Looking back fifty years later at the 1967 publication of “Art and Objecthood” in Artforum, it is hard not to see the absence of a conversation between Fried and film studies as something of a missed connection. 1967 was in a sense the watershed of Fried’s role as a critic of modern art, especially painting and sculpture, but it was also the moment when film studies was beginning to emerge not only as an academic interest but as a discipline of its own. The English-language translation of André Bazin’s seminal What Is Cinema? Vol. 1 came out that year, and the Society of Cinematologists—which would become the current Society for Cinema and Media Studies—founded Cinema Journal as a vehicle for producing and transmitting ideas about film to a more academic audience.1  Programs at colleges and universities were being started, courses were being taught—most notably, for this story, at Harvard, where Stanley Cavell had already taught a graduate seminar on cinema in 1963.

The conditions for an encounter were certainly there. Fried had arrived at Harvard in 1962 and quickly become friends with Cavell, auditing the seminar on cinema. The two sustained an intense dialogue throughout the next decade (and more), one that was focused not least around their shared interest in the arts and questions of modernism.2  Fried, though still a graduate student, was already an established critic. His writing for major art journals was widely known, and variously praised and criticized. On its publication in Artforum, “Art and Objecthood” would help to shape (and sharpen) many of the debates within contemporary art criticism over the years to come. As a result, many film scholars—especially those living in the New York area—were familiar with Fried and his writing, and would likely have read “Art and Objecthood” upon its publication.

Yet if the stars were aligned, no real engagement occurred. Film scholars by and large ignored Fried, and the emergent force of film studies had little, if any, effect on Fried’s writing. To the extent that Fried addressed cinema at all in these years, it is with a brief digression in “Art and Objecthood” that summarily dismisses the medium from his concerns: “cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art.”3  This may be a familiar gesture with critics of high art, but while their rejection is often due to ignorance (or simple elitism), the point of the above narrative is to make clear that this was not the case with Fried. It was a considered, albeit mistaken, judgment; the point of this essay is to show that it had consequences.

The failure to establish a connection between Fried and film studies was a real loss, which wound up being detrimental to each side: avenues for exploration were closed off; methodological opportunities were missed; and a rich dialogue that ought to have taken place never happened. This essay aims to explore some of the reasons for the failed encounter, looking at the surrounding intellectual context at the time as well as at the details of Fried’s key essay on modernist aesthetics. In doing this, I also try to sketch out something of what an encounter between Fried and film studies might have been able to achieve, and why the possibility for a belated and overdue encounter still holds excitement.

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Despite the missed connection, there have always been film scholars deeply influenced by Fried’s work. For this group, and I include myself among them, there were at least two major ways of thinking about film that Fried’s art criticism made possible. The first involved the central concept of acknowledgement he drew from Cavell’s writings. As Cavell put it, “Acknowledgment goes beyond knowledge. (Goes beyond not, so to speak, in the order of knowledge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge.)”4  From this model, Fried extracted a way of talking about reflexive, modernist art that eschewed a reductivist strain in the account of the relation between an artwork and its physical material (one that marked even such a text as Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting”). Engaging with the conditions of a medium, Fried argued, did not mean that a work needed only to display them in order to know them—as if it were sufficient to simply point a camera at a mirror. Rather, acknowledgement meant doing something with the knowledge of these conditions, producing a creative response to them. And in the way the acknowledgment took shape, a viewer would be able to grasp something new about the deep conventions that structured that medium. For example, in accounting for what he describes as modernist painting’s “continuing problem of how to acknowledge the literal character of the support,” Fried saw Frank Stella’s paintings as one solution for understanding “what counts as that acknowledgement.”5  Stella, he writes,

by actually shaping each picture… was able to make the fact that the literal shape determines the structure of the entire painting completely perspicuous. That is, in each painting the stripes appear to have been generated by the framing edge and, starting there, to have taken possession of the rest of the canvas, as though the whole painting self-evidently followed from not merely the shape of the support, but its actual physical limits.6

In no way is Stella finding the key to showing how painting draws on and makes explicit the essential feature of its physical medium. Rather, Fried understands Stella’s aesthetic strategy, at the intersection of paint and shape, to be a way of doing something with the basic knowledge of how painting works, of creating a painting that acknowledges—in some way—how the materiality of the medium matters. It’s precisely in this that the activity of criticism is located: the specific account of how acknowledgment functions within a given work, and what it means there.

This strain of Fried’s thought was formative for my own work. His adaptation of acknowledgment, translating the term from epistemology and ethics to aesthetics, provided me with a range of resources to rethink a set of debates within film theory, especially for figures who blurred the line between theorist and critic. It gave me a model, in particular, for reimagining the way medium-specific theorists were often take to hypostasize the basic facts of cinema, seeing in them instead a model in which the given conditions of a medium could be set out yet the terms of a film’s relation to them not determined in advance. In my work on Bazin, this allowed me to argue that the ontological commitments of his reliance on film’s photographic basis, and its connection to reality, did not inherently conflict with the diversity of his critical insights. There was no capacious critic and naïve theorist: the theory provided a fulcrum, not a constraint, for the criticism to work around. Even more, Fried’s example let me see how a devotion to medium specificity that marked realist film theory, and that was generally taken to be anti-modernist in nature and ambition, closely matched the logic of key exemplars of modernist aesthetics.7

A second line of Fried’s work is less overtly formulated but no less central to his importance for some film scholars. This is his commitment to description, and a sense of the necessity for prose that would not only be adequate to the complexity of the artworks being described but that could thereby reveal the philosophical significance within the very logic of the artwork. Cavell labeled this project “philosophical criticism,” with the explicit recognition that in Fried’s hands it often proceeded through nothing other than “uninterrupted descriptions.”8  Take, for example, Fried’s extraordinary discussion of Anthony Caro’s Carriage (1966):

the use of mesh enables Caro simultaneously to delimit—almost to enclose or box in—a tract of space and to assert its continuity with the rest of the sculpture’s immediate environment. How one ought to describe the mesh itself is a nice problem: for example, although there is an obvious sense in which one can see through it, there is another, perhaps less obvious (or obviously important) sense in which one cannot. It is not transparent, but opaque; one looks both at and past it—as opposed to the way one looks through a pane of glass. By partly superimposing at an angle two meshes of different degrees of openness, Caro establishes a plane of variation, not of transparency exactly, but of visual density. It is as though the mesh is seen as cross-hatching—as literal but disembodied shading of value. In this respect Carriage is intimately related to Jules Olitski’s spray paintings, in which fluctuations of value are divorced from their traditional tactile associations. More generally, an adequate discussion of Caro’s use of mesh would relate it to the opticality both of his own work since 1959 and of the most important painting since Jackson Pollock, whose Number 29 (1950), a painting on glass, deploys mesh in the interests of accessibility solely to eyesight achieved by his allover paintings as early was the winter of 1946-47.9

When I noted at the outset of this essay that it was Fried’s descriptive prose, and the way it created at one moment an account of an artwork, an artistic lineage, and a sense of philosophical importance, it was with passages like this in mind. Working through the basic elements of Caro’s sculpture, Fried’s description conveys a sense of its visceral power while also making two large arguments: about the connection between sculpture and painting, about the place of Caro within a modernist lineage marked by Clement Greenberg, and about the difficulty of critical language in articulating these relations. It’s a complex argument contained within a descriptive account of a single sculpture. Moving beyond the terms of a reductive medium specificity, he shows how two distinct media—painting and sculpture—might be taken to share a common project, and a common set of materials. In this move, in describing the way the mesh produces a sense of touch through sight—and in providing prose that is able to convey the power of that cross-sensory insight—Fried begins to push into a kind of tactile phenomenology that is missing from other instances of modernist criticism at the time (Greenberg’s emphasis on the centrality of opticality for the modernist project is one example).10

For those of us for whom Fried’s criticism matters, it is about more than the specifics of his account of modernism. Such passages pose a key methodological challenge: your own descriptive prose needs to carry the philosophical (or theoretical) weight of the argument. Fried’s writing showed not only the power but also the difficulty of this way of placing criticism at the center of theoretical and philosophical arguments about the terms and appeals of art.

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This reception of Fried, however, was always in the minority. In truth, it’s not hard to see why Fried was left outside the emerging discipline of film studies. As it began to develop its disciplinary boundaries during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the differences with Fried were stark and deep. Two in particular stand out. The first has to do with how the major artistic movements of the twentieth century were defined and championed. Both Fried and film studies—despite the diversity of its trends, I use “film studies” here to mark its central thread—worked to uphold the banner of modernism, but their accounts of what modernism was were irreconcilable. Whereas Fried drew on a line of modernist art that culminated in Abstract Expressionism and work by contemporary sculptors such as Anthony Caro, film scholars were driven by an aesthetic (and political) sensibility that favored a different tradition, seizing on the politically radical and avant-garde movements of the 1920s: constructivism; suprematism; surrealism; Dada; even expressionism.11  This legacy, solidified by the growing importance of Walter Benjamin—who was part of and emphasized these movements—and Bertolt Brecht, defined the artistic inheritance of the twentieth century for film studies on widely different terms than for Fried. And it led to a contemporary valuation of precisely the minimalist (or literalist) artists that Fried opposed in “Art and Objecthood,” such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Tony Smith, and Carl Andre.

Second, modernist-inclined film theories of the late 1960s and 1970s were overtly concerned with the way that cinema seemed predicated on the forceful positioning of the spectator with respect to the screen. Jean-Louis Baudry’s work was emblematic of this trend, in which the pleasures of cinema, and its claim to provide a sense of reality, were dependent on the structural positioning of the spectator within an apparatus of projection.12  To talk about the cinema meant to talk about the way an individual film works with the viewer’s expectations, fantasies, and fears. Thus, much of the academic writing on cinema at the time took up the question of how films position the viewer: apparatus theory; models of suture; psychoanalytic theory; cognitive theory… the list goes on. Even Bazin found himself working through this topic when he defended his preferred technique: deep focus, he says, automatically makes the spectators’ relation to the screen close to what their relation is to reality.13  By contrast, Fried dismissed such structural concerns from the orbit of modernist aesthetics. Writing about the new “literalist” sculpture he found mistaken, he claimed that for it “the beholder knows himself to stand in an indeterminate, open-ended—and unexacting—relation as subject to the impassive object on the wall or floor” (155). More succinctly, he argued that “the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder” (153). For Fried, to the extent that art was interested in these questions—and, by extension, to the extent that critics were interested in discussing them—they were failing in their duties to the material and the history of their medium. “Art and Objecthood,” in this way, was a polemic in an extended battle for what important contemporary art was going to be recognized as, whether it was about creating a situation for a relation of beholding—what Fried pejoratively called “literalism” or “theatricality”—or producing an experience out of the formal articulation of the art object itself. Fried advocated what we might describe as a dual defense of modernism on the grounds of formalism—“the individual elements [of an artwork] bestow significance on one another precisely by virtue of their juxtaposition” (161)—and immediacy—“the condition… of existing in, indeed of evoking or constituting, a continuous and perpetual present” (167).

Fried’s account, whatever its powers, felt woefully inadequate or naïve to many contemporary critics, and the position he espoused seemed anathema to many film scholars. Given the way cinema was understood to produce an inherent sense of presentness—the “there it is” that Roland Barthes singles out to contrast with photography—Fried’s description of the struggles of modernist aesthetics seemed irrelevant at best.

* * *

The striking thing is that it’s not clear that Fried would disagree with this assessment. Even for film scholars sympathetic to Fried’s account of modernism and his critical method, there has been a large and seemingly intractable obstacle to bringing Fried into thinking about film. This is Fried himself.

When Fried does talk about cinema in “Art and Objecthood,” it is with the intent of removing it from consideration in his broader account of the modernist project. Fried takes cinema to be something of a puzzle: why have so many modernist artists found untroubled and uncritical pleasure in movies, whether major works of art cinema or (especially) genre films from Hollywood cinema? How can artists who demand excellence in their own media, or any of the media associated with key modernist movements, be content with run-of-the-mill films? Fried’s answer revolves around the struggle he sees modernist artists engaged in with theatricality. Despite its inherent theatrical setting, “cinema escapes theater—automatically, as it were—it provides a welcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theater and theatricality” (164). The idea of a refuge is a common trope for intellectual film viewers (think of Wittgenstein’s descriptions of going to the movies to escape the burdens of philosophy). But what matters here is the small phrase: “automatically, as it were.” Unlike modernist art, for Fried cinema does not have to defeat theater; it is simply outside its aesthetic arena. The refuge is “automatic, guaranteed” by the nature of cinema itself; we are absorbed simply by being present in a movie theater. (Curiously, this is close to theories of the apparatus, which take absorption not to be a principle of style or an effect of narrative but a basic donnée of the viewing situation itself.) And so, because cinema is “a refuge from theater and not a triumph over it,” Fried concludes that it “is not a modernist art.” All the formal dynamics and art-historical stakes that apply to “painting, sculpture, music, and poetry” do not hold when it comes to the movies.14

This is the challenge for Fried’s admirers within film studies: if you want to adopt Fried’s terms, categories, and methods for thinking about films, you face the problem that he explicitly refuses to countenance such a gesture. To be sure, one could—as many have done—just ignore Fried’s comments on the cinema, and regard them as a view simply disconnected from the history of film. That is certainly fair: from the in-jokes of Hollywood film, to the meta-cinematic reflexivity that spans comedies like Hellzapoppin’ (1941) and movements like the French new wave, to the radical deconstruction (and reconstruction) of the cinematic apparatus in a film like Daisies (1966), to the American avant-garde of Deren, Brakhage, Snow, and Frampton, to the Brechtian tradition of filmmaking that wound up with late-60s Godard and Straub-Huillet (among others)—there is no shortage of filmmakers who have taken the absorptive qualities of cinema less as a given than as a problem to be negotiated, even defeated, in their filmmaking.

I’ve also been tempted to write off Fried’s rejection of cinema’s modernist potential. However, even if Fried’s views about the cinema are wrong—and I think they are—I’m not sure that the reasons behind them have been fully understood. And that’s to miss something important. Less an account of a viewing space, a reading that draws on the repeated description of the cinema as a “refuge,” Fried’s argument in fact turns on a particular understanding of how cinema negotiates a relation to its own past.

In many ways, the question of a past is at the heart of Fried’s account of a modernist sensibility; time and time again, he will argue that the distinctive quality of modernism is the need to create art that stands up to the best instances in the history of the medium. This is central to Fried’s major essay on Manet in 1969, and it runs throughout his work on modernist painting. Fried claims that painting under the conditions of modernism means that the modernist artist is under an obligation to justify him- or herself in relation to the great art of the past. In other words, painting, if it is to have importance in the modernist moment, can no longer be minor; it must be major or not at all.15  To do this means finding new solutions to problems that previous great art had encountered and resolved in its own way. This is the modernist burden of seriousness, in which a failure to produce work that stands up to the great art of the past results in the failure of the modernist enterprise as a whole. And this dynamic is what, for Fried, cinema avoids.

Fried’s insistence on the idea of a necessary relation to the past can sound antithetical to familiar rhetoric about modernist claims to novelty, to creating radically new art. It sounds almost like it should be part of the anti-modernist vocabulary, of a piece with reactionary trends against new artistic forms. But there is an important, if sometimes overlooked, modernist inflection to this emphasis on the past, one that finds its fullest articulation in T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Tradition, for Eliot, means something quite specific: an understanding of the past in relation to creative activity undertaken in the present. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”16  The past is also, and importantly, unstable: “when a new work is created something happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. [They are] modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them… the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered.”17  Because the past exists for and through the present, the nature of the tradition—the very terms of the history of an art—changes in response to the contemporary works being made. So, it’s not just that Tennyson influences Eliot; as Eliot writes poetry, he changes Tennyson’s significance—in a sense, he changes what Tennyson is.

I think this idea is hovering around Fried’s account of modernist art (however much the influence of Greenberg supersedes it), though to show that would take me too far afield. What I want to do here is give a sense of how this way of thinking shapes his approach to cinema. And to see that we need to turn to Cavell. In the opening chapters of The World Viewed, Cavell makes his strongest case for film’s philosophical significance, using classical Hollywood cinema to stake a claim for film’s uniqueness among the arts. This claim is, not least, based on a particular form of its popularity: “The movie seems naturally to exist in a state in which its highest and its most ordinary instances attract the same audience… in the case of films, it is generally true that you do not really like the highest instances unless you also like the typical. You don’t even know what the highest are instances of unless you know the typical as well.”18  This condition, he notes, is uniquely true of cinema—“anyway until recently”—and it is part of what separates cinema from the modernist programs happening in the other arts at precisely this time. It structures film’s status as “the last traditional art,” a position Cavell rehearses throughout the book.19

Cavell isn’t forthcoming about the influence of Eliot, but it is there throughout the book. He even embeds the name of Eliot’s essay early on, but without being explicit that he’s doing so. Discussing the way films relate to the history of their medium, and placing this in relation to the emergence of the auteur theory, he observes: “Each of the arts knows of this self-generation, however primitive our understanding remains about the relation between tradition and the individual talent.”20  What marks cinema is its ability for individual works to negotiate their place within a tradition without any of the self-consciousness of the avowedly modernist arts, or what Cavell glosses as cinema’s “natural relation to its history.”21

We can see this line of thinking in Fried’s brief remarks about cinema in “Art and Objecthood.” Note how Fried highlights what Cavell emphasizes, that the key feature to understand about cinema is the indiscriminateness of its pleasures. His puzzlement is not about why great movies have appeal, but over the fact that “movies in general, including frankly appalling ones, are acceptable to modernist sensibility” (164). Movies are beyond good and bad, beyond the categories of value that so centrally comprise the modernist project. They are something else entirely.

This is where it’s worth returning to Fried’s striking phrase: “cinema escapes theater—automatically, as it were.” The appeal to the “automatic”—an appeal that anticipates Cavell’s emphasis on the term in The World Viewed—suggests a claim that is grounded in the physical basis of the medium, structured by what Fried describes as the phenomenology of movie-going (the place of the screen, etc.) (171n20). But this is in fact dependent on a view about the relation of films to their past, the fulcrum around which Fried’s rejection of cinema as a potentially modernist art turns. Note that, for Fried, movies entail “absorption not conviction”—not, in short, the kind of claims that modernist art has to make toward its past, the justifying of each instance of art in light of the major art that has come before, but the pleasures of a kind of simple immersiveness. Cinema doesn’t “automatically” escape theater solely because of its viewing situation; it has to do with the way, at least within classical cinema, there is nothing fraught in its relation to past instances—what Cavell refers to as a “natural relation” to its history. (That is, Billy Wilder doesn’t feel the need to equal Ernst Lubitsch, to surpass him, in claiming him as an influence; Lubitsch is part of an inheritance that Wilder can draw upon without anxiety.) This is what Bazin was getting at when, pushing against what he saw as the fetishism of directors that was coming to define French film criticism, he isolated the power of Hollywood film as “the genius of the system.” The power was not in the mythic success of individuals but in a way of making film, an art form that thrived on the industrial system behind it.

I focus on Fried’s argument here, and its links to what will be the core of Cavell’s The World Viewed, because it allows us to better see the yawning gap between “Art and Objecthood” and the path of film studies over the next decades. Not only did Fried explicitly reject what so many film critics and theorists argued for—that cinema was an essentially modernist art, and that it needed to be understood as such—but he essentially bracketed off the role of the historical study of film. After all, if the unique feature of cinema was that it had no issue with its own past, what need is there to seriously investigate that history? to see it as anything more than a straightforward progression? And so when the first waves of the New Film History began to emerge in the late 1970s, and in many senses offered a radical phenomenology of the history of cinematic forms—think of Tom Gunning’s influential idea of the “cinema of attractions”—it could have been a moment for a rapprochement with Fried’s enterprise, one that combined description, historical awareness, and new aesthetic models. That such a rapprochement didn’t occur was in part due to the way a focus on the historical specificity of film-going entailed a range of different aesthetic models, and so was antithetical to the appeal to cinema tout court in “Art and Objecthood.”

* * *

The point of showing how Fried and film studies failed to interact is not to criticize either, to show blindspots, or to talk about differing evaluations of artistic media. I think something was lost in this missed connection, something that would have benefitted both. The absence is more evident, though tricky to get out, with Fried, since he clearly missed, for close to four decades, the opportunity to engage with ambitious photographic media. In his 2008 book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Fried explicitly acknowledges a longstanding lack of interest in writing about photography. What changed, he noted, was the way that, “starting in the late 1970s and 1980s, art photographs began to be made not only at large scale but also… for the wall…. [As a result,] such photography immediately inherited the entire problematic of beholding” that he had traced from eighteenth century French painting to the conflict between modernism and minimalism described in “Art and Objecthood.”22  Two things are worth noting here. The first is the key condition that allowed Fried to pay attention to photography as an art: the creation of large-scale images—especially Jeff Wall’s lightboxes—that were hung on the wall as if they were paintings. The second is the conclusion Fried drew from this fact, namely that as a result such photographs “immediately”—he might have said “automatically”—inherited an artistic past, a tradition out of which they could work. And indeed the bulk of Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before is devoted to showing how a selection of contemporary photographers negotiate the historical dialectic between absorption and theatricality.

In this context, it’s not surprising that when Fried finally turns to moving images it’s only when he sees them on the gallery wall. In the discussions of video art in the photography book, as well as in the subsequent Four Honest Outlaws, the importance of the gallery as a viewing site is key.23  Even in his extensive discussion of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A Twenty-First Century Portrait (2006), Fried makes clear that his interest in the film stems from his encounter with Godard’s previous work in gallery spaces.24  I draw attention to this not because of any problem in talking about video art, but to note the way Fried seems to require the space (or the idea) of the gallery in order to be able to take seriously the claims of moving images to engage the viewer in a complex way. In all this, the existence of the cinema goes missing: even when Fried opens himself up to the discussion of moving image works, the vital institution of the twentieth and twenty-first century is absent.

Yet Fried’s treatment of Zidane also points to the difficulties inherent in this act of bracketing. Unsurprisingly, he is largely keen to pull the film into the orbit of his concerns. Responding to the filmmakers’ invocation of Warhol’s screen tests, he pushes against their significance: “[That they were an influence] is doubtless true, but grasping the significance of Zidane also requires viewing it against the background of” the dialectic of absorption and theatricality, and what he describes as “the interest of coming to grips with the ongoing problem of portraiture.”25  This is familiar terrain for Fried, yet a strange move occurs as he goes on. Noting Gordon and Parreno’s almost obsessive interest in images of Zidane’s feet as he walks, runs, scuffs, and stands, Fried writes: “His gait becomes intimately familiar to us by the end of the film. (Somewhere in the neighborhood is Robert Bresson’s magnificent Au Hasard, Balthazar [1966]).”26  It is a moment of brilliant critical insight, evoking complex issues of intention, physicality, and desire that structure each film. The sense of the donkey Balthazar here is not a diminution of the skills of Zidane but a recognition of the deep ambitions—what does it mean to be human? how might a portrait show this?—on the part of Gordon and Parreno. (Fried will again refer to Bresson’s film in Four Honest Outlaws (2011), in the context of a discussion of the “‘human-related’ animals” in the works of Gordon and Anri Sala.)27  The alignment of Zidane with Balthazar also makes both into figures of absorption, of the kind that Fried has been interested in throughout his career: figures turned inward, seemingly oblivious to the (self-evident) fact that they are being beheld.

Yet in making this apt critical gesture, Fried implies something that he otherwise denies: that theatrical cinema, not just of the 2000s but of the 1960s as well, can be involved in the dialectic of absorption and theatricality. Without his having been explicit about it, we are far from the ban on cinema’s modernist aspirations in “Art and Objecthood,” a ban that was rooted in a claim about the capacity of cinema to engage critically and self-consciously with its own past. Fried, that is, allows Zidane to engage with a tradition in the way that, for example, he traces the “sources” of Manet. And this is exactly right. What Fried seemingly stumbles onto, struck by his deep insight of criticism, is a recognition of the way that films—like painting—have always been engaged in evoking and revising their own history (and the history of the media around them). This has been true throughout the history of cinema: Cecil B. DeMille’s parody of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) in his comedic adventure Male and Female (1919), where the famous Babylonian episode is evoked in the guise of parody; Chris Marker’s revision of the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) in Grin without a Cat (1977), his account of the rightward turn of French politics after May ’68; or the shared insight between Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock about the dark aspect of Jimmy Stewart’s persona (developed especially in the films of Frank Capra). The point about the examples is not their uniqueness but that they are profoundly ordinary, part of the warp and woof of film history. Many recent historiographic accounts, like Miriam Hansen’s idea of “vernacular modernism,” have emphasized the complex ways that films have drawn inspiration from a wide range of international sources, creating their aesthetic structures not out of a unique vision but out of an amalgam of pre-existing sources.28  (As Cavell puts it, “a movie comes from other movies.”)29

Of course Fried knows—and has known—that references happen in film, that films refer to one another in all sorts of ways. That kind of knowledge is not a trade secret. My point is somewhat different. When Fried assumes that such work within films happens “of itself,” that it takes place “naturally,” he brackets off the way films self-consciously engage in an artistic project he recognizes in other media. I mean here not just the dynamics of reference, the interest in past artworks against which the success of the present can be measured—though certainly that does matter. The point is even more specific. Films—not some idealized notion of “cinema” but actual films—have sought to work through the dialectic of absorption and theatricality that Fried isolates as the central engine behind modern (and modernist) art. This takes place not so much through characters and events, or even narrative organizations; it has to do with formal structures.

In lieu of a more extensive discussion, let me offer one example. This is shot/reverse-shot, one of the fundamental building blocks of the “continuity” or “invisible” editing technique that dominates classical Hollywood cinema. In its most basic form, we see a character looking, then a shot that isolates what the character is looking at, followed by a shot that returns us to the initial set-up. In one of its most prominent uses, the depiction of a conversation, we often begin by looking over the shoulder of one character at the face of the person they are talking to, followed by the reverse over-the-shoulder shot that gives us the face of the character the camera had been initially positioned behind. This is straightforward, part of what we expect when we see a movie; a range of critics and theorists have argued that it works by showing us what we “naturally” want to see.30  Phrased differently, we could say that shot/reverse-shot constructions are basically absorptive, immersing the viewer in the viewpoint of a character within the world of the film. This sense was the basis of Laura Mulvey’s famous essay on the logic of the “male gaze” in Hollywood cinema: by forcing us to look with a particular character, films made us inhabit their worlds in a particular (and invariably masculine) way.31  More recently, James Chandler has argued that shot/reverse-shot constructions work as a basic form of sympathy, a way of putting the spectator in the mind of the character.32  All of which should call to mind some of Fried’s discussions, especially in Absorption and Theatricality, of the way that artists position figures within their paintings so as to provide an access to that world for the viewer—creating what he called the “supreme fiction” that the ontological barrier between work and world could be overcome.

What allows shot/reverse-shot to resonate with Fried’s work, especially his multi-volume account of what he describes as the unfolding dialectic of absorption and theatricality, are the permutations that have been wrought on its structure. Some of this is extreme: Eisenstein rejected the technique out of hand as part of what he took to be the bourgeois ideology embedded in Hollywood cinema—even though he used it himself—as it created too close an identification between the viewer and a single character (rather than seeing the mass as subject).33  But there are more subtle variations as well. A number of films have experimented with using split-screens to incorporate shot/reverse-shot constructions within a single frame, from Lois Weber’s placing of several lines of action within the same frame in Suspense (1913) to Norman Jewison’s use of multiple frames to depict telephone interactions in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) to Ang Lee’s mimicry of the look of comic panels in Hulk (2003). Or take the way the Bourne trilogy and other contemporary films eschew the stable logic of continuity editing for a series of rapid shots with hand-held cameras, where the identification with characters happens less through access to an optical point of view than through the way that the form of the film conveys their state of mind. This is a kind of filmmaking that has been described variously as “intensified continuity,” “post-continuity,” and “chaos cinema,” and which forms the stylistic template for much of the mainstream narrative films and videos today. In each of these examples, we could say that filmmakers found the basic way of identifying with characters through shot/reverse-shot to be lacking, and that an alternate structure had to be invented for the new conditions so as to continue to draw the viewer into the film.

The truncated story is not exactly like the one that Fried tells of the modernist artist, engaged in a relation to the past as part of the necessity to create major work. Jewison and Lee do not respond to Weber (or to other early examples) in that way. Yet all the same it is a technique that is about relating to the beholder, and one that changes in response to the circumstances—historical, aesthetic, technological—around it. There is, in short, nothing “natural” here, nothing that happens “of itself”; what we see is a carefully constructed formal technique articulated in relation to past examples. (Other techniques could be addressed in this way as well, from subjective shots to parallel editing to jump cuts.) Thinking in this way, we might recast Fried’s wonder about why modernist artists went to the cinema. Perhaps they were not (just) seeking refuge from the burdens of the seriousness of their work; perhaps they saw in the cinema a range of different ways of negotiating the same questions about the relation of artwork to beholder that they were themselves preoccupied with. On this view, cinema does not stand apart from Fried’s modernist history; it continues that history by other means.

* * *

This open-ended query about missed opportunities goes in both directions, and leads to a question about what film studies lost in its failure to take Fried’s criticism into consideration. As I discussed at the outset, the period following the publication of “Art and Objecthood” was characterized by the emergence of “theory,” the belief that the primary object for analysis was not the individual film itself but the structures that governed it (whether mental, political, cultural, etc.).34  That’s not to say that there were no significant works of descriptive analysis. But many—Alfred Guzzetti’s study of Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her (1967), William Rothman’s account of Hitchcock in The Murderous Gaze—fell by the wayside, while the ones that were taken up—Raymond Bellour’s studies of Hollywood films, for example—were characterized by the way they brought established practices of theory to bear on individual films.35  It was in the wake of these tendencies that a strain of philosophically inflected film analysis emerged, part of the broader trend often grouped under the term “film-philosophy.” In it, film scholars sought to give an account of the ways in which individual films could lay claim to philosophical significance, how films could be understood as doing the work of philosophy itself.

My conjecture is that Fried’s example as a critic, especially his writings clustered around “Art and Objecthood,” could have helped film scholars avoid a set of difficulties attached to this approach. Writing about how films had philosophical ambitions has tended to make one of two problematic assumptions: to treat films as, in a sense, glorified thought experiments, complex representations of familiar philosophical problems that can help sharpen and enliven existing debates; or to posit a “mindedness” to films that gives them the agency needed to ground the “making” of an argument. The first fails to take the complexity of films seriously; the second makes an implausible, even incoherent, claim about the intentionality of the film as object. I think it is in the sense of their inadequacy that scholars have recently turned to Cavell’s writings on film (and, in a similar way, to Deleuze). What Cavell does is to make the work of criticism central in eliciting the philosophical stakes implicit in the basic operations of films—whether that has to do with the way films employ conventions, work through references and allusions to other films, or provide insights into to the medium itself. The kind of philosophical work films can do is not given in advance; it is only discoverable, Cavell insists, through critical engagement—the providing of a compelling reading with a philosophical backdrop in mind—with the films themselves. But Cavell’s writing has its own in-built limitation, as it focuses on what we might call, adapting a title from Donald Davidson, “actions and events.” To read Cavell’s criticism is to work through the significance of what people do in a film and how this is shown through the film’s narrative structure (and the attendant thematic features). The critical insight is breathtaking, but it often ignores the details of images and sound that make up the formal textures of a film.

This is Fried’s difference from Cavell. The power of Fried’s writings on modernist art is to take this kind of philosophical and critical project and to show how it can work as a mode of formal analysis. This is a formalism in which the description itself brings with it the philosophical stakes. Again we can listen to Fried on Caro, this time from “Art and Objecthood”:

A characteristic sculpture by Caro consists, I want to say, in the mutual and naked juxtaposition of the I-beams, girders, cylinders, lengths of piping, sheet metal, and grill that it comprises rather than in the compound object that they compose. The mutual inflection of one element by another, rather than the identity of each, is what is crucial—though of course altering the identity of any element would be at least as drastic as altering its placement. (The identity of each element matters in somewhat the same way as the fact that it is an arm, or this arm, that makes a particular gesture, or as the fact that it is this word or this note and no another that occurs in a particular place in a sentence or melody.) The individual elements bestow significance on one another precisely by virtue of their juxtaposition: it is in this sense, a sense inextricably involved with the concept of meaning, that everything in Caro’s art that is worth looking at is in its syntax. (161-2)

From the point of view of a film scholar, it’s hard not to see in this description an account of montage, of the way that individual units of a film hang together—where the meaning is less in any individual shot than in their juxtaposition. (Eisenstein’s writings on film and art, and the way they embody principles of montage, may be the closest comparison.36 ) What Fried brings to this description is a sense of aliveness, the way that the particular object—here, Caro’s sculptures—not only motivates but also furnishes the very terms of a wider account of juxtaposition. The philosophical question is about meaning, about how it emerges from visual form. That account is not given in advance, derived abstractly, but elucidated through an encounter with the specificity of the art objects themselves. Fried achieves his philosophical—and art theoretical—insights by staying with the critical act of looking his prose seeks to capture.

This is what has stayed with me from “Art and Objecthood.” Beyond the account of modernism and the evocation of presentness, what opened a door is Fried’s demonstration of how criticism could work, how art and philosophy could come together through the practice of description. In Fried’s writings, we get a sense not just of why art matters, but also of why talking about art—in the most fine-grained way—matters for a philosophically inclined aesthetic project. This is the as yet unfulfilled promise that “Art and Objecthood” has for film studies.

Purchase of the stock involves a high degree of risk as it is impossible to forecast accurately the results to an investor from an investment in the film, since no one can predict with any certainty whether and to what extent entertainment-related (including motion picture) investments will be successful. Investment in the stock is suitable only for persons of substantial means who have no need for immediate liquidity.1

A film’s “stock,” no less combustible than nitrate, is a notoriously risky investment—one shared by a host of financial agents and industries, including banks, distributors, production houses, and risk-taking “persons of substantial means.” Perhaps not surprisingly, the history of Hollywood production mirrors the history of venture capital in the United States, as each new film presents an idiosyncratic set of risk factors, and each new production or distribution technology distorts return forecasts for a new generation of film speculators. Financiers, however, are not the industry’s only risk takers; rather, every film production erects a new theater of risk for aesthetic gain. A conventional connection between certain forms of risk and artistic merit has crystalized into cliché—an actor’s extreme weight loss or gain, for example, is said to guarantee her an Oscar nomination—but to what extent can one generalize that correlation? In “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage” (1953), Andre Bazin formalizes a “law of aesthetics” around the maximization of risk in front of the camera lens.2 Bazin’s “law” forbids a film cut to mask the risks posed to a pro-filmic subject. Uniting the aesthetic and financial imperatives of filmmaking in a paean to high risk and return, Bazin legislates the terms of “forbidden montage” or montage interdit. He writes, “When the essence of a scene demands the simultaneous presence of two or more factors in the action, montage is ruled out.”3

Bazin illustrates the proper deference to this law with two examples taken from a British and American film—Where No Vultures Fly (1951) and Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus (1928)—both of which, not irrelevantly, entail potentially fatal, bodily risk for the pro-filmic subject. In the first of his examples, Bazin describes a scene between a young child and a lioness. The child encounters a seemingly lost cub, while the cub’s mother approaches menacingly from behind.

This single frame in which trickery is out of the question gives immediate and retroactive authenticity to the very banal montage that has preceded it … It is obvious that, considered from the point of view of a recital, this sequence would have had the same simple meaning if it had been shot entirely in montage or by process work. But in neither event would the scene have unfolded before the camera in its physical and spatial reality.4

Cinematic realism, in these terms, resides in the homogeneity of space and time captured in the single long-take. The same holds for Bazin’s second example, in which Chaplin is unwittingly encaged with a sleeping lion, which he awakens with his typical fumbling and bumbling. Had the scene been merely a shot-reverse-shot sequence of a) Chaplin appearing scared (Fig. 4) and b) shots of the lion sleeping (Fig. 5), it would have involved less risk for Chaplin as an actor: the shots could have been film at entirely different times—even different days. But it also would have contained less aesthetic and comedic impact than the single long take of Chaplin actually standing near the sleeping lion (Fig. 6). The cage becomes a space of comedy because of what Bazin called the “comedy of space”: the scene’s uninterrupted duration of time and unity of space provide a suitable platform for the high risks of humor.5

In both of these examples, the rolling camera serves to underwrite the risks of the films’ diegetic action. It provides credit to the events on screen, acting as a third-party guarantor to what we might call the “reality contract” that a viewer tacitly signs by believing in the unbelievable (and immaterial) film projection. To have reworked these scenes through montage, here defined as a form of “trickery,” would violate this contract: it would have betrayed the authenticity of the scenes’ risks. The odd thing about the terms of Bazin’s reality contract, however, is that “trickery” in front of the rolling camera is not deemed a violation of cinematic realism: “If the film is to fulfill itself aesthetically,” he argues, “we need to believe in the reality of what is happening while knowing it to be tricked.”6 There’s no aesthetic dilemma, for example, if in a scene with a horse “someone had to pull on a cotton thread to get the horse to turn its head at the right moment.”7 Such a gimmick is trickery—perhaps even a form of theatrical deception—but not an aesthetic error: “All that matters is that the spectator can say at one and the same time that the basic material of the film is authentic while the film is also truly cinema.”8 In other words, the aesthetic risks relevant to the film critic must inhere in film’s celluloid materiality—in a continuity of action and indexical transfer from the diegetic scene to the camera’s rolling film. In these terms, realism and risk are understood as correlative endeavors in the search for a kind of cinematic presence. Bazin aligns the business of the production studio with his ontology of cinema—a film’s “stock” and “film stock”—in a celebration of high risk and return.

But the history of risk under capitalism is also a history of risk management: the development of sophisticated mediating techniques to conceal and ameliorate risky assets. For Bazin, the cinematic cut serves as a technique of this order. Implicit in Bazin’s reality contract, dictating when and where montage is interdit, is a theory of the cut as a form of cinematic risk management. Technological mediation through film cuts interrupts the pro-filmic action, minimizing a scene’s risks and compromising its authenticity. Montage, in these terms, becomes “that abstract creator of meaning which preserves the state of unreality demanded by the spectacle.”9 Bazin’s “faith in reality,” as he himself described it, stems from his quasi-mystical faith in the indexical relationship between cinematic sign and referent—the having been there testimony of the film apparatus to the pro-filmic scene.10 With his doctrine of realism and aesthetic value firmly rooted in the identity of index and referent—“The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space which govern it”11—the mediating technique of montage is treated as an impious violation of the ontology of the film image.

But what if montage could both preserve the appearance of realism in Bazinian terms, and nonetheless minimize realism’s risk through mediation? What if, in other words, a filmmaker could somehow hide the montage—act, that is, as both financier, courting the risks of realism, and insurance agent, mitigating them through undetectable edits? These roles, financier and insurance agent, represent the antinomies of risk subtending financial markets. But if these are roles also performed by every filmmaker in negotiating the risk factors of production, two Hollywood productions in particular intensify this logic of filmmaking by preserving the illusion of a 90-minute single-take through quasi-transparent editing. Both Rope (1948) and Birdman or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) capitalize on cinema’s ability to underwrite the risks of cinematic realism through techniques of illusionism—the very same techniques of abstraction and mediation that conceal and ameliorate the risks of capitalism. Indeed, through their respectively analog and digital “trickery,” Rope and Birdman manifest an evolving correlation between risk management and realism in their film forms. The historical transition from the extra-long takes of Rope to those of Birdman can even be seen to allegorize the evolving dynamic of risk management under finance capitalism.

A Theater of Risk

Clarifying his faith in the uninterrupted long-take’s aesthetic value, Bazin refines his definition of montage interdit, writing, “It is in no sense a question of being obliged to revert to a single-shot sequence or of giving up resourceful ways of expressing things or convenient ways of varying shots. Our concern here is … with the interdependence of nature and form.”12 As an example, Bazin concludes that Hitchcock’s Rope “could just as well have been cut in the classic way whatever artistic importance may be correctly attached to the way [Hitchcock] actually handled it.”13 In other words, Rope’s semblance of a single-take (actually a cut-and-paste job of 11 shots) was merely a stylistic departure. It “in no essential way altered [the film’s] subject matter”; nor did it augment its realism.14 Hitchcock echoed Bazin’s dismissal of Rope, retrospectively deeming the film a “stunt” and a “crazy idea.”15 But the gimmicky quality of Rope’s single-take illusion in no way disavows its paradoxical investment, both thematic and formal, in risk-seeking and risk management.16

With the exception of its opening shot (and only conspicuous cut), Rope is set entirely in the Upper West side apartment of Brandon (John Dahl) and Phillip (Farley Granger). Obeying the Aristotelian tenet of drama’s unity of time and space—and never exposing its theatrical fourth wall—the film turns Brandon and Philip’s apartment-space into a stage. This drama is a thriller, in which the two aesthetes strangle their prep-school peer, David Kentley, within the film’s first minutes. The murder, one soon learns, is a cold-blooded killing, a consummation of Brandon and Phillip’s Nietzschean Blonde Beast prowess. Their crime drips with homoerotic innuendo: David’s asphyxiated corpse collapses into Brandon and Phillip’s arms as if he swoons; the murderers culminate their act with heavy breathing, ecstatic reflections (“I felt tremendously exhilarated”) and the obligatory post-coital cigarette before interring their victim in a chest-cum-casket. The theatrics of their crime are spectacular, as the couple invites the victim’s father, girlfriend, aunt, and prep-school mentor Rupert Cadell (Jimmy Stewart) to dine with them on top of David’s still-warm corpse. Their chest/grave becomes a dinner buffet, as they solicit an audience (in addition to the film viewer) to witness their barbaric drama. They heighten the risks of their crime for the sheer thrill of performance—to make of their murder a “masterpiece.”

Ultimately, their masterpiece and their risks are overshadowed by Hitchcock’s own: his meticulous handling of cinematic decoupage and editing that make Rope appear to be 80-minutes of real time in Brandon and Phillip’s apartment. Hitchcock famously masked the cuts of the film—suturing together the 11 film takes, each of which lasts between three and nine minutes—often by focusing on a dark object (the back of Brandon’s suit or the lid of the chest; see figs. 7-9), which allowed for a momentary blackout, so that the camera could be reloaded or refocused.

As a number of scholars have argued, the final film product—a semblance of Brandon and Phillip’s crime in real-time—offers the viewer a sensation of “presence” conventionally impeded by montage in cinema.17 That such a sense of presence could emerge from within cinema at all would have shocked Georg Lukács, who, comparing the then-nascent cinematic medium to theater in 1913, wrote that “the stage is absolute presence, [but] the absence of ‘presence’ is the essential characteristic of the ‘cinema.’”18 He continued, “In a word: the basic law of connection for stage and drama is inexorable necessity; for the ‘cinema,’ its possibility is restricted by nothing … ‘Everything is possible’: that is the worldview of the ‘cinema.’”19 In Rope, however, Hitchcock imposes artificial limits on the cinema’s “endless possibilities.” He imposes the limits of theater. Rope’s camera never probes the perspective of the film’s protagonists (one never gets into Brandon or Phillip’s eyes); rather, Rope’s single, mobile camera assumes one unidentified point-of-view. It becomes an anonymous witness to Phillip and Brandon’s crime and the perverted dinner party that follows. In this sense, the film functions as a subjective long-take, but seemingly without a subject. Like theater-viewers, one sees only what this limited camera-witness sees, peering into the kitchen and overhearing a conversation in the next room. There is no reverse-shot that would attribute this 80-minute visual “quote” to a character because, as in theater, the viewer is it.20

This mode of filmmaking—and the phenomenology of presence that it ostensibly compels for actors and viewers alike—anticipates Bazin’s remarks about the ontology of live television, which he wrote in 1954. For Bazin, the live-ness of live television (then the dominant mode of broadcast) offered the medium “a particular way of dealing with action: more freely than theater, but less varied than cinema. These limits are naturally defined by the technology of live broadcast, which can safely do more than theater but less than cinema … such unity in variety is especially appropriate for the TV viewer, who ends up considering himself an invisible extra tenant.”21 But live television (like theater and a single-take celluloid film) is also prone to error. That is its risk—again, the curiously determinative factor for Bazin and his contract with the real.

One could even understand the scholarly tendency to focus on Rope’s “mistakes” as evidence of Hitchcock’s already-Bazinian investment in a risk-and-reward relationship to the aesthetics of realism and presence—as well as other cultural dynamics. The errors in Rope, for instance, have been well documented, even fetishized, by the film’s “closest” viewer, D.A. Miller. In his 2013 essay “Hitchcock’s Understyle: A Too-Close View of Rope,” Miller unearths all the film’s glitches, which span from continuity errors (a chair that just happened to turn to face the camera, while it was focused on another side of the room) to performance errors (a candle that cants to one side, tottering on its candlestick, until John Dahl turns in time to place it firmly in its socket). For Miller, these errors are not so much mistakes as “mis-takes,” foregrounding a “fault that lies, primal and irreparable, at the core of [Hitchcock’s] art.”22 The risk of the mis-take permeates Rope—it tinges each performance with an “unacted nervousness that spikes through the script’s overliterate finish.”23 It is in this sense that the film collapses its multivalent risks (the risk of murder, the risk of theater, and above all, the risk of homosexuality in 1948) into the risk of the film’s form itself.24 According to Miller, then, Rope’s virtuosic, if imperfect, illusion of a single-take upstages its diegetic risks, thus serving as a form of cinematic risk management (only what gets “managed” is a cultural dynamic too risqué for Hitchcock’s late-1940’s audience).

The Risks of Super-Realism

In nearly every review, Birdman was compared to Rope, as its form also trumped its content in the critical aftermath of its release. Birdman swept the 2015 Academy Awards, winning Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Director for Alejandro González Iñárritu and Best Cinematography for Emmanuel Lubezki. Unusual for a blockbuster, Birdman’s camerawork received most of its critical attention and accolades in the weeks between the film’s release and its Oscars success. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times called the film’s cinematography “an astonishment”; David Edelstein of New York magazine deemed it “the very definition of a tour de force”; and Slate’s Dana Stevens called Lubezki’s roving camera “one of the most intelligent and vibrant presences on screen.”25 Shot to appear as a single, continuous take, the film’s camerawork weaves the viewer in and out of a dizzying, meticulously-choreographed visual maze: in and out of the dressing rooms, stage, wings, and hallways of Broadway’s St. James Theater, where most of the film takes place. Birdman’s actual composition has been dissected and documented by a number of film fans and reviewers, who have exposed the magic trick of the film, which was actually shot in a series of long-takes, digitally composited into a single, seamless narrative in post-production.26

Where Rope took Brandon and Phillip’s apartment as its stage with theatrical realism as its aspirational aesthetic, Birdman is set on an actual stage with theatrical realism serving as its stylistic and thematic foil. The film follows Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), an aging movie star made both obsolete and conspicuous by his former portrayal of the superhero Birdman. On a quest for artistic legitimacy and media attention, Riggan uses his own money (and mortgages his second home) to fund, direct and star in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Riggan’s financial and emotional risks are the film’s obsessive theme: “You risk nothing, nothing, nothing. But I’m a fucking actor. This play cost me everything,” he says to a fictional New York Times theater critic, who has promised to pan his upcoming Broadway debut out of personal spite for the Hollywood blockbuster star-turned-dramatist and the commercialization of Broadway that he represents. Her claim is to artistic integrity; she cares nothing for his risks, daring not even to flinch as he smashes a tumbler against the wall of the bar in which they sit.

Carver’s “dirty realism” (and Flaubert, whom Riggan off-handedly quotes to bolster his cultural capital) stands-in for realism as an aesthetic mode, and as an anachronism: realism is as out of touch with the 21^st-century mediascape as the aging film star himself. Curiously, Carver’s realism is represented in the film as an epistemology in line with what we have already described as Bazinian realism: a naïve, or literalist, faith in the transparency of representations. But the existentially and financially destitute actor can’t even get this naïve realism right. Mike Shiner (Norton), an acclaimed Broadway method actor and Riggan’s costar on stage, relishes deflating Riggan’s posturing attempts at authenticity. Drinking real gin on stage on the night of the play’s first preview, Mike explodes when Riggan swaps it with the water that the actor had used in rehearsals:

Oh, shit. I am so tired of this. Is this water? Did you replace my gin with water, man? [smashes glass]. No, come on what? I’m drunk? I’m supposed to be drunk! Why aren’t you drunk? This is Carver! He left a piece of his liver on the table every time he wrote a page. If I need to be drinking gin, who the fuck are you to touch my gin?

When the audience jeers, taking out cellphones to record his on-stage tantrum (Fig. 10), Mike turns his fury on them: “Oh, come on people. Don’t be so pathetic. Stop looking at the world through your cell phone screens. Have a real experience. Does anybody give a shit about the truth here besides me?”

So turned on by theater’s reality effect Mike produces a real “massive erection” in the next night’s preview during his on-stage sex scene. Again, the audience’s cellphones appear to capture—and filter—the softcore moment of hardness.

But if the audience cannot sustain these moments of Mike’s so-called realness without whipping out their pocket recording devices, the film proves an even more precarious platform for realism, exploiting the surreal capacity of digital filmmaking from the very start of its “single-take.” After a string of opening credits, the film presents a quote from Raymond Carver’s Late Fragment: “To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the Earth.” A quick cut to a jellyfish washed up on the shore (so quick it appears like a pornographic snippet stuck into a celluloid print) precedes another cut to Riggan, seen from behind in his dressing room, levitating feet above the ground in a yogic lotus position (fig. 11).

Riggan drops to the ground, and the camera tours his disheveled dressing room. For the next 105 minutes, the film will appear as a single-take, despite traversing time and space—and defying the presuppositions of classical drama and human phenomenology in its wake. Another quote from Carver is mounted on Riggan’s mirror: “A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.” Like its former, this quote foregrounds the insurmountable distance between signifier and signified, while nonetheless espousing a “faith in reality”—a manifesto for naïve realism and authentic encounters with the real. We seem to be not far, in fact, from Bazin’s insistence that “the photographic image is the object itself.”

In contradistinction to this manifesto and to the tenets of Bazinian realism, Lubezki’s roving camera turns the St. James Theater and the streets outside it into a cinematic hyperspace: inconceivable, unmappable, and yet connected through the film’s digitally composited continuity. An exemplary moment of this continually inconsistent space occurs when Riggan and Mike leave the theater after their first disastrous preview. The camera tracks backward as Mike and Riggan walk toward it. Riggan drops change into a busking drummer’s can, and the camera swings past the drummer, picking up Riggan and Mike from behind, as they continue their conversation. They are now, however, on 47^th street, the location of the Rum House, a bar that the two men enter to get a much-deserved drink. Despite the 3-block leap in space, the thread of their conversation and the drummer’s beat remain consistent, reinforcing the illusion that the entire interaction took place in a unified space and time. While this space-traveling interaction could be conceived as a barely-there continuity error (or a “cheat”), Iñárritu suggested otherwise, when, in a post-production New York Times interview he confessed:

What I wanted to achieve, and the bet for me, and the success for me, it was meant to be an extension of the emotional state of the character, to sustain the emotion, the flow, the internal rhythm, the point of view. When I do films in a conventional way, I do a lot of shit that I’m embarrassed to show. I just take it out. In this case my shit will be out there forever… But I knew that if we do it right, if I’m successful with it, I knew that means I have the audience in the mind of this character. [He] is living a dual reality, and the one he escaped through his mind — I said the only way to do that is putting the audience into that mind.27

The film’s form—the “bet” that Iñárritu took with his single-take artifice—can here be seen as a type of “surreality testing”: not differentiating between an external reality and an internal imagination (as one does in Freudian “reality testing”), but conflating and confounding the two.28 The surreal impossibility of Birdman’s space, which is emphasized in the film’s publicity interviews, is also embedded into the mise-en-scène of the St. James Theater itself. A tracking shot through one of the theater’s many hallways features a patterned carpet that bears considerable resemblance to that of The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel: another famously, and literally, maze-like cinematic space, whose setting reflects a conflation of internal and external realities (figs. 12 and 13).

Unlike the film’s single-take illusion, montage-based editing would belie the lack of insurance (emotional and financial) at the heart of Birdman’s diegesis. Iñárritu’s long-take technique not only transferred the precarity of Riggan’s emotional state to the viewer, it also infused the film’s set with an atmosphere of precarity—turning its actors into tightrope performers, high-risk artists.29 In their respective NPR interviews while promoting the film, Birdman’s stars, Michael Keaton and Edward Norton, emphasized the emotional risk to the actor implied by Iñárritu’s “bet”:

Everybody showed up every morning frightened. The crew too. I think we were all thinking, I don’t want to be the guy who lets everybody down. Anything—a misremembered line, an extra step taken, a camera operator stumbling on a stair or veering off course or out of focus—could blow a take, rendering the first several minutes unusable even if they had been perfect.30

Norton added, of Iñárritu and Lubezki:

It was like watching two masters, you know, paint together. And I think it’s hard for people who don’t make movies to grasp, like, how risky that was … For them, [they were] taking away the entire insurance package of editing later … The reason you shoot coverage … is because you want to have the opportunity to manipulate it later and salvage something if it’s not working. And [they] essentially threw all that optionality out the window when [they] made this film, which is quite a dangerous thing to do.31

For Norton, Iñárritu is like the financier, leveraging risk for future aesthetic return. Critically, however, Iñárritu dispensed with the “insurance package” of conventional editing only to subscribe to another form of insurance: digital composition and the apparently infinite “optionality” of pixilated images. His film may contain few cuts, but it is nonetheless highly edited. With digital images, like those captured on Lubezki’s Arri Alexa and Alex M digital cameras, each image is translated into rows of pixels that are coded and stored in computer memory.32 As individual units they may then be subjected to manipulation with the appropriate software. This is how Riggan hovers above his dressing room cross-legged and leaps from 44^th to 47^th without taking a step. In this sense, the “cuts” in Birdman are not “repressed” as they are in Rope. They are, rather, amalgamated and concealed through compositing. They are decomposed and recomposed into new bundled images. Like the fictional Riggan, digital editing of this sophistication has been most famously used in action films and superhero movies to defy gravity and transcend the limits of the Real. This is not realism but Super-Realism.

Indeed, it is Super-Realism (and not surrealism) that defines Birdman formally and thematically. The new genre is coined by the film’s aforementioned theater critic in her review of Riggan’s Carver adaptation. Falling deeper into the trough of his depression (and floating higher into nostalgic reverence for his days of Birdman-fame), Riggan enters the final, suicidal scene of his opening night production armed with a real pistol instead of the red-dye spouting prop that he had used in previews (a death-driven nod to Mike’s real gin and real erection). The camera trails him from behind as he stumbles downstage, holds the gun up to his head, and pulls the trigger. He falls, and the camera stays steadily on the audience, who, after a moment of shocked silence, erupts in cheers. This is not the end of the film; nor is it the end of Riggan’s life (he missed his brains for his “beak”). But it is the end of the film’s “single-take.” After a satirically dense montage of serene woodlands, plummeting comets, and washed up jellyfish, the viewer is placed in Riggan’s hospital room, where he hears of his rave, if backhanded, New York Times review:

Thomson has unwittingly given birth to a new form, which can only be described as Super-Realism. Blood was spilled both literally and metaphorically by actors and audience alike. Real blood. The blood that has been sorely missing from the veins of the American theater.

The review’s headline is Birdman’s parenthetical subtitle: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.

Toggling between the literal and the metaphorical—between the thing (“real blood”) and what is said of the thing—Birdman’s fictional theater critic defines the scope of Riggan’s Super-Realism in allegorical terms. But Riggan’s high-risk stage performance presents viewers with an allegory of more than the gutlessness of contemporary American theater. Indeed, it is not just ignorance that is unexpectedly lauded in Riggan’s performance; it is risk— high risk—and the singularity of his performance. These are the combined values of 21^st-century celebrity: inimitable acts like Riggan’s are what gets one trending on Twitter or featured on a “reality” show (both subtheme’s of Riggan’s failed career). They are also, relatedly, evidence of a radical transformation in the reality contract that has emerged in the digital era—for both film and finance.

The Economy of the Single-Shot Film

If the terms of Bazin’s 1953 reality contract were contingent upon both the indexicality of celluloid—the “basic material of the film”—and an assumed exposure to risk, what has happened to cinematic realism in the wake of digitization? To defend realism in digital cinema, scholars have alternately abandoned indexicality as a necessary condition for realism, or doubled down on it—both positions that compromise the terms and intent of Bazin’s contract. Stephen Prince, for example, famously redefined cinematic realism as “perceptual realism,” an aesthetic that can be reproduced in analog or digital media.33 Prince writes, “A perceptually realistic image is one which structurally corresponds to the viewer’s audiovisual experience of three-dimensional space. Perceptually realistic images correspond to this experience because film-makers build them to do so.”34 Defining realism in terms of recognizability—does it appear real?—Prince renders the ontology (and indexicality) of images irrelevant to the criteria of realism. By contrast, the appearance of reality—a cognitive, audiovisual process for Prince—is, for Martin Lefebvre and Marc Furstenau a semiotic process, still essentially connected to indexicality. Recovering from Peircean semiotics a definition of indexicality that is not dependent on the co-presence of the camera and the pro-filmic subject (the basic elements of realism for Bazin), Lefebvre and Furstenau claim to discover a Bazinian realism that transcends analog filmic production. They remind the reader that “indexicality is simply how signs indicate what it is that they are about” and that “through indexicality signs denote objects of experience to which they are really connected, i.e. real, existing things.”35 In short, they conclude:

All signs, including digital images and cinematic fictions should they mean anything, are to be understood ultimately as (among other things) indexically connected to reality. This is how signs begin to fulfill their epistemological role of ensuring the intelligibility of the “entire Universe of being.”36

By returning to a Peircean definition of indexicality, however, Lefebvre and Furstenau evacuate realism of the metaphysical sensation of presence that Bazin saw as cinema’s greatest aesthetic achievement. Importantly, they also disarticulate Bazin’s definition of realism from the production and management of risk. As we have seen, for Bazin, cinematic realism necessarily involved two factors: 1) an indexical relationship between camera and pro-filmic subject, and 2) a dynamic of risk-and-reward in the aesthetic conditions of establishing that relationship. Lefebvre and Furstenau think that Bazin wanted only the former and forget just how much the latter mattered in his reality contract.

Returning to “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” one sees that Bazin defines realism neither as an aesthetic that can be approximated, nor as a code that can be remediated, but as a contract, a site of negotiation with inherent risks. But the risks of this contract have to be understood as more than the mere contingencies of an agreement between two individuals. After all, Bazin’s reality contract mediates between individuals by way of an abstract process of representation—it mediates by way of the apparatus of cinema. Such a contract is not as rarefied as it may sound; indeed, it finds analogy in the tacit contract obliging all individuals in a monetary system and the modes of investment that such a system makes possible. In the first place, the contract underpinning the basic conditions of currency and investment presumes faith in representation as transparent. It presumes (as does Bazin’s reality contract), a certain faith in the relationship between the identity of a thing (i.e., gold, pro-filmic subject) and the representation of a thing (i.e., paper money, filmed subject).37 What such a relationship makes possible, then, for both Bazin and systems of currency, are forms of investment in which risks can be assumed and rewarded according to a kind of mediated temporality. If the risky long take with the lion-and-boy can, in Bazin’s words, “retroactively” authenticate the earlier, less risky use of montage—so in finance, a risky “long shot” can retroactively reward an initial investment. But in order for these contracts and investments to function, a collectivity must continually agree to these literalist terms of representation. The ongoing presence, somewhere, of gold (and, eventually, government fiat) guaranteeing the value of paper currency serves as one form of management of this collective risk, authenticating, even retroactively, the representation as real.38 Just as Bazin’s contract states that “All that matters is that the spectator can say at one and the same time that the basic material of the film is authentic while the film is also truly cinema,” the monetarist says of paper money that “all that matters is that the speculator can say at one and the same time that currency is authentic while the dollar is also truly money.”

While the government serves to authenticate currency and investment under monetarism, the camera serves to authenticate the scene under Bazinian realism, underwriting its risks. As we have seen, Hitchcock’s Rope abides by the terms of Bazin’s reality contract with a wink, enjoying the aesthetic rewards of risky long takes, while allowing for the insurance of cuts and reshoots, mediating the risk of any given moment on set. By managing risk with this “stunt,” Hitchcock himself, as opposed to his camera, underwrites the film’s risks. The camera on the set of Rope is no passive guarantor of the risks assumed by actors in the scene; rather, it is mobile and meticulously choreographed according to Hitchcock’s famously precise storyboards. In an interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock conceded that Rope was “in a sense, precut. The mobility of the camera and the movement of the players closely followed my usual cutting practice. In other words, I maintained the rule of varying the size of the image in relation to its emotional importance within a given episode.”39 “Precutting,” or the careful plotting of the camera’s position in the space, secures the viewer’s belief not just in any reality, but in a reality of Hitchcock’s own making. The film’s “painstaking quest for realism,” as Truffaut deems it, is secured not only because the viewer “believes” in the camera’s testimony to a real experience, but also because she “believes” in Hitchcock’s genius and his brand.40 In this sense, Hitchcock’s brand, already well-established by the filming of Rope, provides a kind of fiat cultural currency—both for the film’s backers (the first Hitchcock production that the director coproduced, Rope was a box office success41) and for its viewers, who know the risks of the film’s scenes to be mitigated by Hitchcock’s management and design.

Ed Norton describes a similar dynamic, in which the genius behind the camera underwrites the risks assumed by those in front of it, when he calls the teamwork between Iñárritu and Lubezki that of “two masters … paint[ing] together.” But whether they know it or not, viewers of Birdman are party to a different reality contract than that of Rope’s viewers. The reality that they perceive in the cinema—no matter how approximate to a photographic realism—is fundamentally altered by the film’s digital production. Doubly abstracted from its referent through pixilation and post-production manipulation, digitally recorded images are only optionally tied to the physical world. The viewer who agrees to see the digital image as real is agreeing to a new realism, in which the co-presence of the camera and subject cannot be taken for granted. This new reality contract involves new risks. Again, an analogy to the tacit contract assumed by individuals in monetary markets and the forms of investment they make possible proves illuminating. If digitization ushered in a new epistemology for cinema—a new relationship between thing and representation of that thing—financialization has represented a similar turn in the relationship between currency and value.42

Although the agents and institutions of finance capitalism—banks, stock exchanges, joint-stock companies—have long histories, the 1970s marked an epochal shift in the history of capitalism: a “financial revolution,” a “historic watershed,” a “shift in gravity from production … to finance.”43 This shift is often periodized in relation to the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreement and the total abandonment of the gold standard in 1971.44 Seen as condition postmoderne in economics, the end of Bretton Woods signaled the global hegemony of Marx’s “fictitious capital”—an economic regime in which currencies relate to each other without a stable referent, as floating signs without anchorage in gold. Frederic Jameson summarizes the formal logic of financialization accordingly:

[Under finance capitalism] money becomes in a second sense and to a second degree abstract (it always was abstract in the first and basic sense) … It was cotton money, or wheat money or textile money, railroad money and the like. Now, like the butterfly stirring within the chrysalis, it separates itself from that concrete breeding ground and prepares to take flight.45

Like Birdman’s Super-Real “flights” (digital compositions of computer-generated images, twice abstracted from Michael Keaton’s embodied form), assets under finance capital are restructured to be endlessly divisible and recombinable for speculation.46 As representational techniques, therefore, financial assets and digitally composited images find analogy in their contingent relationship to the physical world. When Riggan concedes that he has mortgaged his home to finance his Broadway production, his confession signals not only his desperation for career redemption; it also associates his “subprime” professional value with the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, in which what was traded among the world’s largest banks and hedge funds was not the value of homes (a single-level monetary abstraction) but the value of risk itself. For financialization commoditizes risk in order to manage it.47 The double-abstraction of assets into highly precise financial instruments (mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, among others) mitigates risk through the bundling of high- and low-risk investments. We might see digital composition as likewise bundling high-risk (live action) and low-risk (CGI) pixels into a fictitious asset with real embodied value: a Hollywood film.

Indeed Birdman’s total interpenetration of realism (the long take, still contingent upon the co-presence of camera and pro-filmic subject) and anti-realism (the creation of an unmappable hyperspace through digital compositing) reflects the antinomies of risk in late capitalism: high risk-seeking and risk-mitigation through virtual mediation. If, per Bazin, the undoctored long-take best captured the “interdependence of nature and form” in midcentury Hollywood film production, this dialect of risk made manifest in Birdman’s digital form may do the same for postmodern cinema. Indeed, if finance capitalism proposes a type of Super Capitalism—monetary abstraction to the second degree—Birdman’s Super-Realism may in fact best capture the real of the present.

Free State of Jones may well be the most politically important film about the civil war and its aftermath to appear in a quarter century. Produced by Gary Ross, Free State of Jones stars Mathew McConaughey as Newton Knight, a confederate deserter who leads a rebellion against the planter class in Southeastern Mississippi, momentarily uniting yeoman farmers and runaway slaves in an autonomous republic, the Free State of Jones County. This film does for Southern white small farmers, what the 1989 film Glory did for enslaved and free blacks—it provides a rich, textured portrait of their political lives that avoids the bold brush strokes and crude caricatures we have come to expect in fiction and public debate.

The film distills Victoria Bynum’s superb history of the legendary Knight Company, his marriage to former slave and co-conspirator, Rachel, and the interracial family and community they created, the “White Negroes” of the Piney Woods.1 The film’s narrative oscillates between the Knight Company’s exploits during the Civil War and the new battle lines of post-war Reconstruction, and the 1948 criminal trial of Davis Knight, the twenty-three year old great grandson of Rachel and Newton, who was charged with violating Mississippi’s state ban on miscegenation, after he married a white woman, Lee Spradley. In dramatic detail, the film reveals the class war underneath the Civil War, a dimension largely erased by the dominant lore of the Confederate “Lost Cause” that continues to shape Southern and national politics.

Free State of Jones is a proper antidote to identitarian thinking, which has mystified popular understandings of the past, and how we approach political action in the present. In contrast to the prevailing view among so many nowadays that racism has always been and continues to be the main barrier to any progressive left politics, this film reminds us of a more complex history, where anti-slavery politics, Radical Republicanism and mass action created the short-lived progress of Reconstruction.

In his classic 1935 book, Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. DuBois characterizes the gathering work stoppages and eventual mass exodus of enslaved blacks from plantations after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation as a general strike. Against the conservative Dunning school of Reconstruction historiography, DuBois illuminates the role that blacks played in winning the war and creating the conditions for federal Reconstruction. Free State of Jones renders part of this history in vivid detail, and conveys a sense of an even more general strike in the process. As slaves put down the hoe and scythe, filling the Union army camps as contraband, increasing numbers of confederate deserters took their long guns and fled into the hollows and swamps, and some switched sides, further weakening the capacity of the southern landlord class to defend their commercial interests.

Historian Mark Lause reminds us in his excellent review of the film that such rebel desertions were not so much exceptions but the rule.2 The fact of confederate desertion and as the film depicts, open rebellion in the Piney Woods, challenges the myth of the pro-slavery Solid South, and should trouble those who still cling to the Confederate Battle Flag and racist nostalgia for an antebellum life that benefited all whites equally. This film renders the drama of war and reconstruction, the personal dalliance and political communion of slaves and yeoman, freedpersons and reformers during this auspicious period with an adroit and nuanced touch that few mainstream commercial American films have attempted.

Not Another “White Savior” Movie

The reaction to Free State of Jones has been swift and in some corners harsh and unforgiving, with some critics rejecting it as yet another white savior story. New York Times columnist Charles Blow dismisses Free State of Jones, concluding that “in the film there are also tired flashes of the Tarzan narrative: a white man who, dropped into a jungle, masters it better than the natives.”3 Blow is also disappointed that “there is little space in the film for righteous black rage and vengeance, but plenty for black humor and conciliation.”4 Blow charges “the movie reduced slavery to an ancillary ephemerality and purges it of too much of its barbarism.” Blow’s characterization does not accurately reflect the events depicted in the film, nor the history examined by Bynum, who he cites.

When I first saw the film’s trailer, I momentarily worried about this being a white savior film as well. Would this be another Dances with Wolves or The Last Samurai, where some broken white character places himself in service of the native people, and their suffering serves as catalyst and backdrop for his self-actualization and redemption? This film does not belong in that genre.

For starters, Knight’s transformation begins before his contact with rebel slaves. He and other characters in the film are politicized by the wider class contradictions of the Civil War, with the conflict over slavery as one dimension of this milieu. Working as a confederate nurse, Knight is disturbed by the hypocrisy of the so-called “Twenty Negro Law,” which exempts large slaveholders from military duty, and he is outraged by the daily predation on small farmers by Confederate tax collectors, who seize their corn, hogs and handicrafts to furnish the battlefront.

The film contrasts the fictional planter, James Eakins and the opulence enjoyed by his family, and the austere conditions of the Piney Woods region’s yeomanry, the majority of Jones County. Most of the small farmers who populated Southeastern Mississippi did not own slaves, not so much because of some affinity for blacks and their condition, but because of the republican belief of the period that too much wealth and commercial success would lead to moral decay. In the film, Knight briefly refers to the wide gulf in material prosperity between Jones County’s small farmers and the patricians of the Mississippi Delta valley when he tells soldiers about a house in Natchez rumored to have a golden doorknob. He eventually deserts and rebels once he can no longer withstand the dissonance between this war to defend wealthy planters, and the tremendous hardship, sacrifice and death of the poor it requires.

There is also something more insidious about the “white savior” criticism of the film. By honing in on Knight, the criticism diminishes the role of other characters, particularly the slaves and maroons, who reflect a wider working class culture of mutuality and resistance. The film portrays what are well-documented instances of the frequent and extensive relations of cooperation between slaves, deserters, refugees, and union sympathizers. We first meet Rachel when she is summoned to save Knight’s ill son. The maroons in the Pascagoula swamp also save Knight. After he is mauled by a search party’s dog, they offer him herbal medicine, and perhaps more importantly, they provide his first contact with blacks as men and women, outside the hierarchy and social norms of the town.

The white savior criticism also distorts Knight’s actions, which in numerous scenes, empowers those around him rather than saving anyone as such. Critics who dismiss Knight as a white savior diminish the importance of leadership, a vital aspect of social movements throughout history. At various turns, Knight displays a degree of altruism that is admirable. He risk his own life to find safe haven for his juvenile nephew who as been conscripted to fight. He leaves the battlefront out of a sense of duty to his family. Even though it means putting his own safety in jeopardy, he puts his skill as a blacksmith to use, freeing Moses Washington, one of the maroons who provides refuge to him, from an iron punishment collar. He shows women and children how to use firearms so that they too might join the rebellion against Confederate authorities.

Bynum has offered a helpful corrective to Blow’s review and its distortions of her book, and in particular, she takes up his claim that her work and the film soft-pedal the reality of sexual exploitation and abuse of enslaved women. I would add that The Free State of Jones does not neglect the horrors of slavery and its aftermath. Rape, torture, beatings, daily indignities, the separation of families, and the rise of southern lynch law after the war ends, all loom throughout the film and are portrayed with dramatic, disturbing power.

The white savior criticism offered by Blow and others derives from the broader preoccupation with black agency in contemporary academic and popular discourses. This concern with valorizing black self-assertion originated in response to the long-standing, problematic tendency in fictional and scholarly depictions of American history to neglect or impugn black self-activity. After the release of Stephen Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln, some critics panned the film for focusing exclusively on the machinations of Washington politicians, as the plot centers on the president’s attempts to secure the Congressional votes needed to pass the Thirteenth amendment. An insistence on highlighting the power and agency of blacks themselves during the civil rights movement seemed to guide Ava Duvernay’s 2014 film, Selma, which dramatizes the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. When the film was released, however, veterans of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and some historians of the period criticized it for downplaying and distorting the president’s role in the passage of landmark voting rights legislation. Perhaps, this is an intractable problem.

All cinematic depictions of history are abbreviations of more multifaceted, conjunctural phenomena, and getting to the truth of the matter requires more than two hours or so of passive entertainment. Filmmakers who emphasize black agency seek to inspire pride and similar feats of heroism in their audiences, but they may also obscure the more complex motives of various historical events, actors and processes. The abolition of slavery was not merely a story of Congressional legislation, nor was the civil rights movement the result of black political assertion and direct-action alone. That all being said, some films like Free State of Jones provide us with more politically useful representations of history than others, illuminating the interplay of different historical forces, individual choices and material interests.

The Limits of the Yeoman’s Freedom

Knight should not be characterized as a “white savior” because in the end he is unable to save anyone, and rather than some tidy narrative closure, we are presented with the lingering consequences of powerful interests aligned against the very kind of egalitarian vision embodied in the republic of Jones County, and the marital union of Newton and Rachel Knight.

The Knight Company was borne out of the weakened power of the Confederacy and the merchant-landlord class. In the wake of devastating defeats by Union forces at the Battle of Corinth in the fall 1862 and later at the Siege at Vicksburg the following spring, thousands of southerners deserted the Confederate army. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia in 1865, however, would bring an end to this wartime period of tremendous upheaval and social fluidity, and the conditions which allowed the free state of Jones County to emerge.

The film climaxes as Knight stands before a crowd after they have repelled the Confederate troops at Ellisville and says, “From this day forward we declare the land north of Pascagoula Swamp, south of Enterprise and east to the Pearl River to the Alabama border, to be a Free State of Jones.” He outlines the core radically egalitarian principles of the new republic, “no man ought to stay poor so another man can get rich…no man ought to tell another man what you got to live for or what he’s got to die for…what you put in the ground is yours to tend and harvest and there ain’t no man ought to be able to take that away from you” and finally, “every man is a man. If you walk on two legs, you’re a man. It’s as simple as that.”

We are denied any catharsis in this film, however. There is no happy ending. We might relish the heroic gunfight in the cemetery which pits farmers and slaves against confederate authorities, perhaps the film’s most typically Hollywood scene, but almost as soon as Knight declares the free state of Jones County, things begin to unravel. Union support for the pro-unionist insurrection is tepid, and the end of the war and abolition of slavery gives way to a downward spiral of racist reaction.

Southern states enact black codes, which regulate the movement of freedpersons, restricting their access to cities and towns, and by default, courts, public life and commerce. The erection of apprenticeship laws, which circumvented the thirteenth amendment’s prohibition of slavery and involuntary servitude, also shores up the power of the merchant-landlord class and their control over black labor.

In the film, when Washington finds out that his son has been kidnapped and forced into servitude through apprenticeship, he grabs his gun in an unsuccessful rescue attempt. The court room scene that follows is one of the more understated moments in the film, but it is important and contradicts the view of Blow and others who judge cinematic treatments of slavery by how well or graphically they depict the plantocracy’s depravity and violence. When Washington and Knight lose the court case against Eakins, who is protected by property laws, a furious Knight pays Eakins to secure the boy’s release—perhaps the only instance of him being a true white savior. Eakins concedes without a fuss and releases the boy, having maintained his economic advantage. This scene underscores that brutality and torture, like Christianity and the legal system, were methods of maintaining the plantation order, but the essential motive of that system was always profit.

What becomes clear in the film is that small farmers and hired hands were slowly won over to the Democratic Party slogan of white supremacy, with some joining terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts and the Knights of the White Camelia, which were themselves political organizations dedicated to breaking black Republican support throughout the South. The racism of some deserters and small farmers is clear in the film, but those sentiments only partially explain their retreat from the utopian promise of the free state of Jones County, and the turn to reactionary politics. Their motivations were as much economic, an attempt to maintain their relative status as small landholders amid the uncertainty of a war torn and defeated South. In the film, some members of the Knight Company disband after the victory at Ellisville, fearful that they might lose their farms. Even more decisively, such unease about property, the basis of the yeomanry’s nominal independence, heightens after the war and as the power of the merchant-landlord class over the Southern economy and public affairs is gradually restored, foreclosing popular, working class hopes of greater self-assertion.

We get a glimpse of these dynamics in the film as Knight unsuccessfully tries to persuade Jasper Collins, the first lieutenant of the Knight Company and Republican partisan after the war, to talk to the local whites, and convince them to attend a Union League meeting. This process of Democratic party consolidation and the overthrow of Reconstruction governments was uneven, and looked different in Jones County where there were relatively few freedpersons as compared to large port cities like New Orleans and Charleston, or the Mississippi Delta counties. Without federal support for reconstruction, and a land reform program that would have redistributed parcels to the freedmen, insuring them some measure of economic independence, hopes of political freedom were dashed.

In the story of the Jones County insurrection, we are reminded of the limits of marronage and secession, which both entail carving out some small-scale form of political community, outside the authority of larger and more powerful nations. Assertions of independence, however bold, mean little without the power to defend the political community and its values. Slaves throughout the hemisphere created autonomous maroon communities in the wilderness, settlements that often helped to spark rebellion in neighboring plantations. And the Knight Company tried to create its own yeoman’s republic against the plantation class. Others would do the same after the war, forging beyond the Mississippi river and into the plains states and towards the Sierra Nevada, creating independent towns that were momentarily beyond the reach of federal authorities. None of these social experiments, however, could elude American capitalist expansion, the geographic enclosure of the continent through railroads and political annexation, and the economic integration of backwaters and rural counties into the emerging industrial and imperial power.

The Freedperson’s Choice

In his review for The Atlantic, Vann Newkirk II is offended by a moment in the film where Knight, preaching at the graveside of comrades who were hanged by Confederates, says, “Somehow, someway and sometime, everybody is just somebody else’s nigger.” “The notion that white people can be ‘niggers,’” Newkirk writes, “is about as offensive as they come when considering the history of the epithet and how it’s long been utilized by poor whites as a demarcation between whiteness—even its lowest rungs—and blackness. There’s a reason why black people were lynched for voting during Reconstruction and are shot for standing on corners today—one that Knight’s political revolution completely fails to comprehend.”5 Sadly, Newkirk fails to comprehend so much of the history he glosses over in this passage. If you ever hear anyone say liberal arts education is no longer relevant or needed, statements like this one, which butcher history and scoff at serious study, are all the evidence needed to rebuff such talk and argue the merits of critical thinking, interdisciplinarity and analytical rigor.

Oddly, Newkirk’s review ignores what happens next in Newt Knight’s eulogy when he turns to Moses Washington, a runaway slave who later serves as a leader of the Union League in Jones County. Knight asks Washington, “Mr. Moses, Are you a nigger?”

“No. I’m not,” says Washington.

“Well, what are you?” ask Knight.

“I’m a free man, captain.”

“Why is that?” Knight continues.

“Because you cannot own a child of God!” Washington says emphatically.

Newkirk neglects this critical dimension of the graveside eulogy, and how their exchange unmasks the mythology of race, the belief in the natural superiority of one race over another, and at an even deeper level, the belief that there are in fact “races” of human beings, divided in some essential way by nature, culture and capacity. It is also worth noting, as Barbara Fields pointed out some time ago in her 1982 essay, “Ideology and Race in American History,” that what we have come to understand as race is a relatively late-breaking development in history.6 Contrary to popular mythology, race did not solidify at the moment of first contact between Africans and Europeans. Race and racism achieved dominance later as a popular ideology, at the precise moment when the planter class’s control of black labor and the moral legitimacy of slavery were being widely contested.

Newkirk assumes that whiteness and blackness are essential and static categories, totally ignoring how long it took for these markers to become firmly associated with the hierarchies we abide today. The actual history of European immigration and acculturation, and the use of the term “nigger” in public rhetoric are much more complex and surprising that his superficial reading assumes.

Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race, Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White, and David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness among numerous other scholarly works, examine the ways each successive wave of “white” immigrants to the U.S. were unwelcomed, met by all manner of xenophobia and ethnic prejudice, which often associated them with enslaved blacks. The experiences of European ethnics were not uniform, nor predetermined by “white skin privilege.”

As the first shots of the Civil War were fired, phrases like “nigger work,” “working like a nigger” and “white nigger” were used by some to describe unskilled, subservient and difficult work undertake by the whites, and often Irish immigrants. In the passage cited above, Newkirk obviously feels the historical weight of the epithet, but clearly misses its highly contextual, varying social meanings. Blow and Newkirk seem to view “race” as a settled matter during the Civil War, and presume that racial identity was the primary and perhaps sole affinity shaping the concerns and actions of slaves, free blacks, small farmers, journeyman, merchants, industrialists and planters in the middle nineteenth century.

Newkirk engages in a dismissal of white workers as perennially racist and reactionary, a practice that has reached the level of blood sport over this past presidential primary election cycle, as all manner of talking heads lined up to write-off the political challenge represented by democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, and to explain the rise of Donald Trump as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, both phenomena which many saw as being fueled white male working class rage. White working class voters, of course, supported various candidates across the Democratic and GOP fields. And although Trump’s calls for protectionist policy and his scapegoating of immigrants appealed to large sections of the GOP base, the majority of his supporters during the primary season were in fact middle class and affluent whites, not blue collar voters. Connor Kilpatrick’s “Burying the White Working Class” offers an indispensible, critical review of this conservative tendency among the corporate commentariat.7 Blow and Newkirk were part of this chorus, and their reviews of Free State of Jones read like an encore performance.8

Blow and Newkirk are clearly irritated by any focus on class politics, and only seem capable of viewing the film with their minds set on our current Black Lives Matter moment. “McConaughey’s Knight is a gun-toting avatar of Woke Whiteness, a man who’s both a stylistic and philosophical forefather to so many Millennial social-media users” Newkirk writes, “His message of universal class-based solidarity, as outlined in his quote about ownership of niggers, is as inadequate as theirs in actually identifying and exploring the roots of racial oppression in America.” Newkirk seems to have forgotten that Knight was an actual historical figure, that a small library of books and articles have been written about this life and exploits, and that there is a wider history of the South which cannot be reduced to either symbolic referents or fodder for contemporary debates, a history that is as multidimensional and contradictory as our own times. Of course, Blow and Newkirk might not concede that last point either, because both share a rather limited view of politics where political constituency is equated with identity, rather than understood in terms of actual interests and expressed political commitments.

Neither reviewer seems aware of the wider labor conflicts between whites that defined the Piney Woods region of Southeastern Mississippi and its yeoman inhabitants’ relationship to the wealthier planters and merchants of the cotton belt. These facts of history seemed like an inconvenience to them, an offense to their liberal anti-racist political commitments, and a distraction from concerns about “wokeness,” and the terms of proper “allyship.”

In a sense, these dismissals of Free State of Jones share a strange lineage with Ethel Knight’s The Echo of the Black Horn. She was Newton Knight’s great-grandniece and her 1951 book was an attempt to silence rumors of her family’s miscegenated heritage. Believing that renewed interest in her uncle was due to “communistic elements,” Ethel Knight portrayed Newton as a traitor to his race and the Confederacy rather than some rural southern version of Robin Hood. Leaving no doubt about her allegiances, she dedicated the book to the “Nobel Confederates who lived and died for Jones County.” Ethel Knight also sought to bury the memory and reputation of Rachel Knight, characterizing her as a disloyal slave, a “strumpet” and a “jezebel,” but her attempt at character assassination had the longer-term effect of piquing the interest of latter day researchers in Rachel, her role in the Jones County insurrection, and relationship with Newton Knight.9

Although Ethel Knight’s screed against Newt and Rachel Knight was inspired by her segregationist politics, I am afraid these contemporary critics represent a consonant political sensibility, a dogged commitment to identity politics and the view that interracial cooperation and solidarity are ludicrous and unlikely. If there is a common thread in both Ethel Knight’s revisionist history and those who see Free State of Jones as a white savior film, it is that American politics has always been and should be about staying in one’s ethnic and racial lane. And this is precisely the reason why this film and Bynum’s The Free State of Jones need to be appreciated and discussed widely.

I find it interesting that few of the reviewers who panned the film ever mention the significance of its core black characters, Rachel Knight and Moses Washington, nor the deft performances of Mugu Mbatha-Raw and Mahershala Ali who portray Rachel and Washington respectively. In public interviews, Ali has been clear about the political virtues of the film, and his own motivations for taking on the role, but his artistic choices and politics do not figure into the broadsides of “white savior” critics.10

Why did Rachel Knight or figures like the fictional Moses Washington, make the choices that they did historically? Why did they choose camaraderie and common cause with white farmers, carpetbaggers and scalawags, instead of “righteous black rage and vengeance”? The kind of race-talk offered by Blow, Newkirk and others, silences the actual historical choices made by thousands of blacks who took up arms against the Confederacy, and who worked alongside whites to advance the Reconstruction project.

This may be the first film I have seen that spends more than a couple frames depicting the Union League, or Loyal League, men’s clubs that were created to strengthen popular commitments to the Union and the Republican Party. As historian Michael W. Fitzgerald details in his book, The Union League Movement in the Deep South, these secret societies were crucial in politicizing freedmen and building black political power after the war, with thousands joining the League in states like Mississippi and Alabama. In Free State of Jones, we witness more than one League meeting. We glimpse the work of the Freedmen’s schools and the intergenerational students who crowded its schoolhouses. We see freedmen marching to the polls singing “John Brown’s Body” and are reminded of the dangerous work of securing the franchise as we watch Washington, going from field to field to register voters. These are stirring and sobering moments, glimpses of a heroic but often forgotten chapter in black political history.

If I have a criticism of this film, it may well be that its extended and brutal denouement will inspire pessimism, inadvertently underwriting the dismal view of history and politics that the film’s broader storyline challenges. As my son said when we walked out of the theatre, “That was difficult to watch.” We know, however, that even after the fall of Reconstruction, freedpersons, small farmers, Radical Republicans and industrial workers strove to build political alternatives, such as the agrarian Populist Movement, the Comité des Citoyens, and the Knights of Labor. Again, why did freedpersons pursue such a politics—progressive, leftist and interracial—given the expanding and constrictive edifice of Jim Crow law?

For those who think that racism is an obstinate barrier to broad popular left politics, how do we explain the actions of black scalesmen, teamsters, and packers in New Orleans, who joined the 1892 general strike in that city? And how were dozens of unions involved able to maintain solidarity during the strike despite virulent anti-black racism in some of the locals? How did they prevail, winning the ten-hour day and overtime pay for workers throughout the city? What is missing from these incessant evasions and put-downs of interracial left progressivism is any serious appreciation of the rich, powerful history of interracial left progressivism itself.

During the age of Obama, hyperbolic racialism has obscured actual alignments and political interests operating within society. Despite his expressed commitment to neoliberal politics, which is antagonistic to the kind of civil rights and social progressivism that defined black political life throughout the Cold War era, Obama’s ascendancy was viewed by legions of supporters as a continuation of earlier black political struggles. In a moment of economic recession, anxiety and political disillusionment, Obama emerged as a personification of black aspiration and object of white racist contempt. The torrent of Right wing, racist attacks against the president, from the astro-turf protests of the Birthers and the TEA Party to the obstructionism of the Republican-controlled Congress and all manner of lesser slights, insults and twisted memes aimed at the first family, have been received as an affront to all blacks, and as evidence of the futility of an alternative politics rooted in the lived experiences and felt needs of working people more broadly. American liberal thinking has long elided class, but the resurgent racialism of the Obama years has made it even more difficult to discuss class interests and politics in a meaningful way.

Perhaps part of the problem here is that the very meaning of class has been lost in our times, too often equated with gradations of education, income and wealth. These markers might serve as rough indicators of class, but none of those categories fully reflect the social character of class, which is a collective relationship to the means of production. In American public debate as well, race is used as a rough proxy for class, with white and black serving as stand-ins for rich and poor, middle class and welfare dependent. There is also a longer, problematic history of thinking about the working class that distinguishes wage laborers from slaves, peasants and domestic workers. Free State of Jones reminds us of this core truth of class with respect to labor, whether paid or unpaid—the shared material conditions and shared interests of those who are compelled by force or necessity to work. In today’s economy where job security and living wages are scarce, many people know what it means to be overworked, underpaid and disposable—what it is like to be “somebody else’s nigger”—even if they resent being associated with those who have long symbolized hyperexploitation and dispossession.

This film is valuable for how well it reveals historical complexities of race, class and power in America, and for what it says about political life and democratic possibility. Free State of Jones should unsettle us, and the ideas about race that dominate our times. If the prevailing view in many corners is that racism is America’s “original sin” and that every attempt to abolish inequality and exploitation has been thwarted by the scourge of white supremacy, Free State of Jones challenges such thinking. The film does not diminish the brutal and dehumanizing character of slavery, nor the vulnerability endured by freedpersons during Reconstruction. It captures those realities in disturbing detail, but it also provides us with an insightful parable of progressive left politics.

These are difficult and very controversial issues. I propose only a small step in responding to such questions, or a narrow focus, let us say; a concentration on one two minute, forty-eight second short film called “Dans l”obscurité,” “In the Dark,” made in 2007 by the Belgian team of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, about whom I’ll say more in a minute.

Just what we see and hear when we see and hear movie events and movie dialogues is a trickier question than it might seem. When we see Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo, we would not be surprised in the slightest if someone were to point out that, “really,” there on the screen is the famous actor James Stewart pretending to be the fictional character Scottie Ferguson. Of course we know this. We might plausibly deny, however, that what we see when we watch this movie is James Stewart, and then we make-believe or pretend that he is Scottie Ferguson, or we see Stewart, and imagine Ferguson “in our heads,” as it were. On the contrary, we are, we rightly say, watching to see what Scottie will do. We have to say something that the philosopher of film, George Wilson, claims in a recent book.1 We imaginatively see, or fictionally see the events occurring in the world of the movie. The objects of our attention are the events and characters of that world. There is no two-step process; real and fictionalizing. (There is no instruction by the film for the viewer to entertain “unasserted thoughts,” and so there is no two step process of first, immediate perception, and second, the making of inferences, drawing of consequences, entertaining of possibilities, as Noel Carroll has claimed.2) This does not mean that the movie experience is “brute” immediacy and nonconceptual; it is already as complexly conceptual as our perceptual experience of the world is. What is different about attending to a visualized fictional narrative is our mode of attending; we see imaginatively. There is much more to be said about this possibility, and there are scores of different film theories about this, but let us say, for the sake of argument, that just as one can look or attend carefully or distractedly or intently or anxiously, one can also see imaginatively.

In trying to explain the very real emotional effect of movies, and plays, it is sometimes said that this effect is made possible by a “willing suspension of disbelief.” But that can’t be right. We do not believe that Scottie is a real person; we do not forget somehow that we are watching a movie; we cannot will ourselves to believe there are real events occurring before us. We cannot will ourselves to believe or disbelieve anything, for that matter.

This has led some theorists to insist that what primarily happens in watching a movie is that we simply accept that we are in some way magically present as the events and dialogue within the fictional world of the movie unfold. This makes things easier, in the way that magic, were it possible, would make a lot of things easier, but it doesn’t get us very far. The main problem is that the way in which events in the movie-world unfold is not that they simply happen in front of us. We notice that we are seeing the events from a particular vantage point, that that vantage point keeps changing, that we suddenly are just inches from a character’s face as a huge close-up fills the screen. We are transported back in time, or to another place in the world, or into the future. That is, we cannot escape the fact that the visual fictional narrative at the heart of the film is being narrated by someone; choices are being made for us. Our access to the movie world is, to use another of Wilson’s terms, “mediated” not direct. And we have no trouble accepting that, that there is an implied controlling intelligence behind what we see, while at the same time we are wholly absorbed in the events of the movie-world, gripped by them. In many or even most films, our first viewing of the film amounts to a rather complete absorption in “the story.” One of the main respects in which first and subsequent viewings of films differ is that in the latter, we tend to pay more and more attention to how we are being shown what we are being shown, and why in just that way.

Since this is controversial, here are two brief examples of how easily we accept, fictionally or imaginatively see, the world of the movie and, at the same time, detect the presence of a narrator directing our attention, thereby suggesting what is significant, and often giving clues as to why, in what we are seeing.

This is a montage from Hitchcock’s great and very successful 1960 film, Psycho. We will see first the opening shot, a wide angle and distant, elevated pan of the city of Phoenix, Arizona. Since obviously, when someone is really looking at Phoenix, letters announcing the name of the city and the date and time, do not appear in the sky, the directed and selected, artificial character of what we are seeing is obvious, and not at all distracting. Then as the camera pans, we get some sense that it is looking for something, hesitantly, and that it finds its target. (The pan is also not continuous; there are dissolves, shifting our perspective, and, at the end, as we approach the window, there is an abrupt alteration of perspective.) The camera begins to move, and to draw us with it, to a particular hotel window, one “selected” out of many, and we sense a great (deliberately made) contrast between the blinding white desert light of the outside, and the dark, initially opaque inside of the hotel room. (This light/dark contrast is important throughout the film.) As the camera enters the room, we already sense some sort of violation of the privacy of the characters, who are in various states of undress. And the next thing our eyes can see is not what we would at all fix our attention on if we were glancing around this room of half-naked people. It is a very brief glance at an uneaten sandwich. (Note what happens later) This is followed in this montage by a brief scene at the end of the most famous sequence in the film, the shower murder of the film’s biggest star a mere third of the way through the film. Again the point is to note how easily we let ourselves be told what is happening in a very distinct and unusual way. The woman had stolen some money that is wrapped in a newspaper on the night table, and the camera acts as if a questioner, cinematically asking, in effect, if the reason for the murder was the money, the theft, and then shifting our attention to the window and a shot of the house behind, where we hear what we first believe to be the real reason, the insanity of the mother of Norman Bates.

If we accept this basic point about the epistemology of cinematic intelligibility, it has a crucial implication for that question about what we must do to understand a film. It helps explain why “readings” of films are unavoidable in such understanding. For this point about narrative mediation means that films can be understood as very much like speech acts addressed to an audience, which narrate some tale, and we can sometimes ask what the director—or the collective intelligence we can postulate behind the making of the film—meant by so narrating a tale. We want to know the point of showing us such a story at all, and showing it to us in just this way, with just this selection of detail. In the same way that we could say that we understood perfectly some sentence said to us by someone, but that we cannot understand the point of his saying it now, here, in this context, given what we had been discussing, we can also say that we can understand some complex detail of a movie plot, but wonder what the point might have been in showing us this detail in such a way in that context.

This allows us to put the point in an even broader way. Visualized fictional narratives, films, can be said to have many functions, can be said to “do” various things. They please for one thing, or they are painful to watch, but painful that is in some odd way pleasant as well. We can also say, in a simple common sense way, that films are ways of rendering ourselves intelligible to each other. Of course, if the question is what the director—or the collective intelligence we can postulate behind the making of the film—meant by so narrating a tale, sometimes the answer will be: he, or she, or they, meant only to be narrating the tale, because the tale is in itself entertaining, thrilling, hilarious. But some films can be said to attempt to illuminate something about human conduct that would otherwise remain poorly understood. The point or purpose of such narrating seems to be such an illumination. There is some point of view taken and not another; and so there is an implicit saying that some matter of significance, perhaps some philosophical or moral or political issue, is “like this,” thereby saying that it is “not like that.” And one other way of rendering intelligible or illuminating is to show that what we might have thought unproblematic or straightforward is not at all, and is much harder to understand than we often take for granted. Coming to see that something is not as intelligible as we had thought can also be illuminating. (Bernard Williams once remarked that there can be a great difference between what we think we think about something and what we really think, and great literature or great film can make clear to us in a flash, sometimes to our discomfort, what we really think.)

Now this linkage of topics only gets us to the brink of an unmanageably large question. If at least part of what happens to us when we watch a film is that events and dialogues are not just present to us, but are shown to us, and if the question that that fact raises—what is the point of showing us this narrative in this way?—does not seem fully answered by purposes like pleasure or entertainment, but because something of far more general, philosophical significance is intimated, some way of understanding something better, then that much larger question is obvious. The short film I want to discuss concerns two particular fictional characters and a very brief series of events in a particular movie theater at some particular time. How could such a visualized fictional narrative, concerning such particular persons and particular events, bear any general significance? Generality, we know, is a matter of form, and it is possible at least to imagine that the events we see are instances, perhaps in some way, highly typical and especially illuminating instances of some general form of human relatedness. Shakespeare, for example, would not be able to portray so well Othello’s jealousy, unless the origins and conditions and implications of jealousy itself were also somehow at issue. But how might such a level of generality be intimated by a narrative with a very concrete, particular plot, and what would explain the illumination’s relation to some truth, not to mere convincingness? (A film after all can be both powerfully compelling, can suggest an ambition to reach this level of generality, and, if the director is technically talented, can carry us along with this point of view, only for us on reflection to realize that the point of view we had been initially accepting is in fact infantile, cartoonish, pandering to the adolescent fantasies of its mostly male fans. I think of the undeniably powerful films of Quentin Tarantino as an example of this.)

One way such a level of generality can be suggested is by the relation of the films to other films, to films by other directors, referenced in a way that suggests the general purposiveness of that director’s overall project, and by reference to the film-maker’s other films, directly suggesting again such a commonality and so generality of purpose.

Both such means are used in the short film, Dans l’Obscurité and in all the films made by the Dardenne brothers, so I should now say something about their body of work. The Dardennes have accomplished something extraordinary. To date, from 1996 until the present, they have made seven theatrical fictional feature films for which they are willing to claim authorship. (Before this, they were for a long time well known documentary film makers, dealing mostly with the Belgian labor movement and its massive defeat in the early 1960’s.) All the films revolve around a basic moral question usually having to do with moral decisions and with responsibility, and all manifest a heightened sense of the complexity of the moral psychology necessary to understand the characters dealing with the question, especially given the social settings as portrayed by the films. Each film is clearly trying to represent the motivation and decisions of certain characters, but the Dardennes proceed under an unmistakable assumption: that there is often something very difficult to understand, even mysterious, about such motivations, decisions, and reactions by others. They are also obviously quite self-conscious about what it is to represent such issues in film and are clearly doing all they can to block or interrupt or prevent conventional assumptions about these issues (and their counterpart in conventional cinematic technique) from coming into play. (They use hand held cameras, follow along after characters from the rear, often show close-ups of the backs of heads, use many sudden jump cuts, and edit their scenes in ways that do not correspond to any conventional understanding of the natural beginnings and ends of actions or conversations.)3

This is especially striking because the acts in question can seem gratuitous and unmotivated, and in that sense very hard to understand. A boy, under no pressure, and clearly on the verge of escaping undetected, suddenly confesses to the wife of a man whose death he helped cover up. (The Promise 1996) A girl rendered almost insane by her inability to find work (already a great example of the theme just introduced; unemployment itself can be form of what could be called “objective” insanity), having informed on a friend to secure a job, suddenly resigns the position. (Rosetta 1999) A man decides to take on as an apprentice and help teach a boy who, he knows, murdered his own son five years earlier and, on the verge of vengeance, releases the boy and works with him. (The Son 2002) A street criminal casually, thoughtlessly, sells his just born baby for adoption, but when he sees the overwhelming effect of this on the child’s mother, his girlfriend, immediately retrieves the baby at enormous cost to himself and his future. (The Child 2005) An immigrant woman from Albania, having secured her own legal residence in Belgium, is involved in a plot to live with an addict until he overdoses, so that she can then, for money, marry and then divorce a Russian eager to emigrate and also gain Belgian citizenship. But she begins to help the addict get off drugs, ruining the plan, and in the face of terrifying threats of reprisals, continues to refuse to go along with the plan even after the addict is murdered by her accomplices. (The Silence of Lorna 2008). A woman who just by chance happens to be just once in the same place as a troubled boy searching for the derelict father who abandoned him, suddenly involves herself deeply in the boy’s life, ruining her own romantic relationship and assuming responsibilities no one would say she owed anyone. (The Kid with a Bike [2011]).

Moreover, the brothers often have in mind characters who are the victims of the new globalized world economy. This is a world where a ruthless form of competitiveness is forced on workers, where one person’s job is another person’s unemployment, and the two often know each other.4 Or the characters are migrants in a strange land; so they live so far outside the normal cycle of production and consumption that in some way their own relation to their inner lives, their own self-understanding, cannot be understood in ways typical for those who live “inside” the social world that these characters live “outside of.” Many of the films draw attention to the effects that having almost no public, recognized social status has on the way characters think of each other, and even how they understand (and often cannot understand) themselves. That link between the psychological and the social, or the demonstration of the inseparability between the moral economy of the soul and social relations of power and powerlessness, is one of the great achievements of their films.

I do not mean here to refer to the issue familiar in philosophy since Plato, the way the psyche can be shaped in very different ways by the education it receives and by the context of some particular regime. Democratic souls for democracies; oligarchic souls for oligarchies. Plato and many others keep the soul’s structure constant in such accounts, concentrating on the effects of the formation process on that structure. I think something much more radical is implicitly suggested by these films—that what counts as such a structure is at issue and open to real variation. This is particularly true of the psychological structure assumed in “explaining actions” or “assigning or accepting responsibility.” How we have come to think of that issue, the range of possible answers, may, if the brothers are right, have more to do with the imperatives of a particular social organization of power than it would be comfortable to admit. (What they have accomplished is all the more remarkable because the principal characters are not well educated or articulate or reflective and there is minimal dialogue and almost no reflective dialogue in their films anyway. Everything about what is traditionally thought of as their “psychologies” must be represented purely cinematically, through what they do and in their faces.)

In the terms we have already developed, we can say two things: that the point of their showing us these narratives this way is a moral point, a way of showing us something of some generality about modern moral experience, and that what they want to show us has something to do with the epiphanic nature of moral insight. These are my terms, not theirs, so I should briefly explain them. I mean by morality something quite broad. The moral question, as I will understand it, is what sort of claim on us, on our actions and refraining from action, on what we ought and ought not or ought never to do, does another human being have? Is there some consideration raised by the existence of another person, and the fact that an action of ours would affect what the other would otherwise have been able to do, that must count as some constraint on our pursuit of our self-interest? What sort of effects are of moral salience (harm being an obvious but not the only one) and what sort of actions are forbidden, obligatory or permissible in the light of such considerations? Some philosophers believe that the only reasons possible in such context are those that show that refraining from the pursuit of self-interest at the expense of another in some context is in the service of an overall self-interest only achievable by cooperation. This is what Tocqueville called “self-interest rightly understood.” On this understanding, this is not a moral consideration. The morally motivated action need not necessarily be to our disadvantage but there must be some way of saying that the deed must be performed or avoided independently of the consideration of our advantage. I there is such a thing as morality, then these considerations are real and compelling. The idea is a staple of much Christian philosophy and is paradigmatically represented in the thought of Immanuel Kant. I will be able to show you what I mean in a minute.

Second, this description can sound like moral experience is like an internal or social debating society, where moral deliberation has something like the form of philosophical argument, pro and con. But we know from experience that this is rarely the case. Often the force of such a claim is not preceded or even followed by any discursive reflection, but is momentary and powerful in a way that the Dardenne brothers clearly regard as both common and quite mysterious. Such moments of insight, powerful even without a fully determinate content, are sometimes called epiphanies. The term is especially common in describing the endings of the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and James Joyce. And it is generally correct to say that all of their films revolve around some moral epiphany, usually at the end.

But, characteristically, what they are after in so many of their films is much easier to see than describe. Here are brief scenes from two of their films, The Promise (1996), and The Child (2005). In the first, The Promise, the boy you see, Igor, works with his father, a corrupt contractor, employing undocumented immigrants. One of them, Amidou, earlier in the film had fallen off a scaffold and gravely injured himself. Rather than take him to a hospital and face the possible discovery of his illegal labor force, the father allows Amidou to die, and he buries him under some cement at the site. Before he died, Amidou had asked Igor to promise to care for his wife and child. Igor does, but throughout the film, he does not tell the wife the truth. At the very end, he is escorting her to the train station, having allowed her to believe that Amidou is in Italy on a job. She is leaving in order to join him with her baby. Suddenly, he makes the admission you see. In The Child, a young petty thief and homeless boy, Bruno, sees an opportunity when his young girlfriend becomes pregnant and gives birth. Without telling her, he takes and sells the child to a black market adoption gang. When he sees, to his great surprise and confusion, the horrific effect this has on the mother, Sonia, he tries to get the child back, at great personal harm to himself, and he ends up in jail. The scene we will see is the end of the film, as he for the first time realizes the full force of the wrong he has done and his guilt. This realization is not articulated but embodied, suddenly, in tears, the first shed by him in the film.

This should be enough scene-setting for the short film.

Clip—In the Dark.

We are watching a pickpocket at work in a darkened and it appears, largely empty theater. (As in many discussions of how cinematic worlds are created and made credible, even in this very short narrative, we know a few things, and make a few inferences from the seen to the unseen; we can pose relevant questions.) The theater is empty. It might be an afternoon show at a revival house. The woman is alone. Does she often go to movies in the afternoon alone? Is she lonely? She is unusually moved by the film; that is, she is the sort of person (and what sort is this?) unusually receptive to cinematic pathos of this apparently high order. The pickpocket does not appear to be of a different social class. They could both be students. There is something significant in the actress being Émilie Dequenne, who starred, as a non-professional first-timer, in the Dardenne film, Rosetta (1999). If we know that film, we should be very surprised by the transition in the actress’s appearance and demeanor. (Still of Rosetta.)

We see the pickpocket’s hands first, quite elongated and thin-fingered, creep along. He is on all fours, like an animal (this will be significant), and a Hitchcockian tension or anxiety builds as he starts to open the purse of a young girl in the audience. The young man, a boy really, is making his move at the end of the film being played, which, we know from the sound track, from Schubert’s piano sonata #20, and its closing credits, is Robert Bresson’s 1966 film, Au hasard Balthasar. This is one of Bresson’s simplest and most powerful films, as well as riskiest, because we see the human events (mostly moments of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, sexual predation, and vanity) from the point of view of a humble, innocent, and much abused donkey, Balthasar. He seems to bear the burden of this profound and unrelieved human sinfulness as patiently and as steadfastly as he bears the actual burdens he is forced to carry throughout the film. This means that we see in him a kind of mindedness that is not, in the conventional sense, psychological; it does not consist of a coherent “inner life,” and is of course, pre-linguistic. Yet there is no question that Balthasar is an aware and responsive witness, and that his witnessing presence alone creates a distinctive moral atmosphere.

Like so many of the Dardennes’ films, this short is concentrated on one epiphanic moment. The girl is weeping at the death of Balthasar, the scene that closes the film. I will show the ending later. As she reaches for a tissue, she catches the pickpocket in the act and grabs his hand, but in a startling, unexpected move that seems in some way prompted by the emotion aroused by the end of Au hasard Balthasar, she brings the boy’s hand up and presses it lovingly to her face. We do not at all expect a moment of such tenderness, and its erotic charge immediately backshadows what we have seen, giving to the boy’s hand pulling open her purse a sexual suggestiveness. We are left wondering at the meaning of such a gesture, since it cannot be preceded or even accompanied by any determinate intention or purpose, and just thereby we wonder at the meaning of the image created by the Dardennes. In the terms suggested above, we wonder about the point of showing this to us.

The gesture is strange beyond the fact that the woman immediately and unreflectively transcends any concern for her property. For one thing, when her hand meets his, there is no recoil, no expression of surprise, only a slight pause before she draws his hand upward. One might even think that she knew he was there, alerted perhaps by the pickpocket’s own recoil a few seconds earlier, but, perhaps, she is so engrossed in, moved by, inspired by, the film that she does not care. Secondly—and this is the most remarkable of all—she does not look at the boy whose hand she touches; does not even look down. This intensifies our sense of her immediate need for comfort, a need for some intimate contact with another that is so great that she ignores completely the injury done to her, much as Balthasar endures what is done to him, simply bears it. (There is a slight suggestion in her gesture that she is “asking” to be stroked and petted; comforted that way.) Not looking at him also intensifies our sense that she may have known, accepted, that he was there. (She does not need to look at him.)

Part of the point of being shown this must have to do with the compressed, triple homage to Bresson, and so, I suggested earlier, suggests an association with Bresson’s thematic interests. That is, two other of his films are invoked besides Au hasard Balthasar. The Pickpocket, of course, from 1959, and also the kind of tension and visual detail calls to mind A Man Escaped from 1956. The closing scenes are the ones invoked, where the captured resistance fighter Fontaine makes his escape from a Gestapo prison with a young boy whom he barely knows but whom, again in a momentary decision based more on faith than rational assessment, he has decided to trust. Another epiphanic moment.

Here is a scene that typifies what the Dardennes are referring to. The emphasis on the hands, stealth, anxiety at being discovered, and movement in the dark are all rhymed in the short film.

But The Pickpocket is more directly quoted, as it were. Pickpocketing is treated there as a kind of abstract image of what it is to wrong someone, to violate the boundaries of a person in the service of one’s one interest. At the end of the film, the girl we see, Jeanne, and the pickpocket Michel, had never been able truly to “find” each other until Michael accepts the baseness of his criminality and Jeanne can forgive him for it, but again in an epiphanic, sudden, not thought out or deliberated gesture, and one that involves the caressing of hands. This is a montage that shows first the scene illustrating their craft and when he is caught, and then cuts to the very end of the film.

Both of these referenced films involve the decisive, epiphanic moments we see in Dans l’Obscurité. In A Man Escaped, Fontaine cannot break free by himself. (And breaking free has of course a religious dimension as well, breaking free from the venality and corruption of the fallen world.) But to succeed, he must trust a new prisoner brought into his cell, a boy wearing a German soldier’s jacket, just to make the choice all the harder. There is no way, no time even, for such trust to have a deliberated, rational basis, but neither is it willful or arbitrary. Likewise, the mutuality achieved by Michel and Jeanne cannot be described as a “decision,” an intentional choice preceded and accompanied by reflected beliefs and desires; yet neither is it some sort of blind leap into the abyss. Accordingly, the somewhat neutralized, flat affect, the extremely minimalist expressiveness that is a feature of Bresson’s directorial style is not a mere technical quirk. It reflects his distrust of what he calls “psychological” acting (typified in the extreme by “method acting”), and this distrust is in turn philosophically motivated, since he clearly does not trust our deliberation and resulting self-avowals or even our emotional expressiveness to be the sort of mindedness actually relevant to important actions like trust, love, and forgiveness. In Bresson’s films, those self-avowals are almost always tangles of a self-deceit motivated by an inescapable vanity. Disabusing ourselves somehow of our misplaced faith in our putative power over what has come to matter to us, what ceases to matter to us, is the major step in Bressonian redemption.

This is why Balthasar’s mindedness in effect makes sense to us, and why it is an appropriate echo for what the brothers have shown us in their short. It seems to involve a pre-deliberative and distinct and potentially morally transformative form of intelligibility, a silent presence of an invisible meaning, that we accept not only in other characters, in what we can and cannot see in their faces, but also in the distinct visual sense moving images can make. Consider how far Bresson is willing to go in affirming the legibility of this form of mindedness in the faces of animals, as in this extraordinary scene of reflected gazes. Balthasar has been sold to a circus and this is his introduction to the other animals, culminating a riveting “exchange,” one has to call I, with an elephant. Clearly, we are meant to see how much pre-discursive meaning can go on

Finally we come to the scene that the girl in the theater is watching, the end of Au hasard Balthasar. Let me note two further things about the woman’s gesture in the short, caressing her face with the boy’s hand. Like all the Dardenne films, it figures an epiphanic, prediscursive moment, contrary to normal, let us say, rational expectations. The boy is trying to steal her money and she responds with a gesture of tenderness, clearly some sort of Christian theme. I have implied that this has something to do with what appear to be references to some sort of “animal-like, but moral sensibility” suggested by Bresson and echoed by the Dardennes. That suggestion points to a sensibility responsive to moral injury and injustice, but in a way that involves considerably more than what is classified by philosophers as “moral sentimentalism.” That “more” has to do with more than one’s own suffering or discomfort at the suffering of others, but the establishment of some connection with the other, some genuine intersubjectivity (figured mysteriously in the “communication” between Balthasar and the other animals). The viewer of the film is affected by the movie; it moves her. But she also takes something from it. As noted before, she reaches for the boy’s hand as if she expected it; does not recoil, but “brings” him to her. Moreover, while we naturally tend to think that she is weeping with sadness at the death of Balthasar, it is quite probable as well that she is weeping at the unrelieved selfishness and brutal cruelty that has seemed so typical of the human species throughout the film. Sorrow about our sorry state might also have prompted this sudden and clearly forgiving gesture. Gestural meaning is non-discursive, so it could by motivated by both reactions.

This moment is also not the result of any choice or decision in the standard sense, but seems unmistakably prompted by the film about the suffering of the innocent Balthasar. This involves the second point. The gesture brings together three dimensions of meaning: the religious meaning of Bresson’s film, the “social meaning of film,” what a film can be said to do to us, displayed to an audience “in the real world,” and the general theme of aesthetic intelligibility and what we might call aesthetic force. The film Balthasar is so overwhelming, it is the occasion for this woman of this moment of grace, a transcendence of ego, property, money, so many of the poisonous elements of modernity. So what is that? The film’s reaching her? Breaching the wall between the film and “reality”? The woman is changed by the film, we should assume, at least momentarily. What kind of change is that? What kind should we expect from art?

None of this, I hasten to add, should be taken to suggest that our moral lives are to be understood as consisting of nothing but epiphanic moments, expressive moments of great emotional power, intimating a rationally inarticulable but deeply real bond, unity or even identity with other persons. Perhaps the Dardenne brothers believe this. I am not sure. But I certainly don’t. It would be fair enough to suggest that we ought to be wary of wholly discursive accounts of the basis of our moral concerns, as if such bonds or claims are the product of arguments, or even more naively, the force of the better argument. Indeed, given the sensibility of their films, one could say that if someone thinks that what we need in the face of the suffering of others, especially suffering directly or indirectly caused by us, are arguments about why we ought to respond, then something has already gone haywire. On the other hand we know that cinematic conviction can be at least temporarily created for any sort of content. And that means that it cannot be the film alone than should be said to be the bearer of some sort of philosophical intelligibility, but the film and the “reading” it is given, a reading which, because articulate, can both be disputed as a reading and as a claim on our moral attention.

To demonstrate one last time that the epiphanic insight created in the film for this character can be just as powerful an epiphany for us, the viewers, I think we should see the final two minutes, forty-eight seconds of the film that produced the reaction in the woman in the short, the end of Au hasard Bathasar. (I will close with this clip. It says more than I could.) I think one needs to see the whole film to appreciate how deep the pathos in the Balthasar ending scene goes, but it is plenty deep just in the scene itself. Balthasar has been stolen by some rogue youths to carry contraband across the mountains in a smuggling deal they have arranged. They are seen by the border police, who give chase and fire their weapons at the smugglers, hitting Balthasar. We do not see, but “feel” Bathasar shot by the customs police shooting at the fleeing smugglers. (You will see a slight flinch, and shortly thereafter see the blood flowing out of him.) Then Balthasar makes his way into a crowd of sheep, as if seeking comfort from his animal brethren, and he receives that comfort. They gather around him in a beautiful scene of silent communion, and then, as he dies, they withdraw in a kind of gesture of respect. We are thus left with a sense of the solidarity and communion possible at least among the animals, one that contrasts brutally with the human world we have just seen. This extraordinary death is what inspires the stunning gesture of acceptance and tenderness by the woman in the Dardenne short, a gesture the rich meaning of which, I have been suggesting, figures for us the richness of meaning born by the art object which represents it.

Ava Du Vernay’s film Selma has generated yet another wave of mass mediated debate over cinematic representation of black Americans’ historical experience of racial injustice. The controversy’s logic is at this point familiar, nearly clichéd. Du Vernay and others have responded to complaints about the film’s historical accuracy, particularly in its portrayal of Lyndon Johnson, with invocations of artistic license and assertions that the film is not intended as historical scholarship. However, even Maureen Dowd recognizes the contradiction at the core of those claims. “The ‘Hey, it’s just a movie’ excuse doesn’t wash. Filmmakers love to talk about their artistic license to distort the truth, even as they bank on the authenticity of their films to boost them at awards season.”1 And that contradiction, as I’ve noted [“Django Unchained, or, The Help”], permeates the dizzyingly incoherent and breathtakingly shallow pop controversies spawned by recent films dramatizing either the black experience of slavery or the southern Jim Crow order.

Notwithstanding their boosters’ claims about these films’ relation to the historical moments they depict, Selma and its recent predecessors, like other period dramas, treat the past like a props closet, a source of images that facilitate naturalizing presentist sensibilities by dressing them up in the garb of bygone days. And the specific sensibilities that carry the spate of slavery/Jim Crow-era costume dramas are those around which the contemporary black professional-managerial class (PMC) converges: reduction of politics to a narrative of racial triumph that projects “positive images” of black accomplishment, extols exemplary black individuals, stresses overcoming great adversity to attain success and recognition, and inscribes a monolithic and transhistorical racism as the fundamental obstacle confronting, and thus uniting, all black Americans. History is beside the point for this potted narrative, as is art incidentally, which the debate over the relative merits of Spielberg’s Lincoln and Tarantino’s Django Unchained demonstrates. The only metric that could make comparing such radically different films seem plausible is the presence or prominence of a black hero or black “agency.”

Du Vernay threw the cat out of the bag in discussing her characterization of Johnson’s role in the struggle for the VRA. The original script portrayed the president as more centrally engaged and actively supportive but, she says, “I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie; I was interested in making a movie centered on the people of Selma.” Of course, her film doesn’t follow through on that pious declaration; she avoids the white savior but only to replace him with a black one. Selma is, despite her insistence that it isn’t, another iteration of King idolatry.2 But the “white-savior” comment is helpful because it makes clear that representing history is not the point of these films. As English literature professor Jerome Christensen contends in a defense of the film’s relation to history, “Selma is not education, it’s mobilization—it’s a movie that wants to move you. Its aim is not accuracy, but to be tragically and poignantly clever.” He goes on to assert: “That movie is Ferguson…Nothing has changed. That’s why Johnson in some sense can’t be the hero of the movie. He can’t be the white savior, because nothing was saved.”3 Similarly, in articulating what offends her about Maureen Dowd’s criticism, the perpetually affronted Gender & Women’s Studies and Africana Studies professor Brittney Cooper declares, “a new racial lens is exactly what America needs. In Selma, we learn what films look like when directors and cinematographers who love and respect black people turn their gaze on us. Selma artfully displaces a white gaze, and it is the unnamed and unsettling anxiety that sits at the heart of so many of the critiques of the film.”4

From that perspective Selma isn’t really about the campaign for voting rights at all; as Christensen says, it’s mobilization and what it’s mobilization for are above all the status claims precisely of the black PMC, here embodied by black filmmakers and actors and, presumably, the parasitic chatterers who bloviate about them. That helps to understand why the ersatz political debate about the film shifted so smoothly into arguments that its director and actors had been “snubbed” for Oscar nominations as well as why the alleged snub is represented as an injustice against black Americans writ large—i.e., not simply the individuals who might have been nominated. In a perverse revision of the old norm of labor solidarity, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” now it’s the black (haute) bourgeoisie that suffers injustice on behalf of the black masses. It’s prominent black individuals’ interests and aspirations that are asserted—under the flag of positive images, role models, equivalent vulnerability to racism, and other such class-inflected bullshit—as crucial concerns for the race as a whole. To be sure, this isn’t a new phenomenon, not even in the imaginations of post-blaxploitation era black filmmakers. Tim Reid’s 1995 period film, Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, adapted from a black conservative’s lovingly nostalgic memoir of growing up in the Mississippi Delta region between the late 1940s and early 1960s, fabricates an incident in which the mass of impoverished and brutalized black sharecroppers rise not to protest their own circumstances—abrogation of citizenship rights, discrimination, lynching, or exploitation in the cotton economy—but to support a black icehouse operator whose white competitors were conspiring to put him out of business.5 This is pure class fantasy.

Much of the debate that Selma has sparked about the relation between artistic license and commitment to historical accuracy rests on terms that are too formalistic to be useful. It doesn’t make sense to talk about the limits of creative license, especially for a narrative that purports to historical or political significance, unless the critique is linked both to the narrative’s focal arc—the specific story the artist wants to tell and how—and to assessment of the ideological commitments and potential impact of that narrative. One objection to Du Vernay’s depiction of Johnson as resistant to pursuing a voting rights law is that it is an unacceptable expression of creative license because: 1) it falsifies the history of the civil rights movement in a way that 2) egregiously distorts a significant element of that history and 3) in doing so, leaves an erroneous picture of how the key victories of the civil rights movement were won that moreover 4) can have counterproductive implications for how we think about political strategy today. In addition to those who defend the film on grounds I’ve discussed, others have acknowledged its consequential misrepresentations but nonetheless conclude that on balance, even with those faults, the film makes a significant contribution in telling even a flawed version of the story of the Selma campaign to a popular audience. Albert R. Hunt, after critically discussing the substance and implications of the film’s treatment of Johnson, rejects Joseph A. Califano’s urging not to see the film. Hunt concludes, “You should see this movie, and know the story of Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. That was brought home to me by my 25-year-old apolitical daughter, Lauren: ‘Seeing it is a lot different than reading about it.’”6

But what does Selma communicate? Does its vision of the Selma campaign as a dramatic event, as much an existential as a political triumph, contribute to making sense of the sources and goals of the civil rights movement, the pursuit of voting rights enforcement, or the relation of either to contemporary problems bearing on race and inequality? If we’re reporting on how our children responded to it, my son, who is an historian, commented at the beginning of the controversy about Johnson’s role that it’s only a matter of time before students show up in his undergraduate courses rehearsing the wrong-headed common sense understanding they’d acquired from the movie or discussions of it. Or, for that matter, from professors of Africana Studies, or English or (for sure) Cultural Studies. Under these conditions, maybe the most pertinent response to Du Vernay’s film is to lay out an historically richer and thicker account of the struggle for voting rights enforcement and the impact of the VRA on the South, black politics and American politics in general over the half-century since its passage.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), of course, was one of the crowning achievements of the high period of southern black political insurgency that began in the late 1940s and accelerated through the early 1960s. The story of the heroic popular protest campaign, culminating in the violent “Bloody Sunday” Selma march, which created the political environment securing the bill’s passage is well known. The most recent irruption of recurrent attempts to undermine voting rights—via the panoply of efforts to stifle voter registration and actual voting, to dilute voting strength through manipulating reapportionment to pack, stack, or disperse concentrations of targeted groups, and finally through direct attack on the VRA itself7—only underscore how successful that law has been in democratizing American society. And that success extends beyond opening opportunities for black or Latino candidates to win office or even for black and Latino voters to register their preferences directly. It has substantially altered the political culture of the region as well as the country as a whole.

After open Nazi/Klansman (take your pick; he wore both swastika and hood) David Duke had received a majority of white votes in both the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial race and a US Senate race a year earlier, I was asked to comment on whether his appeal was a lamentable testament to how little things had changed in southern politics. My response was that his overall performance in those two elections was rather an illustration of the significance of the VRA. Twenty-five years earlier, if Duke had gotten solid majorities of the white vote, he’d have been elected. And that is not just a simple arithmetical point about the additive force of the black vote. That by the dawn of the 1990s more than two-fifths of white Louisiana voters had no trouble voting for candidates actively supported by a vast majority of black voters marks a more significant sea change. That deeper shift in political culture and the potential it implies for pursuit of a transformatively progressive politics is also a reason that the reactionary alliance of fascist agitators, racist and other lunatics and the corporate interests that fund them have become so hell bent on undoing voting rights.

In fact, the contemporary campaign of disfranchisement looks a lot like its predecessor at the end of the 19^th century, and that similarity should remind us that the VRA did not so much extend the franchise to black southerners as restore it. Many of us no doubt find in our teaching that, for undergraduates in particular, black American political history is a seamless blur from slavery to Jim Crow and that, notwithstanding a lot of gestural references to black people’s “agency,” students have no sense of the impact of the Fifteenth Amendment in opening a generation of active and impressive political participation.8 The campaign for disfranchisement that intensified in the 1890s was the direct outcropping of the dominant merchant-planter class’s concerns that blacks and white poor farmers and workers could align to challenge ruling class power. That was not a Freudian compensatory fantasy. Enough evidence existed even before the Populist insurgency of the 1890s to sustain those concerns. In Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement, Jack Bloom describes the context that underlay white elites’ fears. The insurgent Readjuster movement in Virginia won statewide office in 1879 on an alliance of black freedmen and white workers and farmers. More than 60,000 black people across the region belonged to the Knights of Labor, and they made up a majority of the Knights’ 3,000 members in Mississippi. The Colored Farmers Alliance, linked to the Populist movement, boasted more than 1,250,000 members. Most dramatically, a North Carolina Populist-Republican Fusion ticket swept statewide in 1894, including most of the major cities, and was re-elected in 1896. Tellingly, the Fusion government was overturned in 1898 in a white supremacist putsch conducted by Democratic elites.9

As J. Morgan Kousser indicates, the aggressive campaign of disfranchisement that took place in the 1890s and early 1900s, while certainly fueled and justified by racism, was about disciplining white poor farmers and workers as well as eliminating black voting.10 Removing blacks from the electoral equation forced poor and working-class whites to define their political aspirations in terms that presumed the absolute hegemony of the merchant-planter-industrialist class. In his classic study, Southern Politics in State and Nation, V. O. Key argued that plebeian whites were able to win in the political order thus produced not much more than the trappings of nominal white supremacy. That’s all the “southern exceptionalism”—successful disfranchisement (and, after all, northern elites tried and largely failed to disfranchise lower-class whites as well)—necessary to explain why the center of gravity of the region’s politics has been distinctively reactionary. That absolute ruling class dominance meant, for example, that southern trade unionists could not count on significant support from state and local elected officials when they attempted to organize in the 1920s and 1930s with predictable consequences. Indeed, quite the opposite was the case.

I mention the dynamics and consequences of disfranchisement for three reasons: 1) I believe it is important to stress the fact that black people openly and enthusiastically exercised citizenship rights for decades after Emancipation; 2) noting those facets of the historical context underscores the broad significance of both the franchise and its loss, and 3) it is also important to recognize that what most crucially connects successful disfranchisement at the beginning of the 20^th century and contemporary efforts is not so much an invariant, transhistorical “racism” (though there has been no shortage of racist argument and targeting involved in each instance) but a very pragmatic attempt by powerful elites to shrivel the electorate to solidify partisan advantages for their narrow programs of upward redistribution. Black people, that is, were targets of disfranchisement in the earlier moment as much as a Republican-Populist voting bloc as because they were black, just as today’s disfranchisement efforts target blacks and Latinos as Democratic voters. Keeping that in mind may help to neutralize some of the pointless banter about whether black teabagger darlings like South Carolina’s Tim Scott are embodied evidence that that reactionary element is not racist or are merely tokens and dupes and/or lunatics. (I got hit with a deluge of threats and denunciations—more than 350 hate emails in a couple of days—from right-wingers affronted by a very mild, milquetoast even, New York Times op-ed on the significance of Scott’s appointment to fill out the term of Jim Demint, which concluded that Scott’s appointment did not have any larger historical significance but should be understood entirely in relation to partisan jockeying for position in contemporary South Carolina politics and rhetorical posturing in the most ephemeral national political chatter.11) That is not an argument that can be resolved—one side alleges racism, the other denies it—and is moreover not really the point.

Many activists struggled to challenge the post-Populist disfranchisement without much success until the changed national political climate—itself in part a product of increased black voting strength outside the South—opened institutional opportunities. In 1944, for example, the Supreme Court’s decision in Smith v. Allwright invalidated the Texas white primary, which had defined the state’s Democratic Party as a private club and therefore legally able to restrict membership to whites, and subsequent cases extended the ruling to white primaries in other states. This ushered in the beginnings of a shift in southern politics. Between 1938 and 1946 black voter registration in the region trebled to more than 600,000. Henry Lee Moon reported that the increases were “most spectacular” in the cities. In 1946 alone black registration increased in Atlanta from 5,000 to 25,000; 1,200 to 20,000 in Savannah GA; 2,500 to 15,000 in Jacksonville, FL. New Orleans recorded a similarly dramatic increase, from roughly 400 black voters in 1940 to more than 28,000 by 1952.12 These dramatic increases in black voting, however, could not translate into much beyond clientelist politics because black voting strength was generally restricted to cities and even there was not a large enough bloc to support pressing more aggressively to shape policy agendas.

Passage of the VRA opened new electoral possibilities in both urban and rural, especially black belt, areas. These new possibilities showed up in exponential increases in black office holding, from fewer than 1,500 nationally in 1970 to nearly 8,900 in 1998. For the first time since the Reconstruction era, black candidates in the South were elected sheriffs and other city and county officials and to state legislatures. (Selma concludes with a mostly triumphal montage of freeze-frames of selected individual participants in the events with captions indicating aspects of their future lives. Sheriff Jim Clark appears with the note that he was voted out of office in the next election. It struck me that that suggests one prosaic, material reason for his intransigent opposition to black enfranchisement—knowledge that he would lose his job.13) The ranks of black elected officials outside the South grew substantially as well, and the most visible expressions of the new possibilities were the increased numbers of black congressional representatives and the emergence of a phalanx of big-city mayors. The number of blacks in Congress grew from 9 in 1969 to 43 in 2013. By the mid-1980s, what I characterized as black urban regimes—i.e., “black-led and black- dominated administrations backed by solid council majorities,” a formulation intended to distinguish racial transitions in local governing coalitions from instances of black mayors like Tom Bradley in Los Angeles or Wellington Webb in Denver who won office as representatives of electoral coalitions in which nonwhites were not a majority—governed in thirteen U.S. cities with populations of 100,000 or more.14 Many more were elected in smaller cities, typically near-in suburbs that had become largely black in population.

These transformations in black officialdom were widely lauded, understandably, as fulfillment of the victories of the civil rights insurgency. After all, the early waves of the new black elected officials included many with either civil rights, federal Office of Economic Opportunity Community Action or Model Cities experience.15 Moreover, not only was the new stratum of black officials and functionaries directly the product of civil rights and Black Power activism; the election campaigns that propelled the racial transition typically draped themselves in the raiment of popular civil rights insurgency, and candidates commonly presented themselves as embodying the next phase of the victorious movement. Such élan was likely unavoidable in that heady moment. However, as is often the case in politics, the story was more complicated than that.

I laid out an argument in the late 1980s that making sense of the racial transition within which the black urban regimes were constituted required examination of the structural and institutional contexts within which transition occurred. In particular, I focused on the significance, in addition to insurgent black political activity, of metropolitan demographic and political-economic reorganization during the decades after World War II. I argued that, for black urban governance at least, two contradictions were crucial to understand: 1) the political-economic conditions that enabled their emergence, including the fiscal stress characteristic to largely minority municipalities, also undercut those regimes’ capacities to undertake courses of action that would address the downwardly redistributive concerns shared disproportionately among the largely minority electoral coalition and 2) the governing coalitions on which those regimes depend are preemptively weighted toward the pro-growth elites who are committed to programs of aggressive upward redistribution predicated largely on suppressing or preempting the downward redistribution to which the electoral coalition is disposed. I examined Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson’s effort in the 1970s to harmonize the latter contradiction in the case of an airport construction controversy by concocting a notion of black political interest that linked it to one of the contending developers’ proposal.16 Other scholars have made similar arguments about the limits and contradictions of black urban governance—for example, among urbanists, Clarence Stone’s and Claude Barnes’s work on Atlanta, Dennis Judd’s on Denver, Stephen Samuel Smith on Charlotte, Bryan Jones and Lynn Bachelor on Detroit, William E. Nelson on Cleveland, and Robert Smith among students of black politics.17 This scholarship identified structural and ideological tensions but for the most part did not examine closely the fine dynamics of legitimation—the material substance of political incorporation—that linked the new black political class to its governing and electoral bases and in the process articulated a new black politics materially rooted in new opportunity structures that were compatible with elaboration of a privatized and market-driven politics that eventually would become hegemonic as neoliberalism.

More recently a very interesting scholarship has shown the extent to which racial transition in urban politics characteristically was anchored in alliances between insurgent black activists and functionaries and a rising stratum of aggressively pro-growth liberals. John David Arena’s Driven from New Orleans, a study of the forty-year attack on low-income public housing in New Orleans, shows in wonderful detail how from its beginning the racial transition that began in the late 1960s in that city was tied to an urban liberalism that was also the cornerstone of the new, rationalized tourist economy and a broader program of targeting public resources to support rent-intensifying development. Arena examines the nexus of racial transition in local government and an emergent black political class, the policy content of post-segregation era racial liberalism, and the roles of philanthropic foundations and neighborhood groups in consolidating and legitimating that developmentalist regime via discourses of grassroots authenticity. Timothy Weaver discusses the emergence of black governance in Philadelphia as a product of a similar coalition. Kent Germany examines the key role of local administration of War on Poverty and Great Society funds in formation of the institutional architecture of racial transition in New Orleans as well as its intricate connections with the emerging racial and growth liberalism in the 1960s, and Megan French-Marcelin studies the role of the Community Development Block Grant program and other federal economic development aid in cementing interracial growth liberalism in New Orleans in the 1970s and 1980s.18

Among its other contributions, this literature throws into relief what is problematic about a common interpretive tendency in the fields of black politics, black American political history, and black studies generally to posit as a central critical analytical category an idealized “black liberation movement,” “black freedom movement,” or “black community” that in effect exists outside or logically and normatively prior to larger political dynamics in American society and political economy. In positing a false coherence, this interpretive posture, which has its roots, as Cedric Johnson’s and Dean Robinson’s work shows definitively, in Black Power and post-Black Power communitarian radicalism, has been problematic—I’d argue counterproductive—in both scholarly and civic domains. From its earliest iterations as a leftist or racial populist critique of the limitations of Black Power as ideology and program, going back to the end of the 1960s in Robert L. Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America and to some extent Harold Cruse’s critiques of Black Power ideology,19 that interpretive posture preempted recognizing how emergence of a stratum of public functionaries and aspirants had the potential to alter radically the practical universe of the political for black Americans across the board, from the most mundane aspects of quotidian life on up to larger questions of the nature and direction of public policy at all levels.

Such analytical purblindness was understandable at that historical moment both because the new political regime had not begun to take concrete shape and because the rhetorical force of the struggles against racial exclusion and discrimination reasonably presumed a collective or unitary and popular black interest in opposing racism and racially discriminatory treatment. Furthermore, the popularity of anticolonial metaphor gave a radical patina to formulations of black Americans as a singular “People.” As a standard of critical judgment, however, that perspective was never adequate for the interpretive or political challenges presented by the evolving post-segregation order or the revanchist turn in national politics begun in the 1970s and its many ramifications down to states and cities and the lives of all working people as that political turn consolidated on bipartisan terms and intensified over subsequent decades. (Political scientist Alex Willingham, in an article originally published in 1975, was probably the first to articulate a clear understanding of the limits of black radical ideology in this regard.20) It can lead only to dead-end arguments—the parallel to pointless debates about whether or not some individual or stance is racist—about whether individual or program X really represents the interests of the black community or is a “sell out” or inauthentic.

In our current political moment, in which even flamboyantly race-conscious black people embrace career opportunities and ideological rationales attendant to the destruction of public education, privatization of public goods and services, and the dynamic of rent-intensifying real estate development commonly described as gentrification or neighborhood upgrading and revitalization, formulations that presume an idealized “black community” or “black masses” as a collective political subject obscure the real processes through which the larger revanchist regime gains legitimacy among black officials and citizens as its imperatives take on the character of pragmatic common sense. An extreme, or extremely ironic, illustration of this accommodation is Howard Fuller, once also known as Owusu Sadaukai, who was a legendary Black Power radical in North Carolina, a key figure in 1970s Pan-Africanism, then a Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thinking trade union activist. Some time after returning to his Milwaukee hometown, Fuller became the city’s school superintendent and established a reputation as a teachers’ union foe, and is now the founding eminence of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the main black pro-voucher, pro-charter, militantly anti-teachers union organization. However, dramatic cases of radicals’ apparent conversion are less meaningful than are the many, far more insidious instances of following “natural” trajectories along a track of NGO-driven “community activism,” as Arena describes, or other forms of “doing well by doing good” that lead precocious undergraduates to Teach For America and other organizations of neoliberalism’s Jungvolk. Similarly precocious public officials like Cory Booker or Barack Obama insistently define racial aspirations—indeed all concerns with social justice—in line with the interests of financial capitalism, and many, many others all down the pyramid of social standing and power also imagine individual futures and “success” in savoring fantasies of pursuing personal advantage by operating within what a broader perspective reveals are the structures of neoliberal dispossession. An interpretive posture that posits an unproblematic “black community” or “black masses” as a normative standard cannot adequately conceptualize the relatively autonomous tendencies toward neoliberal legitimation in black politics; much less can it confront them politically.

This may be a reason that, as Cedric Johnson and I have complained to each other about since 2006, anti-racist activists focused their political outrage and calls for national action, including mobilization for mass marches, on a racial incident in Jena, Louisiana that was little more than a high school fight yet were incapable of, if not uninterested in, mounting any systematic or coherent action to protest the ongoing travesty of forced displacement and criminal inaction affecting hundreds of thousands of people little more than a three-hour drive away in post-Katrina New Orleans. Jena fit comfortably into a historically familiar frame of stereotypically southern small town racism/antiracism; the political and interpretive tools available in antiracist discourse did not work so cleanly in New Orleans.

Fortunately, recent years have also seen the appearance of a scholarly literature that actively investigates differentiation and class tensions within black politics, both in contemporary life and in the Jim Crow era when presumptions of unproblematic racial unity made more sense empirically. In addition to the work of Arena, Marcelin, Johnson and Robinson I’ve already mentioned, Preston Smith’s Racial Democracy in the Black Metropolis is a study of intraracial tensions and conflict in housing politics in postwar Chicago; Michelle Boyd’s Jim Crow Nostalgia examines a black on black gentrification initiative and attendant political dynamics on Chicago’s South Side in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Touré Reed’s Not Alms but Opportunity examines the class character and contradictions within the National Urban League and its Chicago and New York branches’ programmatic approaches to the organization’s articulated goal of racial uplift over its first forty years. The collection Renewing Black Intellectual History presents a set of case studies that exemplify the benefits of an approach that proceeds from presumption that political processes, differentiation, and structurally rooted antagonisms do not begin at the boundaries of the black American population and have been integral in shaping black Americans’ politics no less than any other.21

So, to conclude this rumination on the VRA, I should note that, while my discussion of the resultant evolution of black politics has focused on the emergence of a new urban regime, similar conclusions can be drawn about other domains as well, from the Congressional Black Caucus, to state legislative politics. In fact, Prof. Willie Legette, a political scientist at South Carolina State University whose extraordinarily apt aphorism begins this essay, and I began in the early years of the current century a running, admittedly somewhat tribalist as well as jocular, discussion about whether the South Carolina black political class or its Louisiana counterpart is the worst—most feckless, least imaginative, most self-serving, capitulationist, venal and time-serving—in the country. (All in all, I suspect that the real answer is a variation of my father’s assessment of state legislatures across the board—i.e., that the worst one in the country is the one presiding in the state where you are at the moment.) What initiated our discussion was the nearly simultaneous performance of the South Carolina black legislative caucus in the Confederate flag controversy that erupted in 1999 and Louisiana black Democrats’ immediate supplication to reactionary Republican Governor Mike Foster, described during his first campaign as “David Duke without the sheet” and who ran on a pledge to complete the work that his grandfather Murphy J. Foster—who not only propounded the call for the 1898 disfranchising state constitutional convention that reduced black voting by more than 90% but also sent in the militia to break the New Orleans general strike—had begun in his eight years as governor.

What we have observed then and subsequently, however, is ultimately a natural entailment of the VRA, insofar as it facilitated black Americans’ participation in the routine arrangements of American politics. That remains a significant victory of the civil rights movement. Election of a black sheriff in Madison Parish, Louisiana, not only democratized police-community relations; it also was an element in facilitating black incorporation into other opportunity structures unavailable under the regime anchored by disfranchisement. The VRA has contributed to altering political and social life in the region in other progressive ways as well. It has also contributed significantly to altering the character of black politics, in addition to ways I’ve already mentioned, by throwing into relief the fact that the interests of black elected officials and the black political class in general are not necessarily isomorphic with those of a “black community,” no more than is the case with respect to any politicians and their constituents in the American political system. Their limitations underscore, or should, the fact that electoral politics is a domain, albeit a necessary one, for consolidating and institutionalizing victories that have been won on the plane of social movement struggle. In that sense the victory condensed in the forms of participation enabled by the VRA is necessary—a politics that does not seek institutional consolidation is ultimately no politics at all—but not sufficient for facing the challenges that confront us in this moment of rampant capitalist offensive against social justice, but neither are the essentially nostalgic modalities of protest politics often proposed as more authentic than the mundane electoral domain. It is past time to consider Prof. Legette’s aphorism and engage its many implications. And that includes a warrant to resist the class-skewed penchant for celebrating victories won in the heroic moment of the southern civil rights movement as museum pieces disconnected from subsequent black American political history and the broad struggle for social justice and equality.

Digression is secular revelation.
–Adam Phillips

Every morning before breakfast, sketchpad in hand, Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) went for a walk to observe and absorb his surroundings. This lifelong practice began early, when the artist launched his career in Paris in the tumultuous fin-de-siècle period, long before he left the urban sidewalks for the greener paths of Vernon and Le Cannet.1 These daily walks were his way of immersing himself, both visually and bodily, in the life of the city and – along with the radical perspectives and bold linear patterns of Japanese ukiyo-e prints2 – inspired many of his early works. Bonnard produced over one hundred paintings and prints in the 1890s that capture the bustling pace and brisk energy of Paris. He later referred to this subject as “the theater of the everyday,”3 and it is his particular vision of this sidewalk theater, and the viewer’s involvement in it, that I will investigate here, with particular attention to how his engagement with new media mattered to developing this vision. In particular, Bonnard’s use of color and his plays with space and figure-ground relations take advantage of the limits and potentials of printmaking as a medium, a medium that was more immediate and accessible yet less flexible than the painting for which he would become known. Playing off the chromatic constraints of lithography, Bonnard shuttles the viewer between foreground and background, intimate proximity and distance. In so doing he explores the duality of the street as a disorienting amalgam of schematic backdrops and looming intrusions into our personal space, both seemingly captured at the limits of our visual field. I will also suggest that early cinema offers an illuminating framework for understanding Bonnard’s urban scenes, not only because it presented new pictorial possibilities for the representation of light, shadow, and (above all) movement, but also, and more importantly, because it enacted the kinds of spontaneous interactions on the street that drove the young Bonnard’s visual imagination.

Taken as a whole, paintings and prints, Bonnard’s street scenes of the 1890s model a new kind of vision that takes its cues from the constant optical interference of urban life: a vision acutely receptive to the peripheral glimpses and chance encounters of life in a city. His immersive approach to the depiction of street life – representing passersby at their own level, obliquely, and at very close range – had no artistic precedent,4 and is all the more remarkable in that he worked from memory, re-imagining these moments of perceptual frisson with strangers after returning to the studio. In the paintings, which are notably small in format – often similar in size or even smaller than his prints – Bonnard focuses on the exchange of gazes between individuals and crowds. In The Cab Horse, ca. 1895, the foreground silhouettes of a woman and a horse cast glances across the street, inviting the viewer to gaze with them at the distant stream of people –rendered as a conglomeration of colorful dabs – filling the café terraces and market stalls (Fig. 1).  In Passerby, 1894, a fragmented view of a passing woman is embedded in a patchwork of figure-like shapes that imply her embeddedness in a crowded street, as she pushes past our line of vision to continue on her way (Fig. 2). In Two Elegant Women, Place de Clichy, 1905, a similarly confrontational woman in an elaborate pink hat stares straight ahead, about to slip past the viewer across the lower-left foreground of the frame, causing a ripple effect of turns and gazes as she walks through a crowded square (Fig. 3). In Café Terrace, 1898, a man and a young girl seated together at a sidewalk café stare in opposite directions, pulled away from the personal space of their table by the surrounding crowd (Fig. 4). In The Street in Winter, 1894, bourgeois men negotiate acts of sexual commerce at strikingly close range, and even little dogs (a Bonnard favorite) have serendipitous meetings, fleeting moments of interpersonal tension, excitement, and exchange (Fig. 5). The diminutive scale of these works serves to underscore their focus on proximate space – the minimal and often invaded margin of air surrounding the self when one moves through a crowd. Bonnard swings between this intimate space and a more remote scenery space throughout his sidewalk pictures. This back-and-forth, and the model of viewing it enacts for the viewer, is fundamental to the works’ aesthetic and psychological force, and emerged, I believe, through his work with other media, most principally color lithography.5 Although a standard line in the literature on Bonnard and his fellow Nabis is that their painterly aesthetic lent itself to printmaking, given the number and importance of Bonnard’s print commissions in the 1890s and his obvious gifts for working in the medium, it seems just as likely that his graphic work shaped his early approach to painting as the other way around.6 Either way, the dialogue between his early paintings and prints begs closer examination.

In his remarkable series of twelve color lithographs, Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris (Some Aspects of Parisian Life), 1895-99, we can see how Bonnard’s printmaking practice generated formal and figurative strategies for picturing the everyday life of Paris’s streets. Created over the course of several years, the series was published in 1899 by the leading dealer Ambroise Vollard as a luxury album produced in an edition of one hundred on fine wove paper. The Vollard album features a broad variety of compositions, from narrow, compressed views of a street or a square to more sweeping urban vistas of a boulevard, a park, or a bridge. As a whole, the album demonstrates Bonnard’s idiosyncratic image of Paris as a continual shifting between close, crowded encounters on the sidewalk and more distant, detached views of elevated cuts of space, with color used sparingly for strategic highlights and tonal variation. The most compelling prints in the album show this shifting between perceptual modes within a single image.

In The Square at Evening, ca. 1897-98 (Fig. 6), carefully spaced spots of searing red serve as sinister marks of the feminine in urban life: the flowers on the central woman’s hat, the bouquet offered by a man in top hat at left, and the four red windows in the right distance, probably marking the lurid lights of a brothel. The square in question is likely Place Pigalle, a lively area of artist’s studios, literary cafés, and shops that was also a hub of nightlife and prostitution. Gathered under the four red windows is a loosely rendered crowd of figures who seem to be attracted by some wider windows below, peering into their yellow light at an indeterminate spectacle, perhaps a commercial display. Like the crowd of men and women in the foreground, compressed into the leftmost half of the composition, this distant clump of figures at right is framed by glowing windows at the back and the solitary figure of a woman in front, hunched over in profile as she steps gingerly across the square. Because of Bonnard’s dramatic compression of this wide open area into a frieze-like arrangement of figures and his limited range of inks dominated by large, intersecting areas of black, both of which collapse and weld together layers of space, the wheel of a distant carriage appears to press down on the woman’s back, and her umbrella, clutched to her side, appears to slice through her pelvis.7 Her walk is the opposite of an easy, flâneur-esque stroll; she seems loath to look up until she gets where she needs to go. The solitary woman in the foreground is another figure given a sense of separateness within the crowd, stepping into the throng as if from our viewing position. Seen from behind, her cloaked torso and fashionable hat with tentacular plumage serves as our entry point into the picture: her body blocks half of the scene, and her point of view guides our gaze to the other half, toward the hunched-over woman illuminated by a garish splash of electric light.8 Between the two of them is another key figure dominating the center of the print: the outsize profile of a man whose rigid posture marks the lithograph’s central axis (Fig. 7). His ominous appearance and sallow skin recall Edgar Allan Poe’s wandering “Man of the Crowd” (1840) or the suspicious “gamblers” Poe’s flâneur describes as “distinguished by a certain sodden swarthiness of complexion, a filmy dimness of eye, and pallor and compression of lip.”9 His features are summarily sketched, but his razor-sharp cheekbone and villainous moustache underscore the work’s theme of anonymous encounter and interpersonal risk – the spontaneous and sometimes mysterious interactions between men and women that drift in and out of our view when navigating busy streets. The woman in the foreground is our surrogate for this sidewalk spectacle, and the wide-open, black, almond eye on the edge of her lost profile is positioned to suggest that although she faces the scene in front of us, she is also looking back, as if aware of being watched and perhaps, followed, too. By both facing ahead and glancing behind, she folds us into the scene.

Bonnard’s printer was Auguste Clot, the leading fine-art printer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, known especially for his skills with multi-color lithography.10 Despite Clot’s authority, Bonnard was a demanding client with an insistent vision: in 1893, at the age of twenty-six, he complained to Vuillard, “I’m again turning my hair white in trying to obtain the impossible from the printer.”11 Like his Nabis colleagues, he was interested in the bold chromatic contrasts of Japanese prints, and he was particularly deft at combining a limited range of colors for a variety of compositional and expressive effects.12 This is hardly surprising; Bonnard is renowned as a great colorist, largely on the basis of his twentieth-century landscapes and nudes. Yet for this same reason the relative chromatic restraint of his early work has made it difficult to reconcile with the rest of his oeuvre.13 In fact, his intuitions as a colorist are just as remarkable in the fin-de-siècle prints as in the luminous canvases of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, only in a much more subtle way, a way befitting these works’ smaller size and casual, merely glimpsed subjects. See, for example, the vibrant touches of bottle green and blood red in Arc de Triomphe, ca. 1898 (Fig. 8). These floating patches of rich color do not, for the most part, delineate recognizable motifs but rather key our eyes to areas of figuration, marking off passages of people and horses from the tangle of trees and buildings that set the stage. They tell us where to look to find the action and bring out the more subtle distinctions between sanguine and gray – resonating with the red and green like faded echoes – throughout the rest of the print. The sunset tonalities of Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, ca. 1898, are created by an over-layer of honeyed beige that washes the reds, yellows, violets, and blacks with a luminous warmth, softening tonal contrasts and uniting spatial layers of ground, trees, and sky (Fig. 9). Bonnard achieves an especially remarkable degree of subtlety in House in the Courtyard, 1895-96, a print whose effect of variable atmosphere hinges on the delicate interplay of slightly different shades of white. Bonnard realizes this slight tonal variation not with actual pigment variation, but by framing these uncolored sections with other colors. That is, the whites are not differently inked, but are the same local off-white of the page, yet the darkest black of the windows on the building make the white of the façade appear brighter, while the white of the sky appears softer, dingier, and faintly warmer, because of the gray roof outlined in taupe topped by four vermilion chimneys leading our eye up to its overcast expanse (Fig. 10).

Because Bonnard was limited in his range of colors when conceptualizing and designing his prints – each additional pigment complicated the process considerably – he discovered more subtle ways of differentiating forms and spaces, and he embraced, rather than resisted, the spatial compression and confusion that was an inevitable result. Indeed, in certain key prints of the Vollard suite he made this spatial compression and confusion central to the urban phenomena depicted, using it in the more populated prints to develop the theme of pedestrians spontaneously colliding or crossing each other’s intimate perceptual space.

The album’s title page, ca. 1898, for example, centers on the peripheral glimpse of the parisienne, the protagonist of the album and indeed of much of Bonnard’s early work (Fig. 11). She seems to be speaking the title, echoing it with her orange rouge, while right behind her head and to the left is the profile of a bespectacled old man smoking a pipe. The Janus-like juxtaposition of his head with hers is a clever pictorial conceit for the alternately delightful and disturbing encounters with strangers that we experience in urban streets. A coil of white then black smoke curling out of his pipe seems to waft directly into the woman’s face, collapsing their otherwise distinct lateral sections of space (she is clearly closer to us, given her size) (Fig. 12). The way Bonnard arranges the title – with the letters undulating upward toward the woman’s open mouth in the same curving left-to-right diagonal as the drifting smoke – further emphasizes this idea of the inevitable and sometimes uncomfortable, even noxious intrusions of others into our consciousness and personal space. Beyond the lettering and the woman’s cheeks, the only touches of orange float beneath this barely perceptible coil of smoke, highlighting the man’s collar and coat, thereby linking the two figures in color as well as contiguous form.

Bonnard frequently used color and perspectival compression to materialize impromptu connections between strangers on the street, across divisions not only of space but also of class, gender, age, and other social divides. In The Street in Winter, 1894, Bonnard explores the spontaneous social dynamics of strangers by layering several encounters in a narrow slice of urban space (Fig. 5). In the right foreground, two little dogs approach one another with flirtatious energy, the white dog turning his head to meet his eager, scampering mate (Fig. 13). Like all of the encounters depicted, the dogs are positioned so as to suggest the sudden shift of perspective that happens when we catch a glimpse of someone or something in our peripheral vision. Bonnard was fascinated by the various kinds of social exchanges that can result from these micro-movements of the eye that redirect our attention. Behind the dogs is a wisp of a schoolboy plodding down the sidewalk, his tiny body almost disappearing beneath the weight of his winter clothes and bag. He is about to bump into an older woman, her hands tucked in a fur muff. The placement of the muff, and the woman’s slight crouch, create a defined negative space between her and the boy – the shape of a sudden detour, akin to the one both may momentarily take, built up in thick, creamy strokes of yellow and beige (Fig. 14). A couple walking behind the woman observes this meeting over her shoulder, mirroring our view of the scene over the shoulder of the broad-backed man in the foreground. Our eyes gravitate to these charming chance meetings, sliding past the flat barrier of black coats that dominates half of the work. Right behind that barrier is another kind of encounter altogether, of which we only catch a provocative glimpse: an exchange between two bourgeois men and two women. Only one of these four figures shows us her face, cropped at the cheek, but its colorfully painted surface offers a hint to her profession, suggesting this meeting may be the opposite of the innocent ones happening in the rest of the scene (Fig. 15).14

The division of the painting into sharp contrasts of black and beige is typical of Bonnard’s Nabi style, when he worked with a restrained palette of colors to capture the grit of the city and emphasize the graphic punch of dark and light shapes. The strong vertical of the central figure’s sleeve leads us straight to the older woman and her exchange with the boy, and Bonnard signs the picture right across this dividing line, linking the faceless men cruising in the street to the charm of children and frolicking dogs. The line marks a sharp tonal shift in both senses of the term, from mysterious, morally ambiguous and dark to charming, broadly comical and light, while also making a sharp graphic distinction between the viewer’s proximate and distant visual fields. Similar to the relationship in The Square at Evening between the immediate foreground (featuring the woman with the elaborately feathered hat and the sinister male profile abutting hers), the right middle-distance (featuring the hunched-over woman with an umbrella), and the background (featuring the crowd beneath the red windows), this structure allows Bonnard to collage together various vignettes, with the middle- and back-ground figures serving as dramatic foils to the dominant yet less legible figures in the foreground. Like a magician distracting his audience’s attention, Bonnard uses lighter tones and striking caricatural silhouettes to divert our gaze from center stage, highlighting peripheral episodes of more easily graspable psychological content. In The Street in Winter, these peripheral events are the lyrical play of the light-colored dogs and the amusingly awkward crouch of the schoolboy, trapped in front of the woman bending down to engage him in a kind yet probably patronizing intergenerational exchange; while in Square at Evening, they are the harried walk of the woman framed by a splash of yellow light, set off by a rolling carriage and a crowd of people gathered in front of a series of windows, a crowd that echoes the one in the more proximate and obscure left foreground of the composition. In The Street in Winter, the lighthearted libidinousness of the dogs and the harmless ensnarement of the little boy ease the viewer, empathetically, into understanding the more obscure dynamics of flirtation between the men and women at the forefront of our view. In Square at Evening, the distant spectacle of the brothel and the hunted posture of the walking woman likewise inform – with the same impish, although in this case blacker, humor – our understanding of the foreground woman, who glances back at us as she steps forward between a man proffering a red bouquet and the threatening Man of the Crowd. Contrast becomes analogy; the sideshow unlocks the main event; theater and personal experience merge.

And yet the ultimate discovery of both Square at Evening and The Street in Winter lies in their immediate foregrounds, which may initially appear spatially disorienting and formally obscure, but ultimately resolve, with the help of the diverting episodes, into something more visually and psychologically readable. This perspectival and psychological diversion later became a vital technique of twentieth-century street photographers like André Kertész and Henri Cartier-Bresson (Fig. 16), but Bonnard was careful to distinguish his approach from photography, saying in 1927:

The [camera] lens records unnecessary lights and shadows, but the artist’s eyes add human values to objects and reproduce them as seen through human eyes. And this vision is mobile. And this vision is variable. I am standing in a corner of the room near a table bathed in sunlight. Distant masses look almost linear, without volume or depth. Close objects, however, rise up toward my eyes. The sides run straight. This vanishing is sometimes linear (in the distance) and sometimes curved (in the foreground). The distance looks flat. It is the foreground that gives us our concept of the world as seen through human eyes, of a world of undulations, or of convexities or concavities.15

When Bonnard states that “it is the foreground that gives us our concept of the world as seen through human eyes,” he clarifies a key organizing principle of his early work: the idea that the only way for the artist to humanely experience the city and engage with its crowds is to immerse himself in them, fold himself into their movements and glances, while simultaneously stepping back and attending to the “linear,” “distant masses” that frame this foreground vision like a theatrical scrim. Unlike the camera, which records “unnecessary” detail, the artist’s eyes “add human values to objects,” and the resultant image is both “mobile” and “variable,” shifting between proximate and distant visual fields.

One of Bonnard’s earliest lithographs, Les Parisiennes, 1893, establishes this approach, depicting two elegant women and their voluminous fashions – in particular, a curve of thick black fur lining the central woman’s coat – ‘rising up’ toward our eyes in ‘convex undulations,’ while a distant man in profile looks flatter, more linear, an effect emblematized by the way the frame of the shopfront window behind him plunges, sword-like, into the highlight of his top hat (Fig.17). This stunning flip from black to white, positive to negative, solid to light, back to front, encapsulates perhaps better than any other detail Bonnard’s canny facility with the lithographic medium. The solitude of this remote male figure, echoed by schematic indications of a surrounding crowd, sets off the intimacy of the chatting parisiennes, and the conjunction of the two visual and psychological registers within the limits of a small, tightly composed black-and-white print pitches the viewer into the layered visual experience of the sidewalk spectator.

A similar structure is apparent even in some of Bonnard’s more open and airy urban views. In The Bridge, ca. 1896-97, from the Vollard album, he employs a virtually monochrome palette – beiges and browns with occasional touches of yellow – so as to focus our attention on composition and the tonal variation between two layers of figures: darker on the right, on the quai, which leads directly toward our spectatorial space, and lighter in the back, on the bridge, where a tightly packed frieze of carriages, buses, and figures moves in both directions across the semi-distant horizon (Fig. 18). The composition creates a split sense of our optical relationship to the city: the frieze of lighter figures are staged in a highly theatrical way, like a shadow puppet performance that we view from a comfortable distance, behind a theatrical barrier, and the light tonality encourages this separation, serving as a veil between us and them.16 But the nearer figures on the quai, the darker and more animated silhouettes of men and women walking with children, suggest a hustle and bustle that we can more easily envision ourselves entering (here there is a clear, unblocked path between us and them). This more accessible relationship is underscored by the figure of the artist holding a large portfolio of prints under his arm (Fig. 19). Bonnard inserts someone like himself into this crowd, while the frieze of lighter figures behind on the bridge is to be watched, stood apart from. The bridge viewed from the quai is a clever compositional device for creating this spatial and spectatorial distinction between the two areas of figures, setting the stage for the viewer’s reflection on different modes of visual engagement with the city: passively distant and disconnected or more experientially embodied and implicated. And on this note, it seems significant that the background frieze is considerably less rewarding to view. Less activated with movement and virtually void of tonal variation or color, this area does not pop or engage the viewer in the same way. Like the woman in the foreground of The Square at Evening, the print thus encourages us to engage in a more participatory, projective mode of viewing the city and its scattered sociality, rather then the more passive mode of viewing a detached stage.

In the preceding descriptions I have used the term “stage” several times to describe how Bonnard establishes spatial and figure-ground relationships in his prints via composition and color. Colta Ives has aptly described how Bonnard’s graphic art treats the picture plane as a tightly structured proscenium, with figures and carriages skillfully packed into narrow street-corners or spread across a series of shop-fronts like a classical frieze.17 His involvement with theater throughout the 1890s, including the production of backdrops, theater programs, even puppets and costume designs, can be seen in his prints’ biting humor and economy of means, as well as his fascination with spectatorship as a visual mode of modern life. At the Theater, ca. 1897-98, is the only print in the Vollard album that depicts the world of theater directly, but its focus on the audience rather than the performance is echoed in much of the rest of the series, where sidewalk spectators abound (Fig. 20).18 Judging by the slumping and somnolent character of this audience relatively void of interaction, compared to the quivering energy and crossing paths of Bonnard’s pedestrians, the theater of the street seems much more lively than the theater of the stage. What Bonnard seems to be trying to capture is his and the viewer’s involvement or at least implication in this sidewalk theater. His approach to representing this spectatorial position was likely informed by his work on theatrical backdrops, in particular, and their way of framing yet detaching from the three-dimensional actors that perform in front of them19; but it was the new medium of cinema that mirrored Bonnard’s interest in viscerally incorporating the viewer into his scenes of urban streets.

We know very little about Bonnard’s interest in cinema during these early years, but he was evidently eager to experiment with new media. He became an avid amateur photographer for several years in the late 1890s, taking snapshots of family and friends, approximately two hundred of which have survived.20 Save for a few pictures of his artist friends in Venice, Bonnard’s photographs include no street views, despite the capability of his Pocket Kodak to capture such spontaneous scenes. He took most of his photographs during visits to the countryside, framing his friends and loved ones in more bucolic natural settings and interiors. Curiously, he only used his camera in Paris to photograph a few nudes and family groups indoors.21 Although snapshot photography would seem like the perfect tool, if not substitute, for his sidewalk pictures, the artist evidently preferred his ritual method of walking, sketching, remembering, and then making, remaining committed to the “human values” of the artist’s eyes and the psychological filter of memory.22

Given Bonnard’s interest in theater, photography, and other new image technologies like chromolithography and the printing of large-scale posters, it is hard to imagine that he was not well aware of cinema and its revolutionary capacity to capture the movement and spontaneity of the street. The young artist was introduced to the first film-makers in France, Louis and Auguste Lumière, via his brother-in-law, the composer Claude Terrasse. In fact, the Lumière brothers were regular guests at the family property in Le Grand-Lemps where Bonnard spent considerable time.23 Like Bonnard, much of their early work was focused on capturing the everyday life of urban streets. A large proportion of their first films are set in major cities, tracking the hustle and bustle of metropolitan traffic and pedestrians. Screened in penny arcades and cafés on major thoroughfares in the latter half of the 1890s, they first appeared to the public in the precise period when Bonnard was working on the Vollard album and wandering Paris’s boulevards every day. These “actualities” (actualités), as they were known, were just 30-60 seconds in length, and were, as the name suggests, entirely non-fictional – mini-documentaries that often focused on the crowded life of the street. Sometimes they feature semi-dramatic events like a parade or the arrival of a prominent politician, but more often than not their primary subject is the everyday activity of lively urban spots.24

Key to the fascination of the Lumière brothers’ urban films – both then and now – is their spontaneity, especially their inevitable involvement of passersby who often seem to realize only in the captured moment that they are being filmed. This realization generally either delights or disturbs these impromptu extras, but it virtually always enthralls them. Their performative self-consciousness and gawking at the camera then becomes the central drama of the reel. As Tom Gunning has shown, early cinema was an art of attraction and “exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption” in narrative, “willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator.”25 In the Lumière brothers’ actualités this rupture happens spontaneously, with people stopping to look into the camera rather than continuing on their way. Indeed, these gawking bystanders are all the more affecting in that their involvement appears accidental, unintended by the people making the film. While Bonnard was striving to capture the perceptual and psychological complexity of his encounters with pedestrians in paintings and prints, the Lumière brothers were making films that showed moments of encounter between the directors and pedestrians in a more spontaneous, haphazard way.

Film-makers and their equipment were a novel spectacle for fin-de-siècle pedestrians, far more mysterious and intriguing to the average urban dweller than the everyday life of the street that the film-makers were trying to capture. It is no wonder that many of those caught by the camera became gawkers gaping into the lens, approaching the viewer as if hypnotized or passing by hurriedly with a furtive glance. For example, in The Crowd, 1896, a crowd gathered for horse races at the Melbourne hippodrome includes various figures who stop in their tracks to look into the camera. Amazed by the spectacle of the cinematic production, they give the audience of the eventual film the sensation of being ogled by the people within (Fig. 21).26 In Street Dancers, 1896, a group of working-class and bourgeois men stop to stare at three young women dancing joyfully in a London street.27 Here, the men seem to be relaying cues from the director, telling the dancers to come closer together when their dancing makes them drift off-frame. This leads viewers of the film to wonder whether the scene is entirely staged, with the men both posing as gawkers and directing the action upon which they gaze, a fascinating conflation of active and passive models of viewing that makes the audience aware of the film’s construction, and their own gawking role (Fig. 22).

Jan Olsson has described how early narrative filmmakers in America handled gawking bystanders, thronging crowds, and “Buttinskis” who invaded outdoor film shootings, and the way in which these interlopers confused the relationship between fiction and reality, acting and “posing.”28 Because the Lumière brothers’ urban films were primarily non-narrative and documentary, distinctions between actor, extra, and bystander did not exist. In fact, crowds and bystanders are often the protagonists of these actualités. This does not mean that they posed no problems for the cameraman, however. In several remarkable instances, such as Exiting the Cathedral, 1896, showing a crowd milling around the cathedral in Cologne, we see the hands of the director waving at these captivated onlookers from behind the camera, shooing them off-frame once they have lingered a second too long (Fig. 23).29 At three different moments in this very short film, a cane – sometimes two – flutters in from the left, the first time with a visible hand, directing people right or left to open up the frame to the crowd scene desired. The gestures of at least two operators are visible physically herding the crowd, and we see the people responding to these directions on screen, halting their movement, shuttling off to the side, stopping in their tracks or changing direction. By the end of the 53-second reel a small sub-crowd has gathered off to the left, stopping to watch the production of the film. They have been waved away yet are still in-frame, watching the film from within both as internal spectators of the crowd and as (former) participants in its bustling movement.

According to Paul Willemsen, this is the central paradox of the extra as a cinematic figure: “they see the film from outside while being in the middle of it.”30 Willemsen has theorized the extra as a revelatory figure in the historical development of cinema, marking major shifts in conceptions of cinematic narrative, action, and “authenticity” from the classic period of early Hollywood studio films, to modern “auteur” films of the post-war era, to postmodern films characterized by self-referential irony and pastiche.31 In general terms, extras are a kind of “human scenery,” the “undirected, uncontrollable broader context” of a film’s narrative action. They are, by definition, extraneous to the main sequence of events, and they are typically multiple, the cinematic equivalent of the masses in real history.32 Willemsen’s characterization of the extra’s role in film history is fascinating, but crucially skips the earliest phase of the medium’s development with which I am concerned. If classical narrative cinema is defined by transparency, or “seamless editing and a camera presence which may not be sensed by the viewer,” and modern cinema “radically distances itself from this approach…by permitting jump cuts and individualizing the camera presence and camera work,”33 then the Lumières’ city films are neither. The camera’s presence is sensed very much by the viewer, but this is primarily due to the reactions of filmed bystanders, not stylized camera work. Their films are pre-classic: first, because in most cases they are fundamentally non-narrative; and second, because their primary “actors” are unpaid, largely undirected and uninformed passersby who just happen to enter or exit the scene. (Street Dancers is a partial exception to this rule, as the gawking bystanders do appear to be involved in the staging of the scene to some degree.) The Hollywood model of strict control over extras had not yet taken root, and there was no division between them as background figures and the main actors in the foreground of each scene. There were no actors other than them, and their awkward collision with the new medium mirrored the awestruck curiosity of the audience on the other side of the screen. By revealing how the gawking crowd was being directed from behind the camera, these films show both the spontaneity and artificiality of the construction of spectatorship that is literally on view, and that is simultaneously being experienced by the viewers in the theater, who necessarily find themselves in a crowd.34 These bystanders wandering into and out of the scene from all sides, including the area behind the camera, create a highly porous and liminal frame that significantly enhances the film’s immediacy for its viewers, who feel thereby looped into the action by these surrogate onlookers whose bodies drift into and around the scene in a way that embodies the exploratory movement of our eyes.

Whether or not Bonnard was directly inspired by such films we can only wonder, but he certainly exploits similar compositional techniques of looping the viewer into the lively human traffic of his early paintings and prints. This experience of spontaneous encounter, of the visual and sometimes almost physical collision with others we experience on the sidewalk and the attendant phenomenological and psychological frisson, was one of the central “aspects of Parisian life” that defined his approach to the street. Many of his prints and paintings from the mid-late 1890s feature people confronting each other as onlookers or furtively glancing passersby, often folding the viewer into their pictorial space via foreground figures who destabilize the boundary between the external space of the beholder and the internal space of the scene. While the Lumières’ films are remarkable in allowing these crossings and confrontations to happen, perhaps even welcoming this spontaneous interaction between directors and subjects to a certain degree, Bonnard made these encounters his pictures’ raison d’être. The waving canes in Cologne: Exiting the Cathedral suggest that the involvement of gawking bystanders was not intended as the film’s central subject, even though this is undeniably its most fascinating feature. Bonnard, for his part, seized on these unexpected and often awkward interactions, recreating their visual and psychic charge through the strategic use of color, oblique perspective, and spatial compression. His carefully constructed compositions impart a range of “human values” to his sidewalk scenes, from intimacy to menace, amusement to satire, empathy to critique.

In 1896 the critic Gustave Geffroy called Bonnard’s scenes of Paris “charmingly malicious,” with “a touch of impudent gaiety,”35 while the artist’s friend and one-time studio-mate, the actor Lugné-Poë, said “a satirical element was always implanted in the decorative” in Bonnard’s early work.36 Humor is an important element of these city views, and of the Lumières’ early cinema as well. Both reveal the street as a modern form of entertainment. But they also show it to be a place where the enforced closeness, anonymity, and awkwardness of modern urban sociality appears powerfully in microcosm, if we stop to look.

Bonnard’s central interest as an artist of the street in the 1890s was the way in which Parisians approached the life of their city as a free, open-air theater – an ever-changing spectacle for passersby to watch. And it was the limits and possibilities of new media, namely lithography and cinema, that throw his achievements as an artist of this everyday theater into relief. One of the most remarkable features of Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris is the way it shows the artist thinking about the exigencies of the lithographic medium as existing somehow hand-in-hand with the pressures and proximities of the urban street. He later described how the challenges of printmaking pushed him in these early years to find new and subtle ways to pictorialize everyday life: “When one must study the relationship among tones while playing with only four or five colors which one either superimposes or puts side by side, one discovers many things.”37 Recalling a breakthrough he had around 1895, he wrote: “[C]olor, harmony, the relation between line and tone, balance – lost their abstract significance and became very concrete. I had understood what I was seeking and how I would try to obtain it. What came after? The point of departure had been given to me; the rest was just daily life.”38 For Bonnard, the challenges of multi-color printing made the problem of balance between line and tone, abstract form and content, newly urgent and “concrete,” pushing him to paint with a similarly limited palette and graphic sensibility to keep the two forces in check. As a result, his sidewalk scenes are a subtle investigation of passive vision: Bonnard tries to translate into lithography and paint a kind of openness – both optical and social – to “just daily life,” to the spontaneous encounters that pop up at the edge of our visual field as we move through the street. This passive vision can lead to lively interactions and flirtations, as well as to moral deviation and social competition, and was an openness the artist tried to practice himself when he strolled and sketched. By giving us the perspective of a proximate bystander and/or distant witness, he imposes this openness, immediacy, and capacity for reflection on his viewers, challenging us to enter and explore his sidewalk theater as individuals, rather than remaining detached in the crowd.39

I would like to approach the aforementioned debate from this latter distance—that is to say, not engaging it directly at all, but rather wondering about its epistemological foundation. I take as a point of departure the view of epistemology as an exercise in extended narrative in the creation of paradigms of human knowledge, its rules, frontiers, and possibilities always contingent, always subject to change, but shifting only on what Michel Foucault called the “deepest strata of Western culture.”2 In this essay, I will sketch out a working hypothesis of what those deepest strata might be for democratic capitalism in the modern West, which I argue brings into view a shift of cultural episteme from reason to affect in the Age of Revolution that becomes eminently visible during the current era of globalization. I will then consider the Hispanist literary canon during this same time period to gauge the epistemological framework at play and to consider how it squares with the periodization that I have proposed largely as a function of France and the United States in the Age of Revolution. Turning to the cultural present, when I argue that affective epistemicity is becoming pervasive on a global scale, I will flesh out its contours through a close comparative analysis of two Latin American films. Finally, I will come full circle to my epistemological lens on the opening debate about the relationship between affect and politics, and its import for cultural criticism.

From Rational to Affective Epistemicity

What are the established terms of the epistemological narration of human knowledge? In the modern West, reason has been the physiological process overwhelmingly credited with the production of human knowledge. The iconic Cartesian cogito “I think, therefore I am” has served as a conceptual lightning rod for narrating—and thus defining—knowledge since the seventeenth century as the exclusive purview of self-conscious rational cognition. The rational cogito has long been conceptually synonymous with modernity and science.

Implicit in this famous formulation is the residual rendering—if not abjectification—of the “being” body over which the “thinking” mind presides. Cartesian mind-body dualism privileges the rational mind and relegates the passionate body to subordinate status. This story of the primacy of the superior rational mind and the relative insignificance of the inferior non-rational body has held culturally hegemonic sway for nearly four hundred years.

All of a sudden, over the past twenty years, affect has emerged as a challenger for the role of protagonist in the storytelling about human knowledge. By some bold counts, modernity is no longer best comprehended through the optic of rationality. Literary critic Patricia Clough calls our attention to what she dubs an “affective turn” in which no aspect of our contemporary social fabric may be fully understood without the consideration of affectivity, a term I employ as the obverse of rationality: sensory perception, emotion, feeling.3 It is not only modernity that is being redefined but also, and perhaps even more significantly from the perspective of epistemological storytelling, scientific discourse. In a groundbreaking rejection of the investigative—epistemological—insignificance of emotion, neurologist Antonio Damasio posits that emotion is the very seat of reason and the foundation of the human condition itself. Damasio’s influential trade publications in the early 1990s coincide with the onset of a steady and rising upswing in funding for affect-related scientific research.4

Four hundred years of epistemic reason have yielded our comprehension of reason as such: as what Foucault made salient, in the Order of Things, as an episteme. Indeed, in this magisterial study treating this same time period—the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries—Foucault lays bare an epistemological archaeology of the modalities of reason in modern European thought. Hierarchical taxonomies as a means of imposing order on the external world dominate the early modern era. Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes argues persuasively that this taxonomizing rationality underwrote the epistemological conquest of the New World by the Old.5 On the strength of Ángel Rama’s reading of Spanish empire as a thinking monarchical head governing an overseas colonial body, the time period for the cogito as modern imperial praxis could be traced in its conceptual origins as far back as the Catholic Kings in the late fifteenth century.6 Indeed, this rationalized conquest—its epistemological aspect underwriting its political, economic, and cultural aspects—would be what thinkers like psychiatrist and anti-colonialist revolutionary Frantz Fanon would centuries later decry as the most insidious mechanism of European imperialism.7 Interestingly, and significantly, then, the rational Cartesian subject was exposed and rejected—overthrown—on the grounds of foundational collusion with modern empire.

The mid-twentieth-century throes of global decolonization and the intellectual decapitation of the Cartesian subject therein dovetail with the globalization of liberal democracy and the onset of the so-called “affective turn.”8 As a thought experiment that is also the central conceit of the present inquiry, let us entertain as a possible diachronic epistemological model a correlative relationship, on the one hand, between rationality and imperialism, and, on the other, between affectivity and democratic capitalism. Cartesian rationality is a dualistic relationship in which the self is split between superior transcendental interiority of mind and inferior residual exteriority of body—an epistemological model wholly resonant, if not coeval, with the imperialist logic of a rational governing head ruling over an unruly body politic, like the classic 1651 frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in which the head and upper body of an absolute sovereign rise up to preside in enormity over a landscape in comparative miniature scale of settled land.9

Of course, companies and private capital played an enormous role in the establishment and proliferation of European empire. Perhaps the most notorious example of the intertwined nature of mercantilism and colonialism was the East India Company, which, founded in the very juncture of England’s maritime-colonial ascent following the decisive 1588 defeat of Spain’s “Invincible” Armada, would become so powerful as to colonize India in 1757, governing by proxy until formal colonization took place a century later. A bourgeois mercantile class possessed of such hefty economic, political, and military might was bound to be on a collision course with top-heavy monarchical rule. By 1751, the French term “laissez faire” had made its first known print appearance.10 Semantically, the third-person plural/formal command “laissez faire” seeks freedom from a higher and greater power to “let do” in trade and commerce; the fact that this petition assumes the form of the imperative would seem to signal an urgency of discontent that a social class capable of economic self-determination, yet hemmed in and denied political autonomy by the constraints of kings, would have been feeling on the eve of the Age of Revolution.

“Laissez faire” answers the cogito in an epistemologically contestatory way: the imperative mode notwithstanding, it is a voice that speaks from below, asking for a freedom that it does not enjoy, and which is at the mercy of a higher authority to give or deny. It is, in short, a subaltern subject, whose contours are further elucidated within the original formulation, which is said to have been “laissez-nous faire“ (“Lettre à l’Auteur” 111)—”let us do”—in a first-person plural speech act that casts the residual body politic as “we.”11 This “we” asks for a loosening of constraints, regulations, rules. It asks for the suspension of vertical power.

This “we” that anticipates the French Revolution finds its conceptual parallel in the contemporaneous “we, the people” that is the speaking subject of the United States Declaration of Independence; their respective “liberté, egalité, fraternité” under the organizing principle “ce qui est immoral est impolitique” and “all men are created equal” for the enjoyment of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are likewise resonant. A political life measured in feeling is declared in both instances as the model for a perfectly equal and free—democratic—social order harmonious in its brotherly horizontality. The implicit homology between morality and capital in these bourgeois revolutions is rendered explicit in the writings of Adam Smith, who theorizes the circulation of capital and morality throughout the body politic in the same terms, as being guided by an internal wisdom that Smith famously metaphorizes as an “invisible hand.”12

The portrait of this collective social subject that emerges in the composite when all of these components are considered as a whole is one whose governance is internal—that is, self-governance—on terms that are fully comprehensible, reasonable, and functional to that self, but which require no guidance or direction from without. This collective “we” of the Revolutionary Age is one that has discursively dispensed with the thinking head of monarchy—and literally, by guillotine—and instead of rationality now affirms a logic of affectivity: a social order that, having done away with the erstwhile sovereign head, vindicates itself, the formerly abject body, as a headless soma that can feel its way toward order. The passions that were once used as a label of dismissive vilification of the commoners by the ruling elite are now rehabilitated as an epistemological elegization of that very class. The bourgeois remainder—what in France was indistinct from the rest of the Third Estate, that is, all who were not nobility or clergy—takes its revenge by investing with the power of political self-determination and autonomy the very body that had been discounted within the epistemological schema of rationality, and, moreover, identifying its base passions as the medium of its felicitous self-governance. As though by homeostatic principle, the headless bourgeois soma feels its way toward social—political and economic—equilibrium. Historian Nicole Eustace claims as much in her analysis of the American Revolution as a political movement made possible by the discursive valorization of emotion in its universal dimension. “Passion is the gale,” her book avers in its subtitle.13 During the eighteenth-century Age of Revolution, Eustace affirms, emotion becomes what I would call the epistemological glue of political horizontality, as that which underpins perfect brotherhood and perfect democracy, because it is what binds all people—and not just an elite—together, creating a “we” and legitimizing its power.

An Epistemological Analysis of the Modern Hispanist Canon

How does the birth of epistemological affectivity as a function of capitalist democracy in the eighteenth century affect cultural representation since that time? I argue that epistemological affectivity is most salient in the aforementioned explosion of storytelling interest in emotion—and I use the term “storytelling” in the broadest possible way, akin to the poststructuralist notion of a “text” that goes far beyond the borders of a book or the parameters of a discipline marked as literary, to include all inquiries into human knowledge, whether in the humanities or sciences, whether empirical or representational. For the purposes of periodization, it is telling, as I have already underscored, that the onset of broad investigative and representational interest in affect coincides with the definitive end of formal empire and colonialism—both in the process of decolonization and the end of the Cold War, which had perpetuated a colonialist division of global territory.

But what of the centuries that lie in between? The tracing of an epistemological historiography of the cultural discourse of emotion would be tantamount to rewriting Foucault’s Order of Things, beginning after the seismic shift he identifies at the end of the eighteenth century and replacing his persistently rational lens with that of affect. This is a challenging proposition, for between the birth of capitalist democracy and its so-called, though fiercely disputed, universal triumph, there lie three centuries of complex global politics.

There is a course that I have taught many times over which affords me precisely this diachronic optic. It is a survey of canonical modern Hispanic texts from 1700 to the present in both Spain and Latin America. I would here like to offer a meditation on how I have been teasing out the relationship between the epistemological model of the democratic-capitalist feeling soma and the texts that I treat from the perspective of my training as a Latin Americanist critic.

The beginning of the course has a certain simplicity and ease because of the fact that it involves received epistemological knowledge: I explain to my students what the Enlightenment is—an obsession with reason, they conclude—and we proceed to consider the ways in which reason turns up in texts from Bourbon Spain and colonial Spanish America. In Benito Jerónimo Feijoo’s “Causas del atraso que se padece en España en orden a las ciencias naturales” (“On the Causes of Spain’s Backwardness in the Order of the Natural Sciences”; 1742), we see a carefully constructed plea for the acceptance of scientific empiricism by the theologically-minded institutional status quo.14 Feijoo casts God as the “Author of Nature” (“Autor de la Naturaleza”; section 12), thereby discursively legitimizing the study of the material world (as opposed to the spiritual) and the acquisition of knowledge through direct observation (as opposed to faith). Tomás de Iriarte’s “El gato, el lagarto y el grillo” (“The Cat, the Lizard, and the Cricket”; 1782) constitutes a lyrical paraphrasis of Feijoo’s position.15 In this fable from the animal world, a learned cat—much like Feijoo’s anecdotal character “Teopompo,” an ecclesiastical scholar profoundly ignorant in the natural sciences—pontificates aloud in incomprehensibly complicated terminology. A lizard looks on, utterly perplexed by the cat’s opaque language, yet finally comprehends the situation when he deduces—through direct observation, like Feijoo’s “Charistio,” an expert on Enlightenment thought—that the cat’s unintelligible latinate utterances mean to communicate his intention to ingest sunflower nectar to reduce his abdominal swelling. The cricket of the story, like Feijoo’s “rudo Vulgo” (“vulgar Commoners”), entirely lacking in the lizard’s powers of direct observation, instead applauds the cat’s pompous display, failing to condemn him for unintelligibility or to comprehend the merits of the lizard’s comparatively simple, plain speech. Revolving around the grammatical figure of the esdrújula, words whose emphasis falls on the antepenultimate syllable, and which are quintessentially emblematic of the scholarly register, the poem performs an intimate knowledge of the very form it critiques, in the process amassing a long list of esdrújulas comprised of the medical, pedagogical, and poetic terms either employed by the pedantic cat or used to disparage him.

This performance of an exhaustive inventory as a means of representing the possession of knowledge—and power over what is known through its display—is a narrative rendering of the dominion of the thinking mind over the unruly material body. In Iriarte’s case, the raw material whose mastery is demonstrated, positioning the poetic subject as its reigning authority, is the language of Spanish imperial culture—of the Church and Crown. Indeed, the poem concludes with the poetic subject’s taunting summary of the fable that has been recounted as a medicinal antidote for the kind of pedantic institutionality that it critiques.

Iriarte’s masterful catalogue of esdrújulas will further evolve into Linnean taxonomy in Alexander von Humboldt’s letter, “A Willdenow” (“To Willdenow”; 1801), in which the celebrated German naturalist will treat the whole of Spanish American flora and fauna as raw material for his—decidedly European—collection of knowledge.16 (The original iteration of this course paired Humboldt with Pratt’s notion of “planetary consciousness” at this juncture to facilitate the consideration of Humboldt’s epic travels through Latin America as a seminal instance of epistemological conquest.17) Simón Bolívar, Andrés Bello, and Esteban Echeverría—the “Liberator” of Latin America, its earliest lettered statesman, and writerly political activist, respectively—all echo this central organizing principle at the heart of this rationalized cataloguing and taxonomizing. Bolívar’s “Carta de Jamaica” (1815), written in the throes of the continental struggle for independence, begins with a genuflection to Humboldt that then strategically dethrones him from his seat of epistemological conquest.18 Bolívar declares the continent to be impossibly enigmatic—therefore unknowable by outsiders, even the great Humboldt—yet then goes on to lay out a detailed region-by-region portrait of Latin America in three ways: first describing the rebellious populations of the colonies, then giving a summary of their inchoate revolutionary self-governance, and finally giving an analysis of their political futurity. It is this display of unparalleled territorial knowledge that Bolívar uses to establish his discursive sovereignty, counterbalancing the fact that he is, in truth, writing from the precarious position of requesting—almost begging for—England’s military aid in procuring definitive independence from Spain. Bello’s triumphal “Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida” (1826), penned in the first blush of definitive Latin American independence, takes as its point of departure the lyrical detailing of the continent’s countryside.19 Now this detailing focuses not on the development of botanical knowledge, but on the inventory of agricultural products; as Santiago Colás brilliantly argues, Bello is aware of the latent value of the Latin American landscape and anxious for Latin Americans—and not neocolonial interlopers, unnamed but implicit—to reap that wealth and resultant political power as their own, thus giving foundational stability to their fledgling nations.20 In yet another echo of the same discursive pattern, Echeverría’s “El matadero” (1838; published 1871), the most frequently cited and studied example of a Latin American cuadro de costumbres, includes an extensive and detailed description of an Argentine slaughterhouse, as though through an empirical lens.21 Here the posture of empiricism is meant to lend incontrovertible truth value to the vision of the slaughterhouse as bloody, violent, and uncivilized, to the end of using it as a condemnatory metaphor for the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas.

Mariano José de Larra’s contemporaneous short story, “El castellano viejo” (1832), is also considered part of the genre of the cuadro de costumbres and shares the same hyperdetailed descriptiveness, here in the service of painting a picture of middle-class Spain.22 The narrator, a refined and worldly writer by the pen name Fígaro—whose name implies the superiority of French culture—finds himself reluctantly compelled to attend the birthday dinner of a crass and uncultured acquaintance whose thorough lack of manners and social grace embody the cultural ills of the insular nation. Yet in the final clause of the very last sentence of this extended diatribe against uncouth Spain, Larra abruptly turns the full weight of the story’s moralizing judgment against itself: he asks, quickly and concisely, whether the middle class, for all its painful gaffes and provincial gaudiness, might not in fact be morally superior after all. Why? Because—and here is where the entire course takes an abrupt turning point right along with the story—the tiny elite to which Fígaro belongs may know how to act with decorum and gentility, but, the final confession goes, this social class knows no true bond of affection. It is the middle class which, rude and crude though it may be, is truly capable of loving and respecting its neighbor.23

This moment in the story cracks the course in two. All of a sudden, in the course of a single complex clause (which usually requires mapping on the whiteboard for students to fully comprehend), the terms of valorization are radically altered—and permanently so, as we will appreciate as we move forward in time. The logic and narrative patterns of rational all-seeing omniscience are undermined in one fell swoop, upended by a new criterion of critical judgment: affect.

At this juncture, I always find myself, without exception, in difficult terrain, and ironically so, since it is at this point in the course that I begin to enter my own comfort zone of disciplinary expertise. Its challenge lies in the sudden loss of established descriptors for a comprehensive epistemological framework. In the context of the course, we have spent the first third of the semester under the conceptual aegis of the Enlightenment insofar as we have come to understand its rationality as an epistemological model: inventories, catalogs, taxonomies, empiricism. In short, models of externally organized order imposed upon a body—be it language, continent, nature, or nation. Suddenly, all such meticulously and exhaustively crafted demonstrations of cultural power and control founder on their moorings, for the sudden shift sends fatal tremors through the fault lines of the old paradigm. Why does Larra suddenly talk about love and respect? This is, interestingly, a question my students do not ask. Instead, they nod their heads and acquiesce, coming at Larra’s turning of the tables from an experiential perspective, regarding love and respect as thoroughly naturalized rather than constructed discourse. In other words, at this point they slide from the epistemological to the ontological: to them, it seems, love cannot be discursive; it can only be real. Are we so steeped in the epistemological supports of capitalist culture that they are invisible as such? I watch, acutely aware of the lack of adequate disciplinary vocabulary—of the lack of adequate epistemological vocabulary—to explicate this shift, much less to propose that they be just as suspicious of love as they have been of reason as a discursive construct.

In the next several readings, the shift toward a foundationally affective narrative logic only becomes more pronounced. Clarín’s “¡Adiós, Cordera!” (1892) approaches the spread of modernity to rural Spain through the emotional response of a little girl, Rosa, who initially regards the telegraph pole and the train with excitement, but ultimately comes to resent technology and the wide world beyond for their role in stripping her humble family of all that is dear—first their cow, then her only brother to fight in one of the Carlist Wars—to satisfy the gluttony of far-off gentlemen, priests, and “indianos” (men made rich in the New World).24 Rosa’s internal sentimental landscape creates the story’s arc; the somatic metaphor of a city callously devouring the countryside serves as the foundation for its social critique, with Rosa’s “loves” (“sus amores”) being an affective synecdoche for all that is lost in this unsalutary crush of modernity. Miguel de Unamuno develops this line of critique, diagnosing Spain on the verge of the Spanish-American War and the loss of its last colonies as though it were a sick body, outlining a pathology of its moral, cultural, and institutional ailments as a paralytic stagnation (“marasmo”) and prescribing a remedial rejuvenation by means of exposure to contemporary European intellectual currents.25 José Martí’s “Nuestra América” (1891) exhorts Latin Americans—particularly Cubans—to wake up to the imperial battle that looms overhead and to stand for independence. For the first time in the course, the first-person plural “nosotros” enters the lexicon of revolution. Martí defines this “we” through the prescriptive definition of where its affects should lie: with the autochthonous over the foreign. Correct politics, in effect, derive from correctly placed affective priorities: self-governance turns on self-knowledge; self-knowledge is rooted in a preferential love of the mestizo self (“Nuestra América mestiza” [121]) as against the European other.26

These late nineteenth-century texts are epistemologically hybrid in the sense that while they move toward affectivity, they also continue to evince some measure of faith in rational institutionality—where Martí, for instance, calls for a supplantation of European models of education, history, and governance by autochthonous ones (in the same way that Domingo Sarmiento has earlier proposed Facundo (1845) as the first sociological study of Argentina, imagining it as the Latin American counterpart of Alexander de Tocqueville’s analysis of the United States).27 But as the course enters the era of full-blown twentieth-century U.S. capitalist cultural dominance, affective logic becomes textually hegemonic. Federico García Lorca’s “New York: oficina y denuncia” (1931) decries the injustice of U.S. social asymmetry through the metaphor of a continual sacrifice of animals symbolic of the powerless poor, imagining the Hudson River as coursing with their blood. Lorca establishes his poetic duty to serve as self-sacrificial empathetic witness as an emotionally charged cultural value judgment in which callous and cold impersonality is associated with the world of ciphers representing the indifference of the elite, whereas passionate feeling and vitality—albeit threatened—are associated with the “other half” (“la otra mitad”), those who occupy the bottom of the social spectrum.28 Pablo Neruda’s “Walking Around” (1935) likewise casts the structures of civilization as artificial and deadening, and fantasizes about the thrill that would come from using poetic language as a revolutionary weapon to interrupt insitutional culture and to achieve a salutary return to organic nature. This poetic desideratum takes on the stature of moral imperative by the close of the poem with the empathetic testimony and implicit wish to alleviate the suffering of the civilized world personified in “toallas que lloran lentas lágrimas sucias” (“towels that cry slow dirty tears”).29

Toward mid-century, affective textual interiority bears more and more weight of narrative content and meaning. In Juan Rulfo’s “Nos han dado la tierra” (1953), the injustices of Mexican post-revolutionary hypocrisy are communicated through the somatic experience of destitute campesinos walking toward the land granted them by a politics of agrarian reform. Far from fertile, this “comal acalorado” (“hot skillet”) of a promised land cannot support even a modicum of life.30 This theme of social asymmetry as deadening thus continues, here conveyed most centrally and powerfully as the compromise of the poor social subjects’ bodies themselves: the campesinos seem to be walking backward even as they set feet forward; the heat and lack of water impedes the generation of ideas in their minds; they mean to speak but they cannot.31 The material circumstance of poverty and its exacerbation by the very government that ideologically purports to alleviate it has the effect of subjugating the poor at the physiological level. Extreme poverty makes it physically impossible to think, to talk, to make literal and figurative progress—impossible to achieve political agency. This is, in other words, a narrative representation of political injustice as biopolitics.

Gabriel García Márquez’s “Un día de éstos” (1962) also turns an affective optic on political realities, treating brutal dictatorship through an encounter between the powerful and the powerless—a lieutenant turned mayor and a dentist—in which the nuanced subtleties of their physical and emotional dispositions tell the story.32 The way the characters’ eyes move, the extent to which their bodies are tense or relaxed, the way they speak to each other through verbal and body language, all work to narrate a tooth extraction that in turn tells a back story of violent military repression cum corrupt civil governance. This reliance on mood and emotion to tell a political story is arguably nowhere better exemplified than in Víctor Érice’s El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive; 1973), which offers a scathing retrospective critique of three decades of dictatorship under Franco as an education in trauma.33 The young protagonist Ana is an independent thinker whose heart naturally draws her to all that is officially categorized as dangerous: presented with Frankenstein, she feels empathy for the putative monster; warned away from poisonous mushrooms, she nevertheless thinks they smell good. Her expansive judgment of the heart leads her to care for a wounded and hungry fugitive in a wordless friendship that contains one of the only true smiles of the film, yet also runs counter to official sanction: the fugitive, presumably a Republican soldier and possibly the addressee of Ana’s mother’s clandestine letters, is soon killed by the resident official of the Francoism that deems him a criminal rather than friend. Yet Ana’s experience proves otherwise: this “Frankenstein” played gently without killing, only to have been victimized as a monster. The film ends with Ana’s renewing her call to this martyred “spirit” of her father’s beehive, the latter being a metaphor for the coerced ideological conformism of Francoist Spain. Ana’s sustained affection for the fugitive, which is more enduring than the letter her mother burns after his death, symbolizes the subterranean persistence of counterinstitutional memory and the possibility of political resistance. (Another film that I often include in this course, El laberinto del fauno [Pan’s Labyrinth; 2006], is a quasi-fantastical period piece that defies history in returning to the scene of the Spanish Civil War to stage not the destruction but rather the triumph of the maqui resistance, characterizing anti-Francoist resistance as a community network defined by impulses toward love and healing whose spirit will outlive the dictatorship even if historical fact tells us that their bodies would inevitably fall victim to its violence.34 If both El espíritu de la colmena and El laberinto del fauno construct the expectation of an emotionally charged phoenix of political resistance, the 2011 movement of the so-called “indignados” in protest of neoliberal asymmetry and the conservative political status quo presents itself discursively as following this epistemological script, as I will discuss in the final section of this essay.)

As the course takes its final turn into the post-Soviet twenty-first-century era of globalization, the theme of health and well-being (both emotional and bodily) that we have seen with particular insistence since 1898 becomes even more salient. In the final two films of the semester, Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (The Swamp; 2001) and Walter Salles’s Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries; 2004), the decadence of landed social elitism is treated as what we could call ill-being.35 In La Ciénaga, a provincial Argentine family of pepper-growers lives in a state of physical decay that finds its moral equivalent in the swamp-like paralytic lethargy of their inner lives. The family’s bodies are riddled with scars and wounds from their auto-abusive lack of self-care, and they project this self-abuse as racialized “savagery” onto the indigenous working class. The dominant class thus inflicts the emotional cruelty of discrimination onto its own hired help as an unsuccessful palliative for its own pain, which the family also tries, equally unsuccessfully, to alleviate with alcohol, sex—including sensual sibling relationships that flirt discomfittingly with incest—and violent sport.

Diarios de motocicleta picks up where La Ciénaga leaves off: with a bourgeois-dominated social order in desperate need of a cure for its deep structural injustices. Positing Ernesto Guevara’s political awakening as a process of coming into his own as a healer, the film suggests that the young “Che” must first learn the care of self. From the outset, Ernesto’s asthmatic condition is foregrounded; the act of becoming a caring healer of the body politic—i.e., a revolutionary—is figured as tantamount to conquering his own asthma. This care of self that is also therapeutic dominion of the self becomes manifest when Ernesto swims the Amazon from the caregivers’ side of a leprosy colony to the patients’ side, bridging the social divide and dissolving false hierarchies within the universal humanity of what Ernesto has declared to be “una sola América Latina mestiza.” The members of this newly unified community call out together, wave together, and stand together in emotional health and harmony as they bid Ernesto goodbye, with the well-being of the group, which represents all of Latin America, having reached what we understand to be an unprecedented apex.

This exercise in diachronic textual interpretation demonstrates most clearly an arc over the three hundred years in question, 1700-2000, in which the beginning and end points show a marked contrast between epistemological rationality and affectivity, respectively. At the poles of this spectrum, eighteenth-century texts are concerned with rationally organized systems of classification, order, and intellectually justified control; twenty-first century texts are concerned with affectively organized mechanisms of assessment, judgment, and a moral claim to power.

How we chart a historiography to explicate all that lies in between is a more complex proposition. In Spain, the shift from the Habsburg to the Bourbon dynasties in 1700 opens the country up to an uneven but significant influx of liberal thought from the rest of Europe. By the mid-late 1700s such aristocratic entities as the Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País have formed in many cities in both Spain and Spanish America with the general agenda of advancing industry and agriculture, and encouraging the Crown toward free trade. We might say that this period also initiates the conflictive cycles of liberal-conservative alternation between what José Ortega y Gasset would later call the “two Spains.” At the same time, Latin America is developing a bourgeois criollo class of Spanish-descended natives who will break free from Spain in the Age of Revolution. Yet, if we accept the argument that the nominally sovereign Latin America immediately enters into a neocolonial economic relationship with Great Britain, and so from the standpoint of epistemological analysis, in some ways the entire continent makes the same seismic shift away from colonial empire and toward global capital—arguably a new form of neocolonialism, though by a democratic power—when Spain loses its last colonies in 1898 and England begins to suffer the same fate in the aftermath of World War I, putting an end to what British revisionist historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson controversially called in 1953 its “imperialism of free trade.”36 Santiago Colás’s aforementioned 1995 analysis of post-independence Latin American discourse as desirous of colonial structures of hierarchical power and textually reenacting them is instructive on this point in the sense that it helps to comprehend how colonial rationality could persist in Latin American discourse well into the post-independence era.37

It is important to note that, in this regard, the preceding evidentiary consideration of canonical Hispanic texts thus suggests that the dynamic interplay between rationality and affectivity is different in the Iberoamerican circumstance where imperial and colonial structures, in their material and epistemological dimensions alike, were more culturally powerful for a significantly longer period of time than were their democratic and free-market counterparts. Yet, regardless of how we periodize this lengthy epistemologically hybrid coexistence of formal empire and capitalist democracy on the world stage, what seems clear is that affectivity holds epistemological sway in the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization.

Toward a Contemporary Model of Epistemological Affect 

In the first section of this essay, I suggested that we understand modern Western epistemology as being most foundationally constituted by the shift from rationality to affectivity, and underwriting imperialism and capitalist democracy, respectively, in non-Spanish Europe and the United States. As a second movement, I turned to the transatlantic context of Spain and Latin America to consider how a diachronic overview of canonical texts during this same time period squares with this periodization. There my goal was to underscore that the same shift from rationality to affectivity is operative in the Hispanic context over the course of the time period that we generally consider modernity—the eighteenth century to the present—irrespective of the particular ways in which rationality and affectivity were entwined in epistemological competition from the Age of Revolution to late twentieth-century globalization in Iberoamerican discourse. Whereas in the second section I framed my brief textual analyses with an eye to a broader measure of a diachronic epistemological differential, since my objective was the demonstration of an overarching pattern across centuries, here in a third section I would like to focus in depth on the contours of affectivity as an epistemological model in the present cultural moment.

To this end, I have paired two Latin American films made in the past decade by renowned directors and enjoying significant distribution and critical reception: Fernando Meirelles’s Blindness (Canada/Brazil/Japan, 2008) and Pablo Trapero’s Carancho (The Vulture; Argentina, 2010), both of which develop a symbology of dystopian car culture that serves to theorize the pathways of neoliberal power.38

I would like to give a brief analysis of each film before turning to a final consideration of how their representations of the social as a function of car culture evince a common epistemological model that I hypothesize is in play in broader global culture.

Blindness begins with a full-screen close-up of lights clicking red and green before giving way to a long shot of generic “anywhere” urban streets at rush hour, which look like a crawling parking lot, one false move away from gridlock. As the film shows us a range of characters moving through that milieu, we appreciate how social life is defined as a grid of hierarchies based on inequities of social class, race, and gender; in this light, the red and green traffic signals represent these strict segregations. That hierarchical verticality should be decried as the backbone of neoliberal culture is its worst possible accusation, for it suggests that the capitalist claim to happy and salutary democratic horizontality is a false and empty ideological shell masking a deeper reality of neocolonial asymmetry. This accusation grows in crescendo when the outbreak of a pandemic affliction of blindness abruptly moves the neoliberal grid into quarantine, where the logic of materialist asymmetry is perversely exaggerated and patently sovereign. One group manages to achieve liberation from the quarantine and, against the backdrop of a sea of motionless cars that symbolizes social death, this small band practices a new form of being-together by moving through the chaos of neoliberal post-apocalypse by holding hands and feeling their way through space as a collective—feeling with their hands and their hearts alike, in both tactile and moral terms. The small renegade community reinhabits private property now defined as shared space, bathing together in a symbolic rebirth and breaking bread together in a first supper. Black, white, Asian, male, female, old, young, rich, poor: all such distinctions are swept away in favor of a common togetherness held together by caresses and laughter. The film ends with the regaining of sight by a member of the group whose first words are a declaration of how beautiful his companions are. When we truly see, the film suggests, our vision reveals the communal beauty of humanity, without unjust asymmetries of any kind. The car culture of asymmetrical isolation—of living in individual and hierarchical compartments—cedes to a culture of perfectly horizontal touch and commingling in which material goods flow according to need, without the hoarding or stagnation of their greed-driven accumulation as capital.

Pablo Trapero’s Carancho also treats dystopian neoliberal culture through the metaphor of cars, but it is infinitely more pessimistic in its vision. Nominally, the film is about the romance between an ambulance-chasing lawyer and a paramedic whose relationship is threaded through the lawyer’s criminal activity of staging accidents for the purpose of gaining clients. But the overarching character in the film is the traffic that courses incessantly through the dark and lugubrious city. The film begins with an opening caption that gives a staggering statistic of some 10,000 deaths from automobile accidents in the last ten years in Buenos Aires. Later, the first flirtatious conversation between the lawyer and the paramedic turns on how commonplace it has come to be for cars to run red lights. From that point on, the film develops quickly as a crime noir thriller; the lawyer and the paramedic are forced to bet their lives on the success of an elaborate scheme for liberation from the corrupt forces bearing down upon them. This proposition is vertiginous: the lawyer’s unscrupulous boss makes clear the extent to which this underbelly of neoliberalism has every thread of the social fabric in its grip when he hisses, “Los clientes son míos, el caso es mío, la policlínica es mía, el país es mío“ (“The clients are mine, the case is mine, the clinic is mine, the country is mine”). Indeed, we see that corruption has woven a seamless connection between hospital, police, and law, rendering perfectly powerless what is portrayed as an unwitting and helpless working class. The lawyer and paramedic wage an epic battle to exercise their free will and to fight for their moral integrity within this system that derives profit at any cost and from the most extreme victimization. The film’s breathless climax resolves into a miraculous getaway on the strength of the couple’s newfound love and commitment to do good. Just as the plot seems to settle into this triumph and the victorious couple drives on through a green light, a truck—barreling through a red light—slams into their car. The screen goes black and emergency-medicine technicians speaking in voiceover give us to understand that the lawyer has been killed and the paramedic critically wounded. There is no utopia in Carancho. The final car crash works like a deus ex machina that crushes the protagonists’ bodies, and, just as importantly, quashes their stories. Their story of love, their quest for redemption, their fight for freedom and a modicum of social justice, their very narratives of unique selfhood in the world—none of this matters because it all succumbs to the immanent force of violence that envelops, defines, and determines their subjectivity and their fate. There are no persons, in the sense of personhood, of which to speak in the context of this kind of unremitting, generalized violence that is posited as the state of neoliberal cultural affairs; there are only numbers of victims.

Both films figure car culture metaphorically as a kind of circulatory system of the social. Blindness imputes a vertical dimension of power dynamics to the ostensibly horizontal car culture, viewing materialist, capital-accumulating, and race/gender/class-based hierarchies as primary in the constitution of neoliberal cultural logic. But Blindness also holds out the optimism that this culture can be abandoned like so many shells of cars left to rust on the congested highways, in favor of a logic of truly horizontal community togetherness enacted through a holding of hands and walking in a group as one with mutual trust, cooperation, and sharing. Carancho, on the other hand, suggests that any bid for dissent, autonomy, and withdrawal from the system will meet with failure. This failure will not stem from an inadequacy of the will or the imagination; it is possible to outsmart neoliberal logic—which, after all, turns monotonously on the vulture-like maximization of profit—but it is not possible to outrun it. There is no outside to the neoliberal circulatory system in Carancho, where the flow is congested and fatal. Cars in continually and spasmodically violent circulation frame and subsume the story of the lawyer and the paramedic like an autonomic system that has gone haywire and evinces a chronic state of fatal precarity. Whereas in Blindness social death is sudden and swift, bringing with it the possibility of social rebirth into a utopian common, in Carancho social death is continuous and progressive, like a body whose own vital fluids have become toxic and disease-addled. Perhaps most disturbing about this film is the suggestion that the sick social collective precludes any and all autonomy; self-determination as an act of narration and of liberation is thwarted not by some rival philosophy or ideology but by the senseless violence of a body that is putrefact, in the throes of slow internal death. Whereas Blindness stages a return to health as the utopian opening of a common, Carancho morbidly suggests that neither health nor common is possible in a neoliberal order that maintains a perfect biopolitical vise grip on its integrants.

Despite the diametrically opposed outcomes with which the imagination of power, dissent, and self-determination culminates in these two films, I would like to underscore the extent to which the component parts of these very different political imaginaries are nevertheless common to a shared epistemological framework. In both films, urban life is a visually horizontal mass, a collective body whose comparative dynamism is indicative of its level of health and functionality. That the circulation within this body should creep along or crash in lethal spurts should be understood as a serious critique: unfettered flow is implicitly privileged as the underlying measure, its obstruction signaling poor social health. Blindness suggests that the reason for this social malaise, in which cultural dis-ease manifests as pandemic disease—figuring a literally sick body politic—is that the urban way of life cannot shake either verticality of power and privilege or the greed-driven and static accumulation of material goods that creates and sustains that verticality. Carancho coincides with this diagnosis, and goes further to suggest a causal connection between exploitative profit and ill-being to the point of death. The health and very life of the body, whether of the broader population or extrapolated to the individual, are the baseline epistemological terms of critique. In the final turn to social and physiological health in Blindness, we see this model expressed positively as a utopian realization of the ideals of flow, though it is represented as a post-apocalyptic outside to the neoliberal culture to which it is epistemologically proper. Carancho seems to say that there is no cure for neoliberal illness because there is no outside of neoliberalism wherein to seek salutary refuge; there is only the putrefaction of the inside. The films’ aesthetics mirror these inner states: Blindness represents social disease as a cold whiteness that gives way to a rich warm palette of earthy reds and oranges symbolizing the healthy vitality of the perfectly horizontal group that has managed to inaugurate a de facto political common; Carancho communicates its comparative cynicism about such a possibility with unrelenting yellow and green hues that make the city’s interior seem like diseased innards. In both cases, contemporary social life is foundationally imagined as a sentient horizontal body in flow, with a healthy, happy flow being the explicit or implicit ideal, respectively, and its circulatory interruption, accompanied by unhappiness and disease, constituting social critique.

From Kant to the Arab Spring: A Politics of Affect, and Its Critical Apprehension

I opened with an anecdote about the taking of sides around Slavoj Žižek’s decontextualized claim of an affective equivalence between falling in love and engaging in politics. As proposed, I would like to sidestep the ontological dimension of this debate in favor of the epistemological, which I suggest we may do by returning to Žižek’s pages. If we resituate his claim in context, we appreciate an uncanny echo of this essay’s central proposition that affective epistemicity is born in the Age of Revolution and fully realized in the current post-Soviet era of globalization.

In the sentences immediately following Žižek’s positing of this analogous relationship between love and politics, he goes on to name the historical and textual precedent that both inspires and evidences such a consideration: the French Revolution as analyzed by Immanuel Kant. Indeed, immediately after suggesting the affective homology between love and politics, Žižek cites Kant’s characterization of the French Revolution as an instance in which politics stirred high emotion in the form of an “enthusiasm” capable of inspiring imitation. Žižek goes on to say that Kant’s assessment of the French Revolution also “fit[s] perfectly” the popular Egyptian revolution of 2011 in which colossal public protest ousted the president: “for that instant of enthusiasm,” says Žižek of the Egyptian uprising, “each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity.”39 Žižek cites the protestors’ chants as demonstrative of this latter sentiment—“We are One!”; “We are brothers! Join us!”—and argues that what they are seeking is “social and economic justice” as well as “market freedom” (2012: 34).40 In Žižek’s analysis, we see the reemergence of the affectively constituted headless soma, the democratic-capitalist episteme of old, again in its revolutionary aspect.41

The 2012 documentary film by the Canadian director Velcrow Ripper entitled Occupy Love echoes Žižek—and Kant before him—in theorizing the Arab Spring and Occupy movements in global terms as arising on the strength of love as the new revolution.42 But enthusiasm and love are not the only emotions associated with these most recent “revolutions”; rage and indignation are their inverse mirror image. Stéphane Hessel is credited with seminally inspiring these movements with his 2010 Indignez-vous!, directly linked to the name of the “indignados” movement in Spain that called for “¡democracia real, ya!” (“Democracy, Now!”).43 In the accounts of the origins of Mexico’s 2012 “Yo Soy 132” (“I Am 132”) student-propelled national protest movement—the “Mexican Spring” perhaps best known by its Twitter hashtag #yosoy132—there is a key moment during a visit made by then presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, staunch proponent of neoliberalism and unrepentant wielder of repressive police force, to the Ibero-American University where a college student, in defiance of the mandate to cease and desist from protest, held up a handmade sign that read, simply, “TE ODIO” (“I hate you”).44 This social media panorama resolves into an emotional spectrum in which negative feelings represent oppositional critique and positive feelings supportive affirmation. It is interesting to observe the extent to which Latin America’s revolutionary icon, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, has been slowly remade through selective citation into a synthesis of these two emotional poles of love and indignation.45

Žižek’s emotional homology between love and politics as bookended by Kant’s admiration of the French Revolution and Mubarak’s resignation after popular revolution draws for us a through-line from the eighteenth-century Age of Revolution to the Occupy movements of the twenty-first. Underwriting this arc, the sentient headless soma—leaderless and guided by feeling—figures as political protagonist on a grand scale in movements that seek democracy and free markets as obverse sides of the same politico-economic structure. Seen in this epistemological light, our notions of first-person plural “oneness,” universal freedom, and well-being take on a discursive value beyond their immediate literal meanings: they epistemically underwrite the multi-century project of democratic capitalism itself. And so regardless of who wields it, affirmative discourse will privilege conditions favorable to the integrity of the headless soma: happiness, vitality, good circulation of capital, positive moral disposition—in short, health and love. Critical discourse will underscore conditions detrimental to the integrity of the headless soma: unhappiness, torpidity, poor or asymmetrical circulation of capital, negative moral disposition—in a word, disease and hate.

Social media—technological networks of communication—are as inextricable from the contemporary avatar of affective epistemicity as were pamphlets and coffee houses of the Age of Revolution. Some months after the Egyptian revolution, a cover of the Economist acknowledged their continuity with a cartoon of wigged and culotted American revolutionaries with bubble captions that fused the revolutionary discourse and media of the two time periods: “Wilt thou be my Visagebook friend?”; “How goeth ye American Spring?”; “I hear Tom Paine’s all a-twitter”; and a news scroll entitled “Wikye-Leakes Latest.”46 Indeed, the role of social media and emotion in shaping political action has garnered considerable corporate, governmental, and academic attention. To wit, in 2014, Cornell researchers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the findings of a highly controversial “emotional contagion” experiment that consisted of covertly manipulating the news feeds of almost seven hundred Facebook users, a study initially announced as having been funded in part by the US Army, though this connection was quickly retracted.47 Speculation continued about the relationship between Facebook and the Pentagon, particularly given that the principal investigator of the Facebook study had been funded in 2009 for research on “Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes” by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative, launched in 2008 to fund academic inquiry into “areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy.”48 Even closer to the question of emotion-driven social media communicativity is the 2014 Minerva Initiative award for another Cornell study, “Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions” (2014, expected), which proposes to evaluate the “critical mass (tipping point) model on … datasets of digital traces of social contagions, which include Twitter posts and conversations around the 2011 Egyptian revolution” (“University-Led Research”). If we lay Facebook’s emotional contagion experiment and the Minerva Initiative’s social contagion research alongside Žižek’s citation of Kant’s commentary on the contagion of revolutionary enthusiasm from over two centuries past, we appreciate a shared language of the communicability of emotion and its privileging as central to the workings of popular politics.

As academics, what will we do with this knowledge? Will we be ontological arbiters of affect without profoundly questioning the epistemological underpinnings of our sense of universal authority on the matter? Will we be activists for affect, privileging non-rationality over the now politically suspect Cartesian rationality of old without interrogating the epistemological impetus for our respective valorizations?49

Coming full circle to the beginning of this essay, I reiterate my concern that we develop the critical language and conceptual framework necessary for the analysis of affect on the epistemological plane. There is certainly an important place for what we might call experiential heuristics—the empiricist teasing out of emotional ontologies on the basis of experience to define what it means to be a sentient living being. There is an equally important place for the definition of a politics of feeling, as distinct from a politics of reasoning. What I suggest in the present intervention is that to engage with affect on either of these planes without considering the epistemological basis for our current cultural interest in and privileging of affective logic and inquiry is tantamount to missing the forest of knowledge construction for the trees of knowledge subsets. Corporations and government are fast researching the workings of affect and developing technologies for their manipulation on a massive scale. In order to comprehend and contest these affective biopolitics, it is of the essence to understand the ways in which they are not only empirical, but also discursive.

Affective epistemicity—the idea of a self-regulating, homeostatic, non-rational flow of well-being in both moral and material terms throughout the headlessly horizontal body politic—is the conceptual framework informing how we view the human experience itself. I argue that the importance we accord to happiness, health, and wealth—in the kaleidoscope of ways that we define these terms, particularly the latter contentious one—as well as the definition of freedom as the universal right to enjoy them all, on the one hand, and, on the other, our denunciation of their lack and deprivation as tragic and even criminal, are discursive movements that take place under the epistemological aegis established by democratic capitalism. Investigating the origins and force of affect as an epistemological cultural structure will help us to comprehend and navigate the premium on affective well-being in contemporary politics. Powers that be assert themselves as purveyors of well-being; critics, in the spirit of Marx and Engels, decry an inverse relationship between ideology and material reality, accusing a reality of ill-being under the false promise of health, happiness, and wealth—”cruel optimism,” in Lauren Berlant’s turn of phrase, as we saw illustrated in the film Carancho.50 Yet even the elaboration of an alternative scheme for the optimization of the homeostatic principle, such as the utopian common that takes shape at the close of the film Blindness as a therapeutic evolution in social structure, privileges this same epistemological model of moral and material headless flow, and stages its realization as a return to truth. To what extent can we reshape democratic capitalism if we are continually staging its epistemological return? Even my own interpellative use of the first-person plural “we” traffics in the same epistemological currency. Be that as it may, I nevertheless maintain the hope that the critical interrogation of the contours we seek to give affect in research and the truth values we assign to affect in our discourse may yet yield an understanding of affective epistemology that proves liberating.

There is little question that Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) is immediately recognizable as an instance of a genre that had become quite important to Hollywood well into the 1950s. It is a Western. It is set in the West in the post-Civil War nineteenth century (probably in New Mexico; Albuquerque is mentioned a couple of times), people ride horses, drink whiskey in saloons, dress in the usual Western clothes and wear six shooters. There are recognizable character types: the saloon woman (i.e., prostitute and/or madame), the gunslinger, the young gun eager to prove himself, an incorrigible, thoroughly evil villain (in a black hat, no less), a vengeful posse (also all in black, as if some horde of ancient furies1 ), and a horrific lynching. The gunslinger is also a recognizable subtype; one who no longer wears his guns and appears to be trying to quit, in the manner of Gregory Peck in Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950), and Gary Cooper in Anthony Mann’s Man of the West (1958).2 There are the crimes we associate with Westerns: the stagecoach hold up, the bank robbery. There is the familiar, final, decisive shootout between two principals. And there is the invocation of elements of the mythic narrative form common in many Westerns.3 That is, “the railroad is coming,” and everyone in the frontier community realizes that this will change everything, creating a situation both of anxiety and opportunity. Usually this event presages a fundamental transition from a situation with weak or no rule of law to a full integration into modern commercial and law-abiding society (with its families, schools, churches, small farmers and shopkeepers), and it is resisted by large landowners and cattlemen, who exist as feudal barons and are unwilling to surrender authority. (The paradigm here could be King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1958). There are similar elements in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962].) This is often the epochal transition that gives the Western at once its mythic universality and its specific inflection in an American experience of the frontier and of its disappearance. In this film, the theme is pictorially invoked, or, to introduce the main theme in the following, rather more “cited” imagistically as a theme than straightforwardly assumed. The presence of the images seems too self-conscious to be “natural.” For instance, over the back of the bar there is a large replica of a railroad engine.

The future, it would seem. Over the entryway to the kitchen (the frame of the opening doorway does not reach the ceiling) there is a replica of a stagecoach.

The present and past, perhaps, but again rather self-consciously displayed, as if primarily decorative. The reference seems to address audience expectations about classic Westerns, foregrounded as such, rather than to permit a Western narrative framework to shape audience expectations.

Moreover, if we start with this last element and work through these familiar elements, virtually every aspect of this traditional framework is present, but “off” in some way, so much so that the excess emotion, elaborate, self-conscious emphasis on costumes, posed and theatrical sets and staging, have seemed to some to cross the line over into camp, or at least near self-parody. At the very least one can say that these major “Westerns” conventions seem, as just noted, more “quoted” or “mentioned” than simply invoked or used, and therein lie issues deeper than genre conventions alone. For example, the railroad is coming, but the work of constructing it is not presented in the usual way, as an opening from the civilized East, but rather as a closing of the West. When the robber gang at the end try to escape (the leader says they are headed for California; that is, they are headed west), they find that construction has temporarily closed the pass in that direction. That construction is presented as a series of spectacular explosions that seal off the direction that at one point in American history seemed ever available–west.4 Moreover, in this film what the railroad is bringing is not so much “the East” in the sense of culture, domesticity, boundaries, the rule of law and so forth, but rather, in the starkest terms, a new social reality built on money, the world of speculation, investment and so the kind of social mobility eagerly embraced by Vienna, the ex-prostitute played by Joan Crawford (how “ex” is not all that clear), a new world where a clever ex-prostitute might quickly become the richest person in town, and a corresponding anxiety among the forces of traditional rectitude so oddly led in this movie by a woman so hysterical, hateful, and blood-thirsty that she seems more like some psychological force of nature than human, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge).

The central social conflict in the film is one between the townspeople, led by Emma and to some extent by a cattleman, John McIvers (Ward Bond), and the saloon owner, Vienna, who, more than anyone in the town, is pro-railroad. Toward the very end of the film, Emma does (finally) invoke the archetypal fear of the coming of the railroad (“they’ll push us out,” bring “farmers, dirt farmers, squatters,” “barbed wire and fence posts”) but by this point it is obvious that this is somewhat pro forma, again, strangely, as if quoted, not meant; “what characters say at some point in a Western like this.” This impression is heightened because the logic of her claim is absurd on the face of it; as if killing Vienna and destroying her saloon will have any effect at all on the massive railroad enterprise inexorably making its way toward the area. And this doesn’t seem any part of her real motivation, which is much more complicated and much darker. For we have seen for nearly two hours that the townspeople have allowed themselves to be led by Emma against Vienna because of Emma’s personal and intense hatred of Vienna (much more on that to come) and because of what appears to be, on the part of everyone else, resentment and envy that Vienna has acted cleverly, far more cleverly than they have, by buying real estate and building her emporium right smack in the path of the coming railroad. This explains the otherwise bizarre totally isolated location of the saloon. She stands to get very rich either if she sells or continues to build in the area that will soon be a depot. (She has, like a modern urban planner, an elaborate mockup of the whole town she envisions coming soon to her doorstep. Our sense of her strength, authority and above all, commercial competence is never challenged in the film.)

So Vienna is only a “saloon owner” strategically; in essence, she is an investor and speculator, and clearly a very good one. (One could say that she gives the old cliché, “a prostitute with a heart of gold,” a whole new meaning.) Soon after we first see her, we find her having dinner with a railroad executive. She is trying to persuade him to invest with her in more local real estate before the railroad arrives and prices escalate. Despite the fact that there is indeed a very great deal of money to be made (when Vienna asks him how much her property will be worth, he responds, “How much is Albuquerq’ worth?”), he has already sensed that there are many in the town who violently object to Vienna, and he clearly does not have the courage for such a fight (courage that Vienna has), and he declines. But what is obvious in the scene is that he genuinely respects Vienna–as a business equal, or even superior–for her acumen and strength. Given the usual treatment of the “saloon woman” the scene is also remarkable for how de-sexualized and professional it all is.5 No flirting, no cajoling, and this even though Vienna has no qualms about, is not embarrassed about, admitting without qualification that she got her information about the railroad’s route from sleeping with the surveyor who planned the route.6 (“We exchanged confidences,” she says; what we would call “insider trading.”)

The “townsfolk,” or the anonymous mass that follows Emma and McIvers around (it includes a well-meaning but, typically for “pre-railroad Westerns,” weak and ineffective marshal)7 also seem responsive to Emma’s nearly psychotic hatred of Vienna’s “loose” virtue. It is obvious that Vienna is a former prostitute and has from many years of plying that trade built up the considerable stake required to buy the land and build the saloon. (Crawford was forty-seven when the movie was made in 1953 and there is no real pretense in the film that she is anything but that age.) This is infuriating enough to Emma and apparently the townsfolk. (Emma says to Vienna, “You’re nothing but a railroad tramp; not fit to live among decent people.”)  But it appears to be especially infuriating that Vienna is not ashamed of her past, does not deny it, and thereby infuriates everyone exponentially; even, as we shall see, her former and perhaps future lover, Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden). The stark and ironic truth of her fundamental claim–that she is no different than they are, or even that she is much better at “what they are” than they are–is what seems so infuriating; what must be repressed, silenced. This is not to say that, finally, bourgeois respectability is not important to Vienna. It certainly is. “Vienna” is likely a pseudonym and already expresses her desire for old world status and standing.8 As Victor Perkins has pointed out, this aspiration is embodied by the elaborate and somewhat out of place chandelier in the saloon, the one Emma intuitively realizes must be destroyed.9 But Vienna clearly wants to buy that standing, on the assumption that money is always the real basis of social status. One could say that Vienna believes in, is the representation of, absolute exchange value (both as a prostitute and as an investor), and when she is posed against the representation of bourgeois moral rectitude (home, school, church, law) in the person of Emma, remarkably, our sympathies are with the honest, unapologetic speculator, not the hypocritical, resentment-fueled townsfolk. They are either self-deceived or hypocritical about their motives, and those real motives are ugly.

The successful saloon woman is not unheard of in Westerns but is not often associated with Vienna’s frankness and her psychological strength, her command of herself.10 But this variation, almost inversion, rather than straightforward invocation of the “railroad arrival” theme and all that it suggests, and the unusual complexity of the psychological motivation of the characters, is only the beginning of what is “off,” what is both Western mythology, and at the same time its citation and inversion. Most obviously, the main character, Vienna, is a woman, and even more unusually, her main opponent is also a woman, Emma. The climactic duel, the final decisive shootout, is theirs. This is hardly the traditional dénouement.11 There were other actresses from the thirties and forties who could credibly play the lead in a Western (Barbara Stanwyck in Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns [1957], for example; or Stanwyck again in Anthony Mann’s The Furies [1950], or perhaps Marlene Dietrich in Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious [1952]), and there are earlier examples (Lillian Gish in Victor Sjöström’s The Wind [1928]), and later (in some ways, Claudia Cardinale in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West [1968]), but none with Crawford’s total self-assertiveness and command,12 and none in such a fundamental, to-the-death struggle with another woman.

Vienna is clearly the heroine of the movie.13 She is wronged but never wrongs, treats her employees with dignity, and unusual equality (if they put in their money she will split evenly with them), and goes to what seems certain death with great bravery and even a kind of hauteur. (This is all so, even though, if we ask a typical “Westerns”-like question–what is all this heroism in the service of?–the clearest answer is simply: profit, her own interest, what she regards, correctly, obviously, as what is rightly hers.) Her former boyfriend, the Dancing Kid (Scott Brady) is often petty, lacks any of Vienna’s gravitas and is childish (the way a child might reason: “if they are going to accuse us of a crime, let’s at least commit the crime and get the money”) and Johnny Guitar, we are told with authority twice by Vienna, remains “gun crazy.” This is apparently a polite term for “seriously disturbed,” given that when he hears Turkey (Ben Cooper), the young gun, demonstrating his shooting prowess, he rushes in wildly (as if stimulated by some Pavlovian response), firing rapidly and, according to Vienna, would have recklessly killed the boy had Vienna not stepped between them.  Later, after she appears to believe he has changed, he offers to pick off a few of the posse, shoot them from ambush, to weaken their will to go on. Disappointed, she notes yet again, that he is “gun crazy.”14

There are very few characters in Hollywood movies, and certainly nothing remotely similar in other Westerns, as over-the-top insane with sexual jealousy and repressed sexuality as McCambridge’s Emma.15 Ray is willing to go right up to the line of absurdity and parody in his treatment of her. She never simply speaks; she rather hysterically rasps virtually every line, cowing the men around her, none of whom really stands up to her. Much of what she actually charges is simply ludicrous. In the first “invasion” of the townsfolk into the saloon, after a stagecoach robbery in which Emma’s brother is killed, when Emma is trying to make a case that it was the Dancing Kid and his gang who committed the crime, she argues that the Kid “was always eyein’ me,” and that he, the Kid, staged the robbery so that he could kill the protective brother, and so “now he thinks he can get me.” She says all this in such a crazy, deluded way that it is impossible to believe that anyone takes it seriously. It is widely and rightly assumed that the Kid has eyes only for Vienna. Indeed the Kid and Vienna clearly think it is funny that Emma has such a complicated fantasy about the Kid going on and that she doesn’t seem to realize it.16 (This is all, of course, before the implications of that fantasy, much of which must also involve a dose of self-hatred, becomes deadly.) The injustice of her attacks on Vienna–there is never a shred of evidence until, by bad luck, misleading evidence at the end–is always obvious, but never noted by anyone. McIver’s announcement that he, as if an all-powerful tyrant, will simply pass a law that will forbid Vienna’s place from opening, is not seriously challenged by anyone except Vienna.17 And so until the very end and the final duel, Emma actually succeeds, comes within seconds of hanging Vienna.

Finally, moving closer to the surface strangeness of the movie, there are the names, the sets, and the music. The first time Johnny Guitar has to tell someone his name, he pauses a beat and almost smiles when he says (again rather quotes, or says in irony quotes) his new surname. (His real name is Johnny Logan, and he is a very famous and deadly gunfighter.)

When he is asked why he does not wear his guns, he again quotes a phrase as if “from a Western,” as if in ironic quotes: “because I’m not the fastest gun west of the Pecos.” (He quotes rather than speaks a line later, too; outside the bank being robbed: “Besides, I’m a stranger here myself.”)18 And a tough guy, macho leader named The Dancing Kid? The women are going to have a fight to the death and the two male counterparts are “of the arts”? There is a kind of sly knowingness between the men about their names, but Johnny really does play the guitar and, lo and behold, the Kid really does dance! In fact, to mock what every intelligent character seems to realize is Emma’s true motivation–hatred of Vienna because the man she, in self-denial, lusts after, prefers Vienna–he demonstrates his dancing talent by dancing with Emma. And she lets him! She does not pull or wrestle herself away, but sweeps across the floor with the Kid for some time, clearly both bothered and thrilled. The two male names in other words are so flamboyantly non-macho that their use seems to ironically cite the Western tradition of nicknames (the Ringo Kid, Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill, the Sundance Kid) only to mock them.

Most of the first thirty-five minutes of the movie take place in the main room of Vienna’s saloon and gambling parlor. The setting is immediately eerie. It is empty and deathly quiet when Johnny enters, even though there are two croupiers and a barman at work, or at least ready to work. And we are never given any reason to believe there are ever any customers other than the Kid and his gang. The employees are hardly welcoming and seem overtly hostile to the newcomer. It is as if Johnny has walked onto the stage of some absurdist drama. (The feeling that we are watching a filmed version of a stage play is hard to avoid when the scene is either of the two interiors, the saloon and the hideout. This again contributes to the feeling of a certain staginess, a self-consciousness about conventions, in the film’s representational style. Movies can easily tolerate this “double vision,” wherein we see at the same time the same object as both “Nicholas Ray’s set” and “Vienna’s saloon,” but in this film, the former is more pronounced than usual.) The saloon has been built into an ochre rock formation and that rock has been left exposed at the rear of the saloon. This is likely some indication of Vienna’s tenacity; her insistence that she is anchored to that spot and is not going anywhere.19 And there is that elaborate chandelier and Vienna’s piano, both of which will play an important role later. The set is also huge, much larger than conventional movie portrayals of a saloon. The effect of this is rather more opera than theater, especially since so many different sorts of elements of the mise-en-scène are also so “outsized” and flamboyant. This goes for the costumes too, which are in bold, even extravagant, bright colors. The costume changes for Vienna are the most elaborate and dramatically important. She goes from a conventionally mannish black-shirted pants outfit, complete with six-shooter (when defending herself from the townsfolk),

to a red, alluring evening outfit (the old Vienna perhaps, in her late-night and decisive conversation with Johnny),

to a kind of neutral grey and brown utilitarian outfit (during a period when a normal life with Johnny seemed fleetingly possible),

to that famous spectacular white dress, a final and self-consciously ironic (virginal) gesture.20

It is also her final insistence that not only was she a prostitute, but that there was nothing, nothing at all wrong in having been one. In moral terms, her conscience is clear; that is, absolutely clear, pure, white as the driven snow. All these codes seem so explicit that the film’s romantic and ironic expressivism often dominates any traditional realism.

And as if all this weren’t enough exaggeration, irony, self-reference, and deliberate theatricality, there is a striking moment in the opening scene in the saloon that is clearly intended to upset normal expectations and to encourage the “double vision” just mentioned.  After witnessing the stagecoach robbery in which Emma’s brother is killed (Johnny is too far away to identify anyone21), Johnny rides up to Vienna’s (he has been sent for by her after an absence of five years) in a violent dust storm.  It is an appropriate opening image for the emotional turmoil, confusion, and unclarity we will see between the two romantic leads. But it prompts Vienna to tell Sam, one of her employees, to light a lantern and hang it outside so that potential customers can see their way to the saloon. (Given the violence of the storm and the thickness of the dust, this is pretty useless, but it is a mark of Vienna’s optimism, for all her hard-headedness and world-weariness.) Ray has Sam walk directly toward the camera and complain about working for a woman, all while looking directly at the camera; that is, at the viewer, violating the first rule of movie acting and destroying any illusion of unobserved observers.22 Ray then, in effect, “corrects” this by showing us that it was a point of view shot, that Sam was walking towards and speaking to Tom (John Carradine),23 Vienna’s trusted kitchen employee.

But the damage has been done, and at the very least the problem of the film’s realism has been raised right at the outset.  I would say that here again the effect is that the movie itself, as a “Western,” has been attended to as such, cited, quoted, mentioned, thematized, not allowed to simply play out conventionally and unproblematically.

Victor Young’s music often makes use of the “Johnny Guitar” theme, the song we only hear finally sung with lyrics by Peggy Lee over the closing scene. When that refrain is not playing the music is as “overdone” as much else in the movie, “cuing” our responses too obviously, always opting for lush when spare would have been just as, if not more, effective.24 But the Johnny Guitar theme and the romantic and sometimes melancholic mood set by the music is a reminder that the conflict between Emma and Vienna is only one aspect of the movie’s focus. The other is a love story, or a love that, as Vienna says, “burned up” and was left in “ashes.”25 And that element of the plot, a melodrama inside a Western, functions itself like some resistance to the Western framework, forcing it into near parodic self-reference.

Near to parody, but it never crosses the line. Bazin is right when he notes that “not once does Ray adopt a condescending or paternalist attitude toward his film. He may have fun with it, but he is not making fun of it.”26 So what is he doing? Why make a Western that works against simply being a Western, that exposes a kind of conflict between content and form, that upsets the “balance” that Perkins has claimed is an ideal in a film, between “what is shown and the way of showing”?27

Genre-Bending

There is no question that our expectations and interpretive assumptions are mainly shaped by the film’s surface conformity to the Western genre conventions. But not exclusively so. The wise-cracking, laconic Johnny Guitar character, unable to free himself from Vienna, and the gambling theme, invoke film noir conventions.28 The sets and costumes and choral movements of the posse suggest the conventions of a movie musical.29 But the excess, even hysterical emotional expressivism also suggests melodrama, a most unusual combination with presumably “masculinst” Westerns. There is no space here to sketch even a crude view about the genre conventions of film melodrama. I will just assume that it is safe to say that there are many types, and that besides, say, Cavell’s “melodrama of the unknown woman,”30 there is at least something like the “melodrama of the wronged, suffering, unjustly judged woman,” known or unknown, and that what such a fate (the quality of being wronged) mostly prevents (in these films, at any rate) is the realization of the possibility of love, the very state often believed to count as some sort of redemption and overcoming of such fate, a second chance or a new beginning, the American hope. The emotional register of the suffering and the hope is intense in melodramas, “boosted” by music and gesture, sometimes said to be exaggerated, even as noted, bordering on camp.31 Another way to say this is that often lovers in melodramas struggle against what appears to be the very bad hands they have been dealt by fate, a fate they can defeat if they can become and remain lovers, despite it all. In this typically melodramatic case: Can a woman once a prostitute ever be anything other than an “ex-prostitute”? Can a man who killed other men be anything more than “a killer” who now (or at least recently) no longer kills? Can each forgive the other for their pasts? Under what conditions? Only if a killer can truly become an ex-killer? A prostitute an ex-prostitute? Finally, melodramas, especially Ray’s romantic (In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground) or familial melodramas (Bigger than Life) portray characters so profoundly invested in their love, that no real relationship could ever “contain” it. There is “excess” emotional turmoil everywhere, destabilizing, undermining, enraging.

Their initial banter makes clear that this is no joyous reunion, even though Vienna has sent for him, and Johnny has come at her bidding. They both initially pretend, perhaps also to themselves, that it is a just a business relationship. But a deep hostility and so a deep emotional connection, is apparent immediately. They clearly each feel betrayed by the other,32 but the fact that they are together again in itself also indicates some hope for a new start, even though neither is willing to admit that hope to the other. In a movie where almost every other line is dripping with irony, the first unmistakable indication of the tonality Ray wants to create between the two is a line of Vienna’s. Johnny is to play something, and asks for requests. She tells him, with a clear trace of bitterness, that whatever he plays, “just put a lot of love in it.” She obviously means: “you’re so good at pretending to love, at ‘performing’ love, and then betraying, leaving.” But of course she also means, as is often the case with irony, exactly what she says: please do put a lot of love in it, return to loving me. What the music helps her recall is ultimately too intense for her to maintain her ironic stance, and she asks him to stop.  (Perhaps the ultimate ironic line in the film occurs after the villain Bart [Ernest Borgnine] kills Corey [Royal Dano], brutally stabbing him in the back, and then says simply and self-righteously, “Some people just don’t listen.”) In a later conversation, Johnny reveals that he had had some hope of a reunion, but he is so clumsy and maladroit in expressing himself that he succeeds only in infuriating Vienna. He says, “A man’s gotta stop somewhere; this is as good a place as any.” A “touching” proposal, Vienna responds; and, yet again the irony: “I’m overwhelmed.”

But the heart of the (noirish) melodrama plot–ex-lovers who have been burned badly but cannot help wanting to re-ignite the flame, however dangerous–is revealed in an extraordinary late-night scene in the saloon. Johnny cannot sleep and has been drinking. Vienna clearly cannot sleep either and comes downstairs in her out-of-the-past scarlet evening dress (or negligée?) get-up. Things don’t start off well. Johnny gets right to the point that he cannot get over, asking bluntly: “How many men have you forgotten?” The obvious absurdity of the question (it’s like asking a crowd: how many people are not here? one can’t remember a number if one has forgotten the men) is some indication that there is no resolution, no reassuring answer, for the problem Johnny has. Vienna has slept with a lot of men. And she responds, “As many women as you remembered.” That is, you are no innocent and, perhaps she means, at least I have forgotten those men; they were not important. But then Johnny asks her to tell him something nice. “Lie to me” he requests and she does. He gives her lines to say and she robotically repeats them, in effect negating them, blocking their pragmatic force, by the way she says them. She says them but clearly does not mean what she says; she in effect expresses the opposite of what is said. Or at least performs this negation. At some level she probably does mean them.

“All these years I’ve waited.”
“I would have died if you hadn’t come back.”
“I still love you like you love me.”

So a theatrical display in a film full of theater, posturing, and ironic reversals; taking back with one hand what is given with the other.33 Here Vienna enacts some of the pathos of an ironic stance; she speaks only in quotations (Johnny’s), cannot be “in” the lines herself. This seems another indication that there is nothing in their attempts at mutual explanation and exculpation that will be of any use in overcoming their impasse; certainly not mere words said now. Perhaps they will all sound like someone else’s words, quotations. Johnny bolted when Vienna suggested settling down and remains “gun crazy”; she did not quietly wait for him to return, but used her talents to build a budding empire, making clear that she did not need him, could live without him. (There is no question of what she had to do to acquire the necessary capital. She tries to tell Johnny what “every board, every plank, every beam” in the place cost her in dignity and self-respect, but Johnny doesn’t want to hear.) Neither of these facts can be changed or explained away.

But in an impulsive moment, they briefly indulge the fantasy that the past and the doubts it creates can simply be willed away, willfully forgotten. Johnny asks her to imagine it is her wedding day; she breaks down and admits she has been carrying a torch for him; they embrace and the strings swell, the Johnny Guitar theme washes over them and us.

Events unfold very quickly from this point on. They are inadvertently caught up in the Kid’s bank robbery so that suspicion is cast on them and they have to escape the posse. This is when Johnny makes his proposal to pick off a few posse members and Vienna knows that he will always be “gun crazy.” They separate; she tells him that it was a mistake to have sent for him; he should stop by and pick up his pay.

The posse arrives at Vienna’s. Emma and McIvers trick Turkey into falsely implicating, betraying, Vienna. Emma shoots down the chandelier with a shotgun and Vienna’s saloon burns in a spectacular fire.

They hang Turkey.34 They are about to hang Vienna. Johnny has not abandoned Vienna, but has hidden and climbed to the top of the hanging tree and cuts Vienna loose just as Emma (who else?) whacks the horse carrying Vienna in the hanging noose. They escape through a mineshaft and make their way to the Kid’s lair, where the posse also tracks them. There is a final shootout between Vienna and Emma. Emma shoots the Kid between the eyes as he calls out Vienna’s name and is then herself shot and killed by Vienna, who is wounded. She and Johnny walk through the waterfall that hides the lair and happily embrace. This is when we finally hear the lyrics for the Johnny Guitar theme, sung in a wistful, melancholic tone by Peggy Lee.

Whether you go, whether you stay,
I love you.
What if you’re cruel, you can be kind,
I know.
There was never a man like my Johnny,
Like the one they call Johnny Guitar.

The contrast is striking. This uncertainty (“whether you go or whether you stay”) and melancholy (“you can be cruel”) stands in counterpoint to what looks like a Hollywood happy ending, the embrace. But of course, nothing has changed. Vienna’s last assessment of their relationship, that Johnny was still gun crazy and that it was a mistake to have sent for him, is no doubt still true. Vienna had said that she would not kill to protect what she has, and perhaps she has learned otherwise and so now accepts the need for a bit of gun craziness, but that is not discussed. Perhaps, with those lyrics, all one can conclude is that the status of their relationship remains highly uncertain.

Counterpoint

Let us say that there are two senses of “not meaning what one says,” the traditional understanding of irony. There is a knowing form, and this is predominant in all the cracking wise in the film. Vienna’s “I’m overwhelmed” in reaction to Johnny’s “proposal” is typical, as are her mere recitations of the lines Johnny feeds her. There is also an unknowing form. We might say that someone ironically reveals (even, in some very complicated way, intends to reveal) the opposite of what they deliberately or consciously intend to reveal by what they say.35

Emma says that the Kid is always eyeing her, but that is not what she “really means.” Unbeknownst to her, unconsciously or in self-deceit, she really means she is always eyeing him, lusts after him. (What she really means to say when she says to Vienna, “That’s big talk for a little gun” is anyone’s guess.) The townsfolk say that their motives in attacking Vienna are moral considerations, but what they really mean to do is, unknowingly but effectively, strike out against the new world of money, speculation and social mobility that she represents; or, they partly mean to protect themselves from their own desires, which Vienna excites; or, simply they want the property Vienna has cleverly secured, they are acting out of envy. As we have seen, sometimes a single statement can embody both forms, as when Vienna says, “Put a little love in it,” knowingly not meaning that, meaning to say he has no love to give, and yet unknowingly meaning the request literally. (Admittedly, the “unknowing” side of this is extremely controversial in philosophy. There are many who will say that they cannot understand what the claim even means. In this limited context, I can only suggest that we would be restricting our interpretive capacity in an extreme way if we must believe either that Emma means exactly what she says, or that she knows perfectly well what she really means, but is simply a hypocrite.) In the melodrama plot this is all intensified by what is clearly a great reservoir of hate and resentment motivating what the two principals say, even as feelings of love and aspirations for reunion also motivate what they say and do, a kind of psychological complexity that is something of a trademark for Ray’s films. This can all make even a single small phrase unusually complicated. When Johnny and Vienna are arguing and Johnny returns to his absurd “why didn’t you wait for me?” theme and notes that between the time they separated and now, there must have been other men, Vienna coyly smiles, almost coquettishly, and says, “enough.” What did she mean to communicate by saying that in that way? That she was proud of the fact? Inadvertently revealing that she enjoys having many lovers? Is she boasting that there were enough (scores, hundreds) to pay for her saloon?  Is she simply defiant in the face of his accusations? Unconcerned about his reaction? All of the above?

At any rate, this is often the situation–unknowingness, misunderstanding, missed signals, honest expression but in a state of self-deceit–that is typical of intense melodramas.36 What I want to conclude by noting is that it is all not typical of conventional Westerns, and that this helps explain why the Western framework in such a situation cannot “mean what it says,” why the expectations and meaning intended by narrating within such a frame cannot but point instead to those expectations and to that framework, rather than that the frame just creates the expectations or orders the plot.

There are of course Westerns with love stories at their center. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance concerns a love triangle.  There is also a triangle in High Noon and Shane and even in another very fine “quasi-Western,” I suppose we have to say, also directed by Ray, The Lusty Men (1952). But the meaning of the love stories within the Westerns is intertwined with the mythic elements of the plot and are bereft of either sort of irony. When Hattie chooses the educated Ranse over the small rancher Tom in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, there is no emotionally charged or as we say “melodramatic” scene (in fact the choice happens offstage), and there is no suggestion of complicated mixed motives or self-deceit. She probably, much later, considered it a mistake, or at least has some regrets, but she knew she was also choosing a way of life–simple literacy for one thing–but also culture, travel, sophisticated politics, and our appreciation of what that sacrifice of Tom cost her could not be as keen as it is if the emotional undercurrents were as complicated as they are in Johnny Guitar.

It would be far too simple to say by contrast that in these epic Westerns people say what they mean and mean what they say, but it is true that there is usually not this melodramatic potential for misunderstanding, and the general drift of such a characterization would not be wrong. And in that context, the context of myth at both a universal and historical level, this is not a limitation. The elemental psychological issues raised–love of one’s own, fear of death, pride, vengeance–are profoundly important and quite complicated. But it is another sort of complication that confronts the Western’s characters, having mostly to do with the taming, education, direction of the political passions, and not with, let us say, first of all, interpretation, the problem of meaning. When the latter becomes central, the Western framework cannot contain them and the framework looks ironic.

This means that there is a large issue to discuss here, too large for this context. Put it this way: The Western at its best is a classical narrative framework, in league with the epic, and often with the tragic (The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Gunfighter, Shane).  In melodrama, neither the inevitable “objective” conflicts in what social roles require, nor the subjective crises stemming from having to determine what to do (the sources of ancient and modern tragedy), propels the action. And it is because no great principles are at stake, are credible (given, perhaps, what we “now” believe about psychological motivation), that love and being loved assume the role of such principles of significance, a role they cannot bear, producing the hysteria and excess of melodrama.

This is partly why, when, in Johnny Guitar, someone voices what would be, in a typical Western, a typical motivation relevant to the epic context, we notice the framework, our attention is directed to the narrative pattern rather than carried along by the narration, because we have seen enough to know that it “can’t be that simple.” As noted, a paradigmatic instance of this is when Emma invoked finally the “cattlemen-farmer” archetypal conflict as a reason for her hostility to Vienna and all that she represents.

It is as if Ray had set down, perhaps as a kind of experiment, inside a classic Western setting, the much later historical world of Sirk, or even the world of Dix and Laurel from In a Lonely Place (1950), and then let us watch the grating, anomalous implications roll out.37 (Ray does just about everything he can to say: this may be a Western movie but these are not Western characters. For example, Corey, one of the Kid’s band, is several times shown reading a book; not a common occupation in Westerns.) Somebody in some Western might be able to say, “All a man needs is just a smoke and a cup of coffee,” but among these ironists, the quotation marks are almost visible.38 The seriousness and the sheer “adultness,” one might say, of Vienna’s defense of herself to Johnny (and her withering destruction, in her “if a woman just slips once” speech, of the male double-standard on which many Western “virtues” were built) and the sophistication of her analysis of where they are fit uneasily into the archetypal purposes of the classical Western, and so make that uneasiness visible and the Western frame more cited than used, seem like a narrative structure and set of problems no longer relevant to subjects of this level of self-consciousness. And even more strikingly the characters seem to know this; this seems to be the meaning of their air of wise-guy knowingness, at least on the part of Vienna, the Kid and Johnny, none of whom ever met a wisecrack they didn’t like. One can quite plausibly imagine Vienna simply saying, “Oh for God’s sake, Emma. Stop with all this public morals, collusion with the Kid in crime, hooray for bourgeois domesticity, the railroad will destroy our traditional way of life crap. You want to kill me because the Kid prefers me to you and you hate yourself for desiring him.” (She actually does say something close to this.) Or, more imaginatively, one can picture the Kid saying to his colleagues, “Well, we look and talk like an outlaw band; you’ve all seen Westerns. We must be an outlaw band. Let’s finally act like it.”

A dominant “knowing irony” can suggest the kind of uncertainty, or reluctance to take any side in some important dispute, which is inconsistent with the high seriousness and mythic ambition of great Westerns. In the crisis situations portrayed in Westerns, indulge such an irony and you begin to sound like a Lee Marvin character, a cynic. The great problem in great Westerns is the possibility of and the nature of and especially the cost of civilized life itself. Such a film cannot do everything and so cannot portray as well the problems that arise at a much more intimate and self-consciousness level, a level not tied to the basic problem of safety from decline into the state of nature.  Those problems include the “unknowing irony” that make stable romantic relations so highly individualized and thus ungeneralizable and the socio-political issues much harder to manage. The relationship between Johnny and Vienna doesn’t mean anything of some mythic importance in the way the relation between Hattie and Ranse in Liberty Valance does, or between Marshal Kane and his wife, Amy, in High Noon, or between Shane and Marian in Shane, or between Dan Evans and Emmy in Delmer Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma (1957) or between Ben Stride and Annie in Budd Boetticher’s Seven Men from Now (1956).

If this is so then it means that the melodramatic and romantic world of a Nicholas Ray film serves rather as a counterpoint to the assumptions and ends of a traditional Western, not an instance of them, even though it is formally presented that way. It is in this sense that a Western, as treated by Ray, cannot mean what it says, must become, as a mere form, visible and so mannered or perhaps “baroque,” a form that cannot contain the melodrama “within” it.39

But if this is the right way to begin to understand the ironic dialogue, the studied self-consciousness of the Kid and Johnny and Vienna, the melodramatically exaggerated sets, costumes, and music, the occasional flirtation with self-parody, the inversions of character types, the intense hate-love nature of the central love story, and the appeal to psychological motivation like repressed sexuality,40 then it all obviously returns us to the most important and difficult question posed in the first section above. Why would Nicholas Ray make a Western that cannot be what it is without a great deal of irony, given what he asks it to contain? Why bring that issue, the lack of fit between form and content, so much to the foreground?

Whatever answer there is to this question, it is present in the film only by implication, and drawing out such implications is difficult. We can though, notice what is not present, what is conspicuously absent, in Johnny Guitar.  The great epic Westerns all have some ethical and often a straightforwardly political dimension. The central question usually concerns some dimension of the problem of justice, whether as a question about the relation between justice and vengeance, or the legitimacy of some act of violence, about the relation between violence and the rule of law, or about the conquest and near-extermination of native peoples, or about the injustice of some form of historical memory, or about the psychological costs of the founding of a civil order in a context where it was absent. As we have been noting, by and large this sort of framework of meaning is absent or present only ironically in Johnny Guitar.  I have said that the love affair between Johnny and Vienna doesn’t mean anything epic or mythic, carries no larger significance. But one could also say that the central events in the other plot, the attacks on Vienna by Emma, McIvers and the townsfolk, do not draw our attention to any social or political issue larger than anxiety about social change. (The exception is to the clear reference to the McCarthy witch hunts and so to forced confessions, self-serving, erroneous accusations, and mob behavior. But even that already suggests a context of corrupt or failed politics; that is, a hypocritical, posed politics, behind which there is only self-aggrandizement, self-interest and venality. McCarthy’s and Nixon’s speeches were both phony, and unknowingly, ironically self-revealing. The framework of national security politics contained the reality of hysteria and power-lust.)

Moreover, there is nothing unusual in Westerns about the portrayal of “ordinary citizens” as easily cowed, acting like a mob. High Noon comes to mind immediately. But that crowd expressed its timidity by inaction; this one by becoming a lynch mob. What, though, is the great issue animating their intense hatred of Vienna? That she is in league with the Dancing Kid and his group? This just on the basis of the fact that they drink at her place on Fridays? That she is not respectable? For that matter, what is McIvers’s motivation? Before he becomes part of the group accusing Vienna of complicity with the stagecoach robbery, he seems to have already formed some resolve to join with Emma and get rid of Vienna. (McIvers and Emma are said to be the two largest land owners in town and to have the most cattle.) The only possible explanation is the one Vienna gives: that he cannot stand for her to make such a profit and so eventually enjoy such influence in the post-railroad town.41 But that is venal, petty; that is, private (which doesn’t, of course, mean it isn’t true), and when joined with Emma’s bizarre sexual and violent fantasies, and the fact that there is no character in the film who defends any principle higher or more complicated than individual entitlement, one could venture the guess that the nearly explicit inappropriateness of the Western’s frame appears motivated by a general skepticism about that political dimension of human life in general, a skepticism that is in this film most often expressed by irony. If this is so, one might venture far out onto a thin limb, and suggest that this skepticism touches on the problematic link between the political psychology required by capitalism and that required by liberal democracy. The latter requires some commitment to a common good; some allegiance to the community that is more than merely strategic. The questions about justice noted above as typical of classical Westerns are not in play if we restrict the basic question of the political bond to “You can get yours if I can get mine.” Yet the “political” rhetoric of “the town,” of Emma and McIver, is mere appearance; the motivational reality is darker or transparently self-serving. The former, a speculative market economy, requires competitive individualism, often a ruthless form that sets everyone off against the other and foments paranoia, justifiably so in Vienna’s case. I don’t mean that Ray’s film means to raise this issue as a question, but rather that the “Western’s” ironic status in the film is an indication that he thinks the issue is settled. Vienna’s shrewdness is the future; the ostensibly countering political rhetoric is phony, an excuse for the prosecution of private interests. Thus Johnny’s extraordinarily unusual (for a Western) cynicism and cold indifference to the conflicts around him. To him, Vienna is a mercenary who will do anything for status and money (though he still loves her, after his fashion); the townsfolk are hypocrites, and the Dancing Kid’s gang are children, or the Western equivalent of unserious fraternity boys.

What we have instead is typical of Ray’s much more psychologically than politically complex films; that is, we have a great investiture of importance in love and being loved as the central human problem,42 or, we should probably say, we have what has become the central and most difficult human problem, since the Western is now noticeably of historical rather than thematic significance.  This is so even though Ray was certainly aware, as few directors ever were or are, of the nearly certain impossibility of such redemption. And yet this does not mean that the film should be characterized as another of the more “psychological” Westerns, such as those by Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher. It is fair to say that those Westerns explore more self-consciously the psychological costs of the frontier-town transition or the legal-extra-legal violence problem, than the “objective” problem itself. But the Western framework itself is secure, just given a different, more-psychological-than-epic inflection. A question like, “What really is the difference between a sheriff and a bounty hunter, if any?” might be explored by asking “What does it mean for this individual (the Jimmy Stewart character in Mann’s Westerns) to face that challenge?” But it is still the classical question at issue.  We are still within the generic language and concerns of the Western.

There is one more element that connects the love story melodrama with the “Western” plot. Put simply, both raise the question of the possibility of “new beginnings,” sort of escape from, or reconciliation with, the past. As in many epic Westerns, the question is whether a “second founding” for the country, after the hatred and brutality of the Civil War, is possible; in this as in other films, whether the re-founding of a modern commercial republic is possible in the shadow of that hatred and brutality, in a context of virtual lawlessness. The Vienna-Johnny relationship poses at a personal and psychological level a similar sort of question about a new beginning, shadowed by the bitterness of their break-up. Vienna has “become” an entrepreneur and insists on being so treated, and for all of Johnny’s persistent “gun craziness,” he has, after all, changed his name, trying for a new identity, his guns are in his saddlebags, and he carries a guitar instead. The surface image at the end–the purification by water, or the waters of forgetfulness–suggests that they have succeeded. But, one final time, we cannot escape the irony of the embrace. Vienna had thought once before that Johnny was over his “gun craziness” and had been disappointed, likely will be again, perhaps the same sort of disappointment the “gun crazy” country seems to experience regularly in trying to hold together its fragile union.

On reflection, it’s possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie. Both dissolve political economy and social relations into individual quests and interpersonal transactions and thus effectively sanitize, respectively, slavery and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing them. The problem is not so much that each film invents cartoonish fictions; it’s that the point of the cartoons is to take the place of the actual relations of exploitation that anchored the regime it depicts. In The Help the buffoonishly bigoted housewife, Hilly, obsessively pushes a pet bill that would require employers of black domestic servants to provide separate, Jim Crow toilets for them; in Django Unchained the sensibility of 1970s blaxploitation imagines “comfort girls” and “Mandingo fighters” as representative slave job descriptions. It’s as if Jim Crow had nothing to do with cheap labor and slavery had nothing to do with making slave owners rich. And the point here is not just that they get the past wrong—it’s that the particular way they get it wrong enables them to get the present just as wrong and so their politics are as misbegotten as their history.

Thus, for example, it’s only the dehistoricization that makes each film’s entirely neoliberal (they could have been scripted by Oprah) happy ending possible. The Help ends with Skeeter and the black lead, the maid Aibileen, embarking joyfully on the new, excitingly uncharted paths their book—an account of the master-servant relationship told from the perspective of the servants—has opened for them. But dehistoricization makes it possible not to notice the great distance between those paths and their likely trajectories. For Skeeter the book from which the film takes its name opens a career in the fast track of the journalism and publishing industry. Aibileen’s new path was forced upon her because the book got her fired from her intrinsically precarious job, more at-whim than at-will, in one of the few areas of employment available to working-class black women in the segregationist South—the precise likelihood that had made her and other maids initially reluctant to warm to Skeeter’s project. Yet Aibileen smiles and strides ever more confidently as she walks home because she has found and articulated her voice.

The implication is that having been fired, rather than portending deeper poverty and economic insecurity, was a moment of liberation; Aibileen, armed with the confidence and self-knowledge conferred by knowing her voice, was now free to venture out into a world of unlimited opportunity and promise.  This, of course, is pure neoliberal bullshit, of the same variety that permits the odious Michelle Rhee to assert with a straight face that teachers’ defined-benefit pensions deny them “choice” and thereby undermine the quality of public education. But who knows? Perhaps Skeeter brought with her from the 2000s an NGO to arrange microcredit that would enable Aibileen to start up a culturally authentic pie-making venture or a day spa for harried and stressed domestic servants. In the Jackson, Mississippi of 1963, no such options would exist for Aibileen. Instead, she most likely would be blackballed and unable to find a comparable menial job and forced to toil under even more undesirable conditions.

Django Unchained ends with the hero and his lady fair riding happily off into the sunset after he has vanquished evil slave owners and their henchmen and henchwomen. Django and Broomhilda—whose name is spelled like that of the 1970s comic strip character, not the figure in Norse mythology, presumably a pointless Tarantino inside joke—are free. However, their freedom was not won by his prodigious bloodletting; it was obtained within the legal framework that accepted and regulated property rights in slaves.  Each had been purchased and manumitted by the German bounty hunter who, as others have noted, is the only character in the film to condemn slavery as an institution.

Django is no insurrectionist. His singular focus from beginning to end is on reclaiming his wife from her slave master. Presumably, we are to understand this solipsism as indicative of the depth and intensity of his love, probably also as homage to the borderline sociopathic style of the spaghetti western/blaxploitation hero. Regardless, Django’s quest is entirely individualist; he never intends to challenge slavery and never does. Indeed, for the purpose of buttressing the credibility of their ruse, he even countermands his bounty hunter partner’s attempt to save—through purchase, of course—a recalcitrant “Mandingo fighter” from being ripped apart by dogs.  He is essentially indifferent to the handful of slaves who are freed as incidental byproducts of his actions. The happy ending is that he and Broomhilda ride off together and free in a slavocracy that is not a whit less secure at the moment of celebratory resolution than it was when Django set out on his mission of retrieval and revenge.

In both films the bogus happy endings are possible only because they characterize their respective regimes of racial hierarchy in the superficial terms of interpersonal transactions. In The Help segregationism’s evil was small-minded bigotry and lack of sensitivity; it was more like bad manners than oppression. In Tarantino’s vision, slavery’s definitive injustice was its gratuitous and sadistic brutalization and sexualized degradation. Malevolent, ludicrously arrogant whites owned slaves most conspicuously to degrade and torture them. Apart from serving a formal dinner in a plantation house—and Tarantino, the Chance the Gardener of American filmmakers (and Best Original Screenplay? Really?) seems to draw his images of plantation life from Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, as well as old Warner Brothers cartoons—and the Mandingo fighters and comfort girls, Tarantino’s slaves do no actual work at all; they’re present only to be brutalized. In fact, the cavalier sadism with which owners and traders treat them belies the fact that slaves were, first and foremost, capital investments. It’s not for nothing that New Orleans has a monument to the estimated  20,000-30,000 antebellum Irish immigrants who died constructing the New Basin Canal; slave labor was too valuable for such lethal work.

The Help trivializes Jim Crow by reducing it to its most superficial features and irrational extremes. The master-servant nexus was, and is, a labor relation. And the problem of labor relations particular to the segregationist regime wasn’t employers’ bigoted lack of respect or failure to hear the voices of the domestic servants, or even benighted refusal to recognize their equal humanity. It was that the labor relation was structured within and sustained by a political and institutional order that severely impinged on, when it didn’t altogether deny, black citizens’ avenues for pursuit of grievances and standing before the law. The crucial lynchpin of that order was neither myopia nor malevolence; it was suppression of black citizens’ capacities for direct participation in civic and political life, with racial disfranchisement and the constant threat of terror intrinsic to substantive denial of equal protection and due process before the law as its principal mechanisms. And the point of the regime wasn’t racial hatred or enforced disregard; its roots lay in the much more prosaic concern of dominant elites to maintain their political and economic hegemony by suppressing potential opposition and in the linked ideal of maintaining access to a labor force with no options but to accept employment on whatever terms employers offered.  (Those who liked The Help or found it moving should watch The Long Walk Home, a 1990 film set in Montgomery, Alabama, around the bus boycott. I suspect that’s the film you thought you were watching when you saw The Help.)

Django Unchained trivializes slavery by reducing it to its most barbaric and lurid excesses. Slavery also was fundamentally a labor relation. It was a form of forced labor regulated—systematized, enforced and sustained—through a political and institutional order that specified it as a civil relationship granting owners absolute control over the life, liberty, and fortunes of others defined as eligible for enslavement, including most of all control of the conditions of their labor and appropriation of its product. Historian Kenneth M. Stampp quotes a slaveholder’s succinct explanation: “‘For what purpose does the master hold the servant?’ asked an ante-bellum Southerner. ‘Is it not that by his labor, he, the master, may accumulate wealth?’”1

That absolute control permitted horrible, unthinkable brutality, to be sure, but perpetrating such brutality was neither the point of slavery nor its essential injustice. The master-slave relationship could, and did, exist without brutality, and certainly without sadism and sexual degradation. In Tarantino’s depiction, however, it is not clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of brutality would be objectionable. It does not diminish the historical injustice and horror of slavery to note that it was not the product of sui generis, transcendent Evil but a terminus on a continuum of bound labor that was more norm than exception in the Anglo-American world until well into the eighteenth century, if not later. As legal historian Robert Steinfeld points out, it is not so much slavery, but the emergence of the notion of free labor—as the absolute control of a worker over her person—that is the historical anomaly that needs to be explained.2 Django Unchained sanitizes the essential injustice of slavery by not problematizing it and by focusing instead on the extremes of brutality and degradation it permitted, to the extent of making some of them up, just as does The Help regarding Jim Crow.

The Help could not imagine a more honest and complex view of segregationist Mississippi partly because it uses the period ultimately as a prop for human interest cliché, and Django Unchained’s absurdly ahistorical view of plantation slavery is only backdrop for the merger of spaghetti western and blaxploitation hero movie.  Neither film is really about the period in which it is set. Film critic Manohla Dargis, reflecting a decade ago on what she saw as a growing Hollywood penchant for period films, observed that such films are typically “stripped of politics and historical fact…and instead will find meaning in appealing to seemingly timeless ideals and stirring scenes of love, valor and compassion” and that “the Hollywood professionals who embrace accuracy most enthusiastically nowadays are costume designers.”3 That observation applies to both these films, although in Django concern with historically accurate representation of material culture applies only to the costumes and props of the 1970s film genres Tarantino wants to recall.

To make sense of how Django Unchained has received so much warmer a reception among black and leftoid commentators than did The Help, it is useful to recall Margaret Thatcher’s 1981 dictum that “economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.”4 Simply put, she and her element have won. Few observers—among opponents and boosters alike—have noted how deeply and thoroughly both films are embedded in the practical ontology of neoliberalism, the complex of unarticulated assumptions and unexamined first premises that provide its common sense, its lifeworld.

Objection to The Help has been largely of the shooting fish in a barrel variety: complaints about the film’s paternalistic treatment of the maids, which generally have boiled down to an objection that the master-servant relation is thematized at all, as well as the standard, predictable litany of anti-racist charges about whites speaking for blacks, the film’s inattentiveness to the fact that at that time in Mississippi black people were busily engaged in liberating themselves, etc. An illustration of this tendency that conveniently refers to several other variants of it is Akiba Solomon, “Why I’m Just Saying No to ‘The Help’ and Its Historical Whitewash” in Color Lines, August 10, 2011, available at: http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/08/why_im_just_saying_no_to_the_help.html.

Defenses of Django Unchained pivot on claims about the social significance of the narrative of a black hero. One node of this argument emphasizes the need to validate a history of autonomous black agency and “resistance” as a politico-existential desideratum. It accommodates a view that stresses the importance of recognition of rebellious or militant individuals and revolts in black American history. Another centers on a notion that exposure to fictional black heroes can inculcate the sense of personal efficacy necessary to overcome the psychological effects of inequality and to facilitate upward mobility and may undermine some whites’ negative stereotypes about black people. In either register assignment of social or political importance to depictions of black heroes rests on presumptions about the nexus of mass cultural representation, social commentary, and racial justice that are more significant politically than the controversy about the film itself.

In both versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in psychological terms. Injustice appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due recognition, and the remedies proposed—which are all about images projected and the distribution of jobs associated with their projection—look a lot like self-esteem engineering. Moreover, nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of neoliberal ideological hegemony than the idea that the mass culture industry and its representational practices constitute a meaningful terrain for struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is possible to entertain that view seriously only by ignoring the fact that the production and consumption of mass culture is thoroughly embedded in capitalist material and ideological imperatives.

That, incidentally, is why I prefer the usage “mass culture” to describe this industry and its products and processes, although I recognize that it may seem archaic to some readers. The mass culture v. popular culture debate dates at least from the 1950s and has continued with occasional crescendos ever since.5 For two decades or more, instructively in line with the retreat of possibilities for concerted left political action outside the academy, the popular culture side of that debate has been dominant, along with its view that the products of this precinct of mass consumption capitalism are somehow capable of transcending or subverting their material identity as commodities, if not avoiding that identity altogether. Despite the dogged commitment of several generations of American Studies and cultural studies graduate students who want to valorize watching television and immersion in hip-hop or other specialty market niches centered on youth recreation and the most ephemeral fads as both intellectually avant-garde and politically “resistive,” it should be time to admit that that earnest disposition is intellectually shallow and an ersatz politics. The idea of “popular” culture posits a spurious autonomy and organicism that actually affirm mass industrial processes by effacing them, especially in the putatively rebel, fringe, or underground market niches that depend on the fiction of the authentic to announce the birth of new product cycles.

The power of the hero is a cathartic trope that connects mainly with the sensibility of adolescent boys—of whatever nominal age. Tarantino has allowed as much, responding to black critics’ complaints about the violence and copious use of “nigger” by proclaiming “Even for the film’s biggest detractors, I think their children will grow up and love this movie. I think it could become a rite of passage for young black males.”6 This response stems no doubt from Tarantino’s arrogance and opportunism, and some critics have denounced it as no better than racially presumptuous. But he is hardly alone in defending the film with an assertion that it gives black youth heroes, is generically inspirational or both. Similarly, in a January 9, 2012 interview on the Daily Show, George Lucas adduced this line to promote his even more execrable race-oriented live-action cartoon, Red Tails, which, incidentally, trivializes segregation in the military by reducing it to a matter of bad or outmoded attitudes. The ironic effect is significant understatement of both the obstacles the Tuskegee airmen faced and their actual accomplishments by rendering them as backdrop for a blackface, slapped-together remake of Top Gun. (Norman Jewison’s 1984 film, A Soldier’s Story, adapted from Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, is a much more sensitive and thought-provoking rumination on the complexities of race and racism in the Jim Crow U.S. Army—an army mobilized, as my father, a veteran of the Normandy invasion, never tired of remarking sardonically, to fight the racist Nazis.) Lucas characterized his film as “patriotic, even jingoistic” and was explicit that he wanted to create a film that would feature “real heroes” and would be “inspirational for teenage boys.” Much as Django Unchained’s defenders compare it on those terms favorably to Lincoln, Lucas hyped Red Tails as being a genuine hero story unlike “Glory, where you have a lot of white officers running those guys into cannon fodder.”

Of course, the film industry is sharply tilted toward the youth market, as Lucas and Tarantino are acutely aware. But Lucas, unlike Tarantino, was not being defensive in asserting his desire to inspire the young; he offered it more as a boast. As he has said often, he’d wanted for years to make a film about the Tuskegee airmen, and he reports that he always intended telling their story as a feel-good, crossover inspirational tale. Telling it that way also fits in principle (though in this instance not in practice, as Red Tails bombed at the box office) with the commercial imperatives of increasingly degraded mass entertainment.

Dargis observed that the ahistoricism of the recent period films is influenced by market imperatives in a global film industry. The more a film is tied to historically specific contexts, the more difficult it is to sell elsewhere. That logic selects for special effects-driven products as well as standardized, decontextualized and simplistic—“universal”—story lines, preferably set in fantasy worlds of the filmmakers’ design. As Dargis notes, these films find their meaning in shopworn clichés puffed up as timeless verities, including uplifting and inspirational messages for youth. But something else underlies the stress on inspiration in the black-interest films, which shows up in critical discussion of them as well.

All these films—The Help, Red Tails, Django Unchained, even Lincoln and Glory—make a claim to public attention based partly on their social significance beyond entertainment or art, and they do so because they engage with significant moments in the history of the nexus of race and politics in the United States. There would not be so much discussion and debate and no Golden Globe, NAACP Image, or Academy Award nominations for The Help, Red Tails, or Django Unchained if those films weren’t defined partly by thematizing that nexus of race and politics in some way.

The pretensions to social significance that fit these films into their particular market niche don’t conflict with the mass-market film industry’s imperative of infantilization because those pretensions are only part of the show; they are little more than empty bromides, product differentiation in the patter of “seemingly timeless ideals” which the mass entertainment industry constantly recycles. (Andrew O’Hehir observes as much about Django Unchained, which he describes as “a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens.”7) That comes through in the defense of these films, in the face of evidence of their failings, that, after all, they are “just entertainment.” Their substantive content is ideological; it is their contribution to the naturalization of neoliberalism’s ontology as they propagandize its universalization across spatial, temporal, and social contexts.

Purportedly in the interest of popular education cum entertainment, Django Unchained and The Help, and Red Tails for that matter, read the sensibilities of the present into the past by divesting the latter of its specific historicity. They reinforce the sense of the past as generic old-timey times distinguishable from the present by superficial inadequacies—outmoded fashion, technology, commodities and ideas—since overcome. In The Help Hilly’s obsession with her pet project marks segregation’s petty apartheid as irrational in part because of the expense rigorously enforcing it would require; the breadwinning husbands express their frustration with it as financially impractical. Hilly is a mean-spirited, narrow-minded person whose rigid and tone-deaf commitment to segregationist consistency not only reflects her limitations of character but also is economically unsound, a fact that further defines her, and the cartoon version of Jim Crow she represents, as irrational.

The deeper message of these films, insofar as they deny the integrity of the past, is that there is no thinkable alternative to the ideological order under which we live. This message is reproduced throughout the mass entertainment industry; it shapes the normative reality even of the fantasy worlds that masquerade as escapism. Even among those who laud the supposedly cathartic effects of Django’s insurgent violence as reflecting a greater truth of abolition than passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, few commentators notice that he and Broomhilda attained their freedom through a market transaction.8 This reflects an ideological hegemony in which students all too commonly wonder why planters would deny slaves or sharecroppers education because education would have made them more productive as workers. And, tellingly, in a glowing rumination in the Daily Kos, Ryan Brooke inadvertently thrusts mass culture’s destruction of historicity into bold relief by declaiming on “the segregated society presented” in Django Unchained and babbling on—with the absurdly ill-informed and pontifical self-righteousness that the blogosphere enables—about our need to take “responsibility for preserving racial divides” if we are “to put segregation in the past and fully fulfill Dr. King’s dream.”9 It’s all an indistinguishable mush of bad stuff about racial injustice in the old-timey days. Decoupled from its moorings in a historically specific political economy, slavery becomes at bottom a problem of race relations, and, as historian Michael R. West argues forcefully, “race relations” emerged as and has remained a discourse that substitutes etiquette for equality.10

This is the context in which we should take account of what “inspiring the young” means as a justification for those films. In part, the claim to inspire is a simple platitude, more filler than substance. It is, as I’ve already noted, both an excuse for films that are cartoons made for an infantilized, generic market and an assertion of a claim to a particular niche within that market. More insidiously, though, the ease with which “inspiration of youth” rolls out in this context resonates with three related and disturbing themes: 1) underclass ideology’s narratives—now all Americans’ common sense—that link poverty and inequality most crucially to (racialized) cultural inadequacy and psychological damage; 2) the belief that racial inequality stems from prejudice, bad ideas and ignorance, and 3) the cognate of both: the neoliberal rendering of social justice as equality of opportunity, with an aspiration of creating “competitive individual minority agents who might stand a better fighting chance in the neoliberal rat race rather than a positive alternative vision of a society that eliminates the need to fight constantly against disruptive market whims in the first place.”11

This politics seeps through in the chatter about Django Unchained in particular. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in the Los Angeles Times article in which Tarantino asserts his appeal to youth, remarks that the “most disturbing detail [about slavery] is the emotional violence and degradation directed at blacks that effectively keeps them at the bottom of the social order, a place they still occupy today.” Writing on the Institute of the Black World blog, one Dr. Kwa David Whitaker, a 1960s-style cultural nationalist, declaims on Django’s testament to the sources of degradation and “unending servitude [that] has rendered [black Americans] almost incapable of making sound evaluations of our current situations or the kind of steps we must take to improve our condition.”12 In its blindness to political economy, this notion of black cultural or psychological damage as either a legacy of slavery or of more indirect recent origin—e.g., urban migration, crack epidemic, matriarchy, babies making babies—comports well with the reduction of slavery and Jim Crow to interpersonal dynamics and bad attitudes. It substitutes a “politics of recognition” and a patter of racial uplift for politics and underwrites a conflation of political action and therapy.

With respect to the nexus of race and inequality, this discourse supports victim-blaming programs of personal rehabilitation and self-esteem engineering—inspiration—as easily as it does multiculturalist respect for difference, which, by the way, also feeds back to self-esteem engineering and inspiration as nodes within a larger political economy of race relations. Either way, this is a discourse that displaces a politics challenging social structures that reproduce inequality with concern for the feelings and characteristics of individuals and of categories of population statistics reified as singular groups that are equivalent to individuals. This discourse has made it possible (again, but more sanctimoniously this time) to characterize destruction of low-income housing as an uplift strategy for poor people; curtailment of access to public education as “choice”; being cut adrift from essential social wage protections as “empowerment”; and individual material success as socially important role modeling.

Neoliberalism’s triumph is affirmed with unselfconscious clarity in the ostensibly leftist defenses of Django Unchained that center on the theme of slaves’ having liberated themselves. Trotskyists, would-be anarchists, and psychobabbling identitarians have their respective sectarian garnishes: Trotskyists see everywhere the bugbear of “bureaucratism” and mystify “self-activity;” anarchists similarly fetishize direct action and voluntarism and oppose large-scale public institutions on principle, and identitarians romanticize essentialist notions of organic, folkish authenticity under constant threat from institutions. However, all are indistinguishable from the nominally libertarian right in their disdain for government and institutionally based political action, which their common reflex is to disparage as inauthentic or corrupt.

The previous year’s version of the socially significant film bearing on race (sort of), Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, which also received startlingly positive responses from nominal progressives,13 marks the reactionary vector onto which those several interpretive strains converge. It lays out an exoticizing narrative of quaint, closer-to-nature primitives living in an area outside the south Louisiana levee system called the Bathtub, who simply don’t want and actively resist the oppressive intrusions—specifically, medical care and hurricane evacuation, though, in fairness, they also mark their superiority by tut-tutting at the presence of oil refineries—of a civilization that is out of touch with their way of life and is destroying nature to boot. The film validates their spiritually rich if economically impoverished culture and their right to it. (Actually, the Bathtub’s material infrastructure seems to derive mainly from scavenging, which should suggest a problem at the core of this bullshit allegory for all except those who imagine dumpster-diving, back-to-nature-in-the-city squatterism as a politics.) Especially given its setting in south Louisiana and the hype touting the authenticity of its New Orleans-based crew and cast, Beasts most immediately evokes a warm and fuzzy rendition of the retrograde post-Katrina line that those odd people down there wouldn’t evacuate because they’re so intensely committed to place. It also brings to mind Leni Riefenstahl’s post-prison photo essays on the Nilotic groups whose beautiful primitiveness she imagined herself capturing for posterity before they vanished under a superior civilization’s advance.14

Beasts of the Southern Wild stands out also as a pure exemplar of the debasement of the notion of a social cause through absorption into the commercial imperative, the next logical step from fun-run or buy-a-tee-shirt activism. The film’s website, has a “get involved” link, a ploy clearly intended to generate an affective identification and to define watching and liking the film as a form of social engagement. There’s nothing to “get involved” with except propagandizing for the film. But the injunction to get involved pumps the idea that going to see a movie, and spending money to do so, is participating in a social movement. (I happened to be on a flight from Hartford, Connecticut, to Chicago with Oprah’s BFF and my local news anchor, Gayle King, on the premiere weekend of Oprah’s film adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Gayle intimated in a stage whisper to the gaggle of gushing Oprah fans seated around her that it was very important to see the film on opening weekend in order to build the all-important box office count. I hadn’t realized theretofore that making yet more money for Oprah ranks as a social responsibility.) In this device Zeitlin repeats a technique employed by Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman, the corporate school privatization movement’s Triumph of the Will, speaking of Leni Riefenstahl, and its fictional counterpart Daniel Barnz’s Won’t Back Down, that movement’s Birth of a Nation. It is a minor cause for optimism that, to put it mildly, neither of those abominations came anywhere near its predecessor’s commercial or cultural success.  

In addition to knee-jerk anti-statism, the objection that the slaves freed themselves, as it shows up in favorable comparison of Django Unchained to Lincoln, stems from a racial pietism that issued from the unholy union of cultural studies and black studies in the university. More than twenty years of “resistance” studies that find again and again, at this point ritualistically, that oppressed people have and express agency have contributed to undermining the idea of politics as a discrete sphere of activity directed toward the outward-looking project of affecting the social order, most effectively through creating, challenging or redefining institutions that anchor collective action with the objective of developing and wielding power. Instead, the notion has been largely evacuated of specific content at all. “Politics” can refer to whatever one wants it to; all that’s required is an act of will in making a claim.

The fact that there has been no serious left presence with any political capacity in this country for at least a generation has exacerbated this problem. In the absence of dynamic movements that cohere around affirmative visions for making the society better, on the order of, say, Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 “Second Bill of Rights,” and that organize and agitate around programs instrumental to pursuit of such visions, what remains is the fossil record of past movements—the still photo legacies of their public events, postures, and outcomes. Over time, the idea that a “left” is defined by commitment to a vision of social transformation and substantive program for realizing it has receded from cultural memory. Being on the left has become instead a posture, an identity, utterly disconnected from any specific practical commitments.

Thus star Maggie Gyllenhaal and director Daniel Barnz defended themselves against complaints about their complicity in the hideously anti-union propaganda film Won’t Back Down by adducing their identities as progressives. Gyllenhaal insisted that the movie couldn’t be anti-union because “There’s no world in which I would ever, EVER make an anti-union movie. My parents are left of Trotsky.”15 Barnz took a similar tack: “I’m a liberal Democrat, very pro-union, a member of two unions. I marched with my union a couple of years ago when we were on strike.”16 And Kathryn Bigelow similarly has countered criticism that her Zero Dark Thirty justifies torture and American militarism more broadly by invoking her identity as “a lifelong pacifist.”17 Being a progressive is now more a matter of how one thinks about oneself than what one stands for or does in the world. The best that can be said for that perspective is that it registers acquiescence in defeat. It amounts to an effort to salvage an idea of a left by reformulating it as a sensibility within neoliberalism rather than a challenge to it.

Gyllenhaal, Barnz, and Bigelow exemplify the power of ideology as a mechanism that harmonizes the principles one likes to believe one holds with what advances one’s material interests; they also attest to the fact that the transmutation of leftism into pure self-image exponentially increases the potential power of that function of ideology. Upton Sinclair’s quip—“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”—takes on all the more force when applied not merely to actions or interpretations of an external world but to devoutly savored self-perception as well.

That left political imagination now operates unself-consciously within the practical ontology of neoliberalism is also the most important lesson to be drawn from progressives’ discussion of Django Unchained and, especially, the move to compare it with Lincoln. Jon Wiener, writing in The Nation, renders the following comparisons: “In Spielberg’s film, the leading black female character is a humble seamstress in the White House whose eyes fill with tears of gratitude when Congress votes to abolish slavery. In Tarantino’s film, the leading female character (Kerry Washington) is a defiant slave who has been branded on the face as a punishment for running away, and is forced—by Leonardo DiCaprio—to work as a prostitute. In Spielberg’s film, old white men make history, and black people thank them for giving them their freedom. In Tarantino’s, a black gunslinger goes after the white slavemaster with homicidal vengeance.”18

Never mind that, for what it’s worth, Kerry Washington’s character, as she actually appears in the film, is mainly a cipher, a simpering damsel in distress more reminiscent of Fay Wray in the original King Kong than heroines of the blaxploitation era’s eponymous vehicles Coffy or Foxy Brown. More problematically, Wiener’s juxtapositions reproduce the elevation of private, voluntarist action as a politics—somehow more truly true or authentic, or at least more appealing emotionally—over the machinations of government and institutional actors. That is a default presumption of the identitarian/culturalist left and is also a cornerstone of neoliberalism’s practical ontology.

In an essay on Lincoln published a month earlier, Wiener identifies as the central failing of the film its dedication “to the proposition that Lincoln freed the slaves” and concludes, after considerable meandering and nit-picking ambivalence that brings the term pettifoggery to mind, “slavery died as a result of the actions of former slaves.”19 This either/or construct is both historically false and wrong-headed, and it is especially surprising that a professional historian like Wiener embraces it. The claim that slaves’ actions were responsible for the death of slavery is not only inaccurate; it is a pointless and counterproductive misrepresentation. What purpose is served by denying the significance of the four years of war and actions of the national government of the United States in ending slavery? Besides, it was indeed the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery.

Slaves’ mass departure from plantations was self-emancipation, by definition. Their doing so weakened the southern economy and undermined the secessionists’ capacity to fight, and the related infusion of black troops into the Union army provided a tremendous lift both on the battlefield and for northern morale. How does noting that proximity of Union troops greatly emboldened that self-emancipation diminish the import of their actions? But it was nonetheless the Thirteenth Amendment that finally outlawed slavery once and for all in the United States and provided a legal basis for preempting efforts to reinstate it in effect. Moreover, for all the debate concerning Lincoln’s motives, the sincerity of his commitment to emancipation, and his personal views of blacks, and notwithstanding its technical limits with respect to enforceability, the Emancipation Proclamation emboldened black people, slave and free, and encouraged all slavery’s opponents. And, as Wiener notes himself, the proclamation tied the war explicitly to the elimination of slavery as a system.

Firefly, or The Road to Serfdom

So why is a tale about a manumitted slave/homicidal black gunslinger more palatable to a contemporary leftoid sensibility than either a similarly cartoonish one about black maids and their white employers or one that thematizes Lincoln’s effort to push the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives? The answer is, to quote the saccharine 1970s ballad, “Feelings, nothing more than feelings.” Wiener’s juxtapositions reflect the political common sense that gives pride of place to demonstrations of respect for the “voices” of the oppressed and recognition of their suffering, agency, and accomplishments. That common sense informs the proposition that providing inspiration has social or political significance. But it equally shapes the generic human-interest “message” of films like The Help that represent injustice as an issue of human relations—the alchemy that promises to reconcile social justice and capitalist class power as a win/win for everyone by means of attitude adjustments and deepened mutual understanding.

That common sense underwrites the tendency to reduce the past to a storehouse of encouraging post-it messages for the present. It must, because the presumption that the crucial stakes of political action concern recognition and respect for the oppressed’s voices is a presentist view, and mining the past to reinforce it requires anachronism. The large struggles against slavery and Jim Crow were directed toward altering structured patterns of social relations anchored in law and state power, but stories of that sort are incompatible with both global marketing imperatives and the ideological predilections of neoliberalism and its identitarian loyal opposition. One can only shudder at the prospect of how Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, or Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege (1972) would be remade today. (Guy Ritchie’s and Madonna’s execrable 2002 remake of Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 film Swept Away may provide a clue; their abomination completely erases the original film’s complex class and political content and replaces it with a banal—aka “universal”—story of an encounter between an older woman and a younger man, while at the same time meticulously, almost eerily, reproducing, scene by scene, the visual structure of Wertmüller’s film.)

Particularly as those messages strive for “universality” as well as inspiration, their least common denominator tends toward the generic story of individual triumph over adversity. But the imagery of the individual overcoming odds to achieve fame, success, or recognition also maps onto the fantasy of limitless upward mobility for enterprising and persistent individuals who persevere and remain true to their dreams. As such, it is neoliberalism’s version of an ideal of social justice, legitimizing both success and failure as products of individual character. When combined with a multiculturalist rhetoric of “difference” that reifies as autonomous cultures—in effect racializes—what are actually contingent modes of life reproduced by structural inequalities, this fantasy crowds inequality as a metric of injustice out of the picture entirely. This accounts for the popularity of reactionary dreck like Beasts of the Southern Wild among people who should know better. The denizens of the Bathtub actively, even militantly, choose their poverty and cherish it and should be respected and appreciated for doing so. But no one ever supposed that Leni Riefenstahl was on the left.

The tale type of individual overcoming has become a script into which the great social struggles of the last century and a half have commonly been reformulated to fit the requirements of a wan, gestural multiculturalism. Those movements have been condensed into the personae of Great Men and Great Women—Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and others—who seem to have changed the society apparently by virtue of manifesting their own greatness. The different jacket photos adorning the 1982 and 1999 editions of Doug McAdam’s well known sociological study of the civil rights movement, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, exemplify the shift. The first edition’s cover was a photo of an anonymous group of marching protesters; the second edition featured the (staged) photo—made iconic by its use in an Apple advertising campaign—of a dignified Rosa Parks sitting alone on the front seat of a bus looking pensively out the window.20

Ironically, the scholarly turn away from organizations and institutional processes to valorize instead the local and everyday dimensions of those movements may have exacerbated this tendency by encouraging a focus on previously unrecognized individual figures and celebrating their lives and “contributions.” Rather than challenging the presumption that consequential social change is made by the will of extraordinary individuals, however, this scholarship in effect validates it by inflating the currency of Greatness so much that it can be found any and everywhere.  Giving props to the unrecognized or underappreciated has become a feature particularly of that scholarship that defines scholarly production as a terrain of political action in itself and aspires to the function of the “public intellectual.” A perusal of the rosters of African American History Month and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speakers at any random sample of colleges and universities attests to how closely this scholar/activist turn harmonizes with the reductionist individualism of prosperity religion and the varieties of latter-day mind cure through which much of the professional-managerial stratum of all races, genders, and sexual orientations, narrates its understandings of the world.

There is another, more mundane factor at play in the desire for “black heroes.” It stems from a view that Hollywood is resistant to depiction of black heroes and that, therefore, any film with a bona fide black hero is the equivalent of a civil rights victory. Minister J. Kojo Livingston, writing in the Louisiana Weekly put his appreciation of Django Unchained succinctly: “I liked the Black guy winning in the end.”21 That’s fair enough, so far as it goes, particularly when consideration is given to how recently it has become possible to expect the black guy to win in the end. I was quite impressed and gratified at the time that Keith David’s character made it along with Kurt Russell’s to the end of John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The Thing and that in the 1979 Alien Yaphet Kotto’s character was the penultimate one killed and only then because of the ineptitude of another crewmember who blocked his line of attack on the creature. When we watched the 1982 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, my then twelve year-old son remarked that he’d want to leave the theater if the black starship captain (played by Paul Winfield) killed himself to save Captain Kirk, which of course happened moments later. (As Minister Livingston continued, “Heck, I liked the Black guy even living to see the end of a movie.”) But, understandable as that impulse is, it is problematic as a basis for making claims about films’ social significance at this point in American history.  Black characters or characters played by black actors now routinely survive to the end of films in which most characters die, and black actors commonly enough play leading roles.

Literature scholar Kenneth Warren has suggested that objections to films like Lincoln on the basis of what they don’t do often rest on a premise that mass-market films depicting themes that bear on black American history are so rare that each of them is under pressure to address everything that could be addressed. So a film that focuses on a particular legislative initiative in a brief period at the end of 1864 and early months of 1865 has sparked objections that it does not address issues outside its scope, such as Lincoln’s evolving views of blacks, the role of black abolitionists and black troops in creating the climate that made the Thirteenth Amendment possible. But the sense that everything must be said at once sets an expectation that no film could ever satisfy even minimally. And, as Warren notes, the notion that occasions for such films are extremely rare is also problematic. That belief, like the premise that Hollywood refuses black heroes, is sustained largely by reference to a past—although, as I indicate above, a not very distant one—when it was clearly true.

Of course stereotypical representations of black characters remain. I had exactly the same reaction as Armond White to Hushpuppy, Quvenzhané Wallis’s character in Beasts of the Southern Wild. When the two-bit magical realism and lame ponderousness of the dialogue are boiled off, she is, down to her name, a contemporary pickaninny and a window into the racial fantasy life of the hipster carpetbaggers who have flocked to New Orleans post-Katrina searching for authenticity and careers. Like all good satire, the “Black Acting School” in Robert Townsend’s 1987 Hollywood Shuffle had a foundation in material reality. Viola Davis seems to be a quite accomplished actor, but not only did she do basically the same performance in The Help and Won’t Back Down; both characters are all too evocative of a stock figure—the quietly strong, long-suffering black woman depicted over the years by a string of actors from Joanna Moore and Claudia McNeil to Mary Alice, Beah Richards, Cicely Tyson, and now, woe be unto those with low tolerance for overacting, Angela Bassett.  And it is not unreasonable to contend that double standards persist for black and white actors, directors, and thematic matter. Denzel Washington, after turning in basically the same sort of performance in a spate of films since the 1990s, finally won the best actor Academy Award for the version of it that was in the character of a corrupt, murderous cop, and he was nominated again in 2013 for a role as another ethically and morally flawed character, this time an alcoholic airline pilot.

Nevertheless, racial stereotypes and morally compromised characters are not the totality of black representation in films any more, nor even the preponderance. What made Hollywood Shuffle possible, and more significantly what made it successful, was the extent to which the conditions it satirized were already under critical scrutiny if not retreat. And a debate over whether there are enough starring roles for black characters, black actors cast in leading roles that may not be racially specified, or films with black subject matter is a much more complicated and ambiguous matter—enough according to what standard of expectation, after all?—than whether there are any.

The more interesting issue is the inclination to see the racial limitations of the present through the lens of the exclusion of the past. This habit of mind shapes the claim that Django Unchained breaks a convention of sanitizing slavery in both films and American culture in general. Harvard sociologist Lawrence D. Bobo rests his proclamation of Django’s cinematic and cultural significance, which belies his nearly simultaneous articulation of the “just entertainment” defense, on an assertion that “For too long American cinema has presented—and American audiences have accepted, digested and largely tacitly embraced—a hopelessly sanitized version of slavery in the South.” He goes on to declaim on a “collective memory” in which the “defining image, of course, is that of Scarlett O’Hara and family enjoying the ‘good life’ before ‘the War.’ Slavery has been often rendered just a benign backdrop to the beauty, elegance and, indeed, virtue of the plantation elite.”22 Bobo is hardly alone in asserting that claim. It is a standard refrain, even including references to Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation, in defenses of Tarantino’s film.23

Are we really to believe that, notwithstanding the massive sea change in the society since the end of World War II, Hollywood’s depictions and the baseline of most Americans’ presumptions about slavery are unchanged since 1915 or even 1939? In his defense of Django Adam Serwer at least limits the domain of persistent “lionization of the Lost Cause and the Confederacy” to the genre of the “revenge Western,” but that qualification takes all the starch out of the claim. Redemption of the genre of the revenge Western seems like a low stakes, even lower reward undertaking. It would hardly be a notable victory for racial justice or any other significant social interest. I take Serwer’s point that the “trope of the wronged former Confederate” is visible, albeit “excised from its historical context” in the sci-fi television program Firefly and its 2005 adaptation to feature-length film, Serenity. However, that excision from social context means more than he suggests.

Firefly’s superficial parallels with the ex-Confederate hero trope are strong enough to have provoked discussion among devotees and adjustments in dialogue to have leading characters denounce slavery off the cuff.24 The central characters are a crew of defeated insurgents operating as renegade traders who remain hostile to the oppressive and corrupt central authority that defeated them, and that makes the parallel to the wronged Confederate trope seem especially, even disturbingly, strong.  I had an immediate and intensely negative reaction to it, even though the defeated rebels and those in league with them are a racially diverse lot, and neither the settings nor plot devices in any way evoke the slave South. Jeff Hart, in an essay on the theme of the brooding ex-Confederate hero in AMC’s period drama Hell on Wheels, contends that Firefly “masterfully extracts all the cool stuff about being a Confederate that we love in our outlaws without any of the bad stuff (like slavery!).”25

However, that observation begs the question whether the “cool stuff about being a Confederate” can reasonably be seen as evoking the 1861 secessionist insurrection at all if it comes without that “bad stuff,” without which there would have been no secessionist movement at all. Slavery, as Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens characterized it weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration, in the midst of the secessionist frenzy, was the “cornerstone” of the southern order that he and his confreres considered in jeopardy.26

I recognize the impulse to treat the disconnected trope as though it has an essential meaning fixed by that distinctive context because that connection has such a lengthy, and more recently a charged, history. It has been around, after all, at least since the romance of the James brothers. As I remark above, that impulse affected my own reception of Firefly. It may be that Joss Whedon’s appropriation of the trope of the brooding ex-Confederate outlaw hero for a setting that has nothing at all, even allegorically, to do with the nineteenth-century South in some way works backward to sanitize it in its more familiar context, but that seems far-fetched. There are, however, two ways in which that impulse is problematic.

First, the view that the trope of the emotionally damaged renegade outlaw of a Lost Cause is necessarily Confederate, even when disconnected entirely from racial subordination and slavery, may in effect validate apologists’ argument that the secessionist treason rested on motives besides defense of slavery. The Lost Cause narrative emerged out of the consolidation of planter-merchant class hegemony in the South at the onset of the twentieth century. Films like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind were instrumental in propagating this discourse, which sought to preempt non-southern opposition to racial disfranchisement and Jim Crow. Rhetorically, in an era in which the secessionist insurrection was within two generations of living memory for many Americans (as many as 10,000 veterans of the hostilities were still alive as late as 1938), that project involved defusing slavery’s legacy as a point of contention by representing it as a benign natural order in the antebellum era and by asserting that secessionism’s objective wasn’t protecting the institution of slavery but defending a conveniently evanescent “way of life.”27

Second, giving in to that impulse directs attention away from the political vision Firefly actually does articulate, which says more about the character of our historical moment. Firefly’s narrative conceit resonates much more clearly with contemporary anti-statist conventions than it evokes the Lost Cause line. The trope of resistance to a brutal and insensitive central authority is what today corrals social imagination in that perverse ratification of inequality and bourgeois class power commonly euphemized as an abstract “freedom” or “liberty.” This conceit permeates mass entertainment from The Matrix series to The Hunger Games and a line of dystopian fantasy that stretches back at least to Norman Jewison’s original Rollerball in 1975.28 It is recycled endlessly in the melodramatic cult of the maverick cop or physician who bristles under the corrupting and defeatist constraints of bureaucratic oversight—what otherwise might be described as accountability to the public trust. It has been a dominant theme in the genre of the disaster film and the lineage of sci-fi horrors in space spawned by Alien.

That the evil central authority is often cast as direct rule by corporations, as in Rollerball and Alien (where it may reflect these stories’ roots in the still politically contested 1970s), is by now more a misdirection than a mitigation of the anti-government narrative; that plot device collapses the distinction between public and private and serves as a naïve counter to criticisms that the films purvey right-wing politics.  However, the overarching narrative framework pits the local, familial/gemeinschaftlich and individual against the central, distant, and bureaucratic, which are invariably villainous. That device is only a step away rhetorically from the crypto-fascist, stab-in-the-back Vietnam vigilante films like the Rambo series and Missing In Action.29

But the ideological patron saints of these films are Friedrich Hayek or Gary Becker more than Julius Streicher or Ted Nugent.  It is the trials and torments, and the glorification of the individual, often even The One, that drive their narrative arcs—even when they imagine themselves doing otherwise. The priority of individual will is a thread connecting fantasy, fiction and “faction” alike. Cold Mountain reduces the southern elites’ treason to a thin backdrop for a puerile love story, barely leavened with a couple of trite “war is hell” references and a dash or two of Clarissa Pinkola Estés-style cultural feminism about how it’s the women who really suffer from the wars that y’all men make. (As Dargis noted, however, the period artifacts nearly all pass muster for authenticity.) For all its bullshit, dorm-room philosophy, geeky double and triple reversals, and purported critique of authoritarianism, The Matrix films pivot on Neo as The One. In fact, apparently the only hope for combatting the ubiquitous threats in any given post-apocalyptic world is to wait for the arrival of the Chosen One. The Iron Lady reduces even Margaret Thatcher to a bourgeois feminist story of Woman Overcoming.

No wonder Maggie Gyllenhaal couldn’t tell the difference between her union-busting, ditzy zealot Jamie Fitzpatrick and Norma Rae or Karen Silkwood. Never mind that both those characters were modeled on real union activists: Norma Rae’s inspiration was Crystal Lee Sutton, a member/organizer of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, now part of UNITE HERE, and Silkwood lost her life as an activist in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, now part of the United Steel Workers. That’s all pointless detail, TMI; it’s really all about individual working-class women fighting for what they believe in and Overcoming. (It may be a marker of the changed era that, twenty-eight years after she played the lead in Silkwood, Meryl Streep starred as Thatcher.)

Forget about possible evocations of the Confederacy; this is Firefly’s ideological milieu. Its vision is anti-government, punto, a multiculturalist, and thus left-seeming, anti-statism. The main expression of the central authority’s oppressiveness that affronts Serenity’s band of inter-planetary smugglers is its exorbitant taxation and arbitrary, corrupt regulation of trade. The captain and central character, also the most given to political declamation, is a committed free-trader. Firefly’s defenders describe its politics as libertarian. That is not only compatible with its multiculturalist egalitarianism; the two can fit organically. But, as Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman—as well as their acolyte, Thatcher—all were very much aware, there is no such thing as a left libertarianism. The belief that there is reflects the wishful thinking, or disingenuousness, of those who don’t want to have to square their politics with their desired self-perception.

Libertarianism is a shuck, more an aesthetics than a politics. Libertarians don’t want the state to do anything other than what they want the state to do. And, as its founding icons understood, it is fundamentally about property rights über alles. Mises and Hayek made clear in theory, and Thatcher and Friedman as Pinochet’s muse in Chile did in practice, that a libertarian society requires an anti-popular, authoritarian government to make sure that property rights are kept sacrosanct. That’s why it’s so common that a few bad days, some sweet nothings, and a couple of snazzy epaulets will turn a libertarian into an open fascist.

Whether or not Firefly contains more or less abstruse secessionist allegory, the fact that that issue is the basis of concern about its politics is a window onto a core problem of the current political situation. It reflects a critical perspective that accepts neoliberal ideological hegemony as nature and finds its own standard of justice in the rearview mirror. To the extent that Firefly embraces a libertarian politics, what it would share with the slave South isn’t racism but something more fundamental. Insofar as the “freedom” the heroes yearn for includes destruction of the regulatory apparatus of the state in favor of a market-fundamentalist idea of freedom or liberty, no matter how racially diverse and egalitarian that world would be, it would be closer than one might think to the essential normative premise of the social order of which slavery was the cornerstone, the conviction that individual property rights are absolute and inviolable.

The southern political economy didn’t become grounded on slavery because it was racist; it became racist because it was grounded on slavery.30 That is, it was grounded on the absolute right of property-owners to define and control their property—including property in other human beings—as they wished without any interference or regulation, except, of course, reliance on the police powers of the state to enforce their rights to and in such property. This takes us back to the necessity for authoritarian government, about which there was little disagreement within the dominant planter class.

Prominent pro-slavery ideologist George Fitzhugh was resolutely antagonistic to free-market, especially free-labor, liberalism and would hardly be considered a philosophical libertarian. But neither would Hayek or Ron Paul have been when describing the authoritarian regime essential for realizing property-based Liberty. As one of the most vocal proponents of the argument that slavery was a positive good for all involved, Fitzhugh doubled down on the matter of holding property rights in people as the sectional crisis intensified. His 1854 book, Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of a Free Society, argued for enslavement of poor whites as well as blacks.  James Henry Hammond, U.S. Senator and former governor of South Carolina, memorialized this perspective in what came to be known as his “Mudsill Speech” on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1858 (also Django’s big year). Speaking in Congress as a member of a party that counted northern free white workers among its core constituencies, Hammond was politic enough not to propose enslaving them. However, he did underscore the essential reduction of freedom to property rights, describing the slave South as enjoying “an extent of political freedom, combined with entire security, such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the face of the earth.” And he argued that, in effect, freedom was more complete and more secure in the South because slavery permitted suppression and absolute exclusion from civic voice of its “mud-sills” —the stratum necessary “to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life [without which] you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” That’s what made the South more effectively free than the North. Freedom, or liberty, meant the unbridled license of the propertied class.

The rhetoric of antebellum fire-eaters and the ordinances of secession they crafted stand out for the vehemence of their protests that their essential liberties were under attack. The secessionists framed their extravagant denunciations of the national government for its potential infringement of their right to hold property in human beings in language that from our historical location seems Freudian in the blatancy with which they declared themselves as literally fearing enslavement by the United States. But it wasn’t psychological projection or reaction formation. They considered any potential infringement on absolute property rights as indeed tantamount to enslavement. For them property is the only real right; therefore, property-holders are the only people in the society with rights that count for anything, and their rights trump all else.

This is a perspective that can provide some badly needed clarity on debates in contemporary politics regarding the relation of race, racism and inequality. For example, Ron and Rand Paul, libertarians of the highest order, do not oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Law because they hate, or even don’t like, black people. (And, for the record, whenever one finds oneself agreeing at all with Kanye West about anything, it’s time to take a step back, breathe deeply and reassess.) They oppose it, as they’ve made clear, because it infringes on property rights. They dislike black people because they understand, correctly, that black people are very likely to be prominent among those committed to pursuing greater equality. They oppose black people’s demands and all others intended to mitigate inequality because any efforts to do so would necessarily impinge on the absolute sanctity of property rights. I don’t mean to suggest that the Pauls aren’t racist; I’m pretty confident they are, no matter how much they might protest the assessment.  My point is that determining whether they’re racist, then exposing and denouncing them for it, doesn’t reach to what is most consequentially wrong and dangerous about them or for that matter what makes their racism something more significant than that of the random bigot who lives around the corner on disability.

Returning to Firefly, we don’t ever have to confront Captain Mal’s and his crew’s libertarianism beyond platitudes and the sort of errant patter of an adolescent irked at being told to clean up her room. We don’t because they aren’t in a position to demonstrate what their libertarianism would look like in practice. What they do perform regularly is liberal multiculturalism, which no doubt reinforces a sense that the show’s gestural anti-statism is at least consonant with an egalitarian politics. And that is a quality that makes multiculturalist egalitarianism, or identitarianism, and its various strategic programs—anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-heteronormativity, etc.—neoliberalism’s loyal opposition. Their focus is on making neoliberalism more just and, often enough, more truly efficient. Their objective is that, however costs and benefits are distributed, the distribution should not disproportionately harm or disadvantage the populations for which they advocate.

But what if neoliberalism really can’t be made more just? (And, to be clear, when I say neoliberalism, I mean capitalism with the gloves off and back on the offensive.) What if the historical truth of capitalist class power is that, without direct, explicit and relentless, zero-sum challenge to its foundations in a social order built on its priority and dominance in the social division of labor, we will never be able to win more than a shifting around of the material burdens of inequality, reallocating them and recalibrating their incidence among different populations? And what if creation of such populations as given, natural-seeming entities—first as differentially valued pools of labor, in the ideological equivalent of an evolving game of musical chairs, then eventually also as ostensibly discrete market niches within the mass consumption regime—is a crucial element in capitalism’s logic of social reproduction? To the extent that is the case, multiculturalist egalitarianism and the political programs that follow from it reinforce a key mystification that legitimizes the systemic foundation of the inequalities to which those programs object.

Regimes of class hierarchy depend for their stability on ideologies that legitimize inequalities by representing them as the result of natural differences—where you (or they) are in the society is where you (or they) deserve to be. Folk taxonomies define and sort populations into putatively distinctive groups on the basis of characteristics ascribed to them. Such taxonomies rely on circular self-validation in explaining the positions groups occupy in the social order as suited to the essential, inherent characteristics, capabilities and limitations posited in the taxonomy’s just-so stories. These ideological constructions and the social processes through which they are reproduced, including the common sense that arises from self-fulfilling prophecy, are what Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields call “racecraft.”31 An implication of the racecraft notion is that the ideology, or taxonomy, of race is always as much the cover story as the source of even the inequalities most explicitly linked to race.

James Henry Hammond’s mudsill theory is instructive. The southern system was superior and afforded greater freedom, he argued, because its mudsills were held to belong to an ascriptively distinct and naturally subordinate population. The North was a less secure and stable society because its mudsills were “of your own race; you are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural endowment or intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation. Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries of all your political power.” He in effect judged the North’s ruling class to be more unstable than the South’s because it hadn’t been able to turn its mudsills into a sufficiently different ascriptive population. (Fitzhugh, the theorist, proposed a remedy for that problem; Hammond, the politician, understood that was easier said than done.)

Hammond was no doubt sincere in his conviction that blacks were by nature fit to be slaves, “of another and inferior race.” But notwithstanding his sincerity, that view was relatively new as a defense of slavery. Alexander Stephens indicated as much in the “Cornerstone Speech” and noted that the dominant perspective of the Founding generation was that “enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature.” Of course, Stephens insisted that that perspective was “fundamentally wrong” in that it “rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races.” The defense of slavery that he and Hammond articulated dated only from the 1830s, when the combined pressures of a surge in abolitionist activism and articulations of free labor ideology outside the South called for a more robust defense of the “peculiar institution” than the fundamentally apologetic contention that it was a “necessary evil” economically. South Carolina’s father of the secessionist treason, John C. Calhoun, gave the new argument its systematic expression in “Slavery a Positive Good,” an 1837 speech to the U. S. Senate.32

That argument aligned with the emergent race science that would provide the basic folk taxonomy through which Americans apprehend race and categories of racial classification to this day. A central text of that nascent race science was the 1854 tome Types of Mankind, co-authored by George R. Gliddon, a British-born Egyptologist, and Josiah C. Nott, a native South Carolinian and wealthy slave-holding physician in Mobile, Alabama.33 In 1851 Samuel A. Cartwright, a plantation physician and pioneer in the science of racial medicine, published in De Bow’s Review a paper, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” which he had initially presented at a Louisiana medical convention and in which he examined, among other racial particularities, a condition he called “drapetomania”—a “disease of the mind” that induced slaves to “run away from service.”34 Race theory, that is, took shape as a defense of slavery only in the last decades of the institution’s life; it was the expression of a beleaguered slavocracy doubling down to protect its property rights in human beings.

Hammond may have believed that he’d always believed the positive good argument and that black slavery was nature’s racial decree. If he did, he would only have been demonstrating the power of ascriptive ideologies to impose themselves as reality. Marxist theorist Harry Chang thus analogized race to Marx’s characterization of the fetish character of money.  Just as money is the material condensation of “the reification of a relation called value” and “a function-turned-into-an-object,” race is also a function—a relation in the capitalist division of labor—turned into an object.35

Race and gender are the ascriptive hierarchies most familiar to us because they have been most successfully challenged since the second half of the last century; ideologies of ascriptive difference are most powerful when they are simply taken as nature and don’t require defense. The significant and lasting institutional victories that have been won against racial and gender subordination and discrimination, as well as the cultural victories against racism and sexism as ideologies, have rendered those taxonomies less potent as justifications for ascriptive inequality than they had been. As capitalism has evolved new articulations of the social division of labor, and as the victories against racial and gender hierarchy have been consolidated, the causal connections between those ideologies and manifest inequality have become still more attenuated.

Race and gender don’t exhaust the genus of ascriptive hierarchies. Other taxonomies do and have done the same sort of work as those we understand as race. The feebleminded and the born criminal, for example, were equivalent to racial taxa as ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy but did not hinge on the phenotypical narratives that have anchored the race idea. Victorian British elites ascribed essential, race-like difference to the English working class. The culture of poverty and the underclass overlap racially disparaged populations but aren’t exactly reducible to familiar racial taxonomies. Some—like super predators and crack babies—have had more fleeting life spans. Their common sense explanatory power hinges significantly on the extent to which they comport with the perspectives and interests of the social order’s dominant, opinion-shaping strata; as Marx and Engels observed in 1845, “the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”36

Hell on Wheels, or the Tea Party

In addition, the exact sort of work that given taxonomies, or categories within one, will do is linked to historically specific regimes of hierarchy. A taxonomy’s ideological significance and material impact, that is, can vary widely. “Race” was an ideology of essential difference in 1820, as it was in the 1850s. Yet it didn’t do the same work in the earlier period’s defenses of slavery as a necessary evil that it did in later defenses of it as a positive good, like those articulated by Fitzhugh and Hammond. Nor does gender do the same work in the early twenty-first century that it did at the beginning, or even the middle, of the twentieth.

Once established, stereotypes and the folk taxonomies that legitimize them may die hard, but their significance as props for a regime of class hierarchy can change along with the political-economic foundations of the class order. Persistence of familiar narratives of hierarchy can evoke the earlier associations, but that evocation can be misleading and counterproductive for making sense of social relations in both past and present. In particular the “just like slavery” or “just like Jim Crow” proclamations that are intended as powerful criticism of current injustices are more likely to undermine understanding of injustice in the past as well as the present than to enable new insight. Another version of the trope of the damaged ex-Confederate is illustrative.

Unlike Firefly, the television drama Hell on Wheels constructs the wounded ex-Confederate much nearer its original form but with revisions that underscore the contemporary period drama’s problematic and ideological relation to history. Adam Serwer adduces Hell on Wheels, which is set in 1865 in a mobile railroad town, as another illustration of the persistence of the trope of the vengeful former Confederate brooding hero/sociopath, albeit in a “hilariously rationalized” form. Its version of the character, Cullen Bohannan, had been a large Mississippi planter who freed his slaves a year before the treasonous insurrection in deference to his northern, anti-slavery wife who—true to tale type—was later martyred by marauding Union soldiers, now the targets of his quest. Serwer is correct to say that the preposterous device of separating the hero’s Confederate loyalties from commitment to slave-holding is a transparent effort to sanitize the hero’s secessionism.

However, the difference in historical context is crucial in this regard as well. The old Lost Cause tropes, originating in the early twentieth-century southern ideological campaign for sectional reconciliation on white supremacist terms, don’t do the same cultural and ideological work in a society in which Glenn Beck appropriates Martin Luther King, Jr. to accuse President Barack Obama of racism that they did in a society in which racial subordination was supported explicitly by the force of law and custom. This is not to imply that there’s nothing politically disturbing and reactionary about the conceits of Hell on Wheels. On the contrary, going beyond the superficial rehearsal of hoary tropes to consider the program’s representations in their actual historical context discloses its more insidious work in legitimizing inequality.

The conceit that Bohannan had freed his slaves before he fought for secession does more than separate the treason from its foundational commitment to slavery. That conceit also replaces slavery as an institution with slaveholding as a matter of individual morality, as in Django Unchained. That Bohannan manumitted his slaves as a gesture of love for his wife folds into another trope of the genre, the pedestalizing, “I love her so much I’d change my raffish ways for her” fantasy. That’s the happy face of adolescent patriarchy, its expression that doesn’t usually involve a restraining order, though it’s probably best that the brooding loner hero’s sainted wife is nearly always a martyr and thus motivation for, instead of the object of, his sadistic violence and mayhem. But in Hell on Wheels that device also reinforces the reduction of slavery to slaveholding as an individual act, a consumer preference to be negotiated within a marriage—like owning a motorcycle, going to the strip club with the guys every weekend, or painting the living room magenta.

From the standpoint of claims to social significance, a deeper problem with period vehicles like Django Unchained, The Help, and Hell on Wheels is their denial of historicity.  By this I do not mean historical accuracy as faithfulness to facts about the past. The manumission themes in Hell on Wheels and Django Unchained are instructive. Voluntary manumission was all but impossible in Mississippi as the sectional crisis intensified on the eve of secession.  By 1860 even Maryland with a relatively large free black population and Arkansas, which had comparatively small slave population, had outlawed the practice; the states with the largest black populations had done so much earlier—South Carolina in 1820 and Mississippi in 1822. Considering its relatively incidental place in each story line, though, the historical inaccuracy on which those bits hinge is within the boundaries of acceptable artistic license. The problem is with the ideological character of the larger story lines that preclude even wondering whether manumission would have been possible.

Both tales trifle with slavery. For Hell on Wheels it’s an unfortunate artifact of the genre, baggage that threatens to sully the appeal of the hero as wronged Confederate. Producers Joe and Tony Gayton (a former production assistant for political reactionary John Milius and co-writer with his brother Joe of the Vietnam POW rescue fantasy film Uncommon Valor) may also have been concerned to preempt sharp criticism for romanticizing the institution indirectly through their hero’s secessionist loyalties.  For Tarantino slavery is a prop for a claim to social significance and a hook to connect spaghetti western and blaxploitation. In both vehicles it is a generic bad thing, an especially virulent species of racism, though slavery’s pastness—not only was Bohannan no longer a slave owner; but the series is set in 1865—keeps it peripheral in Hell on Wheels. And once again the central thread is the individual quest. Even the principal ex-slave in Hell on Wheels, Elam Ferguson (played by the rapper Common), is depicted as “coming to terms with the risks and responsibilities of his newly-acquired freedom,” and, because he had a “white father and a slave mother,” apparently he is therefore “a man with no true home or people he can call his own.”  And he and Bohannan, also a disconnected individual, engage in an exchange about the need to “let go of the past.” Even though that exchange seems intended partly as a comment on the impossibility of either man’s doing so, the punch line remains the individual quest, leavened with the unshakable personal demons that are the banal melodrama’s yeast. (And I can anticipate the contention that Hell on Wheels is somehow critical of capitalism. It’s not. It’s critical of big capitalism and once again the capital/government nexus and their running roughshod over beleaguered individuals. That’s the critical standpoint of a reactionary populism that’s as likely to support Tea Party style fascism as any other politics, and it would be good for us all to be clearer in recognizing that for what it is.)

Effacement of historicity and the social in favor of the timeless—that is, presentist—narrative of individual Overcoming is the deep politics and social commentary propounded in these products of the mass entertainment industry. They differ from other such products only because they ostensibly apply the standard formulae to socially important topics. They don’t, however. They do exactly the reverse; they revise historically and politically significant moments to fit within the formula. In doing so they are nodes in the constitution of neoliberalism’s ideological hegemony.

And the extent of that hegemony is attested by claims from the likes of Lawrence Bobo, Jon Wiener and others who should know better than to think that a film like Django Unchained somehow captures the essential truth of American slavery. That truth is apparently, as Bobo condenses it, “brutality, inescapable violence and absolutely thorough moral degradation.” But those features were neither essential nor exclusive to slavery; they were behavioral artifacts enabled by the institution because it conferred, with support of law and custom, a property right—absolute control of life and livelihood—of some individuals over others. That property right was the essential evil and injustice that defined slavery, not the extremes of brutality and degradation it could encourage and abet.  No effort is required to understand why mass-market films go for the dramatic excesses, but what about the scholars and other nominal leftists who also embrace that view of slavery?

In part, the inclination may stem from a corrosive legacy of Malcolm X. Malcolm was an important cultural figure for most of the 1960s, before and perhaps even more so after his death. He was not, however, an historian, and few formulations have done more to misinform, distort and preempt popular understanding of American slavery than his rhetorically very effective but historically facile “house Negro/field Negro” parable. It doesn’t map onto how even plantation slavery—which accounted for only about half of slaves by 1850—operated. Not only was working in the house no major plum; it hardly fit with the Uncle Tom stereotype, such as Tarantino’s self-hating caricature, Stephen. The well-known slave rebels Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Robert Smalls all gainsay that image.  Anyway, the Uncle Tom notion is not a useful category for political analysis. It is only a denunciation; no one ever identifies under that label. Yet its emptiness may be the source of its attractiveness. In disconnecting critique from any discrete social practice and locating it instead in imputed pathological psychology—“Why, that house Negro loved the master more than the master loved himself,” pace Malcolm—the notion individualizes political criticism on the (non-existent) racially self-hating caricature, and, of course, anyone a demagogue chooses to denounce. Because it centers on motives rather than concrete actions and stances, it leaves infinite room both for making and deflecting ad hominem charges and, of course, inscribes racial authenticity as the key category of political judgment.

That sort of Malcolm X/blaxploitation narrative, including the insistence that Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind continue to shape Americans’ understandings of slavery, also is of a piece with a line of anti-racist argument and mobilization that asserts powerful continuities between current racial inequalities and either slavery or the Jim Crow regime. This line of argument has been most popularly condensed recently in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which analogizes contemporary mass incarceration to the segregationist regime. But even she, after much huffing and puffing and asserting the relation gesturally throughout the book, ultimately acknowledges that the analogy fails.37 And it would have to fail because the segregationist regime was the artifact of a particular historical and political moment in a particular social order. Moreover, the rhetorical force of the analogy with Jim Crow or slavery derives from the fact that those regimes are associated symbolically with strong negative sanctions in the general culture because they have been vanquished. In that sense all versions of the lament that “it’s as if nothing has changed” give themselves the lie. They are effective only to the extent that things have changed significantly.

The tendency to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview mirror appeals to an intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities with familiar images of oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to parse the multifarious, often contradictory dynamics and relations that shape racial inequality in particular and politics in general in the current moment. Assertions that phenomena like the Jena, Louisiana, incident, the killings of James Craig Anderson and Trayvon Martin, and racial disparities in incarceration demonstrate persistence of old-school, white supremacist racism and charges that the sensibilities of Thomas Dixon and Margaret Mitchell continue to shape most Americans’ understandings of slavery do important, obfuscatory ideological work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that, as Mahmood Mamdani argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables disparaging efforts either to differentiate discrete inequalities or  to generate historically specific causal accounts of them as irresponsible dodges that abet injustice by temporizing in its face.38 But more is at work here as well.

Insistence on the transhistorical primacy of racism as a source of inequality is a class politics. It’s the politics of a stratum of the professional-managerial class whose material location and interests, and thus whose ideological commitments, are bound up with parsing, interpreting and administering inequality defined in terms of disparities among ascriptively defined populations reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much of the intellectual life of this stratum is devoted to “shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of inequalities that may appear statistically as racial disparities.”39 And that project shares capitalism’s ideological tendency to obscure race’s foundations, as well as the foundations of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically specific political economy. This felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of “cultural politics” are so inclined to treat the products and production processes of the mass entertainment industry as a terrain for political struggle and debate. They don’t see the industry’s imperatives as fundamentally incompatible with the notions of a just society they seek to advance. In fact, they share its fetishization of heroes and penchant for inspirational stories of individual Overcoming. This sort of “politics of representation” is no more than an image-management discourse within neoliberalism. That strains of an ersatz left imagine it to be something more marks the extent of our defeat. And then, of course, there’s that Upton Sinclair point.

Intuitively enough given its subject matter and title, Fernand Léger’s and Dudley Murphy’s 1924 film Ballet mécanique is generally understood as a relatively straightforward extension of the so-called “machine aesthetic” that informs Léger’s painting of this period. Standish Lawder’s comparison of the film with Léger’s painting is typical in this regard when he writes: “He sought to create in film the same discontinuous, fragmented, kaleidoscopic world that his paintings [evoke]…. The [same] pulsating energies of modern urban life, its rhythms and its forms.” In marked contrast to this view, I want to argue just the opposite: that the relationship between film and painting is highly vexed for Léger; that Ballet mécanique does not function according to the same aesthetic principles as his painting—quite the contrary; and that the strongest relationship between cinema and his painting is to be found not in Léger’s “machine aesthetic” works of the late-19-teens and ‘20s, but rather in his abstract or near-abstract “Orphic” paintings of 1912-1913, particularly in the 150 or so works that make up his Contrasts of Forms series.

As unlikely a comparison as this may seem, I’m not the first to propose it. In a recent essay on these early paintings, Maria Gough has suggestively argued that Léger’s post-Cubist push into abstraction is rooted in a hardening of volumetric and tonal effects, such that, as she describes it, Léger: “hypostatiz[es] chiaroscuro’s most elementary property, that of value, into its two most extreme or contrasted states—brilliant black, brilliant white.” And in so doing, Léger “interrupts the surface of the sheet, animating it with an insistent flicker…[ a ] compulsive, pulsatile flickering on and off…. [such that] Léger creates, in short, a cinematic effect.”1

As much as I find myself in accord with Gough’s basic claim—that these paintings aim to produce an effect of visual movement, and that this movement should be seen, at least in part, as a response to cinema—I need to qualify that agreement somewhat in order to ward off certain potential misunderstandings that I see lurking in the shadows of her, and indeed my, rhetoric. Most importantly, I worry that Gough’s description of these paintings as “compulsive,” “pulsatile,” “flickering,” and “cinematic” could pull them, against their will, in the wrong direction. We only to have to listen to Pamela Lee’s description of the type of painting one generally associates with black and white pulsatile flickering patterns—in this case Bridget Riley’s 1965 Op painting, Descending—to get a sense of where that wrong direction would lead us. “Stand a little longer [in front of Descending], look a little harder, and then what happens? In time the surface begins to flicker, like a stroboscope; or wave like a lenticular screen.”2 According to Lee, this particular kind of flickering “cinematic effect” (as made explicit in her reference to the lenticular screen) has little—indeed nothing—to do with particularities of abstract painting per se, and everything to do with the way in which it disrupts the viewer’s optical and nervous systems. “To what extent do we see this painting?” Lee asks. “In what lies its retinal appeal? To what extent we do not so much see it, but feel it, experience the painting less as an abstraction than as a woozy sense of gravity visited upon the body…. Spangles of gold, pink, and green burst and flash, lining the eyelids and rattling the skull. The eye is enervated while the body feels something else: nausea perhaps or even a blinding headache.”3

For Lee the virtue of this work lies in the way it reverses the conventional flow of action, from viewer to artwork, such that the “cinematic” flickering of these paintings induce involuntary responses that are “visited upon body.” Rather than “see” these paintings in any meaningful sense, they make us “feel” a certain way (“woozy” etc.), like it or not. And indeed, meaningful sense, as opposed to the empty “sense” of simple affect, is precisely what is at stake in this reversal. For as our capacity to see even the most elemental aspects of these paintings gives way to “experience”—to the point that, as Lee remarks, we no longer even engage them as works of abstraction—so too does our capacity to interpret or draw meaning. We do not, after all, interpret a blinding headache or look for meaning in nausea; we suffer through these experiences, waiting for the feeling to pass.4

Such privileging of an artwork’s purportedly direct action on the body’s autonomic system has, to put it mildly, acquired a certain prestige of late within art history and cinema studies, largely under the influence of the philosopher Giles Deleuze. Indeed, for Deleuze the visceral impact of what he calls a new (third) epoch of cinema—epitomized by the “flicker” films of Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, John Cavanaugh, et al.—stems directly from its “flickering” “cinematic effects.” As Deleuze argues, this new type of filmic experience represents a “cinema of expansion without camera, and also without screen or film stock…a virtual film which now only goes on in the head, ‘behind the pupils.’”5 Again, such films are important for Deleuze not because of how we actually view or draw meaning from them, but because of the ways in which they act upon us, hijacking our interpretive agency.6 As a result, the material aspects of such cinema (camera, screen, film stock, and so on) are only a means to end, such that the actual film that we see is subsumed into to the virtual film that we experience “behind the pupils.” More intense than Op art’s “cinematic” flickering, it is ultimately no different in kind. As Branden Joseph recounts the early screenings of Conrad’s 1966 film The Flicker, audience response typically ranged from: “disorientation, temporary hypnosis, and intense experiences of colors, patterns, and even hallucinogenic imagery…to headaches and violent bouts of nausea, all seemingly supplied by the light’s pulsating interaction with the brain’s alpha waves.”7

It is important then that the “cinematic effect” of movement that both Gough and I claim for Léger’s abstraction not be taken as standing against painting—not be taken, that is, as literally cinematic. For if, as Léger writes, “painting must be all radiance and motion,” the motion that concerns him has nothing to do with the “self-movement” or “automatic movement” that Deleuze views as distinct to cinema, whereby “movement [becomes] the immediate given of the image.” Which is not to say that Deleuze believes painting incapable of triggering the kinds of affect he claims for film. The painter Francis Bacon, for instance, creates what the philosopher describes as “not exactly movement, although his painting makes movement very intense and violent,” but rather “a movement ‘in-place,’ a spasm which reveals…the action of invisible forces on the body.”8 And once this type of movement occurs—be it the “automatic movement” of film or the “movement in-place” of painting—then “the essence of the image is realized: producing a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral systems directly.”9

More than simply a representation of “the action of invisible forces on the body,” painting, for Deleuze and his sometime collaborator Félix Guattari, operates as a kind of machine that—again, like it or not—acts directly upon the viewer. To greater and lesser degrees, then, all paintings are understood to produce automatic affective responses upon their encounter. But according to Deleuze and Guattari, it is Léger and Francis Picabia who explicitly take up and thematize this automatism in their so-called “machine aesthetic” work: “The machinic painters stressed the following: they did not paint machines as substitutes for still lifes or nudes; the machine is not a represented object any more than its drawing is a representation.”10 Producing paintings as machines—rather than paintings of machines—Léger and Picabia operate on the level of pure mechanical abstraction, such that the machine period work of these painters is entirely continuous with the automated flow of intensive states already present in their preceding non-representational work. “The machine stands apart from representation…and it stands apart because it is pure Abstraction: it is nonfigurative and nonprojective. Léger demonstrated convincingly that the machine did not represent anything, itself least of all, because it was in itself the production of organized intensive states…. It sometimes happens, as in Picabia that the discovery of the abstract leads to the machinic elements.”11 Ultimately, however, it is not just painting that operates as a form of machine for Deleuze and Guattari, but the viewer’s response mechanisms: “The machine is the affective state, and it is false to say that modern machines possess a perceptive capacity or a memory; machines themselves possess only affective states.”12

Further exacerbating my concern that the “cinematic” movement Gough and I see in Léger’s Contrasts of Forms could be misconstrued as a kind of machine-like “neuro-abstraction,” is the only substantial point on which Gough and I differ. And this difference is important, in my view, if we are to get the measure of Léger’s film. For unlike Gough, I do not think that Léger’s “cinematic effect” in the Contrasts of Form series “confounds” his claims to medium specificity.13 Far from producing a hybridized form between new and traditional media—between film and painting—these works, in my view, affirm the root qualities of the tableau at every turn, especially in the quality of their movement. Léger, in my view, should be taken at his word when he writes: “Each art is isolating itself and limiting itself to its own domain … it is logical that by limiting each discipline to its own purpose, it enables achievements to be intensified.”14 This insistence, mine and Léger’s, on the specific pictorial quality of his paintings, holds true despite the fact—indeed, all the more so because of the fact—that a certain cinematic effect is embedded directly on their surface. Far from contravening qualities proper to the tableau, the cinematic effects that are woven into the visual fabric of these paintings heighten that specificity, ratcheting up the intensity of their surfaces. The means by which Léger achieves this intensity, as he writes in a letter to Léonce Rosenberg, is “contrast”: “I mean to outshine tasteful arrangements, grey shadows, and dead backgrounds. I go for the maximum pictorial output through the contrast of all available plastic resources. Never mind good manners, taste, and ordinary style. For me painting must be all radiance and motion….”15

Again, the problem—or potential problem—is in how we understand “intensity.” Understood in Léger’s terms, intensity remains firmly on the side of painting as that which overcomes or defeats—“dominates” will be his word—what he refers to as “the dead surface.” A central concept and recurrent throughout his writing, “the dead surface” stands for far more than just lifeless painting (although it is certainly that also). Rather, “the dead surface,” opens onto a broad field of visual forms that permeate the warp and woof of modernity at large—a visual tonality that is not just dead but deadening: a hollow, generic and increasingly prevalent visual array that panders to its viewer, presenting us, for all of its supposed optical immersion and emotional force, with a mere facsimile of life. “The dead surface,” for Léger, is visual intensity rendered inauthentically. Various other names and phrases crop up in his writings for this mode of shallow visuality: “sentimentalism,” “good taste,” “habit” “theatricality” and above all—and particularly in relation to new visual forms emerging within twentieth-century modernity—“spectacle.”

As much as I agree, then, that a certain cinematic effect is inscribed onto the immediate surface of these paintings, I by no means think that this constitutes the basic structure and experience of these paintings as a whole. Take Léger’s 1912-13 gouache and ink drawing Composition (Contrasts of Form). One could talk at length about the variations and shifts in tonal value, not only among the blacks and whites (which are themselves rife with qualitative differences), but also in the plethora of greys produced through different kinds of paint and ink application: dry brush scumble, thin translucent wash, wet-on-wet, dappling, and so on. There is also enormous variance in the line quality, where a thick black or grey line will at times draw an outer edge, only to morph into a shadow, or sit in the vague territory between the two. These painted lines are in turn contrasted with the thin graphite pentimenti that begin to appear under scrutiny. Notice also how the gouache and ink quality is juxtaposed across the surface in its thickness, finish, and mode and speed of application—at times very fast, at times very slow. To miss these kinds of effects of contrast that play out, time and again, across the surface of the drawing would be to miss, in my view, Léger’s very understanding of contrast—of intensity—itself.

Movement in Composition (Contrasts of Form) begins as a downward flow, starting in the center of the drawing and moving from top to bottom. The sharp lines and deep blacks along with the blurring of the forms in the periphery, keep our eye centered. And from this point, the flow cascades downward, over the cylindrical pegs, helped along by the black arrow-shaped wedge near the top, and through the repeating dark gashes that cut into the tops of these cylinders like the slots of screws. Along the black and white reflective sides of these cylindrical forms we see a kind of wave or ripple effect that follows the flow of gravity, from top to bottom. At times, particularly towards the top, this ripple of alternating values feels as if it is causing the cylinders to spin. Simultaneous with this downward motion, and again partly because of the blurring on the periphery, there appears a distinctive counter-movement from the left and the right side of the painting towards the center. And finally, in the midst of all this, we also see a roughly circular movement that rotates around the mass of forms in the center, along the cylinders and cubic forms that frame them.

To be sure, Léger was far from unique when it came to his interest in pictorial movement. All of the other so-called Orphic painters—Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Robert Delaunay—were, each in their way, equally preoccupied with the aesthetic consequences of motion. As indeed were a wide range of philosophers, experimental psychologists, and aesthetic theorists, chief among them Paul Souriau, whose 1889 book The Aesthetics of Movement is known to have been read by painters in Léger’s orbit.  Of particular concern for Souriau are the ways in which painting can produce effects of actual (rather than depicted) movement through precisely the kind of nuanced paint application that we saw in Léger’s drawing:

For a well-exercised eye, all the nuances of the execution will be visible and make an impression. Approaching the detail, one will recognize also how each mark was made, one will follow the speed of the hand that had traced it as if one had been there at its making…. It is not enough to understand by this that one sees how they were made. Rather, one must say that we see them making themselves, inasmuch as they give the impression of actual movement.16

More than just describing the effect of pictorial movement, however, Souriau distinguishes between two distinct forms motion: one that captures and holds our attention, pulling us into the rhythm of its movement, and another that repeals us, producing a low-grade optical discomfort that registers as displeasure. The first type of motion—which I’ll call absorptive movement—is generally found in slow, flowing movements that move “gracefully” (his term) across our field of vision, often in a downward flow, as with a waterfall or falling snow, or broad circular patterns, like the turning wheels of a windmill. As Souriau writes it:

Which of us has not lingered, in mindless rapture, to watch the sails of a windmill, the eddies in a river, the quivering of a fire? We could stay for hours gazing at a steam engine, the stretching and shrinking of its connecting rods, the turning of its flywheel, the constant coming up and down of the leather strap. It seems as if our eyes are caught by the gear in motion and drawn forcibly into it.17

By contrast, movements that require rapid readjustments by the musculature of the eye produce active displeasure in the viewer. This would include motions that jut abruptly in and out at us, forcing us to repeatedly readjust our focus; two streams of movement that go in opposite directions at that same time, or a rapid on-and-off switching between light and dark, such as the flickering effect of a strobe light. As Souriau describes it: “The most painful movements to perceive will be those that oblige us to readjust quickly. That is why it is unpleasant to watch [types of movement that are] alternately nearer and farther away from us.”18

The relation of these two forms of movement—one of which absorbs, the other of which repels—is of direct importance not only to Léger’s painting, in which its initial “cinematic” flicker quickly gives way to a more immersive flow of movement, but also to Ballet mécanique, in which the opposite move occurs. Indeed, over the course of its roughly 15 or 16 minutes (depending on the version) Ballet mécanique presents us with a veritable catalogue of movements that, following Souriau, repel vision. If this assault sets the tenor of the film as a whole, these visually aggressive movements are contrasted—again, in Léger’s sense—with just enough moments of optical respite to intensify the overall effect of bombardment. At strategic moments in the film, then, Léger lures our gaze into the immersive mechanics described by Souriau (“the stretching and shrinking of its connecting rods, the turning of its flywheel, the constant coming up and down of the leather strap”) only to return with renewed vigor to the visual onslaught.

Note, for instance, the way in which in the opening shot of Murphy’s wife, the dancer Katherine Murphy, swings in and out toward the viewer. Rather than being “unpleasant to watch” in Souriau’s terms, as she moves “alternately nearer and farther away from us,” the scene is clearly intended to draw us in, not simply by its tranquil mood, but through the metronomic rhythm of the swing in motion. This initial “graceful” movement is almost immediately—and literally—turned on its head, however, as the film cuts to a series of flickering juxtapositions that, to recall Gough’s account of the Contrasts of Form series, hypostatizes value “into its two most extreme or contrasted states—brilliant black, brilliant white.” The net effect of Léger’s reified black and white in Ballet mécanique could hardly be more opposed to his painting, however, as eye and mind struggle, physiologically and mentally, to process these abrupt flashes. Katherine then briefly reappears, this time shot from above and slightly behind such that, disconcertingly, she seems to be swinging upside down, further jarring our sense of sight. This opening barrage culminates with a shot of a pendulum swinging back and forth at the viewer in which we can just make out Murphy and Léger reflected in its metal surface. Tying directly back to the first shot of Katherine on the swing, the pendulum—along with several other structurally similar shots in the film—takes the immersive quality of the swing’s “nearer and farther” and turns it against itself.

Clip 1: Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, Ballet mécanique, 1924

Léger could hardly have been more explicit about his use of cinematic “contrast.” Entirely evident in his “graphic de constructions” diagram of Ballet mécanique, published in 1924 in Friedrich Kiesler’s Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik, Léger leaves little doubt that he conceived the structure of the film as a dialectical synthesis of opposing speeds and movement: “fast vertical masses” and “decelerating vertical masses” punctuated by “accelerating penetration” and “decelerating penetration” combine to form an overarching “tension towards speed.” This internal “tension,” between both the speed and the optical impact of contrasting movements, is of vital importance as—and here is where I part ways with every account of Ballet mécanique that I know of—it sets Léger’s film against film itself. Or more specifically, it produces an anti-absorptive effect within cinema against an otherwise non-dialectical—and accordingly overly facile or “spectacular”—experience of absorption typical of cinematic experience at this time. Michael Fried’s view of the merely immersive quality of film, in which “the absorption or engrossment of the movie audience sidesteps, automatically avoids, the question of theatricality” would, I think, have struck a sympathetic note with Léger.19 In the absence of any theatricality to defeat—in the absence of a visual modality that actively resists or pushes us away—the experience of cinematic absorption is, for Léger, a lapse into mere spectacle. The immersive experience of cinematic spectacle, in other words, is structurally devoid of the tension required by modernist painting to produce a genuinely compelling—I’m tempted to say authentic—mode of absorption.

The Contrasts of Form paintings and Ballet mécanique thus each use cinematic effect to entirely opposite ends. In the case of his painting, the initial surface intensity adds to the overall absorptive effect of the tableau. With Ballet mécanique the inverse occurs. Following the seductive opening movements of Katherine Murphy on the swing, increasing aggressive bursts of optical intensity are punctuated with occasional breaks in tempo to produce more than simply “a study in comparative motion,” as Iris Barry described it in an early review from 1925, but an opposition that systematically frustrates the viewer’s absorption in the film.20 “I wanted to amaze the audience first,” Léger writes of his film, “then make them uneasy, and then push the adventure to the point of exasperation.”21 Even the inclusion of the letterpress “headline” that appears at one point in the film—“On a volé un collier de cinq millions” [“Stolen, a five million franc necklace”] was, as Barry writes in her review, “upsetting because one’s mind, hampered by literature, concludes there must be meaning in it, whereas there isn’t.”22 Writing in July 1924 for the final issue of L’Esprit Nouveau, this is how Léger sums up his and Murphy’s film: “We ‘persist’ up to the point that the eye and mind of the viewer ‘can’t take it anymore’ [‘ne l’accepte plus’]. We exhaust its spectacle value right up to the moment that it becomes unbearable.”23

If Ballet mécanique aspires to exhaust its own “spectacle value”—which is to say, exhausts the spectacle value of filmic absorbtion—Léger’s painting adopts a much different approach. Far from walling itself off from spectacle, modernist painting, Léger argues, must maintain “an affinity with its own age,” constantly adapting to ever new and increasingly pernicious visual forms that ingratiate themselves into our vision. In a 1913 essay, for example, Léger uses the example of the historical painter Édouard Detaille to describe how Manet’s modernism both incorporates and opposes the theatrical aspects of Salon painting.

In addition to certain forms of spectacular Salon painting, Manet’s work also assumes what Fried and T. J. Clark describe as the “hard instantaneity” of photography and the modern advertising poster.24 By the early-twentieth century, however, the spectacle of salon painting cedes to a number of much more formidable adversaries, including, as Léger writes, “modern mechanical achievements such as color photography, [and] the motion-picture camera.” But if these various forms of “spectacle” prove to be tenacious adversaries for modernist painting, they are the kiss of death for the theatrical painters that Manet and his generation positioned themselves against. Next to cinema, Detaille hasn’t a chance. “I earnestly ask myself,” Léger writes, “how all those more or less historical or dramatic pictures shown in the French Salon can compete with the screen of any cinema…. The few workers who used to be seen in museums, planted in front of a cavalry charge by Detaille… are no longer there: they are at the cinema.”25 The only viable means by which modernist painting can avoid the fate of Detaille is thus to homeopathically incorporate these new visual forms and effects, not to surpass them but to overcome them—to “dominate” them as Léger puts it—rendering them authentic through a dialectic of renewal. The modern painter, he writes, “has only one chance left to take: to rise to the plane of beauty by … select[ing] the most plastic and theatrical values possible from the whirlpool that swirls before his eyes; to interpret them in terms of spectacle; to attain theatrical unity and dominate it at any price. If he does not rise high enough, if he does not reach the higher plane, he is immediately in competition with life itself which equals and surpasses him.”26 Modernist painting can only defeat spectacle, in other words, by incorporating and defeating the effects of spectacle itself. But if this fails—if the painter is unable to “dominate” its “theatrical unity”—unable to reach what he calls “the higher plane”—then painting lapses into simply another form of dead surface—another form of spectacle.

In the case of Ballet mécanique, however, it is no longer a question of competing with or dominating spectacular vision from within painting. Opting for a different strategy, Léger works against cinematic absorption and the pseudo-intensity of cinema from within cinema itself. Ballet mécanique, Léger writes in his 1924 essay on the film, represents “the painter’s and poet’s revenge.” And so I’ll end with an ending: the animated figure of Charlie Chaplin—or the “Charlot Cubiste” as it has become known—that opens and ends Léger’s film. Chaplin, along with few select others (Abel Gance and Erich von Stroheim most notably), is one of the few filmmakers Léger regards with particular admiration. “You can figure out too often what Douglas Fairbanks is up to, you can rarely guess with Chaplin,” he writes in 1925. Ballet Mécanique opens with an animated sequence of the Chaplin figure springing up from the bottom of the screen, raising his hat—one of Chaplin’s trademark gestures—and sinking back down again, as if pushed by the open title, “Charlot présente le ballet méchanique” a reference not only to Chaplin’s little tramp character, known as “Charlot” in France, but also to André Charlot, one of the film’s financers. This opening shot literalizes Walter Benjamin’s observation that when Chaplin walks away from us at the end of his films, his unique and instantly recognizable gait transforms into the kind of company trademark typically seen at the beginning and end of Hollywood films. Here, however, rather than a roaring lion or snow-caped mountain, Charlot becomes the opening and closing “trademark” for Léger’s production.27

As Charlot jerks his way across the screen at the end of the film, his animated movements come as close to actual dance as this particular Ballet gets. Again, the quality of these movements is important. For as it so happens, Henri Bergson used the example of dance to describe, in terms very similar to Souriau’s, the difference between “graceful” movements that absorb us and “mechanical” jerky movements that push us away. Watching a skilled dancer, Bergson argues, we anticipate movements before they occur as our vision harmonizes with the fluidly of the dancer’s motion. The pleasure in watching dance thus stems from the fact that we are able to predict—or at least retroactively feel as if we predicted—the dancer’s movements in advance of actually having taken place. Movement spills into movement, drawing us—absorbing us—into the visual rhythm of the dancer’s motion. By contrast, dance that is discordant, mechanical, or jerky—which is to say the kind of dance we see at the end of Léger’s film—does the opposite: unable to predict the flow of one movement into the next, the viewer feels aggravated by the disjunction. This is particularly the case, Bergson claims, when the dancer moves out of sync with the rhythm of the music, as would most likely have occurred had George Anthiel’s unrealized—indeed, until very recently unrealizable—soundtrack been appended to the film. Composed with such complete disregard as to how it aligned with the movements on the screen that it actually exceeded the length of the film by a good ten minutes, Antheil’s discordant composition would have further exacerbated the already discordant movements of Chaplin’s dance.

Clip 2: Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, Ballet mécanique, 1924

Léger, I think, would almost certainly have agreed with Walter Benjamin’s claim that the quality of Chaplin’s movements allegorically reflect back onto the mechanical nature of cinema itself: “Chaplin’s way of moving,” Benjamin writes, “is not really that of an actor…. His unique significance lies in the fact that, in his work, the human body is integrated into the film image by way of his gestures—that is, his bodily and mental posture…. Each movement he makes is composed of a succession of staccato bits of movement. Whether it is his walk, the way he handles his cane, or the way he raises his hat—always the same jerky sequence of tiny movements applies the law of the cinematic image sequence to that human motorial functions.”28 Most film actors according to Benjamin aspire to the opposite: to dominate the cinematic apparatus, triumphantly asserting their humanity in the face of the machine. Hence the appeal of the movie star. Oppressed by the machine in their workaday world, “[The] masses,” he writes, “fill the cinemas to witness the film actor take his revenge on their behalf.”29 Like so many of Léger’s paintings from the 20’s and indeed like dancing figure of Chaplin that ends his film, the machine is encrusted onto the human body. But it isn’t film that resists this dehumanization, for Léger, it is painting. Far from the actor enacting his or her revenge on the part of the cinemagoer, it is the painter who takes his revenge on film.