<<TRANSMATHOME

2.6 Affect-ion, Desire and Becoming

In the next section I am going to play with the idea of film, particularly film which is concerned with what Deleuze calls, in Cinema 2, the ‘affection-image’, as distributing the body’s signification differently, launching the flesh upon an affected becoming otherwise. There are a few reasons why this section is only a play and not a prescription, those reasons I will set out at the moments they appear as a result of the play. But before I begin my discussion I wish to emphasize that I am focusing on a use of Deleuze and Guattari’s terms in a specifically different way than the precise use for which they were intended. Deleuze, I will boldly venture to assume, like other film theorists is in the majority interested in the image unto itself, and of the correlation the image eventually has with the mind/brain of the audience. The audience therefore is not his primary subject, the image is. In the same way the discussions on Deleuze’s cinema books currently being produced are, on the whole, marvelous discussions on Deleuze’s explication of the image. They are concerned with the audience only on a secondary or fleetingly brief level. Patricia Pisters in her PhD dissertation From Eye to Brain uses both Deleuzian film theory and his theory of becoming to analyze film in a new way. For example, Pisters explicates the affection image that supposedly

does not work on our sensory motor schema that leads to action, it does not work on our cognitive ability, it works straight on the affective nervous system that has its sensors everywhere in the flesh. This scene is not just a metaphor for victimhood or masochism, but also the becoming-animal of Elvira… [63]

Pisters commences promisingly enough by tentatively connecting the affection-image with the nerves of the body of the audience, hence setting the stage for a discussion of what the audience are becoming, how they are changing, affecting/ed. Then she immediately switches to a filmic character and her phantasmatic becoming, something interesting and valid as a theory but permanently condemned to the realm of ‘that to be read’ rather than something to be developed as a change, or a moment of qualitative fluctuation in the subject watching. Her most promising statement comes as “With every encounter something happens and the subject changes. The subject becomes,” [64] a sentiment very close to my theory that at every moment the subject is perverted from the moment before. But beyond this discussion of the subject is always the proviso that these theories will be applied to the image, to the character and emphatically not to the audience.

Since I am primarily interested in the audience I may appear to be reading Deleuze’s cinematic terms frivolously but I am not claiming to explain their meaning, only to take the terms most useful to me. At their most basic definitional level I wish to apply them to the audience Deleuze does not talk about, but does not specifically exclude in his cinematic terminology.  My introduction to most of his terminology will be brief and only in order to focus on the one term I find most promising for horror theory, the affection-image.  Deleuze’s affection image is a result of his discussion in Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time Image [65] on Charles Sanders Peirce’s elements of firstness. Peirce posits firstness as an independent ‘thing’, which is juxtaposed narratively with secondness relative to something else and thirdness, which is the mediation between the first and the second. D.N. Rodowick explains this use of Peirce thus:

According to Peirce, firstness is a conception of being or of existing independently of any other thing (quality), secondness is the concept of being relative to some other thing (relation), and thirdness is the concept of mediation wherein the first and the second are brought into relation with one another (synthesis or mediation). [66]

The major division between Deleuze on cinema and his terms and my use of his terms is that Deleuze uses terminology to speak of the image. The reason why Deleuze’s term of firstness, the affection-image, is so interesting and important for my work is precisely the way in which it differs from his other subjective-images; the perception image and the action image. Remembering back to ‘Pleasure’, ‘perception’ is the first moment when the subject is inundated, and hence must consequently re-act, which becomes the action image. [67] Narrative cohesion is in conformity with what other film theorists are interested in, in terms of images presenting to an audience a subject for a potential mirroring effect. The character on screen acts or perceives in order to act. The audience perceives and their thought or mind ‘acts’. The movement of the movement image in Deleuze’s Cinema 1 is first for the image and then presumably for the audience. Movement occurs upon the screen and oscillates between screen and audience. A cohesive chain of events, even mind events, happens in the perception of the image - action, and then re-action. A movement from image to audience occurs at the same time along the frame of the screen and along the narrative story of the plot. The time image is concerned with the non-narrative, the still and the dis-jointed spatially, the moving temporally. The time image is more moments than narrative. The time image aims more for a jarring effect between the quality of an image and the audience. There is something to be expected from the time image not in terms of what is next, but what is this; what relation does it have to ‘anything’. Rodowick points to Deleuze’s use of ‘any-space-whatever’ and the icon.

Any-space-whatever does not yet appear as a real setting or is abstracted from the spatial and temporal determinations of real settings…the icon expresses in itself the bipolar quality of movement, either quality or power as affect expressed in the image without being actualized there. [68]

Based on the entire premise of her book, Pisters would say it is eventually actualized ambivalently in the subject watching, that being the connector of eye to brain, where images that express qualities become actual in the traversing or movement from eye to brain. Instead of the image telling our eyes what to think in a mode of truthful representation, Pisters suggests the mode of information from images goes through the eye directly to the brain, which, because of its rhizomatic configuration in her theories, is better able to comprehend an image as a qualitative flow or affect rather than a truthful simulacrum. Although this theory of the audience alters prevalent models of representation in film theory, it seems to remain based in logic, comprehension and conscious thoughtful decisiveness on the reading or interpretation of images.  Stillness, and, in a horror context, rupture out rather than along a line of movement, are both precluded from the movement image. Interestingly in horror film many scenes of rupture are precluded by stillness, as much as to isolate the image as important in its differentiated moment-ness – its pure affect over narrative purpose – as to wind up anticipation.

In this respect certain horror films fulfil the time-image definition. I think especially of Fulci’s … E tu vivrai nel Terrore! L’Aldila and Paura nel Citta dei Morti Viventi, as well as the more ‘Hollywood’ Eraserhead of David Lynch (USA, 1978), where there is no narrative cohesion, no reason for the images to necessarily be connected and where, in the case of Fulci, [69] the director himself states that the characters in his films are blind because no matter how hard we look we are not going to find any connective story in the film. [70] ‘Scenes’ in these films exist independently of a sense of appropriateness or rational in the film – gore (in Paura), slow violence (bodies crucified, melting, eaten by spiders and becoming-zombie in L’Aldila), illogical situations (the room full of barbed wire into which Sara falls in Suspiria) and weirdness (a head popping off and being turned into erasers, a singing woman in a radiator in Eraserhead). These scenes ask us to think connectivity not with the rest of the film but with the rhizomatic possibilities we can connect these images to, individual and multiple within each viewer and at each viewing. Deleuze states “The viewer’s problem becomes ‘What is there to see in the image?’ (and not now ‘What are we going to see in the next image?’)” [71] We cannot rely on the director, the writer, or any essential signification within the images as either metaphor or metonym.  These images exist for purely qualitative temporal and temporary affect.

Rodowick’s reading of Deleuze’s cinema theory is useful in its incorporation of other theories of Deleuze (and Guattari). But where Rodowick is most valuable is in his insistence on a corporeal reception of images. Unlike Pisters, Rodowick sees the affection-image as explicitly corporeal and even visceral - where thought relates to the flesh and not the brain. In the actual world where we can watch the supernatural happenings of Fulci’s L’Aldila (rather than the world where we would believe its premise of heretic zombies as possible, transcendental or truthful) the full potential of this film is its affect and transformative potential, not its ability to be comprehended and transcendental. Rodowick states “belief is no longer belief in a transcendental world, but a belief in this world and its powers of transformation. It is believing in the body, in its relation to thought, and in the potential of thought to affirm their powers of change and their receptivity to transformation.” [72] Rodowick emphasizes the unbound potential of the flesh and the viewing subject already in the world, which makes redundant any attempt to capture or illustrate a form of transcendental world in the image. He also affirms, with Deleuze, the futility of phantasizing transcendence in an image or a marked division between the lived world and the ‘created’ cinema, claiming instead that the break between reality and representation is between the world and humanity. [73] It is the lack of break between body and screen that I find appealing in both Deleuze and Rodowick’s reading of him. [74]

So, to return to the affection-image, it is probably more available in a time-image than a movement-image, and it is concerned with an individual isolated moment (often a moment of crisis) and hence ‘firstness’ than a narrative or connective moment. In order to continue though I must point out another problem these theories have in being applied to my work. I use the words ‘isolated’ and ‘non-connective’, both of which seem quite anti-Deleuzian ideas. I am not, as Deleuze is in Cinema 2, speaking of an image, that which can be isolated and non-connected to the next image. I am speaking of a watching body, which cannot be completely isolated from the watched. Of course, there is a connection. The reason that I am applying ideas about an image onto a subject is because I am diligently striving away from any connection that can be linguistically or narratively connective. Even the basic image connecting to the subject watching is a problem for me, because it suggests a reaction that refers to the mind of the subject [75] which then suggests a reaction or affection that is able to be articulated and that remains firmly in a mind-over-flesh realm. This linguistic oscillation constructs an if… then equation which embeds film reception in a capital schema where there is an action, reaction and ultimately product, the product being that which the film theorist excavates and puts into language in order that we may know or ‘comprehend’ affect more clearly, thus investing the image with an immutable version of its affect. My application of the idea of the affection-image is about the subject watching, about the material flesh of the subject and not about the image. This is the main reason why I will be qualifying where my theories are a divergence from, rather than an affirmation of, Deleuze’s cinema theory.

Finally, I come to the affection-image. If my primary contention in this book is that horror is valuable to the perversion of the subject because of its affect rather than perceived narrative and ‘readability’, then Deleuze’s theory of affection-image seems an ideal beginning. His summary of it is thus

[firstness is] an immediate and instantaneous consciousness, such as is implied by every real consciousness which is itself never immediate nor instantaneous. It is not a sensation, a feeling, an idea, but the quality of a possible sensation, feeling, or idea. Firstness is thus a category of the possible: it gives a proper consistency to the possible, it expresses the possible without actualizing it, whilst making it a complete mode. Now, this is exactly what the affection image is: it is quality or power, it is potentiality considered for itself as expressed. The corresponding sign is therefore expression not actualization… The affect is impersonal and is distinct from every individuated state of things… The affect is indivisible and without parts; but the singular combinations that it forms with other affects form in turn an indivisible quality, which will only be divided by changing qualitatively (the “dividual”). [My italics] [76]

The term ‘quality (of a possible sensation’) is a most seductive and tantalizing term, and one which I think is implicit in the desire for horror images. It is never the image that is desired, it is the desire to feel sensation through combinations with horrific images, but more so it is the desire for this very quality of a possible sensation. Horror affords a quality of sensation unlike and unavailable from any other form of affect. Earlier I spoke of expected versus unexpected horror. Whichever choice is preferred by the viewer, both desire the quality of the possible. Horror films are all about the possible, the next but not the next in a series… simply the next possible. Like the time-image which has no next narratively, only the next, so the horror image, whether it belongs to the same film or the next film, is all about the possibility of what will happen next - not what will happen next in the film but what will happen next to me.

This returns us to Deleuze’s important insistence that the affect image is impersonal and without parts, without actuality but always expressing potential for actualization that never arrives. [77] There is, most importantly however, no demand or need for it to arrive. This is representational of desire as expression rather than actualization. To actualize desire is to finish or satisfy it, which suggests that there was some emptiness to satisfy. Expression is not unreal or figurative. It is as actual and material as actualization, but not within an equation, which demands satisfaction and comprehensive recognition. Affect-images are a desiring vehicle, they gear the body into desiring mode, they continue the already desiring body, and they catch the body up in the indivisible and create qualities of affect-ion. Whether it is negative or positive affect-desire is always a teeming corporeal desire rather than more traditional modes of figuring desire as lack and hence satisfaction as filling that lack. To pre-empt this discussion affect is an already desiring, affect-ing/ed body desiring more. It is not a non-(moving/affecting/expressing?) or lacking body awaiting effect. That would validate the actualization of the expression of affect that Deleuze explicitly argues against. Affection-images do not act upon but pull along in a flow of varying intersections and connections: quality and power intersecting that which already was quality and power but varyingly changes in its quality and power. It is not a body that begins without a quality that is aspired towards, without power to feel. The idea of the affection-image as being a continuation and qualitatively altered condition, rather than an enactment on a blank waiting body, is the most important feature which differentiates the audience of horror from the idea of the thrill-seeking identity, waiting for a shock to deterritorialize and then reterritorialize to its former still self.

Even though in Cinema 1&2 Deleuze does not explicitly relate his affect image with desire, I wish to do so here. What desire am I speaking of? First to examine the way in which a Deleuzian, following on from a Spinozian, via a Groszian discussion of desire is useful.

In ‘A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics’ [78] Elizabeth Grosz discusses the points of contention and the points of usefulness where feminism intersects with Deleuzian thought. As a by-product of her essay an incredible discussion of desire is presented. Grosz advocates Deleuze’s explication of desire because it departs so violently from the traditional psychoanalytic definition of lack or idealization of the Other as a motivation for desire. Both traditional theories present an abysmally empty or hole-y subject waiting to fill its holes with something that, especially in the context of this chapter, would be named perverse or normal. Grosz, following on from Deleuze following on from Spinoza, posits desire differently,

Instead of understanding desire as a lack or a hole in being, desire is understood by Deleuze - again following Spinoza and Nietzsche - as immanent, as positive and productive, a fundamental, full and creative relation. [79]

Grosz goes on to quote Colin Gordon as saying “Desire is a Relation of effectuation, not of satisfaction.” [80] In terms of the affected body effectuation is an ideal means by which to momentarily define what is happening to it or in what ways its desire is expressing. It is the notion that the body desiring horror is trying to fill a lack or satisfy a craving that is the reason why desire for horror is able to be construed as perverse in the most negative, derogatory sense of the word. Grosz’s paper rapidly leads onto the next Deleuzio-Guattarian element of the looking body theorized: becoming. Grosz quotes Deleuze and Parnet to further her insistence that the body is to be

analyzed and assessed more in terms of what it can do, [81] the things it can perform, the linkages it establishes, the transformations it undergoes, (my italics) the machinic connections it forms with other bodies, what it can link with, and how it can proliferate its capacities - a rare affirmative understanding of the body: (quotes Deleuze and Parnet) ‘Spinoza’s question: what is a body capable of? What affects is it capable of? Affects are becomings’… [82]

The question of what Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming is has been addressed many times by a variety and burgeoning gamut of theorists. I choose in my brief overview to focus particularly on what certain feminist ‘Deleuzians’ have to say on becoming, because my project is feminist, and also because there can be found addressed certain problems with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of becoming from a gender neutral starting point that many theorists gloss over in their euphoria about the undeniably joyousness of becoming. I will also in the course of my discussion point out my reasons for choosing becoming as a theory for reading spectatorship, with its pitfalls (where it does not ‘fit’) and its successes. Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming defies a clear definition as a form of ‘being’, being as an activity, being as a point to aspire towards and eventually gain, or being as a new state of being. Becoming is all these things in a way but for the same reason it is not any of these things because becoming is an aspiration for change in thinking the material self that has no possibility being thought in cessation or completion. Becoming is an actual suggestion rather than a prescription for a new way, it is a suggestion for entertaining new ways. It is not a metaphor to be a new thing in one’s subjectivity or thought, it is not a linear activity whereby one simply turns into an identifiable something else. Deleuze and Guattari state “Becoming is certainly not imitating or identifying with something; neither is it regressing nor progressing… becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing’, ‘being’, ‘equalling’ or ‘producing’.” [83] Becoming is difficult to imagine because the capitalized mind is always asking ‘what do I get, what do I become, what is the matter and the equivalences of this activity’? All these questions are the wrong kinds of questions and this is what Deleuze and Guattari preclude by answering these kinds of enquiries on what becoming is not. What becoming is not is evidently easier to conceive than what becoming is.

Rosi Braidotti makes an important distinction between Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming and the discussion I raised earlier on the Bataillian concept of figuring desire as a radical change to the subject. She states

Deleuze’s becoming is rather the humble apprenticeship to not being anything/where more/other than what one is capable of sustaining and tolerating. It is life on the edge, but not over it; [or against its perpetuation, as Deleuze and Guattari point out in their discussion of becoming in the drug-addicted or suicidal mode] it is excessive but not in the sacrificial sense (exit Bataille). [84]

The positing of a subject up for annihilation is a problem in Bataille. By maintaining that pleasure and perversion are able to destroy the integrity of the subject, the subject’s valuation is overstated in terms of what can break it and how far it can be broken. Always with Bataille is the assertion that post-rupture will be followed by nothing (complete annihilation or sacrifice) or by a return of integrity, the subject changed but intact. What I think Deleuze and Guattari and Braidotti wish to emphasize is that becoming is about a different form/kind/articulation and species of subject. Nothing is killed off in favor of non-existence. (Deleuze and Guattari specifically point out that the becoming-annihilation mentioned above is almost antithetical to the reasons why becoming is good for you.) The subject is changed, perverted in the terms of this chapter. But in the best kinds of becoming there is no death, it is “life on the edge”, but with the emphasis on life, not edge. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, similar to Deleuze’s cinematic machines, the temporal subject becoming in time (‘life’) rather than the annihilative spatial subject in the location of annihilation (‘edge’, also Deleuze and Guattari stating it is not movement - neither regressing nor progressing). Becoming is very difficult to sufficiently articulate, especially within the parameters of the specific becomings available in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. They offer becoming-animal, becoming-machine and becoming-imperceptible among others. These are all actual and irreversible conditions, as Grosz points out “One cannot become animal at will and then cease and function normally. It is not something that can be put on or taken off like a cloak or activity.” [85] This is something to which I will return.

Thus we ask what is the potential becoming of the viewer? Where does becoming fit with cinematic/video watching, and does it at all? The immediate but completely antithetical response to this question would be in representations of becoming. Both Pisters and Braidotti utilize this aspect. Horror films spring to the mind of both theorists when they utilize becoming in cinematic terms, and even in terms of what Braidotti calls the “need to turn to ‘minor’, not to say marginal and hybrid genres, science-fiction, science-fiction horror and cyberpunk, to find fitting cultural illustrations of Deleuze’s work on embodiment and becoming.” [86] Horror is a marginal, hybrid genre. When we consider what Deleuze and Guattari say about hybrids, horror seems even more suitable: “Like hybrids, which are in themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself, but which begins over again every time, gaining that much more ground.” [87] Horror films are seen as sterile artistically and ancestrally. Taking sterile as meaning not able to breed generations, or produce from the union, the relationship Italian horror films have with Hollywood can only be described as a sterile hybrid. When Hollywood ‘produces’, Italy imitates in a unique way in order, not to breed further films, but only to create a hybrid form of the Hollywood film. Even those who would say that Hollywood horror of the thirties was a flourishing reproductive genre disavow the modern Italian horror film. Fans of the Italian horror genre are themselves quick to point out how sterile their objects of desire are. [88]

Many Italian horror films indeed seem to be themselves born of sterile, as opposed to original and hence creative, desire. The phenomenon of the figlia is evidence of this sterility juxtaposed with originality. The supposed ‘artistically lowest’ of films from Hollywood (such as Alien (Ridley Scott, US, 1979), Dawn of the Dead and Evil Dead) breed unrelated films from Italy which claim to be sequels. These films are sterile because, rather than claiming originality and hence the generation of something new or ‘fruitful’, the figlia defines itself as a more outrageous imitation of an already successful film. Suspiria itself, though not a figlia, exists presumably because of the late-sixties to mid-seventies interest in ‘devil-films’ which was started with Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (USA, 1968) and reached a pinnacle when Friedkin’s The Exorcist was nominated for the 1973 Academy Awards for best screenplay and best picture. [89] Hybrid then may be the wrong word to use for the genre that seemingly re-births itself continuously albeit phylically. However the horror genre can not be seen as reproductive because it is seen as so many degenerative things: low-art, non-real, destructive, potentially traumatic. These are not terms that ordinarily align themselves with the reproductive. The sterility of the horror film is imagined not by its content for film history, theory and ‘breeding’ more films, but by its affect and the tone of the things it represents, what it breeds in and with the viewer. At this stage it is sufficient to define the term ‘sterility’ as anything which capitalistically does not produce ‘good results’. The horror film does not ordinarily (re)produce aesthetic truth, intellectual transcendence or even beauty. As a genre the horror film is productive but as a concept horror films are ordinarily imagined as perverse forms of cinema that breed nothing but fear, misery and violence both in that which they present visually and in a more fundamentalist argument, that which they breed affective-ly in the viewer. So in this respect, they are hybrids. Horror films themselves are the monsters they often represent, a theory I will return to in the ‘Watching Monsters’ section of this chapter.

The point of divergence then between myself and theorists of cinematic-becoming like Pisters and Braidotti is the same point where horror is figured not as simply a filmic genre but a perverse hybrid that causes a non-productive affect in the viewer. Braidotti and Pisters both focus on the becoming of characters. [90] In terms of my project, however, I do not wish to theorize the potentialities, perversions and becomings of phantasmatic characters on-screen but of our own phantasmatic subjectivities while we watch those oh-so-already post-moderned characters and the worlds in which they circulate. Further, I want to annihilate these characters in favor of the affect-ion of the film itself, the evocations it presents, the sets, the colors, the possibilities of difference and the very screen upon which it performs.

Horror films, and, eventually out of the specificity of this argument, all films, are vehicles that can encourage a becoming in the viewer, a changing of desire (away from lack and towards whatever) which then become a changing of the desiring subject. Becoming is always about transformation, it is also indivisibly always about desire to transform. This is the reason becoming cannot be shed or disregarded like a mantle, after the change the subject is made different at the moment the desire to become is put in place. In terms of watching horror films, there is an immediate impulse to point out that it is indeed an activity, something Grosz specifically states is exactly what becoming is not. Becoming is transformation of the entire subject both in time and space; by this I mean as the materiality of the subject becomes, so too does the future. Becoming can neither stop nor begin. To put it simply, one cannot ‘become’ in becoming. There is no finish as there is at the end of a film when the affects cease, the machine turns off and the image disappears. This is why film is a vehicle toward a mode of becoming, rather than a means by which to become. By theorizing the body in a state of disruption, through pleasure or horror or whatever else, the subject must think of what it could be not what it is. The corporeal subversion of film is not that which makes the altering body feel as if it is something, but makes the body wonder what will become of it, or rather, what is becoming of it.

Defining becoming creates problems for theorizing watching as a means toward becoming. Are there any resolutions that would not require the creation of a conditional or momentary interpretation of becoming? Part of me is tempted to emphasize the machination of the world which means that we watch representations on-screen daily as part of life, hence the act of sitting down watching is no different to functioning in the majority of the western world. But this does not begin to take into account the desire to sit down and be scared, to alter the subject in a two-hour slot. Viewers want to do it, whether they want to do it five times a day or once a year. The next option, also unsatisfactory, would be to say that experiences of fear, like those of sexuality, impinge upon every part of daily existence, that desire is about fear as much as about want and hence present in every activity. However this aligns too closely with the catharsis theory of horror film, that watching horror is simply a means to overcome and dominate in film that which may threaten in the ‘real’, including one’s own real imagination as a materially impacting virtuality.

My tentative suggestion, and it is only a primary one which hopefully will be expanded and bettered in the future, is that horror allows an experiencing of one’s own flesh, indivisible from its fear, anxiety and all the other multiple affects of horror films. This may lead into new ways of daily experiencing of the body - a new way to live in one’s own flesh, a mode of becoming non-Cartesian, a mode of becoming-corporeal at the same time as becoming phantasmatic, filmic and non-real.  The body is itself more potential than articulate-able. There are more things a body can do than we can ever suggest, and certainly more than we are able to linguistically describe. Above I quoted Braidotti’s claim that becoming is the “humble apprenticeship to not being any-thing/where more/other than what one is capable of sustaining and tolerating”. Beyond this is what culture sees the body as able (and sanctioned) to do. Grosz states “There is an instability at the very heart of sex and bodies, the fact that the body is what it is capable of doing, and what any body is capable of doing is well beyond the tolerance of any given culture.” [91] Though Grosz is speaking politically of the creation of the subject of pervert, she also links this back to the potential limits of the body versus the limits which delineate what it is capable of doing within a cultural, linguistic and Cartesian experience of the body. I think Grosz is including the ‘doing’ of desiring in this theory. The body is capable of doing much more than it is theorized as capable of, in medicine, in cultural and sexual theory, in all discursive fields. Deleuze and Guattari are not asking the body to perform super-human feats of transformation but only to attempt an encroachment on the limits of the body to push the body further out into its potentials. We do not need to become fantastic monsters to become. Only to traverse, rearrange, exceed and decrease the rigid limits culture allows us to exist within and as our bodies. That is all, but at the same time that is mind-blowing enough. Becoming is harnessing the instability of the body, so whatever causes instability could be a useful moment of entry into becoming. Desire causes instability, so too does horror affect. So does the fact of sitting in front of any film watching a world of un-reality for two hours, where all essential-to-subject-formation concepts of reality, of good and evil, and of a million other legislation, are suspended. Perhaps then this is a means by which horror films can be a mode for becoming? These suggestions have many problems, not the least of which is the fear that by privileging the experiencing of one’s own body in new and different ways a body-dominated dynamic is created, and the self is made irreducibly body, another form of limit and not entirely estranged from biological essentialism. This is neither clearly bad nor good as yet, but it highlights boundaries and limits which themselves are against the point of becoming as limit-less and boundary free. I cannot emphasize enough that the best part about theorizing a potential becoming through film is that it could be used as a point of entry into experiencing the world differently and upon a line of flight, of transforming the way in which the self is experienced. That is the most I hope for at this time. So with this brave suggestion I return to Suspiria.

The desire for the body to feel something else, to transform, find pleasure and pained gratification in the language-exceeding terrain of fear, is in one way presented in Suspiria by finding a corporeal identification through the connexion of the building/body. By watching the film and yearning for the image in muscle, in nerve, in widened, gelatinous eye, the audience will ‘become’ what the film evokes: fear, terror, horror. Becoming does not involve imitation, which is why becoming in cinema seems so suitable, one cannot become celluloid [92] . Instead the particles, the body’s molecules, react differently and independently. The look no longer yearns for the picture, but the flesh yearns for the likeness of the fear the film evokes. It yearns for muscle to wind up, teeth to grit, rectum to tense, diaphragm to tighten, it yearns to become the fear Deleuze and Guattari maintain is only possible when the other to which the subject becomes is a molecular biological reality, i.e. an animal, type of human etc. The molecular version of a ‘thing’ however, emphasizes its potentials, its specificities and its micro-levels of being as opposed to a molar object which is irrefutably fixed in time and space, and which is more signification than matter. Deleuze and Guattari state: “Yes, all becomings are molecular: the animal, the flower, or stone one becomes are molecular collectives, not molar subjects, objects, or form that we know from the outside and recognize from experience, through science, or by habit.” [93]   Film seems to fall into the category of what the subject cannot become - it is open-ended, and becoming filmic is entirely alien to becoming (a) film. It is a collective but not a collective object or ‘thing’ rather than a collective of disparate things, both in what it is and what it represents. But becoming filmic may be possible because film as a molar object is not easy to know, so the transformation from the molar to the molecular may already exist. The idea of a less tangible, abstract becoming, becoming an affect, in this situation becoming horror through real changes in molecular assemblage, appeals to me. Whether it works or not in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming is a point of varying relevance. Grosz states “Deleuze and Guattari suggest that becoming involves a mediating third term, a relation to something else, neither animal nor human, through which the subject enters into a connection with the animal.” [94] If the animal is read as the film, then the implemented third term for becoming is the connection which the film and the audience becomes more ‘like’, namely the horror or fear. But use of this mediating third term must be discrete, otherwise the action of becoming, an action which never ceases and is never finished with a new product, may be structured as somewhat narrative: first term + mediating third term = undefinable result. Rather the third term is a means toward something else or new, and the ‘toward’ never actually reaches something, but continues indefinitely. This may explain why becoming is so unnerving, not only is the previous subject lost, but a new one never arrives.

Suspiria continues in ‘secret’, even though the real secret, that the institute is a coven of witches, has been disclosed. A former student is found slain, the same student who Suzy sees at the film’s opening screaming “secrets!” The institute’s blind piano player Daniel (Flavio Bucci) is killed by his own seeing-eye dog. Suzy’s friend Sara (Stefania Casini), who is getting close to the secret, is killed in a room of barbed wire, the presence of which is entirely irrational and unexplained. The rooms in the building exist as certain organs exist within the body, for purposes we know nothing about but which are there nonetheless, explained or not - rooms of barbed wire, the roof of maggots, bats in the windowless bedrooms. Before Sara dies however, the girls glean their information about the murders by listening to the hallways, listening to footsteps, trying to map out in their heads the anatomy of the building, they want to explore but are afraid, as the subject is of its own body. The corridors are the keepers of the secret, they swallow it, ingest it like a virus and the building must be eviscerated in order to find the answer, to repel the fear of the film. It is an evisceration that is necessary but disdainful, like anatomy, like surgery, a tearing away at the tender parts to find knowledge, but being disgusted by the act. Exploring the building for Suzy is painful. It curls the toes of the audience with the anticipation of what will be found.  Suspiria’s architecture provokes audience identification not with character as much as body with internal flesh. The film plays out almost entirely within these plasma walls, things are amiss, disturbing feelings of suspicion and fear occur within the building/body. The ‘answer’ to the mysteries, the cure for the body, is within the hidden chambers of the building. We are dislodged more and more by the events which give no answers to the ‘secret’, no cure for the illness, but which only disturb more uncomfortably and violently as the film progresses. It is as much an itching within the body, a feeling of the discomfort internally brought about by the action within the fleshy building, as a guarded visual discomfort that occurs. [95]

Even the audience’s armored gaze is not protected. Suspiria was the last film made with special tri-color celluloid, a film that relies heavily on basic hues of red-yellow-blue. [96] These are also primary colors of the internal body, blood, pancreas and vascular system. Red is the predominant filter, it is garish and almost a strain on the eye to watch. Red is a color one can indeed become. [97] It is a condition of firstness. In his breaking down of the meaning of firstness, secondness and thirdness Rodowick states

Peirce refers to firstness as ‘feeling’… Consciousness requires time to experience effect, action, or relation as well as to interpret… As a quality of the image it refers to the experience of ‘red’ rather than taking color as the effect of something else (secondness: I find I am bleeding from a paper cut) or as a conventional symbol (thirdness: red as the color of violence, patriotism or danger). [98]

Of course the red of Suspiria is a symbol for danger and violence but it also simultaneously encourages its audience to feel red. If red were simply a symbol then the exact reasons for why Suspiria is such a discomforting film would be easily articulated and its power to disrupt closed off by interpreting its effect. This is why I prefer the word affect when discussing the feelings of such films. If the effect of red is… then the affect of red is exactly the opposite. It is entire corporeal feeling, the body feels red without being able to close off or interpret how or why. The watching subject is discomforted, disrupted and all that can be (irrationally) said is I feel red.

The film reflects images which are not quite true, their lines blur, their borders fuzz, skin reflects blue and the walls could almost drip in their gory deep red. So the unadulterated penetrative stare one may use in order to ‘master’ a film that disturbs, is foiled. The eye squints and reels back each time it tries to penetrate the image. The body is lured into the image because the eye cannot rely on the ‘truth’ of the screen. Lacan states “One can already see, simply at the perceptual level, how the screen re-establishes things, in their status as real.” [99] Nothing in this film is trustworthy as real in an ontological sense. However the affect of the film is real in the sense of being material. We feel it, we see in a tactile sense (its redness, the connection it makes from eye to pulse, to gall to nerve) and we become-otherwise in a symbiosis with it against the actual (outside the viewing moment). To establish this film as ‘real’ the audience must change in some way, become unreal, become less dependent on one version of reality and open to a visceral, or aural, or combinative reality.  Because the film does not look real but more importantly because it does not act like a ‘real’ film (in color, in character, in plot) Suspiria attacks the nervous system, gall, the bile in the stomach, the borders of the subject watching, before it attacks the eye and brain as ‘not quite right’. Many of the clues in the film are aural; truth is not necessarily visual - Suzy is almost overcome with fear by Helena Markos’s use of the image of Sara returned from the dead. But far from making the thoroughly tired suggestion, already so beautifully established by Italian filmmakers, seen in Antonioni’s BlowUp (1966) and Argento’s own Blow-Up inspired Profondo Rosso, that what we see isn’t always ‘true’, Suspiria proliferates the idea of the material image as being real in many senses (in the physiological not intelligible sense of the word) and film as being one of the few worlds where pure possibility abounds, meaning anything can be real – from zombies and vampires to the most mundane domestic events. Suspiria’s reality changes the very function of looking Here the visual is used to confuse rather than enlighten. The only effect which looking has is violence. The soundtrack builds intensities of terror and death before the image of death occurs, it also holds clues to the action. We watch the movie, as an architectural structure, with the ears - this is what Suspiria asks.

Suspiria sets itself up as a film that creates binaries in order to blur them; secret/answer, building/body, real/fake, gaze/visceral response. The active viewer, the plot-solver, finds her/himself feeling nauseous, tensing nerves because of the fear we experience without knowing of what it is we are afraid. We are still wondering what the secret is. While their eye grapples with the image, their body is becoming the fear. We blink away at images rather than penetrate them. The building with which our bodies identify is an uncanny site.  Laura Mulvey sees the following as a standard film experience, “As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events (!) coincides with the active power of the erotic look”. [100] Aside from the fact that there is no male protagonist in Suspiria, to identify with a building through the body, to watch with the ears and to invest the erotic look upon that which horrifies and shatters the power of the onlooker, creates not a feeling of mastery but that which is, in certain ways, unheimlich. In The Uncanny Freud states “the uncanny is the class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” [101] The environment of Suspiria is a building/body, it represents the internal flesh of the body with which we are familiar yet repress in order to save our ‘wholeness’, our symbolically enclosed, sealed selves. To watch ogres and witches trail like infections along the hallways, corpses and maggots in the attic, secrets swallowed by the basement, is to watch some sickness or disease infect our corporeal being. The building is our own internal self. It is not the womb we are from; it may be the gory death we plummet toward in films that horrify the eye and the belly. Like the color red, it is familiar but uncomfortably so. “The uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in” [102] . The building is not a return to infantility or fetality but an un/familiarity with our own othered flesh. Becoming-Suspiria is a becoming our own viscera, which has been violently and irrefutably ripped from our signified bodies. Suspiria is uncanny like our own bodies are uncanny. Suzy wanders about the ballet institute looking like Snow White [103] lost in a forest. She should be at the institute, she should be comfortable there, but she feels uncomfortably, uncannily alien. She is lost when she is inside just as we are lost when we have to look at or listen to our insides. The internality of the viewer is reacting in a way we cannot articulate. The organs shift and various liquids are ingested and expelled as a result of the film yet even though it is my body and has been forever, still I have no idea what is going on inside it. Suzy is at her school yet its gleaming corridors and the secrets it ingests and expels are completely foreign and frightening to her. If the school reflects our own foreign/familiar body, then the lost character wandering through it is an insipid itch, a disease that reminds us how lost we are inside our insides and why we turn away at gore. Because our own eyes are organs with potential for gore, [104] they sometimes refuse us the grace to look away. The sealed self is forced to interact, however superficially, with the internal self during the film. It is forced to become the feelings it denies or else walk away from the image, both of which involve a change in the physical self, and a co-operation with the intemperance of perversity.

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