(Are you noticing a theme?)
Denis Villeneuve’s thriller Enemy is leaving audiences confused and annoyed–the trademark
effects of the puzzle film. Like the films of Davids Lynch and Cronenberg–the
most obvious points of reference here–Enemy
vaults the protagonist (and by extension the viewer) into a world where the
distinction between the real and the imaginary becomes incomprehensible. This
often disturbing oneiric world impels the protagonist to interrogate the status
of his situation both within and outside of the ‘real’; an anxiety that is so
familiar to us in the ubiquity of the digital age.
These epistemological fears are recurrent in films
like Enemy (and Videodrome, and perhaps more contentiously, Lost Highway), where media technologies function as electronic
gateways to a digitalized world that places the status of the real in a place
of crisis: film, television, home-video distribution, just to name a few
examples of ‘virulent’ media that create new ‘hybrid’ or mutant subjects by literally fusing with the human body (as
in Videodrome). Entertainment culture
so perversely thrives on this narrativizing of the digital world’s real-world
ability to permeate our screens; theoretically
(to account for obvious governmental limitations), anyone anywhere can access
videos of questionable veracity and ethics (the legitimate video footage of
Luca Magnotta murdering Lin Jun being exemplary). Digital technologies also
allow for a higher degree of interaction.
Interactivity is not a new phenomenon specific to
the digital age, but the digital’s ease of accessibility confers users the
ability to peruse information about a film or show by means of marketing
paratexts. With this information, users can create new meanings and contexts[1]; fan-fiction,
for instance, demonstrates one way aspects of the text are appropriated and
re-tooled for personal use and enjoyment. These instances of interaction are characteristic
of Kristen Daly’s “cinema 3.0” model of digital cinema; she writes:
Increasingly, for computer and mobile
users, existence is in some intermedial zone of work and leisure; the
experience of moving images through computer and digital technologies is
interactive, blurring the lines between producer and consumer, spectacle and
spectator, representation and information, as embodied by mashups and
crowdsourcing. To represent these sets of relations between art, culture, work
and relations of power, Cinema 3.0 must move beyond vision to engage thought.[2]
Now, these modes of interaction can transcend and replace the
paratext with the extra-text. In Enemy,
Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal) mimics Cinema 3.0’s ‘viewser’ (to borrow Daly’s
wonderfully clever semantic fusion of viewer and user) by interacting outside of the film text rather than
remain within the industrially defined contours[3];
his investigation of his double provokes him to ‘perform’ as his double (a
clear parallel of ambiguous intentionality to cos-playing). Adam, then, is the
epitomical ‘viewser’: he creates a new meaning for himself by re-tooling the information provided to him by the ostensive
unlimited saturation of digital media.
But the media’s role in creating a new hybrid
subject is much more muted in Enemy
than in say, Videodrome (in that it seems the 'film text' seems less important as the narrative progresses). In
Cronenberg’s film, the virulence of television and home-video circulation and
its role in shaping new subjects was clearly the ‘message’. Enemy seems to take this further: it
shows what this perverse new flesh can achieve in an age where access to these
images is even more democratized.
[1] Kristen
Daly, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image,” in Cinema Journal 50 (2010): 86
[2]
Ibid.
[3] So
this is clear I don’t want to merge the paratext with the extra-text, as the
paratext is under the control of the industry. Websites, books, etc. are all put
forth by the studio as a means to generate interest in the product. Conversely, the
parameters of the extra-text are defined by the ‘viewsers’. In this context,
stuff like ‘fan-art’ would be considered
extratextual.
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