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Abstract Taking a schizoanalytic approach to audio-visual images, this article explores some of the radical potentia for deterritorialisation found within David Finchers Fight Club (1999). The lms potential for deterritorialisation is initially located in an exploration of the lms form and content, which appear designed to interrogate and transcend a series of false binaries between mind and body, inside and outside, male and female. Paying attention to the construction of photorealistic digital spaces and composited images, we examine the actual (and possible) ways viewers relate to the lm, both during and after screenings. Recognising the lm as an affective force performing within our world, we also investigate some of the real-world effects the lm catalysed. Finally, we propose that schizoanalysis, when applied to a Hollywood lm, suggests that Deleuze underestimated the deterritorialising potential of contemporary, special effects-driven cinema. If schizoanalysis has thus been reterritorialised by mainstream products, we argue that new, post-Deleuzian lines of ight are required to disrupt this de-re-territorialisation. Keywords: schizoanalysis, Fight Club, mindbody, digital, de-/reterritorialisation
Deleuze Studies 5.2 (2011): 275299 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2011.0021 Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls
I. Introduction
In Anti-Oedipus (1983), Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari advanced a radical conception of desire, no longer shackled to absence and lack, but based on a productive process of presence and becoming. Rather than the old Oedipalising models of psychoanalysis, whereby the subject is constituted or gains an identity through identication with something that is always already lost (identity as having a xed goal, telos, or, in another sense, a reied essence), Deleuze and Guattari proposed that identity constantly undergoes shifts and changes, in response to, or in accordance with, the situation in which it nds itself. The process of becoming (as opposed to the thing of being) that Deleuze and Guattari describe, then, is one in which the conventional distinctions between inside and outside, actual and virtual, and even between self and other signicantly blur. To comprehend and understand the world thus, as well as the works of art it contains, is known as schizoanalysis. In this essay, we employ a schizoanalytic approach to expose the radical potential for deterritorialisation (that is, the upsetting of those conventional distinctions listed above and perhaps even the upsetting of distinctions per se) to be found in David Finchers Fight Club (1999). As we shall show, this potential for deterritorialisation is located at the level of form and content, and in the effects the lm displays in the real world (that is, on spectators). In other words, we shall explore not only what happens in the narrative (its content), but also how the lm itself is put together (its form) and functions in the world. Particular attention will be paid to the lms construction of photorealistic digital spaces and composited images, before examining the actual (and possible) ways in which audiences relate to the lm, during and after screenings. Finally, we shall adventurously propose that schizoanalysis, when applied to a Hollywood lm as here, suggests one or both of two things: that Deleuze underestimated the deterritorialising potential of contemporary, special effects-driven cinema, and/or that schizoanalysis has itself been reterritorialised if found in mainstream products. In this manner, we highlight how new, post-Deleuzian lines of ight are required to disrupt this de-re-territorialisation.
The dark spaces often feature the greatest amount of bodily action (the brawls), while the contrasting washed-out lighter spaces reect the affected spiritual or cerebral dimensions of the lm. In keeping with the above discussion of a mind and body parallelism, Amy Taubin argues the lms use of light provides such a perfect balance of aesthetics and adrenaline [. . . that it feels] like a solution to the mindbody split (Taubin 1999: 18). Signicantly, actors bodies are depicted as lean, muscular and taut, especially Brad Pitts as Tyler. Pamela Church Gibson (2004) argues that this clearly fetishises and commodies the male bodies, highlighting a gaze that becomes ambiguous, upsetting a normative (straight) viewing position without reinscribing an overtly oppositional or gay one. We shall return to the spectator of Fight Club shortly, but rst turn our attention to the lms editing and, in particular, how it uses digital technology to create spaces that can be navigated with a new (total) ease. The lm opens with a virtuoso two-and-a-half minute tracking shot beginning in the fear centre of the narrators brain (although we do not necessarily know this on rst viewing), moving backwards past ring synapses and oating cells of bodily matter, before accelerating outwards via a pore, past a giant drop of sweat dribbling from his pate amidst giant, looming bristles of hair, down his face and along the barrel of a gun. As the camera passes the guns sights, it comes to a rest. The focus changes and what previously had been only an affective rush of colour is pulled into focus to become recognisable as the face of Edward Norton with gun in mouth. Instants later, while the narrator is explaining the nature of Project Mayhems plot, an illustrative camera rushes vertiginously down the outside of the skyscraper from the top oor, down through the pavement and ground into a basement car park which houses a bomb nestled alongside a concrete column. The camera then changes trajectory, heading sideways again at breakneck speed through areas of solid earth until it reaches another subterranean car park, in which the camera races towards a van, through a bullet hole in its rear window, performing a circling close-up of a bomb counting down to destroy the buildings we have just impossibly and rapidly travelled through. Both shots are in part constructed through the use of CGI and animation since it
These sequences of intense continuity differ, slightly, from the intensied continuity of contemporary cinema noted by Bordwell (2002). Bordwell describes the increased cutting rate of contemporary cinema, while here we are describing a cinema that does not (seem to) cut at all. However, it is not that these sequences, and others like it, including the narrator walking through an IKEA catalogue, and the camera becoming the gas spreading around the narrators apartment
Note
1. Pascal Augers name is misspelt when Deleuze rst mentions the concept of the any-space-whatever in Cinema 1 (Deleuze 2005a: 112). Paris VIII has published online transcripts and recordings of Deleuzes seminars on cinema, and these include one in which Deleuze credits Pascal Auger with the concept of the anyspace-whatever, and in which Auger himself also talks about the term in relation to Michael Snows Wavelength. However ingenious (and still valid) the link between Marc Aug and Deleuze, it was not one intended by Deleuze himself. See Deleuze 1982 for more.
References
Aug, Marc (1995) Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, London: Verso. Bensmaa, Rda (1997) L espace quelconque comme personnage conceptuel , in Oliver Fahle and Lorenz Engell (eds), Der Film bei Deleuze/Le Cinma Selon Deleuze, Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universitt Weimer/Presses de la Nouvelle Sorbonne, pp. 14059. Bordwell, David (1997) On the History of Film Style, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bordwell, David (2002) Intensied Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film, Film Quarterly, 55:3, pp. 1628. Bordwell, David (2010) Now You See it, Now You Cant, Observations on Film Art: Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, available at http://www. davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=8509 (accessed 12 November 2010). Bordwell, David and Nol Carroll (eds) (1996) Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Brown, William (2009) Man Without a Movie Camera Movies Without Men: Towards a Posthumanist Cinema?, in Warren Buckland (ed.), Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies, London: Routledge/AFI, pp. 6685. Chandler, Christopher N. and Philip Tallon (2008) Poverty and Anarchy in Fight Club, in Read Mercer Schuchardt (ed.), You Do Not Talk About Fight Club: I am Jacks Completely Unauthorised Essay Collection, Dallas: Benbella Books. Church Gibson, Pamela (2004) Queer Looks, Male Gazes, Taut Torsos and Designer Labels: Contemporary Cinema, Consumption and Masculinity, in Phil Powrie, Ann Davies and Bruce Babington (eds), The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema, London: Wallower Press, pp. 17686.