Passages from Thomas Elsaesser

Mind-game films as Memento is categorized address epistemological problems (how do we know what we know) and ontological doubts (about other worlds, other minds) that are in the mainstream of the kinds of philosophical inquiry focused on human consciousness, the mind and the brain, multiple realities or possible worlds. There is a certain radical ambivalence in the way these films present their characters as suffering from particular pathologies, for mind-game films tend to revolve around mentally or psychologically unstable characters, whose aberrations fall into three major types: paranoia, schizophrenia, and amnesia. One can see the mind-game protagonists’ plight as the pathologies of individual lives, but just as forcefully, opening out to contemporary issues of identity, recognition by others, and subjectivity in general. The “default values” of normal human interaction are no longer “in place,” so that the pathologies prevailing in the films reveal other dimensions as well. Paranoia, one can argue, is also the appropriate – or even “productive” – pathology of our contemporary network society. As a response to the crisis in subject-formation, engages with the symbolic order by constant disarticulation and vigilance toward its systemic intentions and disembodied intelligence. By shifting perspectives and generating horizons with higher degrees of complexity, can lead to new kinds of knowledge. Considered as a productive pathology, Leonard’s amnesia would remind one of the importance of forgetting, rather than remembering. The amnesiac hero is in his pathology programmable like a weapon. The film foregrounds the idea of “programming,” as opposed to remembering: it points to the importance of the change from a society based on law/prohibition (so strong in analyses of myths and narratives) to one organizing itself around procedures and protocols (in systems analysis, engineering, and information sciences). To this extent, Leonard represents the new multitasking personality (dissociative, reactive: not rapid reaction, but random reaction force), with a subjectivity programmable not through ideology and false consciousness, but programmed by a fantasy, or self-programmed through the body (where the body functions as a technology of recording, storage, and replay: the somatic or pathologized body as an advanced “neural” or “ biological” medium, in its mental instability and volatility potentially more efficient than the current generation of electronic media, at least for certain tasks. What used to be private detectives looking for clues down those mean streets in film noir appear now to be insurance agents assessing risk on behalf of their corporate employers in the neo-noir films of the 1990s. If we understand these illnesses as anthropomorphized versions of mathematical code and automated programs, then they seem to liberate and create new connections, establish new networks, but these are not “open” and “free.” They are contained and constrained within a protocol, whose subjective dimensions have not yet been fully understood, not least because of the way they model the future at the same time as they preempt it, and thus potentially short-circuit the very connections they seek to establish: hence the allegorical (and tragic) figure of the “risk-insurer,” who risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophet. We are dealing with pathologies (of subjectivity, of consciousness, of memory and identity): indications of crisis and uncertainty in the relation of the self with itself and with the world (and by extension: of the spectator with the screen). Seen from the Deleuzian interpretation of Foucault’s shift from “disciplinary” to “control” societies (Deleuze 1992), these pathologies of the self are a way of making the body and the senses ready for the new surveillance society. They inscribe “index and trace” in the form of systems of inscription on the individual body under the conditions of generalized surveillance and real-time, permanent feedback. For French philosophy, madness, rather than signifying, as it had done for the Romantics, exceptional talent and genius, becomes a way of “socializing” subjectivity in bourgeois society and under the conditions of liberal market economics. Read “politically” in the light of Foucault, mind-game films would show how perceptual or somatic faculties released or manifest by illness are equally “socialized”: they either represent the (individual) solution to a (collective) problem – rather than constituting the problem, as in the case study – or the illness is made to work, fitting a body (through its mind no longer “in control”) around a new set of social tasks and political relations. In this way “aberrant” mental states signify the effects of the new disciplinary machines of which they are the early warning systems, heralding the next step after internalizing (bourgeois) self-discipline and self-monitoring, where it would no longer be the mind - with its unconscious and superego competing for control – that is in charge, but instead, where the senses, the sensations, affects, and the body are the ones that are being directly addressed, stimulated, and appealed to, and thus “organized” and “controlled,” in order to fit the subject into the contemporary world and the social matrix of “affective labor”. While this recalls Walter Benjamin, and his theory of the cinema as a disciplinary machine, “training the senses” for modernity and urban life, it also provides a bridging argument to an apparently quite different school of thinking about reordering and realigning our somatic responses with the sensory overload of contemporary life. According to Benjamin, shocks to the body are buffered by the cinema, in that films duplicate, repeat, and thereby make pleasurable in the form of humor the terrors of a world where the human body is exposed and subjected to the logic of abstract systems or machines, be they bureaucratic or technological. Cinema thus rehearses and readies the human sensorium for the tasks of “distracted attention,” especially with respect to the perceptual organization of the visual field at the place of work and in everyday life. Media consumption has become part of the “affective labor” required in modern (“control”) societies, in order to properly participate in the self-regulating mechanisms of ideological reproduction, for which retraining and learning are now a lifelong obligation. Undergoing tests – including the “tests” put up by mind-game films – thus constitutes a veritable “ethics” of the (post-bourgeois) self: to remain flexible, adaptive, and interactive, and above all, to know the “rules of the game.” This may explain why mind-game films are at once so popular and give rise to such a flurry of hermeneutic activity. FAQs either ignore the fictional contract and treat the film as an extension of real life, to which factual information is relevant, or they tend to use the film as the start of a database, to which all sorts of other data – trivia, fine detail, esoteric knowledge – can be added, collected, and shared. What they do not seem to be engaged in is (symbolic or allegorical, intentionalist or symptomatic) interpretation. This is surprising, given the patently impossible or at least highly implausible “realities” the films deal with, and since this fan-base is rarely a credulous newage cult community, but made up of very savvy media-consumers, one has to assume that such “taking for real” is one of the rules of the game that permit participation. The film is thus part-text, part-archive, part-point of departure, part-node in a rhizomatic, expandable network of inter-tribal communication. The narratologist, too, is not interested in interpretation, but concerned with definition and the general rules by which certain effects are generated or validated. George Wilson, concludes: “ It would be interesting to inquire why cinematic assaults on the norm of narrational transparency have become so common around the turn of the century. I do not know the answer, and I am not sure how such an inquiry, responsibly conducted, should proceed. No doubt a certain amount of copycatting has gone on, and perhaps some kind of postmodern skepticism about the duplicity of reality and the photographic image has drifted over Hollywood. In any event, my present aim has been to say something fairly systematic about what some of these subversions of cinematic transparency amount to.” What is left out are the material conditions and economic implications of the mind-game film. But these are not “repressed” truths that somehow need to be brought to light; rather, the material conditions and the hermeneutic games are each the recto of a verso, where both sides cannot be visible at the same time. A policy of “access for all” (“a Hollywood film is a party to which everyone can bring a bottle” is how the director Robert Zemeckis once phrased it), and no small achievement, when one considers that multiple entry-point means: audiences of different gender,different age-groups, different ethnic or national identities, different educational backgrounds, but also quite literally, audiences that “enter” a film at different times during a given performance (on television) or at different points in history (the “classic” or “cult” film). Films have also had to perform well on different media-platforms, at least since the 1960s: as theatrical releases, as television re-runs, as pre-recorded videotapes. Since the 1990s, the marketplace has expanded (it has become global, rather than merely US-domestic, European, Japanese, and Australian) and the platforms have diversified: besides the ones named, one needs to add: a film’s internet site, the movie trailer, the video-game, and the DVD. In order to exist at all, it has to be “a major presence in all the world’s markets,” but also, one can add, “a major presence in all the world’s modes of representation.” This is no longer only “no small achievement,” but a truly daunting challenge, when one considers the proliferation of reception contexts and media-platforms. What once was “excessively obvious” must now be “excessively enigmatic,” but in ways that still teach (as Hollywood has always done) its audiences the “rules of the game” of how a Hollywood film wants to be understood, except that now, it seems, at least as far as the mind-game film is concerned, the rules of the game are what the films are also “about,” even more overtly than before. The conclusion would therefore be something like this: the new contract between spectator and film is no longer based solely on ocular verification, identification, voyeuristic perspectivism, and spectatorship” as such, but on the particular rules that obtain for and, in a sense, are the conditions for spectatorship: the (meta-)contact established by the different interpretative communities with the films, across the “rules of the game” that each community deems relevant and by which it defines itself: its “felicity conditions,” as linguists might say. Mind-game films, we could say, break one set of rules (realism, transparency, linearity) in order to make room for a new set. We seem indeed to have come full circle. Initially, I posited that the main effect of the mind-game film is to disorient the audience, and put up for discussion the spectator–screen relationship. The notable emergence (some would argue: reemergence) of mind-game films since the mid-1990s would be one sign of this “crisis,” to which they are the solution at a meta-level. It is for these reasons that I want to insist on treating these films as a “phenomenon” and a “certain tendency.” Given their often cult status, the interest they have elicited from pop culture fans, philosophers, public intellectuals, and even people who usually do not write/think about movies, it is probably equally sensible to treat them as symptomatic for wider changes in the culture’s way with moving images and virtual worlds. Mind-game films may show how the cinema itself has mutated: rather than “reflecting” reality, or oscillating and alternating between illusionism/realism, these films create their own referentiality. This means that, indeed, we cannot be sure if contemporary cinema is “part of the problem” (Foucault, Deleuze) or already “part of the solution” (Johnson, Gladwell) in the reorientation of the body and senses, as we learn to live symbiotically with machines and “things,” as well as with hybrid forms of intelligence embedded in our many automated systems. In this respect, the cinema – even more than a machine of the visible – may have become a mode of performative agency, as well as a form of thinking: that is why I believe these films are mindgame films, and not merely complex narratives, or rather: why complex narratives are only one of the games they play with our minds. This project started from a reflection on the current media-technologies and especially the almost viral proliferation of cinema: from the movie house to the home entertainment centre, from the big screen to the portable phone, from the television in the home to the monitor in offices and airports, from surveillance control centres to electronic billboards, from portable laptops to museums and art galleries.