Shaviro and Cronenberg, Heidegger and Lynch

In watching Cronenberg’s Videodrome I was, as were several class mates, struck by the enormously wide-ranging and edgy bent exhibited by some eighties movies. This is not to say that Sixteen Candles or some other Rambo junk turned my head around, but a few movies did, and one was Dune. Panned by critics and fans of Frank Herbert’s novel series of the same name, upon which the film was based, and released in a longer, TV version that Lynch had his name taken off of—replacing it with the oft-used Hollywood pseudonym Alan Smithee—that actually was more faithful to the original novel, this movie in its shorter version displays a profoundly affective quality. Just as Shaviro maintains in his treatment of Cronenberg’s films, including a section on Videodrome, in some cinema there is the capacity to see “the distinction between fantasy and actuality, or between inner bodily excitation and outer objective representation […] entirely collapse []” (141). This failure of objective reasoning to completely totalize subjective experience has been noted by others, including Heidegger (in Being and Time), who founded his existential analytic on a forceful contestation of the a priori in Kant, saying, in brief, that there can be no a priori objective reality because any structuration or articulation of such is always already the product of subjective understanding. Heidegger is the first philosopher to ask of rational presence, what is the use of claiming to be, or proving being, when one must first ask what it means to be? Affect is crucial here, because—as Heidegger knew, and his work on mood and death show—what we see (and know, cognitively/epistemologically) is inextricably bound up with what and how we feel (emotionally/biologically), so much so that our bodies often react to what they’re shown well before (well, really only a few nano-seconds, but still, before) our mind can identify it, rationalize it, universalize it.
In Dune, Lynch gives us these visceral shocks—body blows—in the form of the various figures of the Harkonens. A different branch of the highly elaborate noble caste system posited by Herbert, the Harkonens are thought of by the Atreides (the noble house from whom our protagonist, Paul, comes) as animals. But in the film, we see, even though we don’t want to. Or as with Shaviro’s claim contra the psychoanalytic view that voyeurism is an active process, the viewer is in a state of radical passivity: “I [the movie house viewer of cinematic art] am powerless not to see” (48). We see the bloated Harkonen Baron flying about with the aid of a levitation device, his body too big to stand on its own; we see the younger generation of Harkonens as glistening with oil, anointed and sexually charged, in the form of Feyd (played by a young and snarling Sting); we see the middle generation between the two, mealy mouthed and bowing when the Baron receives his meal (or is it a drug?): the blood of a young boy, stripped down to a black leather diaper, and complete with a nipple from which the stuff is sucked. But first we see the Baron, in close-up: pimpled and puss-oozing, scarred and red-haired (tufts is all he has, though Sting maintains his normal coif), bloated as he is, he looks as if he’s about to pop, just like one of his sores, straining against a translucent membrane, seeking a weak seam in his outfit just the same as the puss of his sores strains against their covers. The Harkonen scenes get a brash musical score, with plenty of cymbal crashes and angular harmonies, and this acts to further focalize the animal in the Harkonens, as opposed to the Atreides, who get finely orchestrated lines with classic European sensibilities. Guards, also in tight black leather, bring in the boy, and he is pushed forward. After a roaring claim to destroy the house of Atriedes, the Baron flies up to the boy and looks deep into his eyes, almost lovingly, and grabs him by the shoulders, pulling him close. We can count the sores on his face, see the ooze, seemingly smell the feted breath, but in an instant, he’s yanked free the plug on the nipple affixed to the boy’s chest and is sucking at it with glee and slurping noises, just as the scene cuts we hear him laugh and black spatters across the screen; we feel it hit our skin. Now, following Shaviro, we’d say that instead of any identification with the boy or the Baron, we only experience an “alien interest” (49). And despite an urge to make some posterior narrativization that might allow us to locate some allegory to consumption in the work (as would be the case with psychoanalysis), we at the moment of viewing are caught up in the image, neither possessing it, nor able to act against it. This passivity is radical exactly insomuch as it is determined to maintain its passivity even in the face of immanent danger to the subject as a result of such passivity; this masochism is the twine knotted around the wrists of the viewer, whose hairy fibers irritate even before we strain, but whose biting incisions at the moment of struggle we take to be caresses.
Whether we choose to take Shaviro at his word that psychoanalysis is finally moribund or not, his charge (like Sedgwick’s in The Sylvan Tompkins Reader) that the process of film criticism has fallen to some automatism is well taken. While I would argue that the only theoretical apparatus that could adequately deal with the non-narrative is psychoanalysis, I’ll grant that there is some useful methodology to be found in the affect-theory model. We can use both; we need to use what works. What I would avoid is the tendency to afford some special ontological status to the cinematic apparatus, such as when we say that cinema is “a technology for intensifying and renewing experiences of passivity and abjection” (65), as Shaviro does (and as do Benjamin and Silverman, though in different ways), because, given the tendency to recovery that is exhibited in aesthetic production (that is, the tendency to always find new ways to say old things, as well as to say new things all the time), it seems imperative to embrace the ontological analytic, which for Heidegger was the key hermeneutic: we are, and only ever were, on the basis of what it means to be. And because we known what it means to be only in an historically situated moment, completely contingent upon subjective experience that is responsive to pressures from past, present, and future moments (anticipations, illuminations in Bloch’s sense; all recoveries), we might properly think of these technologies (following Heidegger to a place where he only partly leads us) as ontologies, as logics of beings. And as each device has its own logic of being, perhaps what is most important is in what ways each overlaps and anticipates of, and recovers from, the others.