Cinema After Deleuze After 9/11 (review)

 
Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity is an ambitious attempt to bring together the writings of Gilles Deleuze and discourses on national cinemas. In arguing that some of Deleuze’s concepts can be relevant to national cinematic discourses, David Martin-Jones offers a critique of the concept of the nation insofar as that concept is both facilitated and reflected by films.
 
As part of the general framework of his argument, Martin-Jones tends to criticize films that provide unified and totalizing “national narratives,” while he supports those films that undermine or complicate linear unification. In this respect, his argument falls in line with myriad contemporary condemnations of unity and linearity while championing diversity and multiplicity. His argument becomes most sophisticated and provocative when he calls into question recent U.S. cinema responses to the attacks of September 11, 2001. He argues about a number of films, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow, 2003) being exemplary, that the U.S. national narrative can only solidify itself on the basis of significant historical erasures. The September 11 attacks are quite literally a “ground zero” on the basis of which a number of historical truths can be sidestepped (Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and so on) in order that the U.S. be cleansed of its sins and any misgivings about itself swept away by a tide of renewed triumphalism. In short, if before September 11 the U.S. might have been hesitant about its need or ability to meddle in world affairs, then after September 11 it no longer needed to pursue its global aims with reserve. A film like Terminator 3 re-writes history in line with U.S. triumphalism, a reiteration of the kind of re-writing that goes back, Martin-Jones points out, at least to Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915).
 
The significant counter-example to Terminator 3 and U.S. triumphalism is Michel Gondry’s 2003 film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The book’s most important arguments emerge in its discussion of this film, although they are foreshadowed in the book’s opening chapters which, after introductory discussions of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Fellini’s 8½, chiefly deal with Sliding Doors in a British context and Run, Lola, Run in a unified German one, and are rounded off in the final chapter, which comments on films from Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan. The book’s moral message can be discerned in the discussion of Eternal Sunshine, especially in the claim that “by not comprehending the causes of a past trauma people are destined perpetually to repeat it” (173). For Martin-Jones, Eternal Sunshine achieves one thing that most other American films since 9/11 do not: it does not eschew the troubling nature of history. Rather than erasing or re-writing history, Eternal Sunshine asks its characters to re-trace the paths that have forged their histories—to re-visit history, to question it, and to examine their relationship to and responsibility for that history.
 
The contrast between Eternal Sunshine‘s approach to history and the triumphalist approach garnered by films such as Terminator 3 allows Martin-Jones to introduce Deleuze’s main cinematographic categories of the time-image and movement-image. While Terminator 3 affirms a logic of the movement-image by way of its commitments to linearity and an unambiguous national narrative, Eternal Sunshine more appropriately encourages an aesthetic of the time-image, in which the past is re-visited in a manner that allows it to be discovered anew. Eternal Sunshine offers an approach to the past that considers both the past’s impact on the present and also the ways in which the present shapes any approach to the past. This co-implication of past and present contrasts markedly with the movement-image’s affirmation of the separation between past and present, of a past that is safely and securely “in the past,” and of a present that is definitively separated from that past.
 
A final set of categories is borrowed from Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and brought closely into contact with the discourses on national cinema: deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Martin-Jones argues that many recent films—especially the popular films with which the book is mostly preoccupied—look and feel as though they should be time-images. In looking and feeling this way, Martin-Jones adds, such films evoke, in the context of national cinema, modes of deterritorialization; that is, they appear to offer ways of re-configuring and re-discovering national narratives in politically positive ways. However, Martin-Jones argues that most of these films, while looking and feeling like time-images, typically end up as movementimages. While they appear to open up the possibility of deterritorialization, these films (such as Terminator 3) end up reterritorializing the national narrative–they end up forcing the nation and its histories into a linear, unidirectional, triumphal shape. Needless to say, Martin-Jones finds such outcomes politically regressive.
 
All in all, this adds up to an impressive argument. My reservations have to do with Martin-Jones’s insistence on turning Deleuze’s categories into judgmental ones. For Martin-Jones, deterritorializing time-images are positive and politically progressive while reterritorializing movement-images are politically regressive. I am not convinced this is how Deleuze’s categories are best utilized, for, if nothing else, Deleuze was a philosopher who was deeply suspicious of forms of judgment (most concisely in his essay “To Have Done with Judgment”).
 
The question of judgment opens up a can of somewhat wriggly worms, for the major problem facing film scholars keen on using Deleuzian categories is this: how can Deleuze’s terms be used without falling into the trap of judgment? While there does seem to be a tendency in the Cinema books to affirm the properties of the time-image over those of the movement-image—especially insofar as readers will sense that the time-image gives a “proper” version of time (what Deleuze calls a “direct image of time”)—there is also a sense, I think, in which such judgments are mistaken. The Cinema books do not present a system by means of which “good” films can be distinguished from “bad” ones. Instead, they offer a system for the classification of cinematic images, arranged most broadly in terms of a historical split between the earlier movement-image and the later time-image. We know today that the strength and energy of the movement-image has not waned and that the time-image has in no way eclipsed its predecessor. But this gives us no reason to criticize and dismiss the perseverance of the movement-image, nor to regret that the time-image did not result in some kind of revolution of the senses. Rather, I think Deleuze might ask us to admire the brilliance of what the movement-image can do (in the hands of Griffith, Minnelli, Eisenstein, Lumet—or today, for Spielberg or Scorsese) alongside the achievements of the time-image. As Deleuze writes,
 

It is not a matter of saying that the modern cinema of the time-image is “more valuable” than the classical cinema of the movement-image. We are talking only of masterpieces to which no hierarchy of value applies. The cinema is always as perfect as it can be.
 

(Cinema x)

 

And yet, against what Deleuze might here have hoped, film scholars tend to pull Deleuze’s value-neutral categories into shapes that might seem to have a bit more bite. It was Christian Metz who first emphasized the ways in which those who write about films so staunchly and passionately defend the films they love while rejecting and vilifying those they hate, and Metz’s views on this state of affairs seem every bit as justified today as they were in 1975. Film studies has for a long time been a game of judgment, a drawing up of tables which separate the “good” from the “bad,” most often progressive or subversive forms of cinema from regressive, conservative films. Martin-Jones claims to be inspired by Comolli and Narboni’s landmark essay on “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” so as to leave readers in no doubt that his book continues that ideological tendency of film scholarship.

 
If Martin-Jones over-emphasizes the grandeur of the time-image at the expense of the movement-image, then a similar complaint might be made of his endorsement of deterritorialization at the expense of reterritorialization. The process of de- and reterritorialization is just that: a process. Deterritorialization first of all clears the ground—it shatters and disintegrates existing structures and meanings—in order that new reterritorializations might then occur; that is, reterritorialization entails the putting into place of new structures and meanings. The process of de- and reterritorialization is constant and ongoing—or, at the very least, Deleuze and Guattari hope it will be an ongoing process in which structures and meanings are revised and reinvented. For Martin-Jones to prioritize the workings of deterritorialization over those of reterritorialization seems to me to miss Deleuze and Guattari’s point. It again introduces criteria of judgment (that deterritorialization is positive and reterritorialization negative) where they do not exist in Deleuze’s work. For the history of cinema, we might even see the processes of deterritorialization at work most forcefully in the films of Hitchcock, insofar as he pushes the movement-image to its limit, to the point where it begins to break down—Hitchcock’s innovations tend to deterritorialize the movement-image, as it were—so that a new type of cinema then emerges. From that point of view, and quite contrary to Martin-Jones’s argument, the new structures and categories of the time-image would be reterritorializations, new territories that arise as a consequence of the deterritorializations of the movement-image.
 
Why then does Martin-Jones want to turn Deleuze’s categories into categories of judgment? I think he does so because he wants to draw Deleuze’s terms into conversation with some of the more dominant tropes of film studies. On the one hand, Martin-Jones uses Deleuze to subject films to symptomatic readings—to find the deep meanings of representation—while on the other hand he uses some of the guiding lights from the field of cultural studies—Judith Butler and Homi K. Bhabha are names that appear frequently in the book—in order to add weight to the cultural and political stakes of Deleuze’s categories. This approach significantly re-weights Deleuze’s books in a way not explicitly intended by Deleuze. At the same time, Martin-Jones is not alone in trying to force Deleuze’s books to conform to pre-existing notions of “politically progressive” filmmaking; D.N. Rodowick’s and Laura U. Marks’s contributions are key texts in this regard. More than anything—and surely most difficult from a Deleuzian perspective, for Deleuze’s passion and admiration for film shines through on every page of the Cinema books—is a deep suspicion of cinema which sits uneasily in the Deleuzian context of Martin-Jones’s book. The book’s condemnation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for example, left me slightly bemused; if one cannot say anything positive about a film as brilliant as Vertigo, then it seems to me there will be very few films that can ever be deemed worthy.
 
And yet, having said all that, there is something alluring about Martin-Jones’s arguments. Perhaps he has done precisely what needs to be done with Deleuze’s Cinema books; even Deleuze may have conceded that today more than ever we need to make judgments about the state of contemporary cinema. I find it difficult to believe that Deleuze himself would have found much to be enthusiastic about in contemporary Hollywood cinema, and perhaps it is Martin-Jones’s deep dissatisfaction with cinema which emerges as his book’s strongest point. Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity has little time for the prophets of contemporary Hollywood cinema who, on the basis of films like Matrix (1999), Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003), earlier breakthrough special effects thrillers like True Lies (1994) or Jurassic Park (1993), and even off-mainstream films like O Brother Where Art Thou (2000), praise contemporary cinema for moving beyond the confines of indexicality and analogue realism into a new era of digital freedom and unlimited expressivity, as though Hollywood’s technological innovations were the only ones worth devoting one’s time to. At the same time, Martin-Jones has little interest in that other brand of commentator on film style, who continues to chart the technical and aesthetic innovations of the “dream factory” in a manner entirely devoid of cultural or political insight. And while Martin-Jones certainly reserves praise for some recent efforts from the Pacific Rim, he is not kind to contemporary currents of European and American filmmaking. The fact that he links current filmmaking with 9/11 and with renewed instances of nationalism—in Britain, Germany and especially the U.S.—is apt and necessary. I’m not entirely convinced that Deleuze offers the best framework for this kind of political condemnation, and it is here that other commentators—Butler, Bhabha, Douglas Kellner, and others—are more effective. But Martin-Jones’s contribution is important to considerations of the political economy of cinema. It offers what might be the best and most unforgiving political critique of contemporary cinema available. If this means the book persists in drawing up categories of judgment in a manner that reprises long-standing debates in film studies (to again reiterate Martin-Jones’s indebtedness to Comolli and Narboni), then so be it, for this is one of the few recent books of film scholarship that has been brave enough to do so.