In Chapter 1, I analyzed a love scene in Her in which the two principal characters, an unlucky-in- love greeting card writer and his computer’s operating system, manage to consummate their burgeoning romance in spite of the latter’s lack of a body. The impossibility of any physical union between these ontologically different beings is temporarily overcome in this scene as suggested by its rendering of moaning voices over a black screen. Sound, as I argued, is figured in this film as a molecular realm in which bodies, broadly construed, de- and re-materialize. I’d like to open this chapter by looking to a similar scene of bodily incorporation from Leos Carax’s dazzling Holy Motors (2012), and as with the sequence from Jonze’s film, the melding of bodies happens only when the lights go down.
In one of the movie’s dozen or so vignettes, the shape-shifting protagonist Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) emerges from his limousine, a veritable dressing room and prop closet for the donning of
identities, clad in a black, skin-tight suit dotted with tiny white orbs. With a large case in hand and a tubular container strapped to his back, he approaches what looks to be a factory of some sorts. Once inside, he enters a darkened room. So dark is this room, in fact, that the spheres on his body are revealed to be glowing, and they are all that cuts his figure from the ground. Scarcely visible, he opens his case and removes martial arts weapons similarly adorned with luminescent dots. From elsewhere, via an intercom, a voice gives instructions. Oscar obeys. In time, we gather that this mysterious room is a motion-capture studio and that the tiny balls affixed to Oscar are the digital receptors that translate his physical
movements into digital representations. (SEE FIG. 22)
The remainder of the scene, some eight-and-a-half minutes, is a mesmerizing study of the body in motion rendered as the dance of white dots against a black background. Absent the cues provided by shadow, relative size, back- or foreground, any suggestion of a z-axis falls away: depth is in effect erased. Generally utilized to make cinematic space cohere, the conventions of continuity editing prove wholly disorienting in this environment, and even more so than under “normal” conditions, jump cuts are especially jarring. All of this Carax playfully exploits, using sudden camera angle switches and almost imperceptible ramps in and out of slow-motion in such a way that the immediate narrative thrust of
Oscar’s actions become less important than the immediacy of his motion and the sheer pliability of his body. Indeed, for me, the spatial relations of the scene only come into relief when I slowly review them shot-by-shot, over and over, altering, to paraphrase Laura Mulvey, the very flow of the film with my remote control.1 At times, Oscar seems to hang in space, as if momentarily free from gravity, like some Riefenstahlian diver. Moreover, the audible thuds of his landings the only thing reminding us of the floor that we, if only for a second, forget is there. Without spatial orientation and without the more
recognizable features of the human body that illumination provides, we are left with just the fluidity of the movement itself, the “beauté de la geste” (“beauty of the gesture”), as Oscar puts it later in the film.2
At the unseen director’s behest, Oscar begins to wield his weapons in what we surmise is a battle simulation. From the point of view of the audience, there is no clear delineation between hand and object: his arms fuse with his arms like prosthetic appendages or bodily outgrowths. Yet this is fusion is hardly the most remarkable one on offer in the scene. Moments later, when the lights come up again, a woman (Russian acrobat Zlata) in a similarly orb-studded, red leather body suit joins Oscar in the space. The two figures face one another as if a Spaghetti Western duel before slithering together to perform an assortment of simulated sex acts.
Down go the lights once again: as with earlier, figure and ground blur, but here, so to do the boundaries between the two bodies, their contortionistic poses rendering the pair as an constantly morphing, inextricably entangled bodily amalgam. Even more so than in Her, this scene renders
lovemaking (or the performance thereof) as two bodies becoming one, as an in-corp-oration. The glowing orbs thus do not mark out a corporeal boundary or border; instead, they reveal the body in all its atomistic porousness: as the two bodies begin to snake and twist around one another, the unit of analysis ceases to
1 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
2 The English subtitles in the Region 1 Blu-ray release of Holy Motors render “geste” as “act” rather than, as I have, “gesture.” Given that Oscar is an actor, “act” would seem to convey something specific to theatrical performance, while the French “geste” is more general, meaning “movement” and “symbolic gesture.” What’s more, I’ve chosen this translation for its resonances with the recent work on cinema and gesture. See, for instance, Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000): 49–62; and Pasi Väliaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema Circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010).
be the singular body but rather the shifting constellation of dots. The relationship of one to the other is thus refigured as a relationship of even more elemental physical parts—parts that in this depiction can no longer be said to belong definitively to one body or the other. In this regard, the scene serves as a visual figuration of a provocative line from Gaytari Chakravorty Spivak: “[I]f one really thinks of the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such.”3
Figure 22 - Oscar dotted with motion capture sensors in Holy Motors
It must be underscored, though, that in both of these examples (Her, Holy Motors), sex, in however “performative” a fashion, is the primary means by which bodies incorporate, as if following from Aristophanes’ logic of sexual (re-)union. But if as I’ve argued heretofore that bodies are inherently porous and protean, that they scatter and coalesce and enter into peculiar intersubjective assemblages, then it stands to reason that they might do so under circumstances that are less explicitly “carnal” and that do not rely upon physical proximity.
Indeed, this is what I find at work in Shane Carruth’s mind-bending science fiction love story Upstream Color, the primary object of analysis in this chapter. In it, we find an ever more thoroughgoing type of integration, one that widens out in space and time to include not just two bodies but multiple others—human and non-—, the consequences of which demand nothing short of a fundamental re-
thinking of (inter)subjectivity. This fact alone would make Carruth’s film a candidate for inclusion in this study. But it’s not simply what Upstream Color does with regards to subjectivity that warrants our attention but also how it goes about it, the physical, material interactions that set the film into motion. Two related, albeit independent “channels” make possible the expansive, interconnected field of
subjectivity found in Upstream Color: water and sound. It therefore serves as a fitting film with which to end the dissertation, for a number of this project’s earlier concerns here converge. But before we may venture down that path, we must first unravel what is an extraordinarily oblique text.