Université Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle Institut du Monde Anglophone Ecole Doctorale « Etudes Anglophones » (ED 384) Formation doctorale de Civilisation Nord-Américaine Equipe d’accueil : Centre de Recherche sur l’Amérique du Nord (CRAN)

DEVIANCES American Cinematography in the 1990s

Representation, Aesthetics and Psychology of Fragmentation JAMES E.

Mémoire de Master 1 Recherche « Langue, Littérature et Civilisation : Etudes Britanniques, Nord-Américaines et Post-Coloniales »

Directrice de recherches : Professeur Divina FRAU-MEIGS

Année universitaire : 2006 – 2007

Cover : Witkin, Exhibition

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CONTENTS

Introduction The Fluctuating and Sinuous Border

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I. Fragmentation I.1 Psychology and Sociology in Films I.2 The Split I.2.1 Fragmentation and Temporal Devices I.2.2 From Formalism to Hybridism I.2.3 Spatial Devices

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II. Beyond Appearance II.1 A New Space of Meaning: suggestion, sound and subtext 37 II.1.1 Sound and Invisibility II.1.2 Subtext II.2 Beyond the Self 43 II.2.1. Overflows: contagion, excess and transcendence. II.2.2 Paths toward Satisfaction Against general castration Against institutional power and discrepancies Against patriarchal power II.3 Searching for an Opening: a marked body 53 II.3.1 Shapelessness and Deformation II.3.2 Aesthetics of Death Conclusion Sources Annex

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At the dawn of the 20th century’s Europe, a new emergence of expression coming from the inside of man unveiled. What claimed itself to partly refer to primitive art, while giving a new perception of the world through distortion of perspective and space (George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Picasso) , and especially distortion of body and face (Egon Schiele, Edward Munch, Otto Dix, Van Gogh) was soon to be pointed at as a symptom of “degeneration” rather than art.1 This art movement, called “expressionism” because it cast extreme highlight on the expression of the inner emotion and vision, was banished and diminished by the dictatorial regime of Hitler not only because it deformed the real but also because it began to express a pessimistic view, an anguish and morbidity that was closely compared to madness. In other words, expressionism was inventing a new function to the image –that extended to cinematography–, disintegrating the idea of art as a representation of formal beauty and means for moral uplift. But could not what has been called “degeneration” by nationalist and traditionalist States simply be deviance? That is to say a vision, a conception, an expression …………………. 1. 1936, Munich. “Entartet Kunst”, the last exhibition gathering expressionist artworks was organised under the Nazi regime as a despising mocking show. Most of the works were to be destroyed afterwards. A book was published and compared a variety of expressionist artworks to drawings by institutionalized insane persons or criminals. The book aimed to prove that no distinction could be made between the two, not only claiming that expressionist artists had no talent –and therefore did not make art– but also underlining the trait of madness and degeneration, or even criminality of the artists.

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expression out of the common path.

This interlude on expressionism announces the interpretation of art as a symptom –as a sign. A sign of a spirit, of an evolution that makes itself visible 2 and felt through images, by style and content.

As generations went on time and focused on

cinematography rather than painting, similar issues of visual deviance and process changes have been at stakes concerning the film. The notion of device, defined in various ways, reveals on how divergent views keep emerging. Seen as a migration and mutation of the image, the filmic device was defined as a “between-image” in France (“l’entreimage”) and an “intermediability” in Germany while in the United-States, as W.T. Mitchell’s writings show, “pictorial turn” and “mixed media” are rather viewed as a “symptom of an history of art crisis”.3 Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz and Jean-François Lyotard defined the device of film from a meta-psychological point of view. Before going any further in the psychological process –the (un)conscious and memory–, one point on the deviance of today film process may be distinguished as the slippage of point of view4 –which is not unrelated to that of the norms of visualisation and representation: the slippage of point of view in a film offers a possibility of multiplied comprehension and ‘identification’, empathy to different characters owing to the sequence, so that identification and interpretation are unstable. It may be difficult to define what deviance really is – what is so disturbing or what criteria to focus on – as the process of deviance (a stage of mutation) can be an everlasting change of shape. The frontier and margin where deviance moves has ……………………. 2. The notion of visibility/invisibility, pairing with comprehension and incomprehension, will be related to the power of suggestion. What comes to the surface may not be visual but rather imply other devices that act on the subtext. 3. Christa Blümlinger, seminar on “Dispositifs: histoires, theories, analyses” (Paris: Université Paris 3, 2006), http://www.univ-paris3.fr/master_pro_didactique_image.pdf 4. Norman Kagan, The cinema of Stanley Kubrick (1972) (Oxford, Devon: Roundhouse Publishing Ltd., 2000).

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somehow to be ‘located’ to be recognized at different levels, in terms of narrative content and means of narration, of plasticity and aesthetics, of figurative and representation.

Strangely, deviance as such is usually related and defined as behavioural, even in the area of psychology. It is only by looking around through other forms of appearance that the notion of deviance can appear in more extended ways, then including a key factor: psyche. In fact, the term and the topic as well are mostly approached in oblique ways; approaches including the notion of deviance overwhelm it but always deviate from its source. The psychology of deviance has barely brought about an understanding of deviance as a natural phenomenon. Still, we can notice that it is not only an internal dysfunction but can be as well a (sometimes brain’s chemical) reaction to an external phenomena felt as threatening – in other world, it is a detachment or resistance from a confounding reality. In psychological terms, deviance is largely implied as a mental illness and notably linked to labelling process.5 Nevertheless, there can be found daily deviances regarding most of people; deviances may indeed be more or less pronounced, more or less extreme, more or less assumed, but they do not necessarily imply illness. Owing to certain criteria, it would be more accurate to speak of comprehension and liberation of the self (as in the S&M practice) or of low-controlled interiorised tensions (as in compulsive rituals). Sociologically speaking, there can be distinguished two main categorizations of deviance: submissive and instinctive; though deviance as chosen could be also looked closer to. Is deviant behaviour so much a conscious or unconscious process? It would not give much sense to go through every single sociologist theory on deviance and I will more adopt Francastel’s method by basing my research on the image analysis in order to detect where and how in a film deviance emerges, what characteristics of

……………………. 5. Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia, “Deviant Behaviour”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devian

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plasticity it assumes, what representation of the 1990s decade it reveals. Deviant behaviour is commonly conceived as a violation of cultural norms, and what can already be pointed out is the extremes of the dimensions of the social bond (integration and regulation) where deviance finds its place. On the one hand, deviance is a form of resistance to institutionalized norms (the government), a conflict with power, as Foucault defined it. On the other hand, it responds to a confounding of norms in a state where “social goals and the legitimate means to achieve them do not correspond”.6 Is deviance taught? The idea of contagion has always been anchored in the American spirit and the power of images should not be overlooked. Considering the interaction between external and internal images, the power of media to enter the mind and our power to “in-vision” – creating our own images and our own sense of it–, it could be talked of a symbolic interaction. The screen of cinema is such as a mirror reflecting dreams and fantasies: dreams which seem to have turned into nightmares as the viewer followed the path of a vision to suddenly skip into the vision of violence itself. The screen now may reflect emotional strive or the mind of trauma, the effects of psychological torture and the formation of psychological identity. A mind which apparently is let loose, overwhelmed by anxiety or melancholy –and which frenzy and euphoria will not deceive. Through cinema, the viewer follows the paths of dream7 and imagination, “parfois jusqu’à ses limites les plus extrêmes, c’est-à-dire la folie.”8 More than any art that captures the real of unreality9 and ……………………. 6. Wikipedia, “Deviant behaviour”. See particularly sociologist Durkheim and Merton in section “Structural-Functionalism” and the role of institutions in deviance. 7. The expression “paths of dream” is inspired from Trajectoires du rêve, an art exhibition which theme went from romantism to surrealism (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2003). The expression first derives from the title of a book by André Breton in 1936 (GLM ed.). 8. “sometimes reaching its most extreme borders, that is madness.” The quotation is from the preface by Béatrice Riottot El-Habib et Vincent Gille in Vincent Gille, Trajectoires du rêve (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2003). 9. The expression ‘real of unreality’ is used by Sandro Bernardi in Le regard esthétique ou la visibilité selon Kubrick (St-Denis : Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1994). “La fonction symbolique des images chez Kubrick apparaît surtout liée à la coexistence de deux procédés très différents, substantiellement opposés : l’impression de réalité et l’effet de réel”.

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gives form to imagination, cinematography creates in its frame spaces and times, forming a sense that travels between, and projecting a world close to us as it uses the similar process of motion. If deviance transgresses the border of norms, so does art by transgressing the border of dream, making it concrete and experienced, blurring borders.

The Fluctuating and Sinuous Border Most of all, the definition of deviance as a border overtook amounts to questioning the notion of normality. That American sociology only studied deviance in terms of criminality can explain why, in the American cinema, deviance is often visualized through a violent aspect. Violence may be concentrated on mainly one character but it will be made obvious that secondary characters bear more and more the mark of deviance too, constantly associating the world of deviance to the act of violence. As soon as the 70’s, the marks of the Vietnam War traced a definitive line, leaving the image of the 50’s heroic violence and the 60’s mal de vivre for a more problematic view concentrating on the individual and the after-effects generated by war: ultra-violence as survival, but even more as deviance. At this point, it should be kept in mind even before considering the content of a message, that deviance is a difference in movement:

taking shape(s).

Considering the process of imitation (of the real world) by the Hollywood film area, it is clear that the deviance of filmic device respond to (and accelerate) a forming change that occurs in society – a change in ways of thinking and reacting. To set out the precept of deviance is to acknowledge a difference bore by each individual and to explore this other dimension: to open to (and maybe get enclosed in) the stranger dimension. I would add that deviance is strongly linked to impulse, to pleasure and exaltation (fervere).The European view has analysed the American spirit as obsessed

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by fear and grandeur in a way that brings both of them to extreme or to excess.10 Considering the notion of excess (hubris) will imply to study various dimensions in the visual media, notably representation and means of representation. The selected corpus of films (Annex 1: “Credits and Synopsis”), which notably illustrates excess, destruction and confusion, includes: - The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, Orion Pictures Corporation, Strong Heart/ Demme Production, 1991) - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, CiBy2000 and New Line Cinema, 1992) - Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, Alcor Films, Ixtlan Corporation, J D Productions, New Regency Pictures, Regency Enterprises, Warner Bros. Pictures,1994) - Se7en ( David Fincher, New Line Cinema, 1995) - American History X (Tony Kaye, New Line Cinema, The Turman-Morrissey Company, 1998) - 8 Millimetre (Joel Schumacher, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Hofflund/Polone, Global Entertainment Productions GmbH & Company Medien KG, 1999).

While containing spaces and points of views, the frame creates meanings that reflect conflicts of different ‘realities’, the reality of dreams. And there where the theme of deviance is projected, complexes on different levels are made even more obvious and confusing at the same time: entangled paradoxes both confront and mingle opposites such as visibility/ invisibility; innocent/culprit; instinct/ cognition; desire/fear; pain/pleasure; creation/destruction; fascination/repulsion. To give a structure to the notion of deviance requires studying it in a bipolar dimension considering the psychological and the sociological representation given in films. Within these limits, the cinematographic corpus will be arranged considering the main concept each film is constructed on, though there will still be some uncategorized in-between dimension.

……………………. 10. Thibault Isabel, La fin de siècle du cinéma américain 1981-2000. (Lille: La Méduse, 2006) in “Introduction : le nihilisme au cinéma”.

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First the psychological furrows of deviance will be followed, given to its role in mental construction and the consecutive disproportion. Then the conflict with power will be analysed, which notably involves the relation to the social body (behaviour, fulfilment of the self until using violence, abuse of the other). This will lead to explore the visualisation of the characters embodying deviance to reveal their relation to ‘the other’, to the essence of being. Finally, the representation of (and suggestion of) the physical body will be focused on. The body will be explored and probed into as an object of death, a mark of destruction: the symbolic “matière inerte” (inert substance) where according to Denis Duclos11 the serial killer creates and makes meaning in and thanks to this emptiness, this absence, this death – like a counterpoint to the non-sense of life. This memoir will thus imply to study deviance in aesthetics, one that expressionism as well as surrealism put forward, joining fascination to repulsion or angst. From beauty to horror, death has been tackled through many angles and has always been an essential part in art through out history because, as Heidegger would say, we are meant for death. Moreover, the working hypothesis adopted here may show that the more psychological (or symbolic) the approach of a film is, the deeper the search for aesthetic form. Cinematography is always about mettre en scène, to construct a visual space peculiar to an inner representation and view point.

[The] process that the critic A.D. Coleman called ‘directorial’[…] is a projection of meanings onto subjects who become actors in their work. The inner, rather than the outer world is what matters, and the subjects or objects they photograph are reflections of personal realities.12 Used in some style of photography, the process of ‘directorial’ staging consists in subjects and objects that are a mirror of the photographer’s (or the filmmaker’s) own

...………………….. 11. Denis Duclos, Le complexe du loup-garou ( Paris : Editions La Découverte, 1994) 212. 12. Chris Johnson and Barbara Bullock-Wilson, Wynn Bullock-55 (London: Phaïdon Press Limited, 2001) 6.

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vision and reality. This affirmation applies as much to cinematography or any process of mise en scène by the characters within a film. In a process where the image is sufficient unto itself, the figurative representation passes on to a questioning of meaning. 13 But the essence of the moving picture is announced by the order and the relations between images, scenes and sequences: the editing is essential for the creation of a particular meaning in evolution. The movement of the camera (with its cuttings) amounts to the movement of the thought through time: its formation, deconstruction, deformation, and new construction.

At the beginning, deviance was a state or act of the mind. Excess stems from the slip into physical action, into the actualisation of fantasy without restrain and without calling into question. It is the mental experience that draws perception and identity, and draws the outline of a reality… to come?

I FRAGMENTATION

I.1 Psychology and Sociology in Films A guiding line appears as common when viewing The Silence of the Lambs, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Natural Born Killers, Se7en, American History X and 8 Millimetre. A line that links turmoil, disorientation and extreme violence. The films embrace drama, crime and thriller genres and most of them present a myth-realism combination typical of the 90’s. Individual myth as well as social myth may be anchored in a same film while the reality of causes and consequences ends all morally fixed

……………………. 13. “la peinture ‘figurative’ cette étrange distance qui renvoie, non pas à une représentation des choses mais à une interrogation sur la nature des choses et le sens que nous leur donnons.’ Maurice Ulrich, “Où la peinture repasse les plats”, Journal l’Humanité, Rubrique Cultures (May 7, 2005), http://www.humanite.fr

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coherence. Besides, the deviances expressed enable to transgress or displace taboos.

The Silence of the Lambs reveals a great concern for realism and research for the state of mind of characters. Burlesque as he appears, the serial killer James “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, dealing with his own sexual unease by creating a second skin with woman flesh, is not the less realistic: his character was inspired from real killers Ted Bundy, Gary Michael Heidnick and especially Ed Gein.14 Besides, filmmaker Johnathan Demme put a lot into studying crime scenes photography for the sake of authenticity. The centre of the film is focused on the criminal psychological investigation relationship involving the pact of respect and confidence between FBI trainee Clarice Starling and psychiatrist criminal prisoner Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The Silence of the Lambs tells about the psychological dimension that interferes in life while the “silence” relates to the un-revealed, which can be the unconscious or something un-faced (generally a trauma) that cannot directly be dealt with. Locked behind a glass wall in a prison, psychiatric Dr. Lecter “Hannibal the Cannibal” is required to help in an FBI investigation on a serial murder case involving the cutting-up of women in the Middle-West. Considered as a criminal, Lecter is highly valued as a psychological profiler taking part in the social order evolution. Imprisoned for flesh-eating, Lecter is nonetheless rather presented in the eye of the camera as a brain-feeder: someone who lives on from the immaterial substance of the individual mind, catching and analysing the psyche (that motivates the act). His manipulative talent reminds of Fritz Lang’s persona Mabuse, his psychological insight makes him someone superior, with a genius spirit. His

…………………….. 14. “Ed Gein […] s'habillait avec la peau de ses victimes et se regardait régulièrement dans des miroirs, et qui avait également inspiré le personnage de Norman Bates dans Psychose d'Alfred Hitchcock. Le second était Ted Bundy, un étudiant, qui usait d'un faux plâtre au poignet afin de susciter la pitié des jeunes filles. Enfin, une troisième source d'inspiration est le tueur Gary Michael Heidnick, qui détenait des femmes dans une cave et les séquestrait. ” Allocine.com, “Le Silence des agneaux – Secrets de tournage”, http://www.allocine.fr/film/anecdote_gen_cfilm=6641.html

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primal instinct is not to be understood as a paradox to his level of education and culture; his essence – a savagery of nature –, if contrasting with the refined language and subtlety, still meets in calmness the rationality of his discourse, based on the very nature and instinct of beings: comprehension is beyond morals. Hannibal Lecter’s control on the knowledge of the other, together with his capacity of analysis beyond the norm, establishes the complex between confinement and the extent on the outer unknown parts of the mind.

Twin Peaks is an isolated town set between two hills. The name itself is symbolical of a duality and doubling. The last days of Laura Palmer embrace one of the most psychological levels. David Lynch uses narrative codes based on symbolism and surrealism to transgress taboos and dig into the furrows of deviance. The story begins with the discovery of the corpse of Teresa Banks and concludes on the murder of Laura Palmer, revealing a process of figurative replacement. Reality, in Twin Peaks, is interfered and controlled by Another Place, a strange parallel world, which stands for the Psyche; but this ‘Place’ is also the Beyond, independent from the real world, which intervenes and interpenetrates the mind. Dreams and visions become real; they reveal part of the truth beyond the recessed as they decode the symbols, and have an impact on the understanding of future events. Sexual decadence and sexual impropriety (incest) are linked together to show that it is in the domestic environment that the ‘end of innocence’ starts: not only by physical violence but also by psychological violence. If Laura makes the distinction between the right and the wrong, she does not know the notion of perversity. On the contrary, the authoritative harassment of the father (about “cleanness”) translates that only perverse minds see perversity in others when there is none: what Leland Palmer rejects in his daughter is his own perversity. However, Leland’s perversion and abuse is shown as something uncontrolled: within the confines of madness, psyche is submerged by phallic desire, imprisoned by an instinct –which seems someone else’s: Bob’s. Lynch

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plays with the symbolisms of inner duality, with desire and repulsion. Perversity and jeopardy wears a mask which alternates between Bob and Leland. Bob is and isn’t real at the same time. He is the incarnation of Laura’s abuser since she was twelve, whom she cannot identifies as far as she doesn’t face the truth and denies his real identity –her father. Bob is the mask of rape and perversity: he is the image of Laura’s recession, as the little boy-messenger’s white mask metaphorically suggests a penis with his prominent nose. But Bob also appears to be real in the parallel world, as the spirit of evil and angry sorrow. The deviance of the father lies in an inappropriate love which turned into a perverted desire and enrages him; a desire of possession and fusion that Bob concretizes and stands for: Fire Walk with Me.

Se7en may be the most complex movie to define in terms of psychological and social deviance. During a time when he was in a depressive state, Andrew Kevin Walker’s inspiration for the screenplay came clearly from a social disorder which he became obsessed with. “NYC was an assault on my senses. I was just expressing some thoughts that occurred to me as I wandered hither and thither in New York. It did actually seem like you could just go around and find all the sins everywhere in the people, in stores, on billboards, in Times Square and the subways.” 15 The feeling of degeneration stemmed from his environment and condition of life and Walker channelled his depressed mood into the story, revealing a pessimistic vision of the modern world –la fin du siècle–, which David Fincher rendered through a “sense of alienation and disillusionment”.16 If there is a psychological process to detect it is through the metaphor of acts of the serial killer –for his past, psychological motivations and troubles have been erased.

…………………… 15. David Konow, The Best of Creative Screenwriting Interviews Book: 1994-2004 (Los Angeles: Creative Screenwriting), in “Interview with Andrew Kevin Walker”. Creativescreenwriting.com, http://www.creativescreenwriting.com/spw/awalker.cfm 16. Chiranjit Goswami, “Se7en”, notcoming.com, http://www.notcoming.com/reviews.php? id=509

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Moreover, criminal John Doe’s necromancy and the actualisations are an intellectualised form of ritual and art, a language of symbols that tells something about society. John Doe has erased his own identity in the name of morality: who-he-is is irrelevant; it is what he does that is important, as the will of God from the First Testament to punish. The seven sins he uses as calling cards, his preaching and killings (sacrifices) are an inter-textual performance based on written works known as pieces of art exposing religious aspects, productions that have had great impact on mentalities. These fictions are anchored in the cultural heritage of European nations, and find their place on the American continent as an influence connoted with myth and irreducible justice which John Doe actualises. While Doe’s mental digestion of a cultural heritage and social observation comes out to point out the flaws of individuals in society and communicate disgust, the movie takes the shape of a film noir leading our eyes in confined places, the exterior social deviance and violence only being a constant echo, as the camera moves through visions of horror, an ‘inner’ world exposed where sins are exhibited on mutilated bodies. The aesthetics and mature mise en scène of the crimes reflect an individual psychological deviance while the codes of reading (which give sense to the acts) mean the collective depravation and transgression. The tension is constructed on the contradiction between normality and election, the individual and morals. Even the psychology of detectives Somerset and Mills reveals a complex unease for the first one and an ambiguity of social role for the second. Most of all, it is the film’s conceptual and stylistic approaches that make it psychological, notably considering its intended effect on the viewer and its meeting a certain validation in the audience.

Natural Born Killers wavers between personal and historical narrative. Beyond the personal deviances of the misfits, Mickey and Mallory Knox, director Oliver Stone probes the national traumas inscribed on the American collective (un)conscious memory. The drift of the main characters, with the flashbacks and psychological flashes revealing their demons, is tinged with the aftermath of a long succession of historical and historic

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events that marked the society and culture. The reverberation of their behaviours – manipulated by the media – announces (not just a national but) a global drift, like a fascinating contagion. More than a ramification of violence that would simply take its source in the spree killer couple, secondary characters integrated in the society show an inner deviance: such characters as Mallory’s father, Mickey’s father, Deputy Warden Wurlitzeri, Detective Jack Scagnetti prove to have perverse, aggressive, manipulative, dictatorial or simply unstable behaviours. As a criticism of a History controlled by political decisions and of a daily violence used and abused by media –“media as hysteria, media as propaganda, the skin of events only”–, the movie denounces the conditioning of viewpoint, the distortion of reality (the reality of facts) and confronts the delusions about “who we are”.17 Dominated by television – “both with real television sets and with television images playing on” the backgrounds, the surroundings – and “shot in an unprecedented variety of styles […] all intercut and overlayed”,18 the film explores the industry of the media that deceives the viewer and acts on his mind through all visual forms and that dissimulates degenerations and taboo truths. It broadcasts a dream of reality denying the nightmare of sensationalized, glamorized and idealized representation: a surface of perfection in conflict with the madness beneath. Through the content as well as through the form (visual processes, genres…), Natural Born Killers is a quintessential echo of the destructive, terrifying and fanaticising stories in the American history and culture – under the effigy of happiness and freedom at all costs; of being truly oneself and fulfilled, of living fully at all costs. Between instinct and behaviourism, the film questions the predisposition to violence. Mickey and Mallory Knox travel through a drama which is in fact a collective one, of which they are the past product, the present media instrument and

…………………… 17. Oliver Stone, “Speech at a commencement at Berkeley”, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Stone/stone-grad1.html 18. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. “Natural Born Killers”, http://en.wikipedia.org/

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a cause-element of the future. Released in 1998, American History X digs in examining the origins of prejudice and extreme ideologies of hatred, considering the price of identification (the incarnation of the memory of a person) and xenophobic violence. Here, learned deviance finds its roots within the family circle through a bigoted father’s white supremacy discourse. Violence reverberates from generations to generations and intensifies, first through Derek Vinyard, the elder son, who bears the memory of his shot father under the sign of neo-Nazism (of which he becomes a leader), then through his young brother Danny, following in Derek’s footsteps after the latter is jailed, while the neo-Nazi movement is spreading and structuring itself. Though Danny doesn’t seem to share his brother’s xenophobic ardour, he embodies Derek’s identity, ideology and dignity like a resistance to institution. The three years of Derek’s imprisonment vehicles two main messages which make the movie deeply sociological: the ideology cannot survive without a group – if borne by an individual but not fully shared by a group, the ideology is neutralized. The intra-racial aggression (and treason) that Derek experiences leads him to objective: it is ultimately with violence that violence is coped with and neutralized. Both the institution and the violence of the group have led him to isolation. The thread of the movie is woven with deep lines of morality not only represented by the institution (school and prison) and especially by high school principal Bob Sweeney, but also borne by Derek himself after he is released from prison. While two “fathers”, two opposite ideologies conflict, Derek embodies the transition and the clashes between these two worlds. Anchored in a realistic urban context organized in ethnic gangs, the film tells the story of Derek in flashbacks and black and white image. The family context is central in the movie where the evolution of family links reflects sociological phenomena of felt aggression, rejection of minority and unease while the specific family crisis displays a problem of moral and identity. The change of Derek at his return from prison and his

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trying to change his young brother’s neo-Nazi road corresponds, for Danny, to a loss of reference marks tinged both with respect and incomprehension. The visual style of American history X casts a nostalgic and threatening atmosphere at the same time, using various subjective view points that show the mystic value as well as the concrete value of what is seen, to go into the wages of hate inspired violence, collective deviance… and change of path.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. 19 In 8 Millimetre (8MM), the revulsion of private eye Tom Welles induces the image of a moral arbiter while his frustration eventually induces him to violence. As film director Joel Schumacher said, to be a moral arbiter “automatically [sends] a message that you have no dark recesses in your own soul or in your own taste”20, which is a complete denial and lie about oneself. Exploring the extreme limits to ‘good and bad’, the film identifies the character’s desires in relation to nihilism. The mask of monstrosity slips only to reveal a libidinal power that runs through all human being, all social scales, reaffirming violence and death in terms of visceral fantasies and fascinations. The movie is not fundamentally critical of the society despite the ‘exploitational’ mode that is exposed of violence and sex and, perversities or obscenities. It rather explores through these themes the extreme attractions of human nature, responding to the idea that people submit to such attractions because they want to. Normality and abnormality are simply different in that normality does not submit. ……………………… 19. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891) (New York: ModernLibrary, 1995) in “Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146”. 20. Director Joel Schumacher’s commentary on 8MM from DVD (Colombia Pictures, 1998) in “Interactivité”.

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However the ramification of perversities or atrocities confuses all boundaries between legal and illegal deviance21. As violence and sex entwined is illegal on the American screen, illegal deviance basically refers to criminality and murder. What is legal? The principle of torture (pain and pleasure) and sadism is a core element to travel through the limits of intensity towards raw brutal murder. The discovering of underground worlds of various kinds, from S&M to murder, from hardcore pornography to genuine snuff, from Hollywood dream to prostitution and abuse, induces to envisage the most dark side and disgusting point of view on the playing out of fantasies. If detective Welles rejects the “pleasure”, the taste for violence, abuse and death, he will nonetheless use murder to annihilate his frustration, his impotence, which is not sexual but one about repression and justice empowerment. Welles’ position becomes that of a voyeur and the very obscenity (as S. Spitz defines it)22 therefore may well come from the fact that he re-enforces the public side of the underground places, underlining the conflict with the privacy of the place. A sense of ritual is also constantly injected through fetish elements such as leather clothes mask, accessories of torture, the concept of (play) roles. Tom Welles’ viewing of commercial films by Dino Velvet that display arousing violence also anchors the idea of a rite of pleasure in violence while the aesthetics of the scenes reveal a creative research. Art is the link between desire and reality. When this notion is extended to extremes, murder too can be seen as an art. In 8MM, art is the very actualisation of retreat desires, the free energy expressed without control, the ‘macabreness’ of visceral impulses.

……………………. 21. Compare with 1997 British film: Preaching to the Perverted by Stuart Urban. In this “erotic comedy”, Tanya Cheek, chief of the London fetish S&M scene, is put on trial by ministers “on moral cruisade” (imdb.com). The film puts the light on aesthetic forms and self liberation within a ritualistic community of fetish and S&M practices where everyone consents and finds their existential pleasure. (The film was rated -16). 22 . Obscenity “joins what is most private with what is most public”. The understanding of the term “obscenity” refers to psychologist Shirley Spitz definition of it in her seminar “The Psychology of Torture”( Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, 1989). Cited in : Dr. Sam Vaknin, The Psychology of Torture, http://samvak.tripod.com/torturepsychology.html

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The themes of this corpus are divided in two interests, the society and the individual, resurgences of a search that had marked the European lands at the beginning of the 20 th century. In an interview (Annex 2: “The Revolution of the Self”), art critic Wilfried Post remarks that this period was characterized by some kind of individualism and introspection. He insists on the revolution of the self that the first expressionist generation reflected, but also on the social dimension which the artists meant to consider, expressing a sense of crisis, and turning to a political criticism after wartime (1914-18).

Pour la première fois, on prend conscience que l’Homme est infiniment singulier, que personne ne se ressemble, que chacun est, de ce fait, infiniment seul. Mais justement, ce sentiment, on ressent le besoin de le partager... D’où cette peinture écorchée, prête à tout pour attirer l’attention sur elle, qui crie « Je suis comme aucun autre ». […] C’est seulement lorsque l’atrocité de cette guerre se révèle au grand jour que sourd une certaine critique. L’expérience que le monde entier peut être à ce point ébranlé par une guerre est l’élément déclencheur : à partir de là, l’expressionnisme part en quête d’un nouveau sens. En d’autres termes, le peintre de la première génération d’expressionnistes se demande comment il se sent, comment exprimer sa recherche intérieure, l’enjeu étant alors une peinture nouvelle. 23

What makes the American cinema of the 1990s different is that it shows more than an identity torment: it represents an identity split. If American modernism was centred on the united plurality, postmodernism rejects this and insists on deconstruction. As Steven Connor brings forward, there was a search for plurality amidst the modern major concerns; what draws a great distinction with postmodernism is that the latter is centred on fragmentation rather than a unity of plurality or universal schemes. Postmodernism is characterised by fusion, decentralisation, and dissipation24 –a sense of

……………………. 23. Wilfried Post, “La révolution du moi”, interview by Angelika Schindler (Arte, 2006), http://www.arte.tv/fr/expressionnisme-allemand/1364962.html 24. Steven Connor, A Cambrige Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) in “Introduction”.

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endless end and decomposition which saturates. Ingmar Bergman said that “cinema goes beyond the intellect; it speaks directly […] –to the conscious and the unconscious”: Cinema indeed both expresses desire and existential lack.25

I.2 The Split At the turn of the 20th century, artistic transgressions through various devices and aesthetical means mirrored a wish to express different views and build on complex psychic structures. Born at the same time of Freud, the seventh art has had a predilection for exploring and giving plasticity to the unconscious. Art is a form of liberation… But does it remain inoffensive when, in ultimate place, it enables to extrapolate, to push to extremes? For art is as unlimited as the imaginary.

When the subject on the end of the century is tackled, there comes again the everlasting requiem of nihilism, to the rhythm of performance and disorientation. But it implies a whole human evolution; its stamp was at the Origin. Deviance beyond its marginality and studied for its most monstrous essence, for its horror – the face of the abject – can be defined under two trends: abomination and fear.

Barbara Creed , who, in referring back to Julia Kristeva's notion of ''the abject,'' argues that definitions of the monstrous as constructed in the modern horror text are grounded in ancient religious and historical notions of abjection, particularly in relation to the following religious ''abominations'': sexual immorality and perversions; corporeal alteration, decay, and death; human sacrifice; murder; corpses; bodily wastes; the feminine body; and incest. Monsters, according to yet another scholar, speak of the ''fears of contamination, impurity, and loss of identity,'' carrying the outward manifestations of these fears on their bodies (Cohen 14-15).26

……………………. 25. Elisabeth Kapnist, “Un écran nommé désire” (CineCinema Classic, May 2, 2006, 7.50pm). 26. Steffen Hantke, Monstrosity Without a Body: Representational Strategies in the Popular Serial Killer Film, via IIPA Full Text, Steffenhttp://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go1931/is_200301/ai_n8999925

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To insist on nihilism is not so much due to the excess, madness and violence that spread in the spirit of the end of the century but to their association to a complete absence of remorse on the part of the ‘abject’ being, to the irremediable evil, “le bonheur dans le crime”.27 Most of the protagonists of the 90’s are impregnated and saturated with the ‘face(s)’ of amorality, but shortly and repeatedly ‘nailed down’ by a morality politics that failed in finding the right way of the Cross, turning it this way and that without respite: so that the notion of frontier between good and bad has become ambiguous. Some of the protagonists move into a questioning that resurfaces in flashes of consciousness, which may reveal a feeling of discomfort, of unrest or of an ambiguity that endures, where the doubt of “who am I?” hardly articulates in their darkness. Indeed, the assertion of one’s identity and entity is always at stake, underlying. And in the end it is better to have “become one’s own (dark) mirror”: the ideal self image –the alter ego 28– of an individual myth, rather than being nothing. It is in the face of this one and only certainty that “la conscience dans le mal”29 evolves and nourishes its action.

If morals and habits have change (especially in terms of sexual norms), some historical notions of abomination are still true. Monstrosity now usually points to the abuse of an unwilling person, either psychologically or physically. In a succinct way, the various nihilisms of the main characters of ‘abjection’ in the corpus here studied embrace neurosis (also caused by constrain to normalisation) and psychosis; hate (notably elitism) and narcissism; perversity, sadism; sexual sadism and rape. But what ultimately marks …………………….. 27. Ref: Jules Barbey d'Aurévilly, “Le Bonheur dans le Crime” from Les Diaboliques (1874) (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). 28. The ‘alter’ ego in the sense of the other side of me. It involves the idea of the true self and individual myth. 29. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (1861) (Paris : Le Livre de Poche, 1999), “L’irrémédiable” in “Spleen et Idéal” 129: “Tête-à-tête sombre et limpide / Qu'un cœur devenu son miroir / Puits de Vérité, clair et noir, / Où tremble une étoile livide, / Un phare ironique, infernal, / Flambeau des grâces sataniques, / Soulagement et gloire uniques, / - La conscience dans le Mal !’

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their deviances is killing. The depiction of death linked to them, presented as violent and painful, shows an extreme aspect of the liberation of impulse and instinct. The descriptions of corpses symbolize a visceral search to concretize a mental or physical desire.

In 1991, the themes of deviance, transgression and rejection were brought together in the composite structure of Poison, a film by Todd Haynes which entangles three stories and styles in a split (not linear) composition. The very title of the film semantically multiplies itself: poison may be “la souffrance, l'oppression sociale. C'est aussi ce qui est en soi, et qui vous dévore. Ou au contraire ce qu'on rejette loin de soi.”30 Deviance can be acknowledged as a poison, but also as a ‘remedy’. It is poisonous as a suffering, something consuming you, as an object of rejection ; it is a remedy as a form of liberation of the inner difference, as a resistance to the hegemonic oppression, a way to be oneself and which sets one’s role –if not one’s integration– in a group or a society. This film on homosexuality shows that it is the concept of normality that creates deviance.

The construction of Poison shows that it is essential to study the morphê of an artwork, its architecture being an expression of the deviance and polymorphism, the reflection of an internal content – as Wassily Kandisky postulated in 1912: “Form is the exterior expression of the interior content.” The tendency which consists in deconstructing linear structures shows up repeatedly in various ways all through the studied 90’s corpus as the composition within and in-between shots shows signs of fragmentation. ……………………………. 30. “c'est peut-être la souffrance, l'oppression sociale. C'est aussi ce qui est en soi, et qui vous dévore. Ou au contraire ce qu'on rejette loin de soi. ”. From “Culture et questions qui font débat - Poison, un film de Todd Haynes (1991)”, September 10, 2006, http://culture-et-debats.over-blog.com/categorie-89183.html

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I.2.1 Fragmentation and Temporal Devices Time and space disruption is frequent in films as the camera follows different characters. The image jumps from a place to another, however we understand there is a time correlation: it may be successive or take place at the same time. As a counterexample, in Seven, the non-chronological discovery of murders is purposely chosen by the criminal; it enables to give a new and profound meaning to his acts: purposely disorienting the detectives, John Doe is not only, as the serial killer myth spreads the idea, educated and intelligent but shows also extreme patience, calculating every matured act that has been conceptualised at the most.

What in a film affects and strikes the viewer is partly due to the frequency and the speed of jump-cuts which break the sequences and the succession of images, and may form a new type of narration. The variations of rhythm in a film prove that cinematic devices make time flexible as they contract or extend it, accelerate or slow it down, and can create discontinuity. The short-term or long-term fragmentation of an event creates a phenomenon of suspense and accumulation. A remark by Thierry Jousse fits well the analysis of Natural Born Killer: “C’est la prolifération et la vitessse des images, plus que leur contenu, qui est ici libérateur […] travaillant directement sur notre énergie vitale”.31 Mongin, who focused on the visualisation of the outburst of slaughter, concludes on a double tendency of “insensitivity” and radical “exteriorisation of violence” in contemporary cinematography.32 The haste of images is analysed by Mongin as a metamorphosis of the representation of violence where there is no gradation and where the reference to physical experience (and therefore suffering) no longer exists. This analyis ……………… 31. Antoine de Baecque et Thierry Jousse, Le retour du cinéma (Paris: Hachette Littérature, 1996). Cited in Olivier Mongin, La violence des images, ou comment s’en débarasser? (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997). 32. Olivier Mongin, La violence des images, ou comment s’en débarasser? (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997) 140.

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analysis should be modulated, for what stems from the accumulation of haste is clearly the banishing of emptiness. Murielle Gagnebin’s argument on the vertiginous result of the surrealist painting of André Masson can be used here to put a light on the nervous effect it has on the viewer:

L’abondance met à défi l’irruption d’un creux qui s’affirmerait immédiatement et paradoxalement comme le chiffre d’une plénitude.33 Often used to represent the progression of violence, speeds nonetheless modulate the way of intensity. Lynch uses a process of jerks in order to pulse quick visions of the subject of horror, accumulating the fear until entering inside the horror: Bob’s mouth. And indeed, Cronenberg may be right, “we have not developed an aesthetic sense of the inside.”34

Flash-forward seems to be a little used technique in the Hollywood cinema today, however it is known as part of the Hollywood crime drama style of the 40’s and 50’s. At the beginning of Natural Born Killers, the death of a policeman is glimpsed in a flashforward, foretelling what may be the consequence of his ‘playing’ with Mallory Knox but even more foreshadowing the mind of her. Flashback, which is a film noir characteristic, is recurrently used. American History X is rooted on the return to the past in order to analyse the present psychological and social states. As in Twin Peaks, the visualisation of memory helps to draw a link with personality and substitution. Leland Palmer remembers his catching sight of his daughter Laura on the bed of prostitution when he had come to visit his prostitute lover Teresa Banks. Teresa, who looks “just like [his] daughter” (whom he has been abusing), is a substitute ………………….. 33. Murielle Gagnebin, Fascination de la laideur (Seyssel : Ed. Champs Vallon, 1994) in “L’abîme de l’Etre” 238. 34. Michel Ciment, Petite planète cinématographique (Stock, 2003).

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substitute to Laura: the rage melt with fear when he sees that Laura has become the day reality of his dark fantasies and perversions will induce him to kill Teresa. The death of Teresa is a preliminary act manifesting his contradictory feelings to Laura, wanting to possess her to death because unable to control and face the distorted dream that has turned real. Flashback is also a basis for Natural Born killers’ construction and there should be distinguished various types and functions of this device. Some flashbacks are rather ‘objective’, while others are more memory flashbacks, brief and mostly referring back to traumas. But what conspicuously deconstructs the timeline in this particular film is the sudden uses and changes of visual techniques and forms and music that interrupt a sequence in order to reinforce a new meaning and impact. In addition, the overlaying of images and texts together concentrate in one sequence or succession of sequences a multiplicity of ‘messages’ – which may be non-narrative elements and project a sense of confusion as they echo each others and built (possibly paradoxical) associations of meaning.

Flash in its literal meaning is related to lighting and David Lynch uses it to reveal a presence that is not materialized in a form but also as a means to cut up the image, either in its continuity either to ‘dismember’ the representation. A sense of disconnection –a problem of communication in all its meanings– is repeatedly presented through various forms, notably through the use of light. A stroboscopic flickering light in the hall of a café adds an unsettling element that impressions the eye to the expressionist high angle shot of structure, but the (slow) stroboscopic vision during the slaughter of Laura is even more deconstructing: it parcels out the body of the victim. Furthermore, it denotes the disconnection of the mind with reality. Blackouts, not to mention the addition of offframes, fragment the gestures. Fluidity is therefore absent, what incises the narration of the action which reforms through suggestion. Blackouts denote the ‘blanks’ of memory or of consciousness and re-enforce the process of destruction (the death of Laura) that is

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taking place. The body of the dying girl appears in flashed close-up parts as if being apart while only the blood and the important elements are shown, focused on, in a flash. This process introduces the notion of dismemberment of the body as death as well as the power of metonymy, by which a restricted focus is representative of a whole. Not only does metonymy give importance to detail, it gives it a symbolic purpose that constructs the subtext. As a conclusion, the destruction of narration and the visual focus that put aside some elements are part of the processes that feed and underline the power of suggestion, of the invisible; of the unseen.

When one watches in slow motion, one becomes aware of what had escaped one’s view. The comparison between two successive flashes during the slaughter of Laura reveals that one shows Teresa Banks’ face (even though she was murdered one year before) and the other Laura Palmer’s face. Through this parallelism we enter a process of timeless notion and visualize the process of substitution in the mind of the murderer. Visualizing and experiencing a mind inside its own private reality often ignores time. The movie titled The Cell (2000)35 shows brilliantly the entering the mind and the fantastic delirium of a man where he is the king of his imagined realm. Used as a therapy to explore and understand the reason for his killing and self empowerment, to enter the inner world and individual myth is a fictional means to get to the source of the trauma. While this film explores the mind, the double meaning of the “cell” also identifies a confinement, a disconnection with reality, and therefore with time. In “La profondeur délivrée”, Murielle Gagnebin analyses Léonore Fini’s surrealist and symbolic painting. The three parameters she detects in are essential to be mentioned so far as they are mostly present in the cinematic area too when oneirism appears: “beauté, a-temporalité, ……………………. 35. Tarsem Singh, The Cell ( New Line Cinema, Avery Pix, Katira Productions GmbH & Co. KG, Caro-Mc Leod, Radical Media, 2000).

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solitude”. The interference of the unconscious desire is also assimilated to the change of space, where the distinction with reality may not be so obvious. “Or, on le sait, le temps est une notion inconnue de l’Inconscient. […] Le mythe – avatar collectif du rêve – a ses propres lois temporelles qui culminent dans la réactualisation toujours possible du Même.”36

‘Inner flash’ as I may call it is not narrative. It imposes in a few seconds an internal vision, a mental process that is disconnected from reality and reveals the intellect of the character whom we follow the acts. Flashes are posed in the eternal present time and must be thought as real and true because they expose everything: they condensate the mind of the character – they actually show the mind. In Natural Born Killers, not only do we see fragmentally through the eyes of Mickey Knox and Mallory but we also enter Mickey’s inner delirium. At the very beginning of the story their vision is technically manifested through monochromic filming. The words “666 death” appearing on the newspaper of an imaginary man in Mallory’s eyes announces at once the spirit of evil and death that imprints the couple, while it opposes the more childish vision typical of Mallory who imitates the ‘big bad wolf’. The viewer also has a direct contact with Mickey’s mind and mythical image of the self: his vision of himself flashes several times in a coloured portrait covered with blood, standing out against a black background, as the very representation of an ideal ego.

These few examples of interferences and interruptions are the result of technical means, by editing, sound effects and lighting mostly, that affect and disrupt the temporal

…………………… 36. Murielle Gagnebin, Fascination de la laideur: L’en-deçà psychanalitique du laid (Seyssel : Ed. Champs Vallon, 1994) in “Annexe 2” 203.

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line in a film. These processes take part in a system of fragmentation; a fragmentation that is also reflected on a spatial level in the composition of the images . Georg Marzynski wrote in Method des Expressionismus (1921): “Thanks to a creative deformation the artist has means to represent in an intense way the psychic complexity – by relating it to optic complexity.”37 Therefore the fragmentation of time and space, the aesthetics of fragmentation and deformation, are closely linked to the psychic state and identity complex.

I.2.2 From Formalism to Hybridism Between detective films and murder recidivism, mystery and thrill, dream and nightmare, between reality and fantasy, there prevails from certain viewpoints a blueblack tainted atmosphere, an aura transmitted by chromatic dominances, and possibly an insalubrious cold clair-obscur* that is not without recalling that even before the film noir there has actually been an expressionist cinema. As for the tendency for exaggerated and vivid colours in contemporary cinema (Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, David Lynch), it echoes a characteristic of expressionist and surrealist painting. The meticulous search for such virulent and sombre aesthetics particularly concerns psychological movies (Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, TwinPeaks, 8MM) so as to establish an enclosed, or even oppressive environment, and gives an insight into the uncertainty of spaces and characters. Besides deformity, deformation and contortion of characters also enhanced by the film noir, there are technical manipulations proper to the German cinema of deviance or madness that gave birth to M., Dr. Mabuse38 and Dr. Caligari39: the manipulation of perspective (Annex 3: “Spatial Structures”) ending all

……………………. 37. Georg Marzynski, Method des Expressionismus (1921). *. See also the work of Max Reinhardt, who deeply influenced the expressionist style in cinematography. 38. Films by Fritz Lang dating from 1922 to 1933. The third movie on Dr. Mabuse was ultimately made in 1960. 39. Robert Wiene, Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (Decla-Bioscop AG, 1920).

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geometric rules from a particular angle, by low or high angle shots, architectural broken and oblique lines –that tend to cubism, futurism or even abstraction–, the use of distorting lenses, the manipulation of light effects, heavy shades, lighting direction, exposure and contrast. The expressionist interpretation put forward what was latent, evoking an environmental, behavioural and psychological disorder, a chaos.

Speculative or premonitory, the fear of the ‘end of the world’ arose again at the end of the 20th century, with the coming of a new millennium, a symbol of the impossible limit –the progress or the fall of humanity. The European expressionist art in general translated a social crisis since the beginning of the 20th century: the anguish (of today and tomorrow), “the mental torment”40 (Annex 4: “Expressionist Cinema”). In Germany this sense of drama, inner and collective, became clear during the period between the twenties and thirties and can be compared to the nineties American crisis due to inflation and displacement in the world organisation after November 1989, and the importance that individualism and the expression of the self took at the same time.

The migrations of art forms and “Filmarchitekte” to the United States can be explained by different historical factors. The waves of emigration from Europe of intellectuals and artists41 (F.W. Murnau, George Grosz), and notably set designers and cameramen fleeing the repressions of the Nazi State from 1930 to 1945, explain how expressionist forms crossed the seas. In the second half of the century, the foreign origins and cultures of directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski42, etc.) in Hollywood cinema introduced a

………………….. 40. “The Expressionist Body”, from the German Expressionist Cinema exhibition leaflet (Paris: Cinémathèque française, October, 2006-January, 2007). 41. Note that the Bahaus art school was immediately close by Hitler’s goverment. 42 Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974) were shot in the U.S. A particularly interesting film is Repulsion (UK,1965) because of its symbolic representation of psychological trauma: the split. The film notably displays the image of death through a disintegrating corpse.

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more psychological dimension in films and notably introduced the aesthetics of the strange –also a mark of surrealism. The American cinema may have suffered from the Hays code (Annex 5: “The Hays Code, 1930-1965”), which has had a strong repressive impact on the function of cinema as an art, giving it a purely entertaining role with moral precepts. Nevertheless, art films and “auteur” films –and notably subversive films– reached the continent thanks to Janus Films (founded in 1956), which distributed European films in the United States. At the end of the 19th century in Europe, art styles (especially in painting, through symbolism and expressionist style) were marked by the sciences of psychology and identity torments; the expressionist cinema went further in a nightmarish transcription through the theme of crime. It is likely that the resurgence of a form of expressionism in the introspective United States is similarly related to these two components: psychology (the identity split) and crime (the violence anchored in a coarsening American culture; the external wars lead by the government; the spread of criminality in the 1980s). The nightmarish style may be one that is today of the most deeply anchored in the American cinema, as formalist as it may be to the most hybridist genre.

Stylistically speaking, different tendencies were seen in the seventh art when expressionism appeared: a “symbiosis between art, architecture, light and film” 43 took place. Considering the legacy of (Dark) Romantic and metaphysics in the expressionist cinema, what should also be taken into account is the ramification that then took place with its developments towards abstraction, cubism, surrealism or symbolism, as well as its influence together with the French poetic realism on film noir towards social realism, and paths to raw effects of real.44 Of course, influences were not to be technical and esthetical only; indeed a nearly philoso ……………. 43. “The Expressionist Body”, from the German Expressionist Cinema exhibition leaflet. 44. ‘Effect of real’. Expression used by Sandro Bernardi in Le regard esthétique ou la visibilité selon Kubrick (St-Denis : Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1994).

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philosophic level is to be observed as narrative genres, plots, themes and features of the characters’ personalities build a global sense of spirit. This has much weight in the balance for the Hollywood cinema uses the most of all the influences, techniques and arts it has encountered or been developing, mixing them in a multiple collage named under “postmodernism”. From painting and drawing to photography, animated pictures, digital art, performance art as well as non-visual arts, cinema ignores the limit of uses of means of expression. The lines (or the dream) of a new cinema may be traced, Isabel Thibault wrote: a cinema “that is a synthesis of different visual experiences” from virtual to real spaces.45

Much influenced by the film noir, Fincher also presented a myth and realism combination with a parallelism between literature, lithography, black and white photography (of victims), and finally actualisation (mise en scène in life) – in other words, art and life combination. The multi-layered title sequence46 of Se7en definitely made the film one of the most original of its genre: the jump cuts, the superposition and the flashes of black and white photographs, writings, and cutting give the impression of an experimental work, suggesting the underground culture, what is re-enforced not only by dark colours but also by the texture of the film itself: a grained film, with scratches. The underground world is culturally seen as amoral and the character of John Doe will be explicitly connected to it. By introducing crude and tortured artworks, Fincher made relevant an emerging style in arts which had long existed in photography and painting (Annex 6: “Skinned Art, Art of Mutilation”). Altogether, the style usually implies working on the material itself, the skin of the medium itself. It deteriorates and marks it as the skin of a body mutilated. Being an extreme expr ……………………. 45. Sandro Bernardi, Le regard esthétique ou la visibilité selon Kubrick (St-Denis : Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1994) 3. 46. Made by Imaginary Forces.

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expression of psychic state, this aesthetic aspect of deformation (and decomposition) has to be underlined for it matches a concept of “immediate perception” that historian art Antonín Matějček characterized in 1910 as expressionist.47 In the United States, this style of visual immediacy was developed in the independent and experimental cinema, and in the underground culture mostly through performance and body art. Its influence on a general ground corresponds to the depiction of drama and often to a sense of horror, suffering or destruction.

Amongst the more formalist films of the corpus, Silence of the Lambs and 8MM presented nonetheless uncommon proprieties. The Silence of the Lambs makes extreme the ambiguity of (social) role and, through Hannibal Lecter, turns murder into an art form. On the other hand, it sets the bestial48 behaviour and relation that developed through out the decade: “Indissociable de la guerre intérieure que se livre à lui-même le psychopathe, la violence ne se projette à l’extérieur que sur le mode de l’assimilation corporelle. Elle devient de plus en plus carnassière”.49 A cannibal, Hannibal Lecter embodies the very image of the devourer’s will: “la volonté devoratrice”.50 As for 8MM, the movie is all in all based on a classical narration and visualisation; its originality stems basically from the taboo of snuff and sex industry it explores. Sadistic deviance here follows the idea of a biological predestination to violence and is closely linked to the notion of (sexual) pleasure.

…………………… 47. “An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself....[An Expressionist rejects] immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures....Impressions and mental images that pass through mental peoples soul as through a filter which rids them of all substantial accretions to produce their clear essence [...and] are assimilated and condense into more general forms, into types, which he transcribes through simple short-hand formulae and symbols. ” Antonín Matějček cited in Gordon, Donald E., Expressionism: Art and Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) 175. 48. The adjective ‘bestial’ refers to the idea of wildness vs civilisation. It underlines the idea of savagery (the beast) but also the animal features sometimes assigned to deviant characters. 49. Olivier Mongin, La violence des images, 32. 50. O. Mongin, La violence des images, 32.

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The fatalistic attitude, human nature as being primal, and the “self” as being terrifying – may this be transparent, or hidden in a split personality- are deeply rooted and recurring aspects. They help and accompany the theme of the monstrous and the strange. In “De la dégustation à la phobie”, Duclos insists that “l’exhibition de la répulsion est un cliché courant du cinéma ou du roman d’horreur. Elle semble avoir pour fonction de déculpabiliser le désir interdit.”51 But horror and repulsion in other genres may take a new turn, that is from repulsion to attraction – the strange becoming familiar. From a European point of view at least, the strange is attractive as it displays an uniqueness, questions our knowledge, calls our curiosity. Apprehension is part of the culture in the United-States, Adrien Lherm writes : “Qui multiplie les rejets, partant les sécessions, les accès de colère et de fureur. Ce qui nourrit le cycle de la peur et de la violence.”52 Hence, abjection is not only natural but also inculcated. In films, apprehension is commonly controlled by the use of sound, music, expression of faces while the object of abjection is still off-frame.

I.2.3 Spatial Devices Spatial structures (Annex 3: “Spatial Structures”) may enable to transcript a duality by setting an opposition and a frontier – one that can be material or symbolic, visible or suggested; one that can be transgressed. A sequence at the beginning of 8MM shows the projection on a wall of a snuff movie, which appears like a confrontation as there is a division of the image from our point of view when both the viewer detective Welles and the snuff movie appear. The vertical separation of the space structure exposes an interior feeling, an opposition that Is lived from the inside. The

……………………. 51. D. Duclos, Le complexe du loup-garou, 80. 52. Adrien Lherm, La culture américaine. Collection “idées reçues” (Paris : Le Cavalier Bleu, 2002).

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vertical axis creates a parallelism where the focus alternates and the perspective the camera gives of the snuff positions the viewer as a witness though offering him/her only a partial image, bringing the eyes nearer to the projection medium, disproportioning the image: finally, it gives the impression of a closed up space where the snuff prevails while Welles’ compositional importance is minimized, plunged in half darkness. The scene evokes Welles’ reluctance and impotence in front of incomprehensible violence. This confrontation evolves during Welles’ investigation: first axial, it becomes more facial and goes to overlaying. The snuff movie is studied meticulously and the accumulation of viewing underlines a progress by which the private eye enters the film - first metaphorically, then literally. This deviance is suggested by a twist: in his hotel room, Welles is screening the movie when he detects in the shade of a blocked space a third person present on the murder stage, back in retreat, turning his back from the scene of slaughter. Welles freezes on a frame and comes closer to the image, touching it, focusing on the dark space, trying to grasp the reality in it but is blocked by the reality of the wall of his own hotel room. Still, he has entered the field of projection and the overlaying of images suggests that he is already inside it. This scene correlates the notion that space in film is psychological, physical and visual. On all levels, this sequence marks metaphorically his going beyond the screen – into the darkness of the real world of pornography, violence and murder, perverse pleasure and libidinal deviance.

To ‘go beyond’ implies there is a limit somewhere. Besides the use of layering elements and materials to fragment and distort an image, the structure of a space can be determined by duplicity and reflection, often through a shadow, a mirror or a painting. In Lynch’s surrealist Twin Peaks, entering the painting-mirror (the unconscious dream) leads to an infinite/indefinite space; still, the perception is blocked. The composition of the image that is travelled through is opened and closed at the same time: the corridor is an illusive dead end and an abstraction, an access to the unknown. In the

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corridor, the turns create a contradiction of close farness, which can be related to Schumacher’s “snuff movie” sequence described before. In both cases, there is a displacement of spatial structure with an effect of uncertainty. The third man, the ‘voyeur’, in the snuff movie is back turned, what implies a look towards the emptiness of obscurity and separates him from the scene: his presence is also an absence. It is the shot itself that creates a deviant effect because of the superposition of detective Welles and his look going through the still image, while we cannot distinguish anyone at the place he stares. As for Lynch, we can literally speak of a spatial and temporal disorientation. Uncertainty is developed through a kinetic device of travelling that makes space incoherent when walls seem to slide, leading the eyes within a claustrophobic geometry from a room to another… which is the same one: the space multiplies in a sinuous line. In Le regard esthétique ou la visibilité selon Kubrick, Sandro Bernardi evoked the manipulation of space by its stretching and sinuosity “as if in a dark corridor”, in order to make a parallel with the theory on William Bogarth’s “sinuous line”:

Un chemin qui, parcouru à rebours, n’a ni destination ni direction : tordu, dévié, il débouche immanquablement sur une perspective renversée , à l’intérieur d’un tableau ou d’une série de Hogarth.53 In Laura’s corridor, sinuosity takes the shape of an unsteady one-way labyrinth. The slippage of viewpoint when entering the painting-mirror in Twin Peaks comes from a destruction of spatial sense where distance changes: from a reversed angle shot, Laura’s body disappears and the viewer directly sees through her eyes, experiencing the dream. The repetitive travelling of the camera corresponds to a psychic travelling –an obsessive and vertiginous transcription, where a-temporality prevails. Going through the ‘corridor in the mirror’ reflects a continuous passage, an endless……………………. 53. S. Bernardi, Le regard esthétique ou la visibilité selon Kubrick, 56.

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endless transition. Similarly to Hogard, the visual route prevails over the aim for Lynch. Dream and fantasy are not the aim; they are the shifting frontier, the walls and unreal atmosphere of the cell of the mind, the sinuous line where fear and desire melt together. The border of the nightmarish and ecstatic dream has a value only because it is a deviant parallel, narrow and ‘spongy’: it layers two worlds. It is one’s reality and subconscious superposed on appearances and truth.

As an expert of the manipulation of patterns of distance and space and meaning, Kubrick has to be mentioned for his cinema gives a concrete idea of the fluid slippage of point of view that became relevant in the 70’s. Let us note that Sandro Bernardi considers expressionist director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau as the “inventor” of this fluid movement and return of camera54 which consists in constantly shifting from subjective to objective viewpoints (and reciprocally). Bernardi relates this shift to “still movements” that are not narrative and to the inconstancy of space:

En raison d’un glissement continuel de point de vue, le spectateur ne sait jamais avec certitude qui il est ni où il se trouve, le lieu du sujet est indéfini et fuyant. […] le point de vue est toujours déplacé par rapport à celui qui avait été suggéré au départ. De cette façon, Kubrick force l’écriture cinématographique, en évidant l’énoncé. La caméra suit un personnage, le porte, le perd, mais elle ne raconte rien à travers lui, et se limite presque toujours à instituer un espace et un temps.55

The opening scene of A Clockwork Orange brilliantly puts forward the turn that deviance takes from an odd-angled close-up to pull-back dolly and extreme wideangle, showing that deviance is in the environment and, by extension, in society. The film begins ……………………. 54 S. Bernardi, Le regard esthétique ou la visibilité selon Kubrick in “Le plan subjectif comme forme symbolique”, 94. 55. S. Bernardi, Le regard esthétique ou la visibilité selon Kubrick, 54.

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begins with the sinister twisted glare of Alex which fills the screen. Accompanied by the solemn and exultant sound of Purcell’s “Music for Queen Mary’s Funeral”, the reversed zooming and pulling back motion reveal the kitsch decor of Korova’s Milkbar where “classical symmetry expresses a conditioned society’s transference of sexual fantasy” and sadomasochist attraction.56 Bernardi describes Alex and his group as pantomimes that are part of the setting (Annex 7: “Birth and Destruction of Space”). In this expressionist and surrealist context, the aggressive look is lost. As the camera draws back on Alex, the interpretation is reversed: the eyes were never drawn to the camera; they look nowhere, lost in the dreams of the character’s mind.

The effect of sliding is found in Natural Born Killers, but from another perspective, during the mural/mental projection of monsters running after or with Mickey and Mallory Knox; a projection which we face visually whereas the couple goes along it at the same speed, fleeing but seemingly still. The movie is haunted with images that environ the characters and with mental images which cannot be distinguished from one another is this specific scene. The sequence takes different interpretations where the question rises about how much this projection is supposed to reflect their fears. Whether the terrifying is exterior (even if integrated) or inner to the self.

The transparency of the frontier, by the propriety of not being seen, is a disturbing element that appeared as soon as the very beginning of the nineties in The Silence of the Lambs, which definitely consolidated the cult of the serial killer. Transparency itself is heavy with symbolism, for it hides nothing: it signifies the transpare …………………….. 56. Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick : Inside a film artist’s maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) in “The performing Artist”.

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transparency that a mind has for Dr Lecter; it also stands for the transparency of the self, with the complete revelation and forthrightness of his ‘monstrosity’. The glass partition that separates Dr Lecter locked in his cell from the outside world gives the feeling of an enclosure of insecurity for, as we face Hannibal Lecter straight, the transparency betrays any frontier. And indeed, the iron armatures/ frames that delimit the border of the cell systematically disappear from the visual field in favour of a close-up on Lecter’s face and eyes, what defies the notion of distance. These close shots render the importance of the mental power: the mind that crosses walls and influence others (even Clarice transgresses the rules of distance and security). A manipulator, Lecter transgresses the rules of materiality. His upright position face to Clarice Starling, who is uneasily sitting in front of the glass wall, reveals his position of strength on his ‘territory’ – but which territory does he not make his? For the mind is stranger to the experience of distance or spatial frontier: space is a notion that the mind ignores.

II. BEYOND APPEARANCE

II.1 A New Space of Meaning: suggestion, sound and subtext During the decade of the nineties, borders appear to have vanished more and more as the mind had no boundary. Among others, the notion of the serial killer helped spreading the idea of the unlimited space and that the stranger is not outside but in fact at the core of society. In Fight Club57 the ‘stranger’ is even inside the self. The border between the two personalities of the anomic character, the narrator, stays undistinguished for a long time; the process of becoming (someone else) appears in flashes, nearly subliminal images, or in common unnoticed facts: the unconscious works without one’s

……………………. 57. David Fincher, Fight Club ( New Line Cinema, 1999).

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knowing. Following it is “like following the invisible man”.58 On a similar basis, a film is also the film that we don’t see: visual ellipses act all the most on comprehension and on what stays in our mind – suggestion and subtext59 become most decisive in postmodernism. II.1.1 Sound and Invisibility From the dimension of visibility to auditory dimension, a complexity emerged in several genre movies as a feature of contemporary styles, which emphasized an element of film noir and brought a new perspective to the cinema in general. Georg Marzynski60 stated that psychic complexity was related to optic complexity: style is chosen and is the reflection and research of a vision. In the cinematic area, it is the mise en scene – a subjective reality – and the cutting that give meaning (no-meaning, or multiplicity of meaning), which is an essential quality for cinema. Nevertheless the dynamic force created with the relation between image and sound –or silence – has come to take more and more importance as cinematography has developed an increasing sense of the action of sound. Beyond the visual form, deviance appears through an auditory dimension, either by a feature which is specific to it either by the gap it establishes with the image. In Natural Born Killers the overlaying of sounds, in ‘harmony’ with the accumulation of images and association of messages, contributes to disorientate and re-enforces the intensity and stemming from the visual experience. The aggression is even more cast by

……………………. 58. Thus says the narrator of Fight Club when he looks for another man who is nothing but himself, his unconscious self. 59. Subtext implies duality visibility and invisibility. “A term used in drama and film to signify the dramatic implications beneath the language of a play or a movie. Often the sub-text concerns ideas and emotions that are totally independent of the language of a text.” R. Malby and I. Craven, Hollywood Cinema in “Cinematic Glossary” (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 60. “Thanks to a creative deformation the artist has means to represent in an intense way the psychic complexity – by relating it to optic complexity.” Georg Marzynski, Method des Expressionismus (1921).

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the auditory violence than by the optical content. The act of sound accompanies the image as well as it can deform it, hence contributing to giving a new meaning.

Music is the element that has been used since the beginning of cinema in order to give a tonality to the image, it creates a backdrop –which can actually be part of the events taking place in a sequence. Nevertheless, there can be variously observed a conflict created with the text of a film, and the role of music be detected as an enhancement of the subtext. The use of music in The Silence of the Lambs while Lecter slaughters the prison guards annihilates the projection of emotion. Lecter’s waving hands on the rhythm of classical music casts the notion of ecstatic serenity contradicting with the frenetic death and spray of blood. In the same line, the idea of annihilation was used by Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange through the music of Beethoven and the destruction of emotion: the depictions of rapes and beating “have no ferocity and no sensuality; they’re frigid, poetically calculated […] there is no motivating emotion.”61 N. Kagan probes into the role of music and explains how it underlines the conflict between virtue and decadence, and the different interpretations of Alex’s role.

The dicsiplined ecstasies of Beethoven suggest moral limits in which man may truly be fulfilled. Both Alex and the soc. which has produced him are morally undisciplined, yet he can still find delight in Beethoven. Alex’s virtue is thus demonstrated while the society around him moves toward empty eroticism and fullscale decadence. […] (Conversation with Sig Moglen). 62 Sound is not restricted to the area of music. The variety of sound effects that establish an area for deviance is numerous and the expertise of David Lynch in unusual sounds shows by its own how the hearing dimension is essential in cinema. In Twin Peaks, sound can even be defined as a motif.

……………………. 61. N. Kagan, The cinema of Stanley Kubrick. 62. N. Kagan, The cinema of Stanley Kubrick, 185.

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The distortion of sound is a characteristic of Lynch’s cinema namely the distortion of sound and voice, the reversed sound and the discontinuity of sound. The analogical or numerical modifications help creating unidentifiable noises, effects of blowing and of electric waves that are factors of the strange or anguishing aura. But Lynch also uses them as a site of ‘communication’ that the image may not bring out. Thus the act of sound corresponds to the idea of invisibility. In a scene where Laura and Leland Palmer drive home, a faint ‘woow’63 sounds as they pass under the bridge and as a fast-driving van appears behind them: the idea of a frontier appears casual under the form of the bridge; it is the sound that reveals the boundary, the interference of a parallel world. The events that follow become logical (though rationality is blurred by symbolism) only because the specific sound of Little Man from Another Place informs that the link is established between two worlds. Communication and transgression are put on the same level and become alike.

The act of sound substituting visibility is observed in many films, and is currently used in scenes of torture and murder. Directors make up visual auto-censorship by making the viewer sensitive to sound. In the curb stomping scene 64 in American History X, neo-Nazi Derek Vinyard forces a Black wounded thief to bite the curb and kills him under the eyes of his brother Danny, who watches in horror. The retreat of the camera and the black and white monochrome in the night give quite a distant view of the act itself, but the distinct cracking of the neck of the Black man conspicuously reflects unbearable violence. While a detailed image may have failed to convey the idea of suffering, the ……………………. 63. This is the sound of Little Man from Another Place (played by Michael J. Anderson). 64. “Curb stomping describes an act of violent execution in which the victim's mouth is positioned against a curb (as if he were biting it) and applying a large amount of force to the back of the head or neck by the quick stomp of a steel-toe boot. When applied to the base of the neck, the result is a broken neck. When applied to the crown of the skull, the force is directed toward the jaw, separating it from the skull. Curbing is often associated with skinheads.” Definition from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curbstomp

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sound of breaking bones directly touches the viewer, what proves that sounds can provoke reluctance and disgust and be as much efficient to serve as a vehicle for a sensation. It re-enforces the conflict between the coldness of Derek and the concern of the viewer (notably Derek’s brother) face to the ferocity of the act.

In addition to the repetition or echo of voice, non-synchronisation is a recurrent device that gives an otherness contrast and usually reveals a change of dimension. The destabilisation created may come from the conflict of comprehension it denotes. Indeed this device creates an effect of surrealism but which not necessarily unreal. Dithering between objective, subjective and false subjective viewpoints, it displaces –as much as visual devices can– a view point that had been suggested. The frontier of irrationality may move from what one imagines to what one becomes aware of, giving different perceptions of the real. The de-synchronisation of the rhythm of music and images as well results in a symbolic displacement (of vision and therefore) of meaning and response of the viewer. For instance, in Lecter’s slaughtering scene in The silence of the Lambs, it gives a lyrical and harmonious modulation to the act of violence presented in an open form. Gesture is transcended.

II.1.2 Subtext To conclude, the act of the sound implies ideas lying beneath the text. It seems indeed that in contemporary films it is even more the subtext, rather than the visual devices only, that encompasses the conflict which reflects the mental and psychological complex. Informal symbolism of elements have become of the most significant in the 90s that contribute to the subtext complexity. To give a few examples, the blue rose for Lynch signifies sexual impropriety. In Se7en, John Doe’s cutting off his digital prints denotes one of the fears that the American system has exploited: the loss of identity. Furthermore, the character of John Doe implies that the threat is inside the society, undetectable as one individual; the whole process of his symbolic crimes relies on a

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theory of substitution, where the monstrosity of the Other reflects oneself. Indeed, his character embodies the principle and threat of projection while his action condemns the perversions which are made ordinary. Even if taken out of context, this contradiction implicates an underlying drama. The various interpretations of an element determine the complexity of subtext too. S. Bernardi wrote about Stanley Kubrick’s cinema: “Chaque image peut être tout ou rien”. Through the perspective given to the image the author detects layers of signification: “des strates de sens cachés sous la surface lisse des apparences”.65 The term “lisse” proves that there is no need for visual or aesthetical complexity for the subtext to find its place.

The complex of subtext is also made relevant by the conflict of meanings between images and oral texts that are put into correlation. This process of conflict is used in Natural Born Killers when the romanticism and innocence of oral text with the opposite violence of animated images make one: it relies on the principle of unified opposition. In Fight Club, flashes of green forest then of burning trees slide as the narrator says, his hand being burnt by chemical powder: 01:02:45,108 Narrator:

I tried not to think of the word searing of flesh.

01:02:48,111 Tyler: Stop it! This is your pain, this is your burning hand. 01:02:51,38 Narrator:

I'm going to my cave to find my power animal.

The substitution of wood to flesh illustrates his personal inner vision. The cave he mentally escapes to (from burning and pain) is a glacial place where his girl-friend lies, ccc

……………………. 65. S. Bernardi, Le regard esthétique ou la visibilité selon Kubrick, 3.

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cold and blue as death. His animal power is related to the myth of giving life back, the fable where love awakens the dead; but as he comes over her, she, cold and attractive Death, blows to him a suffocating smoke that calls the image of burning smoke of wood again. Subtext is created by manipulations and deviations of meaning from which duality can possibly stem: clearly, the research of style is an open door to new understandings.

II.2 Beyond the Self

II.2.1. Overflows: contagion, excess and transcendence. One’s vision of the world induces one’s way of thinking, as Stoic philosophy points out. In the paranoiac American context where the Other is always the danger, the fear of contagion is conspicuous. The violent mind in Natural Born Killers vertiginously spreads on a global level because of fascination as well as repulsion and hatred. The conclusion there is that contagion is rather a revelation of the very nature of Man. Contagion of violence and deviant behaviour in American History X is rather defined as a matter of education, the learning of extreme ideologies, and as the consequence of social conditions (where the law of the strong prevails) that act as a vicious circle. As soon as 1985, Guy Gaultier and Jacques Valoi brilliantly analysed the presence of horror recurrent in David Lynch’s cinema as a transcription of the infinite circle of reciprocity through the association of opposites reflecting each others:

[…] peur de la différence de ‘l’autre’, jouissance de cette peur et exploitation de cette jouissance, peur de révéler sa propre peur et de la voir se reflèter dans le regard de l’autre, jeux de masques et de miroirs incessants.66 ……………............. 66. Guy Gauthier and Jacques Valoi, “David Lynch (la machine-regard)”, Revue du Cinéma no. 403 (March, 1985): 52.

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It is through the reciprocal look that the circular confounding of the object and subject of anxiety, of fear and pleasure, is enabled. Gaultier and Valoi put forwards the uncertainty that “monstrosity” on screen displays through plays of mirrors and masks (the alter possibly being the reflect as much as the product of one’s own ‘impurity’). Doesn’t otherness project the viewer’s own mind and true self? In other words, isn’t the viewer similar to the stranger and capable of the same abjections? Even though T. Isabel writes that monstrosity enables the common man not to identify and expiate his dark desire through his sense of disgust, the argument of my essay is, on the contrary, that the image of monstrosity illustrates the doubling and the reversibility of anyone’s nature. As said Fritz Lang in 1948: “The murderer can be you or me.” 67

Nicole Brenez wrote: “la démesure n’est pas seulement interne : l’une des formes du débordement humain consiste à faire s’équivaloir le même et l’autre, à abolir les frontières qui garantissent l’étanchéité des créatures”. It is precisely the end of nonpermeability of body (which coordinates with the mind) that the chosen corpus of films illustrates. The “organic exteriorisation” and the “dream of fusion”68 (possibly extending to incest) tend towards the abolition of the border between interior and exterior. The first symbolism of permeability is undoubtedly illustrated by blood. “We’ll be living in all the oceans now” Mallory Knox says romantically to Mickey as their blood flows into the river below them. The spread of blood taking the shape of fantastic snakes through water is far less lovable: It represents the spread of instinctive ferocity – the animal transformation and deviance – through the world. Here the utopia of infinitude is expressed mingling love and violent animosity.

……………………. 67. Idea expressed about his film Secret beyond the Door (Universal Pictures, 1948). 68. Nicole Brenez, De la Figure en général et du corps en particulier: L’invention figurative au cinéma (Paris, Bruxelles: De Boeck Université, 1998) in introduction “Cher Tag”, 21. From the notion of permeability, Brenez also developed the fundamental analysis of the theme of (radical) substitution : “la fable de l’Alter Ego, l’Alter étant conçu comme la vérité du Moi”.

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Another angle reveals indeed that the growth of violence is very linked to a desire of satisfaction and translate in most cases, as far as the ‘subject of abjection’ is concerned, the wish for transcendence. Though in modern times the theory on scapegoat and sacrifice of innocents as a means to funnel violence can be disputed, René Girard points out an interesting argument: “la violence non satisfaite [...] se répand aux alentours, désastreuse.”69 The institutionalised rituals prevent the spread of individual violences that may provoke those of social groups. Here, the need for violence is related to a desire of purification.

At first sight, on a social and moral level, the sense of irreducible justice and revenge seems to prevail. As for the individual psychology, however, it is rather the ‘emptiness’ –the lack or absence– felt, as if needing to be (over) filled, that dictates physical and psychological violence. As a psychopath, the character of John Doe in Se7en stands at an unusual medium position between social and psychological understandings, playing on a religious level: the “preaching” serial killer here acts as the punishing hand of God from the first testament while his extreme acts betray his own perverseness. The deviance and violence of the Other becomes a pretext for punishment beyond any restrain: the Other can become an object of (psychological) release, an object for the deviances he has inspired. In Natural Born Killers the police intervene to arrest the Knox, who have been localised in a pharmacy store. Once Mickey is immobilized under the reporters’ shooting cameras, an uncontrolled drift occurs: a group of policemen abusively keep on beating Mickey. An effect of transcendence then gets off. Forgetting the presence of the media, the policemen get caught by their own violence. They go at fiercely and unrelentingly into their disgust and hatred for the abject being: beside themselves, as if out of themselves …………………. 69. René Girard, La violence et le Sacré (Paris: Hachette Littérature, coll. Pluriel, 1998)24.

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themselves like in a ritual trance, they only come to a stop under exhaustion or weariness, when they regain consciousness. Denis Duclos speaks of an effect of ecstasy in the cyclic battle of good and evil: “c’est à travers le combat vertueux que s’exprime l’appétit de violence américaine. Au-delà des intérêts catégoriels […] la répression est une tentation essentielle, parce qu’elle promet une jouissance équivalente à celle attribuée au crime.” 70 Pleasure is always a priority and the redundant violence that is expressed in the cinema of the nineties translates a state or research of an ecstatic state of mind that can only imply the feature of disproportion. Excess takes place in the reaching of the extreme where duality merges into one, into an ecstasy where the marks between good and bad are irrelevant. The “passion for the infinite animates human beings and induce them to transgress usual moral reference marks”, Jean-Luc Steinmetz71 noted. The idea is that the infinite must be reach by any means. A parallelism can be made with the value that the notion of satisfaction and pleasure have in the American society: to get the best from one’s own ‘gift’, surpassing oneself is nearly a duty, a principle derived from the core value of work and individualism, and which has been assimilated without any concession – without any limit. In the American dream, Liberty is the core value expressing the idea of infinitude and identity politics of the years 90s deeply individualized it. The end of the century was marked by the need to live freely one’s desires and know the revealing of oneself.

II.2.2 Paths toward Satisfaction Satisfaction corresponds to the idea of fulfilment and is often associated with the ……………………. 70. D. Duclos, Le complexe du loup-garou, 246. 71. Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2001) 90.

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idea of charge and thrill. As it is represented, the search for satisfaction despite tensions and discrepancies appears to imply necessarily a point of deviance and therefore includes a stage of transformation: an alteration. In generic terms, this change towards otherness reflects the loss and the sacrifice of a complete unity. The meaning of “satisfaction” through deviance has to be clarified: it does not exclusively translate nihilism or egocentrism; it is about liberating oneself from a power that oppresses and prevents the ‘blooming’ and revealing of oneself. Otherness re-affirms identity liberty, and it is only the eyes of the others –the society– that make it an abjection or monstrosity.

Against general castration How many women in the early years of the 20th century were committed to asylums, wrongly but purposely diagnosed? In their isolation, art became one of their sole means of expression and defence of their identities: “For women in mental institutions in the early 1900s the spontaneous act of creation became an assertion of their identity, and as such it should be distinguished from art therapy. Many used their art as a means to escape from the humiliation of institutionalised life.”72 There has actually been a turn of sex gender in the representation of deviance: abnormality and madness have become predominantly masculine, accompanied by violence and frequently taking the shape of criminality. When a woman is presented as such, she is either not the main character73 or she is joined by a man (or a group). In Natural Born Killers, Mallory’s emancipation and becoming an out-of-law is helped by a man. Besides, her character prove Mongin74 wrong when he says that femininity is lost in violence, that women are then presented as asexual or masculine. However, if there is a tendency to asexuality it is in science-fiction movies, from Alien to Matrix, where menten ……………………. 72. Margaret Hennig, “Irre ist weiblich: Madness is Female”, Raw Vision no.54 (spring 2006): 21. 73. Note the exception of Thelma and Louise by Ridley Scott (MGM, Pathé Entertainment, 1991). 74. Mongin, La violence des images in “Scénarios pour une libération : la famille, les guerriers et les ancêtres”, 71-90.

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and women are put on an equal level and therefore where gender is irrelevant and indifferent –to the verges of no difference. The idea of the ‘weaker sex’ has faded to turn into an image that may be more realistic but not the less inspired by the ideal of the femme fatale and its first origin: the vampire. Independent, strong and above all liberated, the woman that used to be inhuman has acquired in the American contemporary cinematography a complete human entity –more than a mere shape. Then masculine deviant behaviour could be explained as a reaction to his own destructive frustration in a mutating world where roles and rules have changed.

Deviance is not exclusive to masculinity, however the eyes of directors have always put forward one thing in common: that of violence being associated to male gender. How is it that one can assume then that deviance is related to the fear and frustration of men in their new position face to women? It rather seems that it is only a new turn in the problematic spread of the mythical and idealistic representation of man’s role from the warrior, the hunter, the defender of justice. No doubt there is a feeling of castration, that is to say of impotence, but the early years of the 21th century well prove that it is face to a control, an alienation and a limitation that affect in fact every each human being, men and women indifferently.

Against institutional power and discrepancies The psychological construction of deviance translates a conflict that is explained on different levels. When linked to the relation with power, it encompasses a conflict of dominance/constrain (and oppression) and of values. Emile Durkheim insisted that the individual disorder named anomie resulted from the confounding of social norm (notably from the conflict between aim and possibility). Merton added that anomie is “the state in which goals and the legitimate means to achieve them do not

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correspond.”75 Acts of deviance are therefore to be understood as a means for fulfilment against the social and institutional discrepancies and structural limitations, or “a retreat from the regulatory social controls of society”. Durkheim used [the word “anomie”] in his book Suicide (1897), outlining the causes of suicide to describe a condition or malaise in individuals, characterized by an absence or diminution of standards or values (referred to as normlessness), and an associated feeling of alienation and purposelessness. He believed that anomie is common when the surrounding society has undergone significant changes in its economic fortunes, whether for good or for worse and, more generally, when there is a significant discrepancy between the ideological theories and values commonly professed and what was actually achievable in everyday life.76 A. Lherm enumerated the contradiction and dualism of the American institutional ideologies and social reality77, what should be put in parallel with Durkheim’s socio-psychological study . The fall of the Berlin Wall put into question the place and role of the United-States in the world and the early 90’s corresponded to an economic change too: in other words, it was “the end of a world”. The contradiction between ideals, speech and reality were representative of a social-institutional disorder that has been reflected by the individual disorder. The years ninety were those of introspection: turned towards itself, the American society questioned itself and developed the paranoia of the inside –the inside of the society, the inside of the self. The image of the serial killer is that of the invisible enemy being at the core of the society, as well as the schizophrenic character who is able to adapt to society and pretend the act of normality. The latter is very frequent in secondary role characters who take part in the institutional system (police, prison psychiatrist) or symbolically represent the institutional authority (the father). Otherness

………………… 75. Wikipedia -The Free Encyclopedia, “Deviant Behaviour”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviant 76. Wikipedia, “Deviant Behaviour”. 77. A. Lherm, La culture américaine (Paris : Le Cavalier Bleu, Collection “idées reçues”, 2002) 9, 101-106.

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and excess are generalized and apply even to the ‘elements of organization’: In Se7en, John Doe is the element of ambiguity and ‘turbulence’; but the story shows that Detective Mills shows ambiguity in his role, too. Face to the feeling of repression and abuse, with an ascending spirit of suspicion and criticism towards the omnipresent Authority, the American cinema has reflected a general anguish and malaise which ended in touching the most common individuals. At the end of the nineties, Fight Club by D. Fincher narrated the falling down into (temporary) mental illness – a second state of reality – involving terrorism, selfinfliction, and the verge of self-killing, all wrapped in a survivalist spirit. In 2001, the falling into malaise and personal “disorder” is complete with Ken Park78, which first sequence brutally opens on the suicide of a teenage boy. Director Larry Clark intends to comprehend and study the behaviours of the young: on one hand, disarray or a feeling of purposelessness is put forward; on the other hand, there is a sense of innocence and amorality which is inversely seen as a perversion of normality through the eyes of male adults. The life of the teenagers is wrapped into ‘subversion’ –the mutation of beliefs and morals, ethics and subjective morality– and suburban isolation. The microcosms help identifying the subversions, as well as the traditional (and patriarchal) orders that turned pervert.

Against patriarchal power As family has been displayed as a place for oppression and alienation in a great amount of horror films since the 1970s, the role of masculinity becomes relevant. Thibault Isabel remarks:

Sur un plan social, le rapport défaillant à la paternité trouve chez les Americains …………………… 78. Larry Clark, Ken Park (Busy Bee Productions, Cinéa, Kasander Film Company, Lou Yi Inc., Marathon International, The Kasander Film Company, 2001).

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Américains une répercussion forte dans leur représentation de l’ordre établi (ce qui n’a rien d’étonnant : l’Etat constitue un ojet-soi culturel de première importance –une sorte d’extension de la cellule familiale à l’échelle de la nation–, et, en tant que gardien de la Loi, incarne de surcroît la puissance phallique du père).79

American History X deeply sets the family father as a guide of thoughts: he inculcates and dictates a supremacist vision of the Whites in society, perpetuated by his sons. Masculine figures in the Vinyards family structure represent extremist political ideologies while women stand for democrat believes. When, after the death of his father, Derek Vinyard becomes the man of his family, violence and rupture inside the family become obvious. Derek’s extreme protectionism and authoritative hatred result in a confrontation face to his mother and sister that threats their safety on his side. In this film as in many others, dinner scenes are especially appropriate to reveal the (more or less) hidden face of a so-called perfect American family. In Natural Born Killers and Twin Peaks, the image given of the father is that of an abuser, which appears in various forms through psychological or physical (sexual) abuse. Cleanness is the harassing thematic for cases of humiliation and abuse on the daughter and translates the rejection of the fathers’ own moral uncleanness and degeneration. In Twin Peaks, it especially put forward the theme of substitution and replacement80 as Leland Palmer’s rejection of Laura’s “dirtiness” (decadence) reflects his own sexual impropriety. Displaying the regression of human nature by his creeping and coveting like an animal, Bob appears as the linking figure, like a mirror between the father and the daughter which they both reject and integrates. A mask of rape and perversion, Bob is an incarnation of the abuser whom Laura denies the real identity (her father). He is the image of Laura’s psychological repression but also appears to be real in the parallel world as the representation of evil and …………………..... 79. Thibault Isabel, La fin du cinéma américain 1981-2000 (Lille: La Méduse, 2006) 25. 80. The theme de la substitution (radicale) : la ‘fable de l’Alter Ego, l’Alter étant conçu comme la vérité du Moi” (Nicole Brenez, De laFigure en général et du corps en particulier).

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and angry sorrow. Bob is a metaphor by essence, he symbolises the combination of fear and pleasure, of desire and repulsion. In Natural Born Killers, sexual abuse is exposed as a phallic pride which Mallory’s father perversely plays with. His ‘changing face’ through distorting close-ups intensifies the horrifying vision, extrapolating his ugliness and disgusting side. On another level, Mickey’s psychological abuse by his angry father appears in flashbacks as a pure symbol of castration. According to T. Isabel, castration anxiety contributes to develop paranoia and destroy psychological unity. The speculative identity that Mickey develops is typical: like a therapeutic process, the monstrosity he develops is idealistically and unconsciously meant to replace and surpass the fear –making himself the subject (instead of the object) of fear. Natural Born Killers projects a succession of various faces of demons and monsters that have been present in cultural narrations from folklore tales and literature to television and media. The movie superposes infinite physical descriptions of evil, where the image of the father has a significant role, at least as a trigger factor of violence and trauma. The given visualisation from Mickey’s inner bloody portrayals to the ‘declension’ of demon figures is a direct echo to the representations of horror anchored in the American culture and to the way it affects the individual development. Mickey’s appropriation of shifting nightmarish shapes reflects his way to appropriate himself the fear and try to get rid of the image of his father inside. The reject of patriarchal authority inexorably leads to reflect on the Oedipus complex suggested. In Natural Born Killers, two triangular relationships can be detected (Mickey-Mallory-Scagnetti / Mickey-Mallory-Gale) where the two main fascinated pursuers of Mickey and Mallory complete each others in an Oedipus mechanism. Indeed, sadistic detective Jack Scagnetti views Mickey as an adversary and competitor for the love of Mallory. After Scagnetti dies under Mallory’s strike, unscrupulous reporter Wayne Gale forms a new triangle; fascinated by the couple’s unlimited freedom he rebels with them and ‘borns again’ with Mickey as his spiritual father and guide. The unstable identification of Gale resolves in following the couple as

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models to be respected. By this triangle, Gale reconstitutes an ephemeral and illusive family geometry.

“Le père est une douleur sourde, au deux sens du terme : secrète et qui n’entend pas”. In cinematography, the father is often described either as monstrous or inexistent. But the father, who forbids and constrains, “leads the way for the child’s desire.” 81 Duclos put the emphasis on the absence of the father (or the absence of recognition) as a determinant factor in serial killers acts: “les biographies des serial killers constatent que les actes les plus affreux ne sont pas réalisés dans l’appétit , le plaisir ou la colère, mais dans la tentative désespérée de trouver une ouverture là où l’absence de père enferme les tueurs dans le monde fermé de la gémellité et le conflit inexpiable entre purs ‘moi’.”82 The multiplicity of the self is another answer to why deviance is a constant shifting and how the mythical search for the alter who is the self requires sacrifice: the alteration of oneself or the death of someone else. In any cases, the representation of deviance through the killer and his act in American cinematography points out an abyss where the psychological becomes physical. Mind is not separated from body.

II.3 Searching for an Opening: a marked body To Thomas Allen Nelson, sequences in A Clockwork Orange demonstrate that Alex, a nihilist character, “works from the outside out –from fantasy to performance– […], [giving] form to imaginative life through action and performance.”83 Beside the art of performance, it is the art of the product that has to be considered as a way to give form to their perception of inner (personal) reality, hyper-reality; to vision-ism. The art of coco ……………………. 81. Paragraph translated and summarised from documentary “Un écran nommé désire” (Elisabeth Kapnist, CineCinema). 82. D.Duclos, Le complexe du loup-garou, 215. 83. T. A. Nelson, Kubrick : Inside a film artist’s maze, 151.

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murder through the product is indeed central in the American cinema of the 90s. Marks, corpses, mise en scènes by the murderer translate the search for (and possibly communication of) sense and sensation. The motives of murder are numerous; however there are various similarities which link the representation of criminals. One is physical deviance or mutation, the ‘lost’ of body. Nonetheless, this physical stigmatisation may be very discrete or intermittent and even tends to disappearing; symbolizing that the mask of normality is bore by everyone. It is then through the steady deformation of victims that deviance is expressed.

II.3.1 Shapelessness and Deformation Ces manifestations esthétiques, aussi étranges que cruelles, […] comme liées à “la nécessité d’aller jusqu’à certaines limites de la vie, sinon même de franchir ces limites afin de créer quelque chose.” 84 Deviance casts light on an invisible reality, and truth necessarily conflicts with society and its concealing structures. Figuration of deviance has shown two trends: body as a mask – invisible or latent; body as a transparency – physical exaggeration, bringing outward the interior feeling. But otherness also tends to be undetectable through physiognomy. Far from the monstrous representation of Gothic tradition, deviance is nonetheless related to adversity. The various predominant aspects of the protagonist go from the shapeless representation to the deformed one; and ultimately to the common, demonstrating that ‘abnormality’ is generalised: synonym of individual difference.

Adversity is handled with through formless or fluid aspects such as immateriality (the presence of Bob in Twin Peaks is evoked by flashes of light, the ……………………. 84. M.Gagnebin, Fascination de la laideur, 236. Gagnebin cites Andreï Siniavski, Solitude et Communication (Neuchâtel, 1975) 143.

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spectral figure (the spirit) of Mabuse in Das Testament des Dr Mabuse), shadow and anonymous figure (Nosferatu85, Se7en), invisibility (John Doe in Se7en and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs are not shown before the second half of the films) and more generally anonymity (Machine in 8MM wears a mask that hides his identity). The physical normality of adversity is frequent but visual devices may deform it. It is by the eye that the notion of deviance is expressed: bulging eyes that hypnotise (Mabuse) and/or devour (Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Mallory’s father in Natural Born Killers), a look that is terrifying as well as terrified (M.) when culpability and innocence merge into one person and may utter in conflict: “C’est moi, cet autre qui me poursuit!”86 Normality is deformed and marked by neurosis and madness when a latent, uncontrolled dark face appears: in Twin Peaks, Leland Palmer’s face keeps alternating with Bob’s, usually in binary opposition. This fluid change of characters is part of a rhetorical figure of dual personality and multiple face. The faces of replacement of the criminals are also means to emphasize an aspect of personality: In Natural Born killers, Mickey is associated to images of monsters, serpents etc. Multiple shape, or metamorphosis, is indeed directly related to the demonic. Duality, which may be inner, is often expressed through the aesthetic of the body and characterizes the margin of uncertainty: Alex (A Clockwork Orange) is ex-human (though ultra-human), marked by a two-face make-up that divides his face, while serial killer Buffalo Bill is a transsexual, fighting against his male aspect. The mechanic and organic combination is also a hybrid genre that marks cinema since long. Therefore, material and concrete marks play a part in displaying the otherness of protagonists. Again, the sanguinary mark stains normality and exhibits violence: Lecter and John Doe are covered with the blood of their victims. The mask is an element which …………………….. 85. F. W. Murnau, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal, Prana-Film GmbH, 1922). 86. M. in M. (by Fritz Lang).

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indicates the ‘in-human’ in The Silence of the Lambs and 8MM. Lecter’s iron masks constrict his cannibal play while the mask of Machine reminds of the executioner.

The exhibition of deviance in art is particularly (obscenely) symbolic when the antagonist chooses to mutate his body or part of his body: skin becomes a text. A body art, piercing and tattoos are the most commonly accepted. In American History X, Derek’s Swastika tattoo makes conspicuous his political beliefs and rage. In The Silence of the Lambs, the skin of Buffalo Bill covered with tattoos and piercing shows his underground orientation. What is even more relevant is that he kills to (re)create himself: from patches of female bodies, he sews a second skin as a means to be (in) a female body. In Se7en, the serial killer mutilates his own fingers skin, removing his prints. This infliction shows John Doe has erased his own identity, here in the name of morality: whohe-is is irrelevant. The metonymy of the hand in Se7en is recurrent to represent the serial killer and is symbolic. John Doe has no body in the major part of the movie. He is in fact absent except through the crime scenes, like still and lifeless tableaux he leaves behind him and which incarnate his omnipresence. The first sight of him as a whole is that of a back-lit shadow; until the camera focuses on his hand, pointing a gun at Mill’s head, what embodies his omniscience. The generic only shows his hands, of which symbol gains clarity as a signification of the act: of creation, of destruction, or of grace. Texture is skin, it is the very body scratched and cut which repulses the eye. The aesthetic of ugly is linked to suffering and sadomasochism. Each act and each elaboration of crime scenes is a representation of the act as a whole: of the purpose. Each detail is built on logic as symbolic. The discrepancy between the biblical references and violence can be explained in Doe’s murders by the major role of inter-textuality creating syncretism. It reflects also a common absurdity present in the world, in front of which cold cynicism can become a value. John Doe’s collections and

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acts can be viewed as an intellectualised form of ritual and art because it is a language of symbols, and creative too.

The styles of art showing macabre and mutilated visions raised a sense of ‘madness’, of a rip and rift, which projected anxiety and tensions, and a fascination for the dark side. Cinema as well tended to project a macabre picture but it usually implied in the American field the notion of criminality, what was not unrelated to the reality of the society. The years 1990s were especially marked by the serial killer genre that enabled to explore even more in details the product of the murders and an aesthetical autopsy of the victims. It is through the corpses and through mises en scène of lifeless tableaux that criminal deviance was expressed, as much as the vision of an artistic mind.

II.3.2 Aesthetics of Death The idea of the “art of murder” is an expression of a modern notion that art is amoral. To take into consideration the artistic value of the product of a murder does not diminish the fact that body (and particularly skin) is contemplated as an object. On an amoral level, body is used as a ‘medium’, a (living or dead) material.87 The relation to the body translates the relation to the very essence of being: a disbelief, or denigration of (human) integrity? Through the mutilation and deterioration, the torture of body and alteration of skin, it is a rift that is revealed. Paradoxically, the fracture itself can be viewed as a sign of fulfilment: “La faille [cadrages, fission de la matière, etc.] introduit le vide dans la composition.”88 Emptiness is analysed by Gagnebin as plenitude. The imago of the lost body, the introduction of a foreign body, text of skin, body in ……………………. 87. In her essay on Body-art, M. Gagnebin considers the body as raw material: “Dorénavant les corps humains sont choisis pour matière première du geste esthétique. Ils craquent et se brisent”. 88. M.Gagnebin, Fascination de la laideur, 237.

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in pieces (dislocation, dismemberment, metonymy) are relevant matters studied by Jeudy89 which reflect the deconstruction of body and unitary identity. These representations in art introduce the aesthetics of the ugly and reflect creative transgressions where the ugly becomes beauty90, where the inside comes to the surface. In the 90s, it is not only the unconscious that surfaces, it is also the inside of the body. Organs are exposed, veins colour and pattern the skin with sinuous lines; scenes of autopsy in the serial murder genre insist even more on the organic aspect of horror and fascination, where death reveals something and means something. Here, aesthetical deviance through body is a sense of death mis à nu (Annex 6: “Skinned Art, Art of Mutilation”).

Murielle Gagnebin’s examination of the fascination of the ugly shows how modern painting had a great influence on the contemporary visualisation and representation of the body as a medium for or mirror of “déchéance, de la pourriture, de la démence, de la mort et de la décomposition”.91 A reflection of pessimism and violent desire (to live) found resurgence in the visual arts of the ending century through extreme and evolved multiple forms, tainted with raw visions. A lethal outcome. Part of the American cinema reflects the characters’ and the viewers’ fascination of the scar of the repressed which opens again, their attraction for a strange beauty which may transgress all rules (even of morality) and transcends; the excitement of the eye for the unseen, for something that is latent and hides deep beyond the crack of wounds, beyond the deterioration of the image –the lack beyond saturation, which creates desire. Cinema is a mirror and a dream: a reflection of the attraction for a darkness which will never be explained and takes reality –the dream of the Unconscious, this monster. dream ……………………. 89. Jeudy, Le corps comme objet d’art. 90.“Le laid, cet ‘excédent de visibilité’, transgresse les lois de la création”. M. Gagnebin, Fascination de la laideur in “La citadelle du temps”. 91. M. Gagnebin, Fascination de la laideur in “La profondeur délivrée”.

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The dream through and beyond death, in-Human.92

CONCLUSION A saturating sense of end and instability characterize the 90s decade in the United States. Beyond the coarsening and exceptional character of violence shown in films, the directors of the chosen corpus expressed the mental troubles and the disorientation that affect the individual and societal psychology. Psychosis, hatred and traumas converged in violent fear.

Trapped between history and temporality, the decade was doomed to the 21th century. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, involving the end of the Cold War between the United States and U.S.S.R., marked the end of the century owing to historians; therefore a margin of ten years remained between two temporal frontiers, floating between reality and fiction, between increasing fear and free exaltation. The tensions between fear of difference and will for tolerance deeply marked the American society which was going on psychological and moral changing processes. The period of the 90s is literally and figuratively a period of transition, a margin toward new processes of thinking representation and interpreting, Since the end of the Hays Code, characters with mental slips have punctuated the American cinema (Taxi Driver93, The Shining94, Falling Down95); a falling into madness that revealed a feeling of saturation and oppression. The end of the 1980s, with the birth of the serial killer genre, ……………………… 92. A play on words: in human/inhuman. Ref. Die Form, “InHuman” music album (Trisol and Metropolis Records, 2004). 93. Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver (Bill/Phillips, Colombia Pictures Corporation, Italo/Judeo Productions, 1976). 94. Stanley Kubrick, The Shining (Hawk Films Ltd., Peregrine, Producers Circle, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1980). 95. Joel Schumacher, Falling Down (Alcor Films, Canal+, Regency Enterprises, Warner Bros.Pictures, 1993).

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anchored even more deeply in the American cinema an interest for deviances, madness and excesses that marked the collective memory through media as soon as the 1960s. Physical, psychological and moral deviances became an essential guiding line at the end/ beginning of the century. What cinematography began also to stress on was that psychological values and political ones differed.

Artistic deviance built itself thanks to new modes and means of representation –a rupture as well as a hybridisation of genres and styles. The American cinema definitely established the perpetual deconstruction of narration, images and codes. It enhanced the endless process of constructing new codes and structures of meanings that translate multiple visions and lead to multiple understandings. Psychological complex and disorientation became more than optical: it was expressed by textual deviance –which often differed from the ‘instinctive’ understanding of the image. The unrest of cinematographic ambiguity, responding to unfixed rules, showed that deviance came to be normalized. If part of the American cinema still tended to mark deviance with vice and violence, it became clear that the ramification of deviances from personal difference to illegal abuse was seen as an unacceptable theory: behaviourist determinism was rejected –unless it was the whole society that was mentally affected by the determined system. While the ramification of perversities or atrocities seemed to confuse all boundaries between legal and illegal deviance, killing was nonetheless the determinant factor that drew a frontier. By the act or the product, killing itself embodied moral, psychological and physical violence.

Travelling through the limits of intensity, the American cinema induced to envisage an unveiled side of the human being through contradictory ways which show both the necessity and the danger to reveal oneself. It showed how self-control in the

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playing out of fantasies was essential while exterior control and repression created a destructive frustration and excessive response from the part of individuals. The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, TwinPeaks, Natural Born Killers, American History X and 8MM all fluctuate between the conscious and the unconscious, and illustrate through disruption and lapses a search for transition and a means for understanding the sense of the ambiguity of the reality. Jean Mitry wrote: “The process of film joins a deep psychological reality and satisfies our desire to understand the world and each other in a powerful yet necessarily partial way. The aesthetics of film is based on this psychological truth and need.[…] Cinema meets this need by showing us the process of the transformation of the world.”96 Rather than being an establishment of morality, cinematography in the 90s tried to de-categorize and explore the fluctuation of deviance and understand excess beyond moral precepts, trying to distinguish perversity from deviance.

The signs of fragmentation and complexity of expressionist cinema may have emerge again in the American cinema but it is under a largest form of complexity and a fragmentation which translates the explosion (and extension) of the self and borders. The aesthetics of fragmentation –once architectural –notably became organic. 97 If the fragmentation and mutations of the body emerged as a sense of threatening death it has also to be understood as a process of transformation of the notion of art and pleasure where de-formation of the body is the revelation of something deep inside, of the essence of the being; a new formation of representation and mental concretization. The visualisations and movements that cinematography offers correspond

……………………… 96. Jean Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma. Cited in T.A. Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a film artist’s maze, 13. 97. The representation of organic substance here contrasts with the normalisation of sanitized imagery.

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to a range of comprehensions of the world, envisaging the reality through various points of view (also in accordance to the contexts) –integrating the different realities that exist. This corpus of the American screen in the 90s goes further than mere appearance and construct a critical analysis of fears and fascination which correlate. Aesthetics, as much as text, constructs psychological perception and reflects psychic state and process in parallel to and in interference with environmental realism.

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PRIMARY SOURCES - DEMME, Jonathan, The Silence of the Lambs (Orion Pictures Corporation, Strong Heart/Demme Production, 1991). - FINCHER, David, Se7en (New Line Cinema, 1995). F - KAYE, Tony, American History X (New Line Cinema, The Turman-Morrissey Company, 1998). - LYNCH, David, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (CiBy2000 and New Line Cinema, 1992). - SCHUMACHER, Joel, 8MM (Columbia Pictures Corporation, Hofflund/Polone, Global Entertainment Productions GmbH & Company Medien KG, 1999). - STONE, Oliver, Natural Born Killers (Alcor Films, Ixtlan Corporation, J D Productions, New Regency Pictures, Regency Enterprises, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1994). SECONDARY SOURCES Filmography - CLARK, Larry, Ken Park (Busy Bee Productions, Cinéa, Kasander Film Company, Lou Yi Inc., Marathon International, The Kasander Film Company, 2001). - FINCHER, David, Fight Club (Art Linson Productions, Fox 2000 Pictures, Regency Enterprises, Taurus Film, 1999). - KUBRICK, Stanley, A Clockwork Orange (Hawk Films Ltd., Polaris Productions, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1971). - HAYNES, Todd, Poison (Bronze Eye Production, Poison L P., 1991). - KUBRICK, Stanley, The Shining (Hawk Films Ltd., Peregrine, Producers Circle, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1980). - LANG, Fritz, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (Nero-Film AG, 1933). - LANG, Fritz, M. (Nero-Film AG, 1931). - MURNAU, F.W., Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, (Jofa-Atelier BerlinJohannisthal, Prana-Film GmbH, 1922). - SCHMACHER, Joel, Falling Down (Alcor Films, Canal+, Regency Enterprises, Warner Bros.Pictures, 1993). - SCORSESE, Martin, Taxi Driver (Bill/Phillips, Colombia Pictures Corporation, Italo/Judeo Productions, 1976). - SCOTT, Ridley, Thelma and Louise (Metro-Golwyn-Mayer (MGM), Pathé Entertainment, Percy Main, 1991) - SINGH, Tarsem, The Cell (New Line Cinema, Avery Pix, Katira Productions GmbH & Co. KG, Caro-Mc Leod, Radical Media, 2000). - URBAN, Stuart, Preaching to the Perverted (Cyclops Vision, PTTP Films, 1997). Bibliography - BARBEY D’AUREVILLY, Jules. Les Diaboliques (1874). Paris: Gallimard, 2003.

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- GOSWANI, Chiranjit, “Se7en”, Notcoming.com, < http://www.notcoming.com/reviews.php?id=509 > Downloaded : November, 2006. - HANTKE Steffen. Monstrosity Without a Body: Representational Strategies in the Popular Serial Killer Film (Post Script: January, 2003), via IIPA Full Text, < Steffenhttp://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_go1931/is_200301/ai_n89999 25 > Downloaded: January, 2005. - IMDB - The Internet Movie Data Base, imdb.com - KONOW, David Konow. The Best of Creative Screenwriting Interviews Book: 1994-2004 (Los Angeles: Creative Screenwriting), in “Interview with Andrew Kevin Walker”, Creativescreenwriting.com, < http://www.creativescreenwriting.com/spw/awalker.cfm > Downloaded: January, 2007. - La Cinémathèque Française, “Le cinéma expressionniste”, < http://www.cinematheque.fr/fr/espacecinephile/expositions/cinema expressionniste.html > - Preaching to the Perverted, Stuart URBAN, Cyclops Vision, PTTP Films, 1997. - POST, Wilfried, “La révolution du moi”. Interview by Angelika Schindler, 2006, < http://www.arte.tv/fr/expressionnisme-allemand/1364962.html > Downloaded: April, 2007. - STONE, Oliver, “Speech at a commencement at Berkeley”, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, < http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Stone/stone-grad1.html > Downloaded: February, 2006. - ULRICH, Maurice, “Où la peinture repasse les plats”, Journal l’Humanité, Rubrique Cultures, 7 mai 2005, < http://www.humanite.fr >. Downloaded: December, 2006. - VAKNIN (Dr.), Sam, “The Psychology of Torture”, < http://samvak.tripod.com/torturepsychology.html >. See also: VAKNIN, Sam. Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited (Czech Republic: Narcissus Publications,1999). - Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia, “Deviant behaviour”, < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviant > Downloaded: September, 2006. - Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia, “Natural Born Killers”, < http://en.wikipedia.org/ > - “Culture et questions qui font débat - Poison, un film de Todd Haynes (1991)”, 10 Septembre 2006, < http://culture-et-debats.over-blog.com/categorie-89183.html > Downloaded: November, 2006.

Documentary - ARTE (France), “Thema: l’expressionisme allemand”, November, 2006. - KAPNIST, Elisabeth, “Un écran nommé désire”(CineCinema Classic, May 2, 2006, 7.50pm). - SCHUMACHER, Joel, commentary on 8MM from DVD (Colombia Pictures, 1998).

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