©
1995
PMC
5.2
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There are two things I would like to do in this paper: elaborate on some Deleuzian concepts and examine recent science fiction cinema from Hollywood and its periphery (Canada, Britain, and the usually suspicious European transplants, whose films enter into "mainstream" flows or circulation). Ideally, I will do both in the same act, working the concepts and showing how they work themselves into and out of the movies in question,2 producing a configuration that says something about philosophy and its relation to other aspects of the world as well as about the importance of the films. The mapping of various relations that will occur in the process will not take either philosophy or film studies as starting points or guiding frameworks, will not explicitly reject the integrity of either, but rather will reach into an interdisciplinary field that resists accusations of eclecticism yet refuses to call itself an institutional unity. I would like, among other things, to argue for the consideration of Gilles Deleuze as a philosopher because of (not in spite of) his interest in non-philosophical practices, in a nomadic entrance into cinema, in conducting "one of the finest contemporary reflections on the liveliness and grandeur of the seventh art" (Bensmaïa 57). In his reflection he makes connections between aspects of this art and trajectories of the philosophical project that may be discerned running through his books. I would also like to argue for the appreciation of science fiction films from the eighties as participating in the production of philosophical concepts, while, in their capacity as movies and especially "B" movies, they wrest these concepts from the institutional closure that the term "philosophical" might tend to impose on them.
An evident place to start is with Deleuze's work on the cinema, which has received less critical attention than many of his other texts. This is in part because of their relatively recent appearance and translation but also in part, I suspect, because the connections Deleuze tries to make between philosophy and cinema are very demanding--because the concepts he produces are new, unknown, alien to traditional film studies, and particularly illustrative of Deleuze's treatment of philosophy as a Foucauldian "system of dispersion" (Foucault, Archéologie 44-54) rather than an institutional unity. To begin with the Cinema books, then, one would have to proceed through extensions of the multidirectionality of their project and would not be able to avoid various enlistments of other sections of Deleuze's work. This process can't start by summarizing the books or by taking a set of statements from them as a guiding principle in critical analysis of the films.3 It must rather select a line in them, with a certain agenda in mind, and follow it through various materials as it gathers layers--other texts of Deleuze, the films in question--and work with the becomings that take place.
What I would like to do is see the cinema books in light of Deleuze's earlier alliance of his own philosophical project with that of Nietzsche's as something that would contribute to the overturning of Platonism.4 And I would like to see the films as contributing to the same event, by seeing them in light of certain Deleuzian concepts--becoming, image, multiplicity, body without organs, assemblage, becoming-animal, simulacrum, the machinic, becoming-woman, etc. (which Deleuze himself has gathered from a variety of planes--hence Deleuze's "counter history" of philosophy [Douglass 47-48]). Their examinations of, among other things, the cyberneticization of the human organism--the destabilization of its organic structure--and the displacement of a grounded notion of the real by the simulacrum of the televisual image do not simply constitute a social or aesthetic epiphenomenon, but rather participate in the emergenc(e)(y) that Deleuze's efforts map, as well as, in so far as in their images they present crystallizations of philosophical concepts, disturb the unified and privileged discourse of philosophy, something the latter retains from its Platonic legacy. This is the period in which it may be said that "there is no more philosophy in the sense that metaphysics has become impossible as a discourse, simply because it is realized in the contemporary world" (Lyotard 45)--that is, in which philosophy can no longer be an autonomous, self-crowning discipline. One begins, then, to see philosophy and philosophers at the movies.
Deleuze's writing on cinema may be seen as directly tied to the task of overturning Platonism in that it bears on freeing the image from the hold that mimesis has placed on it throughout the history of the west (Bogue, especially 77-78). Constituting as much a treatise on Henri Bergson as an appreciation of the cinema, the two books work with a concept of image that may be attributed to the earlier French philosopher. The following definition goes a long way, I think, toward illuminating the importance Deleuze assigns to the cinema in the revaluation of experience and philosophy's relation to the actual world: "Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of 'images.' And by 'image' we mean a certain existence which is more than what the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing,--an existence placed half-way between the 'thing' and the 'representation'" (Bergson x; quoted in Douglass 51). This notion of image is a direct challenge to the Platonic dualism that would hold the "representation" in a subordinate relation of mimesis to the "thing." To say that "matter" is made up of images is to suggest that consciousness apprehends and inhabits its world in a way fundamentally different from that conceived in the traditional subject-object relationship that has dominated western thinking since Descartes--indeed that it is not the exclusive property of the organic human being at all. Hence Deleuze may speak of the "machine"--here and elsewhere--not in opposition to the organic but as an assemblage of elements in motion, as extending vitality through movement into all of matter.5 If cinema becomes a locus of the image in the twentieth century--one of the "social and scientific factors which placed more and more movement into conscious life, and more and more images into the material world" (Cinema 1 56)--it must be seen as nothing else than the plane on which this transformation in philosophy takes place.
Deleuze acknowledges that Bergson did not find much use for the early cinema in demonstrating his theses on movement: Bergson wanted to free movement from its conception as a sequence of privileged instants, from its subordination to the immobilizing representation of the thing, and to allow it to be considered as belonging to matter and hence to matter's intertwining with consciousness (1-11). Nonetheless Deleuze pays homage to his predecessor in showing that Bergson's conception of the material universe, the "infinite set of all images" (58), involves precisely the identification of image and matter that the cinema makes available after its first twenty or thirty years. The image is the movement that belongs to matter, the latter no longer subordinate to a frozen, single-frame representation or an accompanying ideal form, but in constant flow, all of its elements interacting: "This is not mechanism, it is machinism. The material universe, the plane of immanence, is the machinic assemblage of movement-images. Here Bergson is startlingly ahead of his time: it is the universe as cinema in itself, metacinema" (59). The cinema becomes what Deleuze, writing with Félix Guattari, elsewhere terms a "map" (Plateaus 12-13)--it doesn't separate itself from and raise itself up as a mimetic image of the world, but rather weaves itself into the world, becoming the world as the world becomes it, each and both a multiplicity rather than a unity or part of a duality. If the cinema begins as a series of mimetic representations, each frame giving an isolated idea of the thing, it immediately transforms: "If these are privileged instants, it is as remarkable or singular points which belong to movement, and not as the moments of actualisation of a transcendent form. . . . The remarkable or singular instant remains any-instant-whatever among the others" (Cinema 1 5-6). In its placement in the cinematic series, an instant of this type cannot claim a superior position; each image constitutes a portion of the machinic interaction of matter. This machinic interaction, this assemblage or agencement, is a whole, if not the Whole, a universe, and each of its portions is a set of moments in and of motion, a segment of time or durée. With the Bergsonian concept of the image, which Deleuze sees actualized in the cinema, there is no matter that may be abstracted as an ideal form from its reality in time (10-11; also Bogue 83-84).
Though Deleuze devotes much of Cinema 1 to producing "a taxonomy, an attempt at the classification of images and signs" (Cinema 1 xiv)--masterfully borrowing from and adapting the semiotics of Charles Peirce as he gives detailed attention to his examples drawn from the history of cinema--my interest here bears more strongly on the outcome of the study of signs and images, which occurs in the second book. This is the advent of "a direct time-image" (ix), the completion, as it were, of the valorization of the Bergsonian image, whose links with the project of overturning Platonism I would like to comment on here. In this type of image time is no longer subordinate to movement: that is, it is not in sequential segments of movement that time is viewed. The image is freed from its placement in a sequence; instants do not need to follow their order as determined in movement, but may all become available to view, such that a restrictive picture to which the world must conform6 is no longer possible. There is no more progression of time such that all past moments are seen to be contributing to the constitution of the present; rather, they begin to assume directions and vitalities of their own, and present and past cease to be a dualism. Again Deleuze acknowledges his predecessor: "Bergson's major theses on time are as follows: the past coexists with the present that it has been; the past is preserved in itself, as past in general (non-chronological); at each moment time splits itself into present and past, present that passes and past which is preserved" (Cinema 2 82). Time first becomes available as time-image with Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), in which "time became out of joint and reversed its dependent relation to movement; temporality showed itself as it really was for the first time, but in the form of a coexistence of large regions to be explored" (105). In this film, the present is constituted through several parallel narratives of the past, not always congruent with each other. None of them manages to make any greater claim to reality than the others, yet all permeate the present and are part of what makes it a complex reality, unbounded by narrative closure ("Rosebud" remains, largely, a floating signifier).
It is in relation to such a multiplicity of possible worlds that Deleuze introduces another concept of fascination to him, that of Leibniz's "incompossibility": "Leibniz says that the naval battle may or may not take place, but that this is not in the same world: it takes place in one world and does not take place in a different world, and these two worlds are possible, but are not 'compossible' with each other" (130).7 A figure from Deleuze's "counter history" of philosophy, Leibniz presents a challenge to the Platonic heritage in which our understanding of the world may reflect only one, noncontradictory reality. "He is thus obliged to forge the wonderful notion of incompossibility (very different from contradiction) in order to resolve the paradox while saving truth: according to him, it is not the impossible, but only the incompossible that proceeds from the possible; and the past may be true without being necessarily true" (130).8 But Deleuze wants to free the incompossible worlds from the restrictions that Leibniz places on them: still a party to the ascendancy of the west as self-instituting dominancy, Leibniz leaves it up to God to choose which of the possible worlds will exist (The Fold 63). The cinema's direct time-image may take philosophy a step beyond, as Deleuze states in connection with Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'Homme qui ment, "contrary to what Leibniz believed, all these worlds belong to the same universe and constitute modifications of the same story" (Cinema 2 132).
So, for Deleuze, the cinema becomes a part of the counter history of philosophy, constitutes a series with the latter's imagery, in that it participates in the shaking loose of the Platonic dualism of reality and representation in a way that is akin to the flashes that are available in various philosophical texts. Deleuze makes the cinema accessible to philosophy in a way that it perhaps has not been before, in large part because of its status as image--and particularly, as Deleuze shows, Bergsonian image. The cinema is simulacrum, phantasm, excluded from philosophy's world of admissible representations because of the threat it poses to the ordered world of "true" representations, copies determined by their originals.
But as Deleuze demonstrates in "Plato and the Simulacrum," the distinction is problematic in the Platonic dialogues themselves. It is possible that it is not a distinction of opposition, but rather of degree:
And it may then be said that this division in the founding discourse of western philosophy--that between the discovery of the value of the simulacrum and the ruse by which this value is hidden in order to maintain a hierarchy--persists through the history of philosophy, leaving traces of itself that may be discerned only if philosophy is read, as it were, against itself, against the determinations on its own understanding of itself that it would enact. Throughout the history of western metaphysics philosophy is able to maintain itself as a discourse on being only by instituting a simulacrum of itself. "Affirming the rights" (262) of simulacra, overturning Platonism, is thus to free philosophy from the restrictions it has placed on itself from the outset. It is to link up with a series that has always been available in philosophy, but that has been repressed. In the age of the cinema as locus of the image, the world may reveal itself as image, image reveal itself as simulacrum, philosophy recover simulacrum. And the latter in so doing may redefine its own relation to the world. Philosophy may function according to one of its most traditional tasks, as "the art of forming, of inventing, of fabricating concepts" (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophie 8), and elaborate the relation of thought and matter not as one of opposition--as between subject and object--but as one of coinhabitation, intertwining, or machinic assemblage.
In this age of the image, and in about the same period in which Deleuze's philosophy has been written--in the very decade of A Thousand Plateaus and the cinema books--there appears a variation on the image in the form of specifically technological phantasms. In its various manifestations--television, computer-generated images for television and cinema that can't be distinguished from images of "real" objects--it displaces the cinematic image, effectively suppressing the latter's effectiveness. It may be seen as a kind of coup de force10 against the productivity of the cinematic image, imposing a world picture that is a veritable microcosm, a severance of the relation of thought and matter, a last and tyrannical effort on the part of metaphysics to preserve the domination of a homogeneous, limited, and overwhelming reality. But on the other hand it is the outcome of the emergence of the image as Deleuze describes it: the distinction between virtual and actual worlds, and between imagination and reality, and even between subject and object, is less tenable than ever; any world at all may come into being on the little screen, and the world itself begins to be composed of the picture elements or pixels that make up its own simulacrum. The power to produce worlds is redirected to the production of a single, untouchable world; what we see is the ultimate simulacrum enacting the ultimate exclusion of the simulacrum.11
Where is this coup de force, as well as the conflicts that ensue from it, most visible, and where are its effects represented? In the cinema: in that particular cinema that takes an interest in the technological production of phantasms, in the accompanying transformation of the human body in its ever more intimate interaction with machinery, in the role of the televisual image in relation to consciousness--and that also reflects on its own dependence on the technology of special effects as well as the restriction of its own images through mass production on videocassettes. The genre that makes phantasms out of the material of the extreme truth-telling discourses of the technological sciences is of course science fiction. I am referring to a group of science fiction films that appeared, in my view, as something quite new to cinema in the 1980s, precisely because they may be seen as participating in as well as criticizing, in a sometimes painfully concentrated way, the technological conditions in which the phantasms are produced.
I would like to examine these movies with the Deleuzian notion of the image, as well as a number of other Deleuzian concepts, in mind. The films may be said to constitute a set, or an arrangement, or an assemblage, in the ways that they address and interact with the conditions. As I have mentioned, they are what might be considered "B" movies, often cheaply made, and occasionally expensive but deemed unworthy of serious consideration because participating in some of the forces of which they at least partially reflect on--pretenders, simulacra with regard to the "art" of cinema. There has, of course, been some attention paid to them, as there has been to the genre of science fiction, in which the reasons for their being received a certain way are understood, acknowledged, and taken as an object of criticism. Often enough, this attention is paid in connection with Deleuze and certain Deleuzian concepts, because of the affinity the latter machinic assemblage has with the transformations of the body, spatiality, temporality, and the very idea of the human being represented in science fiction and its recent cinema.12
One figure, in several senses of the term, that recurs in science fiction film from the eighties is that of the cyborg, the cybernetic organism from science and science fiction, which is a "coupling" of machine and animal, and which provides, in the destabilization of the organic structure of the human being, a site for different sorts of becoming.13 The cyborg often appears as something monstrous--as it should be, since the intermeshing of human and machine defies a number of traditional oppositions (spirit/matter, life/death, among others)--and is seen, inscribed in Hollywood narrative codes, as incarnating something evil or potentially evil. The cyborg is usually violent; it is so in its essence, as it is the product of machinery making ruthless incisions into flesh. But evaluation should be disengaged from the prescriptive ideological systems that operate in the films, and offered the chance to present something that marks a fundamental transformation in the human being that may well have very progressive aspects. In their valorization of the simulacrum and their contestation of metaphysical oppositions, I would like to argue, these movies undermine the ideological systems in which they function. Since in every instance an effort is made at producing an identification between the point of view of the spectator and that of the cyborg, the violence of the human-machine relation (the cyborg relation--I would rather see the cyborg as a relation than as a thing or a unity) should be seen as a figuration of the violence of the everyday interface of human beings and technology, particularly televisual technology, that results in the imposition of the strictest of world pictures, the programmed redirection of desires, and an unprecedented hierarchization of the flesh.
In James Cameron's The Terminator (1984), for example, the cyborg, played by an appropriately stony Arnold Schwarzenegger, is described as a "hyperalloy combat chassis" with human flesh "grown for the cyborgs" on the outside, produced by a machine intelligence whose purpose is to exterminate the human population. Ostensibly a simulacrum built for infiltration, this cyborg may be seen as a quaint metaphor for the human-machine relations the film's dystopian vision depicts: human beings have allowed machinery to run them, until they are little more than pieces of flesh hanging on the periphery. But the intertwining of organism and machine is more complex and subtle14. It is by way of machinery--not as accessory or extension, but body part--that the Terminator will be defeated: Reese, the resistance fighter played by Michael Biehn, is sent back in time from the dark future (2029) to stop the Terminator's mission, which is to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), future mother of resistance leader John Connor, in contemporary Los Angeles. The time travel machinery (which Penley suggests is a kind of figure of the cinema ["Time Travel" 66]), then, not only is essential to the continuation of life--both the life of Reese, from 2029 to 1984, and that of humanity--but also enhances life, transforms it, turns it into something else by freeing it from the constraints of linear time (part of a system of determined mimesis).
The time travel machinery is explicitly connected to the cinematic apparatus through its use in the production of the narrative. Relying on a simple, standard Hollywood story, The Terminator removes the time of the narrative from the requirement of conformity to linear progression. The narrative moves, of course, toward a future: killing the Terminator, saving Sarah, during the course of the movie, and of course then saving humanity farther in the future. But it plays with the relationships of past, present, and future: the film uses a customary technique of flashing back, so that the past may be employed to endow the present with sense. But these are Reese's flashbacks, and so are representations of the future; and this past is as malleable as the future, since saving Sarah would save the resistance movement through the preservation of its leader's life. The same type of sense is derived from references to the past as from those to the future. In one sequence, a sound overlap is used for a cut from a junkyard in the present, in which a moving industrial vehicle is seen, to a similar vehicle in the future. The change is registered when the vehicle's treads are seen rolling over skulls. But the sound overlap and the visual similarity work together to give the effect of a continuity between moments that would otherwise be discontinuous; and in the time sequence of Reese, the cut is to the past, while in "our" time sequence it is to the future. The machinery becomes the cinematic machinery, in its production of images bringing the past, the future, and the present to inhabit each other, their relations of causality, sense-determination, and even sequence transformed.
And later in the film the cyborg relation is seen as having a direct effect on the view of the spectators, both as violence and as creating the capacity to see the production of the restrictive images, exactly what the televisual apparatus would disallow. This sequence involves close-ups of the cyborg eye--several in a quickly cut succession--which has already been identified as participating in the viewer's perspective, through a number of point-of-view shots done in "cybervision."15 The Terminator's sight is composed of red-tinted pixels, as though mediated by a television screen, as would be that of most of the spectators watching the film, with the advent of movie viewing on VCRs well established by 1984. The sequence is an evident reference to Un chien andalou:16 there is an extreme close-up of the eye as the cyborg cuts into it with an Exacto knife. Where Buñuel and Dali were concerned with a metaphor involving the cutting process of cinematic production, depicting it as a cutting into the viewing apparatus of the spectator, Cameron turns the image into that of a surgical machine incision. What is revealed beneath the human eye surface is a camera lens--moving around, microprocessor controlled, all-seeing, its aperture dilating and contracting. The cyborg cutting--identified with the cinematic/televisual apparatus--reveals and promotes the affinity between human and machine views.
The Terminator attempts to delineate what, in the present, would constitute a progressive cyborg relation--one that would have the effect of dehierarchizing the human body--and a repressive one. Deleuze and Guattari make a comparable distinction between types of bodies without organs, which may assist in understanding the different cyborg relations. The body without organs (BwO), it must be affirmed, "is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called organism" (Plateaus 158). The organism is a structure that hangs the organs on it as subordinated bits of flesh. And, further, the organism can destroy the body in its attempt at strict, hierarchical layering, which itself produces a kind of body without organs.
Another movie that plays with the double possibility of the cyborg relation, the body without organs, is Robocop (1987), directed by Paul Verhoeven, a filmmaker of Dutch origin who would set spending records after his arrival in Hollywood. Robocop is the first of his exclusively U.S. productions, and is lower budget, less afraid of transgressing Hollywood convention, and less ideologically entrenched than his subsequent efforts (Total Recall, Basic Instinct--though these too have a number of noteworthy qualities, in a rebarbative imbalance with their overt inscriptions). There are moments when Robocop engages in a detailed critique of the late-capitalist management of flesh, of the technocratic colonization of the human body--even though it seems to reaffirm the benevolent paternity of the corporate structure at the end, in keeping, one would suppose, with Verhoeven's own position in the film industry.
The story concerns a Detroit police officer, Murphy (Peter Weller), who is brutally executed by criminals (whose own connections with and participation in the corporate structure is made patent--Verhoeven for the most part avoids the Manicheanism of traditional U.S. representations of illegality). He is mutilated, his right arm shot off by high-tech shotgun blasts, his legs destroyed, before being killed. His flesh, it turns out, fits right into the plans of the corporation--Omni Consumer Products (OCP), a caricature of Reagan-era privatization and malignant corporate growth--that has taken over the operation of the Detroit Police. The company will build a cyborg, made of machinery and Murphy's remains. According to Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer, with exquisite ruthlessness), the executive in charge of production, "We get the best of both worlds: the fastest reflexes modern technology has to offer, on-board computer-assisted memory, and a lifetime of on-the-street law-enforcement programming. It is my great pleasure to present to you--Robocop." This bigger and better police officer is the result of already-existing company policies concerning human flesh. When it is being discussed whether the cyborg transformation should involve "total body prosthesis"--the complete subordination of the flesh to the machinery--one executive remarks, "He signed the release forms when he joined the force; he's legally dead--we can do pretty much what we want to." The creation of this law-enforcement product is presented as a continuation of the operation of the organized crime group--particularly when it is established that the group is directed by one of OCP's top executives.
Robocop is, to an extreme degree, a cancerous body without organs, a "body of war and money" (Plateaus 163). The corporate extensions are evidently cancerous, with their proliferation into all areas of life ("Good business is where you find it")--and the Robocop project even follows the failure of another law-enforcement device, a comically monstrous robot that in a display of corporate brutality kills an executive in the OCP boardroom during a demonstration gone awry. In this meeting, before the robot goes haywire, the CEO of OCP, the Old Man (Dan O'Herlihy), speaks of the "cancer" of crime--the very same processes, evidently, as those which move the corporation, which the corporation will turn against some of its own human elements. But through the engagement and mise-en-scène of the cinematic/televisual apparatus, the cancerous proliferation of images that Robocop depicts and participates in--its overtly stated appeal is "classic" Hollywood action--is undermined. There are a number of sequences done in "cybervision"--these are almost too unsubtly reminiscent of the TV screen, with their pixelated composition and the corner-inset flashbacks, the latter exactly like those on the news programs that constitute segments of the film's narrative. Verhoeven goes out of his way to show the ties between this cyborg POV and the constitution of our own televisually mediated experience, as though the time lines of our lives, and the memories by which we narrate these time lines, were determined entirely by the editing of news program videotape.
The most interesting of these sequences is the one that effects a transition from Murphy's point of view to that of Robocop--its time sequence is delimited by the cyborg's machine functioning. It begins after Murphy's execution, in a frantic urban emergency room, with attempts to revive him. The medical machinery already makes its incisions into his body, the technologization of the flesh quite under way before the event of the cyborg's construction. The recurring shot is Murphy's point of view, intercut with a reverse shot of his dead eyes. The camera participates directly in the cyborg relation: the gaze is dead, but still sees, indicating broader possibilities of life than those offered by the organic alone. This relation, instituted between the spectators and the image, is then placed inside the represented cyborg; the cyborg then becomes a figure of the cinematic/televisual apparatus. At the moment of Murphy's death the screen goes black; the image begins to come back on, exactly as a TV screen would light up. It is clear that it is Robocop's POV. The image disappears a few times, sometimes because of a technical error, sometimes because the cyborg is shut off, but we see and hear nothing that is not seen and heard by the cyborg: this includes conversations about him, in a very cinematic/televisual way, under the pretense that he (the camera and microphone) is not there.
In this interweaving of flesh and machinery that works through the characters on screen and at the same time cuts across the relation between the screen and the spectators, a subversive and transgressive BwO is produced, at least at certain moments in the film. As a point in the corporate grid of control, Robocop undergoes a type of individuation; there is no more unified consciousness for him, but rather the capacity to move in that grid and to form unanticipated linkages with other elements in the network. Though Robocop's recovery of the identity "Murphy" is ideologically inscribed as a triumph of individualism, it may rather be seen as the affirmation of what Deleuze and Guattari call a "haecceity."17 The production of a cyborg identity in the corporate structure gives way to the possibility for the subjected body to become something quite different.
This notion of becoming, through haecceity as a mode of individuation, involving transformations on the "molecular" level that do not allow for the persistence of the organic unity of the "molar" individual, is exemplified in the most viscerally horrific of this set of films, The Fly (1986). This movie was directed by David Cronenberg, a Canadian who, though often working with U.S. money, remains mostly in Toronto, deterritorializing the Hollywood system of production. The Fly is arguably one of the finest cinematic renditions of the Deleuzoguattarian concept of "becoming-animal,"18 as it involves the transformation of a man into a monstrous genetic hybrid of a human being and a housefly.19 A remake of an earlier Hollywood movie whose setting is Montreal, the distinctive feature of this version is that neither human being nor fly, in the process of teleportation that takes place on the molecular level, retains any trace of its composition as a molar entity. In the 1958 movie, two creatures result from the transference, a human being with a fly's head and a fly with a human head; in Cronenberg's, there is only one remaining, a multiplicity of various fly and human parts and characteristics.
The teleportation devices in this film--this set of films always produces images of flesh-altering machinery--are explicitly figures of electronic reproduction. In a conversation over lunch, the inventor, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), and the journalist, Ronnie Quafe (Geena Davis), compare the disgusting results of attempts to transport organic matter to what they are eating, fast food--an excellent example of a copy without an original. And when Brundle steps out of the telepod after successfully transporting himself, he remarks, "Is it live or is it Memorex?"--he repeats an advertising slogan that may be considered a hallmark phrase of the "precession of the simulacrum." The telepods figure the valorization of the simulacrum, which also entails the essential transformation of the spatiotemporal coordinates in which mimesis, and the institution of molar entities as those constituting the nodes of reality, take place. Brundle's purpose in creating the telepods is to overcome a phobia, that of being transported physically. From now on, movement will not be required to submit to the Cartesian grid of space; lines of motion will be valorized, freed from their subordination to fixed points; travel will more and more resemble the cuts of cinema and, to a greater extent, TV. Time will be transformed in that it won't be measured according to movement, will no longer be constituted as the gap between two places. Brundle, becoming-simulacrum, becoming-image, ceases to be a molar entity: he is not a man but rather a becoming-animal.20 He loses his scientist's clear consciousness, his dominating subjectivity, and becomes a haecceity by way of this becoming-fly. He discovers what has happened to him through assistance from his computer--his scientific mind has always functioned in interface, through forming an assemblage, with the machinery--which prints its description of the event on its screen: "Fusion of Brundle and fly at molecular-genetic level." At this level, the molecular plane of consistency, the organic being cannot retain its integrity, its molar composition, and must engage in becoming.
The body without organs that Brundle becomes (in the mutation his external organs fall off and his internal organs become useless) is, as in Robocop, one in which there is a fight between the cancerous and the productive kinds of BwO. But the possibility that these two could form an intersection, that the cancer might actually work toward a transformative productivity, is raised. Describing his mutation to Quafe, Brundle says that the fusion is showing itself as a "bizarre form of cancer." Further along in the process of transformation, he terms his affliction "a disease with a purpose--maybe not such a bad disease after all"; he remarks that the disease "wants to turn me into something else, . . . something that never existed before." We see here an instantiation of what Cronenberg terms a "creative cancer," elaborated in a number of his works (Rodley 80).21 And though the transformation does end up being destructive--"Brundlefly" becomes violent, almost murders, and brings on its own death--the moments in which transformation becomes possible are of interest here. Cronenberg produces these images in the machinic assemblage of the cinematic apparatus: the molecular, machinic transformation is represented as a series of figures flashing across the computer screen, the latter shot in cutaway so that it fills the movie screen. Such an image of the computer screen is frequently used as an establishing shot for sequences in Brundle's lab, as though, to follow the rhetoric of North American editing convention, it constituted and determined the space depicted in the assemblage of shots that compose the sequence. And there is an identification of the fly's eye, belonging to the molecular transformation, and the machinery of cinema in the opening sequence: it is an unrecognizable image, the view from an insect's composite eye, with the cinematic colors separated, movements discernible but not attributable to any entity, until it transforms and reveals itself to be a shot from the ceiling of the convention where Brundle and Quafe first meet and the unity of the narrative begins.
Other movies in this set show the cyborg coupling, the assemblage of machinery and human being that turns out to be machinic and thereby productive of becomings, molecular transformations, as being both repressive and transgressive. Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), a British production and historically the first of the set, elaborates a relation of self and other in which self, combating other, cannot maintain integrity and must reveal to itself that it is a becoming, in a series and molecular relation with the other rather than in opposition to it. The alien--in constant mutation throughout the movie, at one point incubated in the guts of a human being, whom it subsequently destroys by disemboweling him in its "birth"--is placed in homologous relation with the human beings themselves in their spaceship. The computer that runs the ship--the consciousness that inhabits the machinery--is called "Mother," and has a biological relation to the crew: they are "born" in its interior at the outset of the movie--the ship brings the crew into life, awakening them from their prolonged sleep in chambers that look like incubators. This "birth" sequence is preceded by a series of shots, moving down one corridor after another of the ship, figurative of endless machine intestines (Greenberg). The human-machine coupling, as well as the intestinal birth that will be reproduced later with the alien, suggest monstrosity, the elusion of pregiven forms and the bypassing of normal routes of genetic reproduction. The coupling is monstrous because it produces a cyborg relation and because it produces the film's monster. But on the one hand, it limits life, and on the other extends it multidirectionally: the alien kills ruthlessly, but the relationship that Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the crew's one surviving member, reworks with the machinery is what provides the possibility of transgressing the limitations.
And in John Carpenter's overlooked gem They Live (1988), the cyborg relation takes the form of the possibility of reprogramming, or even rewiring, the human brain. The movie begins as a critique of Reaganism, unusually stark for Hollywood of the period: it takes place in a very contemporary urban U.S., depicted of images borrowed from Depression-era cinema. John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels (1941) are distinct references--the film announces its participation in an instituted system of representation.22 What becomes immediately evident is the disparity between the images of everyday life and those seen on numerous television screens. The narrative follows the main character, played by professional wrestler Roddy Piper, a nomadic member of the lumpenproletariat (who goes unnamed, but is identified in the credits as "Nada": a movement without solid form, a haecceity), who, sleeping on the streets, settling in a camp for the homeless, cannot avoid exposure to electronic representations of extreme affluence. After suggestions of a proto-fascist police state, in which the poor are constantly under surveillance and attack, the movie reveals its surprise: none of what anyone is seeing is real, since a signal is transmitted directly into the brain, by a TV broadcasting company, to construct perception. Everything looks quite "normal," when quite a lot is wrong: the film's dramatization bears on the capacity of simulated images to declare themselves as real, and thus exclude the production of alternative images.
What turns out to be the case, when "Nada" gains the capacity to see, is that there has been an alien invasion, the earth is being exploited, treated as "their third world." In the simulacrum-world, the aliens look like human beings; they maintain a social hierarchy through control of corporations, recruiting human collaborators through a proliferation of consumerism. And the "reality" of the consumerist images that "Nada" sees is a shock: instead of advertising's pretty pictures, he sees a bombardment of blatant commands. "Marry and reproduce" is the "real" content of an ad depicting a woman on the beach; "Stay asleep," "Do not question authority," and other messages appear regularly; money becomes white sheets of paper with the words "This is your God" printed across it. The urban landscape, with such phrases plastered across it, are an evident reference to Barbara Kruger's collages: their ugliness and blatancy, in continual interference with seeing, uncannily calls attention to the functioning of a society of consumption. It is the "society of the spectacle" in which nothing may be seen that isn't preconfigured in a determined system.
Though the distinction that They Live makes between the simulacrum-world and the "real" one may at first sight seem to be a simple dualism, the relation is more complicated. "Nada" is able to engage in resistance by transforming the destructive cyborg relation into a productive, machinically transgressive one. The apparatus with which he discovers the simulation is a pair of dark glasses, manufactured and distributed by the underground movement. Wearing them he can see the aliens and the commands. But these "real" images are themselves constructed: besides being a visual pun on the "society of the spectacle(s)," the glasses are borrowed from 1950s 3-D movie viewing23--the image looks more "real" because it is more faked. And the "real" world appears in black and white, reminiscent of both classic science fiction cinema and the television of the same period. This world is just as much a construction, an assemblage of images taken from instituted systems of representation, just as much a simulacrum; but it is the simulacrum that breaks the hold of the image that declares itself to be real. It does this through "Nada's" nomadic practice of transformation, becoming-machine. Putting the glasses on also then becomes a figure for the act of going to see this "B" science fiction movie, a construction of images by which the constructed nature of the images of everyday life, determined by mechanisms of economic and social repression, is revealed.
A similar problematic is explored in the film from this set that treats most thoroughly the concepts I have introduced, a film to which Carpenter gives a number of admiring nods, Cronenberg's Videodrome (1982).24 This movie also concerns the transmission of a mind-altering signal. The target is Civic TV, a Toronto cable operation that specializes in sex and violence; the signal would induce hallucinations in the viewer, as part of a global conspiracy by a multinational called Spectacular Optical. "We make inexpensive glasses for the Third World and missile guidance systems for NATO," says Barry Convex (Les Carlson) to Max Renn (James Woods), manager of Civic TV and the guinea pig for the Videodrome signal. The company, as it were bringing the world into focus, has interests in spectacles, the spectacle, and domination through representation: its interest in Civic TV derives from the station's transmissions of sexual violence because of their capacity to initiate a cutting into the spectator's perceptual apparatus. Max finds himself cut into, after several days of watching the "Videodrome" tapes: in front of the television, his face lit by the flicker of the screen (in the movie all images seem in one way or another generated by TV), he discovers a new orifice in his abdomen. He assumes the position of spectator to the horrific corporeal transformation to which he is subject: the opening is distinctively vaginal, but it also functions, according to the traditional masculine viewpoint identified by psychoanalysis, as a wound, a phantasm of the castration anxiety. But this initial coding of the orifice is reconfigured; just as Deleuze and Guattari suggest that Freud's characterization of the castration anxiety results from a molar conception of the human body, and that rethinking the latter as a machinic assemblage may give way to a release from the limitations of strict sexual division,25 Max is able to give way to the transformation and engage in a productive becoming-woman. He is not losing his body, but becoming a body without organs; he is losing his molar composition as a man, a dominant male, the integrated subject of the spectacle.
His transformation is molecular: as in The Fly, it is the effect of a "creative cancer." The Videodrome signal induces a brain tumor, which will become "a new organ, . . . a new outgrowth of the human brain," according to media theorist Professor Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley) who only appears as a televisual image. This freely acting organ--the organic composition of the body is losing its grip--will allow hallucination, or, as it turns out to be the case, the production of simulacra such that the hold of instituted reality ceases to be viable, reveals itself to be the ruse of a simulacrum. And the transformation is machinic, occurring when Max engages in a coupling with his video equipment: in a bizarre sequence the TV screen bears the image of his lover, Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry), first her face and then just her mouth in enormous proportion, as the VCR displays the contours and motions of desirous flesh. Neither the VCR nor Nicki, in their merging, are organically female, with the multiple machine parts functioning as all manner of sexual organs whose molar gender specificity has been dislocated. Max moves toward the large, open mouth, as it gives him "head," transforming his head as well as his other organs in this machinic assemblage.
In the mutation, Max spends some time as a product of the corporate engineering, a cancerous BwO whose control he is completely under. His new orifice also functions as a video slot--in the completely passive position, forced open, in which the shows his station runs would place the female sexual organs--so that he may be "programmed" by Spectacular Optical to eradicate the opposition, a movement directed by Bianca O'Blivion, the daughter of the media image. But his transformation advances as he reconfigures the machinery, activating the creative and transgressive aspects of the cancer: the program becomes the destruction of the repressive force, Spectacular Optical--Max turns the corporation's own weapons against it, using the gun he had obtained in company service.
Videodrome's violence is troubling, its mutilated bodies often seeming to be equivalent to those represented in Civic TV's programming, gratuitous. However, the idea of violent death undergoes a reconfiguration at the end of the movie, when Max turns the gun against his own head, a final transgression of the limits imposed by the organic composition of the body. At the sound of the shot the screen goes black; the credits run, marking the film's own limit, the end of its possibilities of representation.26 After considering several possible endings that would show Max after this "death," which becomes a transformation of life, Cronenberg opted for this one as the best (Rodley 97). Its effect is to affirm an incapacity to depict what is effectively the end of a metaphysical system, the becoming of the body without organs, within a system of cinematic and televisual representation that is still quite infected with mimesis, by the simulacrum that excludes the production of simulacra. Such a cinema can go to the limit, and can show the limit, but cannot yet move to the intertwining and coinhabitation of thought and matter, the liberation of the image from its Platonic determination. Its indirect presentation, its "presenting the unpresentable," which by all means leaves a feeling of incompleteness at the end, also resists a recuperation by the forces that would subordinate the image to mimesis and, through a limitation of the possibilities of thought, promote a complete spectator passivity.
Dept. of French and Italian
Notes1.Foucault, "Theatrum Philosophicum" 166. Translation slightly modified.2.Deleuze, Cinema 2 280: "[Philosophical theory] is a practice of concepts, and it must be judged in the light of the other practices with which it interferes. A theory of cinema is not 'about' cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege over others, anymore than one object has over others." 3.Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier suggests of these books--and this could be said of all of Deleuze's writing: "In the form of organization they adopt--that of non-linearity--and in the conceptual order they engage--that of divided thought--the two books defy any synthesis other than a disjunctive one. And even this sort of synthesis might betray an exposition that takes the form of a becoming" (120). 4.In a 1967 essay entitled "Plato and the Simulacrum," which appears as an appendix to the 1969 Logic of Sense. 5.Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 256: "This is not animism, any more than it is mechanism; rather, it is universal machinism: a plane of consistency occupied by an immense abstract machine comprising an infinite number of assemblages." 6.It is this determination of representation that Heidegger sees occurring with Descartes, as the culmination of western metaphysics, following groundwork laid by the Greeks. The latter is evident in Plato's designation as eidos, something seen, of the ideal form that determines the being of a thing (131 and 143-147). 7.Leibniz elaborates this concept in the Théodicée, 414-416. 8.A treatment of the idea of incompossibility that Deleuze gives in his recent book on Leibniz may be of interest here: "Leibniz innovates when he invokes a profoundly original relation among all possible worlds. By stating that it is a great mystery buried in God's understanding, Leibniz gives the new relation the name of incompossibility. We discover that we are in a dilemma of seeking the solution to a Leibnizian problem under the conditions that Leibniz has established: we cannot know what God's reasons are, nor how he applies them in each case, but we can demonstrate that he possesses some of them, and what their principle may be" (The Fold 59-60). 9.Deleuze acknowledges Jacques Derrida's closely related work on writing as simulacrum in Plato, its being viewed as a threat to the paternal order of the transmission of the Logos, in "La Pharmacie de Platon"; Logic 361:2. 10.I purposely use the term that Foucault chooses to describe the exclusion of madness by a restrictive and tyrannical reason--of a certain production of phantasms by institutional order--at the outset of modernity, in Histoire de la folie, 56-59 (this section, on Descartes, does not appear in the abridged English translation, Madness and Civilization); I wish to mark the phenomenon I am describing as a repetition of that event. 11.Cinema 2 265: "The electronic image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into being, either had to transform cinema or to replace it, to mark its death." 12.Most notably: see Bukatman, "Postcards from the Posthuman Solar System," and "Who Programs You?"; and Stivale, "Mille/Punks/Cyber/Plateaus." 13.I am, of course, bringing in Donna Haraway's notion of the cyborg, from her 1984 "A Cyborg Manifesto." Stivale is very interested in possible rapprochements between Haraway's idea of the cyborg and various Deleuzoguattarian concepts, such as the "machinic" and the "body without organs." 14.Constance Penley goes into some detail on the ambiguities of the human-machine relations in the film in her "Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia." 15.The term is Cameron's, from the script. 16.Cameron, as well as a number of the other directors I will consider, is fairly liberal with references, to both film and television history. His purpose is one that, after the New Wave, may be called a traditional cinematic one: to call attention to the fact that this sequence of images is part of a coded system of representation. The practice becomes quite interesting, though, when it is coupled with representations of the technological production of images, and when the cinematic references are adapted to comment specifically on the electronic age, as in this sequence.
17.Plateaus 261: "A
season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect
individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is
different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in
the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest
between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected." 18.For elaborations on molar unities and molecular transformations, as well as on becoming-animal, see Plateaus, ch. 10, "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-imperceptible," 232-309. 19.Cronenberg's own term for the genre that The Fly delineates is "metaphysical horror" (Rodley 134). 20.Plateaus 292: "There is no becoming-man because man is the molar entity par excellence." 21.This intersection or hybrid of two types of BwO would seem to be a transformation of the concept put forth by Deleuze and Guattari; they speak of the "dangers" and the necessary "precautions" involved in the fabrication of the BwO, since there is the possibility of "cancerous tissue" (Plateaus 162-163). But we should also be cautious about making such a clear-cut distinction in their concept: they speak of a cancer cell as becoming "mad," a term that cannot be separated from the various critical works on the history of psychiatry, mental illness, and insanity (especially Foucault's), which designates, in one way or another, the proliferation of phantasms or simulacra as well as the latter's repression. The cancer cell may transgress the organic composition of the "healthy" cell--the transformations the cell undergoes in its submission to the hierarchy may give way to its capacity to be productive, creative. 22.See note 16. 23.A later U.S. edition of Guy Debord's manifesto has as its cover photo the image of a crowd wearing 3-D glasses. 24.The remarks that follow derive from a paper that I co-wrote with Larry Shillock, delivered at the 1992 MMLA convention in St. Louis, entitled "Cronenberg's Videology." I would like to add now that I owe many of the observations on the films in the present paper to lengthy viewing sessions and discussions with Larry over the last few years. 25.Plateaus 256: "When Little Hans talks about a 'peepee-maker,' he is referring not to an organ or an organic function but basically to a material, in other words, to an aggregate whose elements vary according to its connections, its relations of movement and rest, the different individuated assemblages it enters. Does a girl have a peepee-maker? The boy says yes, and not by analogy, nor in order to conjure away a fear of castration. It is obvious that girls have a peepee-maker because they effectively pee: a machinic functioning rather than an organic function. Quite simply, the same material has different connections, different relations of movement and rest, enters different assemblages in the case of the boy and the girl (a girl does not pee standing or into the distance). Does a locomotive have a peepee-maker? Yes, in yet another machinic assemblage. Chairs don't have them: but that is because the elements of the chair were not able to integrate this material into their relations, or decomposed the relation with that material to the point that it yielded something else, a rung, for example." 26.Bukatman, "Postcards" 353-354: "Wren [sic] may in fact be approaching the Body without Organs when he fires at his temple, but that's precisely the point at which the film has to end. This re-embodying is inconceivable: even the imagination can only approach its condition.
Works Cited(For the French texts that I cite, the translation is in each case mine.--H. M.) Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Brandywine, 1979. Bensmaïa, Réda. "Un philosophe au cinéma." Magazine Littéraire 257 (1988), 57-59. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: Allen & Unwin, 1911. Bogue, Ronald. "Word, Image and Sound: The Non-Representational Semiotics of Gilles Deleuze." Mimesis, Semiosis and Power. Ed. Ronald Bogue. Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach 2. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991, 77-97. Bukatman, Scott. "Postcards from the Posthuman Solar System." Science Fiction Studies 55 (1991), 343-357. ---. "Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle." Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction. Ed. Annette Kuhn. New York: Verso, 1990, 196-213. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1983. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. ---. Cinema 2. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galatea. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. ---. The Fold. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ---. "Plato and the Simulacrum." The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia UP, 1990, 253-266. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Qu est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Minuit, 1991. ---. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. "La Pharmacie de Platon." La Dissémination. Paris: le Seuil, 1972, 69-197. Douglass, Paul. "Deleuze and the Endurance of Bergson." Thought 67 (March 1992), 47-61. Fly, The. Dir. David Cronenberg. Brooksfilms, 1986. Foucault, Michel. L'Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. ---. Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
---. "Theatrum Philosophicum." Language, Countermemory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, 165-196. Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto." Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991, 149-181. Heidegger, Martin. "The Age of the World Picture." The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977, 115-154. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "Que peindre?" Interview with Bernard Macade. Art Press 125 (mai 1988), 42-45. Penley, Constance. "Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia." Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction. Ed. Constance Penley et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, 64-6. Robocop. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Orion, 1987. Rodley, Chris, Ed. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire. "The Cinema, Reader of Gilles Deleuze." Trans. Dana Polan. Camera Obscura 18 (1988), 120-126. Stivale, Charles. "Mille/Punks/Cyber/Plateaus: Science Fiction and Deleuzo-Guattarian Becomings." SubStance 66 (1991), 66-84. Terminator, The. Dir. James Cameron. Hemdale, 1984. They Live. Dir. John Carpenter. Alive Films, 1988. Videodrome. Dir. David Cronenberg. Filmplan International, 1982.
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