Ezra, Elizabeth - The Cinema of Things - Globalization and The Posthuman Object-Bloomsbury Academic (2018)

The Cinema of Things
ii
The Cinema of Things
Globalization and the Posthuman Object
Elizabeth Ezra
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 1

1 Consuming Objects 31
2 Exotic Objects 67
3 Part-Objects 95
4 Objects of Desire 129
5 Posthuman Objects 159
Bibliography 183
Filmography 197
Index 201
Acknowledgments
This book began life as a collaborative project with Terry Rowden. As

sometimes happens with these things, Terry and I gradually came to
the mutual realization that we were writing two different books, and
we finally decided to let those books go their separate ways. Happily,
this book still bears the hallmarks of Terry’s influence on nearly every
single page, and I am enormously indebted to him for his unwavering
intellectual support and friendship over the years, through various
projects and across continents. It is no exaggeration to say that this book
could not have been written without Terry.
For their very helpful feedback on the manuscript, I would like to
extend huge thanks in particular to Sue Harris, Ana Salzberg, and Maggie
Flinn, as well as to an anonymous reviewer at the press. Conversations
with Antonio Sanchez also sparked a number of ideas that have enriched
the book. For their comments on various portions of the manuscript
through the mists of time, I wish to thank Dudley Andrew, Tom Conley,
Diana Holmes, Michael Rothberg, Max Silverman, and Carrie Tarr. I
am also grateful to Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury for her enthusiasm and
support for the project, which made all the difference. All translations
from the French in this book not otherwise credited are my own. Any
errors in this book are also my own.
Portions of this manuscript have appeared in different forms in the
following publications: Screen (“The Case of the Phantom Fetish: Louis
Feuillade’s Les Vampires,” 2006, 47 [2]: 201–11), Yale French Studies
(“Cléo's Masks: Regimes of Objectification in the French New Wave,”
2010, 118/119: 177–90), French Cultural Studies (“Posthuman Memory
and the Re(f)use Economy,” 2014, 25 (3/4): 368–86), and A Belle Époque?
Women and Feminism in French Society and Culture (“Becoming Women:
Cinema, Gender and Technology”), ed. Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr
(New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006). I am grateful to the
publishers for permission to reprint this material here. I am also pleased
Acknowledgments vii
to acknowledge receipt of a generous grant from the Leverhulme Trust,

which allowed me to pursue research that proved vital for this project.
My family has endured this book for what must seem like ages. My
gratitude and love go to Simon, Nathan, and Paul, who constantly remind
me that life is (mostly) other than what one writes.
viii
Introduction: Cinema, Globalization,
and the Posthuman Object
This book traces the progressive redrawing of the boundaries between

humans and objects as represented in cinema from the end of the nine-
teenth century, when French cinema dominated the global film industry,
to the first decades of the twenty-first century, when Hollywood’s hold on
world film markets remains firm, despite some important competition
from other national cinemas. During this period, globalization has made
it increasingly difficult to distinguish the center from the periphery, a
pairing whose boundaries have been blurred by the overdetermined net-
works of communication that crisscross the planet. This period also coin-
cides with what Steven Connor calls “the thingly turn in recent theory”
(Connor 2009: n.p.). Human beings relate to things, objects, and stuff
in a number of ways: through hyperconsumption; through structures of
racial and sexual objectification that reduce people designated as “oth-
ers” to objects of fascination, sexual gratification, or labor; and through
information technology that replaces human agency with encoding. By
exploring the border zones between life (specifically human life) and
nonlife, it is possible to gain an understanding of the ways that com-
modities take on a life of their own, engulfing and ultimately replacing
the people they were meant to supplement; of the exploitation of human
beings for their use value as pure bodies, whether for entertainment, for
labor, or in war time; and of the creation of technological supplementa-
tion, digital worlds, and artificial life. It is possible, in other words, to
gain an understanding of the ways in which humans are prosthetically
engaged with life beyond the human in the global age.
In virtual realms such as economics, communication, and the media,
the obstructive force of national borders is becoming increasingly
limited. Whereas transnationalism’s mandate is to reconfigure the nation
into global viability, globalization’s mandate is to reduce the nation to
2 The Cinema of Things
pure nominalism. Globalization allows for the positive recognition

of landless aggregates and provisional assemblages as well as the all-
encompassing force of technology. If transnationalism has its greatest
use value in considering the movement of bodies and objects across
discrete but virtual lines, globalization is most useful for considering
how the world is becoming economically and technologically unified in
ways that smudge those lines into unreadability. The utopian imaginary
of transnationalism is that the (united) nations will take their place on
a monopoly board in which flows of diasporized capital and people
will move nonoppositionally through clearly demarcated and stabilized
national units. The utopian imaginary of globalization is that at some
point the strands of the global rhizome will meet and create a perfectly
networked path for unimpeded access and consumption.
Globalization, as the endpoint of capitalism, is revealed by the
various degrees and ways in which the porosity of national borders is
being exploited. The term “globalization” expresses the aporia of a
constant movement toward an imaginary wholeness and plenitude (a
unified “globe”), an endless supplementation that strives for wholeness
at the same time that it undermines the very possibility of wholeness.
Globalization, a very human endeavor, thus shares a supplementary
structure with humanity itself: the logic of the supplement underpins
the traditional definition of human beings as creatures who make and
use tools (Wynn 1994: 133–61). Although this definition has come to be
challenged in recent years (see Goodall 1992), its influence on philosophy
and anthropological humanism cannot be overstated. Tools extend
human capabilities, enhancing existing attributes and compensating
for perceived deficiencies; it is through supplementation that humans
both complete themselves and acknowledge their incompleteness. This
dynamic is the essence of supplementarity according to Jacques Derrida
(1997: 141–57; 313–16). The Derridean term “supplement” has itself been
supplemented in recent years by Bernard Stiegler’s term “prosthesis,”
which refers specifically to the relationship between humans and the
objects with which they surround themselves (Stiegler 1998, passim;
see also Wills 1995, passim). Like the supplement, which is intended
to enhance or complete something previously thought to be complete
but whose supplementation both reveals and creates its retrospective

incompletion, prosthesis is that which provides an alternative to
something deemed inadequate.
In an apparent paradox, the supplementary nature of the human
endeavor of globalization is precisely what makes us posthuman.
According to N. Katherine Hayles, “In the posthuman, there are no
essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence
and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism,
robot teleology and human goals” (Hayles 1999: 3). Like the posthuman,
globalization problematizes boundary maintenance, and both discourses
challenge and build upon the existing systems (whether epistemological
or world-historical) of humanism and transnationalism, respectively.
Where transnationalism produces an oscillation between the need to
transcend borders and the drive to maintain them, globalization is the
will to eradicate borders altogether. As the posthuman uses prosthesis to
extend beyond the human, globalization extends beyond the nation in
reconceptualizing life beyond the local.
Rosi Braidotti provides perhaps the pithiest definition of the
posthuman as “life beyond the self ” (Braidotti 2014: 13). The posthuman
is not a period “after” the human; it is a way of reconceptualizing what it
means to be human. It is to recognize, along with those anthropologists
who define human beings as tool-makers, that prosthesis makes the man
(so to speak). Or as Cary Wolfe puts it, the human “is fundamentally a
prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and
materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have nevertheless
made the human what it is” (Wolfe 2007: xxv). This symbiotic evolution
has been coterminous with globalization, which has transformed the
spheres of consumption, production, and reproduction. Commodities
and human beings alike are conceived as units to be slotted into this
ever-expanding global machine, and then replaced when necessary. This
supplementation is reflected in the key components of globalization:
hyperconsumption (the acquisition of more and more objects, images,
and experiences, whose attainment, far from satisfying the hunger for
more, merely increases it); the instrumentalization and exploitation of
“others,” who are designated as the “waste” products of globalization; and
technological prosthesis, the creation of surrogate or “enhanced” human

beings through technological supplementation, artificial intelligence,
and genetic engineering.
There have been, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, many
attempts to characterize the new phase of capitalism that has followed
the Fordist capitalism of the early twentieth century and the consumer
capitalism of the postwar era. Names such as “disaster capitalism” (Klein
2008), “reticulated capitalism” (Stiegler 2010), “cognitive capitalism”
(Moulier-Boutang 2012), and, of course, “late capitalism” (Jameson 1991)
have all been used to describe capitalism’s new vaguely recognizable yet
utterly distinct guise, and all are more or less valid: it is no longer possible
to speak of capitalism as a singular, self-contained phenomenon, or, at
least, not a monolithic one. Capitalism’s staying power is attributable at
least in part to its protean capacity to change form, constantly reinventing
itself like an aging pop star. Capitalism’s latest guise is advanced
globalization, which is characterized by consumption (defined as the
use of commodities above and beyond the sole purpose of subsistence);
connection (the networked communities that are the digital era’s answer
to imagined communities); and corporation (new ways of perceiving
the human body in light of its biotechnologization). Globalization cuts
across national boundaries, and it cuts through the skin of the self. Its
waste circulates around the system, erupting from designated areas at the
most revealing moments.
Globalization moves beyond, and it moves within, like some
genetically modified creature that has escaped from the lab and crossed
state lines, and it is now worming its way into our hearts and minds.
Within globalization, life is essentially the incidental period between
makeovers. In this economy of transformation, once everyone has
become acclimated to the new you, it is simply time to create a newer
you. Celia Lury describes this dynamic at work:
Within the global imaginary, difference is subject to the dictates of

lifestyle, of consumer culture and commodification. The biological,
historical and social differences which had informed the categories of
type or kind, the categories of gender, race, class, sexuality and age, are
rendered amenable to choice. Once placed within the grasp of choice,
previously biological, political and social attributes of the individual

and collective body, including not only aspects of personal identity, but
also reproductive futures, individual health and well-being, and national
identity, are increasingly understood within a discourse of strategic,
voluntary transformation. (Lury 1998 quoted in Franklin, Lury, and
Stacey 2000: 75–76)
In consumer culture, everything is a lifestyle choice, because everything

can be bought or sold, coveted and then eventually discarded. It will not be
long, one can imagine, before “naturalness” has been completely devalued
and the attractiveness of a subject will be determined by the degree and
forms of supplementation to which his or her body has been subjected.
These evaluations will take place, no doubt, in relation to a continuum
that goes from the micro-prosthetics of wearing braces or contact lenses
to something akin to Robert Downey Jr.’s fully prostheticizing Ironman
suit. Supplementarity enables us to move faster, like the latest operating
system, and it slows us down with its crippling restrictions like a new
pair of stilettos. For the system to expand and prosper, it is enough that
consumers want to buy more shoes; it matters little whether they are
Christian Louboutins or Jimmy Choos.
Expansion is the primary form of movement in capitalism, in keeping
with globalization’s need to eradicate national borders, but this expansion
also entails a recognition and incorporation of the nonhuman. Peter
Sloterdijk, writing about the evolution of globalization over the last few
centuries, notes, “Since the start of the Modern Age, the human world
has constantly—every century, every decade, every year and every
day—had to learn to accept and integrate new truths about an outside
not related to humans. From the seventeenth century on, starting with
the European educated classes and increasingly affecting the informed
masses of the First World, the new psycho-cosmologically relevant
sentiment spread that humans were not the concern of evolution, the
indifferent goddess of becoming” (Sloterdijk 2011: 21). This “indifferent
goddess” favors humans no more than she favors other animals or indeed
inanimate objects; she does not distinguish between life and nonlife. The
contemporary manifestation of this evolution is the posthuman era,
which Donna Haraway has characterized in terms of “the boundary
breakdowns between animal and human, organism and machine, and

the physical and nonphysical” (Haraway 1991: 149). For Braidotti, this
breakdown of boundaries is manifested as “a monistic ontology that
considers all matter as intelligent and self-organizing” (Braidotti 2014:
136). Similarly, Jane Bennett speaks, after Bruno Latour, of a “more
distributive agency” that would apply to both people and objects (Bennett
2010: ix). She attempts to overturn “the haunting association of matter
with passivity,” insisting on the “positive vitality possessed by nonhuman
entities and forces” (Bennett 2010: 49).
For others, the breakdown of the boundaries between the human and
the nonhuman entails a recognition of the central role that technology
(or “technics,” to use Stiegler’s term) plays in the development of human
life. Robert Pepperell sums up the posthumanist view of technics thus:
What makes us human is our wider technological domain, just as much

as our genetic code or natural environment. Throughout history, we have
sought to distribute our selves, our consciousness, and our intelligence
by a variety of means, including language, art, gesture, and music, by
encoding the content of our minds in some material substrate, and to
extend our physical abilities with tools. (Pepperell 2003: 152)
The extension of people’s physical abilities enabled by tools and prostheses

makes it difficult to distinguish between human beings and the technological
domain in which they are embedded. This technological domain is
represented both in and by cinema. I use cinema to mean the art form,
not the material from which or means by which it is made (film, video,
analog, digital) or the platform through which it is consumed, though of
course these affect the art form. If, as Stiegler has argued, consciousness
is structured like cinema (Stiegler 2011: 13), then cinema’s depictions of
aspects of globalization constitute an important gauge of prevailing global
thought processes. Cinema is the art form most congruent with the dynamics
of global modernity because it now offers the bank of representations in
relation to which the conceptual adequacy of positions in cultural theory
can be best ascertained and made available for review and critique.
The advent of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century marked
the birth not only of one of the first truly global industries, but also of a
mass medium by which globalization could be represented to the public.
The history of cinema has coincided with the development of advanced

globalization, and perhaps more than any other national cinema, the
American film industry has both represented and borne witness to
this evolution. But French cinema has also played a vital role in the
drive to globalization, by virtue of its influence, its early domination of
world markets, and the cosmopolitanism of many of its most eminent
practitioners. The Lumière brothers are commonly credited with holding
the first public film screening in 1895, thus ushering in the cinematic age
at what happened to be the height of the French colonial empire. Though
we now know that they were pipped to the post by the Skladanowsky
brothers in Berlin some two months earlier (Barber 2012: 14–17), France
was the most successful early adopter of the new technology, and the
French film industry was the biggest in the world until the eve of the First
World War, when it was eclipsed by Hollywood.
No cinematic traditions have to date been more globally influential
than the American and the French. Vanessa Schwartz has described the
“complex back and forth between France and America” at the origins
of the medium, and notes the close ties between the cinemas of the two
countries (Schwartz 2007: 5 and passim). France’s mighty global colonial
empire, which came to a violent end in the middle of the twentieth
century, here represents the Old Imperialism, and its objectifying
discourses center around exoticism. The United States, as the propagator
of a mighty global cultural empire, represents the New Imperialism, and
its objectifying discourses center around the consumption of objects
and human labor. Of course, this is not an exclusive dichotomy: the
French colonial empire was eclipsed in size by the British colonial
empire, and the UK has also had a “New Imperial” influence on world
music and television that belies its relatively small population (currently
around 60 million, provided the union does not break up in the wake
of the June 23, 2016 so-called “Brexit” referendum). There have no
doubt been a significant number of British films that have highlighted
the importance of Great Britain’s colonial past in the current era of
globalization (for a comparison between British and French films of this
kind, see Ezra and Rowden 2009). But although it has been necessary to
limit the scope of this study to two national cinemas, it is my hope that
the arguments made throughout this book could provide a springboard
for the examination of similar dynamics (mutatis mutandis) in other

national cinemas.
Similarly, I confine my focus here to fiction films aimed, for the
most part, at popular audiences. In Hollywood, and even in France,
long known for its “art cinema,” films produced, packaged, and sold as
visual commodities to the masses for the purposes of entertainment
have tended overwhelmingly to be fiction films. It is those films that I
examine here, at key moments in French film history, and more recently,
in Hollywood cinema. As this book is by no means encyclopedic or
in any way aspiring to be comprehensive, it aims to examine a range
of films that best illustrate certain thematic points. The focus within
the Hollywood sections, with the exception of a film made during the
Second World War and brief mention of earlier films, is on films made
around the turn of the second millennium of the Common Era, in the
age of planned obsolescence and the rise of digital technology. I have
chosen films for their illustrative potential—not, in many cases, for their
status as great works of art.
Cinema is above all a medium that allows us to chart the dehumanization
of people triggered by hyperconsumption, which begins as the
supplementation of people by objects and results in the supplementation
of objects by people, who often become mere “operators” of technologies
that determine, rather than reflect, their identities. Along the way, this
path of objectification passes through the supplementation of some
people by others in arrangements that exploit the legacy of slavery during
the era of apartheid in the United States prior and leading up to the civil
rights era, or colonial exoticism in the case of France. The fetishization
of difference so central to exoticism also appears in war time, when
differences among individuals are disavowed and displaced onto groups,
which are differentiated en masse in an “us” versus “them” dichotomy.
Such a polarization of group identity is also key to the construction of
gender identity and the objectification of women as “objects of desire”—
and to the logical extension of this process, which is the construction of
artificial women per se. This objectifying trajectory concludes with the
construction of prosthetic personhood by means of artificial intelligence
and digital technology.
Things, objects, stuff
What shall we call the items that surround us, items with which we
interact or that lie beyond our reach? What shall we call the items, the
tools, broadly speaking, that humans produce, but that also produce us
in the sense that they define us as the makers of tools? Are they things,
stuff, objects, or, indeed, quasi-objects? All of these terms have been
proposed at one point or another, to the extent that the words themselves
have become things, commodities to be exchanged in the marketplace
of ideas.
Things are often defined in relation to what they are not. For example,
in his introduction to a 2001 special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled
“Things,” Bill Brown differentiates between objects and things. According
to Brown, a thing is a kind of objet manqué: “We begin to confront the
thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks,
when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within
the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition,
has been arrested, however momentarily” (Brown 2001: 4). Brown’s
definition, which evokes the Heideggerian Vorhandenheit, or presence-
at-hand, seems to be opposing the thing to the object in the sense in
which Baudrillard describes it. “The real object,” Baudrillard writes in
The System of Objects, “is the functional object” (Baudrillard 2005 [1968]:
50). If things are objects that give up the ghost, they still exist in relation
to the ghost they have given up, the function that defined the objects they
once were. In other words, things may not be fully instrumentalized, or
even fully grasped by human subjects, but they are still intertwined with
them. As Bruno Latour suggests, the distinction between things that lie
outside the scope of human interaction and objects that are handled by
humans may be a false one, because all things (and objects) are, in fact,
“quasi-objects,” or hybrid entities produced by the intersection of nature
and culture (Latour 1993: 50). “Quasi-objects” is a term coined by Michel
Serres, which has been taken up and popularized in the English-speaking
world by Latour, who writes, “Consider things, and you will have humans.
Consider humans, and you are by that very fact interested in things.
Bring your attention to bear on hard things, and see them become gentle.
Turn your attention to humans, and see them become electric circuits,
automatic gears or software” (Latour 2000: 20). This imbrication of two
ostensibly different identities—the human and the nonhuman—is what
characterizes the posthuman. The border between things and objects is
similarly difficult to demarcate, as Steven Connor notes: “Things come
into visibility when the thought of them ruptures or ebbs. I should
make it clear at this point that, though I will refer at intervals to this
distinction between objects and things, I have no intention of observing
the distinction myself and will mix my usages promiscuously, as the
demands of my argument, or of alliteration, dictate” (Connor 2009: n.p.).
Like Connor, I think that the distinction between things and objects
becomes more slippery the harder we try to grasp it.
“Stuff,” on the other hand, designates an indistinct mass of items.
Daniel Miller, as though influenced by this lack of distinction, cautions,
“Don’t, just don’t, ask for or expect a clear definition of stuff ” (Miller
2010: 1). This warning, however, does not seem to have deterred
Maurizia Boscagli, whose book Stuff Theory is dedicated to the stuff. Her
concept of “hybrid materiality” (Boscagli 2014: 12) is useful here: she
presents “an already existing form of liminal objecthood, stuff, as a test
case for the new materialist designation of all matter as liminal, active,
rhizomatic, and emergent” (Boscagli 2014: 14). It might be argued that
all objecthood is liminal, and all things are a kind of stuff. Boscagli (2014:
11) further specifies that “stuff is better defined by its liminality between
the human and the non-human.” Just as stuff is liminal and emergent,
so the human ignores objects at its peril. For Latour, the human itself is
defined as a redistribution of agency from the human to the nonhuman.
The posthuman, in other words, is the new human: “Modern humanists
are reductionist because they seek to attribute action to a small number of
powers, leaving the rest of the world with nothing but simple mute forces.
It is true that by redistributing the action among all these mediators, we
lose the reduced form of humanity, but we gain another form, which has
to be called irreducible. The human is in the delegation itself, in the pass,
in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms” (Latour 1993: 138).
It is precisely the continuous exchange of forms between a whole range of
“mediators,” both human and inhuman, that this book seeks to address.
In philosophy, the most influential school of thought to emerge in

recent years around these questions is Object-Oriented Ontology
(OOO), also sometimes referred to as Speculative Realism. Developed
by Graham Harman (who attributes its origins to Latour—see Harman
2009: 14), OOO emphasizes the “autonomous reality” of objects (Harman
2011: 19) whose status does not rely on their relations with subjects.
Levi R. Bryant calls this lack of reliance on subjects a “finally subjectless
object” (Bryant 2011: n.p.), and certainly what all these theories have in
common is a non-anthropocentric view of the world. According to Ian
Bogost, “OOO puts things at the center of being. We humans are elements,
but not the sole elements, of philosophical interest. OOO contends that
nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally” (Bogost
2012: 6). Objects, it seems, do not need humans as much as humans
need objects.
For both Latour and Harman, everything and everyone is an object that
carries as much weight as every other object, and their books, like those
of their acolytes, abound with litanies of such objects. Bogost, author of
Alien Phenomenology, has developed what he calls a “Latour litanizer”
on his website, an automated generator of lists using random pages
from Wikipedia’s database. One such list, at once typical and unique,
reads: “Income Tax Act 1842, North Louisiana Historical Association,
ArtCrimes, Hendijan-e Sharqi Rural District, Project topic, Frank Angell,
Chrostowa, Lódz Voivodeship, Anna Corneficia Faustina, Baraan” [http://
bogost.com/blog/latour_litanizer/; accessed on July 30, 2016]. In contrast
to Latour, Harman identifies two separate categories of object: real objects
and sensual, or intentional, objects. Real objects are those to which there
is “no direct access” and which can “only be known indirectly” (interview
with Varn 2014: n.p.), while intentional objects are those objects that
exist in our perception of them: they are “objects lying before the mind”
(Harman 2011b: 173). Harman stresses the independence of objects from
both subjects and other objects, unlike Latour, who argues for the mutual
constitution of objects (indiscriminately nonhuman and human, abstract
and concrete) through their relations with other objects in a network
of “actants,” or agents of change that can be indiscriminately human or
nonhuman (Latour 2005: 54–55).
Braidotti, Brown, and Bennett go even further in their placement of

objects on an equal footing with people in their advocacy of a form of
vitalist materialism, arguing that objects have an existence (one might
even say a “life”) of their own. Bennett, who acknowledges the influence
of Latour’s concept of actants, is similarly prone to litanization when she
characterizes vitality as “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities,
storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs
of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories,
propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett 2010: viii). Not only are
objects independent of humans; they have the capacity to effect change
when they come into contact with the human. Bennett emphasizes the
importance of “detecting . . . a fuller range of the nonhuman powers
circulating around and within human bodies. These material powers,
which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, in any
case call for our attentiveness, or even ‘respect’” (Bennett 2010: ix). What
might be called the impulse to empower the material world often forms
part of a larger ecological project seeking to recognize the essential role of
the nonhuman in human life, just as the role of the human in the material
world is reflected in the term “anthropocene,” which acknowledges the
impact of human activity on Earth’s climate and geology.
Increasingly, the agents and forces of which Bennett speaks, and
which circulate around and within human bodies, are technological. Life
has become not just imbricated with the technological, which it always
has been, but virtually unthinkable without technology, to the extent
that people have had to invent technological strategies to deal with the
decline of physicality that increased reliance on technology entails. Since
the advent of mechanization, human contact with work has become less
intensely physical and more gestural. The factory assembly line made
work more fragmented and repetitive (hence the “alienation” from the
finished product of which Marx spoke), and in the electronic age, people
have less and less contact with the labor process. As technology comes
to play a greater role in human life, strategies arise to compensate for
the perceived eclipse of human agency. Baudrillard has suggested that as
physicality diminishes, humans are reluctant to relinquish the last vestiges
of their agency in the functioning of objects: “Man has to be reassured
about his power by some sense of participation, albeit a merely formal

one. So the gestural system of control must be deemed indispensable—
not to make the system work technically, for some advanced technology
could (and no doubt will) make it unnecessary, but, rather, to make the
system work psychologically” (Baudrillard 2005 [1968]: 51–52; original
emphasis). Although Baudrillard wrote those words half a century ago,
they are even more true today, in the era of computers and smartphones.
Film studies has come up with its own way of compensating for the
reduction of physicality in modern life. In reaction to the diminishing
role of the body and the decline of indexicality in a technological world
dominated by automation and by digital media, theories of embodiment
and haptic cinema have emerged and developed in the last twenty years
or so (see Marks 2000; Beugnet 2007; Hansen 2004). Such theories
emphasize the role of the human body in the act of perception, and, more
generally, the phenomenological role of the affective and the tactile in
the reception of information. Laura Marks (2000) emphasizes the ways
in which the sense of touch is invoked in certain films, while Martine
Beugnet (2007) focuses on the synesthetic capacity of film, in its very
materiality, to activate senses beyond that of vision. Both insist on
acknowledging, in various ways and to varying degrees, the importance
of the human body—indeed, of the human—in spectatorship. Even more
recently, these theories have been complemented by theories of techno-
phenomenology, which recognizes the role of technologies as “constituent
parts of the relations that human agents maintain with their environments
in concretely embodied, practical situations” (Denson 2013: n.p.). As we
saw above, the human body is coming to be increasingly inseparable
from the technological. For Baudrillard, the gestures that represent the
diminishing “signs of [the body’s] presence” when faced with technology
are increasingly delegated to “objects whose functioning, in any case, is
independent from now on” (Baudrillard 2005 [1968]: 55). In 1968, these
gestures would have been the pulling of levers and pushing of buttons,
while today, these gestures are the swipes, pinches, and strokes that allow
us to access the (screen) world at our fingertips.
The “independence” of objects of which Baudrillard spoke are
invoked in the idea of the Internet of Things, in which increasing
numbers of objects are connected to the internet and can communicate,

sending and receiving data to and from people and each other.
Objects thus acquire the capacity to act in unison, exhibiting “ambient
intelligence,” with “the physical world becoming one big information
system” (http://www.techopedia.com/definition/28247/internet-of-
things-iot). In the Internet of Things, conversations among objects
seems to bypass human intervention altogether, but of course, these
colloquia are held in the service of human beings, and made possible
by them. The Internet of Things is an electronic, digital version of
Latour’s Parliament of Things, in which things communicate with
each other, with or without human intervention. In the Parliament of
Things, according to Latour,
Societies are present, but with the objects that have been serving as their
ballast from time immemorial. Let one of the representatives talk, for
instance, about the ozone hole, another represent the Monsanto chemical
industry, a third the workers of the same chemical industry, another the
voters of New Hampshire, a fifth the meteorology of the polar regions;
let still another speak in the name of the State; what does it matter, so
long as they are all talking about the same thing, about a quasi-object
they have all created, the object-discourse-nature-society whose new
properties astound us and whose network extends from my refrigerator
to the Antarctic by way of chemistry, law, the State, the economy, and
satellites. (Latour 1993: 144)
This book takes its name from both the Internet of Things and the
Parliament of Things. Commodity culture and globalization have
ushered in a new era in the relations between people and things. If
humans have always been defined by prosthesis, the ways in which they
are defined by prosthesis are changing. As Bennett writes, “Humanity
and nonhumanity have always performed an intricate dance with each
other. There was never a time when human agency was anything other
than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity; today this
mingling has become harder to ignore” (Bennett 2010: 31). What is new
today is the hyperdevelopment of technology and the commodity culture
of planned obsolescence in which it is embedded.
Consuming objects
Andrew Cole (2015: 323) has written that the trend in philosophy to endow
objects with autonomy is akin to “commodity fetishism in academic
form,” and I share the same suspicion: namely, that the increasing
emphasis on things in philosophy is at the very least a reflection, and
probably a product, of commodity culture—in Heideggerian terms,
commodity culture would be the everyday context, or readiness-to-
hand (Zuhandenheit), that allows us to understand Being. Within global
capitalism, humans extend and supplement themselves primarily by
means of commodities. A key component of globalization is the primacy
of consumer culture, which has come to permeate virtually every aspect
of modern life. Consumption in the global era is defined by surplus:
the surplus value that creates profits for employers; the surplus income
that enables consumers to purchase goods above and beyond the bare
necessities; and ultimately, the surplus labor pools of the unemployed
that provide ready-made work forces when industries expand. “Surplus”
is a concept whose meaning extends from commodities to human beings,
bringing with it associations of reification and expendability. In the logic
of consumer culture, surplus is not just a question of having more than is,
strictly speaking, necessary; it is also the fact of wanting more, wanting
to supplement what one already has, however much that may be. The
supplement is the backbone of consumer culture. Its emotional logic is
this: “With the purchase of this thing or that thing, I will be ‘complete’;
no, it is the purchase of this other thing that will make me complete; no,
no—it is the purchase of this other thing, and this other thing, and this
other thing.” Consumer capitalism is thus foundationally invested in the
notion of prosthetic supplementation.
If the caricatural symbol of industrial capitalism was the hapless factory
worker being swallowed up by the cogs of the assembly line in Modern
Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936), the iconic image of consumer capitalism
is that of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City spending unimaginable
amounts of money on a pair of shoes that are minimally distinguishable
from the hundreds of other pairs she owns. Consumerism has a double-
edged status as both an enactment of desire and a mechanism of capture:
someone who obsessively buys every book about Marxism is still a

consumer, just as the wealthy Middle Eastern women who wear designer
clothes under their burqas in Sex and the City 2 (Michael Patrick King,
2010) are still slaves to fashion. The fashion world is the very model for
supplementarity and planned obsolescence, presupposing as it does that
consumers will buy new clothes every year not because the old ones are
worn out, but for no other reason than that new ones are available. When,
in The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006), the office intern laughs at
the imperious magazine editor and her minions as they hesitate between
two belts that seem perfectly identical to her, it is because she cannot
decipher the miniscule but significant distinctions between them—
because, in other words, she cannot speak the language of fashion. Such
tiny distinctions are vital to a system of planned obsolescence, affording a
broad range of fashion “updates” that necessitate the purchase of new items
of clothing to supplement a wardrobe that seemed complete until the new
season was unveiled, but that subsequently seem woefully inadequate.
Fashion’s mandate is the creation of a product that demands constant
renewal in order to exist (last season’s fashions are no longer fashionable),
and accordingly, fashions are designed to go “out of fashion.” Boscagli
notes that, in the world of fashion, “clothes stand as the key element of
modern material culture both for turning women into a spectacle for
the male gaze, and for signifying the female desire for something other”
(Boscagli 2014: 82). The stereotypical female consumer is at once a subject
and an object of desire, states that are mutually reinforcing.
The spectacle that fashion creates, and the desire that it mobilizes, is
the appearance not only of beauty, but also of youth. In keeping with the
structure of planned obsolescence, aging is not compatible with fashion
(with the exception of the “vintage,” prized precisely because it is the old
become new—and, crucially, commodified—again). The antagonism
between aging and fashion is so potent that it extends metonymically
to the wearers of fashion: predominantly women who are themselves
typically deemed past their “sell-by date” once they have reached a certain
age (i.e., once they have reached menopause). The prevailing assumption
is that women past childbearing age have no need to be fashionable
because they themselves have gone out of fashion, at least in terms of
sexual desirability, and have little remaining use value. Yet, with the
widespread availability of birth control and medicalized abortion, women
have increasingly chosen (at least temporary, and sometimes permanent)
childlessness, thereby transforming reproduction into something that
can be selected from a range of possibilities. After menopause, however,
this choice is no longer an option, and women are often consigned to the
dustheap of romantic history. This is just another example of the logic of
obsolescence that infuses all aspects of life in advanced capitalism.
The flipside of consumption, and its logical extension, is the production
of waste, in both an industrial and a biological sense. Zygmunt Bauman
has noted that globalization is “the most prolific and least controlled
‘production line’ of human waste or wasted humans” (Bauman 2004:
6). Two films analyzed in this study illustrate the overlap between
consumption and excrescence—the 2011 box office hits Bridesmaids
(Paul Feig) and The Help (Tate Taylor). Bridesmaids literally combines
shopping and defecation in the iconic scene in which the eponymous
characters suffer an attack of explosive diarrhea (caused by food eaten in
an Argentinian restaurant) while trying on elegant dresses at an exclusive
bridal boutique. The plot of The Help revolves around the use of toilets
by African American domestic workers, and proliferates with references
to excretion. Both films allegorize the idea of waste. The surplus labor
pools that provide ready-made work forces when industries expand
are conceived as entirely expendable, entirely subject to the needs of
those who employ them—available to be exploited as needed, and then
ejected, like so much human waste, when their services are no longer
required or are somehow deemed intrusive or threatening. Even the
body itself acquires a use value and indeed an exchange value, as it is
reduced to an object to be traded across national and cultural borders.
Such commodification exemplifies the proliferation of what Ranjana
Khanna has called “disposable bodies” in late sovereignty (Khanna 2006:
n.p.). These bodies are the by-product of a system that prosthetizes
human beings and are the result of a crisis of boundary maintenance that
characterizes both globalization and the posthuman.
Increasingly, as biotechnological advances outstrip the availability of
the raw materials necessary to bring “substandard” bodies into existential
parity with the full-bodied, body parts themselves are becoming atomized
marketable objects. In the hierarchy of global citizenship, paralleling, if
not superseding, Marxian notions of the laboring body, bio-objects like
organs, stem cells, and other body parts are becoming valued components
in the supplementation and survival of the bodies that matter by the
body parts of those that do not (see Ezra and Rowden 2009). The 2009
Jean-Pierre Jeunet film Micmacs à tire-larigot (Micmacs) examines the
status of human bodies in a globalized world, emphasizing the ways in
which humans and objects are becoming increasingly interchangeable.
While African and Middle Eastern children get their limbs blown off
in landmines made by multinational arms manufacturers, the owner
of one of these munitions factories collects the body parts of deceased
celebrities, like so many saints’ relics, as a hobby. This unusual pastime
emblematizes the commodification of human beings, their reduction to
items that can be bought and sold.
Exotic objects
One form that the commodification of human beings takes in the era of
globalization is exoticism, a discourse that is closely bound up with both
commodity culture and the rise of the mass media. From its inception
at the end of the nineteenth century, cinema lent itself to depictions of
people and places that were far removed from the daily lives of audiences
in the industrial world. Exoticism found its fullest expression in France,
where the birth of cinema coincided with the height of the French colonial
empire. The study of cinematic exoticism is key to understanding the
imbrication of race-thinking and mass culture, and it is a prime example
of the redrawing of the boundaries between human beings and objects.
This chapter focuses on two moments in the history of cinematic
exoticism in France, the interwar period and the end of the Algerian
War—but of course, exoticism existed long before the interwar period.
At least as far back as Montaigne’s sixteenth-century musings on the
inhabitants of Brazil (“Des Cannibales,” Montaigne 2000 [1580]), the
French were heavily invested in identifying cultural “otherness.” In
the period prior to the First World War notably, French culture was
permeated with expressions of exoticism. In cinema, the influence of
exoticism can be seen as early as the films of Méliès (see Ezra 2000b),
and was certainly apparent in the popular film serials of Louis Feuillade,
which contained many subtle allusions to non-French cultures. Costumes
reflected the influence of Japonerie (especially in the couture designs of
Marie Callot Gerbet), and more generally, they displayed the vogue for
exoticism in French fashion in the early part of the twentieth century,
notably in the influential designs of Paul Poiret and Jeanne Paquin, who
took their inspiration from the Ballets Russes productions in Paris of
Cléopâtre (1909), L’Oiseau de feu (1910), and Shéhérazade (1910) (see
Buxbaum 1999: 18). This exoticist trend in fashion was most apparent
in the wearing of feather headdresses by wealthy women in, for example,
the Fantômas films, which were made at the very end of the Belle époque
(whereas, by the time of Feuillade’s Les Vampires in 1915–16 and certainly
of his serial Judex in 1918, this fashion moment will appear to have
passed). The feather headdresses not only evoke Orientalist opulence,
but also evoke the image of the native American popularized by French
translations of James Fenimore Cooper’s stories of the Wild West and
by the tales of cowboys and Indians by nineteenth-century French
writers such as Gustave Aimard, Gabriel Ferry, and Paul Duplessis (see
Camurat 1993: 2.1.3). At the same time, the word “apache,” from the
American Indian Apache tribe, was used in turn-of-the-century France
to denote “hooligans,” or the criminal underclass. Richard Abel points
out that the fascination with l’apachisme was revived in 1912, with the
public execution of leaders of the anarchist, Paris-based Bonnot gang
(Abel 1996: 6). Fantômas’s band of criminal collaborators are referred
to as “apaches,” as is the gang in which Irma Vep travels in Feuillade’s
1915–16 serial Les Vampires, discussed in a later chapter. The fact that
it is wealthy people who wear “apache”-inspired headdresses suggests
a distribution of criminality and exoticism across the social divide,
underscoring the fact that, in the words of James Clifford, “cultural order
includes both the rule and the transgression” (Clifford 1988: 126). In a
similar way, the incorporation of the “exotic,” literally the outside, within
the intimate sphere of clothing or the household interior suggests a literal
domestication of difference. Exoticism infiltrated the diegetic universe of

films made in the early part of the twentieth century like Irma Vep herself,
slipping into rooms unnoticed. It was part of the fabric of everyday life,
reflected in the tchotchkes that adorned bohemian and middle-class
French homes, just as it was reflected in the most popular films of the day.
Exoticism is a way of domesticating difference, of bringing it “home.” In
this, it shows affinities with anthropological humanism, which, according
to Clifford, “begins with the different and renders it—through naming,
classifying, describing, interpreting—comprehensible. It familiarizes”
(Clifford 1988: 145). The incorporation of “exotic” objects in everyday
life and in cinema worked to familiarize the unfamiliar, but only up to
a point, because exoticism relies on the retention of a certain amount of
residual difference.
After the First World War, exoticism found expression in the vogue for
“Negrophilia,” a discourse that appeared to celebrate both the tirailleurs
sénégalais (West African troops who had fought for France in the war)
and the African American musicians and dancers who came over to
France to perform in the 1920s. This discourse was of course reflected
in cinema, and even in the ways that people spoke about filmmaking:
in 1930, Jean Epstein, filmmaker and film theorist, described the
camera as a “black body” that allows us to know, indeed to penetrate,
an object (“Le cinématographe continue,” 1930, cited in Abel 1988: 64).
This image of the black body is not invoked randomly: it acknowledges
(and reverses) the intersection of French cinema with the exoticizing
fetishistic gaze that accompanied the birth of the seventh art. The human
body is a halfway house between humanity and objecthood: stripped
of subjectivity, people are reduced to their bodies, which, in exoticism,
are the site of the projection of fetishized difference. In its Marxist
incarnation, commodity fetishism veils the process of production. In
the same way, the fetishization of the “black body” hides the process of
colonization. According to Fatimah Tobing Rony, “Emptied of history, .
. . bodies are racialized. The racialized body in cinema is a construction
denying people of color historical agency and psychological complexity”
(Rony 1996: 71). The emblem of the “racialized body” in the interwar
period was Josephine Baker, African American dancer and singer who,
from the age of eighteen, made her career, and her home, in France. In
the 1920s and 1930s, Baker appeared in four French feature films. Since
her arrival in Paris in 1925 with an African American dance troupe,
Baker had remained in France, becoming an icon of the Jazz Age. Baker’s
career illustrated the way that the objectification of black bodies that had
begun in France in the nineteenth century was filtered, in the twentieth,
through the commodifying process of stardom. Her identity was protean,
changing according to the desires of consumers of exotic images: despite
her American origins, she was most often identified with the French
colonial empire (even being elected “Queen of the Colonies” at the
Colonial Exhibition of 1931). In her music hall shows (such as La Créole),
her songs (the most famous of which was “J’ai deux amours, Paris et mon
pays,” which implied that her “country” was a French colony) and three
of her films, she played the role of a French colonial subject. In her final
film, Fausse alerte (The French Way, 1945), to which I devote the most
attention, the national origins of Baker’s characters are not specified, but
the fact that she is shown speaking American-accented English at one
point strongly suggests she is American, like Baker herself. This film,
made in 1939 during France’s “Phony War” but not released until 1945,
is not widely known, and it presents a mature, stately image of Baker, but
one that retains echoes of her prewar persona.
After its heyday in the cinéma colonial of the interwar period, exoticism
in French cinema went under wraps. By the time of the French New
Wave (whose apogee was 1958–62, but which lived on in some form at
least until the 1970s), exoticism was articulated in more muted tones, at
least partly because of the Algerian War (1954–62). The veiled nature
of exoticism in the postwar period is symbolized both in and by the
mask, exoticist fetish-object par excellence. Masks feature in a number
of New Wave films, evoking the ongoing vogue for exoticism even as
the colonial empire was breaking away from France. Masks, icons of the
“primitive,” not only point to the narratives of historical progress that
differentiate “now” from then and “us” from “them,” but also signify the
processes of disguise and censorship that accompany historical trauma.
The Algerian War was a notable cite of censorship, with films made about
the war banned until 1963, well after the war’s end (Stora 1997: 111). The
historical trauma of decolonization was unfolding as the French were still
attempting to come to terms with their fraught role in the Second World
War, and the New Wave films I examine—notably Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from
5 to 7, Agnès Varda, 1961), Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim, François Truffaut,
1962), and Muriel, ou le temps d’un detour (Muriel, or the Time of Return,
Alain Resnais, 1963)—all contain kernels of what Michael Rothberg has
called “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg 2009), overdetermined
moments that point to traumas both contemporary (the Algerian War)
and historical (the Second World War).
Part-objects
Whether or not censorship was officially sanctioned, films often took

circuitous routes to the representation of wars as they were unfolding.
The two films examined in the next chapter both refer to contemporary
wartime in a roundabout way—in Les Vampires, the ten-part serial by
Louis Feuillade made during the First World War through references
to missing fathers, and in the Marx Brothers’ Hollywood vehicle The
Big Store (Charles Reisner, 1941), through subtle but unmistakable
allusions to missing children in the Second World War. Feuillade’s
serial, about a gang of Parisian criminals who can inhabit other people’s
bodies, hides the war’s presence, but articulates it implicitly in a series
of veiled allusions to the events taking place, through references to code
breaking, cannons, poison gas, and exploding ships. It also displays
a preoccupation with fathers bordering on the obsessive, which, in
combination with the recurring motif of the severed head (in the classical
Freudian reading, an image of castration, most prominently displayed
in the serial’s first episode, titled “The Severed Head”), suggests the
felling of the traditionally male chef de famille. By contrast, the Marx
Brothers film contains two references to dead or missing children,
which evoke the tragedy unfolding in Europe during the Second World
War. One reference is embedded in a musical number sung by a singer
known for her deadpan delivery, and another can be found in a scene
set in the bed department of the eponymous department store. Upon
learning that six children from an Italian immigrant family have gone
missing, Groucho tries to pass off six other children as the children
of the Italian family, insisting that there is no difference between the
Italian children and any of the succession of large families of varying

ethnicities (Chinese, American Indian, Scandinavian) who parade
through the bed department. The repeated references to lost children in
this scene, combined with the revelation that the children are actually
stuffed in a bed inside the wall, are retrospectively unsettling in light of
knowledge of the death camps. Both the Feuillade serial and the Marx
Brothers film display the logic of substitution and, more broadly, what
I have called the identification of difference, the discourse that posits
individuals as interchangeable with one another, and that renders them
as part-objects representative of a larger group (Ezra 2000a). This logic
is both metaphorical and synecdochal, and it underwrites the racial and
national stereotypes that fuel war and genocide.
The Germans were the common enemy in First World War France, but
in the United States during the Second World War, there was also another
“enemy within”: the immigrant population. Like many of their films,
The Big Store invokes the Marx Brothers’ own (French-German-Jewish)
immigrant background, bringing to mind those who made it out—and
those who did not. While not mentioning the war overtly, Les Vampires
and The Big Store say a lot about the politics of evasion, censorship and
both the plight of the missing and the effect of this plight on those who
get away.
The logic of substitution also underpins the structure of the fetish,
in which an object is substituted for the phallus that a (male) child
imagines his mother once had. Freud built his theory of the fetish upon
the castration complex, an idea he developed during and immediately
following the First World War, when Vienna was full of amputees and
other war wounded. Les Vampires, with all its references to the classic
phallic symbol of the severed head, invokes the castration fantasy, which,
like Freud’s theory itself, masks the greater trauma of the war. Disavowal
is the discursive hallmark of the fetish (“I know, but all the same. . .”)
that calls forth the simultaneous presence and absence of something that
was never there in the first place. The gang of criminals who slink across
Parisian rooftops terrorizing the populace in Les Vampires wear skin-
tight, hooded costumes that resemble nothing so much as fetish gear,
and the star of the series and only female member of the gang, Irma Vep
(played by Musidora), was certainly a fetish-object in her own right.
Indeed, perhaps the most fully fleshed-out embodiment of the fetish—

the substitution of an object for a living, breathing human being—
involves the sexual objectification of women. The logical conclusion of
such objectification is the literal transformation of women into objects,
or artificial women. It is this transformation that is examined in the next
chapter.
Objects of desire
Women have always played a key role in cinema, beginning with the
hundreds of female workers streaming out of the factory gates at the start
of the Lumière Brothers’ inaugural La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon
(Workers Leaving the Factory, 1895), but more often than not fulfilling
the passive function of “to-be-looked-at-ness” that Laura Mulvey
(1975: 11) described in her classic essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema.” At least since the Judeo-Christian Bible, when Eve was made
from Adam’s rib, women have been characterized as supplements to men,
and this chapter charts the representation in cinema of a very literal form
taken by this supplementarity: the construction of artificial women who
serve as objects of desire for their (nearly always male) creators. “Objects
of Desire” begins its exploration of artificial women with the early days
of French cinema, which dominated global film markets before the First
World War, and then continues with an examination of recent cinema
from Hollywood, the current center of the world film industry. The
chapter moves from mechanized depictions of “automatic” women in the
machine age to virtual versions from the digital era.
The origins of cinema are intertwined with the history of automata.
Film pioneer Georges Méliès owned an important collection of them and
used them in his magic shows at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, into which
he eventually incorporated the new technology of film. Freud’s theory of
the uncanny (1919) takes its inspiration from these stories of the inanimate
becoming animated, which is also, of course, the magic of cinema: Jackie
Stacey and Lucy Suchman have likened screen depictions of automata to
“cinema’s history of bringing things to life” (Stacey and Suchman 2012:
13). Andreas Huyssen has observed that while these mechanized humans
initially had a fairly even distribution of genders, they eventually became
more predominantly associated with women as technology came to be
seen as a force to be feared, like the threat of castration Freud would
associate with women in the early twentieth century:
While the android builders of the 18th century did not seem to have
an overriding preference for either sex (the number of male and female
androids seems to be more or less balanced), it is striking to see how the
later literature prefers machine-women to machine-men. Historically,
then, we can conclude that as soon as the machine came to be perceived
as a demonic, inexplicable threat and as harbinger of chaos and
destruction—a view which typically characterizes many 19th-century
reactions to the railroad to give but one major example—writers began
to imagine the Maschinenmensch as woman. (Huyssen 1981–82: 226)
Perhaps most famously (at least in the wake of Freud’s discussion of

the uncanny), the female automaton was given expression in E. T.
A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” with its depiction of the protagonist
Nathanael’s love for the lifelike mechanical doll Olympia, a plot device
that would subsequently be taken up in the ballet Coppélia (libretto by
Charles Nuitter, 1870). It was in the Victorian era, too, that dolls became
increasingly lifelike (see Kappeler 1986: 78 and passim); life-size sex dolls
were manufactured in France at least as early as the 1880s (Schwartz 1996:
125). In terms of the cultural and corporeal derealization of women, then,
it is a small step from the image of the Victorian angel in the house to that
of the deflated sex doll in the cabinet.
Across its various registers, and from the very inception of the
medium, cinema has been peopled with images of man-made women.
The precedent set by Méliès was continued in such films as Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis (1927), The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935); The
Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975, remade by Frank Oz in 2004), Eve
of Destruction (Duncan Gibbins, 1991), and The Fifth Element (Luc
Besson, 1997). Mary Ann Doane calls the type of creature that marries
technology and femininity the “woman-machine” (Doane 1990: 166).
Hal Foster has written of the “fetishistic link made between a historical
ambivalence regarding the mechanical-commodified and a psychic

ambivalence regarding woman—a desire for mastery over these figures
mixed with a dread of servitude to them” (Foster 1993: 152). The desire
for mastery is apparent in images of the cutting and dismemberment of
women so prevalent in cinema. These images of cutting provide insight
into the constructed nature of objects of desire, through a kind of reverse
engineering.
In the philosophical tradition going back to the Cartesian mind/
body dualism, women have routinely been aligned with the material,
the instinctive—the body—while men have been associated with reason,
subjectivity—the mind. Elizabeth Grosz notes, “Thus excluded from
notions of subjectivity, personhood or identity, the body becomes an
‘objective,’ observable entity, a ‘thing’” (Grosz 1987: 5; cited in Toffoletti
2007: 19). Kim Toffoletti adds, “By extension, woman comes to define
all that is not human, fixed to a corporeal, natural and essential state”
(Toffoletti 2007: 19). Yet, in the two relatively recent feature-length films
examined in detail in this chapter, S1M0NE (Andrew Niccol, 2002) and
Her (Spike Jonze, 2013), artificial women are in fact one step removed
from the corporeal (let alone the “natural”), removed even from the
mechanical, inhabiting the disembodied realm of the virtual. In S1M0NE,
a film producer, frustrated by having to accommodate the caprices of
flesh-and-blood actors, uses a computer program to create a virtual female
star who is infinitely manipulable and so lifelike that even her costars do
not realize she is nothing but a series of zeroes and ones, in other words
what is known as a synthespian, or computer-generated actor. In Her, the
disembodiment of the love object is taken one step further, as a lonely
man falls in love with a voice—the operating system of his smartphone.
Voiced by Scarlett Johansson, “Samantha” provides such a realistic
simulacrum of a romantic relationship that she periodically picks fights
with the protagonist, whom she accuses of not paying enough attention
to her. Her thus suggests that an effective way of protecting oneself against
loneliness (or, for introverts, against the prospect of insalubrious contact
with other people) is by creating your own interlocutors.
The forging of emotional relationships with simulacra is not so far
away from the attribution of subjectivity to these prosthetic creations.
As Latour has written, “It has been necessary to modify the fabric of
our collectives from top to bottom in order to absorb the citizen of the
eighteenth century and the worker of the nineteenth. We shall have to
transform ourselves just as thoroughly in order to make room, today,
for the nonhumans created by science and technology” (Latour 1993:
136). The films examined in the final chapter explore the implications
of making room for these nonhumans and consider what happens when
they take on a life of their own. If digital technology has almost completely
nullified the notion of geographical borders as a form of boundary
maintenance, many films go a step further by positing technology as
capable of obliterating the border between the human and the inhuman.
Science fiction films, in particular, venture into this “final frontier.”
Posthuman objects
Now that the Earth is quickly becoming saturated with humanity and
depleted of resources, people are looking beyond the Earth for the kinds
of spatial and financial opportunities they once sought in the Wild
West. In many science fiction films, the porosity of boundaries between
countries in globalization is emblematized by the blurring of boundaries
between human beings and their technological creations. In the new
global manifest destiny, this porosity is allegorized in the relations
between representatives of Earth (represented by the United States of
America) and aliens from beyond the Earth.
In a film such as Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), it is no coincidence
that the team from Earth sent to “pacify” the extraterrestrial natives on the
planet Pandora is American. By virtue of the fact that their action must take
place somewhere, few films fail to reference at least implicitly some notion of
national identity in the unfolding of their plots. Because of its organizational
use value, it is unlikely that the notion of “national” cinemas will ever be
completely superseded by that of transnational or global cinema, especially in
this era of retrenched nationalism. The economic and emotional investments
of a range of social actors in various markers of “nationality” are too great
for national identity to be abandoned easily. Avatar’s implicit image of Earth
is, therefore, of a place that has become dystopianly Americanized. With no

attempt to recreate the air of transnational camaraderie that characterized
the crew of Star Trek’s Enterprise or the cross-species work and life spaces
brought to vivid, if stereotype-ridden, life in George Lucas’s Star Wars films,
the implication in Avatar is that the United States has done to all of the other
countries and planets what it is now trying to do to Pandora and to its native
population, the Na’vi.
The speed with which Avatar reset the mark for global box office,
grossing over $2.78 billion a little more than a year after its release
(Elsaesser 2011: 263n12), indicates the success of a cinematic machine
designed for maximum ease of consumption. (At the time of writing this
book, two sequels to the film had been announced but not yet released.)
This design is both reproduced and complicated by what may initially
seem to be a surprisingly explicit anti-American perspective in Avatar.
In terms of its reception dynamics, however, the representation of
American militarism as essentially villainous in Avatar is actually quite
logical in a film that was so thoroughly dependent on global success
in order to recoup its nearly $400 million production and promotion
costs. Yet, despite the lush color palette and visual detail that comprise
Avatar’s primary appeal, the heroes and villains and moral issues that the
film raises are essentially black and white. The frisson of transgression
generated by the fact that the Americans are the villains is nullified by
the fact that Americans are also the heroes and, once made Na’vi, the
natives who really matter. In its Noble Savagery, Avatar thus reproduces
the racial dichotomies it appears to transcend. In this, it is analogous to
the claims of a color-blind society that accompanied the heady early days
of the internet, whose encoding is every bit as racial (and national) as
it is digital. As we draw closer to what Philip Rosen (2001: chapter 8)
has called the “digital utopia” of infinite manipulability, interactivity, and
convergence, new simulacra of the imagined communities of previous
eras—already substitutes, according to Benedict Anderson (1983),
for the face-to-face contact of the preindustrialized Gemeinschaft that
the imagined community of the nation replaced—are springing up all
over the world (and all over the World Wide Web). The human sense
of “connection” is increasingly offered in narratives of globalization as a
nostalgic throwback to these lamented communities.
It is no accident that nostalgia for human connection drives the final

two films discussed in this chapter, despite the fact that their protagonists
are robots. With Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008), The Cinema of Things
returns to its roots in consumer culture, as mountains of disused
commodities rise up in piles as high as the tallest skyscrapers, literally
taking over the Earth and driving the planet’s human inhabitants to live
on a satellite space station. Their Big Gulp cups endlessly refilled with
high-calorie drinks, the inhabitants of this space station, who, the film
suggests, will be “us” before long, are overweight, lacking in bone density,
and more or less incapable of independent movement (or, it is implied,
thought). Wall-E is a robot who moves among the rubble, rescuing the
odd piece of obsolete technology to enjoy in his leisure time. One such
piece of obsolete technology is a video cassette recorder, on which Wall-E
repeatedly watches a musical sequence from the film Hello Dolly (Gene
Kelly, 1969) in a manner that can only be described as obsessive. It is this
film fandom that allows viewers to recognize themselves in Wall-E; even
more than his seemingly hopeless love for a newer-model female robot
apparently out of his league who makes Wall-E himself feel obsolete,
the robot’s status as a film enthusiast is what makes him resonate with
viewers.
In this, Wall-E bears a striking resemblance to David, the android in
Ridley Scott’s 2012 Prometheus. In his spare moments, David, played by
Michael Fassbender, watches Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) on
a massive cinema screen in the spaceship in which he and his human
colleagues are speeding toward a distant planet in order to discover the
“Engineers” of the human race. David’s obsessional interest in a film, like
Wall-E’s, generates sympathy for the android, who quotes lines from the
David Lean film and even dyes his hair blond so he will more closely
resemble Peter O’Toole, who played Lawrence. The humanizing tendency
of cinema is an allegory of the role technics plays in the constitution of
human being, which is a principal tenet of Stieglerian philosophy and
an echo of the Prometheus myth invoked in the Scott film’s title. (Even
the Lean film subtly alludes to the Prometheus myth in its depiction of
Lawrence’s fascination with fire, which he likes to extinguish with his
bare hands.) In the Greek myth, Prometheus the Titan was punished for
stealing fire from the gods in order to give it to humans. In Scott’s film,
Peter Wayland, the old man who finances the ship’s expedition, is trying
to find a way of prolonging his life, and thus of tampering with the gods’
plan for humans, with a similar hubris to that of Prometheus. While
Wayland does not get his liver pecked out, he does come to a pretty grisly
end, squashed by one of the very creatures he had so looked forward to
meeting.
Stiegler’s discussion of the Prometheus myth places emphasis on
Prometheus’s all-but-forgotten brother Epimetheus, whose name,
appropriately, means “forgetting” (Stiegler 1998). Epimetheus was
charged with assigning various qualities to the newly created living
creatures, but forgot to reserve any qualities for humans, so his brother
was forced to steal fire from the gods, as well as the capacity for making
things, to bestow upon humans. The making of things to supplement the
human is the very definition of prosthesis—and it is that which makes
us human. Humans are embedded inextricably in the web of technics,
having become operators of the machines they create. What was once
considered to be supplemental to human endeavor—things—have
become that which human endeavor now supplements: center and
periphery have changed places. It is this dynamic that The Cinema of
Things seeks to explore.
1
Consuming Objects
Commodity culture is the most visible emblem of the supplementarity

that characterizes globalization. The drive to purchase and surround
oneself with objects seems never to be sated and is fueled by planned
obsolescence, capitalism’s privileged temporal mode. The pinnacle of
planned obsolescence is fashion, whose acolytes are, by definition, engaged
in a never-ending search for the new. Beginning with an analysis of Sex
and the City 2 (SATC2), a sequel in the brunch-and-stiletto franchise that
started life as a television series and culminated in a cinematic ode to the
excesses of consumer society, this chapter explores the hyperconsumption
that underpins the culture of planned obsolescence, and the cultural
implications of all the waste thus generated.
The biological process of consumption is, of course, eating. In digestion,
matter that is surplus to requirements is not absorbed but is excreted
from the body. The consumption of commodities replaces biological
consumption for stick-thin female characters either shown forgoing food,
or eating far more than the actors who play them clearly do, in films such
as Sex and the City (SATC) (Michael Patrick King, 2008) and SATC2, and
The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006). The excessive consumption
depicted in these films has its correlate in biological metaphors of waste
in films such as Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011) and The Help (Tate Taylor,
2011), whose preoccupation with excrement equates human waste with
what Zygmunt Bauman (2004) calls the “wasted lives” of exploitation. By
examining these films together, it is possible to trace a trajectory from the
manifest content of advanced consumer culture to the latent biological
metaphors of toxic bodies characterized by obesity and excrescence,
visible signs of excess that hint at consumption’s gurgling underbelly.
These films also ultimately suggest a larger social dimension to the
dynamic of consumption and waste in advanced consumer culture: the
consumption and waste of the labor and lives of human beings in a global
system marked by the imbricated legacies of sexism, colonialism, racial
segregation, and exploitation.
The current phase of advanced consumer capitalism is unsustainable,
as many have argued, and in its very excesses, its frenzied will to power,
it is transforming into other things. The emphasis on reuse, recycling,
and sustainability is one such transformation. If in SATC2, Carrie and
company are so wed to their purchases that they risk changing places with
them, becoming almost an extension of the commodities with which they
surround themselves, Micmacs à tire-larigot (Micmacs, Jean-Pierre Jeunet,
2009) takes this exchange to its logical conclusion, imbuing objects with
a life of their own. For Jane Bennett, “The sheer volume of commodities,
and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for
new ones, conceals the vitality of matter” (Bennett 2010: 5). This vitality is
revealed in Micmacs, which rejects the commodity culture whose apogee
SATC2 represents, replacing the planned obsolescence emphasized in the
latter film with an ethic—and an aesthetic—of salvage. The celebration
of obsolescence in commodity culture is counterbalanced by its refusal
in what I am calling “reuse value.” The ragtag band of homeless people in
Jeunet’s film who live together beneath a refuse dump in the film reuse
discarded objects, revealing the palimpsestic layering of different eras that
accrete to the objects themselves when they are given a new lease of life.
In Micmacs, the attributes of people and those of objects have changed
places: the memory-imbued objects are, in a sense, alive, while the people
have been consigned to the scrapheap of history. Through sheer pluck
and determination, those whom history has discarded manage to turn
discarded objects into what, in many ways, is an idyllic new home. This film
thus allegorizes the vitality of matter, while presenting a vision of resistance
to structures of objectification—but a vision whose utopian aspirations are
compromised by its lapses into the very objectification it seeks to expose.
“Dubai is so last year”: Sex and the City 2
Sex and the City 2, as is apparent from the title, is a sequel. As such, it
supplements an earlier film, Sex and the City (SATC, Michael Patrick
Consuming Objects 33
King, 2008) which itself supplemented the television series of the same
name, each of whose episodes supplemented the preceding ones, all of
which supplemented the 1997 collection of essays by Candace Bushnell
(and all of which were in turn supplemented by the televisual prequel The
Carrie Diaries, which ran in the United States from 2013 to 2014). Not
only in its form, but also by virtue of its subject matter and images, the
second film in the franchise invites a meditation on the manifold forms
and figures of supplementarity. In particular, it is the temporal dimension
of supplementarity, obsolescence, that structures the film’s principal
themes of biological reproduction, urban modernity, and commodity
culture: or sex, the city, and shoes.
The television series charted the romantic escapades of four single
women living in Manhattan, working in glamorous jobs, shopping for
designer labels, and meeting for brunch to discuss their colorful sex lives.
The main character, Carrie Bradshaw, writes a newspaper column entitled
“Sex and the City,” which discusses the customs and mores of single life in
a quasi-anthropological fashion, from the point of view of a participant-
observer who is at once removed from and part of the phenomenon she is
describing. In the first feature film based on the series, Carrie finally marries
“Big,” the man with whom she has had an on-again, off-again relationship
for several years, and her three girlfriends are all, despite some wobbles,
happily settled with husbands or boyfriends, and, in the case of Miranda
and Charlotte, children. In the second film, the sexually voracious and
slightly older Samantha is single again, and Carrie fears she is beginning
to grow bored with her marriage. The friends jump at the chance to
accompany Samantha, who works as a publicist, on an all-expense-paid
trip to Abu Dhabi, where much of the action is set (though the film was
actually shot in Morocco). In Abu Dhabi, the women experience romantic
crises, which force them to reassess their individual domestic lives, before
Samantha offends the locals with her overtly sexualized behavior, and the
four are ignominiously sent home.
When SATC2 was released in 2010, reviews were overwhelmingly
hostile. Although critics duly condemned the film’s lackluster script and
dubious gender and racial politics, much of the criticism focused on its
aging stars, who were deemed to be over the hill, too “old” to portray
sexually desirable (and desiring) fashion icons. Ella Taylor in the Village
Voice, for example, opined that “Sarah Jessica Parker is now 45 years old,
and, frankly, I cannot stomach another moment of the simpering, mincing,
hair-tossing, eyelash-batting little-girl shtick,” and described “sadistic
close-ups of faces too old for their fuck-me junior attire and problems
15 years too young” (Taylor 2010: n.p.). Andrew O’Hagan compared
the film unfavorably to its televisual predecessor, declaring that, in the
television series, the women’s dreams “appeared to chime with those
of many a late-twentysomething looking for love. Now, though, Carrie
Bradshaw is 45 and Samantha, her blonde slut friend, is 53, and it’s more
than difficult to love them” (O’Hagan 2010: n.p.). It is worth pointing out,
however, that the actors playing Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte
(Kristin Davis), and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) are all younger than those
playing the principal male love interests (both Parker and Davis were
born in 1965 and Nixon in 1966, while Chris Noth, who plays Big, was
born in 1954, and John Corbett, who plays Aidan, was born in 1961);
even Kim Cattrall, who plays menopausal elder stateswoman Samantha,
is two years younger than Chris Noth. None of the female actors plays a
character significantly younger than herself, and none of the male actors
was criticized for playing a character unbefitting his age. Yet, because
they were approaching the end of their childbearing years, the women
were considered obsolete, surplus to requirements. In Hollywood, after
the age of about forty, female stars either disappear, migrate to television,
or, if they are lucky, establish below-the-title afterlives as “character”
actors (unlike male actors, whose age is ignored until they cannot walk
unaided or speak without dribbling).
Carrie tries to combat the oppression of obsolescence through her
interest in vintage items. Though deeply invested in the latest fashions,
she ultimately prefers vintage clothes and jewelry. Although in the first
film she models a number of up-to-the-minute designer wedding gowns
in the pages of Vogue and wears one of them to her aborted wedding,
she eventually gets married in a vintage dress. Carrie passes herself off
as a kind of Luddite, who, in the first film professes not to know how to
use an iPhone and needs help sorting out her email and is told by Big,
as she reads a library book in bed, that she must be the last person in
New York who still takes out library books (as if to reinforce this point,
Carrie plans her dream wedding at the New York Public Library). The
watch she presents Big for their wedding anniversary in SATC2 is, she
notes, vintage. This film sequel insists on the passage of time in its visual
emphasis on clocks, and it exhibits a nostalgic fondness for the past in an
early flashback sequence in which the four female friends are shown as
they are supposed to have looked when they first met in the 1980s.
The apparent privileging of the past over the present also figures in the
conflict between Carrie and Big over DVDs (which would allow Carrie
to watch her “black-and-white films”) versus TV (on which Big wants to
watch sporting events and modern-day action films). Although cinema
has traditionally depicted television unsympathetically, the antipathy is
especially ironic here, given that SATC started life as a TV show. But
the thing that most appeals to Carrie about DVD technology may be
the fact that it allows viewers to freeze individual frames, creating a
“stillness” that Laura Mulvey calls cinema’s “best-kept secret” (Mulvey
2005: 22). Carrie’s preference for cinema evokes Stiegler’s hypothesis of
an “essentially cinemato-graphic structure for consciousness in general”
(Stiegler 2011: 13; original hyphen). Cinema is a means of mechanical
reproduction, like the photograph, but it is also a means of mirroring
the temporal flux that characterizes consciousness. For Stiegler, this
mirroring of the temporal flux does not merely reproduce the workings
of consciousness; it is the “revelation of the structure of all temporal
objects” (Stiegler 2011: 21). Conversely, live broadcasts (including the
kinds of television programs that Big likes to watch, such as sporting
events) do not show that which has already taken place, and so do not
reveal the workings of retentional finitude, or the consciousness of
temporality (Stiegler 2011: 16–21). This dichotomy, which highlights
Carrie’s acute awareness of the passage of time, thus brings to the fore
the structure of obsolescence itself, and, in particular, the notion of a
“biological clock.”
A dangerous supplement
Youth for women in SATC2 (as for women in Hollywood) is implicitly

equated with the capacity to bear children—hence the perimenopausal
cut-off point implied in the scathing reviews of the film. Samantha spends
much of her time popping pills, slathering on creams, and consuming

estrogen-rich foods in order to turn back the tide of menopause. She fears
becoming surplus to requirements in the economy of sexual attraction,
which seems to be linked, for women, to the ability to reproduce. In
her previous appearances in the earlier film and the television series,
Samantha never expresses any anxiety about the aging process; it is
only when she reaches the point of losing her fertility once and for all—
despite her unchanging resolve to remain childless—that she becomes
hysterically attached to preserving her youth. “When you ladies are
fifty,” she proclaims, flaunting the rejuvenating effects of her hormone
treatments, “I’ll be thirty-five.” It is precisely because Samantha has never
expressed any desire to have children that her sexuality is perceived as
excessive.
Miranda’s problems with maintaining a work-life balance certainly
do not provide any incentive for Samantha to change her mind about
childbearing. Miranda is the quintessential working mother, too busy
working to attend her child’s school functions, and too busy looking after
her child to provide the kind of unwavering dedication to her job that her
colleagues seem to expect. She engages in work correspondence at social
occasions, and her work impinges on her romantic life, prompting her to
curtail sexual relations with her husband because she has to get up early
to go to the office. Neither Carrie nor Samantha has children, and they
can continue pursuing their careers without distraction, but Miranda
struggles to raise her child and devote herself as fully to her job as she did
before she became a mother.
Charlotte, as a stay-at-home mother with a wealthy, bread-winning
husband, represents the other pole of maternal identity, but despite the
fact that she does not work outside the home and has a full-time nanny,
she finds it difficult to cope with the practical and emotional demands of
motherhood. In the second film, Miranda and Charlotte commiserate,
over cocktails in their luxurious hotel in Abu Dhabi, about the challenges
and frustrations of motherhood. Charlotte mentions that she cannot
begin to understand “how women without full-time help manage,” when
she finds it so challenging. This remark received a lot of derision and
condemnation in the press at the time of the film’s release because of its
profound elitism (see, for example, Koplinski 2010 and Bray, n.d.), but
the statement seems intended to emphasize the challenges faced by all
mothers, even the most privileged. Much of the insecurity that women
face in relation to the idea of motherhood revolves around the idea of
supplementarity, and this anxiety is reflected in the SATC films. Women
who stop working in order to raise children are no longer seen as an
integral part of the economic infrastructure, and their social status suffers
as a result; conversely, women who decide not to have children in order
to pursue their careers are perceived to be missing out on a fundamental
life experience. The expression “having it all,” referring to work and child-
rearing, implies that engaging in one but not the other activity amounts
to a shortcoming.
It is significant that the issue of childlessness is first highlighted in
the film sequel at a gay wedding. As if to underline the nonutilitarian
nature of (nonreproductive) homosexuality, the wedding is a masterpiece
of unabashed excess, with the set made to look like a 1930s Hollywood
musical. None other than an eternally middle-aged Liza Minnelli
officiates at the ceremony and performs the Beyoncé song “Single Ladies
(Put a Ring on It)”: here the Child of Dorothy (Minnelli is the daughter of
Judy Garland, who starred in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, directed by
Victor Fleming), performing for Friends of Dorothy, sings of the desire
for matrimony, something not available to children or, until recently,
to gay people. Carrie herself is likened to a gay man by virtue of her
transvestism: a member of the wedding party, she dresses in a tuxedo and
marches down the aisle accompanied by her identically dressed husband.
Carrie’s childlessness is emphasized when a wedding guest who claims
that her life so closely resembles Carrie’s that she “is” Carrie learns that,
unlike her, Carrie has no plans to try for a child, and abruptly distances
herself from Carrie in great embarrassment. Children come between
Carrie and her doppelgänger, as they come between Miranda and her
job, and between Charlotte and her sense of decorum and self-worth.
Carrie is united with her gay male friends not only by virtue of her
fashion sense, but also through her choice to remain childless. Sex in a
childless marriage, like homosexuality, has traditionally been represented
as excessive or supplementary, in the same way that Rousseau, in his
Confessions, deemed masturbation, or sex without the potential for

reproduction, to be a “dangerous supplement” (Rousseau: 1959: 108–09).
The gay subtext is continued throughout SATC2 in the extended
references to The Wizard of Oz, even beyond the presence of Liza Minnelli,
herself a larger-than-life gay icon. Samantha, not known for harboring
any particular fondness for animals, carries a tiny, Toto-like dog at the
wedding, and when the four friends arrive at their luxury hotel in Abu
Dhabi, which is situated at the end of a long brick road, Carrie exclaims,
“We’re not in Kansas anymore!” It is even possible to liken each of the four
women to one of the four travelers on the Yellow Brick Road: Miranda
(the lion) gains the courage to leave her misogynistic employer; Charlotte
(the scarecrow) gains the knowledge that motherhood is no walk in the
park; Carrie (the tin man) has a change of heart about Big, learning to
be more tolerant of his domestic foibles; and Samantha (like Dorothy) is
sent home empty-handed. Even the film’s “political” message resonates
with the Emerald City: There’s No Place Like Home, the film suggests,
as the women are horrified by what they perceive to be the oppression
of Muslim women in a society portrayed as backward and repressive,
despite its modern exterior. But it is in its emphasis on shoes that the
film perhaps most explicitly invokes The Wizard of Oz, whose emblem is
Dorothy’s ruby slippers, which are alluded to specifically in a scene in a
souk in Abu Dhabi, when the camera lingers on Carrie’s reddish stilettos
as she removes them in order to try on a pair of shoes at a market stall.
As Bernard Stiegler has written, “Everything begins with the feet”
(1998: 143). Indeed, there is no better demonstration of the logic of
supplementarity than in the purchase of more shoes: not shoes, which
are a basic necessity of urban life, but more shoes, which are not. Carrie
loves shoes above all things, and throughout the television series and
both films she is shown admiring, shopping for, purchasing, wearing,
and talking about shoes. Shoes are shorthand for fashion in SATC and,
more generally, for consumer culture. Big’s ultimate demonstration of
love for Carrie involves building (or more accurately, commissioning the
construction of) an enormous closet to house not only Carrie’s designer
frocks but, most notably, her hundreds of pairs of stiletto heels. Carrie’s
fetish is a hallmark of stereotypically feminine consumerism, yet in its
Figure 1 Shoe shopping in the souk, Sex and the City 2.
sexualized form the same fetish is commonly attributed to men. In the

sexual fetish, the shoe represents a male disavowal of female sexual
difference, through its status as a phallus-substitute (in fact, the shoes
Carrie buys in the souk have an overtly phallic protrusion jutting out
from just above the tip) (Fig. 1).
In some ways, Carrie herself personifies the fetishist’s disavowal
of female sexuality through her extreme thinness, which suggests an
absence of fertility, or a fashionable boyishness. Anorexia also embraces
the logic of the supplement, if in reverse: the anorexic imagines that
losing “just five more pounds” will make her complete, like the shopper
who imagines that buying a particular pair of shoes will complete her
wardrobe, and thus a certain image she has of herself.
Modes of a dress
Fashion victims replace the consumption of food with the consumption

of clothes. Super-thin Carrie appears not to eat much, but fills her huge
closets with clothes and shoes. In the TV series she refuses to cook, and,
as if to underscore the substitution of fashion for food, uses her oven to
store sweaters. (The politics of recreational skinniness in the fashion world

is also addressed in The Devil Wears Prada, where characters constantly
mock the stick-thin protagonist, Andy—played by Anne Hathaway, who
began her career as a model—for being “too fat.” The art director of the
magazine where Andy works takes to calling her “Six,” in reference to her
dress size, which is unusually small in real-world terms, and unworkably
large in the world of fashion. Throughout much of the film, this mocking
is implicitly criticized, depicted as a sign of fashion’s unhealthy attitude
to body image; but when, at the end of the film, Andy announces that
she has gone down to a size four, viewers are invited to celebrate this loss
as a gain in sophistication. All the while Andy is working for the fashion
magazine, the achievement that she is most proud of in her life, which is
referred to on more than one occasion as a sign of her true calling, is a
hard-hitting article she once wrote about a janitors’ strike. Although she
eventually returns to investigative journalism, as long as she is caught
up in the glamour of New York fashion life, Andy’s vocation, to monitor
waste workers, is neglected as she wastes away.)
SATC2 seems to be advocating this (boyish, sexually liberated,
unencumbered) version of femininity over that attributed to the Middle
East, where women are depicted as little more than the property of men,
forced to suppress their sexuality for all but their husband-owners. The
four friends escape from this apparently backward region in the nick of
time, congratulating themselves on their luck in living in a much “freer”
culture, where women are allowed to express their sexual desires. But the
moral superiority of the American women’s position is cast in doubt when
they return to New York, and Carrie is made to repeat after Big, promising
that she will “never, ever kiss another man”—in return for which she is
given a large diamond, cementing the transaction. Moreover, Carrie’s
debilitating heels, which enslave her to fashion, are as restrictive as any
burqa. Carrie may not be barefoot, pregnant, or confined to the kitchen,
but in being the opposite of these things (childless by choice, unwilling to
cook, and clattering across the polished hardwood floors of her pristine
apartment in stilettos), Carrie is stuck in her own particular prisonhouse of
glamour. Her “happy ending” at the film’s conclusion entails her promise
to stay in more. Carrie’s subjugation to Big is similar to that of Middle
Eastern women as depicted in the film, only it is dressed up in different

clothes. However, even this metaphorical distinction falls away when the
burqa-clad women tear off their veils to reveal the same designer labels
that Carrie and her friends enjoy buying. The implication is that designer
labels have become so naturalized as to be the new nudity (Fig. 2).
It is designer labels, not love, peace, or humanity, that are shown
to be the lingua franca of globalization, uniting consumers across the
world in a common cause. The international working class, transcending
cultural differences, has been replaced by brand recognition. When it
comes to language, the possibility of mislabeling is always present, as
in the black-market industry of designer knock-offs, or when Miranda
mistakenly teaches her friends the wrong word for “yes,” unwittingly
using a Punjabi word (haanji) instead of the Arabic one. But in fashion,
the labels themselves are the objects of desire, even more than the clothes
they represent. This is illustrated in the “J’adore Dior 8” T-shirt that
Carrie wears on her first shopping trip in Abu Dhabi. Here, the “design”
consists of nothing other than the label writ large; Carrie’s outfit thus
takes the statement “making a fashion statement” literally. What is being
advertised is the advertisement, in an enactment of McLuhan’s (1964)
dictum that the medium (or, in this case, the extra small) is the message.
Figure 2 Revealing designer clothes, Sex and the City 2.

“Make mine a cosmopolitan”
In SATC2, even geography is prone to the vagaries of fashion: when

Samantha expresses the desire to visit Dubai, she is told by a Middle
Eastern financier that Dubai “is so last year,” whereas Abu Dhabi, capital
of the United Arab Emirates and a city whose oil reserves have made it
the richest in the world, is representative of “the New Middle East.” The
four friends go to Abu Dhabi in search of new experiences, like capital in
search of new markets, and are suitably impressed by the lavish treatment
they receive as guests of a wealthy hotel magnate. Yet, for all its modern
accoutrements, the “new” Middle East is represented in such a way as to
suggest that it promotes very old-fashioned ideas about sex and gender.
Carrie and her friends marvel at the sight of burqa-clad women delicately
lifting their veils to eat French fries; Samantha chafes at the idea that they
must wear diaphanous wraps over their swimsuits when lounging by the
hotel pool; and the friends are bemused by the burqa-inspired swimwear,
called burqinis, worn by local women. Much of the film’s “comedy”
consists of the horrified reactions of locals when the New Yorkers flaunt
their sexuality, especially Samantha, who makes lewd innuendos and
gestures of a sexual nature that many people, not just those from the
Middle East, would struggle not to find offensive. Carrie, too, relies on
her feminine wiles to help the group get to the airport, displaying her
bare leg at the side of the road in order to attract the attention of a taxi
driver, just as Claudette Colbert did in It Happened One Night (Frank
Capra, 1934), the film Carrie watched with Big in the hotel they stayed in
while attending their friends’ wedding. Big commented that, in the 1930s
when the film was made, such behavior would have been “shocking,”
and the suggestion is that the times have not moved on in Abu Dhabi.
Frequent references are made to the time difference between Abu Dhabi
and New York, a difference that has a larger metaphorical implication, as
even the “new” Middle East appears stuck in an exoticism-infused past.
Abu Dhabi in this film is shrouded in what Johannes Fabian (2014) has
termed allochronism, a primitivist trope in which cultures located at a
geographical remove from one’s “own” are deemed to inhabit a different
temporal space. The leg-display scene draws an explicit parallel between
a time in which such things were considered shocking (the 1930s) and
a place in which, according to the film, they still are (modern-day Abu
Dhabi).
The film announces its exoticist attitude in its very first words, which
are uttered by Carrie in a voice-over as the film opens on a Google
Maps-style perspective of the planet as though from a plane descending
through the clouds. The shot takes viewers closer and closer to Earth,
eventually honing in on Manhattan, which, we are informed, “started
off with some Dutch, some Indians, and some beads.” As the European
settlers stormed in and dazzled the natives with their fake jewels, so the
four American women in SATC2 take it upon themselves to show the
residents of Abu Dhabi a thing or two about gender politics. Bargains
are to be had in the Middle East (Carrie exclaims with disbelief when
she is told that the shoes she wants to buy at the souk cost “only” the
equivalent of twenty dollars), and counterfeit Birkin bags can be bought
for a song. The imperialist legacy is very much apparent in Abu Dhabi, in
spite of its status as a modern cosmopolitan center. Carrie and her friends
ride camels and sit cross-legged in a Lawrence-of-Arabia-style tent in the
middle of the desert, their every need attended to by compliant servants.
As Manhattan could be bought at a bargain-basement price, so the
delights of the Middle East, it seems, can be readily consumed by wealthy
Westerners.
It is ironic that in both SATC movies the catalyst for the friends leaving
the United States is Samantha, the character with the least respect for
cultural mores. Although the Mexican vacation in the first SATC movie
was planned and paid for by Carrie, it was bought for the conventional
gesture of going on a honeymoon and not as a response to any wanderlust
or global ambitions of her own. After she has been abandoned at the
altar, and the other women are wondering what Carrie can do with her
orphaned ticket, it is Samantha who points out the obvious fact that
they can just buy their own tickets and go with her. However, once they
arrive, it is hard to imagine a more unaccountable honeymoon choice
for Carrie to have made herself and for a hyperprivileged New Yorker
like Big than what seems to be a completely undistinguished tourist mill.
Similarly, in SATC2 the trip to Abu Dhabi that takes up the majority of
the film’s running time is made possible by Samantha’s incidental access

to an elite globalized network and is then rescinded because of her yokel-
like refusal to perform the provisional adjustments that cosmopolitan
common sense demands.
Throughout the series and in both films one of the things that reveal
the SATC women to be provincial Manhattanites is the lack of global
knowledge and interests that they display. Whether it is Carrie “stranded”
in Paris in the final episodes of the series, Samantha “stranded” in LA in the
first SATC movie, or the four of them “stranded” in Abu Dhabi in SATC2,
they all seem constitutionally incapable of negotiating difference in ways
one would think would be second nature to women of their class and
professional standing. In SATC2, the primary dramatic tension between
Carrie and Big revolves around Carrie’s desire to “go out” all the time,
while Big wants to spend quiet nights in. Ultimately, Carrie capitulates to
Big’s desires by promising to stay in more, signaling her domestication in
every sense of the word. She decides to transfer her interest in shopping
from clothes to interior decoration, making it her project to furnish her
and Big’s conjugal apartment. But even in appearing to retreat from the
world at large, Carrie is expressing her status as a globalized subject.
As Walter Benjamin observed, “For the private individual, the private
environment represents the universe. In it he gathers remote places and
the past. His drawing room is a box in the world theatre” (Benjamin
1986: 154, cited in Sloterdijk 2013: 25). For all her globetrotting, Carrie
is best at enfolding the outside world into her own, private cocoon—in
short, consuming it. She spares no thought for what this consumption,
quite literally, entails.
Human waste: Bridesmaids and The Help
In its exploitation of workers, in its need for an excess labor pool, and
in its creation of the Lumpenproletariat, global capitalism produces
human waste products—people consigned to the commode of history. In
Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, Zygmunt Bauman writes that
“the production of ‘human waste’ or wasted humans (the ‘excessive’ and
‘redundant,’ that is the population of those who either could not or were
not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay), is an inevitable outcome
of modernization, and an inseparable accompaniment of modernity”
(Bauman 2004: 5). The production of “human waste” is the flipside of
consumer culture, its logical extension. This extension is figured in the
starkest terms possible in two major Hollywood films released in 2011:
Bridesmaids and The Help. Both films have at their core an excremental
vision of the global forces (colonialism, slavery, the drive for cheap
labor) that have swept people across continents and into the homes and
restaurants of those who employ and/or exploit them. The only way
that subjects can become obsolete is if they are first instrumentalized.
The biological metaphors of consumption and surplus that feature
prominently in these films point to an economy of abjection, an affective
reaction to the crisis of boundary maintenance that comes with the
prosthetization of human beings.
When Bridesmaids broke box office records upon its release in 2011,
it was held up as evidence that women could do “gross-out comedy”
just as well as men could. Most of the critical attention lavished on the
film focused on a single sequence, which alone gave the film its “gross-
out” status. Commentary by critics and fans invariably singled out this
scene, in which a bride-to-be and her bridesmaids are struck with food
poisoning (resulting from tainted meat they consumed at a Brazilian
restaurant) while trying on wedding and bridesmaids dresses in an
exclusive, appointments-only bridal salon. As the bridesmaids head for
the single restroom en masse (one woman being forced to defecate in
the sink, and another vomiting on the head of her friend, who is herself
vomiting in the toilet), the bride herself runs out into the street, where,
unable to withstand the urge to excrete, she is forced to squat, enveloped
by her voluminous white gown. That this infamous scene takes place
during a shopping trip allegorizes the imbrication of consumption and
surplus in the era of globalization (Fig. 3).
The idea of Latin American food giving daintily clad women the runs
is prefigured in the first Sex in the City film, when the fastidious Charlotte,
who has studiously avoided the food in Mexico when the women go there
on the honeymoon trip that Carrie had originally planned to take with
Figure 3 That scene, Bridesmaids.
Big, finally relents and tries some of the local cuisine, which causes her
bowels to erupt uncontrollably and soil her chic outfit. It is significant that
in each film, it is food from a developing country that causes sickness.
The striking moment of abjection in each of these films underlines the
difficulty of boundary maintenance, and the fear of commingling inside
and outside.
Food plays an important role in Bridesmaids. The protagonist of the
film is Annie Walker, whose passion in life is cakemaking. When the
film starts, she is struggling to cope with the closure of the cake shop she
owned with a former boyfriend. She meets and begins a relationship with
Nathan Rhodes, a policeman, who appears to find her attractive only after
he learns that she used to own the cake shop, saying that he was a great
fan of her cakes. Nathan encourages her to take up baking again, which
she is extremely reluctant to do. The pair bond over a package of raw
carrots purchased at a convenience store, which they share while sitting
on the hood of the squad car, and from which Nathan extracts a rogue
specimen, explaining that there’s always a bad one in the bag. When
Annie takes the offending carrot and throws it to the ground, Nathan
protests at the act of littering—but not at the actual wastage. After they
have slept together, Nathan surprises Annie by presenting her with the
ingredients to make a cake, a well-meaning gesture that horrifies her and
prompts her to stop speaking to him. The pair are eventually reconciled
when Annie makes Nathan a cake in the shape of a carrot, apologizing for
having discarded him as she had the imperfect vegetable.
Food also looms large in other parts of the film, particularly at the
engagement party held for Annie’s best friend Lillian at the home of rival
bridesmaid Helen. When she drives in to the grounds of Helen’s palatial
house, Annie is handed a tall glass of lemonade by a servant, and because
her old car does not have a cup holder, she is forced to balance the
glass on her lap as she drives, spilling it everywhere. When Annie fears
that Helen has usurped her place as Lillian’s best friend, she goes on a
potlatch-style rampage in the garden, knocking over a chocolate fountain
and destroying a gigantic heart-shaped cookie.
The film’s coda, played out over the closing credits, shows supremely
self-confident and overweight bridesmaid Megan performing sexual acts
with her boyfriend that involve consuming food placed on each other’s
bodies. This scene represents excessive consumption—suggested both
by Megan’s weight and by the use of food for a purpose other than the
satisfaction of physical hunger—in a way that is reinforced by the scene’s
position as overflow or supplement to the main events depicted in the
film.
The alignment of consumption and supplementarity is particularly
significant in light of the fact that it is a Latin American country’s cuisine
that prompts the famous defecation episode. Brazil specifically, and Latin
America more generally, is presented as the object of a particular kind
of consumption that is very different from that associated with the other
geographical location accorded special status in the film: Paris. Both
Bridesmaids and the first SATC film juxtapose a Latin American country
(Brazil, Mexico) with the city of Paris as contrasting sites of consumption.
In the finale of the television series of SATC, Paris is a place of dreams and
illusions to which Carrie moves with her Russian boyfriend, and where
she eventually reunites with Big. Paris is a site of food and fashion, where
food is fashionable and where the fashionable do not eat (similarly, in The
Devil Wears Prada, already-thin editorial assistant Emily starves herself
in order to lose weight before traveling to Paris for the annual catwalk
shows). In Bridesmaids, “Paris” is the theme of the lavish party Helen
throws for Lillian, and the destination for which she buys the bride-to-be
a plane ticket because it has always been Lillian’s dream to go there. By
contrast, the Brazilian restaurant where the women have lunch before the
bridal fitting is located on the “wrong” side of town, and is approached by
means of a dodgy parking lot, prompting Lillian to reassure her friends

that Annie always picks little out-of-the-way places with wonderful food.
The implicit contrast between differing parts of the world extends to
the allusions to colonialism that proliferate in Bridesmaids. Annie shares
her apartment with two housemates, one of whom (played by Rebel
Wilson) has an Australian accent and the other of whom (played by
Matt Lucas) has an English accent, but who are somehow supposed to
be sister and brother. Nathan Rhodes, whose surname evokes the mining
magnate Cecil B. Rhodes and the African country named after him, is
Irish. When Annie asks Nathan if Irish people are allowed to work as
cops in the United States, he replies that they are not, and the film leaves
it at that. Lillian herself is the daughter of a man of African descent and
(presumably) a white woman, and therefore a living embodiment of the
multicultural dream. When Annie, in an intoxicated state on an airplane,
grabs the loudspeaker and announces that she sees “a woman in colonial
dress” walking on the wing of the plane, the image does more than evoke
her own surname, Walker; it also returns viewers’ thoughts to things
colonial, in case too much time has elapsed since the film’s last allusion
to colonialism.
The United States, a colonial outpost that became a superpower, did
not have a colonial empire of its own per se, but instead forcibly imported
labor in the form of slaves. The logic of commodity culture that relies on
the exploitation of cheap labor ultimately results in the commodification
of human beings who may themselves be bought and sold. Although
slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, its direct legacy
was the de jure restriction of rights for African Americans for the next
century, and a de facto inequality for considerably longer. The chain of
associations that metonymically figures certain exploited groups as waste
products, human dejecta, is highlighted even more strongly in The Help.
The contradictions inherent in attempting to reconcile the prosthetization
of people with the boundary maintenance necessary to designate them as
“other” result in abjection, which is invoked in The Help by numerous
references to physiological excretion.
Like Bridesmaids, The Help was also released in 2011 and also presents
an excremental vision of cultural differences and global histories of
human exploitation. Based on the novel of the same name by Kathryn
Stockett, The Help is set in segregated Jackson, Mississippi in the early

1960s, and focuses on the lives of three women: two African American
maids, Minny and Aibileen, who work in the homes of white Southerners,
and a young white writer who documents their experiences in a book
entitled The Help.
The black “help” are both necessary and distasteful to their white
employers. They are used and then discarded as easily as leftover scraps
from the dinner table. One elderly maid is sent packing when she
inadvertently serves guests at a dinner from the right side instead of
from the left, and when her grown daughter walks through the dining
room rather than through the back door of her employers’ house. The
people called “the help” are quickly expelled from the homes of their
white employers when their presence is deemed to cause too much
discomfort.
As the grandchildren of slaves (a maid in the film explicitly invokes
this heritage when she mentions that her grandfather was a slave), these
workers are former transplants, laboring literally on plantations. The
house in which the main character lives is on a plantation, where the
only difference between slavery and employment is the subsistence wage
the help is paid. Unlike antebellum proslavery discourse, racist discourse
from the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to the civil rights era
was designed to position African Americans as “others” rather than the
“ours” they had been in the sentimental narratives of the plantocracy.
Black freedom had to be undercut by a counternarrative that could stem
the converging tides of progressive political and scientific thinking that
were bringing African Americans into the body politic and into full-
fledged membership in the human “race.” This counternarrative is the
discourse of abjection, which is a visceral reaction to a perceived crisis of
classification. According to Julia Kristeva, the abject is “ce qui ne respecte
pas les limites, les places, les règles. L’entre-deux, l’ambigu, le mixte”
[“that which does not respect limits, positions, rules. The inbetween, the
ambiguous, the hybrid”] (Kristeva 1980: 12). The abject is that which falls
between two stools, that which crosses borders. Abjection is the fear of a
failure to maintain boundaries between self and other, inside and outside,
and is most commonly expressed as a horrified reaction to bodily effluvia.
The Help is a stark illustration of this dynamic.
There are many references to the fear of failing to contain bodily

eruptions in the film. The villain of the piece, the smug and overtly racist
white society woman Hilly, breaks out in a herpes simplex facial lesion
when she is finally given her come-uppance, as if to signify not only that
she can no longer contain her own moral turpitude, but also that she can
no longer dam the tide of civil rights that has been burbling up in the
South for some time. Another locus of bodily control is the curly hair
of the white woman Skeeter, the aspiring writer who records the maids’
stories in a book aimed at exposing the injustices they face. Skeeter’s
mother, concerned to observe traditional Southern convention, is forever
trying to smooth out Skeeter’s hair, an affectation with which Skeeter
complies in order to attract a young man. At the end of the film, when
Skeeter’s relationship with the man has ended because he disapproves of
her role in the civil rights movement, Skeeter’s hair reverts to the mass of
kinky curls that is, the film implies, its natural state, and which links her
visually to the African American women with whom she shows solidarity.
But overwhelmingly, abjection in the film is dominated by
representations of biological consumption and excrement. One reviewer
characterized the film as “the most scatological film in Hollywood
history” (McGuire 2012: n.p.). Indeed, excrement assumes paramount
importance in the film, notably through the separate bathrooms provided
for use by African American employees in private homes so that their
white employers can keep their own toilets “uncontaminated.” This
restriction, when imposed on another maid, Aibileen, causes problems
when she tries to toilet train her employer’s young daughter, Mae Mobley.
In another scene, dozens of toilets are dumped on the front lawn of Hilly,
the woman who fired Minny (Fig. 4).
At the center of the film is a chocolate pie baked by Minny, one of the
maids, who has been fired for using her employer’s toilet (in the novel,
she is wrongly accused of stealing silver). An accomplished cook, Minny
serves the pie to her former employer, who greedily eats two slices before
discovering that Minny has mixed some of her own excrement into the
filling, a discovery that prompts her to run off-screen to vomit.
A strong association is suggested between biological consumption
and the maids’ function of prosthetic maternity. They are hired
Figure 4 Toilet humor, The Help.
largely to fulfill the roles traditionally associated with mothers, such

as childcare and domestic chores, but the maids’ maternal capacity is
largely expressed specifically through their skills in cooking and in
toilet training the children in their care. The woman for whom Aibileen
works, Elizabeth, is shown to be a “bad” mother on several occasions
when she fails to acknowledge her young daughter’s progress in toilet
training, and when she leaves her in a wet diaper overnight. Elizabeth’s
apparent aversion to the practicalities of toilet training and personal care
suggests a reaction of abjection to these ordinary processes. Moreover,
Aibileen intimates that Elizabeth feeds her daughter too much, clucking
disapprovingly that the child is “fat”—another failing of Elizabeth’s that
must be countered by Aibileen, who, it is implied, would know to feed
the child the appropriate quantity of food.
Minny’s virtuoso cooking skills are flagged up from the moment she is
introduced to viewers via voice-over. She sings the praises of Crisco lard
to Celia, an anxious white woman who has no idea how to prepare even
the most basic dishes. Celia first shows Minny (and viewers) that she is a
good egg by joining her for lunch, instead of insisting on separate tables.
At the most basic level, food and the rituals that surround it reflect the
social context in which it is consumed. It is no accident that Skeeter’s
beloved maid Constantine is fired for neglecting to observe a minor

procedural formality while serving dinner, combined with her daughter’s
insistence on entering the Phelan home through the dining room while
Skeeter’s mother is entertaining. Minny is fired for using the “wrong”
toilet, that is, the toilet used by the white family she works for, because
her employer fears the intermingling of their bodily effluvia—a fear that
does not extend to white people, but is restricted to African Americans,
who, according to Hilly, “carry different diseases than we do.” As revenge
for her unjust dismissal, Minny’s feces pie, consumed by Hilly with such
relish, brings about the very comingling of waste materials that Hilly
feared in the first place (The film’s catch phrase: “Eat my shit”) (Fig. 5).
In The Help, the association between black women and prosthetic
maternity is figured literally in the relationship between Minny and
Celia. Celia cannot carry fetuses to term, and has a miscarriage in the
presence of Minny, who, conversely, has five children. The hyperfertile
Minny not only has an abundance of children, but she also acts as a kind
of mother figure to Celia herself, instructing her in the art of cooking
and housekeeping. At the end of the film, when Celia cooks a huge
meal to express her appreciation to Minny for her guidance, loyalty and
discretion, the gesture is reminiscent of a child who finally reaches the
maturity necessary to reciprocate her mother’s kindness.
Figure 5 Minnie brings a gift, The Help.

That surrogate maternity is the particular form that African American

women’s prosthesis took in the pre-civil rights era is underscored in the
first words of the film. They are voiced by Skeeter Phelan, the young
white woman who is writing an exposé of the working conditions of
black maids in Jackson, and are directed at Aibileen: “What’s it feel like
to raise a white child when your own child’s at home being looked after
by somebody else?” Extrapolated beyond the domestic sphere, the social
and economic circumstances that require African American women to
transfer their maternal attentions from their own children to the children
of white women mirror the world’s neglect of the children in Africa who
live in abject poverty. Yet ironically, the domestic labor performed by
black women in The Help, from raising their children to cooking family
meals, frees up the wealthy white women to organize fundraising events
for starving children in Africa. Symbolically, Africanness and blackness
do fundamentally different work as global ideologemes. African
abjection, like Latin American abjection as discussed above, is diffuse and
rhizomatic because “over there,” whereas African American abjection is
localized, “over here”: the horreur, to use Kristeva’s term, is so powerful
because the fear is of the “other within.”
This fear is represented figuratively by the imprisonment of one of
the maids in the film. The maid Hilly hires to replace Minny is jailed
for stealing a ring to fund her children’s college education. This image of
the African American woman behind bars evokes the overwhelmingly
disproportionate numbers of African Americans in prison. Today,
African American abjection takes place on death row and in solitary
confinement and, therefore, in the lives of people who, as the etymology
of the word abjection indicates, have been literally discarded.
It is not surprising that the film’s excrescence motif reinforces the
dynamic of abjection that it depicts. It is similarly unsurprising that
capitalism finds it so easy to commodify the culture of a people who, not
so long ago, were themselves commodities. Seen in this light, The Help is
part of a process in which African Americans are commodified at the level
of cultural representation, in a ghostly extension of their commodification
in slavery—their very fashionability (consider the Malcolm X clothing
line sold at Bloomingdale’s that came out on the heels of the Spike Lee
film) making them subject to obsolescence and, ultimately, disposal.
The re(f)use economy in Micmacs à tire-larigot
The logic of prostheticization underwrites both commodity culture

and the objectification of human beings. People are becoming so
instrumentalized that, beyond becoming subservient to the needs
of other people, they become subsumed in the destinies of objects,
and virtually indistinguishable from them. At the same time, objects,
especially technological objects, are being endowed with an increasing
amount of autonomy, assuming roles that were once the preserve of
human agency—including, notably, those of memory and perception.
This outsourcing of memory to phones and computers feeds (and feeds
on) planned obsolescence, which fuels the drive for ever-smarter gadgets.
The image of planned obsolescence and waste that underwrites many
of the films discussed above is not, however, universally embraced. A
very different model of consumption is presented in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s
2009 film Micmacs à tire-larigot, in which a ragtag bunch of misfits who
live beneath a refuse dump give a new lease of life to objects discarded by
others, endowing these objects with what might be called “reuse value.”
From Benjamin’s ragpicker to Varda’s glaneuse, the idea of la récupe
(salvage) is a familiar trope in European culture—and it is, no doubt
aptly, recuperated in Jeunet’s film. The underground dwellers in Micmacs
comprise a re(f)use economy, resisting against (or refusing) global
consumer culture’s redemptive supplementarity, or the deployment of
purchasing power in an attempt to fill a perceived void. This community
embodies a hacker ethics, rejecting the distinction between producer
and consumer. Unlike exchange value, which obscures the past labor that
produced the commodity, reuse value reflects the past use to which the
object was put. Reuse flies in the face of planned obsolescence, which
gives rise to the desire to buy more objects and to replace old things with
new ones that have no history of use. From the point of view of use, such
replacement masks history, as commodity fetishism obscures the power
relations behind the production of the object. Conversely, la récupe enfolds
history into objects, imbuing them with reuse value and making of them
an exteriorized, prostheticized form of human memory analogous to film
and other media, whose functions Micmacs invites us to contemplate.
The double-edged nature of the re(f)use economy, which both privileges
resistance and underlines the posthuman dissolution of the boundaries

between people and objects, points up the pharmacological dimension, at
once destructive and beneficial (Derrida 1981: 61–172), of globalization.
Micmacs revolves around a video-store clerk, Bazil (Dany Boon),
who seeks revenge on the manufacturers of the landmine that killed
his father and the bullet that caused his own near-fatal injury. That the
refuse economy depicted in the film is situated within the context of a
scathing critique of the global arms industry suggests a link between
overproduction and the military-industrial complex of the kind described
by Georges Bataille in La Part maudite (The Accursed Share) (Bataille
1967: 49–80 and passim). By short-circuiting the cycle of planned
obsolescence, excess accumulation, and overproduction characteristic of
advanced capitalism, the underground dwellers in Jeunet’s film are also
subverting the tendency of the biggest industrialized nations to expend
significant portions of their gross domestic product on weapons. The
arms industry is both a contributor to overproduction and a symptom
of it: when there are too many things being produced, the only things
left to produce are things that blow up other things, and, as it happens,
other people. Bataille held up the Marshall Plan, the postwar economic
aid package that the United States gave to Europe, as an example of not-
for-profit expenditure that could divert excess accumulation away from
an otherwise inevitable military expansion (Bataille 1967: 203–25). Seen
in this light, the global arms industry, which supplies weapons to far-
flung warring factions, would be the negative consequence of the failure
to direct excess profits where they could be put to less destructive use.
Micmacs begins with a brief scene set, the titles tell us, in 1979 in
the Western Sahara. The camera pans across a French flag attached to a
jeep, to alight on a soldier examining a landmine. We see the landmine
explode in long shot, from the point of view of some local onlookers. The
scene cuts to the soldier’s home in France, where his wife and son Bazil
receive the news of his death, which is followed by the funeral. We then
jump thirty years ahead to 2009, when the rest of the film is set. Bazil now
works in a video store, where we first see him as an adult watching The Big
Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) dubbed in French, on an old VCR player,
and mouthing both Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s dialogue. Bazil
is caught in the gunfire of a passing police chase, and a bullet becomes
permanently lodged in his brain. When he becomes homeless after losing

his job, he is taken in by a group of people who live under a refuse dump.
This disparate group includes a female acrobat, “La Môme Caoutchouc”
(The Rubber Kid, played by Julie Ferrier), whose extremely pliable body
ends up getting them out of all kinds of scrapes; a man called Fracasse
(Smash, played by Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon), who claims to have
broken a world record for being shot out of a cannon; an inventor who
transforms the abandoned objects found in the dump into wondrous
mechanical devices; a young woman with a savant-level propensity for
measurements and calculations named Calculette (Calculator, Marie-Julie
Baup); a nurturing mother figure, Tambouille (Chow, Yolande Moreau),
who cooks for the group and generally looks after them; and Remington,
an African ethnographer (Omar Sy), who records his observations on an
old Remington typewriter and whose speech consists entirely of clichés,
proverbs, and maxims. (It should be noted that Jeunet’s work resembles
Remington’s speech in this way: his films, even those ostensibly set in
the future, consistently point to earlier eras and are infused with an
aesthetics—and, some have argued, a politics—of nostalgia. See, for
example, Kaganski 2001 and Sancton 2009.)
The refuse dump under which this motley group lives is depicted as
an Aladdin’s Cave, full of objects from the ordinary to the quirky that
appear to have been rescued from the trash heap and given new life.
Reused objects intermittently flash “then/now,” “then/now,” signifying
two eras at once: the one in which they were manufactured (thus the
African ethnographer’s antique typewriter evokes the colonial past), and
the era in which they are being reused (the not-so-postcolonial present,
in which African arms dealers represent a developing world of supposed
lawlessness). In this way, reused objects are analogous to what Deleuze
has called crystal-images, or images in films that evoke both the past
and the present, and thus represent the passage of time (Deleuze 2005:
72). Reused objects might therefore be called crystal-objects, objects that
contain and activate the past. As commodities harbor congealed labor
from which they derive their value as objects of exchange, crystal-objects
harbor congealed use, from which they derive their value as objects of
reuse—but whereas the congealed labor is masked in commodities, the
congealed use is at least intermittently visible in the crystal-object.
The adaptation, or hacking, of a film term, “crystal-image,” to describe

the reuse of objects in a refuse economy is not entirely arbitrary. Visible in
Jeunet’s film is a process of the exteriorization of human memory borrowed
from industrial temporal objects, memory prostheses manufactured in
the era of mechanical reproducibility whose duration is coextensive with
our perception of them, such as sound recordings, television shows, and
films (see Stiegler 2008: 241, 2011: 12). Mediatized “memories” penetrate
the recesses of our consciousness, while our very capacity to remember
is increasingly outsourced, exteriorized in the form of databases and
search engines. At the end of Micmacs, footage of the kidnapped weapons
manufacturers’ confession is posted on YouTube, in an attempt on the part
of consumers (who have been fed carefully manipulated images about the
arms trade) to turn the tables and act as producers, but also as a way of
inscribing a form of countermemory into the public historical archive
that the internet has created. What Jonathan Beller (2006) refers to as the
“cinematic mode of production” refers not only to cinema, but also to the
mechanized forms of what Bernard Stiegler calls grammatization, or the
exteriorization of memory (see Stiegler 2010: 10–11; 29–34). Our “own”
memory goes out (we rely, for example, on vacation snaps and videos
for access to the past), and the world’s memories are folded into our
consciousness like bread dough. We become objectified subjects, another
platform for the storage and retrieval of information, and the objects that
populate our everyday lives in turn become animated: objects become
memories, and souvenirs become souvenirs.
Film scholars have recently begun noting the depiction within cinema
of the distribution of memory across the inanimate world (see, for
example, David Martin-Jones [2013: 720] on human bodies and landscape
as “physical repositories of memory,” and Isabelle Frances McNeill [2010:
51–86] on “memory objects”). The attribution of memory to objects outside
the human brain finds its correlate in the grammatization techniques that
Marshall McLuhan (2001 [1964]) theorized as the electronic extension
of the human nervous system in his landmark Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man, originally published in 1964. This distribution
of the self is the result of humans’ engagement with the world around
them. Robert Pepperell notes, “This ‘extensionist’ view of human nature,
in contrast to the humanist view, does not therefore make a distinction
between the biological substrate of the human frame (what is most often
referred to as the ‘human’) and the wider material domain in which we
exist” (Pepperell 2003: 152). This wider material domain includes those
prosthetic objects we use to enhance our human capabilities. As Stiegler
has put it, “The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it
is the constitution of this body qua ‘human’” (Stiegler 1998: 152–53). In
Micmacs, Fracasse the human cannonball catalogs those parts of his body
that are man-made (various metal plates and prosthetic inserts) which,
while making him a little bit bionic, also help make him “who he is”—like
the processes of exteriorization that characterize what Stiegler refers to as
“technics,” they are “the pursuit of life by means other than life” (Stiegler
1998: 17).
These physical prosthetics thus mirror the function of memory
prostheses in Micmacs, nowhere more so than in the image of the bullet
in Bazil’s head. When the arms manufacturer who produced the bullet
hears of his injury, he says dismissively, “Une balle dans la tête? Comme
ça, ça lui donnera un souvenir de nous” (A bullet in the head? Well, that
will leave him with a memory/souvenir of us). Indeed, when he is shot,
the memory of objects is carved into Bazil’s brain; he carries it with him
wherever he goes. Nothing stops the flow of time, and memory, like a
bullet to the head. Yet it is precisely such a bullet that serves as a constant
reminder to Bazil of his mission to avenge his father’s death and his own
injury. Paradoxically, this reminder is liable to cause serious damage to his
brain at any moment, thus wiping out his capacity to remember. As such,
the bullet in Bazil’s head is an apt metaphor for what Alison Landsberg
(2004) has called prosthetic memory, a mediatized image that replaces
personal memories in individual consciousness. Micmacs allegorizes this
“save as” function with images of mechanized forms of transindividual
memory such as cinema itself. In addition to referring to film in general
through its many images of camcorders and video stores, Micmacs is
studded, or perhaps more accurately shot through, with references to
specific films and filmmakers (e.g., The Big Sleep, as seen above; Brian De
Palma’s 1996 Mission Impossible; the films of Sergio Leone, Chaplin, and
Buster Keaton), including and especially those by its own director. As
well as employing stylistic traits that recall other films in his oeuvre (the
warm color palette full of greens, golds and reds, the fondness for retro
television sets and Rube Goldbergesque contraptions, the underground

community), Jeunet reuses many of his favorite actors, such as Dominique
Pinon (who played Louison in the 1991 Delicatessen and the clones
in La Cité des enfants perdus in 1997), André Dussollier (the narrator
in Amélie [2001] and Pierre-Marie Rouvières in Un Long dimanche de
fiançailles), and Yolande Moreau (the concierge in Amélie). There is even
an explicit reference to Delicatessen, in the scene where Bazil is trying to
plant a recording device in the arms manufacturer François Marconi’s
apartment, and he is shown crouching on a rooftop that looks exactly
like the one at the end of Delicatessen. When he accidentally lowers his
recording equipment into the wrong apartment, we see a re-enactment
of the scene in Delicatessen when Julie and Louison are playing a cello-
and-saw duet in Julie’s living room, with Dominique Pinon reprising his
role as Louison.
The mise-en-abîme of self-referentiality in Micmacs culminates in the
many references to the very film we are watching, through repeated shots
of a DVD case and poster advertising the film Micmacs à tire-larigot,
identical to the DVD case and poster actually used to advertise the film.
The first time we see Bazil as an adult, the poster for the very film we are
watching is visible above the VCR player on which Bazil watches The Big
Sleep. A subsequent shot even shows Dany Boon on the poster for a split
second, the same actor we are watching as he watches the Bogart film.
When the stray bullet from the police chase flies through the plate glass
window of the video store, it shatters a DVD case for the film Micmacs à
tire-larigot. Later in the film, a car crashes through a billboard advertising
the film that we are watching (Fig. 6).
At these moments, the film’s exterior (its advertising campaign, its
physical presence as an object in a DVD case) runs seamlessly, like a
Moebius strip, into its interior. These references to the finished version
of the film we have not finished watching produce the opposite of the
sensation of déjà-vu, or a kind of pré-vu effect—similar to the anticipatory
protention that constitutes our perception of time according to Husserl
(see Stiegler 2011: 17; 27–30). Likewise, the sound and motion effects
that Bazil and his friends make to convince the French arms dealers
that they are being bundled off to the Middle East, when in fact they are
taken to a vacant lot just beyond the banks of the Seine, could almost be
Figure 6 Déjà-pré-vu, Micmacs.
a “making-of ” documentary for the film sequence that we, like the arms
dealers, are encouraged to imagine.
In this way, both the past and the future are enfolded into the present.
As if to illustrate this idea, the characters in the film spend a lot of time
mouthing dialogue spoken by others, making us question the individual
as the originator of his or her own speech. When Bazil is first made
homeless, he pitches up behind a woman busking in a Métro station,
mouthing the words she sings to make passersby think that it is he who is
singing. When Remington impersonates the African dictator’s associate
in a meeting with arms dealer Nicolas de la Fenouillet, he mouths the
speech Remington recites; and Bazil is shown perfectly lip-synching the
dialogue of The Big Sleep when we first see him as an adult, implying that
he has seen the film over and over again. These moments in Micmacs
announce the film’s aesthetic of pré-vu, suggesting that the characters
might be rehearsing dialogue that has always already been uttered.
This aesthetic of pré-vu can help us understand what Stiegler means
when he writes that consciousness is structured like cinema (Stiegler
2011: 13), an assertion that might at first seem counterintuitive. In
one sense, we can understand this to mean that consciousness is now
structured like cinema, in an age in which we are constantly surrounded
by media images from infancy. However, we may also take this statement
to mean that consciousness has always been structured like cinema, since
the dawn of consciousness long, long before the advent of cinema. This
could only be true if time were folded in the way suggested in Micmacs:
(the) film preexists itself. As John Douglas Macready puts it, “Films can
. . . be understood as prostheticizations of our inner cinema” (Macready
2009: n.p.). The Micmacs posters and DVD cases in the film Micmacs
would seem to promote the idea of an “inner cinema,” which only needs
to be articulated by the filmmaker, like the parole that activates and
animates the langue in Saussurean linguistics (Saussure 1975). Stiegler
writes: “Like cinema in life I revise the rushes, I view, I edit everything
that has been repressed-archived: shots, sound and odor recordings,
touch, contact, and caress recordings, I take it all up again and I undo
and redo, I abbreviate” (Stiegler cited in Wills 2006: 250). Expanding on
Derrida’s contention that speech is always already writing, Stiegler adds
that “life (anima—on the side of the mental image) is always already
cinema (animation—image-object). The technological synthesis is not
a replica, not a double of life any more than writing is a replication of
speech” (Derrida and Stiegler 2002: 162).
Bazil’s doubling of Remington’s words mimics the African
ethnographer’s own reuse of language in the form of hackneyed
expressions, clichés, and maxims. In his drive to observe and record
the behavior of his French companions, Remington is an Occidentalist.
He favors recycled language, like the recycled objects, la récupe the
underground dwellers use, and like the old typewriter he types on. His
name, Remington, is analogous to that of the arms dealer Marconi,
whose name invokes the inventor of the radio: together, these names
add to the film’s catalog of grammatization technologies, from typewriter
to radio to photograph (the photos of real landmine victims held up by
the fake Middle Eastern mothers, and the photo of the amoral weapons
manufacturer arm-in-arm with Nicolas Sarkozy), and from video store
to DVD to camcorder to YouTube. Fracasse, the human cannonball, is
not taken seriously for his record-breaking achievement until he finds his
listing in a discarded copy of the Guinness Book of World Records.
Remington, however, is not only a well-known brand of typewriter; it
is also a well-known brand of gun. The association between writing and
weaponry is reinforced when Marconi compares himself in a speech to
Arthur Rimbaud, pointing out that the poet ended his life as an arms
dealer; Marconi’s young son, upon hearing this comparison, assumes
his father is speaking not of the poet Rimbaud but of the action hero
Rambo. In another version of this analogy, Paul Virilio has noted the
links between the development of film technology and advances in
warfare at the beginning of the twentieth century, observing, for example,
that “the nitrocellulose that went into film stock was also used for the
production of explosives” (Virilio 1989: 15). Violence of this kind points
to the pharmacological dimension of posthumanism’s extensionist view
of human nature, its double-edged nature as both remedy and poison
(Derrida 1981: 61–172). As objects are endowed with a life of their own,
human beings are increasingly objectified. This transference evokes
what Braidotti calls, after Lyotard, the “inhuman(e)” dimension of the
posthuman condition. She writes, “If one considers the scale of the
major issues confronting the contemporary world, from the financial
crises and their consequences for employment and structural economic
inequalities, to climate change and the ensuing environmental crises, not
to mention geo-political conflicts, terrorism and humanitarian armed
interventions, it is clear that the posthuman condition has engendered its
own inhuman(e) dimension” (Braidotti 2014: 110).
The reference in Jeunet’s film to Rimbaud evokes the poet’s emblematic
declaration “Je est un autre” (I is an other), ambivalent expression of both
a humanizing empathy and of a posthuman extension of the “self.” The
explosives of which the modern-day arms dealer speaks are responsible
for maiming the limbless children shown in photographs by what appear
to be Middle Eastern women who, when they remove their veils, turn
out to be Bazil and his friends, many of them men, whose masquerade is
intended to shock the arms dealers into confessing their crimes (Fig. 7).
(The veil, too, is part of the film’s salvage aesthetic, drawn from the long-
standing French controversy over the display of “religious”—that is,
effectively, Muslim—symbols in public. The act of unveiling—not unlike
that in SATC2—is a wish-fulfillment of the supposedly republican desire
for Muslim women to spurn the veil, and of the even greater desire that
they turn out, like Bazil and company, not to be Muslim after all, in a
reversal of Rimbaud’s statement: “L’autre c’est moi” [The other is me].)
The unnecessary squandering of life in armed conflict is precisely the
kind of deadly dépense (expenditure) that Bataille was keen to circumvent
in his promotion of no-strings-attached financial aid programs such as
the Marshall Plan (Bataille 1967: 203–25). The watch that Bazil wears,
Figure 7 Fake mothers, real children, Micmacs.
retrieved from a box of his father’s personal effects returned after his
death, bears the words “Armée d’Afrique”—a fitting reminder of the
violent postcolonial world order, writ large on a timepiece. Yet, aside
from Bazil’s father, Micmacs shows surprisingly few deaths for a film
that revolves around the global arms industry. When one of the rival
arms manufacturer’s munitions factory explodes, the (white) couple
who inadvertently detonate the bomb are shown straggling out of the
wreckage alive, and the television news coverage of the incident is careful
to note that, miraculously, there were no fatalities. The (white) arms
manufacturers themselves, the caricatural villains of the piece, escape
unscathed, if ruined and humiliated. Nearly the only fatalities shown
are the African dictator’s representatives, who are killed during the
confrontation between the rival arms dealers and Bazil. Their corpses
remain in shot like so many pieces of furniture while the other characters
sort out their various entanglements. Otherwise, the only other death
actually shown in the film is that of a black soccer player blown up in a
fantasy sequence. These Africans are the film’s collateral damage, reduced
to pure objects (corpses) when the life is taken from them. The only death
for which vengeance is specifically sought is that of Bazil’s (white) father.
The other Africans depicted in the film are shown to be in a prosthetic
relationship with the white French arms dealers, used as tools by them to
achieve their objectives. There is the African domestic worker (country
of origin not specified) in Marconi’s house who looks after his young son;
and the cleaner at Marconi’s company from Somalia whose husband is
threatened with deportation if she does not help him sabotage his rival’s
munitions factory. Although globalization and the posthuman both entail
the erasure of borders (in the case of globalization, between countries,
and in the case of the posthuman, between humans and the material
world), the collapse of boundaries is in neither case unproblematic.
In a globalized world, the logic of substitution is everywhere at work:
a vacant lot in Paris can stand in for the Middle East, and a bunch of
French misfits can play the role of Middle Eastern mothers of landmine
victims; but likewise, human beings can be slotted in for one another, as
so many spare parts rendered interchangeable with one another and with
the objects that surround them.
Thus objectified, the Africans in Micmacs resemble the body parts of
deceased celebrities collected by Nicolas Thibault de la Fenouillet, and
displayed in glass cases in his living room. Included in the arms dealer’s
collection are the crooner Tino Rossi’s vertebrae, Winston Churchill’s
fingernail clippings, Assyrian king Shalmaneser I’s foot, French king
Louis XVI’s heart, painter Henri Matisse’s finger, and Marilyn Monroe’s
molar. The collection is the emblematic mode of possession in commodity
culture, the gesture of infinitely renewed supplementarity. There will
always be new fall and spring collections, just as there will always be
more body parts to collect as long as people keep dying, whether they
are celebrities who overdose on drugs, or anonymous people killed as
“collateral damage.” Missing from his collection, we are told, is Mussolini’s
eye, whose attempted acquisition triggers the series of events that lead to
the arms dealers’ eventual downfall. The fact that part of a fascist leader
holds such importance in the eyes of the collector is very significant.
Commodity culture’s emphasis on exchange value necessitates the kind of
instrumental reason that, when applied to human beings, results in their
objectification, and makes them available for exploitation or worse (see
Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1947]). That the coveted body part is an
eye is also significant: it is the organ of sight (or the eye of the camera) that
enables an active viewing position and thus subjectivity. This subjectivity
is negated when the eye becomes something to-be-looked-at, that is, an
object.
Micmacs stages a rematerialization of the image, a transformation of the
crystal-image into crystal-object. This recuperation of the material world
is analogous to what James Clifford has described as salvage ethnography,

in which the anthropologist tries to preserve cultural traditions that
are disappearing under the entropic forces of globalization (Clifford
1986: 98–121). The crystal-object is a nostalgic reaction to increasing
abstraction: this reactive transformation has already been inaugurated
in haptic cinema, but finds its logical conclusion in the return to objects
themselves. Haptic cinema would be a function of the drive to salvage
materiality before it disappears completely within capitalism’s regime of
abstraction. Although Micmacs is not an example of haptic cinema, in
its emphasis on salvage both literal and figurative, it performs its own
nostalgic return to the material world. This return reaches its logical
conclusion in the film’s final image, of a woman’s blouse and skirt twirling
on a clothes hanger in mid-air, independent of any human wearer,
lifeless yet full of life. The supplement has replaced what it was meant
to supplement, as Derrida envisaged (Derrida 1997: 141–57; 313–16).
The prosthesis steps into the role of the human, as tools take over from
their makers, and humans become prostheses: the human cannonball
is a metonym for the former colonial subjects who can be blackmailed
into sabotaging a munitions factory, or who can serve as cannon fodder
in a world war. Similarly, a woman who can bend into any shape and
fold herself up into a cardboard box or a refrigerator is a none-too-subtle
metaphor for women who are bent to the will of men, as confirmed at
the end of the film, when Bazil grabs la Môme en Caoutchouc (who does
not seem to have a proper name) by her hood and pulls her head toward
him in what is presented as an affectionate gesture, but which, despite its
allusion to the danse des apaches fashionable around the time of the First
World War, is nonetheless uncomfortable to watch.
The complement to the abstraction performed in commodity culture
is the reification of human beings, who become reduced to an assemblage
of inanimate objects, like the body parts that the arms manufacturer
Nicolas Thibault de la Fenouillet collects. The arms dealer’s collection of
body parts is the ultimate extension of commodity culture, in which there
are few things that cannot be bought or sold. De la Fenouillet’s hobby is
also a busman’s holiday, a compulsive repetition in his down time of the
body parts he collects on the job blowing people up. “Marilyn’s molar”
and “Mussolini’s eye” are ghostly substitutes for the missing limbs of
the real child landmine victims in the photographs held up by the fake
Middle Eastern mothers at the end of the film: these missing limbs are
the only objects in the film that cannot be salvaged or reused, and whose
deadly logic cannot be refused.
Micmacs, like SATC2, Bridesmaids, and The Help, thus explores
the increasing resemblance between human beings and objects in the
era of globalization, facilitated by hyperconsumption and planned
obsolescence; by structures of exploitation that reduce some people to
spare parts to be slotted into a global machine; and by technologies that
replace human memory with mechanized memory. Consumer culture, a
key component of globalization, posits that we must supplement ourselves
with commodities without which we would otherwise be incomplete:
but these prostheses, rather than enhancing us, end up creating the
insufficiencies they were meant to overcome.
2
Exotic Objects
In the climax of Micmacs, the homeless band hoodwinks the arms dealers
into thinking they are in the Middle East, when in fact they have never
left the outskirts of Paris. A similar play of distance and proximity is at
work in the objectifying discourse of exoticism, which is underpinned
by the movement of both objects and people back and forth between far-
flung locales and by the commodification of cultural difference itself, with
subaltern bodies celebrated, indeed fetishized. Alienated labor is not the
only form the prostheticization of people takes: they may also be exploited
for the purposes of entertainment or simply contemplation. Like other
manifestations of globalization, exoticism is primarily concerned with
objects—the trade in trinkets and tchotchkes (and even ethnographic
artifacts), certainly, but also human beings as instrumentalized objects
of fascination.
Cinematic exoticism is here examined specifically in the context of the
French colonial empire, which generated an unusually prolific amount
of exoticist imagery, both as overt propaganda and as entertainment
reliant upon familiar tropes that were immediately recognizable to
audiences. Exoticism (defined here as the objectifying and ultimately
dehumanizing representation of non-French cultures) both reflects and
impacts upon conceptions of cultural diversity. Arising from encounters
with other cultures occasioned, to a great extent, by trade in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, exoticism proliferated with the advent of the
printing press and the emergence of what Benedict Anderson (1983) has
called “imagined communities,” culminating in the rise of the culture
industry in the twentieth century. Exoticism has been particularly
prominent in France at least since Montaigne’s “On Cannibals” (2000
[1580]) in the sixteenth century, in which the inventor of the essay form
managed to render the indigenous people of Brazil as incontrovertibly
other, even while arguing for cultural relativism. France was the seat of
a colonial empire that grew from its origins in the seventeenth century
to be the second biggest in the world (after the British Empire) in the
nineteenth century. While ostensibly encouraging intercultural contact,
exoticist discourse ultimately insisted on the impossibility of true
integration, a contradiction that continues to define the French politics
of immigration long after the collapse of the colonial empire.
This chapter considers two key periods in the history of cinematic
exoticism in France: the 1930s, when colonial propaganda was at
its height, and the late 1950s to early 1960s, when the Algerian War
marked the official end of the colonial era. The chapter begins with an
examination of the films of Josephine Baker, African American/French
Jazz-Age icon and marketing phenomenon, whose silent film La Sirène
des tropiques (Siren of the Tropics, Étiévant and Nalpas, 1927) and whose
final film, Fausse alerte (The French Way, de Baroncelli, 1939), have both
attracted much less scholarly attention than her better-known films of
the 1930s, namely, Zouzou (Marc Allégret, 1934) and Princesse Tam-Tam
(Edmond T. Gréville, 1935). Indeed, Fausse alerte, made at the beginning
of the Second World War before the fall of France, but not released until
after the war, has been all but overlooked by film scholars. Baker’s career
emblematized the exoticist aesthetic, in which the “primitive” body is
appropriated and commodified by means of the culture industry, and this
process of commodification is mirrored in the narrative of immigration
and stardom repeated in various forms in all four of Baker’s feature films.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of exoticism in the French
New Wave (1958–62), still the most celebrated film movement in the
history of French cinema. In the period following the Second World
War, the economic boom that brought a sharp rise in the availability of
consumer goods coincided with the traumatic period of decolonization
and what Kristin Ross (1995) has called the “reordering of French life.”
This was also a remarkably fertile time for avant-garde cinema in France,
especially the experimental work of the Left Bank School and the Nouvelle
vague. Deleuze’s influential attribution of the era’s stylistic innovation
in L’Image-temps (The Time Image, 1985) exclusively to the trauma of
the Second World War neglects the role played by decolonization in the
transformation of film aesthetics and in cinematic representations of
Exotic Objects 69
everyday life. Conversely, in films depicting the immediate aftermath of

colonialism, references to the Second World War are often overlooked.
Recognition of the importance of both these historical moments is central
to Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory (2009), and
one that I explore in a number of Nouvelle vague feature films (principally
Agnès Varda’s 1962 Cléo de 5 à 7 [Cleo from 5 to 7], but also François
Truffaut’s Jules et Jim [Jules and Jim], and Alain Resnais’s 1963 Muriel, ou
le temps d’un retour [Muriel, or the Time of Return]). These films were
all made during the Algerian War, and feature ethnographic artifacts,
such as masks, that have been commodified and serve as allegories of
the dehumanizing process inherent in exoticism, bearing silent witness
to the legacy of objectification that underwrites the reduction of people
to their purely corporeal dimension—whether on the basis of “race”
or gender—and the violation or elimination of those bodies that such
reduction legitimates.
Josephine Baker: A global star is born
Josephine Baker was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906. After meeting
with great success in France, where she performed in the mid-1920s with
a touring dance troupe, she made the country her home. She quickly
became a global star, whose image was (and continues to be) immediately
recognizable. Her work consistently thematized the crossing of national
borders and the ensuing encounters between (or at times among) different
cultures, and the image she cultivated played on an oscillation between
national identities and global culture. Baker’s films explicitly invoke
the mass media that both make globalization possible and represent it.
Building on her status as a stage performer, Baker’s films prefigured global
cinema’s imbrication with other entertainment media, while their use of
promotional tie-ins such as fashion, hair products, cosmetics, nightclubs,
and even a faux newspaper used to promote her 1934 film Zouzou, called
Le Journal de Zouzou (Baker and Bouillon 1978: 94), anticipated the
marketing campaigns to come in the age of the Hollywood blockbuster.
The films in which Baker starred made it difficult quite literally to
“locate” Baker’s cultural origins. This topographical indeterminacy
served many functions at a time when French colonial ambitions were

colliding with the geopolitical realignment heralded by the impending
world war. Baker’s stardom was at once forward-looking, in its Jazz-Age
modernism, and atavistic, in its appeal to primitivism. Baker’s status as a
global cultural icon was forged by her evocation of larger world-historical
systems such as colonialism and the competition between “Old World”
and “New” for world cultural hegemony, suggested by the constellation
of French-African American identities that she evoked. Baker’s position
within these shifting global configurations located her on the horizon
between the decline of one era and the dawn of another—making her a
key figure in the history of exoticist cinema and globalization.
The dissemination of Baker’s image in what Walter Benjamin (1979
[1936]) famously called the “era of technical reproducibility” (or the age
of mechanical reproduction) is referred to on a number of occasions in
her films, which endlessly rehearsed the idea of Baker’s own ascension
to stardom, her rags-to-riches story (see Jules-Rosette 2007). In all her
films, Baker played either an up-and-coming performer or an established
star. Indeed, two of the fiction films in which Baker starred were about
the process of becoming a star: in La Sirène des tropiques (Siren of the
Tropics, Henri Étiévant and Mario Nalpas, 1927), Baker plays a West
Indian woman who is “discovered” while clowning around with children
on the streets of Paris and made into a music hall star, and in Zouzou
(Marc Allégret, 1934), Baker plays a Martinican woman similarly
discovered while clowning around on a stage, and made into a music hall
star. (It is perhaps no accident that these narratives of discovery evoke
classic colonial discourses of the “discovery” of previously uncharted
territories.) In the 1939 Fausse alerte (literally “False Alarm,” but
translated as The French Way, Jacques de Baroncelli), which I will discuss
at greater length, Baker plays a well-established music hall star who owns
her own nightclub. Her character’s name, Zazu, and her allusion to a sad
romantic past, strongly suggest that this film might be a sequel of sorts to
Zouzou, in which Baker’s character fails to win the heart of the man she
loves, who falls instead for a blonde woman named Claire. In Princesse
Tam-Tam (Edmond de Gréville, 1935), Baker plays Aouina, a Tunisian
shepherdess who is transformed, Pygmalion-like, into the toast of Parisian
society, a status she augments, rather than jeopardizes (as a jealous rival
Exotic Objects 71
has hoped), by jumping on stage and turning in an impromptu dance

performance during a musical number at an elegant party. The fact that
Aouina’s transformation into a star entertainer turns out to have been
imagined by a novelist for his latest book does not alter the technical
reproducibility of the character’s image, which is disseminated in the
form of a bestselling novel.
The story of Baker’s own rise to stardom is invoked explicitly in the
promotional film for Marcel Sauvage’s Mémoires de Joséphine Baker
(Memoirs of Josephine Baker, Baker and Sauvage, 1927) which itself
prefigures very closely the scenario in Princesse Tam-Tam of the writer
and his assistant appearing to record in writing the Baker character’s
story. This transformation of a life into a story, a life story, is inseparable
from Baker’s public persona, and her work is rife with allusions to
the creation and dissemination of Baker’s image. The explicit ties that
Baker’s characters have to the media are highlighted in the short silent
film Le Pompier des Folies Bergère (The Fireman of the Folies Bergère,
1928), made while Baker was starring in the eponymous nightclub.
In this film, Baker plays a Métro attendant who metamorphoses, in
the eyes of a drunken firefighter, into the scantily-clad exotic dancer
from the famous stage show. Suddenly wearing nothing but a flimsy
grass skirt around her waist and a white brassiere, Baker approaches
an enormous advertising poster (of the kind still used in the Paris
Métro today), which shows a gigantic radio. Baker fiddles with a dial
on the radio and then, clapping her hands as a visual cue to indicate
that the radio is playing music, dances her signature dance (Fig. 8). It is
significant that the poster is advertising radio speakers, which facilitated
the broadcast of entertainment into millions of homes, disseminating
songs by entertainers such as Baker herself, whose fame as a chanteuse
rivaled her renown as a dancer. This short sequence brings out the
connections or “correspondances,” to use a term more appropriate to
the Métro, between advertising and the mass media; and the site of this
conjunction in the Métropolitain is suggestive of metropolitan France or
“la métropole,” self-proclaimed center of France’s colonial empire. And
at the center of the center is Paris, home of the Métro, and political and
administrative headquarters of both the hexagon and “la plus grande
France” (Greater France).
Figure 8 Josephine Baker in the Métro, Le Pompier des Folies Bergère.
Paris is the setting, entirely or in part, of all of Baker’s films, but the
characters Baker plays are always immigrants or visitors. In La Sirène des
tropiques, Baker plays a woman from the fictional Antillean island of Monte
Puebla; as Phil Powrie and Éric Rebillard note, in the film “the ‘tropics’
(as the intertitle has it) and everything they represent are contrasted with
Paris” (Powrie and Rebillard 2008: 255). In Zouzou, Baker’s character is
from Martinique; in Princesse Tam-Tam, she is Tunisian, and, finally, in
Fausse alerte, her origins are not specified, but she is allowed to speak a
line of English (as the nightclub owner Zazu, she says “Hello Girls” to her
dancers), in an allusion to Baker’s own American origins.
This protean adaptability is underscored in La Sirène des tropiques,
when Papitou, a stowaway on an ocean liner who has fallen down a coal
chute while being pursued by passengers and crew, is described thus:
“She’s easy to recognize. She’s all black.” After subsequently becoming
covered in flour while hiding in the ship’s kitchen, Papitou is described
as “all white, like a ghost.” The passengers’ shifting perception of Papitou
mirrors Baker’s own status as a floating racial and cultural signifier, a
Exotic Objects 73
blank screen on which to project cultural identity. The end of the film,
when Papitou goes “far, far away, to America,” is a reversal of Baker’s career
path and a reminder to the Americans that, through her films, songs, and
her image more generally, the French were exporting Baker back to her
home, having transformed her into “la Baker,” as though she had been a
raw material, a diamond-in-the-rough polished to a showbiz luster, like
the characters in her films who undergo a Pygmalion-like transformation
at the hands of French couturiers (e.g., La Sirène des tropiques; Zouzou,
and Princesse Tam-Tam).
Papitou’s elusive nature, which makes her “easy to recognize” but
impossible to pin down, is further complicated by the confusion
cultivated between the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Sérévo,
a Parisian businessman, has investments and holdings in the “Antilles,”
suggesting a French colonial context, but many of the characters’ names
are Hispanic-sounding (e.g., the character Alvarez, Papitou’s father
Diego, and the setting of Monte Puebla). This confusion is also apparent
more generally in the conflicting signals given about the cultural origins
of the characters Baker played throughout her brief film career. In
Princesse Tam-Tam, Aouina comes from Tunisia, but masquerades as
a princess from the mythical country of Parador, and the fact that her
trip to Paris turns out to have been a figment of the writer’s imagination
further problematizes the viewer’s capacity to “situate” her. In Zouzou,
the ostensibly autobiographical song “Haiti” that Zouzou sings while
swinging in a giant birdcage conflicts with Zouzou’s provenance from
Martinique, and in Fausse alerte, the dance number with which the
film ends has a Latin American flavor that evokes the likes of Carmen
Miranda. Even the “tropics” of The Siren of the Tropics is purposely vague,
like the “île” or “island” of the song “Mon coeur est un oiseau des îles”
(My heart is a bird of the isles). This lack of specificity can be traced to the
“melting pot” function of exoticism, which boils down geographical and
historical specificities into an indistinct mass of “otherness.”
It is appropriate that France is the setting (all or in part) for Baker’s
films, since, as a symbol of the “mother country,” the centralizing force
of the metropolis evokes the universalizing tendency of French imperial
discourse, both in the context of France’s colonial empire, and in the
context of its earlier postrevolutionary Napoleonic aspirations. These
associations converge in the film Fausse alerte, made in 1939 during the
Phony War, before the Fall of France in June 1940. This film has routinely
been overlooked by scholars, no doubt due to its lack of availability: it
is occasionally mentioned in passing but has received nowhere near
the degree of attention that has been devoted to Zouzou and Princesse
Tam-Tam and, more recently, to La Sirène des Tropiques. Fausse Alerte
was shelved during the war and was only released in France in 1945 (a
shortened version was released with the title The French Way in 1952 in
the United States). The film revolves around a long-standing feud between
a Napoleon scholar and a woman who claims she is a descendent of the
emperor. When the Napoleon scholar enlists Baker’s character Zazu to
sabotage his son’s romantic relationship with his enemy’s daughter, he
elicits her sympathy by referring to her as a “compatriot” of Napoleon’s
first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, who was born in Martinique. Of
course, by comparing Zazu to “Joséphine,” the film is also slyly alluding
to Baker herself, who, like Empress Joséphine, was in a sense “married” to
the French nation. While she was making Fausse alerte, Baker served as a
kind of spy (an “Honorable Correspondent”) for the Deuxième Bureau,
the French military intelligence service, for which she would infiltrate
receptions at the Japanese and Italian embassies and report back what she
heard. Moreover, while filming Fausse alerte, Baker did a radio show every
Saturday for soldiers at the front (Baker and Chase 1993: 226–27).
Yet, despite Baker’s serious and indeed heroic military contribution
to France’s armed forces, this film, perhaps inevitably, has something of
a “Zouzou goes to war” feel about it. When Zazu introduces herself to
the homeless man whom she has hired to do odd jobs, he says he knows
who she is, and adds that he has gone to a lot of trouble for her. “You
ruined yourself for me?” Zazu asks coquettishly, assuming he has spent
all his money on tickets to see her perform. The man replies, “I carried
you on my back for days on end.” “What do you mean?” Zazu asks,
mystified. “I was a sandwich man,” he explains. “I carried a cardboard
cutout of you.” On the back of a sandwich man, the outline of Zazu’s body
becomes a cipher, a hieroglyph of exoticism, not unlike the function of
stereotype itself, which reproduces endlessly identical empty shapes. This
suggestion that Zazu’s image, literally her likeness, has been reproduced
and disseminated widely, evokes a scene at the end of Zouzou, in which
Exotic Objects 75
the eponymous heroine is shown walking forlornly past a wall plastered

with posters of herself. It also recalls an earlier scene in Zouzou, in which
Zouzou is “discovered” while cavorting after hours on an empty stage
as a spotlight casts her shadow against the curtain. Both Zazu in Fausse
alerte and her earlier incarnation in Zouzou thus allude to the flattening
function of exoticism, which reduces three-dimensional human beings
to two-dimensional caricatures (a phenomenon invoked explicitly in
Princesse Tam-Tam in a montage sequence that conveys the Princess of
Parador’s burgeoning fame through the display of increasingly caricatural
representations of Josephine Baker herself; see Ezra 2000a: 123–24).
It is significant that the pose Zouzou strikes when the spotlight first
illuminates her on stage is that of a shooting soldier. This imbrication
of war and entertainment evokes the origins of cinema itself in the
chronophotography of Félix Regnault, who in 1895 made a series of
images of West Africans and Malagasy walking, running, jumping,
climbing trees, carrying infants, and cooking (Rony 1996: 48). He used
a chronophotographic device developed by his mentor Etienne-Jules
Marey, protocinematic pioneer. It was no accident that these pictures
were taken at a colonial exhibition, exoticizing spectacle par excellence,
in which people were brought from the far reaches of the French colonial
empire and put on display in replicas of their “natural” habitats. Regnault
photographed Africans in order to improve the efficiency of the French
army, which he advised to adopt a “marche en flexion,” or particular gait
modeled on the movements of the Africans and Malagasy, the better to
colonize them. Fatimah Tobing Rony has written of Regnault’s images
that “the subjects are rendered as mere silhouettes, pictorographs of
the langage par gestes. Their faces are unimportant: it is the body that
provides the necessary data” (Rony 1996: 58). In Regnault’s images, as
in the films starring Baker, the “data” provided by the black body invite
exoticist objectification, used, in the case of Fausse alerte, to convey a
sense of mastery to viewers in danger of feeling overwhelmed by the war.
War and entertainment happily cohabit in the film. When the alarm
of the film’s title sounds and everyone crowds into the air raid shelter, a
man sells folding seats, as though war were a spectator sport. Then, one
of the dance numbers in Zazu’s club is called “The Soldier on Leave,”
and involves chorus girls performing a jaunty military march to music.
In this sequence, a military maneuver (marching) is transformed into a

dance step, like the shooting soldier pose that Zouzou strikes when she
is discovered dancing on stage in Zouzou. The complexity of this process
of aestheticization is reflected in the name Zazu Clairon, which resonates
with multiple meanings. The proper name “Zazu” is thought to derive
from the Hebrew word “zaza,” meaning movement, making “Zazu” a
fitting name for a dancer (especially in the medium of cinema, which
itself derives from “kino,” meaning movement). But the name Zazu also
inevitably evokes Zouzou, and, by extension, zouave, for which “zouzou”
was a nickname, and which was an Algerian Kabyle soldier who fought in
the colonial troupes for France. “Clairon” means “bugle” or “clarion,” like
the “Appel” or call to the population in the notice shown at the beginning
of the film, which begins:
“APPEL A LA POPULATION
Parisiens,
Le Gouvernement de la République a dû decréter la mobilisation generale.
La Patrie est en danger et avec elle vos libertés.
Les hommes ne sont forts que par l’union: le Pays sera victorieusement
défendu par l’union de tous les Français.”
[Appeal to the Population: Parisians, the government of the republic has
had to call for widespread mobilization. The country is in danger and
with it, your freedom. Men are only strong by virtue of their unity; the
Country will be heroically defended by the union of all French people.]
(original underlined emphasis)
In the following shot, a worker is shown putting up a poster across

the notice, which says “Vendredi 3 novembre 1939. Réouverture LA
PERRUCHE BLEUE. ZAZU CLAIRON et ses girls (Friday November
3, 1939. Reopening of The Blue Parakeet, with Zazu Clairon and her
girls).” Below the sign for the cabaret, the words “Vive la France” from
the underlying sign are still visible (Fig. 9). This juxtaposition implies
at the very least an equation between the patriotic duties of citizenship
and popular entertainment, and in its logical extension, the eclipse of
the former by the latter. The appeal for a “union of all French people”
invokes the policy of assimilation conveniently emphasized during
wartime in order to legitimate the use of colonial troops in battle, and
opportunistically revoked in peacetime, as illustrated by the problems
Exotic Objects 77
Figure 9 One poster may hide another, Fausse alerte.
experienced by Baker’s characters while attempting to assimilate fully

into French cultural life (see Ezra 2000a: 97–128). Both Zouzou and Zazu,
having helped facilitate relationships between (white) lovers, end their
respective films romantically unattached: Zouzou figured as a lonely bird
of paradise, singing away in a giant gilded cage, and Zazu shown getting
on with the business of running a nightclub as both couples she helped
bring together—the young people and their initially feuding parents—
make wedding plans. Like Zouzou, Zazu is at once part of the group that
comprises “tous les Français” (all French people, as De Gaulle would later
say in his famous London radio broadcast) and separate from it, joining
the fight against Germany’s bid for world domination, while at the same
time failing to be completely accepted by her adoptive compatriots. Yet
Baker’s stardom also embodied French resistance to being eclipsed by US
cultural imperialism. She was American, yes, but she had been repackaged
and transformed into La Baker, singing French songs and speaking French
dialogue in French films, now a (faux) colonial subaltern rather than an

American imperialist. If the war against foreign encroachment was to
be waged in the spotlight, then there was no better soldier-performer
than Baker. Her stardom embodied French resistance to the idea of being
absorbed into another empire, and at the same insisted on France’s role as
a metropolitan hub, a center around which revolved an apparently robust
colonial periphery, despite signs to the contrary (see Britton 2007). This,
the film implied, and explicitly stated in its American title, was “the
French way” (Fig. 10).
France’s adoption of Baker for its own ends recalls Regnault’s
photographs of Africans, which borrowed from them in order, ultimately,
to subjugate them. Similarly, exoticist cinema links the ostensibly
admiring exoticist gaze to the fetishization and reification of the human
body. Of all the roles she performed, of all the images she projected, none
has outlasted the image of Baker in a tiny skirt made of banana skins,
which drew attention to her physical charms more than it hid them. It
Figure 10 Josephine Baker, Fausse alerte.

Exotic Objects 79
is this primitivist, fetishistic detail that sums up better than any song,
film, or theatrical role the significance of Josephine Baker in French
culture in the interwar period. Like the concept of the fetish, borrowed
from (and subsequently projected onto) Africa, and used by colonizers
against Africans (see Wood 2013: 153), photographing the black body
reinforced its subjugation. Homi Bhabha links racist stereotype with
fetishism (Bhabha 1994: 74–75), thus returning the concept of the sexual
fetish to its exoticist origins. In the Marxist sense of the term, these films
obscure the colonial relations of power that produce the colonial subjects
and objects in front of the camera. But in both cases (psychoanalytic and
economic), to fetishize alterity—in other words, to exoticize it—is not to
venerate it: is to disavow a certain state of affairs in favor of a fiction, a
phantasm—whether this phantasm is that of the “black body,” or that of
the mask, which I will examine in the next section.
Cléo’s masks: Regimes of objectification in the

French New Wave
There is a moment early in Agnès Varda’s 1962 film Cléo de 5 à 7 when the
film’s eponymous heroine, a pop singer named Cléo, notices a display of
tribal masks in a shop window while riding in a taxi through the streets of
Paris. This is an iconic moment in the film, highlighting the importance
of masquerade in Cléo’s narcissistic world of appearances (Fig. 11). But
this scene also indicates the extent to which representations of alterity and
discourses of cultural self-fashioning are rooted in narratives of historical
progress. Masks are icons of “the primitive,” and their presence in chic
boutiques and bourgeois homes reinforces implicit cultural assumptions
about how far “now” is from “then,” and “we” are from “them.” These
assumptions, however, are seriously undermined by the forms of
racialized violence that erupted in the twentieth century. Removed from
one context and deposited in another, exotic masks perform a double
displacement: they represent the cultures and places from whence they
come (and a larger global system of expropriation and uneven exchange),
and they also suggest a temporal décalage or gap between instances of
dehumanizing violence, invoking what Maxim Silverman has called
Figure 11 Masks in the window, Cléo de 5 à 7.
“composite memories” (Silverman 2008: 425). As objects, masks come

alive with the episodes of human history they embody, but they also
invoke the reverse process of objectification in which human beings are
reduced to the status of objects in cultural and sexual commodification,
a reduction that paved the way for the worst atrocities of the twentieth
century, including systematic torture and genocide. At the same time,
masks inhabit a metaphorical space of disguise, censorship, and
displacement.
Despite the fact that the French New Wave coincided with the height
of the Algerian War, as Benjamin Stora notes, very few films were made
about the war while it was taking place. Those that were made were
banned until after the Evian Accords in 1962, and not released until 1963
(such as Godard’s Le Petit soldat [The Little Soldier], Robert Enrico’s La
Belle vie [The Good Life, made in 1962], and James Blue’s Les Oliviers de
la justice [The Olive Trees of Justice, made in 1962]) (Stora 1997: 111).
Filmmakers had to find other ways to represent the war. The New Wave
directors were, according to Stora, particularly adept at expressing the
“’déconstructions’ politiques, idéologiques, culturelles qui travaillent
alors la société en profondeur” (Stora 1991: 40) (political, ideological,
and cultural deconstructions that were taking hold in society at the time).
Exotic Objects 81
These deconstructions insinuated themselves into many New Wave films,

undermining assumptions about social and cultural hierarchies. In Cléo
and other New Wave films, masks appear as overdetermined memorial
palimpsests, signifying multiple layers of historical trauma as well as the
repression of these traumas in a dialectic of exposure and concealment.
The stage had been set for the display of masks in fashionable homes
and department store windows as early as 1926, with the appearance
in French Vogue of Man Ray’s photograph Noire et blanche (Black and
White), which juxtaposed a white European woman’s face with that
of a Baule-style mask from the Ivory Coast. The photo’s publication
in a magazine designed to promote the mass-market consumption of
fashion marked the official domestication of exotic objects that had
begun with Picasso’s incorporation of African and Oceanic objects into
his work in the first decades of the twentieth century. The increasing
visibility and availability of objects such as masks and carvings inspired
the vogue for primitivism among Cubists and other avant-garde artists
in the interwar period and beyond (André Malraux mused about this
dimension of Picasso’s work in his 1974 book on the artist called La
Tête d’obsidienne, translated as Picasso’s Mask). According to Wendy A.
Grossman and Steven Manford, the appearance of Man Ray’s photograph
in the fashion magazine “brought the ‘vogue’ for things African into the
mainstream” (Grossman and Manford 2006: 137). It is significant that
the site of the masks’ display in Cléo de 5 à 7 is not a museum, or even a
bohemian-bourgeois home, but a shop window. This positioning of the
masks as items of consumption points to the convergence of exoticism
and consumer culture in France. In one sense, the masks Cléo sees in
passing can be viewed as a comment on Cléo’s own mask-like persona,
her performativity as both a singer in the public eye and as a woman
embracing the trappings of femininity, complete with blonde wig,
makeup, spike heels, and a dress with swishing skirt and tightly cinched
waist that emphasizes her hourglass figure, making her look like nothing
so much as a drag-queen. The masks Cléo sees from the taxi are displayed
in the shop window very much like the hats in the women’s hat shop
she visits earlier in the film, reinforcing the idea of what Joan Rivière
(1929) called “womanliness as masquerade” (for illuminating discussions
of the role of gender in Cléo, see Sandy Flitterman-Lewis 1996: 268–84
and Jill Forbes’s comprehensive analysis in Forbes 2001: 83–89). But the
masks also evoke the racialized violence lurking not so much beneath the
surface as on the surface, hidden in plain view among the exotic objects
and accessories introduced into French cultural life with the rise of mass
culture.
Close-up on Cléo
Cléo de 5 à 7 was made in 1961, as the Algerian War entered its final,
bloody year. Seemingly shot in real time (seemingly, because the film is
actually only 90 minutes long), the film charts two hours in the life of a
minor celebrity anxiously awaiting the results of a medical test. The only
explicit reference to the war, apart from a news bulletin on the radio in
the taxi that ferries Cléo around Paris, appears in the form of Antoine,
the French soldier on leave who renews the despairing Cléo’s sense of
hope and vitality as she struggles with life in the public eye and with the
prospect of her own mortality.
Cléo’s name, we are told, is short for Cléopatre, or Cleopatra, an
association reinforced by the name “Antoine,” or Antony. The evocation
of Egypt in the protagonists’ names is only one of many references to
non-French cultures in the film. At a pivotal point in the film, Cléo
pauses to look at herself in a mirror on the outside wall of a Chinese
restaurant, her face surrounded by Chinese characters. In a voice-over
interior monlogue, she observes, “Je ne regarde personne que moi. C’est
lassant.” (I am not looking at anyone but myself. It’s tiring.) Although
this statement is ambiguous taken out of context (the “it” in “it’s tiring”
could be interpreted in opposite ways: looking only at herself is tiring, or
looking at others would be tiring), it actually refers to Cléo’s newfound
determination to emerge from her narcissistic shell and open herself
up to the world around her. In one of her first acts of awareness of her
surroundings after her turn away from her habitual self-absorption, Cléo
enters a café where she hears two men discussing Algeria, followed by two
other men discussing Surrealism, while others debate the merits of Miro
and Picasso. At another table, people discuss an acquaintance’s trip to
Africa. (These snatches of conversation referring to non-French cultures
Exotic Objects 83
recall the first time we see Cléo in a café, near the beginning of the film,
when Cléo’s minder Angèle tells a story about a man who travels to Egypt
and Turkey.) Before meeting Antoine, Cléo inquires, in an apparent non-
sequitur, whether an observatory that has been drawn to her attention in
the Parc Montsouris is Des Mille et une nuits? (from The Arabian Nights?).
Finally, at the very end of the film, as a sign of her newly emergent interest
in the outside world, Cléo announces that she would like to “connaître le
Liban” [get to know Lebanon]. For Cléo, awareness of other people seems
to be linked to an awareness of other peoples.
Varda develops the theme of alterity in a playful film-within-the-film,
which Cléo’s friend Dorothée, an artist’s model, shows her when they visit
Dorothée’s boyfriend at work. Shot in black and white and approximately
three minutes in duration, Les Fiancés du Pont Mac Donald (The fiancés
of MacDonald Bridge) features such New Wave regulars as Anna Karina,
Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Claude Brialy. In this whimsical tale, Godard
plays a young man whose world changes completely once he puts on a
pair of dark glasses. His blonde girlfriend, called Anna, turns into a black
woman, and an insignificant mishap becomes a fatal accident (complete
with an ambulance transformed into a hearse). Once the man removes
the sunglasses, everything returns to normal and he cries, “C’était à cause
de mes lunettes que je voyais tout en noir!” (It was because of my glasses
that everything looked black). Blackness turns out to have been an
illusion, a question literally of outlook. The short film’s funereal imagery
indicates that the color black is meant to be interpreted as a metaphor for
affect (as in a dark mood), but in the context of the larger film’s exoticist
allusions, the short film’s use of a black woman inevitably conjures up
certain cultural associations. Judith Mayne has noted the short film’s
“unproblematized relation between black and white; indeed, the black
remains as the unexamined projection of the white man’s sunglasses, or
the spectacle of a ‘primitive’ mask” (Mayne 1990: 202). The black version
of Anna is presented as a disguise covering the “real” Anna, who, within
the diegetic universe of the short film, appears to have been wearing a
kind of black mask.
This notion of blackness as a mask or visual effect can be read as a
kind of reversal of Frantz Fanon’s 1952 Peau noire, masques blancs (Black
Skin, White Masks), which argues that colonial subjects of African
descent internalize the worldview of their white oppressors. For Fanon,

the white mask was a symbol of the attitudes and behaviors of a dominant
(colonizing) culture that had been embraced by a dominated (colonized)
culture. The performance of blackness, on the other hand (as epitomized
by the wearing of blackface, for example), is a form of cultural tourism,
a temporary borrowing or wearing of a mask—representing not “black”
culture, but the system of domination that insists on polarizing what the
terms “black” and “white” represent. In the short film, difference turns out
to be a reflection of the lens through which one looks—in other words,
subjective, and culturally conditioned. Cultural tourism commodifies
“racial” identity, making of it something to be tried on like a hat in a shop,
or displayed like an Oceanic mask in a European artist’s living room.
Immediately following the scene in Cléo de 5 à 7 in which Cléo is
confronted with the masks in the shop window, she encounters art and
architecture students engaging in the ritualistic behavior of the French
tradition known as bizutage, or hazing, complete with disguises (we see
an American Indian headdress, and some students’ faces are painted,
while some wear homemade masks and headgear). Varda is suggesting
a parallel between the “primitive” masks and rituals and those of the
Parisian students, in the manner of the Exposition anticoloniale staged
by Surrealists and Communists during the Exposition coloniale of
1931, which presented Christian religious icons as domestic fetishes
by displaying them alongside masks and sacred objects from cultures
deemed “primitive” (Lebovics 1992: 105–10). When one of the students,
a young black man, presses his face to the window of Cléo’s taxi, it is,
according to Steven Ungar, “as though one of the masks she had just seen
suddenly came to life” (Ungar 2008: 35).
The masks in Cléo are shown in a brief but striking collage of close-
ups, in such a way as to evoke the 1953 Alain Resnais and Chris Marker
film Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues also Die), which itself mirrors the
display of masks in ethnographic museums, often removed from their
historical context (see Beugnet 2006). This cultural commodification
finds its parallel in the way in which Cléo herself is packaged and sold
to the public as spectacle. As a star, Cléo is commodified, her humanity
objectified in the mechanical reproduction and dissemination of her
image. (Her commodified status is the inverse of the sculptures that
Exotic Objects 85
her friend Dorothée poses for, which comprise a range of original

representations of a single referent, as opposed to the multiple copies
of Cléo’s hit pop song.) Varda’s film explicitly invokes this process of
objectification through the use of close-up framing in the scene set in
Cléo’s apartment in which the singer rehearses one of her songs, and her
face, detached from its suddenly darkened surroundings, is bathed, in
showbiz style, in a spotlight. Cléo’s face is thus projected as that of a star
performer, wearing the frozen mask of what Deleuze and Guattari call
“visagéité” or “faciality” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 205–34). In faciality,
which is the effect produced by close-ups in films, the face is separated
from what Deleuze identified as its three conventional functions:
those of individuation (that which distinguishes or characterizes each
person), socialization (the manifestation of a social role), and relation
or communication (the assurance not only of “communication between
two persons, but also, within a single person, the internal accord between
one’s character and one’s role”) (Deleuze 1983: 141; 99; cited in Bogue
2003: 78). Stripped of these functions through the medium of film, the
face becomes a thing: “Rather than being a body part in a determinate
spatio-temporal setting, or a marker of an identity, a role or a relation, the
face in close-up is an autonomous object” (Bogue 2003: 78). Close-ups in
the cinema, which create the illusion of intimacy by appearing to bring
the viewer closer to the subject of contemplation, in fact erect a barrier
between the two, turning the subject into an object.
Overlapping regimes of objectification
François Trauffaut plays on this objectifying function of the close-up

in his 1962 Jules et Jim, through the use of a series of freeze frames.
Catherine, a woman involved in a love triangle with friends Jules and
Jim, is shown playfully mugging for a diegetically nonexistent camera.
When she poses and pouts in freeze frame, Catherine’s fixed, mask-like
expressions exaggerate the expressivity that differentiates humans from
other animals, to the point of reversal, so that they slip into the realm of
the nonexpressive or inanimate (Fig. 12). Adapting Michael Rothberg’s
“overlapping regimes of racialization” (Rothberg 2009: 258), it is possible
Figure 12 Catherine mugging for the camera, Jules et Jim.
to speak of overlapping regimes of objectification, as Catherine’s (like

Cléo’s) star turn through the use of close-up is inseparable from the
performance of gender, and as the logic of sexism is shown to overlap
with that of exoticism.
When Catherine and Jules are walking along the banks of the Seine,
Jules asks Jim, in the presence of Catherine, “Qui a écrit ‘la femme est
naturelle, donc abominable’” (Who wrote that “woman is natural, and
therefore abominable”)? To which Jim replies, “C’est Baudelaire, mais il
parlait des femmes d’un certain monde, et d’une certaine société.” (It was
Baudelaire, but he was referring to women from a particular world, and
a particular society.) Jules counters, “Pas du tout; il parlait de la femme
en général.” (Not at all; he was talking about women in general.) Traits
that Jim reserves for subaltern women, women “from a particular world,
and a particular society”—far from “here,” in other words, whether
“here” is defined in terms of geographical location or social class—Jules
would ascribe to all women. This alternation between “other” and “all”
women reveals a similar objectifying dynamic at work in discourses
of exoticism and sexism. Later in the film, Jim encounters a man in a
bar who introduces his girlfriend as “creuse” (hollow), “vide” (empty),
“une chose” (a thing), “un bel objet” (a beautiful object), which would
seem to describe the fossilized, flattened images projected by Catherine’s
reified facial expressions. At the end of the film, Catherine and Jim do
become reduced to pure matter, in a striking sequence that shows their
incinerated bodies being ground into ashes. This scene illustrates the
Exotic Objects 87
logical conclusion of the decontextualizing objectification described

and performed by the man in the bar, and invokes “multidirectional
memory” (Rothberg 2009) in its unavoidable allusion to the Holocaust—
an association made previously in Varda’s early short film L’Opéra-Mouffe
(1958) in a shot of a wall bearing the graffiti-scrawled slogan “Paix avec
l’Algérie libre” (Peace with a free Algeria) next to a swastika (see Ungar
2008: 106–07).
These moments serve as what Michael Rothberg (2009) calls noeuds
de mémoire (knots of memory), which rupture narrative flow and
compel us to consider the historical consequences of objectifying
acts. The overlapping regimes of objectification seem to invoke a
concomitant temporal overlap, a palimpsest of cultural memories. This
decontextualization is also central to exoticism, which, it could be said,
“facializes” its objects, both inanimate and human.
In Jules et Jim, for example, it is no accident that Jules and Jim’s interest
in Catherine is predicated on their obsession with a so-called primitive
sculpture, which they first see in a private slide show given by a friend,
in a mixture of academicism and tourism. Like archaeologist-explorers
of the Indiana Jones variety (or perhaps like Truffaut’s fellow filmmaker
Godard, who studied ethnography at the Sorbonne), Jules and Jim
travel to the Adriatic island where the sculpture is situated, in order to
admire it firsthand. It is significant that the sculpture that so captivates
Jules and Jim is located on an island in the Adriatic, to the west of
Greece and to the east of Africa, midway on the ideological world map
between the “primitive” and the classical, the exotic and the ancient. In
his notes for an Essai sur l’exotisme (Essay on Exoticism), Victor Segalen
proposed l’exotisme dans le temps (exoticism in time) as a corollary to
l’exotisme dans l’espace (exoticism in space) (Segalen 1986: 38). (For
an interesting analysis of Segalen’s work and the larger context of
exoticist thought in France, see Forsdick 2000.) Baudrillard, too, noted
the analogy between historical and geographical displacement: “For
modern man . . . changing country or latitude is essentially equivalent
to plunging into the past (as tourism well demonstrates)” (Baudrillard
2005: 79 n4). In New Wave films, representations of antiquity and
exoticism at times overlap in a heterogeneous atmosphere of cultural
décalage, or slippage.
Some New Wave directors used antiquity to stand in for, or disguise,

the unpalatable present of a colonial war. Just as Jules et Jim’s First World
War setting can be seen on one level as a displacement of the Algerian
War, other New Wave films evoke the past in order to bypass, or more
accurately, to point obliquely to, a present that cannot be acknowledged
explicitly. Resnais’s L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad,
1961), for example, whose ambiguous rape scenes have often been
interpreted as an unambiguous metaphor for France’s actions in Algeria, is
a film that is overwhelmed by antiquity, in the form of neoclassical statues
that grace the formal gardens in which the nameless characters circulate.
In fact, Resnais himself has insisted, somewhat enigmatically, that the
film was a “documentary about a statue” (cited in Higgins 1996: 101).
Lynn Higgins has pointed out that M’s supposed “identification” of the
statue as a representation of “Charles III” is actually a mystification, as no
such historical personage existed. Higgins traces the web of associations
generated by the false identification to Charles de Gaulle, who was often
referred to as “Le Roi Charles” (King Charles) in jokes and cartoons of
the period (Higgins 1996: 104–05), and who of course played a major
role in the decolonization of Algeria. In foregrounding antiquity (and a
false one, no less), Resnais is performing a double substitution, in which
a temporal displacement stands in for a geographical one. However, this
masking effect, far from obscuring its object, actually draws attention
to it. A similar dynamic can be seen in Resnais’s next film, Muriel ou le
temps d’un retour (Muriel, or the Time of Return).
Multidirectional memory in Muriel
In Muriel, as in Marienbad, allusions to earlier eras signal the processes of

displacement that ostensibly enable us to “forget” more recent historical
traumas, but which ultimately flag up the multidirectional nature of
cultural memory. In Muriel, the horrors of both the present (the Algerian
War) and the recent past (the Second World War) are obscured beneath
the banal surfaces of everyday life, as forms of sexual and cultural
objectification are pushed to their logical conclusion in the violation and
Exotic Objects 89
murder of an Algerian woman. Perhaps more than any other New Wave
film, Muriel engages with the complexities of multidirectional memory
by staging the temporal displacement of violence, revealing not so much
a greater violence as the fact that one mask can conceal another.
Old and new are juxtaposed in the film’s setting, in the gleaming
glass, neon-lit city of Boulogne, erected on the ruins of those parts of the
city destroyed in the Second World War. The film’s narrative and visual
emphasis on commodity culture (the buying and selling of antiques,
the repeated shots of brightly lit shop windows groaning with the latest
consumer goods and gadgets) goes beyond the symbolic articulation of
effects. Resnais’s depictions of interiors-as-exteriors—shop windows lit
in such as way as to merge with the streets of Boulogne—suggest that
the commodities that decorate the homes and streets of metropolitan
France appear not as arbitrary signs, but as both symbols and artifacts
of a system of social relations based on expropriation, uneven exchange,
and, ultimately, objectification.
Hélène sells antiques out of her home, and her grown stepson Bernard,
back from military service in Algeria, comments that because of all the
buying and selling of antiques in the apartment, he never knows which
era he is going to wake up in. Hélène’s apartment, with its chaotic jumble
of antiques and layering of historical eras, is a microcosm of the city of
Boulogne. Gaston Bounoure has noted the sense of displacement the
characters experience: “Les personnages de Muriel . . . sont ‘déplacés.’ Ils
viennent d’un autre temps; ils cherchent un autre espace” (The characters
in Muriel . . . are displaced. They come from another time, and are
searching for another place) (Bounoure 1974: 55). This perpetual state
of displacement in which the characters find themselves is accompanied
by their attempts to obliterate their own past. Alphonse, Hélène’s former
lover, claims falsely to have spent several years running a café in Algeria,
and he travels around with his young girlfriend, whom he introduces as
his niece, neglecting to mention that he is actually married to another
woman. Bernard claims to have a girlfriend named Muriel, but it emerges
that Muriel is in fact (or may be) the name of a woman in Algeria whose
torture Bernard witnessed and in which he may have participated. Emma
Wilson has suggested that in Muriel, Resnais “does not so much echo
physical mutilation . . . as intimate the psychological effects of torture on

its victim” (Wilson 2006: 100). If the familial and social entanglements
articulate the psychological effects of colonial brutality, the form of the
film itself, whose fragmented editing style Celia Britton has interpreted
as a cinematic embodiment of Muriel’s mutilation, mimics the structures
of torture and dismemberment (Britton 1990: 38). It is as though the
film’s form were mirroring the dynamic of displacement that haunts the
narrative.
This sense of displacement is most acute in the context of Bernard’s
complicated relationship to his own past. In some ways, Bernard wishes
to hold on to the past, and even carry it into the present (he keeps
meticulous records of his wartime experiences, and when going to visit
his girlfriend Marie-Do, he says that he is going to visit “Muriel”). At
the same time, he is not forthcoming about disclosing his own desires
and motives to others. As Lynne Higgins has noted, Bernard’s face is
often concealed or obscured (Higgins 1996: 110), and he even wears
a mask one evening at dinner—a pair of googly-eye glasses, for which
his stepmother reprimands him—hinting at the broader function of the
mask of censorship (Fig. 13). Exactly halfway through the film, Bernard
shows a home movie he has shot composed of banal scenes from military
Figure 13 Bernard’s glasses, Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour. . .

Exotic Objects 91
life in Algeria, which he projects while recounting the story of Muriel’s

torture and death, which we never see. (Celia Britton has argued that
although the film does not establish unequivocally that Muriel was
raped, the motif of violent penetration that permeates the film adds a
dimension of sexual violation to Muriel’s torture [Britton 1990: 44–46].)
Naomi Greene calls the absence of scenes of torture in Bernard’s film
“a black hole at the center of Muriel,” and interprets this absence as an
indictment of France’s repression of the war (Greene 1999: 49). After
showing the film, Bernard stands before the screen, which is illuminated
(or interrogated) by the harsh light of the projector, the blank screen
a possible reference to the “carré blanc,” literally the blank space of
censorship (Higgins 1996: 110) (Fig. 14). This “carré blanc” might also
be likened to the gleaming plate glass shop windows to which Resnais
returns so often in the film, and which, it may be argued, are monuments
not to memory, but to forgetting—or at least, like screen memories, to
attempts to forget that ultimately point to the events they are trying to
suppress.
In a similar way, the apparently innocuous, even jocular, images in
Bernard’s home movie finally reveal more than they disguise. Leo Bersani
and Ulysse Dutoit have argued that the seemingly random scenes of
Figure 14 The white space of censorship, Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour.
military life in Algeria actually match up with the acts of torture being
described, in a series of “correspondences”:
When . . . Bernard says that the five soldiers participated in the torture
of Muriel, we see five canteens lying on the ground; a soldier raises his
arm just as Bernard speaks of Muriel putting her hands over her eyes; the
shape of the minarets we see evokes that of the flashlight Robert is said
to have focused on Muriel; Bernard’s reference to Muriel’s swollen body
looking as if it had been under water is followed by an image of a soldier
diving into a pool. (Bersani and Dutoit 1993: 195–96)
Although the banal images cover over and attempt to distract from
the violence, they cannot seem to help replicating its form, as though
the violence had infected everyday life, seeping through the screen
that would obscure it. These superficial images invite us to plumb the
depths of the surface, to find what Hannah Arendt called “the banality
of evil” (1994 [1963]), and what Maxim Silverman (2006) has called the
“everyday horror” that characterizes involuntary memories of historical
trauma in post-Holocaust France. The way in which the anodyne images
from Bernard’s home movie both illustrate and disguise the brutality that
cannot be shown mirrors the way in which modern Boulogne paves over
its wartime ruins: the “correspondences” of which Bersani and Dutoit
speak are themselves multidirectional, reaching out to link (certainly
analogically, if not causally) traumatic events from different eras. The
pointed allusions to the Second World War in the shots of the ruined city
cannot fail to invoke the Holocaust, especially in the wake of Resnais’s
explosive documentary Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), the text
of whose narration was written by Jean Cayrol, the screenwriter of Muriel.
Silverman has noted the earlier film’s suggestion of associations between
these historical traumas, writing that, for Resnais, “Algeria is the double
of the concentrationary universe of the Holocaust” (Silverman 2006: 14).
Bernard’s narration of his participation in Muriel’s torture resonates with
the voice-over in Nuit et Brouillard, a film that also juxtaposes banal shots
of everyday life with descriptions of the most horrific atrocities. Alastair
Duncan has observed the echoes in Muriel of the Holocaust documentary,
whose voice-over “exhorted its audience not to believe that the Plague
Exotic Objects 93
rampant in the concentration camps was limited to one time or one

country and urged them to look around ‘autour de nous’” (Duncan 2004:
217). In Muriel, we are again asked to look around us, at the trappings of
modern consumer culture and daily life in postwar France, and beyond,
to atrocities being committed on other continents or in other eras. As
Bernard’s home movie masks the violence of torture, the horrors of the
Algerian War inevitably mask the horrors of the Holocaust—not as the
“ultimate” horror finally revealed, but as a still-living cultural memory
(one of the possible referents of the “return” of the film’s title) and
reference point for subsequent acts of unfathomable brutality. If these
incomparable historical traumas are unspeakable examples of barbarity,
it is their very ineffability that brings them together, weaving them into a
single, tongue-tied knot of memory.
Masks in particular resonate both as a physical presence and
metaphorically as a means of disguise, or masquerade, suggesting the
larger dynamic of disguise that New Wave directors used in order to
represent unpalatable events both past and present. According to Elza
Adamowicz, “Le masque ne se fond jamais avec le corps sur lequel il est
collé; il reste attaché au contexte d’où il est arraché. . . . Le masque, espace
de l’équivoque, figure de l’altérité, est le lieu du surgissement de l’autre au
sein du même” (Adamowicz 1995: 91). (The mask never merges with the
body on which it is placed; it remains attached to the context from which
it was taken. The mask, space of the ambiguous, figure of alterity, is the
site of the emergence of the other within the same.) In Godard’s A Bout de
souffle (Breathless, 1959), which Benjamin Stora has called a “film-miroir”
for the “Algerian generation,” whose “hero,” like France itself, advances
toward its ineluctable destiny (Stora 1991: 40), there is an extended scene
in Patricia’s room, in which small-time gangster Michel sits against a wall
displaying a Picasso print of a man holding a mask (“L’Ancienne et la
Nouvelle Année,” from 1953). Michel says, “Autant dire la vérité; les autres
croient que tu bluffes, et comme ça tu gagnes” (You might as well tell the
truth; people will think you are bluffing, and that is how you win). Masks,
like the truth in a double bluff, appear to conceal something else, when
in fact their secrets lie on the surface for all to see. In New Wave films,
made in the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust and as the sun was
setting on France’s colonial empire, masks evoke the play of concealment

and exposure that characterizes multidirectional memory. But they also
evoke the legitimating symbolic violence of objectification, which entails
the construction of a phantasmatic mask that is overlaid on all members
of a given group. Individual members of a group thus identified (e.g.,
“Africans,” “women,” “Jews”) are rendered interchangeable, in a process
of abstraction I have elsewhere called the identification of difference
(Ezra 2000a). Within these overlapping regimes of objectification, masks
function as fetishes in the Freudian sense, diverting attention from the
face by means of a facial substitute, which disavows the assumed absence
of humanity beneath the mask.
3
Part-Objects
In previous chapters, I have examined discourses that redraw the

boundaries between objects and humans. The force of this conceptual
remapping is so great that it affects even expressions of resistance against
commodification and planned obsolescence. Properties traditionally
associated with the human are reassigned to inanimate objects in
commodity fetishism and exoticism, while reification contributes to
the progressive dehumanization of people, who become alienated
from the totality of the production cycle. The process of abstraction
that creates exchange value is, when applied to humans, a potentially
deadly one. This abstraction is what allows individuals to be reduced to
part-objects—the term is borrowed from psychoanalyst Melanie Klein
(1935), who used it to designate an infant’s limited perception of his or
her mother as that part of her with which the infant comes into contact
(notably, the breast). Here, I use the term in a broader sense to refer to
the designation of people as representative of a larger group that is then
differentiated en masse from another group or groups. The structure
of substitution that renders one person interchangeable with any other
within a group, and the disavowal of the differences that are thus elided,
finds its logical extension in the polarization of group identities (“us”
versus “them”) in times of conflict. This chapter explores this process of
disavowal and substitution in the context of the two biggest wars of the
twentieth century.
In the first section, I examine the fetishistic logic of displacement and
disavowal that underwrites the proliferation of metaphors of severed
heads in the French silent film serial Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade,
1915–16), made during the First World War. The Great War was
especially devastating to the French, who suffered some 1,700,000 losses
and 4,260,000 wounded. Though the war had been going on for over a
year when the films were shot, the serial makes no explicit mention of
the conflict. This apparent omission could perhaps be explained by the
fact that audiences were looking for diversions to distract them from the
horrors taking place around them. Feuillade himself knew exactly what
he was distracting viewers from, having seen these horrors firsthand
while serving as a sergeant earlier in the war, before being released from
duty because of a heart condition in July 1915. In its refusal to show
the physical horrors of the war explicitly, Les Vampires mirrors French
newsreels of the period, which “[hid] neither the destruction nor the
suffering of the soldiers but never reveal[ed] a corpse, a mutilated body or
a wounded man” (Sorlin 1999: 11). This omission was even more marked
in feature films, according to Pierre Sorlin, who notes “the silence of
French cinema” on the subject of the war (Sorlin 1999: 118). However,
despite appearances to the contrary, Les Vampires was not, in fact, “silent”
on the subject of the war. Richard Abel has speculated about the symbolic
presence of the war in the serial: “I myself wonder if, in their conjunction
of the real and the unreal, the banal and the unexpectedly terrifying, the
films also convey, through displacement, the French experience of the
war—the absurd proximity of normal life to the ghastly horrors of trench
warfare” (Abel 1984: 76). Abel’s suspicion can indeed be borne out by
close analysis of the film serial.
The next film examined in this chapter was made during a different war,
in a different country, but displays a similar set of veiled allusions to the
destruction that was taking place in Europe. The Marx Brothers’ vehicle
The Big Store (Charles Reisner, 1941) uses comedy to evoke the un-funny
events of the Second World War. Rather than trivializing trauma, comedy
provided the mechanisms of displacement necessary for processing the
inhumanity that was taking hold in many parts of the world. In the first
part of the twentieth century, Charles Musser notes, “Humor helped
Americans negotiate, question, accept, and sometimes even challenge
their situation. . . . [Comedy] gave voice to pleasures and discomforts
that did not, and often could not, find articulation in other forums”
(Musser 1991: 41–42). I will argue that one such “discomfort” was the
anguish and sense of helplessness many Americans (recent immigrants
as well as long-established residents) experienced in relation to the events
Part-Objects 97
unfolding in Europe after Hitler’s rise to power. Charlene Fix calls The
Big Store a “celebration of the contribution of immigrants to America’s
cultural diversity” (Fix 2013: 139); in its own way, the Marx Brothers film
grapples with the logic of the fetish, or the replacement of something
human with something inhuman, by thematizing the reduction of people
to part-objects.
The case of the phantom fetish:

Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires
On the cover of Laura Mulvey’s collection of essays entitled Fetishism

and Curiosity (1996), there is a well-known illustration of Musidora in
the role of Irma Vep from Les Vampires. This image of a head floating
in space surrounded by a question mark was apparently, and aptly,
chosen to suggest the “curiosity” of the book’s title. However, it also
evokes the “fetishism” of the title, as it provides a substitute for an
absence within the book, which contains no mention of Les Vampires,
Musidora, or Irma Vep. This familiar fetish-image of Irma Vep’s head,
taken from a contemporary publicity poster, perfectly embodies one of
the serial’s central motifs: the severed head. This truncated body part
stands synecdochally for the whole person, as the phallus “stands” for
masculinity. In a similar way, any given member of a group in wartime
(e.g., “the French,” “the Germans”) is stripped of his or her difference
from the other members of the group, as difference is disavowed in the
fetishistic logic of national identity. One act of violence conceals another;
fetishism entails disavowing difference by imposing a substitute that
gives the illusion of sameness. The severed head, a fetish standing in for
castration, is a link in a chain of substitutions: the fear of castration itself
was a phantasmatic substitute for the very real dismemberment taking
place on the battlefields. In what follows, I examine the recurring image
of the severed head in Les Vampires in relation to its various metonymic
functions. In particular, I argue for a reconsideration of its emblematic
status as a symbol of castration, and suggest how the image of the severed
head in Feuillade’s serial can be linked to the traumas engendered by the
First World War.
Feuillade’s serial follows the exploits of a gang of criminals, masters of

disguise, who terrorize the Parisian bourgeoisie while being pursued by
investigative journalist Philippe Guérande (played by Edouard Mathé)
and his sidekick, a reformed vampire and sometime mortician named
Mazamette (played by celebrated character actor Marcel Levesque). Les
Vampires predates the birth of the vampire film genre that viewers today
would recognize, which began with Murnau’s 1921 Nosferatu, based
on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Though both kinds of film reflect similar
anxieties about infiltration and physical violation, Feuillade’s serial is
more concerned with urban crime than with rustic folklore. Anton Kaes
has argued that crime films made during the Great War or in the interwar
period (such as Fritz Lang’s 1931 M) reflect a sense of paranoia that
can be traced to the enemy’s hidden but pervasive presence in wartime
trenches. Invoking Ernst Jünger’s theory of “Total Mobilization,” Kaes
contends that the war mentality had pervaded civilian life to the extent
that enemies—in the form of criminals—were thought to be lurking in
the shadows of the great metropolises (Kaes 1993). The sleuthing used
to track down criminals can be linked to the preoccupation with code
breaking during the war.
The Great War’s presence is in fact encrypted in Feuillade’s serial,
which invites its own decoding in a series of clues offered to viewers.
The first clue involves the very depiction of codes within the films. The
serial abounds in veiled semiotic systems such as cryptograms, as in the
third episode, entitled “Le Cryptogramme rouge” (The Red Codebook);
numerical codes (episode 9), invisible ink (episode 8), and anagrams (as
when the letters in the name “Irma Vep” dance around on a marquis to
form the word “Vampire,” in the third episode). The repeated emphasis
on deciphering scrambled messages evokes the practice of code breaking
used in espionage. The French were the most effective cryptanalysts of
the First World War, possessing “the strongest team of codebreakers in
Europe,” which they had developed as a defensive measure after their
defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (Singh 1999: 104).
Other clues to the war’s hidden presence include the use, in episode 5,
of a poisonous gas with which the vampire gang immobilizes a roomful of
party guests in order to rob them (Francis Lacassin describes this scene in
Part-Objects 99
terms that seem unconsciously to evoke the war, as the transformation of

“a ballroom in to a gigantic mass grave” (Lacassin 1994: 177)). Later, in the
ninth episode, Irma wears a gas mask taken from a chemical laboratory
where she has been helping the new vampire leader conduct experiments;
and the vampires again attempt to use poisoned gas on their enemies in
the tenth episode. These aspects of the plot would have evoked the first
use of poison gas as a weapon of war by the Germans in the spring of
1915, just a few months prior to the filming of these episodes. Similarly,
the oversize cannon that the villain Satanas uses to blow up a Parisian
cabaret would certainly conjure up the “Big Bertha” used in battle for the
first time in the First World War. And finally, the exploding ship from
which Irma narrowly escapes death (for which Feuillade appears to have
used actual newsreel footage of the war) would have reminded audiences
of the sinking of the Lusitania, the British passenger ship bombed by the
Germans, also in the spring of 1915, which killed some 1400 civilians.
But the serial’s most pointed allusion to the Great War occurs in its
almost obsessive allusions to fathers, either actual pères-de-famille, or men
who could potentially father children with the hundreds of thousands of
women left partnerless as a result of the war, contributing to the much-
discussed anxiety over declining birthrates in France at the time (see
Cole 1996). We learn in the first moments of the first episode, and are
reminded several times thereafter, that one of the central characters,
Mazamette, is a single father of three small boys. (Of course, Mazamette’s
single status raises the question of the absent mother, presumably dead,
but it is Mazamette’s status as a father that is repeatedly emphasized in
the films.) Mazamette’s lapse, and later relapse, from respectability and
righteousness into a life of crime is motivated by his need to provide for
his young sons, as he reminds Philippe by brandishing a photograph
of himself with his progeny at several opportune moments throughout
the serial. Then too, the serial’s morally upright hero, the investigative
journalist Philippe Guérande, lives at home with his widowed mother,
while identifying with his deceased father through his paternalistic
treatment of Mazamette, which includes boxing his ears when he
disapproves of his behavior; showing him a moralistic passage from La
Fontaine’s Fables when Mazamette threatens to return to his criminal
ways; and bestowing his blessing upon him when he wishes to marry.
And finally, Irma Vep, a foundling, appears to be seeking a father figure
in her liaisons with the succession of Grand Vampires, gang leaders with
whom she invariably falls in love. The persistence of these images points
to a cultural preoccupation with fathers at a time when many more of
them were going off to the front than were coming back—in the first
four months of the war alone, France had lost about 850,000 men, who
were either dead, wounded, missing in action, or taken prisoner (Cobban
1990: 111).
Absent fathers are figured throughout the films by means of a recurring
image, that of the severed head, which appears in several guises. Indeed,
the serial is capped by the title of the first episode, “La tête coupée” (The
Severed Head). In this episode, the connection between the image of the
severed head and fatherhood is established metonymically, as the film’s
first mention of the missing head of a man decapitated by the vampire
gang is sandwiched between two scenes that allude to fathers. The
mention of the severed head is preceded by a scene in which Mazamette
shows Philippe a photograph of himself with his three children, along
with his wet-nurse bill; and it is followed by Philippe’s return home to bid
farewell to his widowed mother before embarking upon the investigation
(the widow’s mourning dress signaling the loss of her husband, Philippe’s
father).
The image of the severed head also appears in the metonymic form of a
hat. Mazamette spends a brief period as a mortician, in an effort to reform
his errant ways. As proof of his newfound trustworthiness, he shows
Philippe a note (episode 3) that reads “Pompes Funèbres municipales.
Certificat. Nous certifions que M. Mazamette Oscar-Cloud s’est toujours
montré un employé dévoué et ponctuel au sujet duquel nos usagers n’ont
jamais formulé la moindre plainte” (Municipal funeral home certificate.
We certify that M. Oscar-Cloud Mazamette has proved to be a devoted
and punctual employee, about whom our clients have never made the
slightest complaint). Of course, the joke here is that the beneficiaries of
Mazamette’s services would not be able to complain even if they wanted
to, given their posthumous state. We are reminded of their presence later
in the serial when we again see the top hat that emblematizes Mazamette’s
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career as a mortician. In the sixth episode, “Les Yeux qui fascinent”

(Hypnotic Eyes), the top hat is displayed in a glass case on Mazamette’s
mantelpiece, a constant reminder, within the diegesis, of his decision
to follow the path of moral rectitude in becoming an honest working
man, but also a symbolic reminder of the dead the film cannot mention
explicitly (this silencing aptly invoked in the name of one of the vampires,
“le Père Silence” (Father Silence) (Fig. 15).
The missing member is alluded to again in the eighth episode of the
serial, titled “Le Maître de la foudre” (The Thunder Master). The episode
begins when Philippe and Mazamette inform Irma that Moréno, the
lover whom she has described as a father figure, has been executed:
Mazamette makes a slitting motion across his throat to indicate that he
has been beheaded. Then, the new Grand Vampire, Satanas, disguised as
a priest and addressed as “mon père” (my father), blows up the ship that
Vep is traveling on by firing a cannon out the window of his hotel room.
Figure 15 Mazamette’s mortician hat, Episode 6, “Les Yeux qui fascinent,” Les Vampires.
Mazamette, having been newly reunited with one of his sons, played by
the well-known child actor Bout d’Zan, goes off in search of the culprit
and discovers a hatbox which, instead of a top hat, contains a projectile
bomb. The shot of the shell in the hatbox recalls the shot of the severed
head in “The Severed Head,” creating a chain of signifiers that links the
severed head in its box in the first episode to the mortician’s hat and then
to the bomb in the hatbox in the eighth episode. When Satanas, referred
to as “le chef ”—literally, “the head”—of the vampire gang, plants a bomb
in his own top hat later in the episode, the link is reinforced. The fantasy
underlying the war was that the missing head would be recovered (as it is
in “The Severed Head”) and restored to the body familial. But as the war
progressed, the missing head in Feuillade’s serial was replaced in its box
first by a mortician’s hat, and then by a bomb: first, by a symbol of death,
and then by the agent of its own destruction.
The image of the severed head was not an innovation of the First
World War era. At the end of the nineteenth century, severed heads
were everywhere. Jean-Louis Leutrat points out that “cinema was born
when Salome was carrying around the head of John the Baptist. Heads
were falling a lot in this period, in literature, in painting, the theatre, and
even in public squares” (Leutrat 1995: 39). Referring to the widespread
perception by early film audiences that close-ups showed dismembered
bodies, Leutrat continues: “There were links in the public imagination
between the guillotine’s blade, the camera, and close-ups” (Leutrat 1995:
39). The severed head appears perhaps most insistently in the work of the
film pioneer Méliès, whose better-known titles in this vein include Un
Homme de têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads, 1898); Une Bonne farce
avec ma tête (Tit for Tat, 1903); Le Mélomane (The Melomaniac, 1903);
L’Homme à la tête de caoutchouc (The Man with the Rubber Head, 1901);
and Le Bourreau turc (The Terrible Turkish Executioner, 1904), as well
as his stage show, Le Décapité recalcitrant (The Recalcitrant Decapitated
Man).
Charles Bernheimer (1993) has argued that the castration fantasy is
a product of the decadent imagination in European culture at the end
of the nineteenth century. It is thus possible to interpret the function of
the severed head as an extension of its function in earlier decades: ever
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since Freud’s pointed equation between decapitation and castration in

his essay “The Medusa’s Head” (1959 [1922]), it has become somewhat
automatic to read these images as symbols of castration. But unlike earlier
depictions of headlessness, images of the severed head in Les Vampires
had a significance beyond that of castration: that of the father separated
from his family, through absence or death. Castration constructs the
loss, through a phantasmatic wounding, of something that never existed
except as a narcissistic projection (i.e., by giving a phallus with one hand
and taking it away with the other). On the contrary, the loss of fathers and
sons in the war was the result of very real wounding, very real slaughter
that is the unspoken and unspeakable signified underlying these images
of severed heads. The fear of castration actually covers over a deeper
fear. Freud wrote his Medusa essay in 1922 when contemplation of the
rather hypothetical prospect of castration could detract from all-too-real
encounters in the course of daily life with any of the 3.2 million Austrian
war wounded.
The castration complex is thus itself is a fetish, a substitute that both
disavows an absence (the absence of men slaughtered at war), and acts as
a memorial to that absence. A fetish erects a phantom limb where there
was none in the first place, a memorial reminding us of nothing. This is
precisely the function of the castration fantasy. As Freud observed that
sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, I am arguing that in this film serial made
during the war, a severed head is “just” a severed head—or a severed arm
or leg—and nothing less. It is my contention that what Kaja Silverman
calls “the phallic legacy” (Silverman 1992: 65) is undermined in
Feuillade’s serial not because its acephalic imagery symbolizes castration,
but because castration is merely a decoy for another loss that cannot be
acknowledged overtly.
The status of castration as a fetish is reinforced by the logic of
substitution that drives the serial’s narrative, and that also points directly
to the war. This logic of substitution manifests itself in two ways. When
Feuillade began shooting Les Vampires in the summer of 1915, he was
severely limited in his choice of actors and technicians because the
majority of male personnel had been mobilized. Those who had not yet
fought would soon be called away: several characters thus met untimely
demises when the actors playing them (such as, for example, Louis
Leubas, who played the vampire leader Satanas) had to return to battle
(Lacassin 1995: 215). Immune from conscription were Edouard Mathé,
an Australian citizen; Jean Ayme, who was Swiss (but whose character was
killed off anyway when the actor demanded a pay raise), and of course
Musidora, whose gender made her a safe bet (though only relatively so:
she was actually Feuillade’s second choice for the role of Irma Vep, and
was only called in when the first actress hired to play the part became
pregnant) (Champreux 2000: 133–42).
For very pragmatic reasons, then, the logic of substitution underwrites
the prevalence of impersonation in the serial. If these vampires do not
suck blood and have no use for fangs, coffins, or even immortality, they
do display a predilection for inhabiting other characters’ bodies. For
example, we learn at the end of the first episode that the Grand Vampire has
killed an old friend of our hero’s father and taken over his body, helpfully
providing an explanatory note: “Le véritable Docteur Nox dont j’ai pris
la personnalité est mort, assassiné par moi” (The real Dr. Nox, whose
personality I have taken over, is dead, assassinated by me). Meanwhile,
the Grand Vampire has already been using an alias to impersonate the
Comte de Noirmoutier, so his impersonation of Doctor Nox is in fact
a double impersonation. Between them, the various members of the
vampire gang, and, less frequently, the heroes Philippe and Mazamette,
impersonate some twenty different people, sometimes more than one at
a time. And in episode 6, Irma Vep herself is impersonated by a servant
working for a couple of American thieves who are in turn impersonating
other Americans. The rash of substitutions effected at the level of the
diegesis thus mirrors the substitutions among the actors necessitated
by the war. It is perhaps no wonder that, immediately after the war,
psychiatrists identified a new class of paranoid delusion, “l’illusion des
sosies” (the illusion of doubles) or Capgras syndrome, in which patients
traumatized by the loss of loved ones imagined that even survivors had
been killed or spirited away and replaced by imposters who inhabited
their bodies (Schwartz 1996: 73–76).
The episode that contains the most instances of impersonation is the
sixth, “Les Yeux qui fascinent” (Hypnotic Eyes). This episode, with its
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proliferation of substitutions, provides a particularly apt illustration of

the process whereby the loss of life is transformed filmically into the
fetishization of castration. Near the beginning of the episode, we learn
that the hypnotic eyes of the title belong to the vampires’ rival in crime,
Moréno, who has the power to hypnotize people simply by staring at
them. But this episode also suggests that there is another kind of eye with
a similar capacity to objectify those on whom it fixes its gaze: that of the
movie camera. Immediately after the scene in which Moréno hypnotizes
his housekeeper, we see Philippe and Mazamette seated in a cinema. They
are watching a newsreel entitled “L’Assassinat du Notaire, L’Enquête dans
la Forêt de Fontainebleau” (The Murder of the Notary, and Investigation
in the Fontainebleau Forest) (Fig. 16).
The illusion of a film is created by means of live actors on a stage before
the cinema audience, surrounded by a rectangular frame, meant to be
the screen. In a mise-en-abîme effect, in which we see viewers watching
Figure 16 Captured on camera, Episode 6, “Les Yeux qui fascinent,” Les Vampires.
people who are themselves engaged in looking at something, a small group

of people, including Irma Vep in male drag, intently examines the ground
beneath them. We learn that the vampire gang, returning to the scene of
their most recent crime to remove any incriminating evidence, has been
caught on camera by a roving news reporter. A movie camera then makes
a second appearance at the end of the episode, brandished by one of the
journalists who are interviewing Mazamette in his home after he has been
given a big reward for solving a crime. Mazamette shows the reporters his
mortician’s top hat displayed in a glass case on his mantelpiece, announcing,
“Devant cette modeste coiffure que je portais naguère, je proclame que si
le vice tarde parfois à être puni, la Vertu est toujours récompensée” (In
front of this modest headpiece that I once wore, I proclaim that although
vice may not always be punished, Virtue is always rewarded).
Between these two references to filmmaking, this episode of Les
Vampires displays all the hallmarks of the voyeuristic process of
“ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting
control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or
forgiveness” (Mulvey 1996: 205). In addition to the “moral” involving
punishment and reward that Mazamette trots out for the benefit of
the reporters to whom he tells his life story, we are also presented with
another morality tale. While Irma Vep is sent to search the hotel rooms
of an American couple suspected of harboring a treasure map, attention
shifts to her accomplice, the Grand Vampire posing as the Comte de
Kerlor (whose son Irma poses as before slipping back into her body-
hugging vampire suit). The Grand Vampire distracts the hotel guests with
a story about his great-grandfather in Napoleon’s army in Spain which he
reads from an account he has written entitled “Les Aventures de Gloire
et d’Amour du Capitaine de Kerlor, racontée par le Colonel Comte de
Kerlor son arrière petit-fils” (The Glorious and Romantic Adventures of
Captain Kerlor, as told by Colonel Count Kerlor, his great-grandson). We
then see footage shot on location of a soldier ordering a Spanish woman
to feed and water his horse. The woman, whose husband and brother
have been killed by the French, unleashes a bull on the soldier. The bull
chases the Frenchman, who does battle with the animal, finally stabbing
it with his sword. When the bull is dead, an intertitle informs us, “Mais
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les Kerlor ne sont pas de ceux qui tirent vengeance d’une femme” (But the
Kerlors are not the sort to take revenge on a woman).
This incongruous interlude was apparently inserted because Feuillade
had already shot the Spanish footage for another aborted film. The
sequence was fondly remembered by several of the young poets and
artists who would later become Surrealists, and who were fascinated by
bullfighting (see, for example, Michel Leiris’s preface to his 1939 L’Âge
d’homme, entitled “De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie”
[On literature as a bullfight]). Film analysts have commented on the
apparent arbitrariness of this sequence, citing it as an example of Feuillade’s
“automatic filmmaking,” a precursor to the Surrealists’ automatic writing
(Lacassin 1994: 174–75). Ado Kyrou credits Feuillade with the creation
of “collage cinématographique” (cinematic collage), prefiguring the
pictoral collages of Max Ernst (Kyrou 1985: 55). Another explanation for
the illogical nature of the sequence, however, can be found in the very
structure of trauma, in which, according to E. Ann Kaplan, “Images are
repeated but without meaning: they do not have a clear beginning, middle
and end. Rather they erupt into cinematic space, unheralded in the story
as in an individual’s consciousness” (Kaplan 2001: 204). When read as a
symptom of trauma, the bullfighting scene enables the Napoleonic War
to stand in for the war taking place at the time the serial was made. It
also displays a certain coherence that is in keeping with the logic of the
episode and, ultimately, of the whole serial.
The bullfighting sequence’s narrative drive is provided by a woman’s
act of betrayal toward a man, which provokes a desire for punishment.
This scenario prefigures the American woman’s betrayal of her husband
to the police, who arrest him and give the substantial reward for locating
the criminal to Mazamette, which prompts the barrage of reporters to
film his moralistic account of the events leading up to the arrest. Earlier
in the episode, we see the American man on horseback arguing with his
wife, who is standing beside him, and whose look of petulance provides
the first sign of the rebellion that will result in her “betrayal” of him. The
bull sequence begins with a nearly identically staged shot of the Spanish
woman standing beside the horse-riding French officer, with a look of
defiance on her face.
The desire for revenge, provoked by these apparent acts of feminine

betrayal, is always gallantly suppressed, as in the examples cited above,
as well as in the last episode of the serial, in which Irma is finally killed
off—but by a woman, thus fulfilling a male revenge fantasy without
actually incurring masculine guilt. Indeed, the justification for these acts
of revenge often falters upon even cursory examination. For example,
the American woman’s act of “betrayal” consists in opening the door
when the police arrive—but the role she plays in her husband’s arrest
is questionable, when we consider that her husband, named Raphael
Norton but posing as a man named Horatio Werner, has already raised
suspicion about his identity by neglecting to remove his large insignia
ring engraved prominently with the initials “R.N.” Nonetheless, this
man is shown making a strangling motion directed at his wife when
he is finally arrested, implying that she is entirely to blame for his fate.
Similarly, although it is suggested that the Spanish woman’s act of
unleashing the bull on the fictional Comte de Kerlor’s grandfather ought
really to be a punishable offense (were the Kerlors not such a noble and
gentlemanly breed), we in fact learn that the woman is doing nothing
more than avenging the deaths of her father and brother at the hands of
the French.
Irma Vep, too, undergoes a similar transformation from victim to
perpetrator in this episode. In the penultimate scene, after the American
thieves have been arrested but before Mazamette is visited by journalists,
we see Irma with her new lover, Moréno, the arch rival of the vampire
gang. No longer in male drag, but instead wearing a woman’s suit inspired
by men’s fashions complete with fitted blazer and necktie, she writes,
under Moréno’s hypnotic influence, a confession of all her crimes. In the
original script for this episode, however, the letter that Irma writes is the
following: “Je suis une enfant trouvée. On m’a appelée Irma Vep parce que
ce nom est l’anagramme de Vampire. L’homme qui m’a élevée m’a appris
à voler et à tuer. Naguère, il exerçait sur moi un ascendent irresistible.
Maintenant, je n’ai plus peur de lui” (I am a foundling. I was named Irma
Vep because this name is an anagram of Vampire. The man who raised me
taught me to steal and kill. He used to exercise an overwhelming influence
on me, but I am no longer afraid of him). (The version of Les Vampires
on which this discussion is based was restored by Jacques Champreux,
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Feuillade’s grandson, who reconstructed the intertitles after consultation

with Musidora and others directly involved in the making of the film
[see Bastide 1988].) In the trajectory from script to screen, Irma’s account
of victimization is thus transformed into a confession of crime. Moréno
seems satisfied by Irma’s confession and reasserts his control over her by
ordering her to murder her former lover, the Grand Vampire, which she
does, and for which she receives an embrace.
Musidora herself referred to her character’s behavior in a mocking
tone that underscores Irma’s exaggerated culpability: “Je m’accuse . . .
voici mes forfaits. . . . Ce matin, j’ai tué d’un coup de revolver à bout
portant mon dernier amant, le grand Vampire, l’élégant acteur Jean
Ayme—pour vivre ma vie avec un bandit de plus d’envergure” (I confess.
. .; these are my crimes. This morning, I shot and killed my former lover,
the Great Vampire, played by the elegant actor Jean Ayme, in order to
spend my life with a more attractive bandit) (Musidora 1984: 18). The
culpability projected onto this female character is the guilt of survivors,
of men who did not fight in the war, or those who did fight and lived to
tell about it. Irma Vep narrowly escapes death in several episodes of Les
Vampires so that viewers might have the continued pleasure of watching
her undergo yet another near miss. Here is Musidora again describing
a typical day’s work: “Ainsi, hier un train a passé sur mon corps avec
52 wagons . . . et le bruit infernal des roues, les tourbillons de vent et la
vitesse accélérée font que je ne recommencerai certainement pas cette
performance” (Yesterday, a 52-car train went over my body at great speed
. . . with infernal clattering of wheels, accelerated speed, and great gusts of
wind. I am not in any hurry to repeat that performance) (Musidora 1984:
19). The “crime” of which most women were implicitly deemed guilty in
wartime was not castration, but rather the fact of not having had to risk
their lives in combat.
In film, both crime and punishment are often displaced onto the
female body. These scenarios of feminine misbehavior and masculine
desire for punishment rehearse the voyeuristic process of assigning
blame to women for sexual difference: of imagining, in other words, that
they are former men who have brought about their own fall from grace.
This phantasmatic vision of women as modified men is part and parcel
of the castration fantasy, and is figured in the image of Irma Vep in
male drag. This instance of feminine cross-dressing is a disavowal of her

difference, covering over an absence with a surface sheen as distracting
as that created by the same character’s sleek, shiny body stocking, or the
glass case in which Mazamette keeps his mortician’s hat. The hat itself is
a metonymy of death contained safely on Mazamette’s mantelpiece, just
as the castration fantasy itself covers over, with a dazzling theoretical
gloss, the reality of death on the battlefields. (It is almost as though she
is aware of the links between the image of the severed head and the
objectification of women in film when, in the fourth episode, in response
to an invitation from an elderly man to accompany him to the movies,
Irma stabs him in the head with a hatpin. On the cinema bill: “Le Grand
Couronné—Documentaire d’actualités” [The Great Crowned Head—
Newsreel].)
The cut-up, or episodic, nature of the serial form itself reinforces the
fetishistic emphasis on fragmentation in the titles of the two episodes on
which I have been focusing so far, “La tête coupée” and “Les Yeux qui
fascinent.” In addition to evoking the recently developed film technique
of the close-up, the bodily part-objects that pervade the serial suggest the
carnage being created on not-so-distant battlefields, from which so many
fathers (and sons and brothers) would not be returning. But one instance
of dismemberment, or near-dismemberment, which occurs during the
reunion between Mazamette and his son Eustache in the eighth episode,
fulfills a somewhat different function. When the rambunctious little
boy is expelled from school for bad behavior, his father initially greets
him with stern disapproval, but this negative emotion soon dissolves
into paternal affection. Mazamette immediately includes the boy in his
crime-fighting capers, and the two set out in matching outfits, ready
for adventure. After helping his father locate the hideout of the Grand
Vampire and narrowly avoiding the exploding hat-bomb, Eustache poses
as a street urchin begging for money door-to-door. The boy takes out
a gun and aims at the vampire, but misses, and ends up shooting his
father in the nose. Despite their mishaps, Eustache and Mazamette have
nevertheless managed to get the Grand Vampire arrested, and, overjoyed,
Mazamette leans down to kiss his son, but his injured nose gets in the
way. The boy looks straight at the camera and laughs (this rupture of the
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diegesis evoking the well-known child actor’s background in vaudeville),

clasping his hands together in a triumphant gesture.
This scene is actually too Oedipal to be Oedipal. And as tempting as it
may be to think of the Wolf Man with his nose fetish, this would be too
arbitrary an association. The important thing about this exchange between
father and son is that it does not end here. After further adventures with
the vampires, Mazamette receives a visit from Philippe and his mother
(whose widow’s garb reinforces the apparent Oedipal significance of
Mazamette’s shooting by his son). Showing Eustache a newspaper article
declaring the demise of the vampire gang and warning him, “C’est comme
ça qu’on finit quand on travaille mal à l’école” (that’s what happens to
people who do not work hard in school), Mazamette assumes the
paternal role toward his son that Philippe has until now fulfilled toward
him. Mazamette leans over to kiss his son again, repeating his earlier
failed attempt, once again hurting his nose and provoking uproarious
laughter from the boy. But Mazamette makes one more attempt, this time
succeeding in kissing the boy, who finally responds with affection. The
nose wound does not ultimately prevent Mazamette from asserting his
paternal role—that of provider of unconditional love.
In addition to Mazamette’s reunion with his son, the serial’s final
episodes also attempt to reaffirm the integrity of the nuclear family with
Philippe’s marriage, the announcement of Mazamette’s engagement to a
widowed housekeeper, and the marriage of Irma Vep. The reinstatement
of the nuclear family, headed by a man, staves off the acephalic threat,
pushing back the nagging suspicion of a “lack at the heart of all subjectivity”
(Silverman 1992: 4). The final episode’s title, “Les noces sanglantes”
(The bloody nuptials), while referring explicitly to the excesses of Irma’s
bohemian wedding celebration and its culmination in her death, can also
be read in relation to the traditional marriage convention’s demand for a
bloody sheet as a confirmation of paternity, in which the bride’s virginity
is affirmed at the very moment of its dissolution.
But even these insistent images of familial cohesion cannot entirely
obscure the specter haunting the serial, the very present absence buried
deep within it. As “in mechanized warfare, machine-gun operators kill
without seeing any corpses” (Kittler 1999: 131), so it is possible to do
another kind of shooting—of film—without showing those corpses.

When Feuillade’s serial was made, the term “vampirisme,” a term dating
from 1891, referred to “a perverse attraction for corpses” (Joubert-
Laurencin 1993: 283). A serial about vampires provided a home for
these cadavres, a way of mourning them, without having to refer to them
explicitly, as Mazamette’s career as a mortician evokes the mourning that
cannot otherwise be performed in the film. The serial thus incorporates
the dead, in both the usual and the psychoanalytic senses of the term,
encrypting them using the code of castration, the better to bury them in
glass cases, hatboxes or safes. Abraham and Torok (1994: 153; original
emphasis) describe the fetish as “the symbol of what cannot be symbolized.”
Indeed, castration here both signals and obscures the death that dare not
speak its name, of millions of (predominantly) men—fathers, but also
sons, brothers, uncles, and friends—reduced to mere parts sacrificed in
the totalizing logic of war.
The Marx Brothers’ inhuman comedy
The First World War did not bring an end to the reduction of people
to part-objects representative of a larger whole. The Second World
War brought its own forms of disavowal, as people on both sides of
the Atlantic struggled to come to terms not only with the violence of
combat, but also with the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust. During
the war, before the full extent of the destruction could be grasped, there
were nonetheless numerous indications of the human suffering that
was unfolding. Anxieties about the fate of loved ones and the threat of
further calamity that could not be articulated openly could be and were
expressed in other forms. In the United States, the genre of comedy was
one such form this expression took.
It is perhaps no accident that one of the most successful comedy acts
of this era was the Marx Brothers, the American sons of immigrants who
grew up in New York’s Lower East Side and rose through the ranks of
vaudeville before breaking into film in the early sound era. Critics are in
general agreement that the Marx Brothers’ films became “desemitized”
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over the course of the 1930s as anti-Semitism gathered force (see Musser
1991: 71). More broadly speaking, Charles Musser has argued that “the
Marx Brothers’ move to Hollywood . . . resulted in significant shifts.
Never again would ethnic interfacing be so explicitly the focus of their
humor” (Musser 1991: 71). What Musser calls “ethnic interfacing” does,
in fact, surface in the 1941 film The Big Store, though the specifically
Semitic dimension of the film goes underground. In response to the
argument that Hollywood comedy in the 1930s became “desemitized,”
Mark Winokur contends that this assessment “describes only one half of
a dialectical process in which overt ethnicity disappears at the expense
of critiques of and changes in the host culture. In the process Hollywood
culture, and mainstream culture, internalize certain ethnic dynamics as
well” (Winokur 1995: 126). I am not proposing to argue that The Big Store
displays an implicit Jewish stylistic “dynamic,” but rather that it evokes, at
the level of narrative content, the already disastrous plight of many Jews
at a time shortly before the full extent of their fate was widely known.
The United States had not yet joined the war in 1941 when The Big Store
was made, but as second-generation Jewish immigrants from Germany
and France, the Marx Brothers would have been acutely aware of the
kinds (if not the magnitude) of danger that their kinsmen in the “old
country” were facing. Simon Louvish cites an account of Harpo passing
through Germany six months after Hitler’s rise to power and feeling
distinctly uncomfortable:
Walking around the port city of Hamburg, he was horrified, he later
wrote, to see the shop windows painted over with stars of David and
daubed with the word “Jude” for Jew. “Inside,” wrote Harpo, “behind
half-empty counters, people were in a daze, cringing like they didn’t
know what hit them and didn’t know where the next blow would come
from. Hitler had been in power only six months, and his boycott was
already in full effect. I hadn’t been so wholly conscious of being a Jew
since my bar mitzvah. It was the first time since I’d had the measles that
I was too sick to eat. I got across Germany as fast as I could go. (Louvish
2003: 272)
As the Second World War approached, the Marx Brothers could have no
illusions about the worsening plight of Jews in Europe. Their films may
have increasingly downplayed their cultural roots, but, as Winokur writes,

“What critics call ‘desemitization’ is in fact a representation—across a
number of personae, films, genres, and decades—of various strategies
of incorporation and resistance” (Winokur 1995: 126). It is certainly
possible to detect examples of such incorporation and resistance in the
Marx Brothers’ films.
Although some of the biggest comic film actors in silent-era Hollywood
were immigrants to the United States (Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel,
for example, were British), it was only in the sound era that the national
and social background of actors was visible (or, rather, audible) on screen,
through accents. As Winokur has noted, “the Marx Brothers’ accents
define them regionally and economically: they are ethnic and poor, no
matter their fictional position within the story” (Winokur 1995: 138). In
many of their films, the brothers play either immigrants or fish out of
water in unfamiliar social milieux, roles that “metaphorize the immigrant
experience as a sense of placelessness. They are exposure nightmares; they
recreate the experience of being physically, socially, and intellectually
vulnerable to hostile environments that reveal the disjunction between
one’s inadequate personal resources, and the visible, yet inaccessible,
abundance of goods” (Winokur 1995: 132). The contrast between the
down-and-out and an inaccessible abundance of goods might explain the
prominence of the department store in two of the most enduring films of
the silent era: the Harold Lloyd vehicle Safety Last (Fred C. Newmeyer,
Sam Taylor, 1923), and Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). It is this tradition
that The Big Store continues.
Baudrillard has described the metonymic appeal of department stores,
with their promise of material comforts that many people could only
afford to taste in small quantities:
The big department stores, with their abundance of canned foods and
clothing, of foodstuffs and ready-made garments, are like the primal
landscape, the geometrical locus of abundance. . . . There is something
more in this piling high than the quantity of products: the manifest
presence of surplus, the magical, definitive negation of scarcity. . . . We
find here the fervid hope that there should be not enough, but too much—
and too much for everyone: by buying a piece of this land, you acquire
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the crumbling pyramid of oysters, meats, pears or tinned asparagus. You

buy the part for the whole. (Baudrillard 1998: 26)
The image of the not-quite-socially acceptable outsider in a temple of

abundance is depicted not only in The Big Store, but also more generally,
in all the films in which the Marx Brothers play social interlopers trying
to break into a milieu that is more genteel (or perhaps more Gentile)
than the one from which they originate. For example, Musser makes a
convincing case for reading Animal Crackers as a story of Jewish identity:
“The Marx Brothers are Jewish hustlers insinuating themselves into
WASP high society, itself shown to be a model of corruption and doubtful
respectability, without this elitist group realizing what is happening.
This comic premise is an aggressive assault on the exclusionary policies
being applied to Jews by WASP-dominated universities, country clubs,
and other public and private institutions” (Musser 1991: 63). Although
Musser is discussing Animal Crackers, he could be referring to any of the
Marx Brothers’ films when he observes : “The film affirms the immigrants’
ability to outfox and so adapt to the cultural and economic exigencies of
American capitalism” (Musser 1991: 70).
One of the greatest exigencies of twentieth-century capitalism was,
of course, the transformation of the means of production through
mechanization. Mechanization gave rise to its own aesthetic, which
pervaded popular culture, from Germany’s “Tiller Girls” to the assembly-
line formations of dancers in Busby Berkeley films (see Kracauer 1995
[1927]: 78–79). At least since the publication of Henri Bergson’s treatise
on laughter, Le Rire (Laughter), in La Revue de Paris in 1899, comedy has
been associated with the inhuman. The essence of comedy, according
to Bergson, is when a human assumes nonhuman characteristics: “The
comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that
aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys
the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement
without life” (quoted in Gunning 1994: 362n20). The particular form
that this “movement without life” takes is a mechanical one. The
laughter thus provoked is a product of the “natural hostility of organic
life to the machine,” as Michael North puts it (North 2009: 4). That this
idea should become so attached to the mechanical is testament to the

preponderant role assumed by machines in the era of Taylorization and
Fordism. Tom Gunning argues that Bergson’s theory reflects “a historical
phenomenon of an age saturated with the mechanical” (Gunning 1994:
362n20). Taylorization had introduced new methods of regimentation
for increasing productivity in the workplace. In this period, according
to Rob King, “cultural discourse on mechanization represented a
disavowal of the social implications of the new technologies and an
unwillingness to engage the experiences of workers, who bore the full
brunt of modernity’s impact” (King 2010: 129). As workers were being
alienated from the production process through compartmentalization
and assembly-line techniques, they were made interchangeable, “cogs
in the wheel” of industry. At the same time, automation ensured that
human workers were made increasingly redundant, in both senses of the
term.
However, despite comedy’s affinity with the mechanical, it is not a
straightforward expression of what could be called the well-oiled machine.
Some theorists are quick to point out that comedy is a function of the
failure of the mechanical, its auto-destruction. Gunning links comedy
to the “crazy” machine: “Gags are devices that explode, collapse, or fail
in some spectacular manner. The self-destructing machine provides a
vivid image of the dynamics of a gag” (Gunning 2010: 138–39). Similarly,
Jacques Rancière sees comedy, and slapstick in particular, as a celebration
of malfunction: “The machine functions as art as long as its success, and
that of its users, is also a glitch, as long as its functionality constantly turns
against itself ” (Rancière 2013: 203). If things are, according to Bill Brown,
objects that fail to do what we ask of them, then comedy is a machine
that fails to do what is asked of it (Brown 2001: 4). Slapstick, it is thus
argued, proposes a critique of the machine age, a reminder of humans’
hubristic investment in the supposed perfection of their creations. The
classic example of such a critique, Chaplin’s Modern Times, in which the
Little Tramp plays a worker caught in the gears of the assembly line on
which he repetitively tightens bolts, provides the Ur-text for readings of
cinema that link the comic with the workings of machines. Noting the
strong resemblance between a film projector and the enormous gears
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in which the Chaplin character gets caught in Modern Times, Michael

North comments:
When the beltway gobbles him up, it seems the epitome of every camera
that Chaplin ever faced, stealing his visage and stamping it as an image
on the film. Thus it seems that the iconic image of the tramp among the
gears was conceived from the beginning as an image, as an ironically
self-reflexive comment on the very process by which Modern Times was
grinding up the human being Charles Chaplin and turning him into an
aesthetic commodity. (North 2009: 187; original emphasis)
In the Society of the Spectacle, images are consumed, and the Marx
Brothers, like Chaplin, served themselves up to the masses through
the medium of film. Their work, however, adds up to far more than a
series of gags. As Rancière puts it, “Through Chaplinesque pantomime,
cinema expresses the secret nihilism that accompanies the great
mechanical faith” (Rancière 2013: 205). This nihilism is invoked in The
Big Store, which, while appearing to celebrate the cult of consumerism
and technological progress that engenders the society of consumption,
ultimately challenges the instrumental reason that underwrites both the
“great mechanical faith” and the reduction of people to part-objects in
time of war.
“Sing While You Sell”
The Big Store (Charles Reisner, 1941) was the last film the Marx Brothers
made for MGM. Even before its release, Groucho, Harpo, and Chico
announced that they would not be making another film together, though
they had a change of heart after the war, when they reunited twice more
to make A Night in Casablanca (Archie Mayo, 1946) and Love Happy
(David Miller, 1949), as well as performing occasional cameo roles in
other films and television programs. The Big Store has not had the kind
of afterlife among Marx Brothers fans that films like Duck Soup (Leo
McCarey, 1933) and A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935) have had,
and it has been largely overlooked by film scholars.
The film is set primarily in a department store that has been put
up for sale—the irony of selling the salesroom was surely not lost
on viewers. The store’s owners are musician Tommy Rogers (played
by singer Tony Martin) and his aunt Martha Phelps (played by long-
time Marx Brothers collaborator Margaret Dumont, who was always
cast as the wealthy, matronly object of Groucho’s ulteriorly motivated
affections). The store’s manager Grover (Douglas Dumbrille) is plotting
to have Rogers killed so that he can marry Phelps—who he is wooing
for her money—and gain sole ownership of the store. Suspecting
that her nephew may be in danger, Phelps hires bodyguard and
private detective Wolf J. Flywheel (Groucho) to protect him. Rogers
miraculously survives the numerous attempts on his life by the inept
henchman Grover has hired, and the plot is foiled by Flywheel and
his right-hand man Wacky (Harpo), who teams up with his long-lost
brother, Rogers’s friend Ravelli (Chico).
Like many of the Marx Brothers’ films, The Big Store is a musical,
and it is through some of the musical numbers that we get the strongest
sense of the film’s overarching themes. In the film’s first major musical
number, “Sing While You Sell” (music by Hal Borne, lyrics by Sid Kuller
and Hal Fimberg), Groucho, posing as a floorwalker—what would today
be called a manager—advises the department store employees on using
the power of song to persuade shoppers to buy the store’s products: “Sell
this weenie with Rossini / and this birdie goes with Verdi.” When he
arrives at the store’s linens department, he grabs a cotton plant and, with
a deep, booming voice meant to suggest an elderly Southern patriarch,
sings, to a banjo accompaniment, lyrics about a cotton plantation in the
deep South. The camera alights on a group of four African American
men dressed identically in straw hats and overalls clutching a cotton
plant, smiling broadly and singing about the process of turning cotton
into clothing. The scene then cuts to the rug department, where the song
continues, with Groucho, wearing a turban, being carried in a litter by
four African Americans dressed in turbans, silk jackets, and voluminous
trousers that reflect a blend of Middle Eastern and Indian influences.
The African Americans serve as catch-all signifiers of Orientalist
exoticism in the song and as no African Americans appear anywhere
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else in the film, their role seems to be that of generic “Other,” not unlike
many of the roles played by Josephine Baker. Their depiction as slaves
in the preceding scene has paved the way for their representation as
commodities whose relative “worth” can be arrived at through a process
of abstraction.
The song in which these representations appear is, of course, all
about commodity culture. Its title, “Sing while you sell,” is fairly self-
explanatory, encapsulating the advertising aesthetic, the combination
of entertainment and commodification, that would come to dominate
American culture in the twentieth century. The song’s lyrics recognize
the role of commerce in entertainment at the same time that they draw
attention to the function of popular entertainment as itself commodity in
the Society of the Spectacle. A moment of self-conscious recognition of
spectacle as product occurs in the song when Groucho stages a fashion
show in the women’s clothing department, complete with women dressed
in glamorous evening gowns, whom Groucho escorts down a sloped cat
walk while describing their outfits. When speaking of one woman’s gown,
he breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience of the black and
white film they are watching: “This is a bright red dress, but Technicolor
is soooo expensive.” After three women model gowns, Groucho himself
appears at the top of the catwalk dressed as a school boy, his hair slicked
back, wearing short trousers. He skips down the ramp while singing,
looking like a slightly disturbing, overgrown child—thus providing a
segue to the musical number’s next section, which is dominated by the
theme of childhood.
In the next segment of the song, Groucho, still dressed as a child,
greets a woman who explains that she is looking for a new bassinette for
her baby, as the one she has is “scratched”—a word that hints at possible
violence to come. The woman in the market for a new cradle exudes
traditional maternal attributes: smiling broadly, she appears gentle, warm,
and solicitous, and her position next to Groucho-as-child reinforces her
status as a mother. Groucho replies (in song) that the bassinettes they
sell come with a lullaby thrown in as a bonus. The focus then shifts to
an unsmiling woman who sings the classic lullaby “Rock-a-bye baby”
as she rocks a small cradle. The woman is the singer Virginia O’Brien,
who enjoyed a brief vogue in the early 1940s for her “deadpan singing,”
a comic performance style characterized by a complete lack of facial and
vocal expression. O’Brien drones the lullaby robotically with glazed eyes
fixed directly on the camera, and the contrast between her emotionless
delivery and that of the chirpy woman shopping for a bassinette could
not be more pointed. The greatest sense of dissonance, however, is
caused by the contrast between O’Brien’s machine-like performance and
the attributes normally associated with a lullaby—love, affection, and a
sense of security. As O’Brien continues singing, repeating the words “bye
bye baby,” her manner becomes increasingly robotic, and her “rocking”
of the cradle (more like shoving) becomes increasingly violent (Fig. 17).
The covers of the cradle are arranged so that it is not obvious whether
there is a child inside, but the possibility that there might be creates a
sense of unease. This sense of unease will be greatly reinforced a few
scenes later.
Figure 17 Virginia O’Brien, deadpan lullaby, The Big Store.

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How did you get to be an Italian?
Not long after the “Sing While you Sell” number, Groucho, Harpo, and
Chico find themselves posing as salesmen in the bed department, trying
to hawk beds that slide out of the wall or disappear into the floor. When
a large Italian immigrant family enters the showroom, Ravelli (Chico)
approaches the pater familias, who initially takes offense because he
thinks Ravelli, who speaks with a thick pseudo-Italian accent (as Chico
does in all his films), is imitating his accent. Eventually, it emerges that
Ravelli and this man, Giuseppe, know each other from the “old country,”
Naples (“I’m a same nationala like you,” Ravelli exclaims), where they
both stomped grapes to make wine. Wacky (Harpo) is brought in, and
it turns out that he, too, knows Giuseppe. The moment of recognition
and joyful reunion between Ravelli and Giuseppe in the bed department
recalls a scene in Animal Crackers, in which Chico and Groucho reveal
the “real” identity of wealthy art patron Roscoe Chandler as Abie
Kabibble, erstwhile fishmonger from the brothers’ old neighborhood.
The resemblance between the two scenes is reinforced by the fact that the
character played by Chico has the same name, Ravelli, in each film.
In Animal Crackers, Chico asks Chandler, “How did you get to be a
Chandler?” to which the man’s rejoinder is: “How did you get to be an
Italian?” Mark Winokur links this insistence on the identification of
mutual origins to the establishment of landsmannschaften, or immigrant
communities (Winokur 1995: 131), a dynamic that is also apparent in
The Big Store. After the joyful reunion of Ravelli, Giuseppe, and Wacky in
the bed department of the latter film, when the Italian family is looking at
the merchandise, Ravelli points to a bed and says, “There, you see? That’s
a safe-a place to keepa the kids,” an ostensibly helpful remark that carries
with it a hint of foreboding—why would children not be safe in their own
beds? It is at precisely this moment that Giuseppe’s wife realizes that six
of their twelve children are missing. The remaining six children begin
calling out the names of their siblings, and the noise wakes Flywheel
(Groucho), who has been napping on one of the beds. He stands up and
at first tries to convince the father that he couldn’t possibly afford to raise
twelve children on his modest salary: “It’s economically impossible for
you to have twelve children!” When the man insists that he does indeed
have twelve kids, Flywheel implies first that the man does not actually
know how many children he has, and then that he is confusing children
with grapes, adding that “You should have gone to the fruit department.”
When the man persists, Flywheel notices six blond-haired children on
the other side of the showroom, and ushers them over, announcing
triumphantly, “There you are, you came in here with twelve kids, you’re
going out with twelve kids.” The blond children’s parents then arrive
and bundle their kids off, and Giuseppe cries, “You’ve got to give-a me
twelve-a kids!” Next, a family of Chinese children in traditional dress
comes in to the accompaniment of Chinese-sounding music, and Ravelli
announces, “These are your kids,” which provokes more consternation.
Continuing the Disney-themed “It’s-a-Small-World” display of ethnic
diversity, a large American Indian family in full regalia then enters to
the sound of tom-tom drums, and Ravelli again says, “Hey, there’s-a your
kids” (Fig. 18). In the general mayhem that ensues, most of the children
Figure 18 In the bed department, The Big Store.

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have climbed onto various items of furniture, and Wacky presses all the
buttons on the panel that controls the functioning of the beds, which
slide in and out of walls, alternately revealing the missing children (who
are shown lying on a multi-story bunk bed as it rises out of the floor).
This scene is extraordinary for its ethnic stereotyping, and for the way it
blatantly proposes that children are interchangeable. Appearing not long
after the eerie, robotic lullaby scene in which the deadpan singer appears
to want to get rid of her baby, the implications of this scene of children
gone missing are chilling. Throughout the 1930s and well into the 1940s,
the United States was subject to recurring polio epidemics, during which
parents feared the very real possibility that their children would be, at best,
bedridden, and, at worst, killed by the illness (see Shell 2005). However,
added to this ongoing concern, in the early 1940s, was another: the image
of hidden children inevitably evoked what was then still referred to in the
United States as the “war in Europe.” I would suggest that, although the
missing children are from an Italian family, there are enough parallels
with the Marx Brothers themselves to encourage viewers to envision the
missing children as Jewish, like those who would have emigrated to the
United States before the outbreak of war, or indeed, those who stayed
behind in Europe and had gone into hiding (see Klarsfeld 1996). In the
French context, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (2004: 4) notes “the creation of
a social climate (especially regarding children) which was disturbingly
hospitable to the Nazi genocide.” Implicit in The Big Store is the idea of
the Marx Brothers themselves as children of a large family of immigrants,
an idea that is reinforced by the fact that Wacky and Ravelli turn out
to be long-lost brothers. (It is also significant, in this respect, that the
prospective buyers of the department store are brothers.) The idea of
siblings is explicitly invoked in the “Marx Brothers” brand, by means of
which their films were conceived and marketed. Moreover, in the first
scene in which Groucho appears near the beginning of the film, we see
his own bed at the detective agency spring up and disappear into the wall
when he turns his residence into a place of business. Both this scene and
the memory of Groucho dressed as a schoolboy in the “Sing While You
Sell” number linger in the mind throughout the sequence set in the bed
department.
Themes established in these earlier scenes are developed in the film’s

second big musical number, which takes place near the end of the film.
Sung by crooner Tony Martin in the role of Tommy Rogers, “Tenement
Symphony” was written by the same team that wrote “Sing while you sell”
(music by Hal Borne, lyrics by Syd Kuller and Ray Golden). Backed by an
orchestra and chorus both composed entirely of children, Martin sings
about a range of families, all of whose names suggest different ethnicities
(e.g., Cohens, Campbells, Vermicellis), who, together, make up the
“tenement symphony” of the song’s title. The tenement in question, we
learn, is located in the east side of New York—clearly the Lower East
Side, home to European immigrants who worked predominantly in the
Garment District (such as the Marx Brothers’ father, Samuel), rather
than the more gentrified Upper East Side. Martin sings of children from
the various immigrant groups each practicing a musical instrument
on a different floor of the tenement, an image that is reinforced by the
child orchestra playing the very music he is singing. This image would
seem to promote an assemblage of different identities, rather than a
homogeneous group, but this idea is quickly dismissed in the chorus,
where it is described as a “grand illusion.” The “grand illusion” evokes
the 1937 Jean Renoir film of the same name, which was set during the
First World War but spoke very much to the concerns of the period
in which it was made. In Renoir’s film, the “grand illusion” is national
identity itself, which erects imaginary borders between groups of people.
“Tenement Symphony” reverses this idea, suggesting that what is illusory
is the possibility that national identities can be effaced in order to form a
unified whole, however desirable this might be. In contrast with Renoir’s
film, the song Tony Martin sings reinforces the differences among groups
(the Cohens, the Campbells, the Vermicellis)—to the detriment of the
differences among individuals within those groups.
Another scene in the film appears to reinforce this ambivalent dynamic
of give and take, of individual and group identity. In this scene, Harpo
finds himself in a department within the store that displays furnishings
and decorative objects in the Louis XVI style. He swaps clothes with a
mannequin dressed in eighteenth-century finery, complete with knee
breeches and powdered wig, so the mannequin ends up dressed in Harpo’s
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trademark dark suit and hat, while Harpo wears the mannequin’s silk
brocades. Spying a harp positioned in front of two mirrors that reflect him
at an angle, Harpo sits down to play. Eventually, however, the “reflections”
take on lives of their own, first playing different chords from the ones that
Harpo has played, and then playing different instruments, a violin and
cello, that accompany the harp. This scene is very similar to the famous
scene in Duck Soup in which Groucho’s movements are mirrored by what
at first appears to be his own reflection, but which is eventually shown to
be an identically dressed Harpo. What initially seems to be a reflection
of sameness turns out to be an expression of difference: what both these
scenes demonstrate is the undermining of uniformity, the breakdown of
the logic of substitution. Winokur, however, sees it differently:
The mirror scene in Duck Soup is a countermoment in this filmic tendency

to valorize uniformity in physical motion. It opposes Leni Riefenstahl’s
and Busby Berkeley’s use of uniformity in film in the 1930s, which
emphasized the way in which large groups should work together—like
clockwork, like machines—for the greater good. . . . In contradistinction
to the musical and the crowd, the mirror scene allegorizes uniformity as
an escape from historical necessity into the fairyland of aesthetics and
play. It metaphysicalizes the search for the landsman, becoming a fiction
of redemption through self-multiplication and fragmentation. (Winokur
1995: 159)
While it is true that the mirror scene in Duck Soup is indeed a

countermoment in the trend toward uniformity in film entertainment, I
would argue that any “redemption” does not come through multiplication
of the self, but rather through the breakdown of such multiplication.
In both the Duck Soup mirror scene and The Big Store, this is a case
of the false double, or false multiple, rather than a straightforward
doppelgänger. The humor, as well as the subversiveness, of both scenes
derives from the nonidentity of the “mirror” images. Significantly, in the
bed scene when Groucho and Chico propose children from different
families to replace the Italian family’s missing members, the parents
adamantly reject the logic of substitution, insisting on their own,
noninterchangeable, children. Harpo’s mirror scene, then, ultimately
exposes the flaw in the logic of substitution, showing that the supposed
replica is not, actually, identical to the other.
It is perhaps no accident that the pivotal mirror scene in The Big Store
features Harpo rather than one of his siblings. The silent, wide-eyed Marx
brother has been the object of much scholarly debate. As Simon Critchley
asks, “What or who is [Harpo]? He is a fool. And what is a fool? A fool
is a thing—an uncanny mixture of perversity and simplicity, of wisdom
and stupidity, of familiarity and strangeness—who speaks the truth,
often by remaining mute” (Critchley 1999: 231). Or as Paul Flaig puts
it, “Harpo is an automatic object-machine that converts both the world
and himself into a polymorphously perverse source of jouissance” (Flaig
2011: 100). Aptly enough, one such source of jouissance is none other
than a cash register. In The Cocoanuts (Robert Florey and Joseph Santley,
1929), Harpo repeatedly pushes shut a cash register drawer with his
lower abdomen so that it will make a particular sound again and again,
smiling ecstatically as he does so. This suggestive gesture is situated at
the intersection of sexual and commodity fetishism, both of which are
functions of what Žižek calls a symbolic fiction. Žižek quotes Groucho in
Duck Soup saying, “Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?” and
then explains that the eyes “see” the truth (in the case of the fetish, that
the woman has no phallus), but the story the fetishist tells himself is that
the woman does have a phallus, and that phallus happens to look like a
shoe, or a glove, or a petticoat. Expanding on this idea, Žižek argues:
What a cynic who “believes only his eyes” misses is the efficiency of
the symbolic fiction, the way this fiction structures our experience of
reality. The same gap is at work in our most intimate relationship to
our neighbors: we behave as if we do not know that they also smell bad,
secrete excrement, and so on—a minimum of idealization, of fetishistic
disavowal, is the basis of our coexistence. (Žižek 2006: 347; original
emphasis)
The story the fetishist tells himself is, as we have seen, the story of
castration (or, in the case of Freud in interwar Vienna, the story of the
castration complex). Žižek repeats his example in at least three different
books, but in fact, it is Chico, disguised as Groucho, who utters these
words (which are actually “Who you gonna believe, your eyes or my
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words?”). It is as though Žižek is illustrating his own anecdote, disavowing

the difference between Chico and Groucho, and asking us to believe his
(Žižek’s) words rather than our own ears. In any case, the metonymic
logic of the fetish owes much to the logic of supplementarity. The sexual
fetish is compensation in displaced form for a perceived or invented lack,
as in commodity fetishism the commodity is compensation in displaced
form for a perceived or invented lack (the lack of the magical object that
will bring the purchaser perfect happiness). This displacement is a form
of the symbolic fiction of which Žižek speaks, and to which Groucho
alludes in Duck Soup when, referring to the war between Freedonia and
neighboring Sylvania, he says, “I’m sick of messages from the front. Don’t
we ever get any messages from the side?” Displacement is precisely that:
a way of conveying messages from “the side,” that is, indirectly. It is the
symbolic fiction that accompanies disavowal: phalluses for limbs torn off
in battle, sultans for slaves, Italian children lost in the bed department
for Jewish children hidden (or, much worse, not hidden) from the Nazis.
Figure 19 A Night at the Opera.

In two earlier Marx Brothers’ films, such displacements foreshadow

the atrocities to come. In the final scene of Animal Crackers (Victor
Heerman, 1930), Harpo walks around a crowded room spraying a toxic
substance that knocks everyone unconscious, finally turning the spritzer
on himself so that he can collapse on the floor beside an attractive (and
unconscious) young woman. In light of the gas “showers” that sprayed
deadly fumes in the Nazi camps, this scene is particularly chilling. It also
recalls the scene in Les Vampires in which the assembled guests at a party
are felled by poison gas, as well as the famous cabin-room scene in A
Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935), in which a tiny room is stuffed
with more and more people who eventually come spilling out of it like
objects from an overstuffed closet (Fig. 19). This Medusa-like profusion
of bodies, which prefigures the postwar photographs of bodies piled up in
the death camps, is the counterpart, the flipside, of the fragmented body,
and the logical conclusion of the dehumanizing reduction of people to
part-objects, interchangeable synecdoches of a larger group.
4
Objects of Desire
As the previous chapter demonstrated, the fetishistic logic of substitution

in which one thing stands in for another underpins the construction
of group identities, which work by disavowing differences among
individuals and imposing them among (or, usually, between) groups.
When applied to human beings, such logic is inevitably objectifying.
The disavowal of sexual difference lies at the heart of the fetish and is,
at least in a developmental sense, the model for other identifications of
difference. Masculine articulations of heterosexual desire for women
have dominated cultural production because of increased access to the
means of expression by male writers, artists, and filmmakers. These
articulations have often taken objectifying forms, and this objectification
finds its symbolic force in the construction of women as objects, things
that can be manipulated—erected, dissected, dismantled, and rebuilt—
by men.
From its inception, cinema has been an unusually effective medium
for the global dissemination of gendered stereotypes. From the dancers
who performed little more than a decorative function in Méliès’s films,
to the traditional gender roles prevalent in early cinema more generally,
images of women that both reflected and reinforced the power differential
between genders were disseminated all over the world (see Bean and
Negra 2002). From creating images of women to creating women, it is
but a small step. The gendered representations that together comprise
what Mulvey (1975) calls “to-be-looked-at-ness,” or the objectification
of women on screen, have always been an integral part of the global
cinematic machine, and the logic of supplementarity that characterizes
globalization is the very logic that underwrites the prosthetization of
women as objects of the male gaze. In the machine age, the ability to make
things on a mass scale inspired fantasies of the Pygmalion-like creation
of women tailor-made to cater to the whims of their makers. In the digital

era, such objects of desire can be made from strings of zeroes and ones.
This chapter thus examines the discourse of corporal manipulation
that objectifies women, representing them as bodies to be dissected and
scrutinized. It also examines the flipside of the same discourse, which sees
women as fantasy objects, at first mechanical, then digital, constructed by
the men who have designs on them. The first part of the chapter focuses
on the French tradition of constructions of the feminine, which can be
traced back to the earliest days of cinema. The second part of the chapter
looks at Hollywood iterations of this phenomenon in the virtual era.
Cut/Splice
In 1898, the Parisian surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen had himself filmed

while performing a hysterectomy. His intention, at least initially, was to
use this film, one of a group of six thought to be the first surgical films
ever made, for training purposes. However, by 1907, this film was making
the rounds of traveling fairground film exhibitors, where it was shown
in a tent made up to look like an operating theater, replete with wax
anatomical figures, into which viewers were ushered by actors dressed as
nurses and hospital interns (Meusey 1995: 123–24).
Doyen’s films raise several issues concerning the often imbricated
roles of gender and technology in film history. The connection between
the birth of cinema and medical science is not limited to the shared
billing between cinema and the new technology of X-rays as fairground
attractions at the turn of the twentieth century. Auguste Lumière devoted
much of his life to medical research, and it was this research, rather than
the invention of cinema, that he apparently considered his crowning
achievement (Cartwright 1995: 1). It is well known that the Lumière
brothers refused to sell the patent to their innovative camera-projector
to the likes of Georges Méliès at the historic first public film screening in
December 1895 precisely because they felt that the new medium’s greatest
potential lay in its scientific applications rather than in entertainment.
But what happens when science itself becomes a form of entertainment?
Objects of Desire 131
Is it an accident that this convergence so often exploits sexual difference,

indeed relies upon sexual difference for its entertainment value?
In Sexual Visions, Ludmilla Jordanova contends that medicine is
“allied with privacy” while images of women are associated with public
culture (Jordanova 1989: 134–36). It is precisely when medical science
represents the female body that this private discipline is often turned
into public spectacle. For example, Lisa Cartwright has pointed out that,
although the inventor of the X-ray, Wilhelm Roentgen, X-rayed his own
hand, it was the X-ray image of his wife’s hand, taken in 1896, that was
widely circulated in at first the medical, and then the popular press:
“Among the many physicians who immediately repeated Roentgen’s
experiments, a woman’s hand, sometimes captioned as ‘a lady’s hand’ . . .
became a popular test object” (Cartwright 1995: 115). Rae Beth Gordon
has observed that “the public of 1895 was fascinated by the body and
all of its phenomenal pathologies” (Gordon 2001: 188). We might ask to
what extent this interest in pathologies real and imagined existed within
a gendered framework. Méliès’s Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-
Houdin (The Vanishing Lady, 1896), one of the best-known “trick” films
of all time, relies for its entertainment value on both the gender of the
disappearing subject, played by Jehanne d’Alcy, and her reappearance as a
skeleton, which gives the magician a fright. This hide-and-seek anatomy
lesson perfectly emblematizes the popular combination of masculine
scrutiny (masquerading as “x-ray vision”) and sensationalized eroticism
that characterized early film experiments.
The early operation film can be situated in the context of the
nineteenth-century passion for dissecting women. Elza Adamowicz
(2001: 22) describes a turn-of-the-century fairground exhibit displaying
“the waxwork of a cateract operation where the disembodied hand of
an assistant holds open the eye of an apparently compliant woman that
the director’s scalpel prepares to pierce.” Images of similarly “compliant”
women being fragmented and scrutinized were also prevalent in the
more elite arts of painting and literature. Elaine Showalter has noted that
men “gain control over an elusive and threatening femininity by turning
the woman into a ‘case’ to be opened or shut. The criminal slashes with
his knife. The scientist and doctor open the woman up with the scalpel
or pierce her with the stake. The artist or writer penetrates the female
case with sharp-honed imagery and the phallic pen” (Showalter 1991:
134). To this list, it is no great leap to add the filmmaker, whose tendency
to divide the female body into part-objects has been widely commented
upon. Richard Abel has pointed out that when Dr. Doyen took his camera
operator to court for selling the operation films as his own, “the court
ruled that, because he had ‘first arranged his subject and planned the
setting,’ Doyen was the principal author of these films, which were indeed
worthy of legal protection. Within the framework provided by education,
surgeon and filmmaker became analogous, not only as teachers, but as
artists” (Abel 1990: 87). It is not necessary to rehearse the rather obvious
parallels between filmic cutting and splicing on the one hand, and
dissecting and manipulating (in particular, women’s) body parts on the
other, in order to appreciate the relevance of these operations for film
studies, even from the very beginning: the first known example of a cut
from one shot to another occurred in The Execution of Mary Queen of
Scots (Alfred Clark, 1895), at the precise moment of decapitation (Salt
1996: 171).
One difficulty posed by these films is analogous to that experienced
by literary scholars who wish to do a Freudian analysis of Sophocles’s
Oedipus Rex: the almost unavoidable risk of descending into tautology.
What does it mean to say that these images are “about penetrating the
female body” when they are so obviously about penetrating the female
body? One approach to the question might be to read the operation
scenes as a projection of the castration fantasy onto women’s bodies:
images of women being cut open are the closest thing to performing this
fantasmatic operation while remaining within the bounds of suspended
disbelief. In this sense (when it relies upon sexual difference for its
entertainment value) it is not inappropriate to regard the operation film
as a kind of slasher film, and surgery as the new pornography. Carol
Clover has pointed out that in the slasher film the victim “is at her most
effective in a state of undress, borne down upon by a blatantly phallic
murderer” (Clover 1987: 206).
The tradition within French cinema of films that show women being
cut (almost always by men) extends throughout the twentieth century, but
was particularly prevalent in the 1960s. One of the most notable examples
of the genre is Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes without a Face, Georges Franju,
1960), in which a surgeon kidnaps young women and removes their faces
so he can graft them onto his daughter, who has been disfigured in an
accident. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), Lemmy Caution shoots
holes through the breasts of a naked woman in a pinup picture, illustrating
the penetrating gaze of the shooting gun/camera and of the man who
eyes the woman holding the picture. Later in the film, a group of male
scientists files past a larger-than-life-sized photo of a naked woman in a
display case. Finally, women’s status as a conglomeration of part-objects
is illustrated in the film when a woman stands on a conference table, only
her legs visible in the frame, as she is stared at matter-of-factly by a group
of lab-coated scientists. Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968), too, literalizes
the concept of cutting, in the famous scene in which little doll-creatures
hurl hundreds of tiny blades into the flesh of the eponymous heroine. (In
addition, for a discussion of the fragmentation of women in Truffaut’s
films around the same time, see Dalmolin 2000.)
Coming full circle, in a more recent film, cutting is overtly represented
as a form of popular entertainment that harks back to the Belle Epoque.
Patrice Leconte’s La Fille sur le pont (The Girl on the Bridge, 1999) depicts
the romance between a knife-thrower and his assistant who, although
she escapes serious injury, almost always gets nicked, in scenes that are
invariably followed by a tender ritual of bandaging the wound. Another
woman, a bride in full wedding regalia, is not so lucky (or perhaps, the
film suggests, she is even luckier): she gets stabbed in the thigh while
spinning on a wheel, blood seeping through her formerly virginal
white gown in a none-too-subtle image of deflowering. This film is only
making explicit, indeed playing on, a long tradition of eroticized cutting
of women in film history. Certainly a great many science fiction films,
including English-language films made by French directors such as Alien
Resurrection (1997), directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and The Fifth Element
(1997), directed by Luc Besson, depict female characters splayed out on
operating tables. These two films represent both strands of the tendency
to make and unmake women on screen: in Besson’s film, the “perfect”
creature Leelou is created by a team of scientists out of a fragment of
DNA, and in the Jeunet film, Ripley is subjected to a Cesarean-like

operation in order to remove an alien creature from her abdomen.
The late-twentieth-century films described above have their
antecedents in the Belle Epoque, particularly in the work of Méliès. As
film history has shown, Méliès quickly recovered from his failure to secure
the patent to the Lumière Brothers’ film projector, going on to make some
500 films, including several that depicted the construction from ordinary
objects of artificial women, who were then brought to life Pygmalion-
like. These Pygmalion films, and films that show the dissection of
women, are products of the same patriarchal discourse in which women
are transformed into the objects of technological manipulation, or made
and unmade. Such a discourse merges anatomical scrutiny and erotic
spectacle, and its strong presence in films made during the Belle Epoque
would serve as a model for films made throughout the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries.
Rae Beth Gordon suggests that Méliès may have been “consciously
drawing on medical science for his images of dismemberment,
multiplication of the self, and convulsive movement” (Gordon 2001:
176–77), and that the filmmaker “was not unaware that these cinematic
images might well remind spectators of [hysteria and epilepsy]” (Gordon
2001: 177). However, there is a crucial distinction between portrayals
of dismembered men and dismembered women in Méliès’s films. As
we saw earlier, the magician figure himself is shown “losing his head”
on several occasions. However, the magician always removes his own
head, demonstrating that he is in control, whereas women’s bodies are
manipulated by the magician. Similarly, women do not dress and undress
themselves, but are often shown having clothes thrown on them or
taken off them magically by the magician, in another figure of making
and unmaking. Méliès “makes women” of them, for example, when, in
Les Quat’cents farces du diable (The Merry Frolics of Satan, 1906), the
wizard Alcofribas removes the outer garments of his seven, apparently
male, wizardly assistants—the Seven Deadly Sins—revealing them to be
women. It can also be argued that Méliès was “creating” women from
the (perhaps apocryphal) moment his camera jammed in the Place de
l’Opéra, with the subsequent jump cut showing men appearing to change
sex. The “construction” of women is at the heart of the castration fantasy:

women are not simply born as women, but instead fashioned into women
through dismemberment (according to this fantasy, anatomically correct
women do not exist prior to their dismemberment: it is castration that
makes women of them).
The “making and unmaking” of women in films from the Belle Epoque
to the present confers a kind of power to men that can be undermined
by the presence of actual women. Women in Méliès’s films are largely
divided between those who pose a threat—witches, evil fairies, nefarious
goddesses inclined to gobble up men—and those who are entirely in thrall
to a man: magician’s assistants (conjured out of thin air, made to levitate,
or brought to life from an inanimate state); Blue Beard’s dead wives
hanging from nooses; benevolent sea goddesses; and celestial creatures
bearing aloft stars and planets. Both types of woman feature in one of the
last films Méliès ever made, entitled A la Conquête du Pôle (The Conquest
of the Pole, 1912), which proposes two starkly dichotomized alternatives
for women: as celestial helpmeets ushering the male explorers’ space ships
along, or as intrusive feminists who want to muscle in on the action. The
latter are masculine, trouser-clad caricatures, suggesting that adventure
and initiative are the antithesis of femininity, which is allied with ethereal
affability and the desire to be of assistance to men.
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter
Benjamin compared the filmmaker to a surgeon who “penetrates
deeply” into his subject, which “consists of multiple fragments which are
reassembled under a new law” (Benjamin 1979 [1936]: 863). (Conversely,
at the turn of the century, Eugène-Louis Doyen had written in his
magisterial Surgical Therapeutics and Operative Technique that “surgery
should ever remain an Art: all Surgeons should be true Artists” [Doyen
1917: 17]). This impulse to dissect—especially women, the removal
of whose wombs, it will be recalled, Dr. Doyen captured on film—is
intimately connected to the fantasy of (re)assembly.
Some of the Méliès films that display the construction of a woman from
spare parts also show her exploding into a shower of feathers or scraps
of paper. For example, in Les Illusions funambulesques (Extraordinary
Illusions, 1903), a conjurer assembles a woman from inanimate body
parts before bringing her to life; after several more transformations in

which she apparently eludes the magician’s control, she disintegrates
into a swirl of paper fragments before reforming. She then turns into a
male chef, whom the magician rips to pieces. Her transformation into
a man may diminish the violent impact of the image, but the ultimate
impression is nonetheless one of a woman (originally constructed by the
conjuror, but who momentarily escapes his control) being torn to bits.
The same impulse that leads to depictions of anatomical scrutiny and
the dismemberment of women in these films is also behind the images
of constructed women in films of the Pygmalion or Frankenstein’s
monster variety. Linda Williams has drawn a parallel between Méliès’s
interest in automata and his recreation of the Lumières’ cinématographe
when he failed to purchase the machine from its inventors at the Grand
Café in 1895: “Méliès seems to have been fated to repeat the invention/
construction of machines capable of ever more perfect and lifelike
simulations of the human body” (Williams 1986: 525). The filmmaker
would go on to explore this interest in creating and recreating bodies—
particularly female bodies—in the films themselves. La Statue animée
(The Drawing Lesson, 1903), for example, combines the Pygmalion
story with detailed examination of a woman’s body. In this film, a
magician figure assembles the statue of a woman from a spinning ball, a
handkerchief, and a coat. When a drawing instructor enters with a group
of students who proceed to inspect and draw the “statue,” it comes to
life and mischievously steals the instructor’s hat before disappearing. The
statue, created by the trickster magician, is clearly carrying out his wishes
by foiling his rival. In La Photographie électrique à distance (Long Distance
Wireless Photography, 1908), Méliès plays an inventor who creates a
magical camera that reproduces a life-size image of three women in a
Three Graces pose from a small photograph; the magic camera can also
replicate the movements of a live model, as if televised. The “televised”
image, however, is clearly an idealized version of the all-too-human,
and less obliging, human original. According to Linda Williams, “The
apparatus which makes possible ‘long distance wireless photography’
packages the real-life bodies of women into safely proffered cheesecake
tableaux. Individual female bodies become the simple stereotypes of
femaleness which uniformly differ from the male” (Williams 1986: 529).
For Williams, the machine that this film (and others like it) highlights
is one that reproduces images of women’s bodies; that is certainly true,
but it is important to recognize that these constructed women are also
machines in themselves, which do exactly what they are programmed to
do, and whose behavior differs noticeably from that of real women. As
Lucy Fischer puts it, in Méliès’s films, “woman (as woman) is gone, with
only the male-fabricated image remaining” (Fischer 1996: 39).
Making women up
Even when the desire to manipulate women’s bodies is not expressed

literally in images of female mannequins being assembled by men, it is
expressed metaphorically, through references to makeup. Such references
evoke the role of women in the debates about artifice and nature, and
the nature of artifice, that have raged throughout first literary, and then
cinematic, history. Baudelaire’s 1885 essay “Eloge du maquillage” (In
Praise of Makeup) follows in the tradition of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (The
Art of Love, 2008 [2CE]) by singing the praises of women’s cosmetics,
though Baudelaire goes further than Ovid in suggesting that, without
the aid of a considerable amount of artifice, women are too horrible
to contemplate. For Baudelaire, “‘[La femme] doit donc emprunter à
tous les arts les moyens de s’élever au-dessus de la nature pour mieux
subjuguer les coeurs et frapper les esprits. Il importe fort peu que la
ruse et l’artifice soient connus de tous, si le succès en est certain et l’effet
toujours irresistible” (Woman must borrow from all the arts the means of
elevating herself above nature, the better to capture hearts and make an
impression on the mind. It matters little whether the ruse and the artifice
are known to all, if they lead to certain success and an irresistible effect)
(Baudelaire 2010 [1885]: 102). Conversely, in Les Belles Poupées (The
Beautiful Dolls), Théodore de Banville laments the erasure of “natural”
hierarchies effected by the use of makeup and other accoutrements
of fashion: “A présent, toutes les femmes se ressemblent, la bonne, la
mauvause, la sublime, la médiocre et la pire. Elles sont peintes, teintes,
coiffées, tatouées et coloriées par les mêmes ignobles artifices” (These

days, all women look alike: the good, the bad, the gorgeous, the mediocre,
and the horrible. They are painted, tinted, coiffed, tattooed, and colored
by the same disgusting artifice) (Banville 1988: 340).
In the French filmic tradition, women who are man-made—or remade,
as in the case of the Pygmalion/My-Fair-Lady-inspired Nikita (La Femme
Nikita, Luc Besson, 1990), whose heroine’s personality is reshaped by
a man—invariably receive a cosmetic makeover as part of the package.
When the priest’s assistant in The Fifth Element brings Leeloo a selection
of women’s clothing that the priest just happens to have lying around the
house, he hands her, in addition, an instant makeup applicator. In between
learning English and memorizing crucial events in world history, Leeloo
takes a moment to press the contraption to her face, which instantly
becomes fully made up. This scene probably parodies, and in any case
certainly recalls, scenes in other films in which the heroine’s “civilizing
process” includes a cosmetic makeover. In Nikita, for example, a central
moment of the female protagonist’s transformation (from rebellious
criminal to docile, state-sponsored criminal) occurs when Jeanne
Moreau, in a cameo role, instructs Nikita in the fine art—and, this being
a French film, the philosophical lessons—of applying lipstick. As Moreau
tells Nikita upon meeting her for the first time, “. . . nous finirons sûrement
par vous donner une forme humaine, étape intermédiaire et néanmoins
nécessaire avant de devenir l’essentiel de l’homme: une femme” (We’ll no
doubt end up giving you a human form, which is an intermediate but
nonetheless necessary stage before becoming the essential thing for man:
a woman). In this exchange, artifice is humanizing, in much the same
way that it appears to be for Baudelaire. But in order to become fully
human, artifice alone does not suffice. Humanity, for women, requires
vulnerability. Moments after showing Nikita how to apply lipstick, Moreau
adds, “Laissez-vous envahir par cette petite fragilité qui va embellir votre
visage, un sourire” (Let yourself succumb to that small fragility that will
embellish your face—a smile).
The application of makeup always proves to be merely an external
sign of a less tangible transformation within. One of the most important
steps in a constructed woman’s evolution is that of becoming fragile or
vulnerable. For example, in The Fifth Element, we see a medium close-up

of the bewildered priest confiding to a bartender that he finds Leeloo,
though “the perfect being,” oddly vulnerable and (he searches for the
right word) . . . “human.” When he asks the bartender if he knows what
he means, the camera swivels to reveal the bartender, a robot, who
shakes his head. Besson’s film here parodies science fiction’s conventional
interrogation of what it means to be human, but it also points up the
nature of the gender roles inherent in the genre. Although Leeloo is
the most “perfect” creature in the universe, with more genes per square
inch than any human (according to the film’s “scientific” logic, more is
better when it comes to genes), her gender makes it imperative for her
to evolve into a less perfect, more vulnerable, and thus, the implication
is, more feminine, creature in the course of the film. Both the priest
and the blue diva let us know that Leeloo is “more vulnerable than she
might seem.” Belle Epoque precedents for such displays of feminine
vulnerability abound: trick films in particular, in which a male magician
conjures women out of thin air, invariably convey the impression that
the magician is “taming” the woman, making her conform to his vision
of what a woman should be. In Bulles de savon animées (Soap Bubbles,
1906), Méliès makes women appear in a column of smoke, and then
makes women’s heads appear in soap bubbles that float up to pedestals,
where they grow both bodies and wings. The illusionist then transforms
them into butterfly kites, which he waves before flicking them away. The
women are not seen again.
So, men may create women who are, in a sense, automatic, but they
must not be autonomous. In these films, a woman’s accession to humanity
is achieved by her acquisition or assumption of stereotypically “feminine”
traits such as vulnerability, emotiveness, and irrationality. But above all,
women’s humanity in these films depends on their succumbing to a man.
This capitulation usually culminates in the woman’s confession of love to
the man, a speech-act that serves to make the woman less machine-like
and more accessible. We see this, for example, in Cocteau’s La Belle et la
bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946), where Belle’s words “Je t’aime” bring
the Beast back to life while at the same time demonstrating that she has
yielded to him. Paradoxically, Belle never has more freedom than when
she is the beast’s captive, locked in his castle. There, she is no longer under
her father’s control, and she has the beast in her power. He is “under her
spell,” at her beck and call; it is only when she falls in love with him that
the spell is reversed, and she is in thrall to him. Yet, in the final moments
of the film, as she is preparing to fly away with the man formerly known
as Bête, Belle’s resigned air, her unfairytale-like ambivalence, suggests
that she is not entirely happy with her loss of autonomy. As Marina
Warner has noted of this film: “At the end, in an enigmatic twist, the
disenchanted Beast turns out to have the same human face as Belle’s n’er-
do-well, aspiring lover Avenant, whom she rejected kindly, but firmly
(the actor Jean Marais plays both). So La Belle et la bête traces a promise
to male lovers that they will not always be rejected, that human lovers,
however profligate, can be saved, and it withdraws at the last moment any
autonomy in love from Beauty herself ” (Warner 1994: 296–97).
A variation of the romantic speech-act that both signals and triggers a
woman’s vulnerability occurs at the end of Alphaville, when Lemmy turns
to Natasha as they are speeding away from the city in his Ford Galaxy and
says, “Think of the word ‘love’.” Once Natasha is able to conceptualize
the magic word, she relinquishes both her apparent automatism and her
autonomy: her transformation from unfeeling automaton to vulnerable
woman in thrall to a man is complete. At the end of The Fifth Element
(Luc Besson, 1997), although it is Korben who must tell Leeloo he
loves her, the survival of the world still depends on her acceptance of
his declaration, which must convince her that there is something worth
living for. Korben is seduced by Leeloo from the moment she comes
hurtling into his space cab, but the film’s resolution, as well as the fate
of the Earth, hinges on her succumbing to his charms. Such scenes of
seduction are often accompanied by scenes in which the woman is shown
learning to cry, which is emblematic of her acquired vulnerability. We see
just such a teary apprenticeship in The Fifth Element and in Kieslowski’s
Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colours: Blue, 1993), in which a bereaved
Juliette Binoche finally sheds a tear as she succumbs romantically to her
dead husband’s colleague.
Women begin these films as machine-like creatures either literally, in
that they are cobbled together by a scientist or magician, or figuratively,
in that they display an antisocial coldness. Both in Belle Epoque films

and in the later films discussed, women are artificial creatures created by
men, who can then breathe life into them, or “humanize” them. It seems
to matter little whether the women start out subservient or autonomous,
that is, whether they serve another or themselves: they all ultimately end
up serving the same master. Misogyny in these films is linked to a fear of
technology and dehumanization, which transforms autonomous women
into automatic women. In The Culture of the Copy, Hillel Schwartz defines
some of the challenges involved in creating life-like automata: “Not
physiognomy but responsiveness, sociability, sincerity have been at issue.
. . . The more agile we become at replicating animate beings, the more
we look to qualities social or immaterial (loyalty, love, despair, boredom,
competitiveness, confusion) to tell ourselves from our creations”
(Schwartz 1996: 360). In “becoming women,” the female creatures
in these films are made to relinquish their hyperbolic rationality and
assume their traditional role in the conventionally gendered Cartesian
mind/body split. Women and technology, or the super-rational, have
an analogous function, and are therefore conflated in these films: they
are both desirable and threatening, and both are potential sources of
dismemberment (according to the castration fantasy) and destruction.
Women are more reassuringly rendered as pure corporeal dummies,
like the female mannequin named Francine that René Descartes took
traveling with him on voyages (Frude 1983: 121).
Kaja Silverman has noted that “Classic cinema’s success can be
measured by the degree to which it manages to construct adequate
surrogates” for absent presences (Silverman 1988: 11–12). In the digital
era, the construction of women to fulfill the desires of men is taken to
a new level, as women’s actual bodies are replaced entirely, by virtual
representations. The following section seeks to ask, what happens
when the object of desire is itself unreal, or indeed virtual? Does such a
blatant replication of the structure of desire merely expose desire’s inner
paradox, that is, the fact that once the desired object has been attained,
desire ceases to exist? And what are the implications for gender as a social
construct when the vast majority of such virtual objects are (en)gendered
as women?
S1M0NE
In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler

has argued that gender is constituted, rather than expressed, through its
performance, and that it has no a priori existence outside of its habitual
practice (Butler 1990). Gender is thus supplementary to one’s identity, a
prosthesis you “put on.” That such a construct forms the basis of sexual
desire—“sex” meaning “division” or “differentiation,” which is precisely
what is constituted through the performance of gender—makes it doubly
supplementary. The virtual is an apt representation of the elusive nature
of desire, whose objects are, by definition, constantly slipping out of
one’s grasp, for desire itself is structured according to the logic of the
supplement (Derrida 1976: 156): as long as it exists, it can never be
completely fulfilled.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Hollywood, aka The Dream Factory,
excels at depicting the elusive nature of virtual desire. Nor is it a
coincidence that two of the most prominent films to do so also evoke the
concept of stardom, an other-worldly quality characterized by being just
out of reach. In the first film I will consider, S1M0NE (Andrew Niccol,
2002), stardom is explicitly thematized, as a Hollywood director creates a
digital simulacrum to play leading roles in his movies. In the second film
discussed, Her (Spike Jonze, 2014), stardom is invoked implicitly, in the
absent-present identity of screen siren Scarlett Johansson, who voices the
phone operating system with which (with whom?) a lonely man falls in
love.
In S1M0NE, Hollywood director Viktor Taransky has a falling-out
with the star of his latest blockbuster, and she abandons the project in
the middle of filming. As he is frantically searching for a new lead, a
terminally ill software developer entrusts him with a computer program
that allows the director to use an artificially created actor in place of a
real one in his movie. The film is a hit, and Taransky decides to keep
up the pretense that his new star, “Simone,” is a real actress, hiding the
truth from everyone, including his family and closest associates, as he
constructs an elaborate series of virtual “appearances” for Simone in the
media.
The film’s graphics in the opening and closing titles turn all instances
of the letter “O” into zeroes and all instances of the letter “I” into ones,
emphasizing the digital code that constitutes Simone—her “DNA”. The
name “Simone” is a contraction of “Simulation One,” the computer
program that created the artificial being. She belongs to the order of
appearance that Baudrillard has characterized as simulation, which he
defines as “the reigning scheme of the current phase that is controlled by
the code” (Baudrillard 1983: 83). Unlike the antecedents discussed above,
S1M0NE, the object of desire, while man-made, is not material. Instead,
Simone follows in the footsteps of Lara Croft, who Mary Flanagan
notes was the first digital star (Flanagan 2007: 299). Scott Bukatman
differentiates between human surrogates of the cyber age and their
mechanical predecessors: “Through the construction of the computer
itself, there arises the possibility of a mind independent of the biology of
bodies, a mind released from the mortal limitations of the flesh. Unlike the
robot forms of the modernist era, wherein a mechanical body substituted
for the organic, the invisible processes of cybernetic information
circulation and electronic technology construct a body at once material
and immaterial—a fundamental oxymoron, perhaps, of postmodernity”
(Bukatman 1993: 208). This oxymoron, or ambiguity, is apparent in
Simone, who may be composed of zeroes and ones, but whose feminine
curves are repeatedly emphasized. Although (or perhaps because) she is
immaterial, Simone is nonetheless the perfect “woman.” She enraptures
audiences, men and women alike, but especially heterosexual men, one
of whom is shown wallowing euphorically in a bed he thinks she has slept
in.
Simone’s body is a sign without a referent, an avatar without a subject.
She epitomizes what Bukatman calls “the postmodern crisis of a body
that remains central to the operations of advanced capitalism as sign,
while it has become entirely superfluous as object” (Bukatman 1993:
16). Simone is composed of nothing more than code, as the film keeps
reminding us. This code is binarized, like the idea of gender itself.
Computer binary code, in this context, is a metaphorical representation
of the traditional either/or gender division. Simone, as the fantasmatic
“perfect” woman, certainly plays the role of the adoring, uncomplaining
helpmeet, a prosthesis that allows the male director to accomplish his

goals. As Flanagan points out, “The digital star is the location on which
fantasies of desire and control are projected; they embody the fears,
desires, and excess of our culture in the form of obnoxiously sexualized
female stars” (Flanagan 2007: 298). Simone, played by Rachel Roberts,
a model who had never acted in films before, does indeed conform to
the stereotypical object of male heterosexual desire, at least as portrayed
in Hollywood cinema: blonde, blue-eyed, long-legged, at once busty and
slim, with smooth, unblemished white skin. She is unblinking, and she
does not fidget or stutter, exuding a zen-like calm: in other words, she
appears neither more nor less “human” than any other movie star.
However, Simone is not entirely autonomous. Viktor must manipulate
Simone’s movement from a computer terminal. He must also speak for
her by talking into a microphone attached to his computer (Fig. 20).
Simone literally speaks, to use the advertising jingo of the early RCA
phonographs, in “her master’s voice.” Viktor breathes life into Simone,
as though he were Prometheus (or the Judeo-Christian God) creating
human beings: in other words, he animates her. Vivian Sobchack has
traced the evolution of the concept of animation from its association with
Creation to its current meaning:
In the nineteenth century . . . the usage of “animation” (Mary Shelley’s, in
particular) transfers the divine power to endow “life itself,” including self-
propelled movement as one of its signs, to humans (Dr Frankenstein, in
particular) as in “Capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.”
Figure 20 A star is born, S1M0NE.

. . . In the twentieth century the human power to bestow movement

and, questionably, life, upon inert matter is further transferred, this
time from human to machine (in particular, the cinema). (Sobchack
2009: 381)
Simone is the ultimate prosthesis, the ultimate extension of (Viktor’s)

self. As Viktor explains to his studio head ex-wife when she asks why
Simone has not written any notes on the script for her new film, “She
considers herself an instrument.” Not only can Viktor get Simone to do his
bidding, he even projects his desire to use her onto Simone herself, who
announces to the assembled costars of one of her films on speaker phone,
“I relate better to people when they’re not actually there.” Of course, she
is effectively voicing the attitude—taken to its logical extreme—of the
people who watch her. Simone is the proverbial mirror of men discussed
by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (2004 [1929]), onto which
Viktor projects his own desires. The fact that he prefers Simone to real
people (and in particular real women) is made patently clear when an
ingénue who wishes to sleep with him tells him to call her Simone, and
asks him to “do to me what you do to [her].” Viktor rejects her advances,
appearing to prefer the “real thing” (i.e., the simulacrum), whom he
eventually “marries”—like Simone, Viktor clearly relates better to people
when they are not actually there. Raymond Bellour has observed that
“the actual process of substituting a simulacrum for a living being directly
replicates the camera’s power to reproduce automatically the reality it
confronts. Every mise en scène of the simulacrum thus refers intrinsically
to the fundamental properties of the cinematic apparatus” (Bellour 1991:
127). Simone is a mise-en-abîme of artifice: she is a representation of
cinematic representation itself.
The manufactured nature of S1M0NE pushes to its logical conclusion
the manufactured nature of stardom. Richard Dyer points out that stars “do
not produce themselves alone” (Dyer 2004: 5). They are shaped, coiffed,
coached, made up, filmed, publicized, interviewed, photographed, and
written about by an army of people who help to fashion their persona.
“Part of this manufacture of the star image,” Dyer explains, “takes place in
the films the star makes, with all the personnel involved in that, but one
can think of the films as a second stage. The star image is then a given,
like machinery, an example of what Karl Marx calls ‘congealed labor,’
something that is used with further labour (scripting, acting, directing,

managing, filming, editing) to produce another commodity, a film” (Dyer
2004: 5). Indeed, Simone’s star persona precedes her “actual” (i.e., virtual)
presence on the set of her second film. Her costars believe she is a real actor
who is too self-important to deign to meet them in person—their rapport
with her is more reminiscent of that between a diva and her fans than of a
relationship between colleagues. Yet, the difference between Simone and
flesh-and-blood stars is merely a matter of degree. According to Mary
Flanagan, “Stars of the cinema share qualities with computer-generated
stars; not static or fixed in time and space, they inhabit screen worlds. A
star system draws upon the separation between the image and the body,
the public and the private, the historical, biographical persona and the
location of many fictional biographies, between the scripted and the ‘real,’
to create a culture of consumption around the ‘persona’” (Flanagan 2007:
300–01). Simone’s “persona” is indeed neither static nor fixed in time and
space, but entirely manipulable in ways that human beings, even the most
basely exploited, simply are not. Her “screen world” is the only world in
which she exists, yet this screen world extends across nearly the whole
“real” world, in which her image is disseminated not only in cinemas
but also on television programs and magazine covers (there is a montage
sequence in S1M0NE where dozens of magazines displaying her image
on the cover are pinned to washing lines, connoting Simone’s worldwide
fame and Viktor’s mock-trivialization of it).
Scott Bukatman has observed that contemporary culture “eroticizes
the technological” (Bukatman 1993: 328). The inverse is also true, as the
pinup’s image is (historically) first disseminated far and wide through
mechanical reproduction, and then by technological means that obviate
the need for a “real” referent. At the end of Niccol’s film, Simone and
Viktor have a “baby” together, an electronic creation just as hyperreal
as Simone herself. Not only is Viktor able to fulfill the stereotypical
male dream of reproducing without need of women (in “giving birth to”
Simone), but he is also able to give birth to a virtual baby who is, in an
Oedipal conflation of generations, at once his child and his grandchild.
The Oedipal motif is further suggested by the partially blind software
developer Hank, whose malignant tumor is the result of sitting too close
to the computer screen for an extended period of time. Another wink to
Oedipus occurs during Hank’s first encounter with Viktor on a sound

stage, when an enormous image of an eye—a prop for a film set—is hefted
within view in the background behind him. These references to vision, of
course, recall the pivotal moment in Oedipus Rex when Oedipus gauges
out his own eyes upon discovering that he has unwittingly committed
the double crime of incest and patricide. The self-blinding represents
Oedipus’s desire not to see, not to know such things; in Freud’s analysis of
the myth and the complex that bears its name, blindness also represents
the male child’s supposed fear of castration. Hank warns Viktor gravely
not to sit too close to the computer screen, to avoid sharing his tragic fate.
The association between blindness/castration and excessive computer
use thus presages Viktor’s relationship with his digital star, Simone.
When Viktor looks at Simone, his gaze is literally a controlling one, in
alignment with Laura Mulvey’s classic discussion of visual pleasure and
narrative cinema, and the “active/passive heterosexual division of labour”
in which women are the passive objects of the active, heterosexual male
gaze (Mulvey 1975: 12). Simone’s virtual status allows Viktor to control
her without the need to worry about niggling ethical considerations. His
control over Simone is so complete that he sometimes forgets to mask
it, as when, speaking to reporters, he lets slip that Simone will appear
“only when I want her to appear,” prompting questions about whether
she is his hostage. He is able to brush away such questions, because they
apparently do not apply to digital beings. During Viktor’s encounter
with Hank, the software developer reminds him that they first met at a
computer conference where Hank gave a keynote speech entitled “Who
needs humans?”
This question of who needs humans is a particularly apt one in the
Cinema of Things, and it is framed explicitly in S1M0NE. However, it is
raised with even more insistence in Her, which goes one step further in
its examination of virtual objects of desire, asking, “Who needs a body?”
Her
The logical conclusion of the progression to virtuality, after the corporeal

simulacrum, is the elimination of the body altogether, which no longer
exists even as image. If, as Scott Bukatman has observed, “the body has
long been the repressed content of science fiction, as the genre obsessively
substitutes the rational for the corporeal, and the technological for the
organic” (Bukatman 1993: 19), then Spike Jonze’s 2014 film Her is the
epitome of a science fiction film. Whereas in S1M0NE the main female
character has no voice of her own, in Her, the central female character is
all voice. She is a computer operating system named Samantha with whom
Theo Twombly, a lonely man in his late thirties, conducts a romantic
relationship. It is fitting that Theo’s job at Beautifulhandwrittenletters.
com involves the creation of simulacra: an epistolary Cyrano de Bergerac,
he composes seemingly heartfelt, “personal” letters for clients to send to
loved ones when they cannot be bothered to write them themselves but
wish to appear thoughtful. These epistles entail a double surrogacy of
sorts, since a letter is already a stand-in for an absent interlocutor.
Samantha is modeled on Apple’s voice-activated, so-called “intelligent
personal assistant and knowledge navigator,” Siri—so much so that,
upon the film’s release, Apple updated Siri to respond to questions about
Samantha. When asked if Siri is “Her,” Siri replies: “No. In my opinion, she
gives artificial intelligence a bad name.” When asked what she thinks of
Samantha, Siri responds: “Her portrayal of an intelligent agent is beyond
artificial” (Watercutter 2014: n.p.). The extremely lifelike nature of the
operating system (whether Siri or the Siri-surrogate in Her) prompts its
users to imagine that there is more to the programmed voice than meets
the ear. As Mladen Dolar has observed, “There is an uncanniness in the
gap which enables a machine, by purely mechanical means, to produce
something so uniquely human as voice and speech. It is as if the effect
could emancipate itself from its mechanical origin, and start functioning
as a surplus—indeed, as the ghost in the machine; as if there were an effect
without a proper cause, an effect surpassing its explicable cause” (Dolar
2006: 7–8). What might be called the operating system’s “humanity effect”
owes its existence to the disavowal of the system’s origins in a series of
binary code.
There is no image to go along with the voice with which Theo falls in
love. That so much of the film is devoted to showing Theo speaking to
Samantha on his phone reverses the traditional emphasis on spectacle in
the science fiction film. The many extended close-ups of Theo’s face as he
speaks to Samantha are analogous to a one-sided series of extremely long
reverse shots, without any shots of Samantha speaking (analogous to, but
not equatable with, reverse shots, because the shots of Theo’s face are not
from the point of view of Samantha) (Fig. 21).
Rick Altman has criticized the “historical fallacy” whereby sound is
thought to supplement the image in the cinema, and is thus marginalized:
“Historically, sound was added to the image; ergo in the analysis of sound
cinema we may treat sound as an afterthought, a supplement which the
image is free to take or leave as it chooses” (Altman 1980: 14). For Altman,
this historical fallacy is bolstered by an “ontological fallacy,” which “claims
that film is a visual medium and that the images must be/are the primary
carriers of the film’s meaning and structure” (Altman 1980: 14). There is
no danger of either of these misapprehensions in Her, which accords a
privileged status, both in terms of the diegesis and in total screen time, to
the voice of the main character’s love interest.
The part of Samantha is voiced by Scarlett Johansson, whose husky
tones lend an unmistakably seductive quality to the role. As Anthony
Lane, the New Yorker’s film reviewer, put it, “Had Jonze picked the voice
of Marge Simpson, say, the film would have turned out very differently”
Figure 21 Theo, Her.

(Lane 2013: n.p.). Johansson would appear to be what Richard Dyer has
termed a “perfect fit” for the role: “In certain cases, all the aspects of a star’s
image fit with all the traits of a character” (Dyer 1998: 129). Johansson’s
Samantha is playful and flirtatiously “insecure” (she frequently stops
talking mid-sentence, protesting that what she is saying is “stupid,” and
she often hints at a slight lack of self-confidence, though only enough to
make her otherwise supreme competence and self-possession seem less
threatening). As scripted by Jonze and voiced by Johansson, Samantha
the operating system seems eerily like a “real” person. Yet, she does not
seem to fall into the “uncanny valley” described by Masahiro Mori (1970),
which is a state of anxiety caused by a representation that is very life-like
but not entirely life-like. Like Theo, viewers soon forget that Samantha is
not “real.”
The role of Samantha was not always played by Johansson. Samantha
Morton initially voiced the character, and the switch to Johansson
was made only in postproduction (Zeitchik 2013: 1). The fact that the
character bears the name of the actor who was replaced, like some ghostly
residue, serves to draw attention to the substitution, begging the question
of what Johansson brings to the role that Morton did not. Although
Morton is a very well-respected actor, she does not have the screen-
goddess image that Johansson has, the latter regularly being compared
to Marilyn Monroe (see, for example, the Dolce & Gabbana ad campaign
of 2010, in which Johansson was made up explicitly to resemble the late
star). Audiences cannot help but picture Scarlett Johansson, whose image
conveys a strikingly voluptuous, siren-like intensity, in what Michel
Chion (1999: 129) calls a “mise-en-corps” (embodiment) of the voice.
Mary Ann Doane has noted that, despite the advent of the technical
reproducibility that Walter Benjamin discusses in his famous essay on
the decline of the aura, “The voice is not detachable from a body which
is quite specific—that of the star. In the cinema, cult value and the ‘aura’
resurface in the star system. . . . Thus, the voice serves as a support for
the spectator’s recognition and his/her identification of, as well as with,
the star” (Doane 1985: 164). Although (or perhaps because) Samantha’s
voice is disembodied, Johansson’s star quality inhabits the voice like a
phantom. Samantha’s voice may not be fixed to a visible character, but it
is most certainly fixed to a particular star. As Chion notes, “Marguerite

Duras coined the idea that the contemporary cinema stringently requires
voices to be nailed down to bodies. . . . ‘Nailing-down’ nicely captures the
rigidity and constraint in the conventions that have evolved for making
film voices appear to come from bodies” (Chion 1999: 130; original
emphasis). The female star’s association with a feminine corporeal
ideal reinforces the viewer’s desire to “nail down” the voice to a body, a
very particular body—in this case, that of Scarlett Johansson. In Jonze’s
film, the star’s voice functions very much like the star’s image itself; the
cinematic plenitude with which it entices viewers is a fantasmatic one,
forever receding into the distance.
Her is not the first film to feature a not-so-virtual virtual voice. Doane
observes in the context of what might be considered a precursor to
Samantha, in the televisual version of Battlestar Galactica (Richard A.
Colla, 1978), that “even a computer (named Cora) deprived of mobility
and the simulacrum of a human form is given a voice which is designed
to evoke the image of a sensual female body” (Doane 1985: 175 n2).
Her may not be entirely original in its use of a sultry female-sounding
computer (in fact, an episode of the popular television sitcom The Big
Bang Theory [Season 5, no. 14, 2012, “The Beta Test Initiation”] featured
the identical conceit of a man falling in love with his phone’s operating
system)—but the Spike Jonze film pushes this premise to its logical
conclusion.
Her is a film about listening, and in particular about listening to
a voice. People walk around wearing barely visible ear pieces, deep in
conversation with someone else, but appearing to talk to themselves. In a
way, Her is merely staging the everyday drama of the absent interlocutor,
a phenomenon that dates back to the advent of writing. Logocentrism,
according to Derrida’s critique of the Western metaphysical tradition
originating with Plato, privileges the voice over writing, which is
consigned to marking an absence. Jonze’s neat reversal of this paradigm
represents this absence through the voice, the very thing that is supposed
to be the mark of presence (Derrida 1976: 26–73; passim). Michel Chion
argues, “Human listening is naturally vococentrist, and so is the talking
cinema by and large” (Chion 1999: 6). The voice we hear but whose source
we cannot see—the voice of Samantha—is acousmatic, which is what

Chion calls sound without a visible source. An “acousmêtre” for Chion is
more specifically a human voice whose source one does not see, and in its
purest form is a voice one has never seen (Chion 1999: 21). Even though
viewers know that Samantha is an entirely virtual presence, they disavow
this knowledge in the hope that she will somehow materialize during the
course of the film. The disavowal of this absence is central to the film’s
diegesis, and makes the viewing experience an inherently fetishistic
one (“I know, but all the same. . .”). As Stacey and Suchman put it, “Our
willingness to know the artifice, and yet to forget the means through
which it achieves a sense of a believable world, is what we might call the
hidden double vision of the cinema” (Stacey and Suchman 2012: 22). In
Her, this double “vision” is entirely auditory. We keep hoping against hope
that there will be some revelation of a “real” presence, a final unmasking.
Such a moment would be what Chion calls “de-acousmatization,” which
he links to exhibitionism:
The unveiling of an image and at the same time a place, the human and
mortal body where the voice will henceforth be lodged, in certain ways
strongly resembles striptease. The process doesn’t necessarily happen all
at once; it can be progressive. In much the same way that the female
genitals are the end point revealed by undressing (the point after which
the denial of the absence of the penis is no longer possible), there is
an end point of de-acousmatization—the mouth from which the voice
issues. (Chion 1999: 28; original emphasis)
Like Theo, we never see Samantha’s mouth, or the rest of her, for that
matter, but that in no way diminishes (in fact, quite the opposite) the
physical quality of her voice. Chion’s implicit alignment of the mouth
with castration, and thus the voice with the phallus-substitute, or fetish,
invokes Derrida’s discussion of logocentrism, as mentioned above. For
Derrida, writing refers back to its missing counterpart, the voice, in the
hope of returning to an originary plenitude, but the voice turns out to
be just as lacking, or internally divided, as writing. In deconstruction,
the voice, privileged site of metaphysical transcendence, is linked to the
phallus (Derrida 1976: 26–73). As Barbara Johnson puts it, the supposedly
castrated phallus-voice is the “lack that makes the system work” (Johnson
1988: 225), the voice behind the written sign that is an always-absent
presence.
In Her, this voice reverses the logocentric order of things. Samantha’s
voice acts as a sign masking not only the absence of a real woman on
the other end of the phone, but also the absent phallus evoked by the
female body. Kaja Silverman has noted the parallels between the female
voice and the role assigned to the female body in cinema: “Hollywood
requires the female voice to assume similar responsibilities to those it
confers upon the female body. The former, like the latter, functions as
a fetish within dominant cinema, filling in for and covering over what
is unspeakable within male subjectivity” (Silverman 1988: 38). What is
unspeakable is, of course, the recognition of sexual difference, but also
recognition of the loss of a presymbolic union with the mother, before
the advent of both language and the prohibitive function of the father
(the Lacanian nom/non-du-père):
In her vocal, as in her corporeal, capacity, woman-as-fetish may be

asked to represent the phenomenal plenitude which is lost to the male
subject with his entry into language. However, the female voice, like
the female body, is more frequently obliged to display than to conceal
lack—to protect the male subject from knowledge of his own castration
by absorbing his losses as well as those that structure female subjectivity.
(Silverman 1988: 39)
At the same time, however, that Samantha’s voice symbolizes loss (of a
unified ego, in this case, and more generally of humanity itself in the
posthuman era), it does not symbolize the loss of the body. According
to Britta Sjogren, the voice “expresses the body and inhabits it: it is
organic and foreign at once, a ‘characteristic’ that also expresses a kind of
subjectivity. It speaks not only of but through the body. . . . In its relation
to speech, too, the voice is both ‘flesh’ and ‘sense’” (Sjogren 2006: 25).
The physical dimension of the sounds that Samantha makes (or that
together comprise Samantha) is what Barthes calls “the grain of the
voice” (Barthes 1972: 188). Johansson’s voice is grainy in the extreme,
its breathiness emphasized when she sings a song on the soundtrack
(“The Moon Song”). Her voice has a physical presence that cannot be
encapsulated in the meaning of the words it utters—the very fact that
Jonze used it to replace Samantha Morton’s voice is testament to this

presence.
Mary Ann Doane argues that the voice in cinema functions to
conjure up an imaginary body, even when it is visibly attached to a
character: “the body reconstituted by the technology and practices of the
cinema is a fantasmatic body, which offers a support as well as a point
of identification for the subject addressed by the film” (Doane 1985:
162). On one level, in Her, the explicitly fantasmatic nature of the body
to which Samantha’s voice is “attached” merely exposes the workings
of the usual cinematic process. Silverman, referring to the disconnect
between what spectators see on screen and the absence of a “real” object
(unlike in the theater, where the actors are actually present in the room),
describes cinema as “the story of missed encounters” (Silverman 1988:
3). The absent presence of the illusory (love) object in Her enacts just
such a missed encounter.
Samantha herself seems keenly aware of her disembodied state. She
urges Theo to go on a date with a “real” woman, which ends disastrously.
She then arranges for a prostitute, a surrogate for herself, to come to
Theo’s apartment and have sex with him while Samantha speaks to him,
so that he can put a face (and more) to a name. This encounter, too, ends
in disaster, as Theo realizes that he does not want a Samantha-substitute;
what he wants is Samantha, despite (or perhaps because of) her virtual
state. Interestingly, the woman Samantha sends to Theo looks very much
like Scarlet Johansson, with pale skin and disheveled blonde hair: she
is thus not only a Samantha-surrogate, but a Scarlett-surrogate as well.
(The press-on facial mole used to hide a microphone on the woman’s face
also evokes both Johannson’s and Marilyn Monroe’s facial moles.) Like
Rousseau, Theo seems to prefer sex with Samantha (i.e., himself) which
is the “dangerous supplement” to which Derrida draws our attention in
Of Grammatology (Derrida, 1976: 141–64). Rather than supplementing
relations with a “real person,” Theo’s implied self-gratification is the “real
thing,” which the sex surrogate attempts to supplement.
This “original” or structuring lack follows a certain logic, as Silverman
observes: “The object thus acquires from the very beginning the value
of that without which the subject can never be whole or complete, and
for which it constantly yearns” (Silverman 1988: 7). This is precisely the
structure of the Derridian supplement, the addition of which to an entity,
far from “completing” it, serves to expose its lack of integrity. Silverman
further points out that in the cinema, the “pleasure of possession is in
constant jeopardy; not only are cinema’s objects fantasmatic, but they
belong to the order of the signifier. Here as elsewhere the operations of
meaning exclude the real; the moment the viewer reaches out to claim
the profilmic event, it fades to black” (Silverman 1988: 10). The more
Theo yearns to “possess” Samantha, the more she eludes his grasp, in a
Proustian dynamic that satisfies the melancholy protagonist’s desire to
be perpetually unsatisfied, as it fulfills the filmgoer’s need to be forever at
one remove from the action, however closely he or she may identify with
the character.
In cinema, the unification of body and voice plays an important role
in reassuring the viewer (or perhaps we should say “listener”) of his/her
own place in a world of imaginary plenitude:
The aural illusion of position constructed by the approximation of

sound perspective and by techniques which spatialize the voice and
endow it with “presence” guarantees the singularity and stability of a
point of audition, thus holding at bay the potential trauma of dispersal,
dismemberment, difference. (Doane 1985: 171)
In Her, however, we are deprived of the illusion of a unified subject.

What the film stages is precisely the trauma of dispersal and difference.
There is no person behind the voice, certainly no corporeal presence and
ultimately even no subjectivity. Samantha, who seems to be full of life,
is ultimately lifeless. Like Simone before her, it/she is what Jackie Stacey
and Lucy Suchman would call “animated” rather than “animate,” in that
they both rely on human input in order to act (Stacey and Suchman 2012:
17). However, Simone must be controlled constantly, like a marionette,
as though by a God who micromanages the world, whereas Samantha’s
workings, after the initial startup, provide the illusion of autonomy. The
acousmêtre can be, among other things, the “voice of a Machine-Being”:
it is but a short distance from Hal in 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) to
Samantha in Her (Chion 1994: 24–25; 36).
Theo’s name may mean “God,” but it is Samantha who calls the shots.
Samantha’s voice (so the fantasy goes) has been “cut off ” from her body,
just as the phallus has been “cut off ” from the body in the castration
fantasy. The male character’s gaze—and thus the spectator’s gaze, for
whom the male character is a surrogate—is a controlling and dominating
one, subjugating her and thus overcoming the threat that her sexual
difference represents to him (such objectification is suggested as early
as the film’s title, Her, which is further dehumanizing in its nameless
pronominalism). But what happens to the spectator’s identification
with the controlling male gaze when there is nothing for the male gaze
to behold? In the absence of a female body, this threat is presumably
removed. Moreover, since Samantha can “see” Theo but he cannot see
her (she asks him to prop his cell phone on his bedside table so she can
“watch” him sleep), the position of dominance seems to be reversed in
Her.
There are several ways in which gender roles are overturned in Jonze’s
film. For example, changes in fashion in the near future, when the film is
set, are marked not by women’s but by men’s clothing: the female characters
wear unremarkable clothes that would blend in seamlessly with what
women wear today in the industrialized world, whereas the young male
characters, many of whom sport a mustache, wear high-waisted trousers
and cardigans and carry shoulder bags. While it is a commonplace of
cinema to see a young woman lounging on a bed or in a chair speaking
on the telephone to a friend or romantic partner, in Her it is of course
Theo who we see constantly speaking on the phone to Samantha, never
the other way around. During most of these conversations, Theo wears
an earpiece, which channels the voice of his loved one directly into his
body, in an intimate invasion that is a reversal of the association of the
male with “active” sexuality and the female with the “passive” sexual role.
This controlling figure, all-powerful and almighty, is actually an
uncanny presence, long familiar (familial) and perhaps something, as
Freud (1919) put it, that should have remained hidden. According to
Chion, “The greatest Acousmêtre is God—and even farther back, for
every one of us, the Mother” (Chion 1999: 27). The association between
the female voice and the dream of some kind of pre-Oedipal fusion with
the mother is reinforced by the various references to motherhood in Her.

When setting up his new operating system, Theo is asked to describe
his relationship with his mother. He hesitates, and before he can reply,
the OS (operating system) moves on to the next question, implying that
his hesitation is more telling than anything he could possibly say. This
exchange evokes the scene in Blade Runner in which Leon is asked about
his mother and responds, “Let me tell you about my mother,” before
shooting his interlocutor. Theo’s neighbor, Amy, a former romantic
partner with whom he is still good friends, is a computer games designer
who is developing a game in which the aim is to be deemed a “good
mother” by caring for a couple of cyberchildren. Finally, Theo himself
plays a computer game called “Alien Child.”
These allusions to motherhood offer little compensation for the fact
that there is no de-acousmatization in Jonze’s film, no revelation of the
source of the all-controlling voice, and thus no reunion with the maternal
source of life. The point eventually comes where any romantic illusion
that Samantha might transcend the constraints of her programmed
origins, that she might jump the barrier between machine and human,
is shown to be groundless. Theo eventually learns that Samantha has
been “seeing” hundreds of other people—in other words, that he is not
“special.” Chion describes a moment like this as the “acousmachine”:
“The acousmachine is born when the voice stops. It’s as if the acousmêtre
were becoming an acousmachine” (Chion 1999: 42). The acousmachine
is what remains when the acousmêtre is revealed to be a mechanism, as
when Hal is “killed” in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, and he ends up spouting
what are clearly automated, noncustomized, messages. In Her, the loss
of the veneer of Samantha’s spontaneity results from the realization that
all of her apparently idiosyncratic departures from her programming
have in fact been part of the programming all along. (Similarly, when
Amazon recommends books “just for you,” “you” tend to feel a frisson
of recognition, until you are reminded that this function is merely an
algorithm.) Theo is shocked to realize that Samantha is “just” a machine—
even though he has known this all along (cf. the fetishist’s mantra, “I know,
but all the same. . .”). It is Samantha’s apparent infidelity—her intimacy
with hundreds of other purchasers of her operating system—that exposes
her lack of humanity. Yet, infidelity is typically a trait associated with an

“all-too-human” nature. But all the same . . . the film, ultimately, leaves
unresolved the question of Samantha’s humanity.
It also leaves unresolved the nature of Theo’s relationship with his
former girlfriend Amy, with whom he is seen in an affectionate pose at
the end of the film, in a scene left open to speculation: they sit next to
each other on a rooftop at night, gazing at the city skyline, she with her
head resting on his shoulder. If the pose is interpreted romantically, then
the end of the film could signal a new beginning for their relationship
(thus paving the way for Theo’s life with a new/old “her”); however, if the
pose is merely a gesture of commiseration, then “Her” is the “woman”
Theo has lost forever (and never really had in the first place). In either
case, Theo seems destined to mourn the loss of the one voice, the one
being, who spoke his language. The voice belongs to the acousmachine,
which, in the cold light of day, turns out to be nothing more than a mass-
produced virtual presence. It is only as long as this presence is tailored
to the desires of the customer that the illusion of the human can be kept
alive.
5
Posthuman Objects
If, in the films explored in the last chapter, subjectivity was an illusion
closely manipulated by magicians, film directors, and scientists in order
to make their creations seem more life-like, in the films discussed in
this chapter the technological creations have taken on lives of their own,
becoming sentient beings in their own right. Not only have we entered the
era of digital humanities, but we have now also entered the era of digital
humanity, which is the product of artificial intelligence and the new
kinds of subjectivity this entails. This chapter explores these subjectivities
in three films: Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), Prometheus (Ridley Scott,
2012), and Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008).
James Cameron’s 2009 mega-blockbuster film Avatar is a none-too-
subtle allegory of post-global conquest and rebellion. That the film is set
in the year 2154, that the natives, correspondingly called the Na’vi, are
inhabitants of a planet called Pandora, and the invading force is the planet
Earth (represented Hollywood-style by the US Marines), are but minor
variations on the familiar colonial narrative of invasion and indigenous
resistance. The defection to the Na’vi side of Jake Sully, wheelchair-bound
ex-marine, his Romeo-and-Juliet-style romance with a Na’vi princess,
adoption by the blue-skinned natives, and subsequent leadership of the
successful insurrection, further invoke colonial tropes dressed up to look
like anticolonial tropes, with the film ostensibly encouraging viewers to
root for the insurgents in their plight against the villainous US military
machine. Caught in the middle of the conflict is the crack team of
social scientists employed by the army to study Pandora, the planet that
contains vast amounts of the precious substance named, with remarkable
bluntness, “unobtanium.” Led by tough-talking, chain-smoking, gin-
swilling anthropologist Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver,
the researchers clearly sympathize with the objects of their study, and
are in continuous conflict with their military paymasters—yet the aim
of their fieldwork is ultimately to facilitate the callous exploitation of the
Na’vi. (As Jake succinctly puts it, “When people are sittin’ on shit that
you want, you make them your enemy, then you justify taking it.”) The
predicament in which Augustine and her team find themselves—which
might be called, after James Clifford (1988), the predicament of culture—
is none other than that of the ethnographer caught between two worlds,
the world of the observers and the world of the observed. The generic
conventions of science fiction complicate this anthropological model
only slightly, as the DNA of Augustine and Jake Sully is fused with that of
the Na’vi to produce genetic hybrids, participant-observers in the most
literal sense.
Two other blockbuster science fiction films released within a couple
of years of Avatar, Prometheus and Wall-E, also stage the fusion of the
human and the technological, in their attribution of human characteristics
to robots. Both films feature an inanimate, mechanical object that bears
many of the hallmarks of an animate being. The anthropomorphic traits
attributed to these artificial life forms evoke both films’ principal theme
of the generation (or regeneration) of life. In Wall-E, the plucky trash
compactor nurtures a plant, lone surviving life form on an Earth laid
waste to human profligacy, in order to revive the dying planet; while in
Prometheus, regeneration is thematized through exploration, religion and
childbirth. The agents of this regeneration in each case are objects created
to act as prostheses by means of technics, which Stiegler describes as “the
pursuit of life by means other than life” (Stiegler 1998: 17). Prostheses are
intended to extend and enhance human capabilities—but in these films,
the prostheses have become, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable
with humans.
“I See You”: Digital and cultural encoding in Avatar
In Avatar, the natives of planet Pandora inhabit an Edenic and ecologically

harmonious utopia, free from social conflict, where their every physical
Posthuman Objects 161
and spiritual need is catered for by a bountiful natural environment. It

is perhaps no coincidence that this geographical utopia also bears the
hallmarks of a digital utopia, whose inhabitants plug their USB-like
appendages in to the motherboard and connect with each other in a giant
network. As Thomas Elsaesser puts it, “the Na’vi are less ‘natives’ than
they are ‘navigators’: not postmodern versions of ‘the noble savage,’ but
cybernauts who are ‘digitally native,’ that is, savvy users and consumers of
the latest communication technologies, always ‘plugged in’ and ‘online,’
interacting with their game consoles or laptops the way the Na’vi plug
themselves into their horses, birds or dragons” (Elsaesser 2011: 261). In
Avatar, the natural is (almost) indistinguishable from the technological,
and the “real” from the virtual.
The theme of digital encoding or virtual reality is announced in the title
of the film. As one blogger wrote, “Technology never looked so human in
film” (Vargas 2011: n.p.). A major part of the narrative surrounding the
film’s release in 2009 was Cameron’s oft-repeated assertion that he had
conceived of Avatar some fifteen years prior to filming it, but needed to
wait until the technology was perfected in order to bring the project to
fruition. (Cameron took a similarly unhurried approach to the second
in a planned trilogy of Avatar films, announced for release in 2017 or
2018.) When the first film was finally completed, Avatar was heralded
as “the iPhone of movies” (Michael Arrington, cited in Vargas 2009) for
its ability to create a fantastical world that looked startlingly real (right
down to the iPad prototypes the characters walk around with). Cameron
was hailed as the first photo-realist fantasy filmmaker to avoid plunging
into the “uncanny valley,” a term coined by the roboticist Masahiro
Mori (1970), it will be recalled, to describe the eerie effect created when
artificial facsimiles of human beings look very much like humans, yet
are different enough to disturb viewers. In many ways, Cameron seems
to have achieved the digital utopia which, according to Philip Rosen,
presupposes an opposition between an inactive and fixed indexical
spectatorship and an active and mobile digital spectatorship, which has
supposedly superseded the latter. This opposition, Rosen argues, “is
redolent with theological connotations of determinism-free will debates”
(Rosen 2001: 348).
Handily enough, Cameron invokes these debates quite explicitly

in the name Grace Augustine, which is fairly bursting with religious
significance. In the character’s surname, there is the allusion to St.
Augustine (Augustine of Hippo), known for his interpretation of the
concept of divine grace—which is, conveniently, the character’s first
name. Augustine was the fifth-century author of City of God, in which
human history is characterized by the conflict between the City of Man,
where people are caught up in earthly distractions, and the City of God,
whose inhabitants reject earthly pleasures, dedicating themselves to
the eternal values of the Christian faith. (According to this schema, the
Earthlings or “Sky People” would reside in the City of Man, while the Na’vi
would inhabit the City of God.) Augustine’s Confessions, considered the
first Western autobiography, recounts the author’s early life of sin and his
conversion to Christianity. (Grace Augustine’s last words before expiring,
“I’m with her, Jake. She’s real!” are suggestive of a similar religious or
mystical epiphany and, possibly, conversion.) As José Antonio Vargas
wrote about the film, “From here on out, movies will be divided into two
epochs: B.A. and A.A. Before ‘Avatar,’ After ‘Avatar’” (Vargas 2011: n.p.).
Indeed, the word “avatar” itself has a religious meaning, referring to the
incarnation of a Hindu deity.
If, in the digital age, the debate about free will becomes reduced
to an allegory of modes of spectatorship, the latter play a prominent
role in the film, not only because it is a film, but also because, in a
particularly self-conscious way, the film thematizes spectatorship. The
phrase “I see you” recurs at various points in the narrative, acquiring
the status of a catch phrase that implicitly evokes the concept of divine
grace. “I see you” also evokes Augustine’s catalog of “the lust of the
eyes,” or curiositas, which Tom Gunning associates with the aesthetic
of attractions, or visual spectacle for its own sake—not out of a desire
for beauty, but out of a desire for knowledge of that which is out of the
ordinary (Gunning 1995: 124). Avatar, of course, is all about spectacle,
or lust of the eyes, and the hundreds of millions of viewers who have
seen it, making it for many years the highest-grossing film of all time
(around three billion dollars and counting), would no doubt confirm
this. But the phrase “I see you” means much more. In the film’s diegetic
universe, “I see you” not only refers to visual perception, but also
implies a porosity of boundaries that enables a deep understanding
or connection with the person (or blue-skinned, feline creature) with
whom you are communicating. As if to emphasize the importance of
this kind of vision, the film ends with a close-up of Jake’s face, as his
eyes open, signaling a crossing over to the other side, his rebirth as a
Na’vi. Just as Jake’s eyes open, the “eye” of the film closes: the screen
goes black.
It is ways of seeing that have been and are being transformed by
the digital revolution, and modes of spectatorship that are at stake in
the much-heralded digital utopia. Rosen identifies three aspects of
this utopia. These are: the practically infinite manipulability of digital
images; the convergence among diverse image media, and interactivity
(Rosen 2001: 318). Rosen equates each of these objectives with one
of the three branches of the film industry: manipulability would be
an aspect of production; convergence would relate to distribution,
or the delivery of information; and interactivity would be a feature
of exhibition or reception (Rosen 2001: 318). Indeed, Avatar is a
global cinematic object that, as a film foundationally designed to
be a blockbuster, had to generate processes of interactivity and the
convergence of various media and capital streams by becoming a
brand or industry and by creating an unprecedentedly large body of
preinvested consumers. It is an “event movie,” which, as Carolyn Jess-
Cooke puts it, is “planned and packaged to distribute entertainment
around the world in as many ways and forms as possible, to expand
the spectatorial experience of the film’s theatrical release—and its
commercial potential—across myriad cultural events” (Jess-Cooke
2009: 7). Cameron’s film is thus the product of what could be called
cinematic engineering. According to Elsaesser, “For the industry that
makes them, images are instructions for actions—they trigger further
movies, purchases and events—rather than pictures to contemplate or
immerse yourself in, however much ‘immersion’ might be the stated
objective” (Elsaesser 2011: 261).
But we do not need to venture beyond the diegetic universe that
Avatar so painstakingly creates to encounter another striking analogy for
the three-pronged digital utopia, in the realm of genetics. Biotechnology

is brought into the twenty-second century when Grace and Jake’s DNA
is fused with Na’vis’ DNA to produce super-hybridized, nine-foot-tall
creatures with blue skin, tails, and feline facial features, but who still
enjoy playing the odd game of basketball in cut-off Stanford university
athletic wear—another reminder not only that Grace is a researcher with
the highest academic credentials, but also that this film is the fruit of
technological expertise cultivated in Silicon Valley, of which Stanford
is the hub (Fig. 22). As Cameron said of Neytiri, the Na’vi princess,
presumably to deflect the barrage of marriage proposals that would no
doubt be sent to her by lovelorn teenage boys, “She exists only as a big
string of ones and zeroes” (Goodyear 2009: n.p.). The biotechnological
equivalent of the aspiration toward infinite manipulability would be
genetic engineering, and humans are certainly approaching the point
of infinite manipulability when they can be grown in vats and when
their DNA can be combined with alien DNA. (Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien
Resurrection [1997], which, like Avatar, contains shots of Sigourney
Weaver floating in a vat of amniotic fluid, also springs to mind, making
one wonder if such scenes might actually be written into the actor’s
contract.)
Figure 22 Grace Augustine, Stanford alumna, Avatar.

The second aspect of the digital utopia, convergence, involves the

transmission of code from different sources through a single interface.
The genetic equivalent of convergence as boundary-crossing would be
hybridization, or what used to be called miscegenation. In Avatar the
hybrid formations merge human and Na’vi DNA, resulting in interspecific
creatures, but since the encounter between Earthlings and the Na’vi is
such an overt allegory of colonialism, the implications for intercultural
hybridity as well as for the attendant discourses of transculturation, are
clear. Robert Young explains that “‘hybrid’ is the nineteenth century’s
word. But it has become our own again. In the nineteenth century it was
used to refer to a physiological phenomenon; in the twentieth century
it has been reactivated to describe a cultural one” (Young 1995: 6).
This cultural meaning encompasses what Françoise Lionnet describes
as “the métissage of forms and identities that is the result of cross-
cultural encounters” (Lionnet 1995: 12). Avatar literalizes hybridity’s
metaphorical capacity, reinvoking the concept’s nineteenth-century
biologized meaning in order to illustrate the ambivalence of twenty-first
(or twenty-second)-century racial discourse.
Finally, the third aspect of the digital utopia, interactivity, involves
“rewriting the script,” participating in the construction of new
narratives using old paradigms. Such interactivity has its equivalent in
the wheelchair-bound protagonist’s reinvention as a fully mobile Na’vi
warrior, and more generally, in the twin phenomena of assimilation in
the colonial context, and of racial “passing” in the context of de jure
or de facto apartheid. Indeed, the dynamics of passing are emphasized
in the film’s title, Avatar, which refers in its most common usage to
the adoption, in the gaming world, of an alternative, online identity.
Mark Hansen notes that “on-line identity performance can be said to
generalize the phenomenon of passing. By decoupling identity from
any analogical relation to the visible body, on-line self-invention
effectively places everyone in the position previously reserved for
certain racial subjects” (Hansen 2004: 112). However, although the
phenomenon of passing may be generalizable on the internet, this is
not to say that race has been erased. In the early days of the internet,
many heralded the emancipatory possibilities of self-invention
afforded by the new medium. The internet was seen as a level playing
field on which, so the story went, anybody could be anything. The
Microsoft slogan, “Where do you want to go today?” became virtually
synonymous with “Who do you want to be today?” Media theorists,
however, were quick to point out the fallacy of these assumptions,
which were rendered unattainable, notably, by the so-called digital
divide between those with easy internet access and those without.
The Deleuzean option of “becoming-other” remained largely the
prerogative of the postindustrial middle classes. Beth Coleman (2009)
has rehabilitated Charles Babbage’s nineteenth-century term, applied
originally to the precursor to the modern computer, “the difference
engine,” to describe the social stratification that is reinscribed, or more
accurately, reencoded, on the internet.
Likewise, as Lisa Nakamura puts it, “The Internet is a place where race
happens” (Nakamura 2002: xi). Nakamura has analyzed the advertising
campaigns of high-tech and networking communications companies in
the heyday of the internet revolution, from the mid-1990s to the early
years of the twenty-first century, noting the preponderance of exoticist
iconography that likens internet use to “an African safari, a trip to the
Amazonian rain forest, or a camel caravan in the Egyptian desert”
(Nakamura 2002: 89). She points out that “networking ads that promise
the viewer control and mastery over technology and communications
discursively and visually link this power to a vision of the other which, in
contrast to the mobile and networked tourist/user, isn’t going anywhere”
(Nakamura 2002: 90). Avatar borrows heavily from these exoticist tropes,
depicting the place where the Na’vi roam as a lush rainforest into which
the camouflage-clad Sky People intrude, and which the latter observe
by a variety of technological means, from video logs to CCTV cameras
installed on tanks. The Sky People enter and leave Pandora at will, but
the Na’vi remain there, practicing their ancient rituals and worshipping
the tree that provides them with literal and metaphorical roots to the
sacred land of their ancestors. Pandora may be dripping with metaphors
of networking and connection, but the Na’vi are the objects, rather than
the subjects, of the virtual gaze, as, uncoincidentally, they are the objects
of the anthropological gaze.
One of the most interesting aspects of Avatar is its racialized deployment

of notions of humanity and animality. As Rob Waugh described them,
“The Na'vi look like deer but are recognisably human. There are emotions
in their faces” (Waugh 2009: 37). It is important that the imagined
evolutionary path that resulted in the Na’vi must be indeterminate but
unquestionably nonsimian, while their contemporary form must be
humanoid enough to make questions of bestiality moot (Fig. 23). In a post-
Holocaust and increasingly animal-rights-conscious world, the genocidal
assault on figures that were either essentially humanoid or recognizably
animal would be untenable in a film economically dependent on avoiding
any controversy that could seriously affect the bottom line. However, the
racialized casting of the performers who play the Na’vi (practically all
of the primary Na’vi characters were enacted and voiced by nonwhite
performers) reinstates “racial” difference as the privileged binary. The
implication seems to be that some recognizable economy of difference
must be installed for the film to be readable by a mass audience and the
idea of the racial or ethnic other as being “beyond the pale” is the most
convenient of fall-back positions when alterity must be normalized or
deconstructed in the service of romance. Esther Iverem went so far as to
claim that due to the paucity of African American feature films released
Figure 23 I See You, Avatar.

in 2009, Avatar “was actually the best ‘Black’ film of the year, with its CG
(computer-generated) tribute to African spirituality, triumph of nature
over earth-killing science, triumph of native people over imperialism,
and of course, a stunning performance by Zoe Saldana” (Iverem 2011:
12). Despite its utopian trappings and narrative trajectory, Avatar offers
a dystopian image of human-alien contact. It recreates the standard
trope of the genocidal alien invaders, but with Earthlings, specifically
Americans, positioned as the monsters from outer space. Avatar’s anti-
Americanism is a constitutive component of its will to globality; however,
its ultimately reterritorializing investment in Americanness is revealed by
its cowboys- and Indians-inspired rejection of the notion of coexistence
and of nonoppositional difference. Much of Avatar’s global success was
made possible by the minimal extent to which it moves past standard
narrative tropes of science fiction cinema despite its much and justly
lauded extension of the special effects template. It is notable that after
only a few weeks, Jake can enact and instrumentalize Na’vi masculinity
more authoritatively than his Na’vi rival who has inhabited both a Na’vi
body and Na’vi culture for his entire life. As an image of imperialist white
manhood gone native, Sully of Pandora is not far from Lawrence of
Arabia.
In Avatar, Jake Sully is ecstatic to discover that his Na’vi self is not
confined to a wheelchair. Slavoj Žižek has lambasted what he sees
as the “brutal racist motifs” underlying the film’s “politically correct
themes,” noting that, in the digital utopia, “a paraplegic outcast from
earth is good enough to get the hand of a local princess” (Žižek 2010:
n.p.). Although this formulation is highly problematic, it does recall
the rather more eloquent comment by Frantz Fanon, who wrote, “The
crippled veteran of the Pacific war says to my brother, ‘Resign yourself
to your color the way I got used to my stump; we’re both victims.
Nevertheless with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation.
I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep
as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without
limit’” (Fanon quoted in Chun 2009: 21). Fanon refused to see race
as a handicap (as disability rights activists refuse to see disability
as a handicap instead of as a difference), which is implied in the
assumption that the internet offers emancipation from the shackles

of race. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun points out that “for those who are
already marked, the Internet supposedly relieves them of their problem,
of the flesh that races, genders, ages and handicaps them, of the body
from which they usually cannot escape. Ineffaceable difference, rather
than discrimination, engenders oppression, and the discriminated
against, rather than the discriminators, must alleviate this oppression”
(Chun 2007: 309; original emphasis). When race is a “problem” to be
overcome, it is a problem only for some: the construction of race seems
to be inseparable from the construction of racial hierarchies, with the
latter inherent in the former.
In the biologized understanding of race, which is the heir to
eighteenth-century natural history, race-thinking is not just skin deep.
According to Samira Kawash, in this way of thinking, “Skin color
becomes visible as a basis for determining the order of identities and
differences and subsequently penetrates the body to become the truth of
the self. . . . Race is on the skin, but skin is the sign of something deeper,
something hidden in the invisible interior of the organism (as organic
or ontological). To see racial difference is therefore to see the bodily
sign of race but also to see more than this seeing, to see the interior
difference it stands for” (Kawash quoted in Chun 2009: 11). When Jake
tells the Na’vi princess Neytiri that he “sees her,” in his conflation of the
ocular with the epistemological and the ontological, Jake means that he
sees more than the eye can see. He “gets” her, in a charming declaration
of intimacy, but one that also evokes the more sinister dynamic of race-
thinking. The ultimate expression of such thinking would be eugenics,
which, as Chun puts it, “redefined all humans as the carriers of eternal
characteristics, making the base unit not the human but the trait.
Racism renders everyone into a standing reserve of genes to be stored
and transmitted” (Chun 2009: 19). Racialized individuals are seen, to
adapt Pierre Nora’s (1996) term slightly, as corporeal lieux de mémoire
(sites or realms of memory), bodily repositories of cultural memory
that can be tapped into in the right circumstances that would reveal the
workings of atavism (or what, in the context of our film, might be called
Avatism).
But what is cyberspace if not one big lieu de mémoire, the biggest
the world has ever known? Grace Augustine may die (or transcend all
forms of corporeality), but her memories live on, and can be transferred
directly into the Tree of Life in order to help the people of Pandora
defeat their attackers. This direct transmission of experience would
be an instantiation of what Nora deems “real” memory, as opposed to
history, which Nora identifies as a pale imitation, an inadequate modern
substitute for, or avatar of, the former: “The ‘acceleration of history’ thus
brings us face to face with the enormous distance that separates real
memory—the kind of inviolate social memory that primitive and archaic
societies embodied, and whose secret died with them—from history,
which is how modern societies organize a past they are condemned to
forget because they are driven by change” (Nora 1996: 2). The “primitive
and archaic” society Nora describes sounds very much like the Na’vi in
Cameron’s film. The main difference between Nora’s idealized version
of memory and his postlapsarian account of history seems to be that
memory is unmediated, whereas history is mediated. Nora’s distinction
between history and memory is clearly grounded in the Noble Savage
myth, relying upon primitivist stereotypes (see Ezra 2000a: 69–70). As
Mark Poster has pointed out, “Such a binary opposition fails to account
for the mediations within face-to-face communities, the way they are
technologies of power that constitute subjects and their ethnic identities
through material, symbolic practices” (Poster 2001: 160; original
emphasis). The Na’vi are a hierarchal community, comprising a chief,
esteemed elders, and junior members on various rungs of the social
ladder, to say nothing of the traditional gender roles that are all too
familiar to human audiences.
Similarly, the idea that cyberspace is free of the shackles of racism
strips the medium of its mediation, producing the illusion of a directly
accessible realm (like memory for Nora) of communication and
exchange. Perhaps the digital utopia can more accurately be considered
as what Foucault (1986) terms a heterotopia. Foucault identifies four
types of heterotopia: crisis heterotopias (the boarding school and
honeymoon), heterotopias of deviance (rest homes and prisons),
heterotopias of illusion (nineteenth-century brothels), and heterotopias
of compensation (colonies) (Chun 2003: 8). By contrast, Pandora, which
has no location in reality, is a fully fledged utopia—literally, nowhere—

rather than a heterotopia. It is internally conflict-free, showing no
signs of the strife or exploitation that characterize all real societies.
However, as a metaphor for cyberspace, Pandora certainly qualifies
as a metaphorical heterotopia, to which David Harvey’s critique of the
concept of heterotopia as “a commercial for Caribbean luxury cruises”
(Harvey 2009: 161) may certainly be applied.
The actual heterotopia is, somewhat paradoxically, the virtual world.
Cyberspace is at once a heterotopia of crisis (with distance learning the
equivalent of boarding school) and a heterotopia of compensation (with
internet explorers starting new lives in online communities in which they
can assume positions of power denied to them in their nonvirtual lives,
like the downtrodden working men in French cinéma colonial of the
1930s who fled checkered pasts to carve out new lives of adventure in the
colonies). Cyberspace is also a heterotopia of illusion (with the brothels
cited by Foucault finding their ubiquitous pornographic counterparts on
the internet) and, finally, a heterotopia of deviance, in which the prison
that Foucault mentions is what Mark Poster terms, aptly enough, the
internet’s “super-panopticon” (Poster 1995: 78–94), which observes our
every movement, and tracks our “history”—purchases we have made,
websites we have visited, messages we have posted or sent. According
to Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Operating systems, especially those with
names like ‘Windows,’ promise unobstructed transparency, but are in fact
one-way mirrors. Like invisible police investigators examining a suspect,
the computer sees us” (Winthrop-Young 2011: 76). The all-seeing nature
of technology, the way it monitors and becomes inseparable from lived
experience, is ultimately the meaning of the film’s motto, “I see you.”
According to Elsaesser, “The ending which seems at first the triumph of
nature over technology has a built-in twist, in that the avatar is a piece
of technology simulating both human and nature and thus it is in fact
the same technology in another guise that rescues nature from the evils
of technology” (Elsaesser 2011: 257). The “unmediated” natural paradise
that the Na’vi inhabit is thus preserved only through the medium of
human intervention.
As the film’s ending implies by placing Jake’s transformation at the
center of the Na’vis’ triumph, he transforms them as well. Their previous
sense of holistic continuity with their environment must now be

reconciled with the knowledge that, in the Derridean sense, their “being”
could only be maintained by their technologically engendered access to
a supplement, a literal pharmakon (see Derrida 1981: 61–172) in that
Jake was initially inserted into their world for the express purpose of
destroying it.
It is important to remember that for most of the film the human Na’vi
are devices enlivened by their connection to the “real” human being; in
other words, they are bio-machines capable of being unplugged. As Leigha
McReynolds writes, “Ultimately, Jake is the hero of the movie because
of his ability to form prosthetic relationships—he embraces amborg
status and modifies his body, privileging a new body that is defined
by mutual interdependence (over the power of the autonomous self)”
(McReynolds 2013: 122). Avatar is an addition to that body of science
fiction that literalizes the notion of the “becoming human” of technology
and the idea of prosthetic supplementation as an essential element of
human evolution. The creation of virtual humans is part and parcel
of the will to create nonvirtual technological prostheses that resemble
humans and that may be used to do our bidding. At the moment, these
prosthetic people are largely confined to the realm of science fiction,
but with advances in robotics and artificial intelligence accelerating
rapidly, cinematic representations of androids, robots and cyborgs could
be rehearsing anticipated “real-life” scenarios. In all the films discussed
in this chapter, some form of technologization, the incorporation of a
transformative technological apparatus into the mundane processes of
daily life, drives the drama or comedy of the narrative. In the final two
films I examine, the merging of humanity with technology is taken to its
logical conclusion.
How cinema makes us human: Wall-E and Prometheus
In Prometheus (2012), Ridley Scott’s long-anticipated prequel to the

landmark Alien (1979), the android David (Michael Fassbender) is
presented as a huge fan of the film Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean,
Figure 24 David of Arabia, Prometheus.
1962). He watches it raptly in his spare moments on an enormous,

wall-sized screen, repeats lines from the film with an almost religious
reverence (especially the masochistic mantra, “The trick, William Potter,
is not minding that it hurts”), and even dyes his hair bright blond in order
to look like Peter O’Toole, the actor who played T. E. Lawrence (Fig. 24).
David’s obsession with the film softens the edges of the otherwise
invulnerable, apparently emotionless android. To be such a devoted fan
of a pop-cultural artifact is to strike a chord with viewers who themselves
are watching a Hollywood blockbuster, many of whom may well be
fans of the Alien series. David’s fandom links him to viewers not only
by exposing his emotional—and therefore vulnerable—side, but also by
showing him engaging in the same activity in which viewers of Scott’s
film are engaging. In opposition to the characters in the Alien franchise
who are revealed to be androids, David is humanized, or at least, rendered
sympathetic to and identifiable with humans. This humanization process
occurs largely through his involvement with cinema—specifically, a big-
budget, 1960s-era Hollywood film.
In this respect, David bears a striking resemblance to another film-
loving robot that preceded him by just four years: the eponymous star
of Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). Like David, Wall-E watches a classic
film in a manner that can only be described as adulatory. The film in
question is Hello Dolly (Gene Kelly, 1969), the hit musical starring Barbra
Streisand. Wall-E repeatedly views one of the film’s musical numbers
on a VHS copy of the film that he has rescued from the garbage heap
left behind by human litterbugs who have abandoned the Earth and are
floating around the galaxy in a giant cruise-ship-like space station (Paul
Flaig refers to these people as “gigantic babies incapable of action or
thought” [2016: 3]). Through Wall-E’s obsession with this filmed musical
number depicting heterosexual courtship, the Pixar film reinforces
the robot’s desire for romantic love. Yet, this desire is already amply
illustrated in Wall-E’s encounters with the robot coded as female, named
Eva, which convey his shy awkwardness and nervous desire for the state-
of-the-art technological creation. What Wall-E’s repeated viewing of the
Hollywood film demonstrates is the obsessive nature of his desire, the
repetition recognized by Freud (1967 [1920]) as the pleasure principle or
life instinct (which ultimately leads to the death instinct). Most viewers
would be able to identify with Wall-E’s compulsion to repeat his viewing
of the scene from Hello Dolly, just as they would remember repeatedly
listening to a particular pop song as teenagers (or as they would identify
with the Mark Zuckerberg character’s insistent pressing of the “refresh”
key at the end of The Social Network to check if his ex-girlfriend has
responded to his friend request on Facebook). Wall-E projects himself
on to the male character in the Hello Dolly dance number, who performs
a wish-fulfillment role not unlike that of the T. E. Lawrence character
in the film so admired by David in Prometheus. T. E. Lawrence is a self-
sacrificing soldier with clear masochistic tendencies, while David is a
self-sacrificing android with implied masochistic tendencies. As Wall-E
and David identify with the characters in the films they watch, the
spectators who watch the robots watching identify with these surrogate
viewers.
Wall-E
Hello Dolly is the primordial ooze from which Wall-E was born. The earlier
film’s talismanic slogan is: “Money, pardon the expression, is like manure.
It’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread about, encouraging young things
to grow.” This is the sign that Dolly eagerly awaits from her dead husband
Ephraim, and which is finally bestowed on her by her soon-to-be-second
husband Horace. It is also the sign, replete with images of growth and
generation, whose ghostly echo haunts Wall-E. As Ephraim’s voice seems
to resonate from beyond the grave in the words of his favorite saying
repeated by Horace, so Hello Dolly itself is revived in ghostly afterlife in
Wall-E.
The Barbra Streisand vehicle began life as a hit Broadway play, and
was finally turned into a film in 1969, directed by dance legend Gene
Kelly. The Streisand character, Dolly Levi, is a professional matchmaker
in 1890s New York. The film opens on a freeze frame of a bustling
urban street scene. The sepia-tinted image remains frozen for several
seconds before finally bursting into movement. This transition from
stasis to kinesis recalls the historic moment in December 1895 when
the Lumière Brothers began their inaugural public film screening with
a still image suspended on the screen for long enough to lull audience
members into thinking, initially, that they would be watching nothing
more than a conventional magic lantern show. This none-too-subtle
reference to an iconic moment that happens to be contemporaneous
with the film’s 1890s setting links the Hollywood film to the origins
of cinema itself, both anecdotally in its allusion to the screening in
the Grand Café in Paris, and symbolically in its invocation of the shift
from stillness to movement (kino, cinema), from the inanimate to
animation.
This generational dynamic—in the double sense of temporal
succession and of coming-to-life—established at the outset of Hello
Dolly also, inevitably, informs Wall-E. When the Pixar film’s protagonist
falls in love with a newer-model trash compactor, he is confronted with
the implications of planned obsolescence: he fears he just cannot keep
up with the sleek, streamlined metallic marvel that is Eva. But Wall-E,
as the animated product of digital engineering by Pixar Studios, and as
an apparently autonomous, anthropomorphic product of mechanical
engineering within the film’s diegesis, also embodies this generational
dynamic within himself. Vivian Sobchack points out that Wall-E
functions dialectically: “The little trash compactor literally embodies
not only the contradictory mechanistic and animistic modeling of
animation as, on the one hand, automatic and repetitive movement and,
on the other, autonomous and autopoietic life, but he also acts out an
atavistic synthesis that, as Eisenstein recognized, conflates the inanimate

and animate, the object and subject” (Sobchack 2009: 385). Wall-E, being
mostly mechanical in an environment in which he is surrounded by
electronics, represents the old guard. (Similarly, Paul Flaig notes Wall-E’s
nostalgia for slapstick “against the post-Fordist cinema of which Pixar is
vanguard” [Flaig 2016: 5].) But Wall-E also represents the way forward:
he is a Janus figure, facing two eras at once. According to Sobchack,
who quotes Susan Buck-Morss, he “thus stands with his Hello, Dolly!
videotape not only for ‘the utopian hope of past generations, but also—
and with EVE—as the new ‘form’ of ‘those who come after’ to whom
these hopes (and their betrayal) have been passed” (Buck-Morss 1991:
336, quoted in Sobchack 2009: 387–88). Wall-E thus represents not only
the obsolescence of mechanics in the face of electronics, but also the
evolution of film formats, from video to DVD (the form of the film initially
distributed for home use) and CGI technology (Fig. 25). As Deborah
Tudor observes, “When photochemical images are placed in dialectic
with digitized images produced solely within the computer . . . this
slippage lets film instead of actuality become the ‘lost real,’ the point
of certainty and origin for representation’” (Tudor 2008: 92, cited in
Sobchack 2009: 379). In this light, Sobchack reads Wall-E’s fondness
for Hello Dolly as “mourning work” for the death of cinema in the
digital age, a “cinephilic homage to photochemical cinema” (Sobchack
2009: 279).
Figure 25 Film fandom, Wall-E.

The succession of generations is also apparent in the relationship

between Hello Dolly and Wall-E, with the “money is like manure” tagline
of the former prefiguring the waste motif of the latter. Similarly, Lawrence
of Arabia is about conquering the final frontier at the height of the
colonial era, anticipating the Ridley Scott film’s theme of exploration and
reinvention through travel to far-flung lands. But Prometheus, as its title
suggests, also invokes a much earlier precedent.
Prometheus
The Greek myth of Prometheus has long been synonymous with the
creation of life—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, was titled The
Modern Prometheus. In the myth, Prometheus (literally “forethought”)
fashions the first humans out of clay, and bestows, among other things,
the gift of fire upon them, which he has stolen from the gods. As
punishment for his hubris, Zeus orders the Titan’s liver to be pecked out
by an eagle each day and regenerated each night so the torture can begin
anew.
Scott’s film opens with a genesis scene, in which an anthropomorphic
creature of Titanic proportions, a Prometheus figure, drinks a
concoction seething with microscopic life and then himself dissolves
into an ocean, thereby generating life on Earth. The humans in
Prometheus in turn experiment with the generation of human life: they
tamper with DNA, and try to reanimate a long-dead extraterrestrial.
In Scott’s film, Peter Weyland, the old man who finances the ship’s
expedition, is trying to find a way of prolonging his life, and thus of
tampering with the gods’ plan for humans, with a hubris similar to that
of Prometheus.
Prometheus is much more about the destabilization of traditional
methods of human reproduction than it is about monsters in outer space.
This destabilization is exemplified, first, by the numerous references
to homosexuality, and most notably by the android David, whose self-
containment is presented as essentially queer. The precision of his
movements and his meticulously maintained self-attention work against
the disheveled ungainliness of the “real” men on board and mark him
as ontologically superior to mere humans. This dynamic recreates the
relationship between Lawrence of Arabia and the “beasts” among whom
he achieved his queer self-fashioning in the Far East.
Moreover, in Prometheus the almost anorexically thin bodies of
Charlize Theron in the role of Meredith Vickers and Noomi Rapace, who
plays Elizabeth Shaw, are images of female bodies that have apparently
foregone reproduction just as they have rejected consumption. The
captain’s response to Vickers’s rejection of his playfully put but serious
sexual advances is to ask the question that one suspects has been on the
audience’s mind since her first appearance on screen: the question of
whether she is, in fact, an android instead of a “real girl.” The fact that
she responds by curtly scheduling an appointment for sex with him is
her way of both answering and avoiding the question. She does this by
signaling her (ironic) understanding that no “real” man could possibly
care whether a woman who made herself sexually available to him was or
was not actually human.
On the other hand, her counter in the film, Elizabeth Shaw, is not a
“real girl” because, as she tearfully reveals midway through the film, she
cannot have children, which is, the film implies, the ultimate act of self-
fulfillment for a woman. Shaw’s infertility sheds new light on the scenes
of the explorers in their bubble-headed white oxygen suits depicted as
sperm-like entities traveling through the alien ship’s essentially fallopian
tunnels (a basic marker of the Alien series) in search of an egg to fertilize.
Shaw’s quest to find her Creator becomes readable as a stand-in for
her inability to perform the godlike gesture of giving birth. The act of
childbirth that Shaw does eventually perform—a do-it-yourself Cesarean
section inside the medical pod, complete with staple-gun sutures—is
so horrific that it actually seems to be punishing her for having had sex
while knowing that she was incapable of having a baby.
The alien invasion begins when Charlie Holloway is infected by some
primordial sludge with which David spikes his drink. Holloway then has
sex with Shaw, who miraculously becomes impregnated with the alien
spawn where human sperm had been unable to do the trick. The creature
she extracts from her body, which has matured by three months over the
course of just ten hours, is a human-sludge hybrid, seemingly bypassing

Holloway’s DNA altogether, which acts as little more than a host for
the sludge’s paternal DNA (though it must be said that the child bears a
closer resemblance to its father’s side of the family than to its mother’s).
Similarly, the film’s penultimate scene shows the now fully grown sludge
creature wrapping itself around the last remaining human-DNA’d
engineer and thrusting its long, octopus-like protrusion into his mouth;
the final scene shows the gelatinous product of this romantic encounter
bursting out of the engineer’s chest, evoking the chest-bursting scene in
the first Alien film (Ridley Scott, 1979). The genealogy of the alien, then,
is a métissage between humans and sludge. Within the alien (the other,
the outside), there lurks a little bit of “us” (the same, the inside)—and
vice versa.
This hybrid model of procreation, of an “inside” that is constituted by
its “outside,” is analogous to the transductive, or mutually constitutive,
relationship between human beings and technology, which is also
invoked in the film’s title. In the Greek myth, Prometheus and his brother
Epimetheus (literally afterthought or hindsight) were charged with the
task of creating life on Earth. However, Epimetheus, whose job it was to
bestow positive attributes on all the creatures, ran out by the time he got
to humans. Because of this forgetful omission, which Stiegler (2011) calls
the “fault” of Epimetheus, Prometheus was obliged to endow humans
with the capacity to make tools to supplement their originary lack. The
use and creation of tools, of course, is what traditionally defined humanity
according to anthropologists. The prosthesis therefore supplements the
human, which is to say that, in the logic of the supplement, it makes us
human.
If humans are actually posthuman—in other words, so successful at
using the tools that identify them as human that they begin to merge with
technology—then technology is posttechnological, that is, so perfectly
achieved that it begins to acquire “human” traits. Technology performs
tasks once performed by humans, from surgery (e.g., the medical pod in
Prometheus) to locomotion (comically rendered in Wall-E with the hover-
chairs that do away with the need for humans to walk, to feed themselves,
or even to turn their heads to speak to the people whizzing along right
beside them). A number of philosophical, cultural and literary theories

of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries articulate, in various
ways, how humans are embedded in symbolic and technical systems. One
example of this imbrication of humanity and technology is the fact that
it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between people
and screens. Interface has become intersection, which in turn has become
fusion. Stiegler’s contention that consciousness is structured like cinema
is partially echoed by Jonathan Beller’s theory of cinematic consciousness
(Beller 2006), and by Alison Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory, which posits
that individual memories are being replaced by mediatized images of
historical events (Landsberg 2004). We (humans) have screens for brains,
while the contents of our brains are uploaded to computer databases; we
walk around in a fog, while anything we are moved to express is shot up
into the Cloud. At the same time, much recent film theory has been taken
up with haptic cinema (the landmark work in this respect being Laura
U. Marks’s The Skin of the Film, first published in 2000), which engages
with senses beyond the visual. But this work on cinema and sensation,
when read in conjunction with work on cinematic consciousness, points
to the idea that sensation is actually coming to be processed through
screens rather than through the human body. In other words, the human
body and the screen have merged to such an extent—either through
the phenomenon of prosthetic memory or through the projection of
memories on to screens—that phenomenology itself is something that is
mediated by screens. For example, in Prometheus, when we see images of
a little girl playing a violin on a big screen that the characters watch, we
are not sure if these are Shaw’s actual memories or simply representations
of her memories (and what, in fact, is the difference?). And when the
laser-image of long-dead alien creatures passes over David when he is
in the cave and he shudders with pleasure, the line between cinema and
sensation seems completely blurred. What if the body is increasingly
coming to experience sensation, not as an effect (or affect) of watching
a screen, but through screens, to the extent that any sensation that body
might experience can be mediated by screens? Scott Bukatman notes
that virtual reality “significantly extends the sensory address of the
existent media to provide an alternate and manipulable space. . . . In an
ecstatic exaggeration of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological loop, world

and body comprise a continually modifying feedback loop, producing a
terminal identity without the terminal: a cybersubject” (Bukatman 1993:
187; original emphasis). It is not necessary to deny the very real presence,
agency, and importance of human bodies in order to recognize that
perception and experience are coming to be increasingly prostheticized
by, and interchangeable with, screens.
A similar supplementary logic drives the relationship between center
and periphery in globalization. Hello Dolly tells the tale of the American
Dream, of enterprising European immigrants (Dolly from Ireland,
Horace from Eastern Europe) who build successful businesses and
become the very emblem of American capitalism. Lawrence of Arabia,
while purporting to depict the central role played by a British officer in
the Arabs’ fight against the Turks, ends up telling the story of how Arabia
changed a British officer and, by extension, how the empire exerted a
reciprocal influence on the colonial metropolis. Both Lawrence of Arabia
and Hello Dolly underline the role of the “outside” in constituting the
“inside”—in the case of Lawrence of Arabia, the role of the empire in
creating Britain; and, in the case of Hello Dolly, the role of immigrants
in creating the wealth and alliances (both mercenary, through Horace’s
enterprise, and dynastic, through Dolly’s matchmaking) that made the
United States the globally dominant country of the twentieth century.
But such enfolding of the “outside” into the heart of power inevitably
triggers a counterdefense. The initial role of cinema, according to
Stiegler, was to provide a common ideal around which the various
immigrant groups in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could
coalesce: “Because it was permanently necessary to project the American
‘model’ to newly arrived immigrants, as well as to the Southern states
that, following the Civil War, had to be kept in the Union, the United
States became the country born of cinema” (Stiegler 2011: 105; original
emphasis). This exchange between center and periphery is not only
represented in cinema; it is also enabled by it. On a far more modest
level, this exchange plays out between Hollywood blockbusters and
French philosophy, and between French art cinema and (largely) North
American film theory.
As watching films, even bad ones, extends our vision of the world, what
we see (and hear) courses through us, globalizing our consciousness. If
consciousness is structured like cinema, then each viewer has become at
once the most deep-seated and the most far-flung outpost of globalization.
What Wall-E and David ultimately show us is that cinema, in making us
human, makes us global subjects. Cinema supplements us, showing us
what we’re missing.
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Filmography
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Dir. Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,

Stanley Kubrick Productions.
À Bout de souffle (1959) (Breathless), Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: Les Films Impéria,
Les Productions Georges de Beauregard, Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie.
À la conquête du Pôle (The Conquest of the Pole) (1912), Dir. Georges Méliès, France:
Star-Film.
Alien (1979), Dir. Ridley Scott, UK/USA: Brandywine Productions, Twentieth-Century
Fox Productions.
Alien 3 (1992), Dir. David Fincher, USA: Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation,
Brandywine Productions.
Alien Resurrection (1997), Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, USA: Brandywine Productions,
Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation.
Aliens (1986), Dir. James Cameron, USA/UK: Twentieth-Century Fox Film
Corporation, Brandywine Productions, SLM Production Group.
Alphaville (1965), Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy: Athos Films, Chaumiane,
Filmstudio.
L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) (Last Year in Marienbad), Dir. Alain Resnais,
France/Italy: Cocinor, Terra Film, Cormoran Films.
Avatar (2009), Dir. James Cameron, USA/UK: Twentieth Century Fox Film
Corporation, Dune Entertainment, Ingenious Film Partners.
Barbarella (1968), Dir. Roger Vadim, France/Italy: Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica,
Marianne Productions.
Battlestar Galactica (1978) [Television series], Dir. Richard A. Colla, USA: Glenn A.
Larson Productions, Universal Television.
La Belle et la bête (1946) (Beauty and the Beast), Dir. Jean Cocteau, France: DisCina.
La Belle vie (1963) (The Good Life), Dir. Roberto Enrico, France: Les Films du
Centaure.
The Big Bang Theory (2012, Season 5, no. 14, “The Beta Test Initiation”) [Television
series], created by Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady, USA: Chuck Lorre Productions, Warner
Brothers.
The Big Sleep (1946), Dir. Howard Hawks, USA: Warner Brothers.
The Big Store (1941), Dir. Charles Reisner, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Dir. James Whale, USA: Universal Pictures.
198 Filmography
Bridesmaids (2011), Dir. Paul Feig, USA: Universal Pictures, Relativity Media, Apatow
Productions.
Le bourreau turc (The Terrible Turkish Executioner) (1904), Dir. Georges Méliès,
France: Star-Film.
Bulles de savon animées (Animated Soap Bubbles) (1906), Dir. Georges Méliès, France:
Star-Film.
The Carrie Diaries (2013–14) [Television series], created by Amy Harris, USA: Fake
Empire, A. B. Baby Productions, Warner Bros Television.
Les Cartes vivantes (The Living Playing Cards) (1904), Dir. Georges Méliès, France:
Star-Film.
La Cité des enfants perdus (1995) (City of Lost Children), Dir. Marc Caro, Jean-
Pierre Jeunet, France: Club d’Investissement Médias, Eurimages, Studio Image,
Canal +.
Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), Dir. Agnès Varda, France/Italy: Ciné Tamaris, Rome Paris Films.
The Cocoanuts (1929), Dir. Robert Florey, Joseph Santley, USA: Paramount Pictures.
Delicatessen (1991), Dir. Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France: Constellation, Union
Générale Cinématographique, Hachette Première.
The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Dir. David Frankel, USA: Fox 2000 Pictures, Dune
Entertainment, Major Studio Partners.
Duck Soup (1933), Dir. Leo McCarey, USA: Paramount Pictures.
Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin (The Vanishing Lady) (1896), Dir. Georges
Méliès, France: Star-Film.
Eve of Destruction (1991), Dir. Duncan Gibbins, USA: Nelson Entertainment.
Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (Amélie) (2001), Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France:
Claudie Ossard Productions, Union Générale Cinématographique, Tapioca Films.
Fantômas (1913–14), Dir. Louis Feuillade, France: Gaumont.
Fausse alerte (1945) (The French Way), Dir. Jacques de Baroncelli, France: Flag Films.
The Fifth Element (1997), Dir. Luc Besson, France: Gaumont.
La Fille sur le pont (1999) (The Girl on the Bridge), Dir. Patrice Leconte, France: Canal
+, France 2 Cinéma, Les Films Christian Fechner, Sofica Sofinergie 5, UGCF.
La Grande illusion (1937) (Grand Illusion), Dir. Jean Renoir, France: Réalisations d’Art
Cinématographique.
Hello Dolly (1969), Dir. Gene Kelly, USA: Chenault Productions, Twentieth Century
Fox Film Corporation.
The Help (2011), Dir. Tate Taylor, USA/India/United Arab Emirates: DreamWorks SKG,
Reliance Entertainment, Participant Media.
Her (2013), Dir. Spike Jonze, USA: Annapurna Pictures.
L’homme à la tête en caoutchouc (The Man with the Rubber Head) (1901), Dir. Georges
Les illusions funambulesques (Extraordinary Illusions) (1903), Dir. Georges Méliès,
France: Star-Film.
Filmography 199
It Happened One Night (1934), Dir. Frank Capra, USA: Columbia Pictures.
Jules et Jim (1962), Dir. François Truffaut, France: Les Films du Carosse, Sédif Productions.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dir. David Lean, UK: Horizon Pictures.
Love Happy (1949), Dir. David Miller, USA: Artists Alliance.
M (1931), Dir. Fritz Lang, Germany: Nero-Film AG.
Le mélomane (The Melomaniac) (1903), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film.
Le merveilleux éventail vivant (The Wonderful Living Fan) (1903), Dir. Georges Méliès,
France: Star-Film.
Malcolm X (1992), Dir. Spike Lee, USA: 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks.
Metropolis (1927), Dir. Fritz Lang, Germany: Universum Film.
Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009) (Micmacs), Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France: Épithète
Films, Tapioca Films, Warner Brothers.
Mission Impossible (1996), Dir. Brian De Palma, USA: Paramount Pictures.
Modern Times (1936), Dir. Charles Chaplin, USA: Charles Chaplin Productions.
Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963) (Muriel, or the Time of Return), Dir. Alain
Resnais, France/Italy: Argos Films, Alpha Productions, Éclair.
My Fair Lady (1964), Dir. George Cukor, USA: Warner Brothers.
A Night at the Opera (1935), Dir. Sam Wood, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
A Night in Casablanca (1946), Dir. Archie Mayo, USA: Loma Vista Productions, Inc.
Nikita (La Femme Nikita) (1990), Dir. Luc Besson, France/Italy: Gaumont, Les Films du
Loup.
Nosferatu (1921), Dir. F.W. Murnau, Germany: Jofa-Atelier Berlin Johannisthal, Prana-
Film GmbH.
Nuit et brouillard (1955) (Night and Fog), Dir. Alain Resnais, France: Argos Films.
Les Oliviers de la justice (1963) (The Olive Trees of Justice), Dir. James Blue, France:
Société Algérienne.
L’Opéra-mouffe (1958) (Diary of a Pregnant Woman), Dir. Agnès Varda, France: Ciné
Tamaris.
Le Petit soldat (1963) (The Little Soldier), Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: Les
Productions Georges de Beauregard, Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie.
La Photographie électrique à distance (Long Distance Wireless Photography) (1908), Dir.
Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film.
Princesse Tam-Tam (1935) (Princess Tam-Tam), Dir. Edmond T. Gréville, France:
Productions Arys.
Prometheus (2012), Dir. Ridley Scott, USA/UK: Twentieth Century Fox, Dune
Entertainment, Scott Free Productions.
Les Quatre cents farces du diable (The Merry Frolics of Satan) (1906), Dir. Georges
Safety Last (1932), Dir. Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, USA: Hal Roach Studios.
Sex and the City (2008), Dir. Michael Patrick King, USA: New Line Cinema, Home Box
Office, Darren Star Productions.
200 Filmography
Sex and the City 2 (2010), Dir. Michael Patrick King, USA: New Line Cinema, Home
Box Office, HBO Films.
S1M0NE (2002), Dir. Andrew Niccol, USA: New Line Cinema.
La Sirène (The Siren) (1904), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film.
La Sirène des Tropiques (1927) (Siren of the Tropics), Mario Nalpas, Henri Étiévant.
France: La Centrale Cinématographique
The Social Network (2010), Dir. David Fincher, USA: Columbia Pictures, Relativity
Media, Scott Rudin Productions.
La statue animée (The Drawing Lesson) (1903), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Dir. J. J. Abrams, USA: Lucasfilm.
Les Statues meurent aussi (1953) (Statues also Die), Dir. Alain Resnais and Chris
Marker, France: Présence Africaine, Tadié Cinéma.
The Stepford Wives (1975), Dir. Bryan Forbes, USA: Palomar Pictures.
The Stepford Wives (2004), Dir. Frank Oz, USA: Paramount Pictures.
Trois couleurs: bleu (Three Colours: Blue) (1993), Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski, France/
Poland/Switzerland: MK2 Productions, CED Productions, France 3 Cinéma.
Un homme de têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads) (1898), Dir. Georges Méliès, France:
Star-Film.
Un Long dimanche de fiancailles (2004) (A Very Long Engagement), Dir. Jean-Pierre
Jeunet, France/USA: Warner Brothers, Tapioca Films.
Une bonne farce avec ma tête (Tit for Tat) (1903), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film.
Les Vampires (1915–16), Dir. Louis Feuillade, France: Gaumont.
Wall-E (2008), Dir. Andrew Stanton, USA: Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation
Studios.
Les Yeux sans visage (1960) (Eyes without a Face), Dir. Georges Franju, France/Italy:
Champs-Élysées Productions, Lux Film.
Zouzou (1934), Marc Allégret, France: Les Films H. Roussillon, Productions Arys.
Index
Abel, Richard 19, 96, 132 Barbarella (1968) 133

A Bout de souffle (1959) 93 Barthes, Roland 153
Abraham, Nicolas 112 Bataille, Georges 55, 62
acousmachine 157–8 Battlestar Galactica (1978) 151
acousmêtre 152, 156–7 Baudelaire, Charles 86, 137–8
Adamowicz, Elza 93, 131 Baudrillard, Jean 9, 12–13, 87, 114, 123
Aimard, Gustave 19 Bauman, Zygmunt 17, 31, 44
A la Conquête du Pôle (1912) 135 Belle Epoque 133–5, 139, 141
Algerian War 18, 21–2, 68–9, 80, Beller, Jonathan 57, 180
82, 88, 93 Bellour, Raymond 145
Alien (1979) 172 Benjamin, Walter 44, 54, 70, 80, 93,
Alien Phenomenology (Bogost) 11 135, 150
Alien Resurrection (1997) 133, 164 Bennett, Jane 6, 12, 14, 32
allochronism 42 Bergson, Henri 115–16
Alphaville (1965) 133, 140 Berkeley, Busby 115
Altman, Rick 149 Bernheimer, Charles 102
ambient intelligence 14 Bersani, Leo 91–2
American Indian Apache tribe 19 Besson, Luc 133, 139
Americanness 168 Beugnet, Martine 13
Anderson, Benedict 28, 69 Beyoncé 37
androids 25, 29, 172–4, 177–8 Bhabha, Homi 79
Animal Crackers (1930) 115, 121, 128 Big Bang Theory, The (2012) 151
anthropocene 12 “Big Bertha” 99
anti-Semitism 113 Big Sleep, The (1946) 55, 59–60
Apple 148 Big Store, The (1941) 22–3, 96–7, 113–15,
Arendt, Hannah 92 117–18, 121–3, 125–6. See also Marx
Ars Amatoria (Ovid) 137 Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, and
artificial intelligence 4, 6, 8, 14, 74, 148, Chico)
159, 172. See also digital encoding/ and ethnic stereotyping sequence
virtual reality in 121–8
artificial women. See women, as objects mirror scene in 125–6
assembly-line techniques 116 and “Sing While You Sell”
automatic filmmaking 107 (song) 117–20
autonomous reality 11 Binoche, Juliette 140
Avatar (2009) 27–8, 159–72 biotechnology 164
Ayme, Jean 104, 109 bizutage (French tradition) 84
black body image 20
Babbage, Charles 166 Blade Runner (1982) 157
Bacall, Lauren 55 body
Baker, Josephine 20–1, 68–79, 119 “black body” image 20
Banville, Théodore de 137 racialized 20
202 Index
and voice 147–58 City of God (St. Augustine) 162

Bogart, Humphrey 55, 59 Civil War 49, 181
Bogost, Ian 11 Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) 69, 82–5
Bonnot gang 19 Cléopâtre (1909) 19
Boon, Dany 55, 59 Clifford, James 19–20, 65, 160
Boscagli, Maurizia 10, 16 Clover, Carol 132
Bounoure, Gaston 89 Cocoanuts, The (1929) 126
Bradshaw, Carrie 15, 33–4 Cocteau, Jean 139
Braidotti, Rosi 3, 6, 12, 62 cognitive capitalism 4
Brexit 7 Colbert, Claudette 42
Brialy, Jean-Claude 83 Cole, Andrew 15
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) 25 Coleman, Beth 166
Bridesmaids (2011) 17, 31, 44–53 collage cinématographique 107
Britton, Celia 90 comedy 112–28. See also Marx Brothers
Brown, Bill 9, 12, 116 (Groucho, Harpo, and Chico)
Bryant, Levi R. 11 composite memories 80
Buck-Morss, Susan 176 computer binary code 143
Bukatman, Scott 143, 146, 148, 180–1 Confessions (Rousseau) 38
Bulles de savon animées (1906) 139 Confessions (St. Augustine) 162
Bushnell, Candace 33 Connor, Steven 1, 10
Butler, Judith 142 consumer capitalism 4, 15, 32
consumerism 15, 38, 117
camera-projector 130 consumption 2–4, 7–9, 15, 17, 28, 31–2,
Cameron, James 159, 161–4, 170 39–41, 44–5, 47, 50, 54, 66, 81, 117,
“carré blanc” (blank screen) 73, 91 146, 178
Carrie Diaries, The (2013-2014) 33 convergence 28, 81, 131, 163, 165
Cartwright, Lisa 131 Cooper, James Fenimore 19
castration fantasy 22–3, 25, 97, 102–3, Coppélia (1870) 25
105–6, 109–10, 112, 126, 132, 135, Corbett, John 34
141, 147, 152–3, 156 Critchley, Simon 126
Cattrall, Kim 34 Critical Inquiry 9
Cayrol, Jean 92 crystal-images 56–7, 64
censorship 21–3, 80, 90–1 crystal-objects. See reused objects
CGI (computer-generated imagery) Culture of the Copy, The 141
technology 26, 146, 168, 176 curiositas 162
Champreux, Jacques 108 cyberspace 170–1
Chaplin, Charles 114, 116–17
Chion, Michel 150–2, 156–7 d’Alcy, Jehanne 131
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong 169 de-acousmatization 152, 157
Churchill, Winston 64 de Beauharnais, Josephine 74
cinéma colonial 21, 171 de Bergerac, Cyrano 148
cinematic exoticism de Gaulle, Charles 77, 88
and Baker, Josephine 69–79 de la Fenouillet, Nicolas Thibault 60, 64
and masks in Cléo de 5 à 7 Deleuze, Gilles 56, 68, 85, 166
(1962) 79–85 Delicatessen (1991) 59
multidirectional memory in Derrida, Jacques 2, 55, 61, 65, 151, 152, 154
Muriel 88–94 Descartes, René 141
overview 18–22, 67–9 desemitization 114
Index 203
Devil Wears Prada, The (2006) 16, 31, Fantômas films 19

40, 47 fashion 16, 19, 31, 33–4, 37–42, 47, 53,
diegetic universe 20, 83, 85, 162–3 65, 69, 79, 81, 108, 119, 135, 137,
“the difference engine” 166 145, 156, 177–8
digital divide 166 Fassbender, Michael 29, 172
digital encoding/virtual reality 26–7, Fausse alerte (1939) 21, 68, 70, 72–5, 77
160–72. See also artificial Ferrier, Julie 56
intelligence Ferry, Gabriel 19
digital utopia 28, 161, 163–5, 168, 170 fetish 8, 15, 20–1, 23–5, 38–9, 54, 67,
disaster capitalism 4 78–9, 84, 94–5, 97, 103, 105, 110–12,
disposable bodies 17 126–7, 129, 152–3, 157
Doane, Mary Ann 25, 150–1, 154–5 Fetishism and Curiosity (Mulvey) 97
Dolar, Mladen 148 Feuillade, Louis 19, 22–3, 95–9, 102–4,
Downey, Robert, Jr. 5 107, 109, 112
Doyen, Eugène-Louis 130, 132, 135 Fifth Element, The (1997) 25, 133, 138–40
Dracula (Stoker) 98 First World War 7, 19–20, 22–4, 65, 88,
Duck Soup (1933) 117, 125–7 95, 97–9, 102, 112, 124
Dumbrille, Douglas 118 Fischer, Lucy 137
Dumont, Margaret 118 Fix, Charlene 97
Duncan, Alastair 92 Flaig, Paul 126, 174
Duplessis, Paul 19 Flanagan, Mary 143–4, 146
Duras, Marguerite 151 Fleming, Victor 37
Dussollier, André 59 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy 81, 123
Dutoit, Ulysse 91–2 Foster, Hal 25
Dyer, Richard 145, 150 Foucault, Michel 170–1
d’Zan, Bout 102 Franco-Prussian War 98
freeze frames 85, 175
“Eloge du maquillage” (essay) 137 French cinema 1, 7, 20–1, 24, 68, 96, 132
Elsaesser, Thomas 161, 163, 171 French New Wave (1958–62) 21–2, 68,
Epimetheus 30, 179 79–83, 87–9, 93
Epstein, Jean 20 French Way, The. See Fausse alerte (1939)
Ernst, Max 107 Freud, Sigmund 22–5, 94, 103, 126, 132,
Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert- 147, 156, 174
Houdin (1896) 131
Essai sur l’exotisme 87 Garland, Judy 37
Eve of Destruction (1991) 25 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Evian Accords 80 Subversion of Identity (Butler) 142
Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, The globalization 1–7, 14–15, 17–18, 27–8,
(1895) 132 31, 41, 45, 55, 64–7, 69–70, 129,
exoticism. See cinematic exoticism 181–2
Exposition anticoloniale 84 Godard, Jean-Luc 80, 83, 87,
Exposition coloniale of 1931 84 93, 133
Gordon, Rae Beth 131, 134
Fabian, Johannes 42 grammatization/exteriorization 57, 61
Fables (La Fontaine) 99 Grande illusion (1937) 124
faciality (visagéité) 85–7 Great War. See First World War
Fall of France 74 Greene, Naomi 91
Fanon, Frantz 83–4, 168 Grossman, Wendy A. 81
204 Index
Grosz, Elizabeth 26 Jules et Jim (1962) 22, 69, 85–8

Groucho, Harpo, and Chico Marx. See Jünger, Ernst 98
Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo,
and Chico) Kaes, Anton 98
Guattari, Félix 85 Kaplan, E. Ann 107
Gunning, Tom 116, 162 Karina, Anna 83
Kawash, Samira 169
Hansen, Mark 165 Kelly, Gene 175
Haraway, Donna 5 Khanna, Ranjana 17
Harman, Graham 11 King, Rob 116
Harvey, David 171 Klein, Melanie 95
Hathaway, Anne 40 Kristeva, Julia 49
Hayles, N. Katherine 3 Kubrick, Stanley 157
Hello Dolly (1969) 29, 173–7, 181 Kyrou, Ado 107
Help, The (2011) 17, 31, 44–53
Her (2004) 26, 142, 147–58 La Belle et la bête (1946) 139–40
heterosexual male gaze 147 La Cité des enfants perdus (1997) 59
heterotopia 170–1 La Fille sur le pont (1999) 133
Higgins, Lynn A. 88, 90 La Fontaine, Jean de 99
historical fallacy 149 L’Âge d’homme (Leiris) 107
Hitler, Adolf 97, 113 “La Môme Caoutchouc” 56, 65
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 25 Landsberg, Alison 58, 180
Hollywood 1, 7, 8, 22, 24, 34, 35, 37, 45, Lane, Anthony 149
50, 69, 113–14, 130, 142, 144, 153, L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961) 88
159, 173–5, 181 La Part maudite (Bataille) 55
Holocaust 87, 92–3, 112, 167 La Photographie électrique à distance
Huyssen, Andreas 25 (1908) 136
hybrid materiality 10 La Revue de Paris (1899) 115
hyperconsumption 1, 3, 8, 31, 66 La Sirène des tropiques (1927) 60, 68, 70,
72–4
imagined communities 28, 67 La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon
intentional objects 11 (1895) 24
interactivity 165 La Statue animée (1903) 136
intercultural hybridity 165 late capitalism 4
Internet 166, 169 “La tête coupée” episode 100–3
Internet of Things 13–14 La Tête d’obsidienne (Malraux) 81
It Happened One Night (1934) 42 Latour, Bruno 6, 9–12, 14, 27
Iverem, Esther 167 Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 29, 43, 168,
172, 177, 181
Jazz-Age modernism 68, 70 Le Bourreau turc (1904) 102
Jess-Cooke, Carolyn 163 Leconte, Patrice 133
Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 18, 32, 54–7, 59, 62, “Le Cryptogramme rouge” 98
133–4 Le Décapité récalcitrant (1891) 102
Johansson, Scarlett 26, 142, 149–51, Left Bank School 68
153–4 Leiris, Michel 107
Johnson, Barbara 152 Le Journal de Zouzou 69
Jonze, Spike 148–51, 154, 156–7 Le Mélomane (1903) 102
Jordanova, Ludmilla 131 Le Pompier des Folies Bergère (1928) 71
Index 205
Les Belles Poupées (Banville) 137 Chico) 22–3, 96–7, 117–18, 123–4,
Les Illusions funambulesques (1903) 135 128. See also The Big Store (1941)
Les Quat’cents farces du diable (1906) 134 Mathé, Edouard 98, 104
Les Statues meurent aussi (1953) 84 Matisse, Henri 64
Les Vampires (silent film serial, 1915- Mayne, Judith 83
16) 19, 22–3, 95, 97–112, 128 mechanization 12, 115–16
absent fathers in 100–1 “Medusa’s Head, The” (Freud) 103
and castration fantasy 109–10 Méliès, Georges 24–5, 102, 129–30,
“La tête coupée” episode 100–3 134–7, 139
“Le Maître de la foudre” 101 Mémoires de Joséphine Baker
“Les noces sanglantes” 111 (Sauvage) 71
“Les Yeux qui fascinent” episode 101, Metropolis (1927) 25
104, 110 MGM 117
Les Yeux sans visage (1960) 133 Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009) 18, 32
Leubas, Louis 104 re(f)use economy in 54–66
Leutrat, Jean-Louis 102 Microsoft 166
Levesque, Marcel 98 Miller, Daniel 10
L’Homme à la tête en caoutchouc Minnelli, Liza 37–8
(1901) 102 Miranda, Carmen 73
lieux de mémoire (sites or realms of miscegenation 165
memory) 169 mise-en-abîme effect 59, 105, 145
L’Image-temps (1985) 68 Modern Prometheus, The 177
Lionnet, Françoise 165 Modern Times (1936) 15, 114, 116–17
Lloyd, Harold 114 Monroe, Marilyn 64, 150, 154
logocentrism 151–2 Moreau, Jeanne 138
L’Oiseau de feu (1910) 19 Moreau, Yolande 59
L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958) 87 Mori, Masahiro 150, 161
Louis XVI 64, 124 Morton, Samantha 150, 154
Louvish, Simon 113 multidirectional memory 22, 69, 87
Love Happy (1949) 117 in Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour
Lucas, Matt 48 (1963) 88–94
Lumière, Auguste 130 Mulvey, Laura 24, 35, 97, 129, 147
Lumière Brothers 7, 24, 130, Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour
134, 136, 175 (1963) 22, 69
Lumpenproletariat 44 multidirectional memory in 88–94
Lury, Celia 4 Murnau, F. W. 98
Musidora 97, 104, 109
McLuhan, Marshall 41, 57 Musser, Charles 96, 113, 115
McReynolds, Leigha 172
Macready, John Douglas 61 Nakamura, Lisa 166
Malraux, André 81 Napoleonic War 107
Manford, Steven 81 Na’vi 28, 159–72
Marey, Etienne-Jules 75 Negrophilia discourse 20
Marker, Chris 84 networking ads 166
Marks, Laura U. 13, 180 New Imperialism 7
Marshall Plan 55, 62 New Yorker 149
Martin, Tony 118, 124 Niccol, Andrew 146
Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, and A Night at the Opera (1935) 117, 128
206 Index
A Night in Casablanca (1946) 117 Prometheus myth 29–30, 179

Nikita (1990) 138 prosthesis 2, 3, 4, 14, 30, 53, 58, 65, 142,
Noire et blanche (photograph) 81 144, 145, 179
Nora, Pierre 169–70 Prosthetic Memory (Landsberg) 180
North, Michael 115, 117 Pygmalion/My-Fair-Lady (play) 138
Nosferatu (1921) 98
Noth, Chris 34 quasi-objects 9
Nouvelle vague feature films 68–9
Nuit et Brouillard (1955) 92 race/racial difference/racism 18, 69, 165,
166, 168, 169
Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) 11 racialized body 20
O’Brien, Virginia 119–20 Rancière, Jacques 116
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 132, 145 Rapace, Noomi 178
Of Grammatology (Derrida) 154 Ray, Man 81
O’Hagan, Andrew 34 Rebillard, Éric 72
Old Imperialism 7 Regnault, Félix 75, 78
“On Cannibals” (essay) 67 Renoir, Jean 124
online identity 165 Resnais, Alain 69, 84, 88–9, 91–2
ontological fallacy 149 reticulated capitalism 4
OOO. See Object-Oriented reused objects 56, 54–66
Ontology (OOO) Rhodes, Cecil B. 48
operation film 131–2 Rimbaud, Arthur 61–2
O’Toole, Peter 29, 173 Rivière, Joan 81
Ovid 137 Roberts, Rachel 144
robots 3, 29, 120, 123, 139, 143, 160–1,
Paquin, Jeanne 19 172–4
Parliament of Things 14 “Rock-a-bye baby” (lullaby) 119
Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) 83 Roentgen, Wilhelm 131
Pepperell, Robert 6, 57 Rony, Fatimah Tobing 20, 75
“the phallic legacy” 103 A Room of One’s Own (2004) 145
Phelps, Martha 118 Rosen, Philip 28, 161, 163
“Phony War” 21, 74 Ross, Kristin 68
Pinon, Dominique 56, 59 Rossi, Tino 64
Pixar Studios 174–6 Rothberg, Michael 22, 69, 85, 87
planned obsolescence Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 37, 154
and Bridesmaids (2011) 31, 44–53
cosmopolitanism 42–4 Safety Last (1923) 114
and The Help (2011) 17, 31, 44–53 St. Augustine 160, 162
and human waste 44–53 Saldana, Zoe 168
and Micmacs à tire-larigot 54–65 Sauvage, Marcel 71
overview 31–2 Schwartz, Vanessa 7
and Sex and the City 2 (SATC2) 32–5 Schwartz, Hillel 141
Plato 151 Scott, Ridley 29, 172–3, 177, 180
Poiret, Paul 19 Second World War 8, 22–3, 68–9, 88–9,
Poster, Mark 170–1 92, 96, 112–13
Princesse Tam-Tam (1935) 68, 70–5 Segalen, Victor 87
Prometheus (2012) 29, 159–60, 172–4, Serres, Michel 9
177–82 Sex and the City (2008) 15, 31–3, 37–8,
Index 207
43–4, 47 surplus labor pools 15, 17

Sex and the City 2 (2010) 16, 31–5, 38, synthespian 26
40, 43–4, 62, 66 System of Objects, The (Baudrillard) 9
Sexual Visions (Jordanova) 131
Shalmaneser I 64 Taransky, Viktor 142
Shéhérazade (1910) 19 Taylor, Ella 33
Shelley, Mary 177 technologization 6, 12–13, 160–72
Showalter, Elaine 131 “Tenement Symphony” (song) 124
Silverman, Kaja 103, 141, 153–5 Théâtre Robert-Houdin 24
Silverman, Maxim 79, 92 Theron, Charlize 178
Simpson, Marge 149 things, definition 9
“Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” Toffoletti, Kim 26
(song) 37 Torok, Maria 112
“Sing While You Sell” (song) 117–21, “Total Mobilization” 98
123–4 transnationalism 1–3
Siren of the Tropics, The 73 Trois couleurs: Bleu (1993) 140
Siri 148 Truffaut, François 59, 69
Sjogren, Britta 153 Tudor, Deborah 176
Skin of the Film, The (Marks) 180 2001 (1968) 155, 157
Skladanowsky brothers 7
slapstick 116, 176 uncanny valley 24, 150, 161
Sloterdijk, Peter 5 Understanding Media: The Extensions of
S1M0NE (2002) 26, 142–7 Man (McLuhan) 57
Sobchack, Vivian 144, 175–6 Une Bonne farce avec ma tête (1903) 102
Society of the Spectacle 117, 119 Ungar, Steven 84
Sorlin, Pierre 96 Un Homme de têtes (1898) 102
spectatorship 13, 161–3
Speculative Realism. See Object-Oriented Vadim, Roger 133
Ontology (OOO) vampire film genre 97–9
Stacey, Jackie 24, 152, 155 Varda, Agnès 54, 69, 79, 83–5, 87
Star Wars films 28 Vargas, José Antonio 162
Stepford Wives, The (1975) 25 Village Voice 33–4
Stiegler, Bernard 2, 6, 29–30, 35, 38, Virilio, Paul 62
57–8, 60–1, 160, 179–81 Vogue 34
Stockett, Kathryn 49 voice and body 147–58
Stoker, Bram 98
Stora, Benjamin 80 Wall-E (2008) 29, 159–60,
Streisand, Barbra 173, 175 173–7, 179, 182
stuff, definition of 10 Warner, Marina 140
Stuff Theory (Boscagli) 10 Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts
substitutions 104–5 (Bauman) 44
Suchman, Lucy 24, 152, 155 Waugh, Rob 167
“super-panopticon” 171 Weaver, Sigourney 159, 164
supplement 1–5, 8, 15–16, 18, 24, 30–3, Wikipedia 11
35, 37–9, 47, 54, 64–6, 127, 129, 142, Williams, Linda 136
149, 154–5, 172, 179, 181–2 Wilson, Emma 89
Surgical Therapeutics and Operative Wilson, Rebel 48
Technique (Doyen) 135 Winokur, Mark 113–14, 121, 125
208 Index
Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey 171 World War

Wizard of Oz, The (1939) 37–8 First 7, 19–20, 22–4, 65, 88, 95, 97–9,
Wolfe, Cary 3 102, 112, 124
women, as objects Second 8, 22–3, 68–9, 88–9, 92, 96,
cutting/splicing 26, 130-7 112–13
Her (2004) 147–58
makeup 137–41 Young, Robert 165
S1M0NE (2002) 142–7 YouTube 57, 61
Woolf, Virginia 145
“Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Žižek, Slavoj 126–7, 168
Reproduction, The” 135 Zouzou (1934) 68–70, 72–6

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The Cinema of Things

1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square

First published 2018

© Elizabeth Ezra, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2885-5

Cover design: Louise Dugdale

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 1

This book began life as a collaborative project with Terry Rowden. As

to acknowledge receipt of a generous grant from the Leverhulme Trust,

This book traces the progressive redrawing of the boundaries between

pure nominalism. Globalization allows for the positive recognition

but whose supplementation both reveals and creates its retrospective

technological prosthesis, the creation of surrogate or “enhanced” human

Within the global imaginary, difference is subject to the dictates of

previously biological, political and social attributes of the individual

In consumer culture, everything is a lifestyle choice, because everything

breakdowns between animal and human, organism and machine, and

What makes us human is our wider technological domain, just as much

The extension of people’s physical abilities enabled by tools and prostheses

The history of cinema has coincided with the development of advanced

for the examination of similar dynamics (mutatis mutandis) in other

Things, objects, stuff

In philosophy, the most influential school of thought to emerge in

Braidotti, Brown, and Bennett go even further in their placement of

about his power by some sense of participation, albeit a merely formal

numbers of objects are connected to the internet and can communicate,

someone who obsessively buys every book about Marxism is still a

domestication of difference. Exoticism infiltrated the diegetic universe of

Whether or not censorship was officially sanctioned, films often took

Italian children and any of the succession of large families of varying

Indeed, perhaps the most fully fleshed-out embodiment of the fetish—

Perhaps most famously (at least in the wake of Freud’s discussion of

ambivalence regarding the mechanical-commodified and a psychic

is, therefore, of a place that has become dystopianly Americanized. With no

It is no accident that nostalgia for human connection drives the final

Commodity culture is the most visible emblem of the supplementarity

“Dubai is so last year”: Sex and the City 2

Youth for women in SATC2 (as for women in Hollywood) is implicitly

much of her time popping pills, slathering on creams, and consuming

Confessions, deemed masturbation, or sex without the potential for

Figure 1 Shoe shopping in the souk, Sex and the City 2.

sexualized form the same fetish is commonly attributed to men. In the

Fashion victims replace the consumption of food with the consumption

store sweaters. (The politics of recreational skinniness in the fashion world

Eastern women as depicted in the film, only it is dressed up in different

Figure 2 Revealing designer clothes, Sex and the City 2.

“Make mine a cosmopolitan”

In SATC2, even geography is prone to the vagaries of fashion: when

the film’s running time is made possible by Samantha’s incidental access

Human waste: Bridesmaids and The Help

Figure 3 That scene, Bridesmaids.

means of a dodgy parking lot, prompting Lillian to reassure her friends

Stockett, The Help is set in segregated Jackson, Mississippi in the early

There are many references to the fear of failing to contain bodily

Figure 4 Toilet humor, The Help.

largely to fulfill the roles traditionally associated with mothers, such

beloved maid Constantine is fired for neglecting to observe a minor

Figure 5 Minnie brings a gift, The Help.

That surrogate maternity is the particular form that African American

Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 1