Kubrick’s audible bodies: unseen subjectivities in 2001 and The Shining

Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metaphysical works lies in what is unseen. There is an embodiment to Kubrick’s films that maintains a sense of subjectivity, but one which is unapparent and non-visual. This opens another way into Kubrick’s works, that of conditions of audibility (hearing/listening), affectivity, and signs. To think of embodiment from such an audible perspective requires one to subvert film spectatorship (the frame) and instead enter the reality of the film’s immanent, borderless unfolding as itself. This essay applies Gilles Deleuze’s semiotic concepts of cinema, metaphysics, and subjectivity to conditions of audibility and unseeing, a connection Deleuze largely ignored in his writings. These dual concepts of audibility and unseeing break prevailing analytical norms in cinema discourse that affirm limitations via material, visual, textual, and spatial reification: subjective-objective delineations, the body and the gaze, sound as necessarily spatial/material, and the dominance of images in regard to aesthetics, surveillance, and evidence. Instead, this essay moves through Kubrick’s constructions of milieu that are unseen in the midst of an otherwise visual unfolding, and audible in the midst of an otherwise sonic unfolding. To consider Kubrick’s films through their audible embodiment, one must detach (1) the microphone from its adherence to space, (2) the body from its visual gaze. Here, sounds, images, and objects become secondary to hearing and signs in a temporal unfolding, resulting in a cinema that is experiential rather than representational. This opens to an actuality of spirit within the world of the film, offering new opportunities for creativity in the cinematic form.

Bad Faith in Film Spectatorship

This article seeks to develop an under-appreciated aspect of spectator activity: the way in which viewers make use of film to enter or sustain a project of bad faith. Based on Jean-Paul Sartre's account of bad faith in Being and Nothingness (1943), the article explains the aspects of bad faith that are pertinent to viewer activity, then explores the way viewers can make use of filmic depictions to facilitate self-denial. For example, spectators may emphasize the fact that persons are depicted in narrow terms as corroboration for their belief that human nature is just as its depicted, thereby denying that we have the freedom to be otherwise. Or spectators may deny the relevance of problematic aspects of themselves when they find it depicted in characters who are admirable in other ways. I then consider whether films themselves can be described as being in bad faith. While technically they cannot, I identify ways that a film may encourage or discourage bad faith in viewers. I also examine how the immersive aspect of film enables viewers to turn attention away from themselves while they engage in self-denial. The case for this approach to viewer activity and film analysis is supplemented by a distinction between traits that do apply to film, e.g., being racist, sexist, or homophobic, and the resources it gives persons to be in bad faith about these social attitudes. I argue that a film can have traits like these while not encouraging bad faith and vice versa, demonstrating the unique perspective offered by approaching film and spectator activity in terms of bad faith.

Redefining the Self: The Human Centipede and Physical Spectatorship

As I watch the infamous scene in Tom Six's 2009 release, when Katsuro, the front segment of the centipede, defecates into the mouth of the second, my body rocks back and forth in a futile attempt at self-soothing. I hear the distant whine of a voice uttering, 'I don't want, I don't want to', before I realise it is my own. Finally, in a mixture of horror and relish, my back arches, my shoulders hunch forward and my chest heaves as I retch once, twice, three times. The Human Centipede belongs to a large and varied group of films released in recent years that have become notorious for eliciting intensely physical responses, from anxiety and nausea, to the fear of, desire to or even act of vomiting. In this paper, I build on current research into the embodied spectator by creating a detailed analysis of how physicality is constructed and manipulated by representations of faeces in this scene. Engaging with Richard Rushton's theories of spectatorship, Vivian Sobchack's studies of phenomenology and film, and Elizabeth Wilson's work on neuroscience, I explore the concept of physical spectatorship - the idea that embodied responses to film are textual constructions that return the viewer to a sense of their own corporeality. The notion of physical spectatorship challenges the dichotomy of film as object/viewer as subject, as well as the language we use to theorise the film-viewer relationship. By acknowledging the disgust this film generates, I question the extent to which notions of the viewer are strained against the concept of spectator as textual construction. Finally, I aim to theorise that which often escapes analysis in relation to film spectatorship: those body parts that make up the gastrointestinal tract, or the gut, that are brought into play in films designed to revolt.

Shocks to the System

This chapter offers a theory of moving-image horror based in the “sensational address,” the construction of mise-en-scène around the provocation of the viewer/gamer. It builds off of the tradition of theorizing horror film spectatorship to show the commonalities between horror film viewing and playing horror games—using trailers depicting audience reactions to Paranormal Activity (2007–2009) and Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010) as well as reaction videos made about horror games—to analyze the effects of a sensational, physical engagement with the screen. It argues for a fundamentally ludic understanding of horror film spectatorship that places the viewing activity of the horror film spectator and the active “entanglement” of the horror gamer on a spectrum of interactivity. This chapter proposes an understanding of horror as an engagement with the inconceivable, with things we fear but cannot fully comprehend. Sensational horror translates that feeling of inconceivable horror into visceral, physical experience.

Trust and Truth in Shutter Island

This article examines questions of trust in cinema through the lens of Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010). With its self-referential allusion to the mechanical “eye” of a camera, a stage-managed fantasy embedded within its plot and image of a dark lighthouse, Shutter Island explores its spectators' and its own cinematic sense of suspicion. The plot revolves around a protagonist who has locked himself out of certain memories and into a fantasy world. The article links pathological and therapeutic aspects of trust with interpersonal and institutional trust issues in ways that blur distinctions between trusting others and trusting oneself, and shows how reliant each is on the other. Construing trust as a type of participant attitude and highlighting techniques used to render it cinematically, the article tracks its emergence and erosion, both in terms of the diegesis and its bearing on film spectatorship. As a post-classical commentary on film-making, Shutter Island is viewed as intricately exemplifying what Robert Sinnerbrink (2016) describes as an action-driven film with “a highly reflective consciousness of cinematic spectatorship” (p. 70), as well as what Thomas Elsaesser (2009) describes as a “mind-game film”. To make sense of its ending, which may strike viewers as baffling and unnerving, and show how the protagonist's seemingly irrational decision is part of its film-philosophical point, traumatic disturbances in subjectivity and “monstrosities” depicted in the film are linked to Jean Epstein's notion of “something monstrous” in cinematic imagery. The protagonist's deliberately chosen fate is interpreted as a reparative gesture, expressing a desire for psychological healing and a way of helping him to marshal and recover a semblance of moral order and integrity under demoralizing circumstances.

Third Reel

This chapter assesses how, in Shivers (1975), David Cronenberg uses image and sound as discrete channels to extend narrative space and alter the significance of the visual information with the context provided by the aural. By coupling visual pleasure to aural infodump, Cronenberg not only smooths the audience's experience of a passage of pure exposition, but also qualifies their enjoyment in a way that produces a comic shudder. The chapter then considers exploitation cinema and exploitation film spectatorship. The film's association of a desiring female subject with fear raises the question of whether one is watching a misogynist film. The chapter also reflects on Cronenberg's Canadian liberalism. Moreover, it looks at the most significant evaluations of Shivers.

Psychoanalysis, Apparatus Theory, and Subjectivity

One of the aims of critical theories has been to reveal the systemic oppression that flows from the social structures of power, and critical theories have most typically turned to psychoanalysis to provide the theory for how these social structures work and reproduce themselves through the formation of their social subjects. Chapter 8 examines the influential film theory that derived from the intersection of semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis called “apparatus theory.” This grand theory proved contentious but very influential, especially the concept of suture, which provided a model for film spectatorship and subjectivity. This chapter concludes with a section on neo-Lacanian theory and uses it to explicate the soundtrack theory of Michel Chion.

Psychoanalysis and Film

Those who believe that the psychoanalytic understanding of human nature is broadly correct will also likely believe that there are essential aspects of film that cannot be adequately understood without it. Among these are film’s power; the nature of film spectatorship; and the characteristics of specific films and genres. Why are we attracted to certain kinds of films—horror films and those depicting violence we abhor? The most basic claim underlying psychoanalytic approaches to film is that the creation and experience of film is driven by desire and wish-fulfilment and functions to satisfy certain psychological, protective, expressive needs of artists and audiences. Psychoanalytic explorations of film tend to draw together aspects of artistic creation and spectatorship, as well as accounts of film’s power to move audiences and the nature of film spectatorship in general—the affective and cognitive significance of the nature of film experience itself.