
In the particular films with which Stewart is concerned, the freeze-
frame replaces the corpse, preserving the living body in the ontology
of the photographic image. The mythic subject is thereby saved from
history, allegory, and decay.
Likewise, the slowing down of the film corresponds to a slowing
down of life. As in the freeze-frame, the representational illusion is
preserved through the identification of the body of the film with the
body of the actor. The protraction of the dying process that occurs
with slow motion does not represent pain but, in the freedom from
gravity, its opposite: movement without friction. Neither film nor life
is actually retarded, but in the equation of the two, and in the "grace"
achieved by the falling body, death and stasis are virtually effaced
and disavowed. Death in slow motion, especially when it occurs at
the end of a film, participates in a "code of excess." The shift into met-
aphor preserves the image at the moment it is threatened with disin-
tegration.30 In the case of Bonnie and Clyde, in the codification of
excess, the apocalypse is effectively postponed.
While this codification of excess through metaphors of mortality
certainly occurs in The Wild Bunch, the limits of cinematic realism
are pushed much farther than in either Bonnie and Clyde or Butch
Cassidy. Slow motion in the climactic scene of The Wild Bunch take
variable speeds and alternates with "normal" speed. It is this cho-
reography of dying that has been charged against Peckinpah. The
exploding blood bags and swooning bodies that represent death in
The Wild Bunch constitute an iconography of death that can even be
described as baroque in its excess. Slow motion interrupts the narra-
tive momentum for a veritable danse macabre, and indeed two fea-
tures of the sixteenth-century iconographic mortuary frescoes seem
pertinent here. Philippe Aries notes that the dance of death involves
a mixing of the living with the dead: "The dead lead the dance; in-
deed, they are the only ones dancing The art lies in the contrast
between the rhythm of the dead and the rigidity of the living."31 In
what was fundamentally a depiction of destiny as rebirth, an energized
188 American Apocalypticism

representation of mortality, the danse macabre evolved into violent

and erotic celebrations of sensuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Aries describes it as an intermingling of "pleasure and pain
that will later be called sadism" (p. 370).
Likewise, in The Wild Bunch, the dying leap and bleed while the
living cower, and Thornton, the survivor, learns about death and de-
sire from the dance that he witnesses from afar. Pike and Dutch
come closer in their final moments to articulating their libidinal rela-
tionship than they have over the entire course of the film. Once again,
violent death involves a melodramatic displacement of the desire
that cannot be fulfilled or sustained in the narrative. In this case it is
the impossible homoerotic desire of the "buddy system."32 Kolker's
claim that Peckinpah reveals the "unseeable" indicates the melodra-
matic impetus of the violence, its excessive attempt to exceed the limit
of the visible. Sexual desire is displaced onto excessive violence in this
Western, but so is the unrealized historical desire of the collective
antihero that is the "wild bunch." The excessive gesture of the ballet
of violent death restores to the dead heroes the dynamics of these
desires as valid wishes, despite the impossibility of their realization.
Unlike Bonnie and Clyde, the apocalyptic discourse of this film
does possess a form of historical vision. The crisis might become a
threshold onto historical change insofar as the spectacular death scene
not only constitutes an intrusion into the diegesis, but it lasts five
minutes, over which time the "code" of excess cannot quite be sus-
tained. In the severe retardation of the film's movement, and in the
splashes of red liquid across the screen of the protracted bloodlet-
ting, pleasure is compromised by duration. The number of bodies
alone challenges any plausibility theory of narrative realism and points
to a discursive excess and ideological counterpoint to the "regenera-
tive" epilogue, thus rendering it discontinuous, if not ironic, with re-
spect to the rest of the narrative.
The point at which stasis is finally reached is a stoppage of Dutch's
body (and an end to the sound of guns), not a stoppage of the suc-
cession of frames. Before the final close-up of Dutch's face, an out-of-
focus point-of-view shot is inserted, but it has the opposite effect of
representing the subjective vision of a dying man (death from within).
As the only such shot in the entire sequence, it restores narrative dis-
course (a metadiegetic "voice") to the temporarily threatened move-
 American Apocalypticism 189

ment of the film. The scene then continues with the slow, silent re-
sumption of movement as the scattered survivors emerge from the
carnage.
On one level it might be said that The Wild Bunch participates
fully in the myth of "regeneration through violence," which has been
described as constitutive of American Western narratives. When man-
ifest destiny is transposed into the psychological terms of heroism,
the savagery of the wilderness becomes part of the identity of the
conqueror. Self-annihilation through aggression is a transcendence
of the ineffectual "Eastern" (cultured) self, but also remains in the ser-
vice of the civilizing teleology.33 The wilderness is thus conquered
by the internalization, through violence, of its "uncivilized" values, a
theme played out most explicitly in John Ford's The Searchers. Vio
lence assumes the character of "moral necessity" in its perpetuation
of manifest destiny, and as such has become an archetype of Ameri-
can culture.34
A transcendent, regenerative function of the violence is certainly
suggested in The Wild Bunch through the conversion of Thornton
from vigilante back to outlaw after the massacre. Moreover, after their
deaths, a series of superimposed flashbacks of each of the five dead
members of the gang is superimposed over Thornton's ride back
into the wilderness. Insofar as their suicidal action results in the per-
petuation of their values through the staging of violence, the death
of the wild bunch is sacrificial. Their values of fraternity and outlaw
ethics survive in Thornton and his ragged bunch of outlaws despite
the fact that the film has demonstrated the historical anachronism
that those values embody.
And yet an important shift has taken place, and "the work" that
the group of survivors at the end of The Wild Bunch have to do is
not simply to terrorize the landscape. Sykes, the old man who Thorn-
ton finally joins up with (an ex-cohort of the bunch), says, "It ain't
like it used to be, but it's better than nothin'." The men with him are
from Angel's village, Mexicans whose outlaw status is that of revolu-
tionary guerrillas, so it is Che Guevara on whom the heroism of the
film is to some extent modeled.35 The bunch do die out of loyalty to
Angel, although not necessarily to his cause, and as Sykes's words sug-
gest, the recourse to revolutionary action is a reluctant one. In this
sense, the "necessity of violence" implicit in the heroes' moral code
190 American Apocalypticism

is ironically pushed to a limit at which it might accommodate revolu-

tionary violence. Capitalism is represented in The Wild Bunch as shee
greed, which has totally corrupted the once-open frontier, and in or-
der to preserve the frontier ideology of individualism, the narrative
is literally forced into the defense of the oppressed and an embrace
of history. The memory of Angel's village, a pastoral "folk" Utopia, pre-
serves the possibility of social change, and while it may be an ideal,
it is nevertheless quite different than the culture that gave rise to
these heroes.
This ending is in fact neatly balanced on the verge of allegory.
The historical past is much more fully lost here than in Bonnie and
Clyde, and the bodies that die over and over again in the "ballet"
testify to the different historical time of representation. In the sheer
length of the interruption that the massacre occupies, time is felt to
be passing; narrative time and viewing time are radically collapsed
into a present tense from which the mythic time of the American
wilderness is absolutely excluded. The corpses of the aged heroes in
their final dance are the very ruins of history. At the same time, there
is the coda of regeneration, return, and transcendence awkwardly
tacked onto the bloodbath. In the spectacle of the dance itself, the
pleasure in fantasy that was noted in Bonnie and Clyde survives as
the historical desire of the genre. In the autonomy that the death
scene achieves through its excesses lies a resistance to the law of
narrative and the law of history that demands the heroes' deaths.
Their outlaw status takes on the proportions, however briefly, of a
challenge to the norms of visual pleasure. And yet any radical po-
tential of this discourse is, like the suggestion of revolutionary activ-
ity, ultimately enfolded within the structure of myth: the regenera-
tion of the buddy system and American patriarchal individualism. It
is most definitely "Che," the (beautiful) male revolutionary hero, and
not Marx who lurks outside this Western.
Peckinpah leaves the viewer on the very threshold of history as it
escapes from myth. As many critics have noted, the body counts and
disabled men returning to the United States from Vietnam during
this period rendered the myth of manifest destiny inadequate and
dangerous. The depiction of death as a violation of the body was
undoubtedly a response to the war experiences and media imagery
 American Apocalypticism 191

of Vietnam, and yet it is a mistake to label a film like The Wild

Bunch "an allegory of the My Lai Massacre."36 The lingering faith in
the image and its myths of pleasure, desire, and closure have noth-
ing to do with the horrifying televisual imagery. In the very excess
that verges on allegory, the possibility of regenerative violence re-
mains in the desire to see, a desire encouraged by the careful cho-
reography of cameras, bodies, and blood. Moreover, this vision is linked
to an apocalyptic historiography in which social change resides, how-
ever awkwardly, with repetition. The cataclysm of the massacre is
offset by the pressure of memory, visually represented in the final
series of superimposed flashbacks.
It may be fair to say that narrative mortality subsists in The Wild
Bunch as an allegory that remains closely knit with the mythology
of death as closure. The dialectical thresholding that was identified
in the films of Oshima and Godard cannot be realized here because
of the realist codes that effectively close off the narrative from his-
torical desires. The reading of narrative mortality in The Wild Bunch
is only possible through criticism that is prepared to perform the
mortification—to move beyond the pleasure principle of narrative
realism. If this violence can be construed as allegorical ruins, it is not
due to the slow motion itself, or to any other isolated technique em-
ployed by Peckinpah, but principally to the scale and duration of the
violence. A causally organized narrative suddenly gives way to a non-
linear sequence of shots in which time, space, and bodies are frag-
mented. It is to the extent that the violence against the characters
extends to a violence to and of the image that the scene may be de-
scribed as autonomous and allegorical.
On the other hand, The Wild Bunch demonstrates the reluctance
of American culture to let go of the myths of regeneration that have
informed the nation's narratives since the first encounter with native
peoples. After John Wayne has saved Natalie Wood and scalped her
Indian captor in The Searchers, he returns to the clean white scree
of the desert. Natalie retreats into the darkness of history. In films
such as Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch, the structure of apoc
alypse indicates a certain exhaustion of mythic, regenerative violence
as valid social discourse, and yet the spectacular nature of these apoc-
alypses tends to close off historical possibility.
192 American Apocalypticism

The fetish made of the image and of vision itself, articulated as ex-
cess, contains (and organizes, in the form of slow motion) the violence
to the body. The fragmentation of both image and body is disavowed
in the pleasure of the spectacle. At the same time, the spectacular
codification of excess prevents the recognition of ethnic difference
(e.g., the Mexicans in The Wild Bunch) from fracturing the integrity
of American mythology. Despite the enactments of catastrophe, the
films end without forsaking the promise of the return of the specta-
cle and the replaying of the myths in imaginary form.

Nashville: The Show Must Explode

Of all the apocalyptic films made during this turbulent period in

American history, Nashville comes closest to articulating a discourse
of narrative mortality because it is a text that is most aware of its
own limitations as a realist Hollywood film. The disintegration of
American cultural myths and institutions is narrativized through the
corruption of the country music industry, but equally important is
the narrative structure of fragmentation and apocalypse. Lacking a
central protagonist, subjectivity is dispersed over twenty-four charac-
ters. In Hollywood terms, this constitutes a radical decentering of
narrative. The center is eventually restored in the enactment of death
as closure, but it is a very empty center that is signified by the final
death.
The possibility of this being a road movie of any kind is abruptly
curtailed in the massive traffic jam of the second scene. This narra-
tive "jamming" also pertains to the structure of desire, which is not
that of romance or travel but strictly a desire for spectacle. The spec-
tator of Nashville is implicated in a form of terminal pleasure, the ul
timate apocalypse of which pertains beyond subjectivity to the "fam-
ily" of American popular culture.
Wandering through a mountainous junkyard of cars in Nashville,
Opal (Geraldine Chaplin) eulogizes the dead metal ("Without coffins
... their vast and vacant skeletons sadly sighing to the sky ...") into
her tape recorder. She concludes: "Oh cars, are you trying to tell me
something?" Her demand for meaning from these ruins is a futile de-
mand for a mythic symbolic counterpart to mortality, a demand that
is never met by the film. When Kenny eventually shoots country-
 American Apocalypticism 193

music star Barbara Jean from the audience of a political rally at the
Nashville Parthenon, the cynicism of the junkyard sequence is absent.
The final death is represented neither in close-up nor slow motion,
but from the detached perspective of a surprised witness or spectator.
The onstage assassination of Barbara Jean, typical of the apoca-
lyptic violence of so many of the films of this period, should be con-
sidered within the context of the history of the spectacle of violence.
This history includes the ritual sacrifices of ancient cultures, Roman
circuses, public executions, tortures, and witch hangings, as well as
organized sport.37 Both Georges Bataille and Rene Girard have iden-
tified ritual sacrifice as a constitutive feature of social representation.
Bataille points out that the taboo of death is lifted for religious rea-
sons and describes its sacramental element:

Only a spectacular killing carried out as the solemn and

collective nature of religion dictates has the power to reveal
what normally escapes notice divine continuity is linked
with the transgression of the law on which the order of
discontinuous beings is built. Men as discontinuous beings try
to maintain their separate existences, but death, or at least the
contemplation of death, brings them back to continuity.38

Whereas Bataille emphasizes the erotic element of violent sacrifice,

Girard emphasizes its role in the maintenance of the social order. The
circular and mimetic tendency of violence as vengeance can only be
curtailed with the murder of a surrogate victim, of which Oedipus is
an exemplary figure. Violence, for Girard, is a fluid phenomenon that
"moves from one object to another" and, unless it is checked, can de-
stroy an entire society through mimetic acts of vengeance. Justice sys-
tems have supplanted sacrifice only by institutionalizing vengeance;
therefore the "purity" of sacrificial violence has been completely lost
and "impure" violence festers beyond the facade of justice.39
"Sacrificial crisis" is, for Girard, the failure of ritual to organize dif-
ference in society. The unleashed violence of reciprocal killing is an
infectious crisis of mimesis, into which sacrificial violence constitutes
an inoculation of "difference." When the ritual can no longer contain
the spread of the infection and the reciprocity of judicial institutions
has been unmasked, sacrificial crisis emerges as a crisis of distinctions.
Girard points to classical tragedy as a paradigm of sacrificial crisis:
194 American Apocalypticism

The tragedians portray men and women caught up in a form

of violence too impersonal in its workings, too brutal in its
results, to allow any sort of value judgement, any sort of
distinction, subtle or simplistic, to be drawn between "good"
and "wicked" characters.... It is the act of reprisal, the
repetition of imitative acts of violence, that characterizes tragic
plotting.40
Certainly the Christian myth of the Crucifixion and its related ritual
of Communion serve as examples of "good" violence that is all but
lost in contemporary society. And although Girard can be accused of
an unacknowledged Christian orientation, his notion of sacrificial cri-
sis remains pertinent to the representation of death in contemporary
American film.41 From Intolerance to Platoon, the Christian mythol-
ogy of sacrifice has informed Hollywood melodrama.
It is Girard's theory of sacrificial crisis, rather than Bataille's the-
ory of sacrificial redemption, that has been invoked more often with
respect to American film of the 1970s.42 Girard's conception of "equi-
librium" derives from an analysis of the identity and doubling of the
antagonists in Greek tragedy, and from the superstitions regarding
twins and fraternal resemblance in primitive cultures. But it is equally
true that the American myth of "regeneration through violence" is
based in a structure of mimetic, reciprocal violence. Indeed, in Bon-
nie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch, the final eruption of violence i
not only a repetition of previous instantiations, but is motivated by
revenge; the cop, Hamer, taking revenge against Bonnie and Clyde
by assuming their violence for himself, and "the bunch" taking action
against Mapache for his violence against Angel. In fact, most of the
violence in contemporary American film is grounded in a cyclical,
repetitive schema of vengeance, epitomized perhaps in the Dirty
Harry, Cobra, Death Wish, and Lethal Weapon narratives in which
the hero-killers aspire to the enemy's capacity for violence. The end-
less regeneration of sequels to these movies indicates their ritualistic
impetus, and also the failure of the ritual to stem the tide of violence.
In Nashville, sacrificial crisis is directly linked with the failures of
the American political process and democratic institutions. Watergate
is explicitly invoked by the film's only nondiegetic song, "Trouble in
the U.S.A.," which accompanies Walker's limo and his entourage's
approach to the Parthenon. The Hal Phillip Walker "Replacement
 American Apocalypticism 195

Party" van babbles throughout the film about the crises of American
society. If the reprisal of moralistic nationalism during the Watergate
crisis was the transcendence of nationhood over its corporal debase-
ment, if "in the end it was the soul of the nation that suffered most
from the assaults of Watergate,"43 then it must be within a civil-reli-
gious context that the sacrifice of a surrogate victim is performed.
Although the final shooting comes suddenly in Nashville, it is fore
shadowed in several ways, including Lady Pearl's eulogies for "The
Kennedy Boys."44 The overt trajectory of the film is toward the ap-
pearance of Hal Phillip Walker, the "presence" behind the aggressive
Replacement campaign. Barbara Jean's death is therefore a double
displacement: it is the spectacle for which the audiences inside and
outside the film have been surreptitiously prepared, and if—as the
film's/Walker's opening words claim—no one can escape politics, it
is also the political assassination.
Girard is careful to distinguish between the fiction of tragedy and
the reality of history,45 and we too must distinguish between the killing
of the "kings" in the sixties—John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King,
and Robert Kennedy—and Altman's "poetic" gesture. In sacrificial cri-
sis, "pure" and "impure" violence can no longer be distinguished,
which, for Girard, means that ritual can no longer function indepen-
dently of history. "The difference between blood spilt for criminal
purposes and ritual purposes no longer holds" (p. 43). The theme of
assassination might therefore be understood as an attempt to restore
the ritual of sacrifice, an attempt to recover a "pure" violence. Sympto-
matic of its failure is the mimeticism inevitably attributed to it, exempli-
fied in the Hinckley case in which Ronald Reagan's would-be assas-
sin was reputedly inspired by Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Since Kenned
and Oswald in 1963, political assassination in America has been a reci-
procal form of violence, emblematic of "contagious, reciprocal violence
[that] spreads throughout the community" (p. 49). If Watergate can
be understood as a failure of ritual and the myth of the presidency, it
may be the real crisis alluded to by Girard. Altman, along with his
contemporaries, supplies the tragic, if ineffectual, response.46
In popular ("hyperdermic") communications theory, violence on
TV and in movies causes violence in the world. In this lack of dis-
tinction between the commodification of violence in the mass media
and its intensification outside representation, all violence is either
196 American Apocalypticism

caused or causing, involving all individuals in a "total system" of uni-

versal violence. Most psychosocial studies of the "effects" of screen
violence fail to distinguish between documented and fictional vio-
lence.47 In the literature on the effects of violence, the debate is be-
tween imitation and catharsis,48 which is simply a difference between
externalized and internalized mimesis. The repetitive replaying of tele-
vised violence—such as political assassinations, the Vietnam footage,
the exploding Challenger space shuttle in 1986, and the beating of
Rodney King in 1991—locates random and disordered violence within
the ritual of the nightly news.49 In endless repetitions, real violence
enters into a discourse of mimesis through the doubling of multiple
broadcast signals and media representations.
Girard claims that "if tragedy was to function as a sort of ritual,
something similar to a sacrificial killing had to be concealed in the dra-
matic and literary use of katharsis."50 Sacrificial crisis involves a dis
integration of catharsis into mimeticism. The ritual displacement of vi-
olence in sacrifice gives rise to a reciprocity that cannot differentiate
between the real and the representation, or the pure and the impure
functions of violence. In Nashville, this reciprocity that represses th
articulation of difference and distinction is present as a perverse or
extreme form of catharsis: the film's representation of spectatorship
ultimately embraces the film's own spectator.
The function of violence in ritual is, for Girard, the production of
the mythology of individual as victim; for Bataille, it is a transgression
of the mythology of individualism. What for Girard is the mimetic ten-
dency of violence in its reciprocity (vengeance narratives) and cathar-
tic forms is, for Bataille, an erotic transcendence of alienation. Narra-
tive mortality in Nashville allegorizes both aspects of sacrifice: the
eroticism of the spectacle and the failure of mythic violence to purify
the cultural order. Through the lack of mythic values in the rituals of
country music in Nashville, the film engages with the post-Watergat
lack of American faith in America. The final staged assassination effec-
tively replaces critical fragmentation with the simulacrum of unity,
which is both binding and erotic. In Altman's ironic mode, the sight
of death is a guilty, shared pleasure.
Violence in Nashville does not employ a pattern of vengeance, but
instead aspires to the random violence of terrorism and assassina-
tion. The staging of the violence and the nature of the victim point
 American Apocalypticism 197

directly to the practice of sacrifice as a social ritual enacted as a re-

sponse to social disintegration. While it is horrifying, it is also spec-
tacular, fully operative within the structure of scopophilic and narra-
tological desire that the film has set up. The crisis of Barbara Jean's
death is, moreover, couched in the terms of a discourse of the fam-
ily, in which her assassin emerges as the troubled son of the post-
Watergate, post-Vietnam, dysfunctional American family.
During Barbara Jean's last song, "My Idaho Home," at the Parthenon
(Nashville is referred to as the "Athens of the South"), Kenny un-
locks his violin case. A series of reverse shots between him in the
crowd and Barbara Jean (Ronnee Blakeley) on stage punctuates the
number. The shots of Barbara Jean move in to tighter close-ups, and
before she finishes the song a screen-size shot of the American flag
is inserted. When she finishes, she dedicates the song to "Momma
and Daddy," and Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) joins her onstage.
Over an extreme long shot of the stage, from an angle higher than
the crowd, the sound of a whizzing bullet is heard, followed quickly
by Barbara Jean sinking suddenly to the floor. Cut to a long shot of
Kenny in the crowd, firing his pistol several times in the direction of
the stage. After Private Kelly wrestles him to the ground, Barbara
Jean is already being carried off, most of her body obscured by the
men around her.
Kenny and Kelly, both bland young men in their twenties played
by (then) relatively unknown actors (i.e., not-stars), are most perfectly
equated as audience members (figure 12). Although these two char-
acters do not meet until the shooting, both have come to Nashville,
apparently, simply to watch. They are especially attracted to Barbara
Jean and Connie White — or, at least, Altman's reverse shots suggest
an erotic specular bond between these young men and the two icons
of femininity: the virginal Barbara Jean and the red-dressed, primp-
ing White. In other scenes of Nashville, particularly in the two paral
lel edited scenes of Sueleen's striptease and Tom's love song to four
women, the erotic potential of performance is subverted. Tom's vari-
ous women, and Sueleen as well, are represented as the victims of
their own self-deceit and of the male gaze.
Kenny and Kelly, however, are less developed as characters; situ-
ated among the masses of bland white faces at Opryland, at the Opry
Belle, and at the Parthenon, they are the generic desiring subjects on
198 American Apocalypticism

Fig. 12. Nashville: Kenny (David Hayward), Private Kelly (Scott Glenn), and Opal
(Geraldine Chaplin)—far right—with a bored audience at the Opry Belle. Public-
ity still courtesy of Cinematheque Quebecoise.

whom the commodification of Barbara Jean depends. All we know

of either character is their relations with their mothers. Barbara Jean
is the love object standing in for Private Kelly's mother, who "saved"
her. For Kenny, she stands in for a hated mother whom he argues
with, the mother who, it is implied in his brief telephone conversa-
tion, will not release him from her care. Kenny roams Nashville look-
 American Apocalypticism 199

ing for someone on whom to unleash the vengeance packed up in

his violin case. To the extent that he is doubled with Private Kelly,51
his oedipal crisis of a love-hate relationship to his mother is extended
to the traces of the Vietnam War—the vengeance of its servicemen
against American nationalism: a love-hate relationship to the mother
country.
The rhetoric of family unity underscores many of the film's key
songs, including "For the Sake of the Children," sung by Haven Hamil-
ton (Henry Gibson) at Opryland, and "My Idaho Home," which Bar-
bara Jean sings right before she is shot. The assumptions about famil-
ial security in these numbers are in blatant contradiction to the various
disintegrated families in the film. Martha/"L.A. Joan" disowns her
family from the moment she arrives in Nashville in favor of the larger,
nebulous family of country music. Kenny and Mr. Green (Martha's
uncle) arrive at the Parthenon rally directly from Mrs. Green's funeral,
which Martha fails to attend. The token nuclear family in the film is
a classic suburban time bomb of repression, adultery, and miscommu-
nication, epitomized in the father, Delmer, who cannot understand
his two deaf children's sign language.
The family of country music is represented as one in which ethnic
and racial difference is disavowed. The film's opening credit sequence
underlines the difference between American black music and Ameri-
can white music in the crosscutting between two studios, where Haven
Hamilton records an epic, patriotic, bicentennial dirge in one and a
choir-gowned black gospel group enthusiastically praises the Lord in
the other. Linnea's lily-white, weak-voiced presence among the rol-
licking gospel group reminds Opal of a woman missionary she met in
Kenya. Over the course of the film, Opal denounces the disabled (Lin-
nea's deaf children) as well as servants (Norman, the driver), and con-
stantly assumes class, cultural, and racial differences that no one in
the film except Wade, the black chef, addresses or acknowledges.
Tommy Brown, the black country singer whom Wade denounces
as "an Oreo cookie," epitomizes the dissolution of cultural difference.
(Wade is headed for Detroit, where the integrity of black music is
supposedly secure in the form of Motown.) In other words, what is
at issue here is not racism and discrimination but the sterile homoge-
nization of American culture. In keeping with Hal Phillip Walker's first
words of the film, that "no one escapes politics," the various singers
200 American Apocalypticism

are assembled at the Parthenon through their ignorance of govern-

mental politics. None of them endorses the candidate, but they agree
to perform for reasons of self-promotion, within the polemics of show-
business politics. In Nashville, there is no category of "the Other"
except for the relation between spectator and spectacle. In Haven
Hamilton's rhetoric, long hair, rock and roll, and death simply "don't
belong in Nashville."
Sexual difference, however, remains in place as a dominant cul-
tural code, institutionalized in the fetish of the spectacle. Kenny's ac-
tion is psychologically motivated by the eroticization of the mother
figure of Barbara Jean, the oedipal threat that the down-home lyrics
of "My Idaho Home" finally fail to contain. When Barbara Jean is shot,
her long white dress is stained with blood: the color scheme makes
it that much more spectacular. If the virgin and the lamb are sacred
precisely because they are defenseless and incapable of revenge, Bar-
bara Jean's stain marks her as a sacred victim. And yet Girard claims
that the taboo against menstrual blood in primitive societies is symp-
tomatic of the fear of cyclical violence. In the sacrificial ritual, blood
is contained and controlled (placed in a chalice) and prevented from
running wild. The fear of sexual violence represented by menstrual
blood suggests to Girard "some half-suppressed desire to place the
blame for all forms of violence on women."52 Haven's white cowboy
outfit is also stained with Barbara Jean's blood, indicating the un-
checked flow of her bloody wound. In other words, she looks like
the sacrificial victim, dressed like a bride in a false couple beside
Haven, but her death is the apogee of impure violence, marked by
repetition and mimesis, and ensuring further violence.
Given the cruel exploitation of women that goes on in the film—
Linnea's, Sueleen's, and Mary's especially—Barbara Jean's death points
to the patriarchal structure of the music industry and "show busi-
ness" in general. As Catherine Clement observes, "All the women of
opera die a death prepared for them by a slow plot, woven by furtive
fleeting heros, up to their glorious moment: a sung death."53 Barbara
Jean's death fulfills the promise of her collapse in the opening scene,
and also, insofar as she is pushed into her performances by her ma-
nipulative manager-husband Barnett, it is an "answer" to the men
who con Sueleen into performing a striptease. Sueleen's misguided
ambition to be a singer is in fact wholly motivated by her worship of
 American Apocalypticism 201

Barbara Jean. To many of the characters in Nashville, Barbara Jean is

a sacred being, an icon of American wholesomeness, and (echoing
the mythic Judy Garland) she inevitably crumbles under the pressure
of fulfilling such expectations. Her appeal to the mother-frustrated
Kenny and Kelly further entraps her in an oedipal mythos of purity,
so that her collapse under the phallic thrust of a pistol is also a rape
of the inviolable mother.
The woman as spectacle and sacrificial victim dies, like Carmen,
for the spectator whose complicity with the murderer is bound up in
the desire for her "otherness" to remain other, separate: on the stage
and on the screen.54 If the structure of the folk musical typically breaks
down the distinction between spectator and performer in the inter-
ests of a "total" community, Altman gives this larger familial configu-
ration an oedipal dimension. "Producer and consumer [of music] are
not separated by a proscenium, they are part of the same family,"55
but the individuating audience shots that mark every performance in
Nashville culminate in the son's violence against his parents. The
"crisis of distinctions" from which the violence erupts exists not only
in the enforced homogeneity of the country-music "family," but from
the unrelenting mimesis of the film's representational strategies, which
continually conflate audiences in the film with the audience of the
film.
It is this self-referential aspect of Nashville that enables it to be
read as more than an example of sacrificial crisis, but also as an alle-
gory of narrative mortality that articulates the limits and boundaries
of narrative realism. Girard's notion of ritual enables us to address
Nashville as a cultural ritual that understands itself quite consciously
as such. Altman's irony lies in the knowledge of sacrificial crisis; the
recognition that American ideology is a civil religion without a sacred
character precisely because it cannot organize racial, ethnic, or sex-
ual difference, or contain the violence with which it is preoccupied.
The film is likewise wrapped up in its own realist aesthetic, presented
as an attraction, a spectacle as empty as that within the film, equally
incapable of breaking out of the apparatus of entertainment.
In keeping with the violent conclusions of Bonnie and Clyde and
The Wild Bunch, Nashville also channels the revelatory potential an
sacred power of apocalypse into the spectacle itself. As a film about
show business, it seriously questions the politics of image production,
202 American Apocalypticism

stardom, and industries of appearances, but fails to step outside the

society of the spectacle. Indeed, the film's real crisis pertains to this im-
possibility. The desire for spectacle survives and is perhaps regener-
ated, the crowd having got a little more than it bargained for at the
Parthenon that afternoon, and the audience of Nashville receiving a
sense of closure—or at least an explanation for Kenny's presence in
the film—and an explanation for the spectacle of the film itself. Dis-
placing the categories of desire and the mythic archetypes represented
by the open frontier or the romantic couple, the show, in Nashville,
"goes on." The mythic Other that is supplied by this spectacle of vio-
lence is the phenomenological other of the stage and the screen.56
In its opening credit sequence, Nashville announces its participa-
tion in consumer capitalism by introducing its stars in the manner of
a cheap TV record commercial. It sells itself precisely by collapsing the
difference between the actors and the "stars" they portray. Within
the narrative, the differences between the political campaign and the
entertainment spectacular, between politician and star, are diminished.
The viewer is in a sense the victim of this process of matching; in
the end, there is no one to blame, nor any lesson to have learned,
merely the satisfaction of seeing Kenny do what it is he had to do.
One of the most critical aspects of the Nixon period from the per-
spective of civil religion was that "the public tended to look upon
the Watergate scene in terms of bemused spectators watching a game
in process."57 As Thomas Elsaesser puts it, in Nashville "the spectacle
consumes the spectator in the end,"58 and the revolutionary moment—
the potential of catastrophe—becomes the revolutions of repetition:
a restoration of myth.
A key implication of Girard's theory is that repetition and homo-
geneity are the price of pacifism. This is the bleakness of Altman's
Nashville, its reduction of social choices to violence and nondifferen
tiation. The only valid distinction in Nashville is that between specta
tor and spectacle, a relation that is articulated as a structure of pas-
sivity, out of which Kenny's gesture erupts. Although its revisionist
practice involves the articulation of difference, disharmony, and con-
tradiction within the context of "the musical," the representation of
the audience in Nashville is homogeneous and undifferentiated.
The final Parthenon scene begins with a TV broadcast, from which
 American Apocalypticism 203

Altman's camera slowly pulls back to reveal a monitor on a picnic

table at the scene. The announcer's voice-over about Walker contin-
ues over nontelevisual shots of the preparation of the Parthenon.
The temporary identification of Altman's discourse with that of the
TV (which is, of course, as fictional as the film in which it is con-
tained) underlines the status of the film and its audience as equally
culpable participants in the politics of the spectacle. There is no dif-
ference, no "moral" difference, between the production of the spec-
tacle within the film and of the film itself; NashvilWs audience watche
the same thing as the audiences, real and implied (e.g., the TV audi-
ence), within Nashville.
In the aftermath of the violence, Albuquerque, the aspiring singer
(Barbara Harris), sings "It Don't Worry Me" with the gospel choir, a
song that has been heard in fragments periodically throughout the
film. The lyrics—"I don't care if I ain't free; It don't worry me / They
say that life's a one-way street but it don't worry me" — are a per-
verse spiritual and an anthem to apathy. The crowd of mostly white
families, happy to have something to watch, sway to the rhythm and
the camera pans up, past the screen-size flag, to the sky. Before it
does, a quick camera movement is inserted, which follows a female
security guard wearing dark glasses moving through the crowd. It is
an ominous and disconcerting shot, suggesting a fascistic underside
to the passive, homogeneous Nashville crowd.
The very last shot of the film, a tilt up from a long shot of the
Parthenon hung with red, white, and blue iconography to the sky, is
not unlike those unbroken shots of sea and sky that Godard employs.
The emptying out of the image has, in this case, a slightly different ef-
fect, however. As a loss of the spectacle of performance, the last trace
of differentiation is diminished—that between spectator and specta-
cle. The passive gaze of the viewer, which has met its mirror image
several times in the course of the film, finally encounters the giant
gap of an empty sky.
Although the "awesome machinery of ritual" does contain the spec-
tacle of violence, insofar as the show does go on, order is restored,
and the crowd is pacified, the mythic content of the ritual is impossi-
ble to realize. The family of America is represented as a consuming
"mass" in which sexual and racial differences are radically suppressed.
204 American Apocalypticism

Haven Hamilton's claim that "this doesn't happen in Nashville" is

clearly a pathetic attempt to restore an ideological facade over the
explosion of contradiction and disharmony. In NashvilWs apocalyp-
tic ending, the nonviability of either the mythic harmony of the fam-
ily or the salvation of fidelity is registered. And yet a simple ideolog-
ical reading can go only so far in explaining the function of death in
the film. Ideological contradictions remain unaddressed, restricted to
Opal's obsessive muttering, and the reconstitution of the spectacle
and the show is unhampered by blood. The film has been criticized
for Altman's failure to take a position on the "issues" raised by the
narrative and for the ideological complicity of his unrelenting realist
style.59 But it is precisely this realism, continuous even through the
unstylized representation of death, that produces an allegory of the-
atrical ritual.
The teleology of the musical putting on of the "show" becomes a
discourse of fatalism through the social experience and recent mem-
ory of political assassination. At one point, Opal offers a "theory of
assassination," which is that "people who carry guns are the real as-
sassins. They stimulate other people who are perhaps innocent, but
who pull the trigger." In keeping with Opal's theory, Kenny emerges
as much a victim as does Barbara Jean. After the shooting, their bod-
ies are carried off the scene in a short series of matched shots, both
splayed with arms outstretched in Christ-like postures. Barbara Jean's
death ties up all the narrative threads of Nashville by virtue of the
presence of all the characters at the scene of the crime. Triplette's ef-
forts to assemble all the singers in the film for Walker's rally consti-
tutes the film's major connective story line. What we believed was
an epic text is suddenly dramatic, in terms that are less Brecht's than
Barthes's:
Disclosure is then the final stroke by which the initial
"probable" shifts to the "necessary": the game is ended, the
drama has its denouement, the subject correctly "predicated"
(fixed) ... what is shown is shown in one stroke, and at the
end: it is the end which is shown.60

Narrative mortality is produced as the allegory of "the show" of

American cultural homogeneity. It is allegory rather than critique be-
cause the extensive mortification of social values and public institu-
 American Apocalypticism 205

tions remains within a circuit of realist image production in which the

myth of the real is never really lost. The impotence of cultural criti-
cism within a realist mode is itself allegorized within the film's morti-
fication of entertainment. Barbara Jean's death is the final stroke in
the film's demystification of the Hollywood musical. The movement
of the narrative toward the grand finale of the political rally at the
Parthenon emulates "the type of unifying finale which has character-
ized the folk musical ever since Oklahoma.1"61 However, if the domi-
nant myths of the musical are those of romance, familial and national
unity, and the ease with which an ideal world can be realized from
the contradictory world of work and social differences, in Nashville
every relationship is irrevocably fraught with contradiction and dishar-
mony. This discursive tension is then radically subverted by the nar-
rative strategies deployed to achieve a closing image of startling uni-
fication and frightening homogeneity.
The attempt to address violence and its representation is extremely
difficult within a realist cinematic mode. Any representation is in-
evitably a contribution to the mimetic circuit that violence has in-
scribed in American culture. If "the mimetic attributes of violence are
extraordinary,"62 the ultimate sacrifice would be the image itself, but
while representations of death often involve a dissolution of realism
through such techniques as spatial fragmentation and temporal retar-
dation, the image is ultimately "saved" by the very theme of death.
The paradox implied in the Bazinian "myth of total cinema" is sus-
tained through violence; Cawelti's "moral necessity" is displaced onto
the image itself. The regeneration of the image after the sacrifice may
be a restoration of "order" — a curtailment of the potential spread of
violence—but it is also a resurrection of the binding principle of
death, and the metaphoric, mimetic pleasure of narrative closure.
The transgressive potential of Bataille's theory of sacrifice is al-
luded to in the shock of the event, and yet it cannot be realized in the
commodified form of narrative realism. Barbara Jean's violent death
closes the story of a "good film," a performance of sacrifice, a the-
atrical gesture of meaningful meaninglessness. Narrative mortality is
the allegory of a desire for sacrificial purification, the shocking dis-
covery that this is the death that was wanted all along, but also the
knowledge that such an act cannot be merely a performance but must
also be part of history. The final shots of the film, the Saturday after-
206 American Apocalypticism

noon audience, restore the sign of history in an abrupt shift to a doc-

umentary mode. It is only because the death has been theatrical but
not excessive (the special effects of Bonnie and Clyde and The Wil
Bunch are conspicuously absent) that this shift to the "historical" au-
dience is possible. The spectacle of death is effectively framed within
a total system of consumption, which is characterized as a homoge-
neous "mass" that swallows the film's own spectator.
Even the eroticism of sacrifice is nullified within the system of
commodified ritual. The dialectic of "continuity" and "discontinuity,"
which Bataille identifies in ritual sacrifice, is given over entirely to
the ongoing facade of "the show must go on." The political transfor-
mation that Hal Phillip Walker has called for is, of course, never go-
ing to take place—in his populist terms or any other. The "realistic"
representation of violence in Nashville co-opts narrative mortality
within the codes of performance instrumental to the maintenance of
the entertainment industry. The gender codes, as we have seen, also
inscribe the death within the institution of the oedipal family, refig-
uring political violence as domestic violence.
In contrast, in The Wild Bunch, in which violence becomes a form
of writing, an inscription of excess within a sacrificial mode, the ne-
cessity of historical change is implied. (The violence of that massacre
is also "staged" insofar as the heroes shoot from Mapache's "podium"
into the audience of the village.) Its eroticism contains the shock
necessary for historical imagination, even if the film's Utopian ideation
is in turn mystified as revolutionary heroism. The spectacular depar-
ture from realism at the end of Bonnie and Clyde offers no spectato-
rial position other than empathetic identification with the dying char-
acters. The "shock" of discontinuity is thereby entirely closed off by
coherent subjectivity, limiting the film's historical discourse to end-
less repetition. Although Nashville also succumbs to repetition and
homogeneity, history is not mystified but visibly "emptied" through
the event of sacrificial crisis. The blue sky at the end is "not the blue
sky at the end of the Wizard o/Oz";63 it has no Utopian dimension,
nor any critical perspective, but simply drains the spectacle of the
residue of violence.
In Nashville, the sacred character of sacrifice is mortified in a nar-
rative in which death as closure becomes a spectacle in and for it-
self. The erotic power of sacrifice is alluded to on several levels, but
 American Apocalypticism 207

the film is only an allegory of transgressive desire, fully conscious of

the limits of Hollywood realism and the society of the spectacle. Bar-
bara Jean's death cannot be rationalized and Kenny's action is un-
premeditated, and yet it fulfills the viewers' expectation of spectacle—
collapsing performance, assassination, and political discourse onto a
single falling body. As such it suggests that the narrative teleology is
itself a "ruin" of a lost myth of closure, an arbitrary adherence to a
convention of desire. Girard's claim that a desire for violence in and
for itself informs such a myth seems to be borne out by Nashville:

The notion of an instinct (or if one prefers, an impulse) that

propels men toward violence or death — Freud's famous
"death wish" — is no more than a last surrender to
mythological thinking, a final manifestation of that ancient
belief that human violence can be attributed to some outside
influence—to gods, to fate, to some force men can hardly be
expected to control.64

Perhaps the random violence of terrorism and assassination, like the

car accident, is an uncontrollable, infectious disease of violence that
the enactment of ritual sacrifice can only reduplicate. Jean Baudrillard
claims that "we live in a situation where cataclysm never occurs. We
live in a situation of only virtual catastrophes which are eternally vir-
tual."65 Apocalypse, in other words, has been mystified in sacrificial
crisis, and is rendered impotent. In postmodern culture, the vision-
ary dimension of apocalypse reveals nothing but its own status; and
this is its catastrophe. The Utopian potential of narrative mortality is
to grasp this catastrophe as a passage, a bridge or threshold onto an-
other history, one in which memory serves as the guarantee of trans-
formation and temporal difference.
It may be that Nashville goes as far in this direction as it is possi-
ble for a Hollywood film to go; that is, the dialectic of memory and
desire, loss and expectation, upon which narrative mortality depends,
can only take place in the cinema with an allegorical treatment of
the image itself. Although in Nashville many of the actors and ac-
tresses write their "own" songs, the distinction between actor and
character is by this means further blurred and not—as in Wenders's
and Godard's use of performance—incorporated as a discursive frag-
mentation. Although the star system is in a sense allegorized by stars
208 American Apocalypticism

"playing" stars, the industrial apparatus that such a system supports

is actually reinforced. The visionary impetus of Benjamin's "dialecti-
cal images" depends on a mortification of the symbolic desires on
which visual pleasure feeds. What we have seen in the three films
discussed here is a refusal to forego such pleasure and a consequent
compromise of apocalyptic vision. With nothing really lost after all,
there is nothing to redeem.
CONCLUSION

THE SENSELESSNESS
OF ENDING

I know the delirium of mourning. When the dead one with all its gigantic
body invades the heart of the one left alive, a savage explosion drives
the living to obliterate all limits, in a dangerous intoxication.
— CATHERINE CLEMENT1

M and water, blue expanses broken only by a horizon or a cloud

any of the films discussed in this book end with images of sky

(Le Mepris, Pierrot lefou, Lightning Over Water, Nashville). Visibil

itself is stripped to its most essential form of seeing, and yet there is
nothing to be seen. If "nothing" is the threat of death, it is also the
potential of narrative to create a void, a desire for meaning. In the
empty image of sea, sky, or both, nature provides the background
for a historiography of catastrophe in which nothing and everything
happens. Natural history is, for Benjamin, a history of decay and
transience, privileging the present moment as being always at the
limit of history. The film spectator, who is left with a closing image of
emptiness and perceives it as a ruin of visibility, may therefore "see"

209
210 Conclusion

the condition of the cinema, and also the condition of historical

imagination.
These allegories of eternity demonstrate the impossibility of rep-
resenting eternity, and they do so through a radical form of address.
Insofar as the frame is empty, without being blank, point of view is
made redundant. The last shot of Night Moves (Penn, 1975) is an ex
treme high angle of a boat in which the protagonist is left to die
turning slow circles on a blue ocean; the name on the back of the
boat is "Point of View." The otherness of the screen and the specta-
cle returns the gaze as a reflection of the projector beam, so that the
loss of the image and the lost transparency of the image are redeemed
in an intersubjectivity of looks. Although this formulation, drawn from
Benjamin, may have mystical overtones, it is also true that the "look"
produced by these images exists in a present tense. The allegorical
representation of history is grounded in an experience of the pre-
sent because it is only possible to imagine the history of the future
on the blank screen of eternity.
Despite the intertextual fragmentation of these films, their discourse
of history may be more properly modernist; it becomes "postmod-
ern" through the mortifying gaze of allegory. Fredric Jameson notes
that the allegorical method "is very much what is demanded and mobi-
lized by the periodizing schema of the modernism/postmodernism
break as such."2 The break between the modern and the postmod-
ern may, in other words, be accomplished through allegorized read-
ing, rather than any formal properties of the text. It is, moreover, really
more of a fracture than a break. Narrative mortality becomes increas-
ingly irrelevant as an interpretive structure in films like Godard's King
Lear (1987), a film that "shoots itself in the back," or Atom Egoyan's
Family Viewing, which shoots itself in the living room.
Frank Kermode claims that "the sense of an ending" is "endemic
to what we call modernism," as is the perception of historical time
as "eternal transition, perpetual crisis."3 Now that another fin de sie-
cle is upon us, we need to apprehend the limits of modernism. As
mortality has become a virtual function of representation, violence
in contemporary culture has become disturbingly banal. Apocalypse
has been rendered boring through repetition, and in the age of AIDS
apocalyptic fantasies have given way to a more politicized view of
mortality, as in Derek Jarman's Edward II (1991). The cynical appre-
 Conclusion 211

hension of narrative mortality is epitomized in films such as Tetsuo

(Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989) and The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980), film
that sustain their ironic and apocalyptic discourses from start to fin-
ish, ending at fairly arbitrary points of narrative exhaustion. Closure is
completely robbed in this postmodern cinema of both imminence and
immanence.
The films with which this book is concerned contain the indices
of sacrificial crisis, but they cannot be characterized as either mod-
ern or postmodern. They might be said to occupy a certain threshold
between modernist desire and its postmodern annihilation. Although
they may be open to various postmodern readings, narrative mortal-
ity persists as the trace and limits of modernism within the postmod-
ern. As Benjamin puts it,
Once modernism has received its due, its time has run out.
Then it will be put to the test. After its end it will become
apparent whether it will ever be able to become antiquity.4

Benjamin's fascination with the limits of modernism was a relentless

effort to conceive the present as historical, and to conceive the future
neither as "progress" nor as Utopian, but as the obverse side of mem-
ory, as a space of desire and imagination. The reading of these films
as allegories of narrative mortality may be described as an attempt to
redeem the historiography of modernist film practice. At the same
time, it is evident that the filmmakers themselves—Lang, Oshima, Go-
dard, Wenders, and Altman—locate themselves at the limits of vari-
ous modernisms. Beyond these limits, narrative mortality is still legi-
ble in postmodern cinema, though in significantly altered forms.

The Consumption of Transgression

Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990) and The Cook, the Thief, His W
and Her Lover(Peter Greenaway, 1989), made more than twenty years
after the bloody ballets and tableaux of Vietnam-era cinema, sug-
gest that history in postmodern crisis cinema has become a discourse
of decay and decadence, which the aesthetic practice of auteurs
such as Greenaway and Lynch is designed to purify. A comparison of
these two films with Weekend (Godard, 1968) will indicate how nar
rative mortality appears within the postmodern aesthetic of excess. In
212 Conclusion

Wild at Heart, Sailor and Lulu come across a wounded girl in a still-
smoldering car accident who is more concerned about her lost pocket-
book and credit cards than her dead boyfriend and bloody head. In
Weekend, Corinne emerges from a car wreck screaming "Help! My
Hermes bag!" Perhaps this intertextual motif is an incidental point of
contact between two films that might seem to have very little in com-
mon. Where Godard's film ends with the titles "End of Story/End of
Cinema," Lynch's ends with a deus ex machina of redemption. And
yet both are road movies featuring multiple fire and car accidents,
both are about a couple, a dead father and a bad mother, and both
narratives are constantly interrupted by stories and corpses. The Cook,
the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is divided, like Weekend, into danarratives are constantly interrupted by stories and corpses. The Cook,ys
of the week and (like the 1967 film) shifts to the French Revolution
for its codification of time. It also shares with Weekend a cannibalis-
tic ending and an anti-Hollywood ambition.5 Historical discourses
figure quite critically in both Wild at Heart and The Cook, the Thief,
but there is a sense in which violent excess and spectacular death
are closely linked to a failure of narrative to redeem history.
The respectively cold and hot performances of The Cook, the
Thief and Wild at Heart are highly stylized. And yet both these films
are centered around a core of believability, a sign of authenticity an-
choring all of their respective excesses, in the discourse of romance
and true love. Both Greenaway and Lynch are engaged in a resancti-
fication of decadent and debased worlds, Greenaway through the
iconography of the garden and the ritual of Communion, Lynch resort-
ing to a melange of Elvis and the Wizard of Oz, an American iconog-
raphy of pleasure and resurrection. In both cases, this truth-value is
eroticized, its indubitability ironically guaranteed by its invisibility.
The bodies of the lovers in both films are the harbors of goodness;
and intercourse in secret, secluded spaces is the only escape from the
evil of their unbearable, inhospitable worlds.
Historical references in The Cook, the Thief operate on so man
levels that they are reduced to an accumulation of signifiers with little
allegorical potential. If the library contains the traces of the French Rev-
olution, the parking lot is Margaret Thatcher's England. A seventeenth-
century Dutch painting of bourgeois mastery hangs over the dining
room, and on yet another textual axis is a characterological figura-
 Conclusion 213

tion of the French Revolution. The history of the European bour-

geoisie is thus alluded to in a virtually random fashion. The dispos-
sessed kitchen staff may be liberated from their feudal existence at the
end of the film, and yet Albert's death is brought about not by revo-
lution but by an act of vengeance drawn from seventeenth-century
English drama. Greenaway's refusal to distinguish between bourgeois
greed and the historical terror performed against it is symptomatic of
his allegorical technique, in which history becomes discursive style.
The ideological significance of the Girondist and Jacobin periods of
the French Revolution loses its impetus when they are collapsed into
a single character (Alfred). Greenaway's purpose may be to reinvest
the ruins of history with new meaning, which is indeed the potential
of Benjaminian allegory, and yet the effect is a redemption of bour-
geois cultural consumption and mastery.
Greenaway is, in Benjamin's words, "at home in the fall." The Coo
the Thief'avoids the existential anxiety and nostalgia of modernist art
cinema and, despite the reflexivity, there is no crisis of representation.
The crisis is, rather, one of aesthetics. The "hell" that is depicted in
The Cook, the Thief'is not the void that lies beyond representatio
because this "void" is filled by the aesthetics of consumption; the
signified "content" of romantic love and good taste is preserved in
the fetish of the lover's corpse. Michael's body, as it is finally glazed
and garnished by the cook, is revealed in a close-up lateral tracking
shot, not unlike those that have displayed the laden tables of culi-
nary materials and products throughout the film.
The lover's body is a metaphor for the body of the film; an objet
d'art prepared by a master craftsman.6 In the process of remystifying
a debased culture, Georgina's feminist vengeance is displaced onto
Michael's prairie oysters: the male genitals perched cockily atop the
corpse like a flag. The male body is finally raised to the status of those
beautiful women's and children's bodies that Albert has so cruelly dis-
figured and symbolically castrated. Although the narrative structure
of The Cook, the Thief takes the form of apocalypse, its alliance of p
rification and aestheticization redeems the transient body of history
with the aura of art. The scatological is cleansed with the pleasures
of the erotic body, the mortal flesh itself is redeemed as good taste,
and the Rights of Man are given visual and carnal representation.
214 Conclusion

The body of the film, like the body of the lover, is a "cooked" im-
age, one prepared and served up for the purpose of visual consump-
tion, a signifier of desire that is indeed inaccessible because it is only
the look of death: like the black food that Richard (the cook) serves,
it is not death itself. And yet we are left again on the verge of alle-
gory because this ironic consciousness is ultimately lost to the ritual
of film narrative, the desired image of the desired end. For Bataille, the
erotic importance of beauty is its befoulment, and the power of death
is its ugliness, a power of which it is robbed in the final moments of
The Cook, the Thief. Greenaway, like the cook, has made death sa
for visual consumption by transforming mortal flesh into a sacrament
of moral justice, and, given the film's sumptuous production values,
he has indeed charged a lot for it. The image of sacrifice in this film
has the effect of closing history off from that which cannot be repre-
sented, which for Girard is the sacred, and for Benjamin the theolog-
ical and the difference of historical change.
Connie's pleasure in eating her husband in the final shots of Week-
end suggests that the ritual of cannibalism has caused that film's vio-
lence to be reappropriated by bourgeois culture and the aesthetics
of "good taste." The film itself, however, remains a "bad" film, in bad
taste, transgressing the conventions of visual consumption. Transgres-
sion, of course, often only confirms the social codes that are broken,
and ritual sacrifice is the institutionalization of such transgression. But
Bataille's transgression, or the properly surrealist dynamic,7 involves
the eroticization of death, the pleasure of murder, and it is this po-
tential that is subversively linked with Third World revolution in
Weekend. The film itself is only an allegory of pleasure and desire,
of which the conflagrations of smashed cars are the signifiers. The
body of the film itself, signified by the rabbit, whose lifeless eye re-
turns our gaze as fixedly as those of the immigrant laborers, is the
auteur's sacrifice and signature of historical transformation.
The closure of representation is also the theological force inform-
ing Wild at Heart, although here it is American popular culture that
is redeemed from a hell ruled by a monstrous mother. Death in Wild
at Heart is not in itself allegorical, for it is inscribed quite securely
within an ideology of failure. It only happens to other people, which,
in Wild at Heart, includes a black man, a number of anonymous
strangers, Johnnie the incompetent detective, Lulu's cuckolded father,
 Conclusion 215

and the very bad Willem Defoe character, Bobby Peru. Sailor's re-
demption at the end of the film by the good (white) witch is more
fully allegorical, especially when he incarnates Elvis's immortality,
singing "Love Me Tender" on the hood of Lulu's car. The iconographic
artifice of Wild at Heart, epitomized in Sailor's repeated comment
about his snakeskin jacket and its representation of his identity,
involves a redemption of signification and a recovery of meaning.
Sailor's "identity" is finally secured through the mythology of family
romance.8
Lynch is also preoccupied with forcing the viewer to look at trans-
gressive imagery of the body, from grotesque deformities and acci-
dent victims to vomit and disabilities, symptoms of the "hell" in which
Sailor and Lulu find themselves. The discourse of the grotesque
reaches its climax in Wild at Heart with the death of Bobby Peru,
and yet the decapitation and amputation of this scene is "contained"
within the generic conventions of the splatter film. Tania Modleski
has argued that the "terror of pleasure" fundamental to the horror film
may constitute an "other" aesthetic in postmodern culture. She sug-
gests that "perhaps the contemporary artist continues to be subver-
sive by being nonadversarial in the modernist sense, and has re-
turned to our pop cultural past partly in order to explore the site
where pleasure was last observed."9 Certainly this return is accom-
plished in Wild at Heart, with the effect of transforming crisis into
an aesthetic of excess, but is this recovery of pleasure really worth
the price?
Modleski evokes the terms of Benjaminian allegory, and yet where
she, like Benjamin, is concerned with historical difference and the
potential of postmodernism to break quite radically with the cultural
assumptions of modernism, Wild at Heart fails to realize this poten-
tial because of its cultural affirmation and closure of history. The work
of the text blurs the distinction between "classic" American popular
culture and the 1990s on all levels. From cars and costume to rock
music, the difference between the 1950s and the 1990s is lost to the
universalizing discourse of Americana. If the radical potential of alle-
gory is the inscription of history in the ruins of signification, these
ruins become the foundation in Wild at Heart for a mystification of
American cultural history. The representation of death and violence
does not open up representation onto the void of the future, or mark
216 Conclusion

the limits of representation, but becomes the signifier of a weirdness

that the film manages to bring under control through a discourse of
belief.10
In Weekend, car accidents and traffic jams are signifiers of the ru-
ins of desire in commodity culture, and the trajectory of the film is
toward the preautomotive realm of nature for a redemption of his-
torical desire. The traffic jam at the end of Wild at Heart is a symbolic
desire for progress in a stagnant culture, and Sailor and Lulu fulfill
this desire through an allegory of resurrection. Their romantic re-
union—with child—is a transcendence of the stagnation. If the film's
trajectory is toward Los Angeles, it is a Western in which the moral-
ity of the wilderness has been fully eclipsed by the civilizing force of
the nuclear family.
In their capitulation to resurrection, both Wild at Heart and The
Cook, the Thief fail to realize the historical potential of allegory. Th
allegories of these films "fill out and deny the void in which they are
represented, just as, ultimately, the intention does not faithfully leap
forward to the idea of resurrection."11 Neither Lynch nor Greenaway
can allow allegory to go away "empty-handed" either. Evil in Ben-
jamin's Trauerspiel "means precisely the non-existence of what it
presents ... evil as such reveals itself to be a subjective phenome-
non,"12 but in these films evil remains a necessary characteristic of
worlds rife with class and racial tensions. Class and race may not
themselves be demonized, but they are key characteristics of the hell-
ish worlds within which white bourgeois couples can take on the aura
of transcendence.
Perhaps what neither Lynch nor Greenaway fully appreciates is
the effect of narrativity and its powers of closure on their allegorical,
painterly imagery. Despite the historical regression and bodily trans-
formation that takes place in their work, neither one is able to reach
back to the prehistoric of the profilmic material. Their refusal to vio-
late representation to this extent constitutes a closure of history and
cinema within the limits of the visible and knowable. Their allegorical
stylistics inscribe a desire to transgress these limits, but the body of
the film itself will not be sacrificed. In both the European and the
American contexts, it may be authorship itself that is being preserved
from the threat of history. The discourse of gender in the two films
suggests that the crisis at hand is one of male mastery, and the ab-
 Conclusion 217

straction of belief that the narratives strive to salvage from the ruins
of representation is, on some level, a belief in patriarchy.
In the end, their transgressive imagery is not so different from the
excessive violence of Bonnie and Clyde or The Wild Bunch, still con
tained within the limits of a spectacle that is now disguised as the
aesthetic, auteurist production of images. For both directors the body
is the site of transience, semiosis, and transformation, and the most
potent symptoms of decay are Lynch's flies on vomit and Green-
away's maggot-ridden meat. And yet the body is also eroticized, the
decay corrected, and historical temporality closed off in the symbol-
ization of transcendence, resurrection, and immortality. This is also
true of Penn's and Peckinpah's genre revisionism, in which myths of
romance and nostalgia are inseparable from the spectacular bodies
of actors and actresses: the repressed homoeroticism of The Wild
Bunch and the destiny of the couple in Bonnie and Clyde are only
realized in the fantastic and violent destruction of those bodies. The
discourses of historical Utopia in the earlier films have, however, de-
cayed into the ruins of theatrical settings for narratives of redemp-
tion in the late 1980s, and are thereby quite incapable of being them-
selves redeemed.
At the "end of cinema" in 1967 Godard offers a demonstration
that the historiographic potential of cinematic allegory depends on
the temporal relation between the filmic discourse and that which
was filmed. Of course cinema had to continue to be made, and
while Godard has continued to work more or less within this histori-
cal dialectic, as have other filmmakers, one finds in the films of Lynch
and Greenaway a capitulation of transgression to transcendence. In
this respect, they perpetuate the desperate auteurism of Wim Wenders,
without his preoccupation with film history and ontology. Weekend
may be a dead film, insofar as its political rhetoric is a somewhat
naive appreciation of postcolonial culture, and yet its use of violence
is in the service of a historiography that, in Benjamin's terms, con-
ceives the present tense as the death of the past.

Fin de Millennium Dystopias

In the mid 1990s, the body counts of contemporary cinema seem to
be on the rise, on a number of a different fronts. The increased pop-
218 Conclusion

ularity of Hong Kong cinema in North America indicates an expand-

ing international market for highly stylized violence predicated on
thin narrative premises. The proliferation of martial arts and action-
hero films and TV series have spawned renewed debates about media
violence. On the margins of these developments, a number of inde-
pendent filmmakers have produced dystopian responses to the excess
of social and media violence. Ostensible critiques of the macho cul-
ture of violence, these films challenge the spectator to participate in
sadomasochistic viewing experiences, with varying degrees of suc-
cess in distancing themselves from the exploitation with which they
flirt.13 The "end of the cold war" and accompanying proclamations
of the "end of history" at the end of the century have brought renewed
significance to questions of terminality, closure, and narrative mor-
tality, both in Europe and North America. Both continents have wit-
nessed extreme racial and ethnic violence erupt in the context of the
New World Order declared in the aftermath of communism.
Two of the recent "ultraviolent" films merit consideration as indi-
cations of yet another development of narrative mortality as a politics
of representation.14 Less consumable than the films of either Green-
away or Lynch, C'est arrive pres de chez vous (Remy Belvaux, Andr
Bonzel, and Benoit Peolvoorde, 1991—Man Bites Dog is the Englis
release title) and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughto
1986, released 1990) explore psychotic personalities in realist styles
that are evocative of the documentary impetus of the New Wave cin-
emas. They are, however, entirely fictional. Stripped of any allegori-
cal sense of history, they rework narrative mortality as an infinite
present tense.
In fausse-verite style, Ben, the psycho hero of Man Bites Dog, talk
incessantly to the camera, explaining the techniques of serial killing
and boasting arrogantly about his atrocities. Benoit Peolvoorde's vir-
tuoso performance and the film's mastery of direct cinema conventions
lends the violence a surreal quality.15 In black and white, the blood
and gore are easily accommodated into the "everyday" reality of
Ben's suburban existence. However, as the nonlinear structure of the
film moves from one setting to another with little motivation, the mur-
ders are often emphasized by violent cutting. The shock effect of the
random killing consistently interrupts the banal suburban reality,
 Conclusion 219

which nevertheless absorbs the murders by allowing Ben to continue

his killing spree unchallenged.
The narrative continuity of Man Bites Dog is provided only by Ben'
omnipresent face in front of the camera, but the film crew's escalat-
ing complicity with his actions lends the narrative a teleological thrust.
Ben and the filmmakers are eventually shot by an unknown hand.
Someone is tracking Ben throughout the film, although the details of
this "other" story remain outside the purview of the narrative, which
refuses to explain anything more than meets the eye. The film's final
shot, a canted angle from the perspective of the dead cameraman,
evokes the ending of The State of Things. This shot, of the crumblin
walls of an abandoned building, is more radically empty than Wen-
ders's though, especially since we never actually see the cameraman's
face in the film (although we do hear his voice). The static shot is
held until the film "runs out." Narrative mortality emerges here as a
surrealist discourse of shock, disruption, and violent transgression
that has the capacity of emptying cinematic representation of its pre-
tensions of realism and closure. We are far from Wenders's anxieties
of subjectivity and identity, and, as the French title's second-person
address suggests, the film constitutes an assault on the spectator.
One scene in particular seems to depict the crisis of spectatorship
that narrative mortality, as a discourse of believability, negotiates. At
one point in the film, Ben is hospitalized after a boxing accident.
The filmmakers and Ben's friends hold a small birthday party for
him when he comes home, and Remy (the "director") presents Ben
with a gun holster as a gift. After putting it on, Ben turns his back to
the group, swings around, and shoots the man at the other end of
the table, provoked by minor jealousy and insecurity when the man
whispers to Ben's girlfriend behind his back. A moment of silence
follows, while the party guests, splattered with blood, contemplate the
abrupt turn of events. For the spectator, it opens a space in the nar-
rative flow for someone to call Ben's bluff, to call the film's bluff,
and plead for an end to the carnage. The camera rests on the two
women, Ben's girlfriend and his mistress, who flank the dead man,
but the moment passes, and both party and film recover their mo-
mentum. The film depicts a world where no one is safe unless they
fill a subservient role to Ben's monstrous ego. His bigotry identifies
220 Conclusion

the discourse of power as white chauvinist supremacy, and allusions

to the holocaust (Ben dumps his victims in a reservoir, which drains
to reveal heaps of corpses) historicize the narrative as the persis-
tence of a historical nightmare.
As a critique of media violence, Man Bites Dog goes too far be-
yond the scope of believability and good taste to make an "ethical"
intervention into yellow journalism. By plunging the viewer into a
dystopian realm of gratuitous violence, it suggests instead that mor-
tality is a critical function of narrative realism. Any critique of vio-
lence must first come to terms with the techniques of realist repre-
sentation that the media exploits. The challenge of wedging death
and realism apart is as difficult as facing up to "Ben" and his control
over the film. That he is not, in the end, brought to justice, but killed
by the specter of vengeance that lurks within the ruined landscape,
suggests that the terror he has personified is a historical terror. The
film cannot imagine another history, or provide an end to the terror
it depicts, but this total failure may in fact be the means by which it
is most allegorical, subjecting history absolutely to the natural logic
of decay.16
Like Man Bites Dog, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer opens wit
horrifying imagery of blood and violence, in this case color tableaux
of female corpses. Again, apocalyptic narrative conventions are de-
flected by sustaining a high level of violence throughout this film, al-
though here, the full gamut of horror-film techniques is deployed:
eerie music, camera movements, and point-of-view editing to build
suspense at critical moments.
The detailed realism of Henry locates his "portrait" within the his-
torical context of a poor Chicago neighborhood, and Henry's "prob-
lem" is analyzed as an oedipal nightmare of sexual abuse. Instead of
offering any kind of therapeutic cure, though, the film spins out Hen-
ry's misogyny as an endless series of dead bodies. Henry and his
friends Otis and Becky, who he draws into his routine of random vio-
lence, are victims of poverty, isolated within an insular world of in-
cest, racism, and institutional neglect. The big battered 1970s cars that
Otis and Henry drive are the film's most potent images of the ruins
of capitalism within which the serial killer plies his trade. In the vir-
tual absence of any sign of the law, Henry's confidence in his work
 Conclusion 221

distinguishes the film from any other American thriller. With no moral
authority to lose, this film, like Man Bites Dog, deploys narrative
mortality as a discourse of infinite repetition, in which death serves
only to distinguish killer from victim. It becomes a mechanism of
power cut off from any historical necessity. The excess and repeti-
tion rob death, finally, of its redemptive potential in narrative, as the
reality test is repeatedly tried and relentlessly passed. The final shot
of Henry, a suitcase (which we assume conceals Becky's body) sit-
ting on the side of the highway, reduces the banality of nothingness
that we have seen in so many other films to trash.
Because we do not see Becky's murder, the heavy, blood-soaked
suitcase makes demands on our imagination that the opening im-
agery of Henry prevents. It is a powerful image precisely because of
the absence of a body. Corpses in this film, especially female corpses,
are robbed of any allegorical potential. Stylized by color, lighting,
and camera movements, the opening tableaux can only represent
violence against women in bold symbolic fashion. Symbolism fi-
nally gives way to allegory in the film's final shot, but there is no
sacrifice here, nor anything to redeem. Henry's world is governed by
a power greater than his own, and "believability" is a believability
only in the invisible corpse that sustains the image. The image is not
freed by the representation of death, but weighted down by the bur-
den of reality.
Henry and Otis shoot one of their most vicious atrocities—the
desecration of a domestic scene (also the height of violence in Man
Bites Dog)— on video, and Otis watches the footage at home over
and over again. Instrumental to the dystopian imagination of history
in these films is the way they are cut off from the profilmic. Both films
incorporate filmmaking practices—low-end, low-tech technology op-
erated by fictional characters—that produce a second level of reality
within each text. Not only is this second order of reality equally fic-
tional, but the filmic gaze that is inscribed in these films is character-
ized as the desire to see death and violence. This thorough mortifi-
cation of the gaze finally aligns the art-film spectator with the snuff-
film spectator in a dialectical relationship.
Benjamin describes the surrealists as having opened up an "image
sphere" in which
222 Conclusion

political materialism and physical nature share the inner man,

the psyche, the individual ... with dialectical justice, so that no
limb remains unrent. Nevertheless—indeed, precisely after
such dialectical annihilation—this will be a sphere of images
and, more concretely, of bodies [The surrealists] exchange,
to a man, the play of human features for the face of an alarm
clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.17
In the serial-killer films' dangerous evocation of the snuff film, the
unfilled desires of surrealist practice have become monstrous. The
depiction of an eternal present tense is truly alarming, and yet the
representation of "now" is divorced from any historical index of the
image. The repressed violence of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt has
returned with a vengeance that annihilates even the dynamics of cat-
astrophe. A mortification of visibility itself takes place in these films,
which come even closer than Weekend to apprehending the "end of
cinema." The Utopian thrust of the New Wave cinemas is inverted by
way of a narrative mortality turned in on itself, consuming cinematic
pleasure and narrative desire in dystopian affirmations of cinematic
realism.

The Gender of Narrative Mortality

Writing about Reservoir Dogs (Tarantinfigure quite critically in both Wild at Heart and The Cook, the Thief,o, 1992), Amy Taubin com-
ments, "It's the privilege of white male culture to destroy itself, rather
than to be destroyed by the other."18 Narrative mortality emerges in
the latter part of the twentieth century as a partner to feminist dis-
course, clearing the way for cinematic representation that might re-
deem the annihilated desires of so many female characters and spec-
tators. Its manifestation in postmodern cinema as a discourse very
specifically aligned with male violence indicates that the traces of
modernism are the traces of a "boy's" cinema in decay, and that this
deterioration may have been reified in the perpetual delay of its final
disappearance. Reservoir Dogs, in which no woman characters appear
at all, revives a motif from Double Indemnity in which the time of
the film is the time of a man bleeding to death. The femme fatale
may be reduced to a single bullet from an anonymous woman (who
is herself killed by her victim, Tim Roth/Mr. Orange), but her abstract
 Conclusion 223

disembodiment confirms her necessity to this cinema of decay.19 Mary

Ann Doane has suggested that
as soon as the relation between vision and knowledge
becomes unstable or deceptive, the potential for a disruption
of the given sexual logic appears. Perhaps this disruptiveness
can define, for feminist theory, the deadliness of the femme
fatale.20

The triumph of the riddling question of the Sphinx in the frac-

tured story of Oedipus implicit in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is
made possible by the virtual abstractions of the femme fatale as a
form of textual logic. It is ultimately over the dead body of Patty/
Emma that the contradictions of capital law and "classical Holly-
wood cinema" are mortified and deauthorized. Both Godard and Os-
hima mobilize the narrative potential of double suicide for historical
desires. The woman's body remains the image of desire, but, in the
transposition from melodrama to allegory in Cruel Story of Youth,
that body becomes the sign of a desire for social change and not
sexual or emotional fulfillment. Mako's abortion in the middle of the
narrative becomes an allegorical loss of family and motherhood, a
sign of the ruins of Japan, which are not mourned but mortified.
For his part, Godard's women display a proximity to popular cul-
ture constitutive of modernist cultural anxieties. The lack of distance
between women and their culture (Bardot is discovered sunbathing
with an open book resting on her naked posterior) is characteristic
of countless theories of mass media — including Benjamin's, as we
have seen.21 And yet, from the perspective of narrative mortality, Bar-
dot in Le Mepris and Karina in Pierrot le fou effectively destabiliz
the existential anxieties of their male counterparts. The double deaths
that end each film evoke a romance of double suicide that confronts
the meaninglessness of modernist suicide. It is by way of the desires
of the women that the narratives are able to transcend the end of
history and imagine a different future.
In contrast, the cruel disfigurement of Faye Dunaway in Bonnie
and Clyde, tied to the gearshift, and the assassination of Barbara Jean
Ronnee Blakeley in Nashville curtail any redemptive potential by sub
mitting totally to the tyranny of narrative realism, in which the spec-
224 Conclusion

tacle of violence is a violence predominantly against women. Wim

Wenders's inability to represent women or work within romantic nar-
rative structures is constitutive of his inability to "go home" — or re-
member German history. As a perpetual detour, narrative mortality is
an allegory in his cinema of the failure of documentary and narrative
realisms to come together in the interests of auteurist mastery. Women
in his films about filmmaking are always on the sidelines, awkwardly
caught in a gaze that kills without desire, helplessly outside history.
The serial-killer films of the 1990s adopt this mortifying gaze in
an escalated violence that is no longer able to distinguish image from
reality. In the postmodern arena, the annihilation of the real robs
narrative mortality of its redemptive potential and reifies it as a func-
tion of historical amnesia and horror. The independent art cinema
may still be dominated by white men, but it is significant that the ex-
cess of violence is perpetrated within "the men's room," and within
very legible languages of misogynist bigotry in which nothing is hid-
den except the women themselves. The film history traced in this
book has located a mortification of realist aesthetics and politics in a
cinema of masters for whom romanticism and baroque decadence
are aesthetic choices in a library of styles.
Peter Greenaway and David Lynch demonstrate that heterosexual
romance remains a vital discourse in the resurrection of art cinema,
but at the same time that the narrative scenario of threat and rescue,
in which women are the eternal victims, confuses the dynamics of
corporeality with those of the eroticized female body. Beyond the
New Wave cinemas, identity politics has redefined the categories of
subjectivity and desire within a global politics of competing voices.
Women's desire can no longer be co-opted for Utopian discourses
that fail to ruin the historical coding of gender, class, and race.
Oshima's preoccupation with rape within the drama of rebellion
is an attempt to embrace the romance of heterosexual desire on the
verge of its annihilation. Especially in the Japanese context, "freedom"
for women has meant only the freedom to choose a husband, mark-
ing the limits of the discourse of melodramatic desire. Rape does not
produce victims and villains in Oshima's cinema, but a narrative struc-
ture in which sexual desire cannot be read as an allegory of closure.
In the theme of double suicide, "marriage" and death are uncannily
 Conclusion 225

united, potentially splitting open the sense of closure precisely by

doubling it.
In the ruins of the master's house, cinema might yet redeem itself
and its historiographic nature in the interests of new subjectivities.
Especially in the age of AIDS, death can no longer be taken for
granted, as the condition of "meaning." Death wields a very special
power, as Derrida has said,22 and it yields it to the critic of a text: the
power of textual death is precisely in its deconstruction of an ideol-
ogy of presence. To mortify a film is to go beyond its perpetual pre-
sent tense and illuminate it as a discourse of history. Benjamin's the-
ory of historiographic vision insists on a redemption of belief from
its modernist destruction, a belief in history free of mythical limits,
including the limits of Benjamin's own modernism.
Visibility in narrative film produces a dialectics of seeing in which
death is always an allegorical option, insofar as the images register a
past tense. The cinema, in this sense, may have been postmodern all
along, and narrative mortality is the process by which it becomes
aware of this state and produces a dialectical spectator, one who both
believes and disbelieves, a crucial position for the feminist spectator
looking for pleasure in the cinema.23 When the void against which
representation defines itself is not mystified but is articulated as im-
possible to represent, death comes into its own as the sign of the
fragility of the present tense.
In addition to bodies, a great number of dead cars were discovered
littering the preceding pages, rusting by the wayside of a discussion
about dead characters and dying narratives. Not only do these shat-
tered automobiles, as the emblems of collision and decay, register a
collapse of accident and necessity; not only do they signify the false
promises of consumer capitalism; they will never completely return
to nature. This impossibility of total decay undermines the very prin-
ciple of death as closure as a form of narrative desire. History is in-
dexically embedded in these ruins, restricting desire and its construc-
tion of the future from imagining eternity; the image of the future
becomes a history of the future. It is loss and not return that is in-
scribed in dead cars, the loss, moreover, of desirable commodities. The
allegorical potential of narrative mortality lies precisely in its mortifi-
cation of commodification and loss.
226 Conclusion

The spectacle of death keeps death somewhere else, a strategy es-

sential to a disavowal not only of our own death but of the claim his-
tory has made on nature. Narrative mortality maintains the subject's
tenuous claim on time, but, in the work of many filmmakers, it has
become a structure upon which to reassert that claim, to reverse it,
or to explode it. At stake is the redemption of history from the ruined
mythologies of capitalism and Marxism. Once death is understood as
something other than closure, as the vehicle of expressing the very
impossibility of closure, it stands as a threat to commodification, on
the threshold of the discovery of historical difference.
NOTES

Introduction: Narrative Mortality

1. Robert Kolker has written about this period as "Contemporary International

Cinema" {The Altering Eye [Oxford University Press, 19831), and I used "Internationa
Postwar Cinema" in an earlier version of this project. However, neither "contempo-
rary" nor "postwar" labels convey the sense of a historical period distinct from the
present.
2. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Ne\
York: Vintage Books, 1985).
3. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1981).
4. See George Steiner's introduction to The Origins of German Tragic Dram
trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), and Susan Buck-Morss, The Di-
alectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: M
Press, 1989).
5. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 97.
6. "Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemp-
tion. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The
past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption" ("Theses
on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, p. 254).
7. Jugen Habermas, "Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The Contem-
poraneity of Walter Benjamin," New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), p. 56.
8. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," p. 262.
9. Habermas, "Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism," p. 59-
10. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symb
^ic/(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981).
11. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (
ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990, p. 168.
12. For example, Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941), Lolita (Kubrick, 1962), Gandhi (At-
tenborough, 1982), Vagabond (Varda, 1986). Raymond Bellour has even labeled nar-
rative return a "law" of classical film: that the end must reply to the beginning. His
work on Psycho (Hitchcock, I960) demonstrates the "monstrosity" of the detour that
Hitchcock's narrative takes in order to meet this requirement ("Psychosis, Neurosis,
Perversion," Camera Obscura 3/4 [Summer 1979D-
Perversion," Camera Obscura 3/4 [Summer 197

227
228 Notes to pages 8-10

14. George Gerbner, "Death in Prime Time: Notes on the Symbolic Function of
Dying in the Mass Media," The Social Meaning of Death, The Annals of Political and
Social Science, vol. 47, 1980.
15. Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage
Books, 1982), pp. 582-83.
16. Benjamin notes that "dying has been pushed further and further out of the
perceptual world of the living" ("The Storyteller," p. 94).
17. Ernst Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973). Becker draws
on the post-Freudian thought of Norman O. Brown and Otto Rank to delineate the
mechanisms of the repression of death, but breaks with Freud himself on the primacy
that he (Becker) attributes to the fear of death.
18. The "denial of death" is likewise assumed by most clinical thanatologists. Repres-
sion theories of death often assume a "healthy" relationship to death. Aries makes the
important point that psychologists of mourning, in which he includes the Freud of
"Mourning and Melancholia," assume that the model of "the beautiful death" is a nat-
ural rather than a historical attitude toward death. Repression, and the corresponding
tactics of the psychologist to heal the bereaved's "wound" take for granted the "affec-
tivity" that became bound with death as love was to sex in the nineteenth century
(Aries, The Hour of Our Death, p. 581.
19. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980).
20. Linda Williams objects to the facile inclusion of "snuff within the pornogra-
phy genre, pointing out that it involves very different forms of power and pleasure.
She does note that snuff violence offers a high visibility quotient that may compen-
sate for the invisibility of sexual pleasure. It is precisely this contradictory spectacular-
ization of death that challenges its ostensible denial. See Linda Williams, Hard Core:
Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989), p. 194. See also Geoffrey Gorer, "The Pornography of Death," in Identity and
Anxiety: Survival of the Person in Mass Society, ed. Maurice R. Stein, Arthur J. Vidich,
and David Manning White (New York: Free Press, I960).
21. Herbert Marcuse, "The Ideology of Death," in The Meaning of Death, ed. Her-
man Feifel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), p. 66.
22. Ibid., p. 74.
23. At the time of writing, Dr. Jack Kevorkian in the United States and Gaile Ro-
driguez in Canada have been bringing euthanasia politics into the public arena,
demonstrating that the desire to die one's own death constitutes a challenge to social
norms of mortality. In both countries, assisted suicide has been legislated against.
24. Foucault argues against "the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ush-
ered in an age of increased sexual repression." He convincingly demonstrates that
"never have there existed more centers of power; never more attention manifested
and verbalized; never more circular contacts and linkages; never more sites where the
intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch hold, only to spread else-
where" (p. 49). He effectively counters Marcuse's premise of Eros and Civilization in
which Thanatos is conceived as a repressive force.
25. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories
of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 111.
26. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
(New York: Vintage Books, 1955), p. 29.
 Notes to pages 10-17 229

27. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capital-
ism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), p. 118.
28. Rick Altaian, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989), p. 360.
29. "Ressentiment" is the "ideologeme" par excellence of Jameson's second stage
of textual interpretation, in which the symbolic act is situated within the arena of its
social consumption. Jameson's concept derives from Nietzsche, for whom "ressenti-
ment" originates in a "slave revolt in manners" dating from Roman times: "All truly
noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation. Slave ethics, on the other
hand, begins by saying no to an 'outside,' an 'other,' a non-self, and that no is its cre-
ative act" (Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Genealogy of Morals," in The Birth of Tragedy
and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing [New York: Doubleday, 1956], p.
171). In Golffing's translation, "ressentiment" is translated as "rancour."
30. Catherine Clement, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsey Wing (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 174.
31. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Toronto: Granada Publish-
ing, 1973). Benjamin actually anticipates Barthes's theory of myth in the Arcades Pro-
ject. He says, "what matters here is the dissolution of 'mythology' into the space of
history." And at another place he advocates a release of "the enormous energy of his-
tory that lies bonded in the 'Once upon a time' of classical historical narrative. The
history which showed things 'as they really were' was the strongest narcotic of the
century" (Walter Benjamin, "N [Theoretics of Knowledge; Theory of Progress]," trans,
of Passegen-Werk by Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth, The Philosophical Forum
15:1-2 [Fall-Winter 1983/84], p. 32).
32. By "apparatus" theory I am referring to the body of work that appeared in
Screen in the 1970s, especially that of Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Jean-Louis Baudry,
and Stephen Heath. This work has been anthologized and reprinted in numerous
places. It finds one of its purest forms in Apparatus: Selected Writings, ed. Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980). Baudry, for example, writes: "Film
lives on the denial of difference: the difference is necessary for it to live, but it lives
on its negation" ("Ideological Effects of the Basic Apparatus," p. 29).
33- Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 28.
34. Ibid, p. 89.
35. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 28.
36. Helene Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?" trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7:11
(Autumn 1981), p. 45.
37. Ibid, p. 53.
38. See Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower' in
the Land of Technology," New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 179-224.
39- Walter Benjamin, "Notes to the Theses on History," Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1,
p. 1231, quoted and translated by Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 339-
40. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," p. 102.
41. Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, p. 217.
42. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" [1969], trans. Donald F. Bouchard and
Sherry Simon, repr. in Critical Theory since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle
(Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1986), p. 140.
230 Notes to pages 18-24

43. Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death" [1949], The Gaze of Or-
pheus and Other Literary Writings, trans. Lydia Davis, ed. P. Adams Sitney (Barry-
town, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1981), p. 55.
44. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 99.
45. Williams, Hard Core, pp. 56-57.
46. "Snuff film" refers to the documentation of actual human death as it is contex-
tualized and exploited through fiction, marketing, and exhibition to become a consum-
able spectacle. However, when the spectacle of death becomes an end in itself—in
films that few people have actually seen or desire to see—we have a virtual mortifi-
cation of visibility.
47. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, p. 417, quoted in Buck-Morss, The
Dialectics of Seeing, p. 197.
48. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 201.
49. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit. Black and Red, 1983), p. 158.
50. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 47.
51. Ibid., p. 132. Because the "duration" of the film Last Year at Marienbad, for
example, "is the ninety minutes passed in watching it," this text is merely a matter of
"rigor," a formal tendency that could "destroy the novel" (p. 151).
52. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 9-
53. The question of video specificity and the possibility of reading narrative mor-
tality in videotexts will be deferred to chapter 2, although it has to be said that this
book cannot do justice to the question.
54. Richard John Neupert, The End: Notions of Closure in the Cinema (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1986), p. 58. Neupert defines narrative discourse
as an "umbrella term" for the totality of discursive operations in a text (p. 43), but
does not actually clarify how it can be open or closed. In his film analyses, it is said
to be "open" when "the device is laid bare" (e.g., Tout va bien) or the plurality of nar-
rative voices remain fragmented (e.g., Weekend), and "closed" when it is "unified, di-
rected and homogeneous" (e.g., The 400 Blows).
55. Although Neupert notes that repetition on the discursive level is a means by
which "a Closed text brackets itself off from the endless fictional world" (p. 93) and
that "ending on marriage in a classical narrative goes beyond mere story logic," there
is no acknowledgment of those (identical) processes by which a text is "bracketed"
from nonfictional reality, or any questioning of why certain endings "go beyond story
logic."
56. Heath cites an Apollinaire story about some ambitious early filmmakers who
kidnap three unsuspecting performers off the Paris streets. On camera, "the gentle-
man is forced, under threat of himself being killed, to murder the young lovers. The
crime is sensational ... the film a spectacular box-office draw" {Questions of Cinema,
p. 111). The Apollinaire story is called "Un beau film."
57. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino, "Towards a Third Cinema," Afterimage
3 (1971), in Movies and Methods, vol. 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1976).
58. Kaja Silverman argues that the protagonist of Peeping Tom is brought down by
the female aural control of Mark's womb/cave/projection room, negating the gaze
with the power of sound {The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis
and Cinema [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], pp. 32-41).
 Notes to pages 24-34 231

59. Other examples of the "mortifying gaze" literally reproduced in narrative film
can be found throughout the history of cinema. They include Falsely Accused! (Bio-
graph, 1907), The Machine to Kill Bad People (Rossellini, 1948), Blow-Up (Antonioni,
1967), Good Morning Babylon (Paulo and Vittorio Taviani, 1987).
60. Noel Carroll, "Interpreting Citizen Kane," Persistence of Vision 7 (1989), pp.
51-62.
61. See Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American
Cinema, 1940-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
62. Jacques Rivette, "Notes on a Revolution," Cahiers du Cinema 54 (Christmas
1955), trans. Liz Heron, repr. in Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950's, ed. Jim Hillier (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 95.
63. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 233-
64. Benjamin, "N [Theoretics of Knowledge; Theory of Progress]," p. 32. Benjamin
is quoting from Monglod's Le preromantisme frangais, vol. 1, Le heros preromantique
(Grenoble, Editions B. Arthaud, 1929).

Chapter 1. Beyond Pleasure: Lang and Mortification

1. Sigmund Freud, "Reflections upon War and Death" [1915], in Character and
Culture, trans. E. Colburn Mayne (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 122.
2. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 101.
3. Jacques Rivette, "The Hand," in Rivette: Texts and Interviews, ed. Jonathan
Rosenbaum, trans. Amy Gateff and Tom Milne (London: British Film Institute, 1977).
Originally published in Cahiers du Cinema 76 (November 1957).
4. The Venice Film Festival had been held annually since 1934, although it was
suspended from 1943 to 1946 and revamped in 1947; Japanese film made a splash
there in 1951 with Rashomon. The Berlin festival was established in 1951 as a direct
result of the cultural isolation of West Berlin after World War II. The Moscow festival
was inaugurated in 1935 and became biennial after 1957. With the establishment of
Cannes in 1946, a competitive atmosphere emerged between these different European
forums, which developed in the late 1950s into a strong international film culture.
5. The postwar French interest in American film is said to have been spawned by
the flooding of the French market with all the Hollywood films banned during the oc-
cupation. See Dudley Andrew, Andre Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978), p. 97.
6. See Andre Bazin, "The Myth of Total Cinema" and "The Evolution of Film Lan-
guage," in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1967).
7. See Andrew, Andre Bazin, for an intellectual biography. For a discussion of
the Christian existentialist dimension of Bazinian neorealism, see Bazin's colleague
Amedee Ayfre, "Neo-Realism and Phenomenology," Cahiers du Cinema 17 (November
1952), trans. Diana Matias, in Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950's (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 182-91.
8. Andre Bazin, "An Aesthetic of Reality" [1948], in What Is Cinema?'vol. 2 (1971),
p. 27.
9. The paternal relations of the Cahiers du Cinema collective are most explicit in
the biographical legends of Bazin and Francois Truffaut, a relationship memorialized
232 Notes to pages 34-44

in Truffaut's first film, The 400 Blows (I960). See also Truffaut's introduction to What
Is Cinema? vol. 1.
10. Jacques Rivette, "Letter on Rossellini," Cahiers du Cinema 46 (1955), trans.
Tom Milne, in Hillier, ed, p. 198.
11. Jacques Rivette, "Notes on a Revolution," Cahiers du Cinema 54 (Christmas,
1955), trans. Liz Heron, in Hillier, ed., p. 95. Rivette is writing specifically about the
films of Nick Ray, Richard Brooks, Anthony Mann, and Robert Aldfich.
12. Luc Moullet, "Sam Fuller: In Marlowe's Footsteps," Cahiers du Cinema 93
(March 1959), in Hillier, ed., p. 148; Jean-Luc Godard, in an editorial board discussion
of Hiroshima mon Amour, Cahiers du Cinema 97 (July 1959), in Hillier, ed., p. 62.
13. Moullet, "Sam Fuller," p. 148.
14. The editors of Cahiers du Cinema, "John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln," Cahi
du Cinema 223 (August 1970), trans, in Screen 13:3 (Autumn 1972).
15. Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American Ci
ema, 1940-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
16. As far as I can determine, no print longer than the eighty-minute version that
is currently in distribution ever existed.
17. Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse; Hollywood Direct
Speak (London: Angus and Robertson, 1969), p. 123.
18. Lang is quoted as saying that "every film should be a documentary of its time"
in Peter Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang in America (New York: Praeger/Movie Magazine,
1967), p. 19.
19- Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborn
(London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 166.
20. Ibid, p. 234.
21. Ibid, p. 75.
22. Benjamin best presents his theory of literary criticism in the "Epistemo-Critical
Prologue" to the Trauerspiel book. To explain its philosophical basis is beyond th
scope of this chapter. See Charles Rosen, "The Ruins of Walter Benjamin," in On Walte
Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 199D-
23. Stephen Jenkins, "Lang: Fear and Desire," in Stephen Jenkins, ed, Fritz Lang
The Image and the Look (London: British Film Institute, 1981), p. 115.
24. Garrett Stewart, "Photo-gravure: Death, Photography and Film Narrative," Wide
Angle 9:1 (1987).
25. Raymond Bellour, "The Pensive Spectator," trans. Lynne Kirby, Wide Angle 9:1
(1987), p. 9.
26. Reynold Humphries, Fritz Lang: Genre and Representation in His American
Films (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 66.
27. See, for example, Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography" [1931],
trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13 (Spring 1972).
28. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" [1919], in Studies in Parapsychology (New Yor
Collier Books, 1963), p. 40. Freud uses Otto Rank's "Der Doppelganger" as a key
source.
29. This is how Vivian Sobchack uses the term. She points out that the semiosis of
the body is "difficult to contain in cultural vision" because of taboos against and denials
of death ("Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation and
Documentary," Quarterly Review of Film Studies [Fall 1984], p. 293).
30. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 2, p. 228, quoted by Teresa
Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 3
 Notes to pages 44-51 233

Peirce's semiotics provide de Lauretis with the " 'missing link' between signification
and concrete action," giving "the sense of a certain weight of the object in semiosis,
an overdetermination wrought into the work of the sign by the real" (p. 41).
31. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Tex
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979)- See also Teresa de Lauretis, "Gaudy
Rose: Eco and Narcissism," in Technologies of Gender, pp. 51-69.
32. These are the terms used by Jean-Louis Comolli and Francois Gere to describe
Lang's Hangmen Also Die in "Two Fictions concerning Hate," in Jenkins, ed., Fritz
Lang, p. 146.
33. Rivette, "The Hand," p. 65.
34. Higham and Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse, p. 124.
35. A typical death in film noir consists of a crumpled grey suit, a suddenly heavy
body, followed by an emotionally charged reaction shot, or by a metaphoric image,
such as a falling bowling pin, or a synecdochic image, such as a dropped object. Cor-
poreality is, for the most part, repressed. Challenges to the production code were be-
ginning to survive in 1956, and there are some important exceptions, including films
by Lang and Hitchcock as well as Kubrick's The Killing (1956).
36. Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association Production Code, 1939,
reprinted in Ruth A. Inglis, Freedom of the Movies (Chicago: University of Chicag
Press, 1974), p. 206.
37. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Scienc
(New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 8.
38. Nick Browne, "The Spectator in the Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach,"in
Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Pres
1985), p. 468.
39- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 200.
40. Foucault argues that the system of surveillance embodied in panopticism orig-
inated in the containment of the plague in the late Middle Ages, when entire towns
were compartmentalized and subdivided so as to thwart the chaos of death and dis-
ease with the analytical discipline of power (ibid., pp. 195-200).
41. Comolli and Gere, "Two Fictions concering Hate," p. 146.
42. Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, p. 232.
43. Hugo Adam Bedau, "Introduction" to The Death Penalty in America: An An
thology, ed. Hugo Adam Bedau (Chicago: Aldine, 1964), p. v.
44. D. N. Rodowick, "Madness, Authority and Ideology: The Domestic Melodrama
of the 1950s," in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woma
Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), p. 277.
45. Paul Arthur, "Shadows on the Mirror: Film Noir and Cold War America, 1945—
1957" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1985), p. 56.
46. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt comes toward the end of Arthur's periodization
of film noir, which he terminates with Touch of Evil in 1958, and indeed, by 1956,
cold war hysteria had dissipated somewhat with Stalin's death and the end of the Ko-
rean War. The domestic conflicts in this film, like those of the family melodramas of
the period, indicate the synecdochic nature of "domesticity" in American cold war
ideology, and also the overlap of genres. Arthur and Rodowick both identify narrative
conflicts in the mid-fifties—rocking the "domestic" boat—between individual and in-
stitutional values, which are conceived of as state, judicial, and corporate institutions
in film noir, and as the patriarchal nuclear family in the melodrama.
234 Notes to pages 51-58

47. Arthur, "Shadows on the Mirror," p. 76.

48. Jenkins, Fritz Lang, p. 122.
49. Claire Johnston, "Double Indemnity," in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan
(London: British Film Institute, 1980), p. 102.
50. Lotte H. Eisner, Fritz Lang (New Yor k: Oxford University Press, 1977), p.
359.
51. Mark Vernet provides a particularly phallocentric reading in his analysis of the
"black hole" of film noir. He provocatively argues that the noir text seeks to fill the
void of an opening murder, but I would take issue with his assumptions that (1) this
"hole" is a textual "castration" and (2) the fiction successfully restores the defensive
structures against this threat of castration (Mark Vernet, "The Filmic Transaction: On
the Openings of Films Noirs," trans. David Rodowick, The Velvet Light Trap 20 [Summer
1983]).
52. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989), p. 179. Mulvey equates the first part of Oedipus's story, his travels to
Thebes, with Propp's model of the fairy tale. The subsequent investigation that Oedi-
pus undertakes to free Thebes from the plague is organized by a hermeneutic code
such as that of the detective story. Mulvey notes the parallels between the noir protag-
onist's questioning of identity and his narrative trajectory with the structure of the
Oedipus story. Both the proairetic code (the code of actions) and the hermeneutic
code (the code of enigmas) are developed by Roland Barthes in S/Z, trans. Richard
Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).
53- Shoshana Felman, "Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis,"
in Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 1029-30.
54. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, livre 2, Le Moi dans la theorie de Freud et dans
la technique psychoanalytique (Paris: Seuil, 1978), pp. 271-72; quoted by Felman,
"Beyond Oedipus," p. 1032.
55. Jacques Lacan, "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet," Yale French
Studies 55/56 (1977), p. 19.
56. Hamlet is also a privileged text for Benjamin, who sees in it the redemption of
melancholy that the German baroque poets were never able to achieve {The Origins
of German Tragic Drama, p. 158).
57. See The Ego and the Id (1923), standard edition, vol. 19, pp. 58-59, where
Freud describes the fear of death as a "development" of the fear of castration.
58. Stuart Schneiderman, facques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 58.
59. Ibid., p. 76.
60. An example of this tendency in film criticism is Mark Vernet's analysis of film
noir ("The Filmic Transaction").
61. Comolli and Gere, "Two Fictions concerning Hate," p. 132.
62. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, p. 200.
63. See Johnston, "Double Indemnity."
64. Lacan, "Desire," p. 45.
65. Rivette's description of the film's "objective mise-en-scene" is strikingly close
to Benjamin's description of Trauerspiel. "It is up to the spectator to assume responsi
bility not only for the thoughts and 'motives' of the characters, but for this movement
from the Interior, grasping the phenomenon solely on its appearances; it is up to him
 Notes to pages 59-69 235

to know how to transform its contradictory moments into the concept" (Rivette, "The
Hand," p. 68).
66. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Ne
York: Vintage Books, 1985), p. 22.
67. Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Fiscourse Digure: The Utopia behind the Scenes of the
Phantasy," trans. Mary Lydon, Theatre Journal 35:3 (October 1983), p. 356.
68. D. N. Rodowick, The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Diffe
ence and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 94.
69. Ibid.
70. Barbara Klinger, " 'Cinema/Ideology/Criticism' Revisited: The Progressive Text,"
Screen 25:1 (January-February 1984), p. 44. The initial theorization of the "progressive
text" is the Comolli/Narboni Cahiers du Cinema editorial of 1969: "Cinema/Ideology/
Criticism," trans, in Screen 12:1 (Spring 1971). Klinger lists the key articles that have
endorsed this position.
71. Raymond Bellour, "On Lang," in Jenkins, ed., Fritz Lang.
72. Benjamin evokes Beyond the Pleasure Principle in his discussion of the Prou
tian memoire involontaire (see chapter 4). "Memory traces" in the unconscious protec
the psyche against traumatic experiences, but in modernity, when "the shock experi-
ence has become the norm," experience becomes highly conscious, a constant meet-
ing of stimuli and expectation. Poetry produced in such a context is highly "con-
scious" (as opposed to "memory traces"): "It would suggest that a plan was at work in
its composition.... There is something odd about speaking of a raison d'etat in the
case of a poet; there is something remarkable about it: the emancipation from experi-
ence" (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, tra
Harry Zohn [London: Verso, 1983], p. 116).
73. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 58.
74. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A
Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 55.
75. Comolli and Gere, "Two Fictions concerning Hate," p. 132.
76. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 89.
77. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," p. 87.
78. See Barbara Klinger, "Much Ado about Excess: Genre, Mise-en-Scene and the
Woman in Written on the Wind," Wide Angle 11:4 (October 1989).
79- Lang left Hollywood shortly after completing Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
saying, "I looked back over the past—how many films had been mutilated—and
since I didn't have any intention of dying of a heart attack, I said, 'I think I'll step out
of this rat race.' And I decided not to make pictures here any more" (Bogdanovich,
Fritz Lang in America, p. 110).

Chapter 2. Wim Wenders: Film as Death at Work

1. Andre Bazin, "Mort tous les apres-midi," Qu'est-ce que le cinema?'vol. 1, On

tologie et langage, Editions du Cerf, 1969, p. 68; my translation.
2. Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rut
gers University Press, 1989); Eric Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Tim
Reflections on the Twenty Years since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills, N.Y.: Redgrave, 19
3. Timothy Corrigan, New German Film: The Displaced Image (Austin: Universi
236 Notes to pages 69-74

of Texas Press, 1983), p. 39- Corrigan also demonstrates Lang's similar role in Alexan-
der Kluge's and Werner Herzog's conceptions of cinematic nationalism (pp. 95, 139).
4. La politique des auteurs was developed in Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s as
a policy of privileging the role of the director in film criticism. See Francois Truffaut,
"Une certaine tendance du cinema francais," Cahiers du Cinema 31 (J a n u a r y 1954),
and Andre Bazin, "De la politique des auteurs," Cahiers du Cinema 70 (April 1957).
5. Kathe Geist, The Cinema ofWim Wenders: From Paris, France, to "Paris,
(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), p. 89-
6. Quoted by Geist, ibid., p. 89, from Alain Masson and Hubert Nioget, "Entretien
avec Wim Wenders," Positif (October 1977), p. 24.
7. Vivian Sobchack, "Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Repre-
sentation and Documentary," Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Fall 1984), p. 292.
8. I would like to thank Paul Arthur for pointing this out to me.
9. This term comes from Amos Vogel, "Grim Death," Film Comment 16:2 (March-
April 1980), p. 78; quoted by Sobchack, "Inscribing Ethical Space," p. 283.
10. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborn
(London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 178.
11. Two versions of Lightning Over Water exist. One was screened at Cannes in
May 1980 under the title (or subtitle, depending on the source; see conflicting reports
in Sight and Sound [Spring 1981]) Nick's Film. Wenders subsequently reedited it and
added voice-over and soundtrack for rerelease in the summer of 1981, under the title
Lightning Over Water. Pacific Arts Video has unfortunately released the first version
as Lightning Over Water. I will be referring throughout to Wenders's (second) reed-
ited version, and its transcription in Nick's Film: Lightning Over Water, by Wim W
ders and Chris Sievernich (Zweitausendeins, 1981).
12. Ron Burnett, "Wim Wenders, Nicholas Ray and Lightning Over Water," Cine-
Tracts 14/154:2/5 (Summer-Fall 1981), p. 13.
13. The conception of film as "la mort au travail" can be traced to Jean Cocteau,
cited by Stephen Heath in Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1981), p. 114. He refers to "Entretien avec Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huil-
let," Cahiers du Cinema 223 (August 1970), pp. 53-55, for the source of the comment.
It was also elaborated upon by Godard in a 1962 Cahiers du Cinema interview (Go-
dard on Godard, ed. Jean Narboni and Tom Milne, trans. Tom Milne [New York: Da
Capo Press, 1972], p. 181).
14. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxfo
University Press, 1973), p. 10. Bloom characterizes anxiety of influence as a "fear of
death that is a personified superego."
15. Geist claims that "when it came time to edit, Wenders lacked sufficient footage
and was forced to use the videotaped material" {The Cinema of Wim Wenders, p. 84
And yet the omnipresence of Farrell and his camera in almost all the scenes suggests
some level of purposiveness on Wenders's part during the shooting.
16. Ivone Margulies, "Delaying the Cut: The Space of Performance in Lightning
Over Water; Screen 34:1 (Spring 1993), p. 59-
17. Timothy Corrigan, "Cinematic Snuff: German Friends and Narrative Murders,"
Cinema fournal 24:2 (Winter 1985), p. 11. In this passage he is quoting Julia Kristeva,
"The Father, Love, Banishment," in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Liter
and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 150-51.
18. It is significant that Wenders does not read the two lines that follow these in
 Notes to pages 74-84 237

the diary, also scrawled on the screen, which continues: "and the will to find all the
places to work down the love ... (indecipherable) ... silent thoughts."
19- Bernardo Bertolucci, "The Boundless Frivolity of People About to Die," in
Wenders and Sievernich, Nick's Film, p. 5.
20. Corrigan, "Cinematic Snuff," p. 16.
21. Margulies, "Delaying the Cut," p. 61.
22. Bazin develops these thoughts in relation to "le petit mort" in "Marginal Notes
on Eroticism in the Cinema," in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1971), 169-175.
23. Bazin, "Mort tous les apres-midi," p. 69-
24. Philip Rosen, "History of Image, Image of History: Subject and Ontology in
Bazin," Wide Angle 9-A (1987), p. 14.
25. Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1 (1967), p. 10.
26. Rosen, "History of Image," p. 18. Rosen quotes Bazin from What Is Cinema?
vol. 1, p. 15.
27. Annette Michelson, review of the English translation of What Is Cinema? Art-
forum 6 (September 1968), p. 70.
28. Rosen, "History of Image," p. 17. The best discussion of Bazin's Catholicism is
Dudley Andrew's in Andre Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
29. Pamela Falkenberg, " 'The Text! The Text!': Andre Bazin's Mummy Complex,
Psychoanalysis and the Cinema," Wide Angle 9:4 (1987), p. 36.
30. Margulies, "Delaying the Cut," p. 67.
31. Ibid.
32. James Naremore argues that Nick's participation in the film was "genuine be-
havior" because "the actor's body is different from the social construct we call the ac-
tor's "self." But in another sense Lightning, like most movies, tends [ultimately] to put
biology in the service of character" (James Naremore, "Film and the Performance
Frame," Film Quarterly 38:2 [Winter 1984/85], p. 15).
33. Ray was a close colleague of Elia Kazan and shared the responsibility for in-
troducing method acting to Hollywood in the 1950s. (See Bernard Eisenshitz's biogra-
phy of Ray in Wenders and Sievernich, Nick's Film?)
34. Geist, The Cinema ofWim Wenders, p. 88.
35. Stephen Heath, "Film Performance," in Questions of Cinema, p. 115.
36. Geist has remarked on the parallel these images bear with the depiction of
death as "passage" in Romantic painting. She notes especially Caspar David Friedrich,
and points out that one German word for eternity, dasfenseits, translates as "the other
side" (Geist, The Cinema ofWim Wenders, p. 88).
37. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" [1917], trans. Joan Riviere, in
General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology (New York: Collier Books,
1963), p. 164.
38. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception [1984], trans. Patrick
Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), p. 67.
39- Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," p. 178.
40. If film is a "death mask," a mummification to which death poses an ontologi-
cal challenge, the instantaneous video image is equally damaging to the preservative
capacity of the Bazinian image (Falkenberg, "'The Text! The Text!'" pp. 45-47). The
distinction between "living" TV and dead photographic mediums is problematic, espe-
cially when the video imagery has been transferred to film.
238 Notes to pages 84-101

41. Jon Jost, "Wrong Move," Sight and Sound 50:2 (Spring 1981), p. 96.
42. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 8.
43. Ibid., pp. 32, 35.
44. Eric L. Santer, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar G
many (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). Wenders's melancholia is more
international in scope than the other German films Santer analyzes.
45. Elsaesser, New German Cinema, p. 215.
46. The American Friend and Paris, Texas are perhaps the best examples of thi
equation of woman and an originary home.
47. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" [1919], in Studies in Parapsychology (New Yor
Collier Books, 1963), p- 51. See also Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire-. The W
an's Film of the 1940's (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 139-40, for
a discussion of the Freudian uncanny in relation to the gaze.
48. Margulies notes the play of the uncanny in the film's representational strategies
("Delaying the Cut," p. 3).
49. Elsaesser, New German Cinema, p. 116.
50. Ibid., p. 49
51. Greg Kahn, "Territorial Rites: Ruiz, Jost and Wenders in Portugal," Framework
Ybl\dlYI:Vm (Summer 1981). According to Kahn, Jost had planned to document Ruiz's
production, but was once again ousted by Wenders.
52. Wim Wenders, "Interview with Patrick Bauchau," Jungle 7 (1984), p. 55.
53. See interviews with Bauchau and Isabelle Wiengarten in "Dossier on Wim
Wenders; L'Etat des choses," Jungle 7 (1984).
54. Wenders, "Interview with Patrick Bauchau," p. 55.
55. Wenders, interview in pressbook.
56. Wenders, "Interview with Patrick Bauchau," p. 55.
57. Ibid., pp. 52-53.
58. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 94.
59. Ibid., p. 87.
60. In the first scene of what I call the Portuguese segment of the film, Fritz gives
Anna (Isabelle Wiengarten), one of the actresses on The Survivors' set, a copy of Th
Searchers by Alan Le May. Anna reads a passage about "survivors," which she repeats
in a subsequent scene. Later, after a piece of driftwood crashes through his window,
Fritz reads a passage from the book about reading such uncanny signs. In Los Ange-
les, he drives by a movie marquee where The Searchers is playing.
61. Geist quotes Wenders's address to a New York audience on 21 May 1982: "An
American production, shot in Hollywood, inside a studio, with a producer who under-
stands himself as the center of the film ... The tradition was such a myth for me, the
American cinema had haunted me for so long, that it was an enormous challenge and
opportunity when Francis Coppola invited me to come over and make Hammett for
him" (Geist, The Cinema of Wim Wenders, p. 82.)
62. Wenders, "Interview with Patrick Bauchau," p. 55.
63. J. Laplanche and J.-P. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dona
Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 256.
64. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," p. 173. See also "On Narcissism: An Intro-
duction" [1914], trans. Cecil M. Baines, in General Psychological Theory.
65. The casting of Sam Fuller and the hiring of Robert Kramer as screenwriter
might be regarded as means by which Wenders attempted to offset his directorial vi-
 Notes to pages 102-111 239

sion. But since these directors are relegated to their specific tasks, they function more
as support for Wenders's valorization of directorial vision, in which his own is unam-
biguously privileged.
66. Stephen Heath, "Film Performance," p. 121.
67. Santer, Stranded Objects, p. 31.
68. The fictional filmography appearing on a computer screen reads as follows:
1969, Schaupldtze (the title of Wenders's own first short film); 1970, Der Lange Brie
1971, A Stranger Here Myself; 1972, Le Visage Vert; 1973, Rule Without Exceptio
working title of The American Friend); 1976, Shadow of a Man; 1977, No Incident;
1978, Trapdoor, 1989, The American Hunter.
69. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, p. 185.

Chapter 3. Oshima Nagisa: The Limits of Nationhood

1. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), p. 144.
2. Peter B. High, "Oshima: A Vita Sexualis on Film," Wide Angle 1:4 (1977), p.
62.
3. Oshima Nagisa, "Authorial Asthenia," in Cinema, Censorship, and the Stat
The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, trans. Dawn Lawson, ed. Annette Michelson (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), p. 46. In keeping with Asian convention, all Japanese
names will be printed with the last name first.
4. Oshima Nagisa, "Beyond Endless Self-Negation: The Attitude of the New Film-
makers," in Cinema, Censorship, and the State, p. 48.
5. Joan Mellen, Voices from the Japanese Cinema (New York: Liveright, 1975), p
264.
6. An extreme example of the prostitution of the body is the buying and selling of
blood in The Sun's Burial (I960). The sweat that is emphasized in the film's mise-en-
scene visually underscores the "milking" of the characters by their corrupt environment.
7. Ian Buruma, Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transv
tites, Gangsters, Drifters and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (New York: Panthe
1984), p. 166.
8. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Fre
(New York: Vintage Books, 1955), pp. 203-16.
9. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 136.
10. Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese C
ema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
11. Noel Burch introduces this term into his discussion of Oshima, using Jindrich
Honzl's definition ^in "la mobilite du signe theatral" in Travail Thedtral 4 (July-
September 1971), developing it in terms of theatrical and cinematic specificity (Burch,
To the Distant Observer, p. 336). The use of the term here is intended to emphasiz
Oshima's allegorical approach to traditional "presentational" Japanese aesthetics. David
Desser also uses the term in a similar sense in Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction
the Japanese New Wave Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp.
171-91.
12. Stephen Heath, "The Question Oshima," in Questions of Cinema (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 153.
13- Peter Lehman, "The Mysterious Orient, the Crystal Clear Orient, the Non-existent
240 Notes to pages 111-16

Orient: Dilemmas of Western Scholars of Japanese Film," Journal of Film and Video
39 (Winter 1987), p. 10.
14. See Desser for a more complete explanation of the historical underpinnings of
the Japanese New Wave {Eros Plus Massacre, pp. 13-38).
15. Zengakuren are associations of Japanese students formed in the 1950s with
close ties to the Japan Communist party.
16. The successful Korean uprising in the spring of I960 was a source of inspira-
tion to the Japanese zengakuren (Richard Stony, A History of Modern Japan [Penguin,
1984], p. 275).
17. The michiyuki is a theatrical device found in Noh drama, puppet theater, and
Kabuki. During the passage, the lovers "mature," or become dignified, while the nar-
rator indulges in his most poetic language (Donald Keene, The Major Plays ofChika-
matsu [New York: Columbia University Press, 1961], p. 24). That the couple always
travels away from their village or home indicates the choice they have made of love
ininjo) over duty (giri).
18. Tadao Sato describes the feminisuto tradition: "The image of a woman suffer-
ing uncomplainingly can imbue us with admiration for a virtuous existence almost be-
yond our reach, rich in endurance and courage. One can idealize her rather than
merely pity her, and this can lead to what I call the worship of womanhood, a special
Japanese brand of feminism" {Currents in Japanese Cinema, trans. Gregory Barrett
[New York: Kodansha International, 1982], p. 78).
19- Desser points out that, given the historical exclusion of women from the Japan-
ese stage and screen, their presence in the films of the 1920s was already political,
and in the 1960s the erotic emphasis replaced the "transcendental" for a more psycho-
logical politics {Eros Plus Massacre, pp. 108-44).
20. See, for example, Oshima's essay on Violence at Noon, "The Wounds of Those
with Shame," in Cinema, Censorship, and the State, pp. 114-22. For a more thorough
discussion of sexuality in Oshima's films, see Maureen Turim, "Signs of Sexuality in
Oshima's Tales of Passion," Wide Angle 9:2 (Spring 1987).
21. Audie Bock claims that Oshima regarded American films as "the enemy" {Japan-
ese Film Directors [New York: Kodansha International, 1987], p. 315) but even in the
essay she cites (translated in Cinema, Censorship, and the State) there is far more
wrath directed at the Japanese cinema, its repetitive engagement with certain genres,
and its high production values than at foreign films. In fact, I cannot find any refer-
ence to the American cinema in Oshima's translated writing.
22. Maureen Turim, "Oshima's Cruel Tales of Youth and Politics," Journal of Film
and Video 39 (Winter 1987), p. 50. My reading of the melodramatic structure of Cruel
Story is indebted to Turim. Oshima apprenticed at Shochiku's Ofuna studio. Under
the direction of Kido Shiro, Ofuna specialized in humanist formula pictures known
for their sentimental "flavor."
23. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama
and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 141.
24. The costumes are credited to M. Hinae, who was to become a major fashion
designer.
25. Oshima has described melodrama as the most traditional form of cinema in
Japan {Cinema, Censorshp, and the State, p. 28). The abbreviated discussion of West
ern and Japanese melodrama that follows has been developed in "Insides and Out-
sides: Cross-Cultural Criticism and Japanese Film Melodrama," Melodrama and Asian
Cinema, ed. Wimal Dissanayaki (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See
 Notes to pages 116-23 241

also Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro, "Melodrama, Postmodernism and Japanese Cinema," East-

West Film Journal 5:1 (January 199D, p. 44.
26. Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melo-
drama," in Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1985).
27. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1982), p. 62.
28. Ibid, p. 49.
29. The bunraku puppet plays and Kabuki plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-
1725) are not usually described as melodrama, probably because of the discredit the
label tends to bear, and yet these are narratives of great emotional intensity, height-
ened by music, gesture, and mise-en-scene.
30. The term "moral occult" is central to Brooks's theory of melodrama. It refers to
the invisible realm of moral feeling that is not transcendent or handed down from
above, but comes from within melodramatic personae, with equivalent authority to
that of divine law.
31. The different psychoanalytic structure of Japanese culture is, however, only
one explanation for the differences between Japanese and Western melodrama's per-
formances of suffering. Doi Takeo has mapped the Japanese psychoanalytic terrain in
terms of amae, or "the anatomy of dependence." His work suggests that when Freudian
terms are applied to the Japanese psyche (and, of course, there is no reason to be-
lieve this should or can be done), the Japanese subject appears to be terminally pre-
oedipal and overwhelmingly male {The Anatomy of Dependence, trans. John Bester
(New York: Kodansha International, 1981).
32. Ibid., p. 33.
33- Buruma, Behind the Mask, p. 176.
34. Alan Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 38.
35. The "I-novel" was an early twentieth-century genre of first-person narrative.
Its most well known exponent is Soseki Natsume, who died in 1915.
36. Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, p. 34.
37. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne
(London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 184. Further references will be included in the
text.
38. Turim, "Oshima's Cruel Tales," p. 46.
39. Bock, Japanese Film Directors, p. 231.
40. "For it was absolutely decisive for the development of this mode of thought
[allegory] that not only transitoriness, but also guilt should seem evidently to have its
home in the province of idols and the flesh" (Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic
Drama, p. 224).
41. Dana Polan, The Political Language of the Avant-Garde (Ann Arbor: UMI Re-
search Press, 1985), pp. 114-15.
42. Oshima's thematics have been described by Dana Polan as an opposition be-
tween "an enclosed inside ... and an historically reflexive outside" (ibid., p. 34). Noel
Burch poses Oshima's problematics as "What is the relation between this me and the
struggle out there'''' {To the Distant Observer, p. 327). Maureen Turim has also isolat
the conflict between the personal and the political in Oshima's films ("Rituals, Desire,
Death in Oshima's Ceremonies," Enclitic 5:2/6:1 [Fall 1981/Spring 1982] and "Oshi-
ma's Cruel Tales").
242 Notes to pages 123-33

43. Peter N. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (London: Cromm Helm, 1986),
p. 105. Dale specifically links giri and ninjo to Japanese perceptions of social out-
sides and more personable insides, and further, to Japaneseness and non-Japanese-
ness.
44. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 140.
45. As the boy lists the places through which the family has traveled, three grainy
black-and-white photographs of his face fill the screen, followed by two color stills of
him lying on the pavement, and one of a red taillight, and then three more black-and-
white photos of him with other boys.
46. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 94.
47. Joan Mellen claims that the boy's sense of responsibility for the girl's death is
evidence of the survival of his "moral sense," and it is the means by which "Oshima
pleads for the valuable humanity being trampled ... in Japan" {The Waves at Genji's
Door: Japan through Its Cinema [New York: Pantheon Books, 1976], p. 353). Adam
Knee argues that the boy blames his parents for the accident, which is why the mem-
ory of the girl precipitates his confession ("Criminality, Eroticism and Oshima," Wide
Angle 9:2 [Spring 1987]).
48. Garrett Stewart, "Photo-gravure: Death, Photography and Film Narrative," Wide
Angle 9:1 (1987), p. 22.
49. The four point-of-view shots are (1) a pan shot of the horizon from a moving
ferry (one of the only camera movements in the film), which ends when it reaches
the boy's parents; (2) his glimpse of some bullies in an alley, who, seeing him see
them, turn on him violently; (3) his voyeuristic peek at his parents singing drunken
folk songs with some geishas at an inn; and (4) his accidentally seeing his mother
leave the doctor's office, where she was supposed to have gone to have an abortion
(she slaps him and later bribes him to keep quiet).
50. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell have exhaustively and convincingly
documented and demonstrated Ozu's alterity vis-a-vis the classical Hollywood model
("Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu," Screen 17:2 [Summer 1976]).
51. Bataille, Erotism, p. 22.
52. Oshima, Cinema, Censorship, and the State, pp. 170-72.
53- Ibid., p. 172. Oshima's adaptation of this "true story" went to some lengths to
preserve an ethnographic quality. He stresses the efforts he and his crew went to in
casting the boy (who was himself an orphan and not a professional actor), and their
travels around Japan visiting orphanages. He also points out that the film was shot in
chronological order, with cast and crew following the wandering trail of the family
across and around Japan.
54. H. D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Toku-
gawa Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 410.
55. Ibid., p. 413.
56. David Bordwell describes Ozu's narratives as "liberal protests" against the "bro-
ken promise of Meiji" {Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 19891, p. 42). Although Bordwell recognizes the importance of history in
Ozu's narrative structure, there is little evidence that Ozu or his characters have or
ever had any historical desires or expectations of social transformation.
57. Oshima notes that shooting the film in chronological order meant that the boy
matured over the course of the shoot. However, he became too dependent on the
 Notes to pages 134-45 243

"family" of the crew, a dependency that Oshima tried to break. "And in order to do
the important scene in which the boy becomes isolated and independent, I thought
that 'Tetsuo' had to throw away dependency and become able to stand on his own in
reality as well" {Cinema, Censorship, and the State, p. 180).
58. Stephen Heath, "Anata Mo," Screen 17-A (Winter 1976/77). The words "anata
mo" (and you) are repeated over and over again by the voice-over that concludes
Death by Hanging.
59- Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen, p. 410.
60. Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence, p. 95.
61. Desser, Eros Plus Massacre, p. 199-

Chapter 4. Jean-Luc Godard: Allegory of the Body

1. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne
(London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 166.
2. Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, ed. Jean Narboni and Tom Milne, trans.
Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 217.
3. Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 104.
4. Jean Collet, Jean-Luc Godard: An Investigation into His Films and Philosophy,
trans. Ciba Vaughan (New York: Crown Publishers, 1970), pp. 35-36.
5. Godard, Godard on Godard, p. 174.
6. Susan Sontag, "Godard," in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 1982), p. 255.
7. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans, and ed. Caryl Emer-
son (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 290.
8. Belmondo's blurry vision as he "dies" at the end of A bout de souffle may be a
representation of death "from the inside," but it is highly ironic, suggesting the absur-
dity of this point of view within the film's otherwise verite style.
9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and
Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 58. Go-
dard refers extensively to Merleau-Ponty, both directly and indirectly, in Two or Three
Things I Know About Her (1967).
10. Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France, p. 148.
11. The best discussion of the film as an adaptation, which takes into account the
ironic aspect of the novel, is Marsha Kinder's "Thrice-Told Tale: Godard's Le Mepris,"
in Modern Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. Andrew S. Horton and Joan
Margretta (New York: Ungar, 1981).
12. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
1969), p. 242.
13- Yvonne Baby, "Shipwrecked People from the Modern World: Interview with
Jean-Luc Godard on Le Mepris," in Focus on Godard, ed. Royal S. Brown (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972), p. 37.
14. For the mythic dimensions of "aura," see Winfried Menninghaus, "Walter Ben-
jamin's Theory of Myth," trans. Gary Smith, in On Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), p. 316.
15. Benjamin, "The Work of Art," p. 233. In Harry Zohn's translation the word
244 Notes to pages 145-52

"orchid" replaces "blue flower." Miriam Hansen claims that the latter is the correct
translation, and points out the resonance of "blue flower" to the German Romantic
tradition (Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in
the Land of Technology,'" New German Critique 40 [Winter 1987], p. 204).
16. Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, p. 165.
17. Benjamin, quoted and translated in Menninghaus, "Walter Benjamin's Theory
of Myth," p. 321.
18. Ibid., p. 320.
19- Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, p. 108.
20. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations, p. 98.
21. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), p. 114.
22. Walter Benjamin, "N [Theoretics of Knowledge; Theory of Progress]", trans, of
Passagen-Werk by Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth, The Philosophical Forum 15:1-2
(Fall-Winter 1983/84), pp. 8-9.
23. Menninghaus, "Walter Benjamin's Theory of Myth," p. 315.
24. Richard Allen, "The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity: Adorno, Benjamin and
Contemporary Film Theory," New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987), p. 230; Jurgen
Habermas, "Conscious-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The Contemporaneity of Wal-
ter Benjamin," New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), pp. 48-49; Miriam Hansen,
"Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower' in the Land of Technology,"
New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987), pp. 195-96.
25. Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty," in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York:
Schocken Books, 1986), p. 334.
26. Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience," p. 222.
27. Collet, Jean-Luc Godard, p. 90.
28. The best examples of this attempt to transgress the limitations of perception
are Karina in Vivre sa vie and Le Petit Soldat and Godard's description of Belmondo in
A bout de souffle as "a block to be filmed to discover what lay inside" {Godard on Go-
dard, p. 175).
29. Letter to Jane even includes references to Henry Fonda as an icon of American
ideology—a far cry from Godard's 1957 essay on The Wrong Man, in which he wrote
that "essence intrudes on existence" in the "beauty of Henry Fonda's face" (ibid., p.
49).
30. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 149.
31. Ibid., p. 148.
32. Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience," pp. 213-15.
33- Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 147.
34. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16:3 (Autumn
1975), repr. in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1989).
35. As Colin McCabe and Laura Mulvey put it, "Godard slides continually between
an investigation of the images of woman and an investigation which uses those im-
ages," compromising, in their opinion, his feminism ("Images of Woman, Images of
Sexuality," in Colin McCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1980), p. 87.
36. Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, p. 55.
 Notesto pages 152-58 245

37. Although neither section of the film is set entirely outside or inside, the exteri-
ors in Rome include only high-walled clearings in claustrophobic city streets and a
furnished garden; the interiors in Capri have huge windows through which the land-
scape continues to overwhelm the characters. It should also be noted that Godard has
reversed the proponents of the two theories in his adaptation. In Moravia's // Dis-
prezzo, it is the German director who proposes the modern "neurotic" interpretation,
and the screenwriter who wants to stick to the classical Homeric version.
38. In Eric Auerbach's analysis of Homer, the Greek epic had no secrets, no morals,
and no meanings to divulge; detail had the status simply of detail (Erich Auerbach,
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask
[Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 19531, p. 13.
39. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," p. 99.
40. George Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historical-Philosophical Essay on
the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1971), p. 47.
41. Raymond Bellour, "On Fritz Lang" [1966], in Fritz Lang: The Image and the
Look, ed. Stephen Jenkins (London: British Film Institute, 1981), p. 29.
42. Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, p. 223.
43. Lang's first words in the film, addressed to Prokosch while watching rushes of
"his film," interpret Homer's Odyssey as a "fight of the individual against circum-
stances ... a fight against the gods." As is made clear later in the film, when Camille
reads from a book on Lang, these sentiments echo Lang's own treatment of the theme
of destiny in his films. Bardot/Camille reads aloud from what looks like Luc Moullet's
monograph on Lang, and Lang has repeated similar ideas in his interviews with Bog-
danovich and Eisner.
44. Godard, Godard on Godard, p. 201.
45. Ibid, p. 175.
46. Bill Simon pointed out to me the monumentality of Godard's mise-en-scene
and its resonance in the Langian intertexts.
47. Godard, Godard on Godard, p. 201.
48. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 132.
49. Godard says that "it's not that she (Bardot) can do many things. She can only
do certain things. Just don't ask her to do more She couldn't think about what she
was doing, do it, and make it work" (Collet, Jean-Luc Godard, p. 90). He also says of
Jack Palance that he was "very disagreeable" to work with because "he didn't have to
act, just the fact of his being there was already a kind of performance" ("Excerpt from
an Interview with Richard Grenier and Jean-Luc Godard" by James Blue, in Jean-Luc
Godard, ed. Toby Mussman [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968], p. 250).
50. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, p. 444, trans, and quoted by
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), p. 195.
51. Benjamin, quoted in Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 195. Buck-Morss
quotes from Benjamin's text "Zentralpark" (1939-40), a "fragmentary text formulated
specifically with reference to Benjamin's planned book on Baudelaire."
52. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmod-
ernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 209-
53- Two Hollywood gangster/noir films, They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948)
and Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949), seem to be fairly close to the surface of
246 Notes to pages 159-67

Pierrot lefou, especially the latter in terms of the prevalence of automobiles and the
femme fatale who is responsible for the hero's increased criminal involvement. The
pastoral interlude of Lang's You Only Live Once (1937), as well as the romantic dou-
ble death with which that film ends, suggest that it also belongs to the "popular" nar-
rative sources of Pierrot lefou.
54. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 127.
55. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 70.
56. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 114-18.
57. The term "metaphysical materialism" is used by Terry Eagleton with reference
to the common theoretical ground of Bakhtin and Benjamin (Walter Benjamin or To-
wards a Revolutionary Criticism [London: New Left Books, 1981]).
58. Marie-Claire Ropars Wuilleumier, "Form and Substance, or the Avatars of Nar-
rative," in Brown, ed., Focus on Godard, p. 101.
59. Ibid., p. 102.
60. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986).
61. Benjamin, "N [Theoretics of Knowledge]", p. 10.
62. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, pp. 75-76.
63. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, p. 150.
64. Walter Benjamin, "On Surrealism," in Reflections, p. 192.
65. Benjamin, "N [Theoretics of Knowledge]," p. 13.
66. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, p. 155.
67. Godard, Godard on Godard, p. 219.
68. Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," in After the
Great Divide, pp. 44-64.
69. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989), p. 360.
70. Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Critical Theory since 1965, ed.
Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1986), p.
209.
71. Charles Baudelaire, "De l'essence du rire," in Curiosites esthetiques: L'Art ro-
mantique et autres CEuvres critiques, ed. H. Lemaitre (Paris: Gamier, 1962), quoted in
de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," p. 214, trans, eds. of Critical Theory since
1965.
72. Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, p. 178.
73- Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 179, quoting Benjamin from "Zentral-
park," pp. 658, 660.
74. Godard, Godard on Godard, p. 215.
75. Luc Moullet's "Sam Fuller: In Marlowe's Footsteps" {Cahiers du Cinema, March
1959) is perhaps the seminal appreciation of Fuller's violence. Godard's own commen-
tary on Forty Guns is basically a euphoric description of the film's most violent scenes.
See also James Hillier's Introduction to part 2 of Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950's
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 79-
76. Benjamin quotes Marx in the Arcades project: " 'The reformation of conscious-
ness lies solely in the awakening of the world ... from its dreams about itself.'" ("N
[Theory of Knowledge]," p. 1; quoted from Der historische Materialismus: Die Friih-
schriften Leipzig [1932], vol. 1, p. 226).
 Notes to pages 168-75 247

77. Arthur Rimbaud, "Une Saison en Enfer" (1873), trans. J. S. Watson, Jr., in A
Season in Hell: The Life of Arthur Rimbaud, by Jean-Marie Carr (New York: Macaulay,
193D, pp. 301, 304; italics in source.
78. Allusions to Rimbaud have been isolated by both Milne {Godard on Godard,
p. 279) and Ropars Wuilleumier ("Form and Substance," p. 101).
79. Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death" [1949], in The Gaze of
Orpheus and Other Literary Writings, trans. Lydia Davis, ed. P. Adams Sitney (Barry-
town, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1981), p. 55.
80. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 290.
81. Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, p. 218.
82. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," p. 102.
83- Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, p. 178.
84. Ibid.
85. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 172.
86. "The necessity to be modern" is a theme that runs throughout the essays that
Jim Hillier has collected in his volume of writings from the 1950s. See especially
Jacques Rivette, "Notes on a Revolution" {Cahiers du Cinema 54 [Christmas 19551)
and Godard, "Nothing but Cinema" (February 1957), in Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du
Cinema: The 1950's (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

Chapter 5. American Apocalypticism: The Sight of the Crisis

1. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 1976), pp. 1-2.
2. Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 138.
3. In his survey of research into screen and TV violence, Andre Glucksmann
notes that violence in sociological and psychological studies is rarely defined with
any precision. It is generally assumed to be acts that "if carried out in reality, would
be illegal, immoral or simply brutal" {Violence on the Screen: A Report on research
into the effects on young people of scenes of violence in films and television, trans. Su-
san Bennett [London: British Film Institute, 1971], p. 16; italics in source).
4. Glucksmann cites Edgar Dale (1935) as the first quantitative analysis of vio-
lence in film. This study, like some subsequent studies, distinguishes between murder
and other crimes, but not between death and violence (Glucksmann, Violence on the
Screen, p. 23.)
5. The relationship between violence and formal innovation is implied, if not
stated, in William Faure's collection of stills and frame enlargements, Images of Vio-
lence (London: Studio Vista, 1973).
6. Eisenstein notes that Griffith's bourgeois representation of society de-
mands that the anticipated violence be perpetually postponed. American society "per-
ceived only as a contrast between the haves and the have-nots, is reflected in the
consciousness of Griffith no deeper than the image of an intricate race between two
parallel lines" {Film Form, ed. Jay Leyda [New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1949]), p.
234.
7. Vivian Sobchack, "Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Repre-
sentation and Documentary," Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Fall 1984), p. 289.
248 Notes to pages 175-87

8. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception [1984], trans. Patrick
Camiller (London: Verso, 1989).
9. Yuri Rubinsky and Ian Wiseman, A History of the End of the World (New York:
William Morrow, 1982).
10. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 5.
11. Jo Ann James, "Introduction" to Apocalyptic Visions Past and Present," ed. Jo
Ann James and William J. Cloonan (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1988),
p. 3.
12. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), p. 126.
13- See, especially, Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Phillip Beitchman and
W. G. J. Niesluchowski, ed. Jim Fleming (New York: Semiotext[e], 1990).
14. Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls, p. 138.
15. William J. Free, "Aesthetic and Moral Value in Bonnie and Clyde," in Focus on
Bonnie and Clyde, ed. John G. Cawelti (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1973),
p. 104.
16. Arthur Penn himself invokes a line from Macbeth to describe the violence:
"Who would have thought the old man could have had so much blood in him?" Inter-
view with Arthur Penn by Jean-Louis Comolli and Andre S. Labarthe, in Focus on Bonnie
and Clyde, p. 17.
17. Ibid., p. 16.
18. Roland Barthes, "The Third Meaning," in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen
Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 61.
19- Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1982), p. 49.
20. Pauline Kael, "Crime and Poetry," from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1967); repr. in
The Bonnie and Clyde Book, comp. and ed. Sandra Wake and Nicola Hayden (London:
Lorimer, 1972), p. 167.
21. Steve Neale, "Melodrama and Tears," Screen 27:6 (November-December 1986),
p. 19- Neale is quoting from Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac,
Henry fames, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1976), p. 67.
22. Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls, p. 150.
23. Penn interview, Focus on Bonnie and Clyde, p. 18.
24. Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spie
berg, Altman, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 52.
25. Ibid., p. 53.
26. Lawrence Alloway, Violent America: The Movies 1946-1964 (New York: Mu-
seum of Modern Art, 1971), p. 57.
27. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, p. 55.
28. In comparing the representation of death in documentary and fiction film,
Vivian Sobchack claims that the general cultural toleration of narrative death (as op-
posed to documented death) is due to its containment "in a range of formal and ritual
simulations ... thus simulated, it simply 'doesn't count'" ("Inscribing Ethical Space," p.
291).
29. Garrett Stewart, "Photo-Gravure: Death, Photography and Film Narrative," Wide
Angle 9:1 (1987), p. 22.
30. Stewart writes: "Into the (metonymic) chain of contiguity, of continuous motion,
 Notes to pages 187-95 249

of sequence, of plot, breaks the radical equation stasis equals death, the axis of sub-
stitution, the advent of metaphor" (ibid.).
31. Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Vin-
tage Books, 1982), p. 116.
32. Much of the violence preceding this massacre is directed against women, who
are represented as unfaithful and brutal intruders in an all-male world. The homo-
erotic aspect of the narrative of The Wild Bunch has been developed by Terrance
Butler in Crucified Heroes: The Films of Sam Peckinpah (London: Gordon Fraser, 1979)
33- Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1973).
34. John G. Cawelti, "Myths of Violence in American Popular Culture," Critical In-
quiry 1:3 (March 1975), p. 529.
35- The representation of "Che" in The Hour of the Furnaces (Solanas, 1967) in-
volves a similar conflation of heroism and revolutionary ideology. It is also an inter-
esting example of narrative mortality and the representation of death in the duration
of the still photo of Guevara's face held silently on-screen for several minutes.
36. David A. Cook, History of Narrative Film (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), p.
632.
37. Gerard Lenne, La Mort a voir (Editions du Cerf, 1977), p. 27.
38. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San
Franciso: City Light Books, 1986), pp. 82-83.
39- Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 19-
40. Ibid., p. 47.
41. The Christian orientation is made more explicit in Rene Girard's Things Hidden
Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (London:
Athlone, 1987).
42. See, in particular, Christopher Sharrett, "The American Apocalypse: Scorsese's
Taxi Driver," Persistence of Vision 1 (Summer 1984); Garrett Stewart, "Coppola's Con-
rad: The Repetitions of Complicity," Critical Inquiry 7:3 (Spring 1983); and Christo-
pher Sharrett, "Apocalypticism in the Contemporary Horror Film: A Typological Sur-
vey of a Theme in the Fantastic Cinema, Its Relation to Cultural Tradition and Current
Filmic Expression" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1983), p. 301.
43. H. Dale Crockett, Focus on Watergate: An Examination of the Moral Dilemma
of Watergate in the Light of Civil Religion (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1982),
p. 98.
44. Barbara Jean's frailty and the black funeral wreath in her hospital room, the
several discussions of guns, Linnea's cocktail chat about violent death, and Kenny's
skulking around the Walker campaign headquarters can all be read retrospectively as
hints of the narrative denouement.
45. "The poet brings the sacrificial crisis back to life; he pieces the scattered frag-
ments of reciprocity and balances elements thrown out of kilter in the process of be-
ing 'mythologized.' He whistles up a storm of violent reciprocity, and differences are
swept away in this storm just as they were previously dissolved in the real crisis that
must have generated the mythological transfiguration" (Girard, Violence and the Sacred,
pp. 64-65.
46. Sharrett has suggested that Watergate was a mythic apparatus constructed to
displace violence, but that the "sacrifice of Nixon failed as ritual, not only because it
250 Notesto pages 196-209

was incomplete, but because it was revealed as ritual per se and one that did not
genuinely respond to a consensus." The mystification of violence in contemporary
America removes it from a political/historical dimension ("The American Apocalypse,"
p. 61).
47. Glucksmann, Violence on the Screen, p. 59-
48. Ibid., p. 60.
49. See Amy Lawrence, "The Aesthetics of the Image: The Hanging of Colonel
Higgins: A CBS NewsBreak," Wide Angle 12:2 (April 1990).
50. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 291.
51. Kenny rents a room from Mr. Green (Keenan Wynn); Kelly becomes something
of a confidant for Mr. Green as they both stand vigil at the hospital—Kelly for Bar-
bara Jean, Mr. Green for his wife. Kenny and Kelly's status as replaceable sons for Mr.
Green is made clear when Green tells Kelly in church that he lost a son his age in the
South Pacific.
52. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 36.
53. Catherine Clement, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsey Wing (M
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 45.
54. Ibid., p. 52. Carmen's death is played out "in a space between two theaters:
the opera theater and the fictional amphitheater."
55. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989), p. 318.
56. Girard's project in Violence and the Sacred involves a revision of psychoana-
lytic epistemology, and the restoration of myth through the scapegoating process in-
volves a demarcation of Self and Other as fundamental as sexual difference. The "oth-
erness" of the sacrificial victim is the key to the mythic apparatus of ritual.
57. Crockett, Focus on Watergate, p. 108.
58. Thomas Elsaesser, "Nashville-. Putting on the Show," Persistence of Visio
(Summer 1984), p. 42.
59- Kolker, for example, argues that it "falls short of the notion of the open narra-
tive, in which the viewer is asked to participate in, question, and respond to new
forms of expression" {A Cinema of Loneliness, p. 319)- Other negative reviews o
Nashville include Penelope Gilliatt in the New Yorker (16 June 1975), pp. 107-9; Steve
Abrahams in Jump Cut 9 (October-December 1975), pp. 7-8; and Robert Mazzocco in
the New York Review of Books 22:12 (17 July 1975), pp. 18-20.
60. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p.
188.
61. Altman, The American Film Musical, p. 324.
62. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 31.
63. Altman, The American Film Musical, p. 327.
64. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 145.
65. Jean Baudrillard, "Panic Crash!" trans. Faye Trecartin and Arthur Kroker, Panic
Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene, ed. Arthur Kroker, Ma
ilouise Kroker and David Cook (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1989), P- 65.

Conclusion: The Senselessness of Ending

1. Catherine Clement, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsey Wing (Mi
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 177.
 Notes to pages 210-18 251

2. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (

ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 199D, p. 168.
3. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (N
York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 98.
4. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capit
ism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), p. 81.
5. "Food for Thought," Peter Greenaway interviewed by Gavin Smith, Film Com-
ment (May-June 1990), p. 58.
6. Kathy Acker has pointed out that Michael's body is the body of the host,
transforming "violent political vengeance into the ritual of eating and drinking Christ.
The transformation of death into life" (Kathy Acker, "The Color of Myth: The World
According to Peter Greenaway," Village Voice [17 April 1992], p. 67).
7. The political dynamics of transgression are developed by Bataille in his read-
ing of de Sade, whose language, he says, is the means by which violence is appre-
hended by the conscious mind. His description of de Sade's text is remarkably similar
to the experience of watching Weekend: both are a means of changing violence int
"something else, something necessarily its opposite: into a reflecting and rationalized
will to violence" (Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwo
[San Francisco: City of Lights Books, 1986], p. 192).
8. The flashbacks of patricide, Marietta's attempted seduction of Sailor, and Sailor's
acquisition of fatherhood are the tokens of an oedipal trajectory of which Marietta,
the wicked witch, is both mother and sphinx, brought down by ridicule and ugliness
and replaced by Lulu. See Sharon Willis, "Special Effects: Sexual and Social Difference
in Wild at Heart; Camera Obscura 25/26 (January-May 1991), pp. 275-96.
9. Tania Modleski, "The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and
Postmodern Theory," in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Cu
ture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 164-65.
Modleski argues that the violence of representation in the contemporary horror film
confounds the critical distinction between modernist and mass culture insofar as visual
pleasure is a terrifying, rather than gratifying, experience. She re-poses Hal Foster's
question, "How can we break with a program that makes a value of crisis ... or
progress beyond the era of Progress ... or transgress the ideology of the transgres-
sive?" She quotes Foster from the Preface to The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmod
Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), p. ix.
10. The fantasy of resurrection at the end of Wild at Heart evokes an important
group of films, categorically built around the disavowal of death. These are the "ghost"
films in which the boundary between life and death is crossed and the dead mix
freely with those they are supposed to have left behind. In genres from the supernat-
ural to the domestic melodrama, this theme has been engaged with many variations,
including Liliom (1930 and 1933), Heaven Can Wait (1943 and 1978), Topper (1937
It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Stairway to Heaven (1946), Beetlejuice (1988), and W
of Desire (1988). These films are not about death but about the capacity of the cinema
to transcend death, to penetrate the realm of the unseeable and unknowable; they
not only deny death but do so with a melodramatic indulgence in its disavowal.
11. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborn
(London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 233.
12. Ibid.
13. In addition to the two films discussed here, other examples of art-house vio-
lence produced in the early 1990s include Benny's Video, Laws of Gravity, Reserv
252 Notes to pages 218-25

Dogs, and One False Move. For discussions of the trend toward excessive violenc
see B. Ruby Rich, "Art House Killers," Sight and Sound 2:8 (1992), pp. 5-6; Amy
Taubin, "The Men's Room," Sight and Sound 2:8 (1992): pp. 2-4; "Eight Critics Talk
about Violence and the Movies," Village Voice (1 December 1992); Devin McKinne
"Violence: The Strong and the Weak," Film Quarterly 46:4 (Summer 1993), pp. 16-22
14. A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971), which remains a repertory cinema stapl
is certainly a precedent for the discourses of spectatorship and violence perpetrated
against suburban domesticity that occur in the films discussed in this section.
15. It may be the Maysles brothers whom the film emulates most closely, tracking
the killer as closely as the investigation of Salesman, and also showing the footage t
"Ben," catching "Ben" off guard, and including technical "accidents" (three soundmen
are accidentally killed, temporarily silencing the film) a la Gimme Shelter.
16. "The word 'history' stands written on the countenance of nature in the charac-
ter of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on
stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin histor
has physically merged into the setting" (Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic
Drama, p. 178).
17. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writin
trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 192.
18. Taubin, "The Men's Room," p. 4.
19. Reservoir Dogs opens with an ironically misogynist conversation among all th
men in which they debate the necessity of tipping waitresses, introducing the charac-
ters by way of their various moral stances with respect to this sexism. They are on the
"grounds" of absent women.
20. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis
York: Routledge, 199D, p. 14.
21. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide. Modernism, Mass Culture, Postm
ernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 44-64; Mary Ann Doane,
"Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator," in Femmes Fatales, p
17-32; Patrice Petro, foyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in W
Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).
22. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicag
Press, 1981), p. 6.
23. Judith Mayne's conception of the screen as figure of ambivalence in women's
cinema might be read against the threshold of narrative mortality for an articulation of
female desire. The difficulties of closure in women's cinema demonstrate "how the fe-
male subject is both complicit with the fictions of patriarchy and resistant to them"
("Screen Tests," in Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Woman
Cinema [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990], p. 85).
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INDEX
Compiled by Hassan Melehy

Abe Tetsuo, 125, 131, 133 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 21, 22, 90,
Accatone, 22 231 n. 59
Acker, Kathy, 251 n. 6 Apocalypse Now, 175
Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, Apollinaire, Guillaume, 230 n. 56
The, 70 apparatus theories of cinema, 15, 32,
AIDS, 127, 210, 225 49, 52, 54, 63
Akerman, Chantal, 21, 90 Aries, Philippe, 8, 188, 228 n. 18
Aldrich, Robert, 22, 232 n. 11 Aristotle, 62
allegory: and body, 170; and cinematic Arthur, Paul, 51, 236 n. 8
representation, 71; and classicism, Ashby, Hal, 22
143-44; and death, 121-22, 225-26; Attenborough, Sir Richard, 227 n. 12
and desire, 109; and excess, Auder, Viva, 100
179-80; and femininity, 115, Auerbach, Erich, 245 n. 38
150-51; and history, 5-6, 171, 210, authorship: and death, 12, 17, 65;
215-17; and image, 207-8; and myth of, 77, 79, 88, 97, 148, 154,
irony, 164-66; and melodrama, 216
119-21; and memory, 145-46; and Avventura, L', 22, 23
modernism, 152; and myth, 145; Ayfre, Amedee, 231 n. 7
and narrative mortality, 137-38,
191, 204-5; national, 118-19, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 140-41, 159-60,
130-31; and representation, 3, 6, 161-62, 172, 246 n. 57, 247 n. 80
12-15, 18-19, 30, 37, 49, 52, 67-69, Balzac, Honore de, 167
103-4, 141-42, 147; and time, 190 Banded part, 140, 166
Alloway, Lawrence, 185-86 Bardot, Brigitte, 138, 142, 148, 149,
Altman, Rick, 13, 246 n. 69, 250 n. 55, 150, 151-52, 155-56, 223, 245 n. 43
250 n. 61, 250 n. 63 Barthes, Roland, 1, 14, 21, 77, 116,
Altman, Robert, 2, 3, 22, 175, 176, 117, 118, 179-80, 204, 234 n. 52
191-208, 211 Bataille, Georges, 105, 130, 161, 193,
American Friend, The, 69-70, 71 194, 196, 205, 214
American Soldier, The, 4 Battle of San Pietro, 27
Andrew, Dudley, 231 n. 5, 231 n. 7, Bauchau, Patrick, 88, 91, 97, 238 n. 60
237 n. 28 Baudelaire, Charles, 4, 18, 29, 144,
Andrews, Dana, 36, 37, 39, 47 149-50, 157, 158, 164

263
264 Index

Baudrillard, Jean, 207 Bogdanovich, Peter, 232 n. 18, 235 n.

Baudry, Jean-Louis, 229 n. 32 79, 245 n. 43
Bazin, Andre, 13, 33-34, 75-77, 78, 79, Bonnie and Clyde, 18, 19, 29, 176,
82, 139, 151, 158, 205, 236 n. 4 177-83, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191,
Beatty, Warren, 177-78, 179, 180 194, 201, 206, 217, 223
Becker, Ernst, 8 Bonzel, Andre, 218
Being There, 22 Bordwell, David, 22, 242 n. 50, 242 n.
Bellour, Raymond, 42, 43, 227 n. 12, 56
235 n. 71 Borgnine, Ernest, 185
Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 138, 140, 156, Boy(Shonen), 2, 11-12, 111, 123-35
158, 164, 168, 170, 243 n. 8, 244 n. Boyz 'n the Hood, 29
28 Brakhage, Stan, 70
Belvaux, Remy, 218 Brasseur, Claude, 140
Benjamin, Walter, 4-6, 10-11, 13, 14, Breathless (A bout de souffle), 106,
16-17, 18-19, 23, 29-30, 31-32, 37- 140, 156, 244 n. 28
38, 62, 64, 71, 94, 101, 102, 104, 119- Brecht, Bertolt, 107, 147, 204
20, 121, 127, 137, 144-47, 149-50, Bresson, Robert, 21, 22, 26, 140
152-53, 154-55, 157,161-62,165-66, Broken Blossoms, 26
167, 171, 172, 208, 209, 211, 214, Brooks, Peter, 6l, 115, 116, 181, 227
215, 217, 221-22, 223, 225, 228 n. n. 2, 235 n. 66, 241 n. 30
16, 229 n. 29, 233 n. 42, 234 n. 56, Brooks, Richard, 232 n. 11
234-35 n. 65, 235 n. 72, 246 n. 57, Brown, Norman O., 228 n. 17
246 n. 76, 247 n. 81, 247 n. 82 Buck-Morss, Susan, 227 n. 4, 229 n.
Bergman, Ingmar, 26 39, 230 n. 47, 230 n. 48, 231 n. 63,
Bergman, Ingrid, 148 245 n. 50, 245 n. 51, 246 n. 73
Bertolucci, Bernardo, 70, 74 Burch, Noel, 239 n. 11, 241 n. 42
Beware the Holy Whore, 90 Buruma, Ian, 108, 117
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, 2, 12, 27, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
28, 32, 35, 36-65, 74, 105, 111, 184, 186-87
151, 155, 184, 186, 222, 223
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 56, Cahiers du Cinema, 28, 32, 33, 34-35,
59-60, 62 37, 65, 138, 154, 158, 167, 172
Binns, Edward, 40 cancer: and obscenity, 86
Birth of a Nation, 175 Carabiniers, Les, 140
Blackmer, Sidney, 39 catharsis: and mimesis, 196
Blakeley, Ronnee, 73, 197, 223 Cawelti, John G., 205, 249 n. 34
Blanchot, Maurice, 17-18, 173, 247 n. Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 158, 163
79 Chaplin, Charlie, 154
Blow-Up, 22, 231 n. 59 Chaplin, Geraldine, 192, 198
Bock, Audie, 120, 240 n. 20 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 112-13, 116
body: and allegory, 170; and Citizen Kane, 23, 27, 28, 227 n. 12
consciousness, 72; and self, 80; Cixous, Helene, 16
and subject, 15; and violence, Clement, Catherine, 14, 200, 209
173-74, 186-87, 217 Clockwork Orange, A, 252 n. 14
 Index 265

Cobra, 19'4 desire: and allegory, 109; and death,

Cocteau, Jean, 236 n. 13 59-60; and narrative mortality, 6,
Collet, Jean, 139, 244 n. 27, 245 n. 49 52-58, 105-6, 114, 183; and
Comolli, Jean-Louis, 46, 48, 49, 63, psychoanalysis, 52; and repetition,
233 n. 32, 234 n. 61, 235 n. 70, 235 60-61; and representation, 17; and
n. 75, 248 n. 16 sexual difference, 54
Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Desser, David, 239 n. 11, 240 n. 14,
Lover, The, 211-14 240 n. 19
Coppola, Francis Ford, 67, 96, 175 Dirty Harry, 176, 194
Corrigan, Timothy, 74-75, 77, 182, discourse: and story, 22-23. See also
235-36 n. 3, 247 n. 2, 248 n. 14 narrative
Course de taureaux, La, 75 Doan, Mary Ann, 223, 252 n. 21
Coutard, Raoul, 151 Doi Takeo, 135, 241 n. 31
Cruel Story of Youth, 2, 13-14, 107, Dostoyevski, Fyodor, 141, 159
108, 109, 111-21, 134, 135, 182, Double Indemnity, 222
223 Double Suicide, 118
Dr. Strangelove, 3, 26
Dafoe, Willem, 215 Dreyer, Carl, 26
Dazai Osamu, 118-19 Dunaway, Faye, 177-78, 179, 180, 223
de Man, Paul, 164-66 Dwan, Alan, 90
death: and allegory, 121-22, 225-26; Dying, 70
and carnival, 159; and closure, 2,
3-4, 14, 178; denial of, 8; and Eagleton, Terry, 246 n. 57, 246 n. 66
desire, 59-60; disavowal of, 133; Eco, Umberto, 44
and existentialism, 138-39; and Edward II, 27, 210
genre, 140; and meaning, 6-8; and Egoyan, Atom, 210
narrative, 31-32, 38, 57, 93-94, 97, Eisenstein, Sergei, 175, 179-80
100-102, 209; and phallus, 15, Eisner, Lotte, 234 n. 50, 245 n. 43
16-17; and phenomenology, 141; Electrocution of an Elephant, The, 26
and photography, 21-22; and Elsaesser, Thomas, 86, 88, 116, 202,
poetry, 160-61; and power, 45-51; 235 n. 2
and realism, 23, 33-34; Eraserhead, 23
representation of, 1-30, 46, 70-71, Eros Plus Massacre, 135
75-77, 103, 106, 134-35, 137; and excess: and allegory, 179—80;
spectacle, 19; and transgression, codification of, 188; and narrative
214; and Utopia, 9-10, 11; and mortality, 211
violence, 18-20, 174-75. See also Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, The,
narrative mortality 26
Death by Hanging, 105, 107, 110,
122 Falls, The, 211
Death Wish, 194 Family Viewing, 210
Debord, Guy, 19, 248 n. 12 Farrell, Tom, 73, 85, 236 n. 15
Delerue, Georges, 155 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 4, 22, 26,
Derrida, Jacques, 225 90
266 Index

Faulkner, William, 158 Godard, Jean-Luc, 2, 3, 13-14, 19, 26,

Felman, Shoshana, 55-56 27, 29, 64, 68, 70, 85, 88, 90, 94,
female sexuality, 55, 115 106, 109, 137-72, 176, 178, 191,
femininity: and allegory, 115, 150-151 203, 207, 210, 211, 212, 217, 223,
feminism: and narrative mortality, 232 n. 12, 236 n. 13
52-55, 222-24 Godfather, The, 176
film noir, 26, 28, 35, 37, 41, 51, 53, 62, Goorwitz, Allan, 90
74, 86, 90, 94, 158; and narrative Great Train Robbery, The, 38, 175
mortality, 50-51 Greed, 26
Fonda, Henry, 181, 244 n. 29 Greenaway, Peter, 27, 211-14, 218,
Fonda, Jane, 138, 149 224
Fontaine, Joan, 40 Griffith, D. W., 154, 175
Ford, John, 35, 95-96, 189 Guevara, Che, 189, 190
Foster, Hal, 251 n. 9
Foucault, Michel, 8, 9-10, 17, 36, Habermas, Jiirgen, 5, 244 n. 24
47-49, 50, 123, 228 n. 24 Hackman, Gene, 180
400 Blows, The, 230 n. 54, 232 n. 9 Hamlet, 56-57
Fox and His Friends, 22 Hammett, 67, 69, 89, 96
Franju, Georges, 70 Handke, Peter, 69
Free, William, 248 n. 15 Hansen, Miriam, 147, 150, 229 n. 38,
French Revolution, the, 212-13 244 n. 15, 244 n. 24
Freud, Sigmund, 43-44, 56, 59, 62, Hara Setsuko, 133
83-84, 87, 100, 207, 228 n. 18. See Harootunian, H. D., 131-32, 134
also psychoanalysis Hays Production Code, 46
Fuller, Samuel, 28, 34, 35, 70, 93, 97, Hayward, David, 198
98, 99, 166, 167, 238-39 n. 65 Heath, Stephen, 24, 102, 122, 227 n. 3,
229 n. 32, 236 n. 13, 237 n. 35, 243
Gallipoli, 186-87 n. 58
gangster film, 139, 158-59, 166, 174, Hegel, G. W. F., 139
177, 181 Henry-, Portrait of a Serial Killer, 27,
Garland, Judy, 200 218, 220-21
Geist, Kathy, 80, 236 n. 5, 236 n. 6, Herzog, Werner, 236 n. 3
236 n. 15, 237 n. 36, 238 n. 61 Hinckley, John Roy, 195
genre: and closure, 174; and death, 140 Hiroshima mon amour, 232 n. 12
Gere, Francois, 46, 48, 49, 63, 233 n. history: and allegory, 5-6, 171, 210,
32, 234 n. 61, 235 n. 75 215-17; and narrative mortality,
Gettino, Octavio, 24 19-20; and tragedy, 195
Getty, Paul J. Ill, 98 Hitchcock, Alfred, 178, 227 n. 12, 233
Gibson, Henry, 197, 199 n. 35
Gimme Shelter, 70, 252 n. 15 Holbein, Hans, 63
Girard, Rene, 193-94, 195, 196, 200, Holden, William, 184, 185
202, 207, 214, 250 n. 56, 250 n. 62 Hollywood: and Europe, 89, 96; and
Glenn, Scott, 198 French cinema, 147; and narrative,
Glucksmann, Andre, 247 n. 3, 250 n. 45-46; and narrative mortality,
47, 250 n. 48 32-33
 Index 267

Homer, 142, 152, 153 Kubrick, Stanley, 26, 227 n. 12, 233 n.
Houston, John, 27 35, 252 n. 14
Hughes Brothers, 29 Kurosawa Akira, 106, 111, 121
Huyssen, Andreas, 158, 246 n. 68, 252 Kuwano Miyuki, 112, 115
n. 21
Lacan, Jacques, 15, 56-57, 62, 63, 234
image: and allegory, 207-8; and myth, n. 64. See also psychoanalysis
192; and narrative, 157; and Lady from Shanghai, The, 186
referent, 77. See also representation Lang, Fritz, 2, 3, 11, 12, 27, 31-65, 67,
Imitation of Life, 23, 121 69, 70, 97, 105, 142, 143, 148, 149,
In the Realm of the Senses, 107, 119, 152, 153-54, 155, 164, 181, 211,
122, 135 246 n. 53
Intolerance, 194 Laplanche, J., 238 n. 63
Ivan the Terrible, 180 Last Emperor, The, 70
Last Year at Marienbad, 230 n. 51
Jameson, Fredric, 6-7, 9-10, 14, 210, Lauretis, Teresa de, 15, 232 n. 30, 233
230 n. 44 n. 31
Jarman, Derek, 27, 210 Le May, Alan, 95
John, Saint, 176 Lee, Spike, 29
Jost, Jon, 85 Lescov, Nicolai, 4
Joyce, James, 158, 163 Lethal Weapon, 194
Jules and Jim, 70 Levine, Joe, 144
Life Is a Dream, 4
Kael, Pauline, 180-81 Lightning Over Water, 2, 12, 27,
Karina, Anna, 138, 148-49, 158, 160, 67-68, 69, 71-88, 89, 103-4, 209
168, 170, 223 Lower Depths, The, 121
Kawazu Yusuke, 112 Lukacs, Georg, 153
Kazan, Elia, 237 n. 33 Lusty Men, The, 80
Kennedy, John F., 195 Lynch, David, 27, 211-12, 214-17,
Kennedy, Robert, 195 218, 224
Kermode, Frank, 21, 22, 23, 210, 248 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 59-60
n. 10
Kevorkian, Jack, 228 n. 23 Macbeth, 248 n. 16
Kime, Jeffrey, 98 Made in USA, 172
King Lear, 210 Malcolm X, 29
King, Martin Luther, 195 Man Bites Dog (C'est arrive pres de
King, Rodney, 196 chezvous), 27, 218-20, 221
Kings of the Road, 80, 86 Man Who Left His Will on Film, The,
Kiss Me Deadly, 3, 22, 175 135
Klinger, Barbara, 60, 235 n. 78 Mann, Anthony, 28, 232 n. 11
Kluge, Alexander, 236 n. 3 Marcuse, Herbert, 9-10, 11, 108, 109,
Kolker, Robert, 183, 186, 188, 227 n. 1, 133, 228 n. 26
250 n. 59 Margulies, Ivone, 236 n. 16, 237 n. 21,
Kramer, Robert, 89, 238-39 n. 65 238 n. 48
Kristeva, Julia, 236 n. 17 Marianne and Juliane, 70
268 Index

Marx, Karl, 141, 190, 246 n. 76 Murnau, F. W., 103

Marxism, 226; and representation, musical (the), 159, 164, 166, 201, 202,
138-39 204, 205
Masculin/Feminin, 140 myth: and allegory, 145; and image,
Mayne, Judith, 252 n. 23 192; and violence, 196
Maysles brothers, 70, 252 n. 15
McCabe, Colin, 244 n. 35 narrative: and death, 31-32, 38, 57,
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 22 74-75, 93-94, 97, 100-2, 209; and
McCarthy, Joseph, 51 documentary, 68-69; and
McNaughton, John, 218 Hollywood, 45-46; and image, 157;
meaning: and death, 6-8; and and psychoanalysis, 56-57; and
narrative mortality, 39 repetition, 81; and subject, 124;
melancholy: and narcissism, 100 and Thanatos, 58-59; and time,
melodrama, 8, 28, 35, 90, 106, 109, 20-21
111-20, 123, 131, 132, 134, 166, narrative mortality: and allegory, 3, 6,
175, 177, 180-82, 183, 188, 194, 12-15, 18-19, 30, 37, 49, 52, 67-69,
223, 225; and allegory, 119-21; 103-4, 137-38, 191, 204-5; and
Japanese vs. Western, 117-18 apocalypse, 175-77; and desire, 6,
Menace II Society, 29 52-58, 105-6, 114, 183; as
Meninas, Las, 47 discourse, 2; and excess, 211; and
Menninghaus, Winfried, 146, 243 n. feminism, 222-24; and film noir,
14, 243 n. 17 50-51; and history, 19-20; and
Mepris, Le, 2, 13-14, 20, 64, 90, 137, Hollywood, 32-33; and meaning,
138, 139, 140, 141-58, 170, 171, 39; and realism, 15; and
209, 223 "ressentiment," 14; and semiosis,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 141 44; and subject, 133-34; and
Metz, Christian, 229 n. 32 uncanny, 87. See also death
Michelson, Annette, 237 n. 27 Nashville, 2, 19, 29, 176, 182, 183,
Mishima Yukio, 118-19 192-208, 223
Mitchum, Robert, 80 nationalism: Japanese, 106, 107,
Mizoguchi Kenji, 111, 112, 114, 115, 109-10, 132-33
117 Neale, Steve, 181-82
modernism: and allegory, 152; and Neupert, Richard, 22-23
postmodernism, 158, 172, 210-11, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 229 n. 29
215 Night Moves, 176, 210
modernity: and aura, 147 Nixon, Richard, 202, 249 n. 46
Modleski, Tania, 215 No Regrets for Our Youth, 111
Moll, Giorgia, 144, 151 Nogi, General, 118
Monglod, Andre, 30
Mora, Camila, 98, 100 Odyssey, The, 142, 144, 145-46, 149,
Moravia, Alberto, 142, 152 152, 153
Mouchette, 22 Oedipus, 55-56, 193, 223
Moullet, Luc, 35, 245 n. 43, 246 n. 75 Oklahoma!, 205
Mulvey, Laura, 57, 229 n. 32, 234 n. Origins of German Tragic Drama,
52, 244 n. 34, 244 n. 35 The, 4, 37, 144
 Index 269

Osaka Elegy, 114 Rabelais, Francois, 159

Oshima Nagisa, 2, 3, 11-12, 13-14, 26, Rank, Otto, 228 n. 17, 232 n. 28
27, 105-35, 137, 182, 191, 211, 223, Rashomon, 231 n. 4
224 Ray, Nicholas, 28, 34, 70, 71-88, 232
Oswald, Lee Harvey, 195 n. 11, 245 n. 53
Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 129 Reagan, Ronald, 195
Ozu Yasujiro, 21, 69, 90, 111, 123, realism: and cinema, 101-2; and
130, 132, 133 death, 23, 33-34; and narrative
mortality, 15; and violence, 34-35
Paisa, 22, 76 Rebel Without a Cause, 50, 120
Palance, Jack, 142, 156 Renoir, Auguste, 163
Parallax View, The, 186-87 Renoir, Jean, 33
Paris, Texas, 96 repetition: and desire, 60-61; and
Parsons, Estelle, 180 narrative, 81
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 22, 26 representation: and allegory, 71, 141-
Passenger, The, 22 42, 147; of death, 1-30, 46, 70-71,
Peckinpah, Sam, 3, 175-76, 183-92 75-77, 103, 106, 134-35, 137; and
Peeping Tom, 24 desire, 17; and Marxism, 138-39;
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 44 and subjectivity, 79-80; and the
Penn, Arthur, 3, 175-76, 177-83, 210 uncanny, 43-44; and violence,
Peolvoorde, Benoit, 218 28-29, 205. See also image
Petit Soldat, Le, 140, 244 n. 28 Reservoir Dogs, 222-23, 251-52 n. 13
photography: and cinema, 41-45; and "ressentiment": and narrative
death, 21-22 mortality, 14
Picasso, Pablo, 158, 163 Reverse Angle, 96
Piccoli, Michel, 142 Rimbaud, Arthur, 158, 159, 160-61,
Pierrot lefou, 2, 13-14, 137, 138, 139, 167-69
141-42, 147, 158-72, 178, 180, 209, Rivette, Jacques, 32, 34, 45, 58, 62, 231
223 n. 62, 247 n. 86
Platoon, 194 RKO, 36
Polan, Dana, 35-36, 122, 231 n. 6l, Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 21
241 n. 42 Rocha, Glauber, 26
Pontalis, J.-P., 238 n. 63 Rodowick, D. N., 60, 233 n. 44
Ponti, Carlo, 144 Roemer, Michael, 70
Porter, Edwin S., 175 Rohmer, Eric, 34
Poster, Mark, 139, 141 Rome Open City, 16
Powell, Michael, 24 Room 666, 85, 96
Prenom Carmen, 19 Ropars-Wuilleumier, 160, 247 n. 78
Presley, Elvis, 215 Rosen, Philip, 76-77
Propp, Vladimir, 234 n. 52 Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 49, 65
Proust, Marcel, 146 Rossellini, Roberto, 22, 33, 34, 76, 148,
Psycho, 227 n. 12 231 n. 59
psychoanalysis: and desire, 52; and Ruiz, Raoul, 4, 89, 90, 102-3
narrative, 56-57. See also Freud, Ryan, Robert, 185
Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques Ryu Chishu, 133
270 Index

Sade, Marquis de, 251 n. 7 Tadao Sato, 117, 240 n. 18

Sanders, George, 148 Tarantino, Quentin, 222
Sang des betes, Le, 70 Tati, Jacques, 21
Santer, Eric, 86, 103 Taubin, Amy, 222, 252 n. 13
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 21, 141, 163 Taxi Driver, 176, 195
Sauve quipeut, 85 Territory, The, 89, 90, 102-3
Schneiderman, Stuart, 56, 234 n. 58 Tetsuo, 211
Scorsese, Martin, 175, 195 text: open and closed, 22-23
Searchers, The, 95-96, 189, 191 Thanatos: and Eros, 59-60, 108-9,
Shakespeare, William, 57 166-67; and narrative, 58-59
Shinoda Masahiro, 26, 118 Thatcher, Margaret, 212
Shinya Tsukamoto, 211 They Live by Night, 245-46 n. 53
Shorten (Boy), 107, 108, 110 Throne of Blood, 121
Sidney, Sylvia, 181 time: and allegory, 190; and Christ, 21;
Silverman, Kaja, 230 n. 58 and narrative, 20-21
Singleton, John, 29 Tolstoy, Leo, 141
Sirk, Douglas, 28, 121 Topper, 251 n. 10
Sisters of the Gion, 114 Touch of Evil, A, 233 n. 46
Sobchack, Vivian, 232 n. 29, 236 n. 7, Tout va bien, 149, 230 n. 54
236 n. 9, 247 n. 7, 248 n. 28 Trotta, Margarethe von, 70
Solanas, Fernando, 24 Truffaut, Francois, 26, 70, 231-32 n. 9,
Sontag, Susan, 86, 139-40 236 n. 4
Sophocles, 56 Turim, Maureen, 120, 240 n. 20, 241 n.
spectacle: and death, 19; and 42
spectator, 202-3; and violence, Two or Three Things I Know About
24-25 Her, 243
spectatorship: and apparatus theory,
15; 46-47, 48-49, 52, 54; and Ugestu Monogatari, 120
Bazin, 77, 83-84; and ethnicity, uncanny, 43-44, 60, 63, 71, 81, 87, 99,
107, 111; and mortification, 25-26, 103, 150; and cinematic
43, 50, 60, 63-64, 209; and politics, representation, 43-44; and
133-35, 199-201, 202; and narrative mortality, 87
violence, 35, 45-46, 70-71, 196,
205-6, 218, 219-20, 221; and Vadim, Roger, 149
women, 222, 225 Varda, Agnes, 227 n. 12
Stalin, Joseph, 233 n. 46 Verne, Jules, 163
State of Things, The, 2, 12, 27, 67-68, video: and film, 84-85
69, 71, 86, 87-104, 174, 219 violence: and body, 173-74, 186-87,
Stewart, Garrett, 186-87, 232 n. 24, 217; and death, 18-20, 174-75; and
242 n. 48, 248-49 n. 30, 249 n. 42 myth, 196; and realism, 34-35; regen-
subject: and body, 15; and narrative, erative function of, 189; represen-
124; and narrative mortality, tation of, 28-29, 205; and sacrifice,
133-34; and object, 110-11, 131-32 193-94, 205-7; and spectacle, 24-25
Sun's Burial, The, 107, 108, 109 Virilio, Paul, 83, 175
surrealism, 162, 221-22 Visconti, Luchino, 33
 Index 271

Vivre sa vie, 139, 244 n. 28 Wild at Heart, 211-12, 214-17

Voyage in Italy, 34, 148 Wild Bunch, The, 19, 29, 175-76,
177, 182, 183-92, 194, 201, 206,
Warhol, Andy, 90 217
Wayne, John, 84, 95, 96, 102, 191 Williams, Linda, 18, 228 n. 20
We Can't Go Home Again, 78, 81 Wings of Desire, 251 n. 10
Weekend, 19, 171, 211, 212, 215, 216, Wizard of Oz, The, 206
217, 222, 230 n. 54 Wolfe, Alan, 118-19
Welles, Orson, 28, 33, 227 n. 12 Wood, Natalie, 191
Wenders, Wim, 2, 3, 11, 12-13, 18, 21,
27, 67-104, 138, 151, 164, 207, 211, Yanagita Kunio, 131, 132
217, 219, 224 Yoshida Yoshishige, 135
Western (the), 95, 177, 184, 185-90, 216 You Only Live Once, 181, 246 n. 53
White, Lionel, 158 Young Mr. Lincoln, 35
Wiengarten, Isabelle, 100, 238 n. 53,
238 n. 60 Zen Buddhism, 110
CATHERINE RUSSELL teaches in the Department of Cinema at Concordia
University, Montreal. She has published numerous articles on experi-
mental film, video art, Japanese cinema, ethnographic film, and fem-
inist film theory.