From high overhead the melee, the scene opens. Hundreds of bodies press against one another tightly, moving simultaneously but not in unison, not towards some common destination. Rather, they proceed in all directions, directionlessly. As the bodies collide with one another, they ricochet, altering their course but not their slow, forward momentum, like wind-up toys colliding against wall until a less obstructed path offers itself. Bodies ooze into whatever pockets of space they might find. These figures are indistinguishable from one another, dripping as they are in red liquid. Even in the second, closer shot, one would be hard pressed to differentiate one person from another, let alone home in one particular body to track. Figures and ground become hopelessly entangled.
In the next shot, a more intimate vantage brings us in closer to the crimson substance that coats them all: crushed tomatoes. With delight, the horde flings fistfuls of it at one another as they trudge through ankle-deep rivers of tomato along the streets of this unidentified location. As the camera moves closer in the subsequent shot, a few of the revelers come into relief. Some bellyflop into the pools of red; others pour buckets of it over their heads. Amid this tumult, two men bend down and slowly lift a supine woman from the muck: is she dead? Unconscious? Answers the next shot: no, she is very much alive. Indeed, she beams as the men hoist her over their shoulders. Other hands enter the frame and reach for her legs and her back, joining the human scaffolding that keeps her aloft. She surfs the crowd in a messianic pose, anointed in tomato.
This scene, we eventually gather, takes place during an Italian harvest festival, one in which the revelers bathe in the yield’s fruits. But it quickly shifts from gaiety to something more unsettling, signaled largely through a modulation of the sound track. The cheers of merriment are gradually dialed down in the mix, replaced first by a somewhat ominous score and then by muffled screams of horror that seem to hail from somewhere and somewhen else. These sounds alter the overall tone of the bacchanal, especially when the woman, whom we can now more clearly see is played by Tilda Swinton, is lowered back into the mire. The hands that moments earlier held her above the fray are now fashioned into shovls that douse her in red. Now, rather than joyously bathing in the tomato pulp, she appears to be squirming in it, almost
drowning it. Even the substance itself takes on a different quality: the liquid’s intense red recalls the hue of blood and the bits of tomato skin and flesh increasingly begin to look like that of the human variety. What is at first a suspicion of a human mire becomes the overwhelming impression in the scene’s final shot as the camera lingers in close-up on a pool of the chunky liquid as it slops and slurps in waves alongside the echoing, muffled cries of terror. All diegetic sound has been completely evacuated.
Thus begins Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), an intensely tactile film that chronicles the deterioration of Eva (Swinton), once a travel writer and now the mother of a sociopathic boy who as a child rejected her attempts at maternal warmth and as a teenager slaughtered her husband, her daughter, and dozens of his classmates at a high school sporting event. This opening scene, then, suggests either a dream or a memory of a time in Eva’s life prior to the birth of the deranged Kevin, a time when she still trotted the globe, a time when she still knew peace. But even the confines of her mind prove porous to the boy’s malevolence, which seems to slowly creep into the scene before enveloping it entirely, turning a rapturous moment of self abandonment into a horrifying spectacle of a city strewn with ichor and entrails.
One critic describes these opening moments of the film as “an orgy in a lake of blood,” and an apposite characterization is this, for it captures the immense pleasure of Eva, the Swinton character, that is nonetheless suffused with dread and the threat of bodily harm.1 Joy and pain, transgressive pleasure and the promise of death: jouissance rendered in widescreen. But I want to focus more closely on the “orgy” descriptor. In contemporary usage, “orgy” carries the connotation of sexual indiscriminateness within a group setting. Etymologically, however, the term derives from the ancient Greek rites celebrating Dionysus, the god of wine, of drunkenness, of music. Dionysus, one will recall, is a central figure in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, a work in which a similar emphasis on the orgiastic, the fluid, and the bodily is on display. First published in 1872, Nietzsche’s debut monograph argues that the genealogy of ancient Greek art, and indeed, all of ancient Greek culture, exhibits a subtle negotiation between the twin
1 Roger Ebert, Rev. of We Need to Talk About Kevin, Chicago Sun-Times, January 25, 2012, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/we-need-to-talk-about-kevin-2012.
impulses within Greek man—order and chaos, broadly—that Nietzsche aligns with the gods Apollo and Dionysus, respectively.
The Birth of Tragedy is a difficult and enigmatic text, often regarded by scholars of Nietzsche as not reflective of his “mature” philosophy—he was at the time of its writing a practicing philologist, after all—, for it bears an almost obsequious attachment to two of his early heroes, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and composer Richard Wagner, from whom he would later distance himself. Nietzsche owned up to as much in “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” a “belated preface (or postscript)” he wrote for the book’s fourth, very slightly revised edition in 1886, a move that many take to signal Nietzsche’s divorcing of himself from this, his first book. In this appendage, Nietzsche describes The Birth of Tragedy as “questionable,” “an impossible book” that is “poorly written, ponderous, [and] embarrassing.”2 Key to this embarrassment, he concludes, is his youthful over-reliance on his at-the-time intellectual idols:
How much I now regret the fact that at the time I did not have the courage (or the presumptuousness?) to allow myself in every respect a personal language for such an individual point of view and such daring exploits—that I sought laboriously to express strange and new evaluations with formulas from Schopenhauer and Kant, something which basically went quite against the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as their tastes!3
However, despite what a number of commentaries might tell us, Nietzsche did not disown the book so much as his approach in writing it, as a recent revival in interest in this early work has revealed. The Birth of Tragedy’s thesis, in fact, is central to Nietzsche’s entire philosophical project, which is why he later defends it in Ecce Homo (1908) and then redeploys the term “Dionysian” in his “mature” writings.4 Paul Raimond Daniels describes the notoriously difficult-to-pin-down book thus:
The Birth of Tragedy is a philosophical chameleon whose true color is still unseen, and whose purpose and intent may very well lie in this fact. It is an amazing work, bold,
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” in The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. by Ian Johnston (Arlington, VA: Richer Resources Publications, 2012): 7, 4, 5.
3 Ibid., 8, emphasis in original.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1992): 49; Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Graham Parkes (Hollywood, FL: Simon and Brown, 2012): 382.
vast, and ambitious; it overwhelmed its author, who could only write of it with differing feelings of pride, curiosity, caution and embarrassment—but never contempt—suggesting that the book is hardly the tame animal that Nietzsche would have us believe [in “An Attempt at Self-Criticism”].5
Within this familiar and often dismissed text lies a feral one. In it, Nietzsche develops an aesthetic theory of bodily sensation that is rooted in a contrasting of music with the plastic arts, a notion that I argue can be productively broadened to encompass, more generally, sound and image, which of course are the “raw materials” of cinema. I therefore mine the insights of one of Nietzsche’s key moves in The Birth of Tragedy (his concept of “transfiguration”) for insights that might be brought to bear on film studies. Next, I demonstrate how Nietzsche’s equation of music with formlessness marks an early instance of a line of thinking that will later emerge in critical theory that braids together sound
(specifically reduced hearing), and fetal experience in an complex of ideas that problematically hinges on essentialist notions of sexual difference. These same tropes crop up often in the cinema of Lynne Ramsay, a filmmaker whose preoccupation with certain formal devices and types of imagery offers a fruitful place against which to test the implications of these various theories of sound, water, and the maternal. Yet even as these elements tend to recur throughout her cinema, they fail to fuse into a coherent system of meaning, for, from one film to the next and even within individual films, Ramsay works both sides of the binary. This chapter thus asks: how might we imagine sound and wateriness not as being formless but instead as being between form or as being that which deforms? Crucial to all of this, then, is a word that appears in The Birth of Tragedy and that will appear later in the chapter in a different theoretical context but with a different prefix and with sometimes diverging meanings. That word is “figure.”