From Transhumanist Fantasies to Posthumanist Futures

Name Student: Zoë de Ligt Student Number: 10000350 Completion Date: 26-06-2015 Course: Master Thesis Supervisors: Tarja Laine, Marie-Aude Baronian, Maarten Reesink Programme: rMA Media Studies University: University of Amsterdam Word Count: 20.587

FROM TRANSHUMANIST FANTASIES TO POSTHUMANIST FUTURES Lucy, Under the Skin and Her as Filmminds of the Anthropocene

 

Index Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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Chapter 1 - Fulfilling Transhumanist Fantasies Luc Besson's Lucy

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Chapter 2 - From a Predatory Gaze to an Empathetic Glare Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin

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Chapter 3 - Being With Her and the World Spike Jonze's Her

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Appendix

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Acknowledgements I would like to use this page to thank everybody who has supported me during the period of my thesis. Nevertheless, my gratefulness can hardly be expressed in words. First and foremost I would like to thank Tarja Laine, who has been a great supervisor for the second time during my studies. She always finds a way to motivate me and pushes me beyond my boundaries. Her feedback and ideas have been vitally important in working towards this final version. I would also like to thank my second and third reader, Marie-Aude Baronian and Maarten Reesink, who have taken the time and effort to read and comment on my work. A special thanks goes out to Maarten who was always willing to talk to me about my project and has given me much useful feedback. In addition, I would like to thank him for his sincere enthusiasm, which continues to inspire me. Moreover, Maryn Wilkinson has provided my with all the motivational speeches I needed throughout my project – thank you. I am extremely grateful to all colleagues and friends who have read, commented on or took the time to talk to me about parts of my thesis; all your feedback has been extremely helpful. Most personally, I would like to thank Sander Mooij, whose humour and imagination is a continuous source of creativity. Thank you for always being there for me. I could not have accomplished this without you. In the spirit of my thesis, I would like to thank some non-human actors that played a crucial role in writing this thesis. Initially, Lucy, Under the Skin and Her, the vibrant matters that sprung my imagination and creativity in the first place. Lastly, I would like to thank Moos and Gijs, my dearest companions, for always being on, above, under or near my desk, wherever in the house that might have been.

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Introduction The filmosopher engages in a thinking of and for the future (where film ‘tells’ us new things). In filmosophy, film is the beginning and the future of our thought. We thought we needed to calculate our beliefs about the world, but the of philosophy, with its metaphorical pictures of that belief, might lead us to realize that we can understand the world in like manner — that we can ‘film’ our beliefs. Daniel Frampton – Filmosophy (212-213)

The ecological crisis that we face is so obvious that is becomes easy – for some, strangely or frighteningly easy – to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more the world opens up. Timothy Morton – The Ecological Thought (1)

The Anthropocene has become the general label for signifying our current era; the era in which the impact of humankind on the earth’s ecosystems has become clearly measurable. The prospect of an approaching ecological catastrophe induces philosophical reflection on the position of the human subject and its place in the world. Philosophers from different stances have pondered this question. Some regard the Anthropocene as an invitation to recognize that the fate of humanity is deeply intertwined with the fate of all sorts of other entities (Shaviro Universe of Things 1). In their opinion, it is important for the future of the earth that we no longer consider ourselves to be unique. Rather, the human must be conceptualized as equal to all other beings. This type of thinking is a characteristic of posthumanism, which draws the centrality of the human subject into question. In contrary, other thinkers keep the human subject at the centre and affirm its privileged position. This is reminiscent of transhumanism, a philosophical stance that celebrates the human subject and its rationality. However, not only philosophers are occupied with these questions, as the medium of film also engages in this kind of thinking. Three contemporary science fiction films, all released in 2013, can be characterized as filmminds of the Anthropocene, which

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reflect on and rethink the human-world relationship. The films: Luc Besson’s Lucy, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, and Spike Jonze’s Her, embody philosophical reflections by means of their aesthetics systems. They speculate about the future and in doing so, they reproduce or critically examine beliefs concerning the world. Moreover, the films invite the spectator to think along and to react to the thoughts they embody. With his concept of filmmind, Daniel Frampton asserts that films contemplate the characters and subjects they present. Furthermore, Frampton does not understand film-thinking in an anthropomorphic sense. A filmmind does not think like a human, but in its own way through its complex system of aesthetics. He states, “Film bleeds ideas. The rupturing of complex film-thinking creates spaces for ideas to appear” (165). In this manner, Frampton characterizes film as a non-human, performative entity; an organic intelligence that embodies philosophical reflection. Similarly, Tarja Laine uses Jane Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter to grasp this. Cinema is not passive, it is an active non-human agent that produces effects and affects; cinema is vibrant matter. For Laine, film is not only a filmmind but also a filmheart, a concept that she coins in her book Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Filmstudies. As a filmheart, film cares about its subjects in a particular way and transfers these embodied emotions to the spectator.1 What I find particularly interesting about these conceptualizations is the premise that the spectator is taken beyond the human. By means of the filmic event, in which a dialogue between the human and the non-human film is established, the spectator engages with a non-human type of thinking. If, as Frampton states, film is the future of thought, it might be interesting to explore to what extent film could help to make human thought less human centred. As previously discussed, Lucy, Under the Skin, and Her embody thoughts concerning the nature of the human being. All three films do so by telling the story of a female creature in process of becoming that either leaves her human form behind or entails an Other becoming human. Lucy portrays the story of a women becoming a supercomputer, as she learns to use the full capacity of her brain. In Under the Skin, an alien disguised as a woman begins a journey of self-exploration as she starts to wonder to what extent her human veil defines what or who she really is. Lastly, Her features an                                                                                                                 1

Throughout my thesis, for the sake of clarity and structure, I will use the concept of filmmind.

But, I want to acknowledge and emphasize that I believe a filmmind also thinks with feeling. For me, a filmmind is a filmheart that feels for and feels with its characters and subjects.

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A.I, which is an intelligent computer without a body who tries to make her way in a human world. In all three films, Scarlet Johansson plays the roles of these characters. According to Ara Osterweil, Johansson is the current favourite choice of contemporary filmmakers to play these inhuman characters, precisely because she is so human (46). With her classic female physique, her renaissance face, and lively voice, she dares the spectator to put a label on her, only to call these labels into question. All three films belong to the genre of science fiction and reflect on the porous boundaries between the human and the Other. In this process, they reveal essential insights about the world we live in (Osterweil 46). Nevertheless, Lucy, Under the Skin, and Her are also markedly different. Ranging from Indie-cinema to Hollywood blockbuster, they have diverse cinematic styles. By means of their aesthetic systems, they reflect upon their protagonists’ transformations in different manners. My aim is to analyse how they do so and what this thought embodies. In this way, I intend to discover to what extent these films could be characterized as filmminds that think ecologically. As such, an ecological filmmind would consider and recognize human beings’ equal position to and reciprocal relations with non-human entities; the fundamental entanglement with others and the world. An ecological filmmind is concerned with the earth’s future and dares the viewer to think differently. This idea is reminiscent of Timothy Morton’s book: The Ecological Thought. In the introduction he argues: Ecology shows that all beings are connected. The ecological thought is thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is thinking about ecology but it is also a thinking that is ecological. The ecological thought does not just ‘occur in the mind’. It is a practice and process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings. (7) My aim is to show how films can think ecologically too. As non-human minds they think differently and could potentially help the spectator towards ecological contemplation. Therefore, I address the following research questions: Lucy, Under the Skin and Her are embedded into the Anthropocene era. What are their thoughts about the position of the human subject and how do they embody these thoughts? In addition, can they be characterized as ecological filmminds?

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To analyse the films and to answer these questions, I use one main theoretical background, namely posthumanism. Posthumanism is an important philosophical stance that reflects on the position of the subject and the biological and cultural tasks connected to that position. Due to its frequent use in academic as well as in popular context, posthumanism (and related concepts such as the posthuman) has become a slippery concept. Over the years, different meanings have emerged. In an academic context, the posthuman is often associated with Katherine Hayles and her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Hayles’ critical work centres on the question of changing human subjectivity in an era where technologies emerge and develop rapidly. In her book, Hayles critically examines the changing thought as a consequence of these developments. Privileging information over materialism has transformed the human into the posthuman, a disembodied creature for which the body is a mere prosthesis (3). This idea of the posthuman should not be regarded as a move away from humanism. With the term humanism, I refer to the broad philosophical and ethical stance that ascribes humankind a privileged place in the universe. It emphasizes the value and agency of human beings essentially based on their capacity for reason. Hence, reducing the body to a mere shell or container for the mind should not be viewed as a move away from yet rather as an identification of the ideas of humanism. I will refer to this conceptualization of posthumanism as transhumanism. In his book, What is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe opposes himself to transhumanism. He states the following: Posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being “after” our embodiment has been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself, that Hayles rightly criticizes. (xv) Wolfe’s posthumanism desires to criticize the anthropocentric worldview of humanism. He wants to move beyond humanism’s binary thinking in which the mind is separated from matter, body from ratio, human from animal; a mode of thought still so present and persuasive in contemporary society. For Wolfe, moving towards posthumanism would mean that the thematic of decentring the human to evolutionary, ecological, and technological coordinates is not merely discussed (xvi). More importantly, this move

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towards posthumanism also entails trying to grasp how thinking confronts these thematics and what thought should become when facing these challenges (xvi). According to Wolfe, this forces people to “rethink our taken-for-granted modes of human experience, including the normal perceptual modes and affective states of Homo sapiens itself” (xxv). My contribution to this line of thought is a filmic one. Namely, I would like to examine how a film, as an organic thinking subject, can reflect these questions, and how a film by means of its particular, non-human thinking might be able to alter human thought, as Wolfe requires. As such, Wolfe functions as a key-thinker throughout my thesis. Moreover, I refer to other posthumanist thinkers such as Karan Barad and Donna Haraway. In addition, I refer to other related philosophies that critique a human-centred worldview such as eco-criticism and object-oriented ontology.2 My methodology for examining these films could be characterized as filmphenomenological.3 A film-phenomenological method studies the relation between the embodied spectator and his or her relation with the cinematic body during the film. Film-phenomenologist Julian Hanich states, “Phenomenology can enlarge our capacities for conscious awareness, refine our cultural sensorium and change our perspective on the world” (7). Therefore, my thesis explores the aesthetics of these films. For example, how these films embody thoughts on the human-world relationship, and how they invite the spectator to react both philosophically and emotionally. In other words, to analyse the manner in which they guide the spectator to think and feel in a certain way that reproduces, comments, or critiques a humanist, anthropocentric worldview. In this thesis, the phenomenological works of Jennifer Barker, Laura Marks, and Laine play                                                                                                                 2

I will use different works that belong to the field of object-oriented ontology, such as the work

of Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost and Timothy Morton. Some of Timothy Morton’s work could also be identified as eco-theory. 3

To others, my phenomenological method might seem to clash with an interest in ecological

thinking, since phenomenology puts the experience of the human subject at the center, which is what posthumanism and certainly object-oriented-ontology wants to critique. In this way, Tom Sparrow states that phenomenology has always been haunted by an anthropocentric specter. However, I do believe that a phenomenological method is still valuable. I consider our being-inthe-world not to be stable, but can shift due to people’s fundamental embodied entanglement with an ever-changing world. Phenomenology as a practice could aid to change that being-inthe-world, by making people aware of the un-aware.  

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imperative roles, since they have engaged extensively with embodiment in the cinematic experience. While not fundamentally phenomenological, William Brown’s book Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age provides a crucial basis regarding contemporary digital cinema. 4 Every chapter engages with one of the case studies separately. Throughout the chapters, I analyse their differences and similarities, tying them closely together. The first chapter discusses Besson’s Lucy. In the film, Lucy becomes a victim of an illegal drug operation, which ships the synthetic drug CPH4. This drug enables the human being to use more than ten per cent of its cerebral capacity, exploring previously unreachable areas of the brain. Accidentally, Lucy is exposed to a large amount of the CPH4, transforming her into the first human to use more than ten per cent of her brain and unlocking new abilities. In this chapter, I characterize Lucy as a transhumanist fantasy that celebrates the human because of its rationality and, therefore, positions it on an evolutionary pedestal. Lucy intensifies Cartesian thought and envisions the human as fundamentally privileged, separate from the world, and able to eventually transcend all material and biological boundaries. Therefore, Lucy rejects the invitation to think ecologically, but rather proceeds and reproduces anthropocentric thought. Glazer’s Under the Skin is less straightforward and far more complex in its filmthinking. In Under the Skin, an alien traversing the earth and hunting for human skins learns what it means to be embodied. In this chapter, I intend to demonstrate how the film embodies the non-human phenomenology of the alien, which shifts from a predatory gaze to an empathetic glare. During this filmic event, the spectator aligns with the strange phenomenology of the alien and is invited to reflect on it. While the film begins with a hyper-Cartesian distance, it moves towards an embodied closeness. In doing so, the film both preserves and challenges humanist dichotomies. Thus, Under the Skin can be characterized as a filmic event that makes the spectator philosophize about its ambiguous filmmind.                                                                                                                 4

Brown identifies himself as a Deleuzian. Throughout his book he analyses Deleuze’s work and

applies it in the posthumanist readings of his case studies. Deleuzian and phenomenological ‘theory’ are often said to collide. However, I do believe that in this case my phenomenological method does not collide with Brown’s theory. Moreover, in his chapter on the experience of digital film Brown also elaborates on phenomenology, letting Deleuzian and phenomenological theory exist alongside each other.

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Lastly, I examine Jonze’s Her, a film that could be categorized as an ecological filmmind. Her tells the story of Theodore Twombly, a middle-aged writer whose divorce has left him cut-off from the world, unable to make meaningful connections. In the film, Theodore comes to interact with Samantha, who is an OS, a conscious operating system without a body. Due to this interaction, Theodore learns how to be with the world. Here, the film’s aesthetics shift to the haptic aesthetics of whimsical, which invite the spectator to touch and realize their embodied and open engagement with the world. Because of this, the spectator, similar to Theodore, obtains an insight into how to engage with the world anew by means of intimate gestures of care and responsibility. Eventually, I aim to enhance the understanding of these films by highlighting their philosophical relevance. By examining them closely and critically, I hope to demonstrate that these contemporary filmminds are embedded in the Anthropocene for they reflect upon the human’s place in the world in their own specific ways. By employing the method of close reading, I aim to augment the understanding of cinema as a filmmind. Moreover, I propose that filmminds could be ecological. By aligning the spectator with their non-human way of thinking, ecological filmminds could potentially de-centre the human from thought and can help to observe that human beings are not the monarchs of being, but instead beings among beings, entangled in beings and implicated in other beings (Bryant 44). I intend to illustrate how film as a non-human, vibrant matter could inspire the viewer to think about the future and invite to alter the nature of humanist thought, a feature so eagerly required in the Anthropocene.

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CHAPTER 1

Fulfilling Transhumanist Fantasies Celebrating Human Rationality and Overcoming Biology in Luc Besson’s Lucy Lucy tells the story of its homonym protagonist, a young student who lives in Taipei. In a confrontation with her new boyfriend Richard, Lucy (Scarlet Johansson) winds up in an ugly situation where she is forced to deliver a mysterious suitcase to Mr. Yang, a man unknown to her. Soon, the spectator learns that the suitcase holds a large amount of the experimental drug CPH4, and Lucy’s faith intertwines with that of an illegal drug operation. After Lucy has been taken into captivity, the film cuts to the parallel storyline of Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman). This storyline consists of a lecture given by Professor Norman about the evolution of cells. This lecture presents the viewer with the film’s conception of the human brain. Namely, through this cellular evolution the Homo sapiens have become able to use ten per cent of their cerebral capacity, and through science, this capacity might be expanded. In its first half, the film alternates between the storylines of Lucy and Professor Norman. The spectator learns that Lucy, with four other prisoners, is forced to ship a large amount of drugs to another country, the drugs being surgically implanted into her lower stomach. The CPH4 causes cells to reproduce at a phenomenal speed, which enables the human to use more than ten per cent of its cerebral capacity. When Lucy is kicked in her stomach by one of the drug cartel members, a large amount of CPH4 leaks into Lucy’s body. As a result, Lucy’s brain changes rapidly. From this point, the film involves different sequences marked by a per cent signifying Lucy’s cerebral transformation (for example, twenty per cent and thirty per cent). The more her brain expands, the more Lucy develops. As such, Lucy becomes able to control other people’s bodies, alter magnetic and electronic waves, and eventually travel through time. In order to keep her cells reproducing, and thus to survive, Lucy needs a larger amount of the drugs. She looks up information about the subject and finds Professor Norman. From this moment onwards, their lives and their storylines are entangled.

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Furthermore, Lucy tracks down the other drug-mules with the assistance of a French police officer: officer Del Rio (Amr Waked). While the Chinese drug cartel hunts Lucy to prevent her from obtaining the drugs, Professor Norman helps her to pass on her knowledge. With Professor Norman’s aid, Lucy absorbs all the drugs and further colonizes the remaining capacity of her own brain. Because of this, she transforms into supercomputer, a god-like creature of pure ratio with infinite knowledge and power. The film ends when Lucy has passed on her knowledge to Professor Norman and Mr. Yang is killed. Unlike Her and Under the Skin, Lucy was not well received after its release. Many reviews criticize Lucy’s transformation as being too fantastical, in particular because it is based on a disproven scientific hypothesis. Different reviews, such as “Save Your Brain: Skip Besson’s Fantastical Lucy” and “Lucy: Dumbest Movie Ever Made About Brain Capacity”, indicate that the ten per cent myth is incorrect since it has already been proven that humans use the full capacity of their brain. According these writers, the film should be dismissed for its incredibility. Moreover, Lucy’s bad reception might also be the reason that the film has lacked academic analysis. In comparison with both Her and Under the Skin, which came out in the same year, not much has been written on the film. Despite the film’s use of false science, I consider it a key object of study, since the film reproduces dangerous anthropocentric ideas and morphs them into a seductive transhumanist fantasy that is in need of critical reflection. Furthermore, Lucy can be regarded as a filmic event that submerges the spectator into a transhumanist fantasy. In terms of film-thinking, Lucy understands the human-world relationship in Cartesian terms, which entails that the human is deemed different and separate from the world and other entities in it. Additionally, the film celebrates human rationality through which the human is able to enhance itself by means of science and technology. For this reason, the film puts the human on an evolutionary pedestal. This chapter analyses in-depth how the film constructs this transhumanist fantasy, and how it pulls the spectator along with it. First, I explore the concept of transhumanism as an intensification of Cartesian thinking. Subsequently, the analysis is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the timeline of Professor Norman, which consists of a lecture on the evolution of cells. The film uses this lecture to convey the anthropocentric ideas that form the basis of Lucy’s story. In the second part, I analyse how the film applies these ideas in Lucy’s fantastical transformation of

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infinite progression and, in turn, fulfils a transhumanist fantasy in which Lucy overcomes all material, biological and evolutionary obstacles. In the introduction, I define humanism as the broad philosophical and ethical stance that ascribes humankind a privileged place in the universe. Moreover, humanism is an anthropocentric dogma that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings. Wolfe states that a human is often provided with this privileged position because of its rationality. Wolfe reminds us of the following dictum: “Where there is reason, there is a subject” (129). Rationality means that the subject makes sense of the world in terms of facts, logic, and beliefs. This idea of rationality has its roots in the work of Rene Descartes. In Descartes’ opinion, the human subject exists because of its critical thinking – cognito ergo sum. Descartes cannot prove that objects exist in the world, however he can perceive or think himself thinking. Therefore, he must exist (Ayers 40). Descartes’ theory of subjectivity is a theory of scepticism, as he cannot prove that objects exist in the world and the world might not be real. In addition, it is a correlationist theory since he is certain of his own thinking, the world might only exist because of his thinking. Hence, reality can only be known indirectly through the subject. The mind does not have a position in the world, yet is separate from it and able to know the world. In Elizabeth Grosz’ words, “Descartes places the mind in a position of hierarchical superiority over and above nature. From that time until the present, subject or consciousness is separated from and can reflect on the world of the body, objects, quantities” (6). Transhumanism does not oppose the Cartesian conceptualization of rationality, yet rather intensifies it. In her book, Hayles sketches the technological developments that form the cultural and philosophical basis for transhumanism. Hayles’ work focuses on the question of changing human subjectivity in an era where technologies emerge and develop rapidly. In the twentieth century, many scientists flirted with the idea of a thinking machine. In their view, the human brain was just an information-processing machine that could be replicated. Furthermore, consciousness became conceptualized as mere information that could be transported into a computer. In this way, transhumanist thinkers believe that the essence of the human lies in its mind. Moreover, since the mind is an information-processing machine, this machine can also be improved. Transhumanism believes that the human can be perfected through new developments in science and technology. Eventually, emerging technologies can

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facilitate the human to overcome all its limitations. The material and mortal body is viewed as one crucial limitation that can be overcome. Hayles is critical of these perspectives. Hayles states that transhumanist thinkers privilege information over materialism and consider the material body, which utterly binds them to the world and to other beings, as irrelevant. This has stripped the human being of its flesh and transformed the human into a posthuman whose mind is fundamentally separated from its body. In the transhumanist view, the body is an unnecessary shell, an empty house, and a mere container for the mind. Thus, transhumanism envisions the human as more privileged than other beings because of its specific rationality and perceives materiality, as an obstruction that can eventually be overcome. Thus, transhumanism celebrates human rationality and supposes that the human condition can be utterly perfected until all worldly obstacles are surmounted. Lucy, as a filmmind, thinks and eventually fulfils these transhumanist dreams. The film’s ideas of the subject are firstly constructed in Professor Norman’s lecture. During this lecture, Professor Norman stands on the stage of a lecture theatre and speaks to a large group of students and fellow scientists. Simultaneously, Professor Norman addresses the spectator. As such, the film provides the spectator with ideas that subsequently feed into the understanding of Lucy’s story. In the film, Professor Norman’s research focuses on the ten per cent myth: the idea that the human only uses ten per cent of its cerebral capacity. Professor Norman believes that this could be expanded if a means is discovered to alter the way brain-cells reproduce. Therefore, Professor Norman’s lecture starts with a history of the biological development of brains. While presented with a black screen that gradually dissolves into an image of swimming jellyfish, Professor Norman begins to speak: If life starts approximately a billion years ago, we would have to wait for hundred thousand years to see the aberration of the first nerve cells. This is where life as we know it begins: brains in formation of only a few milligrams. It is not possible to determine any sign of intelligence yet, it acts more like a reflex. One neuron, you’re alive. Two neurons you’re moving. And with movement, interesting things begin to happen.

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Subsequently, the film alternates between shots of Professor Norman giving the lecture and shots of animals moving. By rendering the human equally large to other species on screen, the film could be said to emphasize the likeness and equality of these different species. Adrian Martin argues that an object-oriented approach to cinema would recognize that the human is just one of the many different entities on screen. Here, the film starts with an interesting, potentially posthumanist premise, namely that all living beings have a common feature - their cells. Bears, jellyfish, and humans are composed of cells, which work and behave in a similar manner. Therefore, Hannah Landecker states that acknowledging that humans are first and foremost biological entities, similar to all other biological entities, could result in more responsible behaviour towards other living beings (235). Similarly, Jan Jagodzinski argues that the experience of bio-art creates an embodied sense of spectatorship in which the viewers become aware of their position as biological entities and the socio-political capital that is attached to such viewing (16). In short, the aesthetic depiction of different beings in the beginning of Professor Norman’s lecture could potentially embody an ecological, posthumanist thought. However, the film soon deviates from this idea of equality and rather presents the human as different from and more privileged than other biological beings. Soon after Professor Norman introduces his topic, he emphasizes the difference between animals and humans. Unlike most animals, who use three to five per cent of their cerebral capacity, the Homo sapiens are the first to use ten per cent of their brain. According to Professor Norman, “Ten per cent might not seem like much, but that this a lot when you look at all we have done with it”. In this moment, the spectator is offered a rapid sequence of images that present and celebrate the development of man. This sequence is dominated by technological and intellectual achievements such as the first airplane, the pyramids, Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, and the atomic bomb. Professor Norman ends the first part of his lecture by comparing the human to the only animal that uses more per cent of its brain, which is the dolphin for it uses twenty per cent of its brain. With this twenty per cent, the dolphin has developed a more advanced sonar through cellular evolution than every sonar ever invented by men. In Professor Norman’s words, “And this is the crucial part of our philosophical reflection we have today: can we therefore conclude that humans are more concerned with ‘having’ than ‘being’?” This sentence forms the corner stone for the film’s transhumanist ideas, since

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it considers the human as different and more privileged because it can ‘have more’ and thus enhance itself. Thus, throughout this sequence, the film places the human on a pedestal. This is not because the human uses the most per cent of its brain, but because it possesses a unique rationality, which allows it to invent, create, and modify. The hierarchal position of the human is emphasized visually further on during the lecture. Professor Norman explains various characteristics that all cells share. In the beginning of the lecture, these statements are accompanied by a sequence of animal images. For example, when Professor Norman elucidates that all cells reproduce when their habitat is favourable, the spectator sees images of different species reproducing. Every sequence of animal images ends with images of humans. For example, the sequence of reproducing animals is closed off with a shot of two people making love in a car. Therefore, the film does not level animals with humans because of their cellular equality, as these sequences rather present a cellular evolution with the human on top of the animal chain. This is also evident in the next sequence of animal images. Professor Norman

Image 1.1 until 1.3

explains that through reproduction information and knowledge is assigned to the next cell. Simultaneously, the film

Image 1.1 – 1.3

presents different animals giving birth, as the viewer observers a piglet and subsequently a foal being born. The sequence closes of with a long-shot of a human mother in labour and a close-up of her new-born baby. Again, the film presents a linear, cellular evolution with the human as the endpoint, accentuating the human’s privileged position.

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Professor Norman proposes that in time, the human might be able to use more than ten per cent of its cerebral capacity due to the developments in science and technology. Thus, Professor Norman asserts that enhancement could be directly accomplished in the brain. By taking on the ten per cent myth, the film envisions that a brain can be expanded and colonized, which is a transhumanist assumption in itself. When one of the students wonders whether this will truly be possible, Professor Norman answers: For the moment it’s just hypothesis, I confess. But if you think about it, it’s troubling to realize that the Greeks, the Egyptians and the Indians had notion of cells centuries before the invention of the microscope. And what to say about Darwin whom everyone took for a fool when he put forth his theory of evolution. It’s up to us to push the rules and laws, and go from evolution, to revolution. With this answer, Professor Norman confirms his faith in his own hypothesis by making a comparison to history. As such, the film presents the human as qualified to surpass its origins in biology and evolution. So far, through Professor Norman’s lecture, the film brings about its anthropocentric ideas. The film envisions the human as different because of its rational ability to have, and the film conceptualizes this as a means of putting the human on top of a hierarchy. Moreover, in employing the ten per cent myth, the film reveals that it believes that the brain can be utterly perfected. Additionally, I aim to assess how the film applies these ideas in the story of its protagonist, who transforms from a human woman into a disembodied supercomputer because of a synthetic drug. Lucy’s story is presented as a fantasy of eternal progression in which she eventually transcends all biological limitations, fulfilling all transhumanist dreams. I analyse Lucy’s timeline with the help of Brown’s third chapter: “From Temporality to Time in Digital Cinema”. In this chapter, Brown makes a distinction between temporality and time. While analogue cinema portrays temporalities, digital cinema moves towards a depiction of time itself. For Brown, temporality is the experience of time. Brown wonders: “We and all matter may experience different temporalities, but what is time such that we can experience it at all?” (92). In this

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manner, time in itself is a whole, the totality of time or the simultaneous coexistence, and the interlinked nature of all moments in time. Brown claims that analogue cinema has often been occupied with representing human temporality. Consequently, he argues that Deleuze’s movement image is most characteristic of this. Brown characterizes the movement image as anthropocentric, since it strives towards achieving a temporality that feels like a daily experience of time. However, digital cinema departs from this anthropocentric idea and moves towards a depiction of time. In fact, digital cinema democratizes time and brings the spectator closer to an encounter with time in itself. According to Brown, there are different ways in which digital cinema achieves such a representation of time in itself. For example, by emphasizing that all moments in time are connected. Digital techniques make it possible to envision time as a continuum that can be traversed in any direction and in which all points in time coexist and are interlinked. Brown illustrates this with an example from Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011). Here, the film travels through time and by means of digital techniques presents images of the big bang and the developments of cells. In Brown’s words, “The relevance of the big bang sequence is to suggest precisely how we are temporally connected from present moments right back to the origins of the universe” (111). For Brown, Malick’s scene moves beyond the anthropocentric

Image 1.4 – 1.7

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temporality of the movement image and presents a posthumanist encounter with time itself. I aim to demonstrate that Lucy, despite its status as a digital film, still presents an anthropocentric, linear temporality. This is brought forward by means of the protagonist’s introduction. The film opens with a fission of a cell. Before the title appears, the credits are juxtaposed with a sequence in which a cell rapidly reproduces. After the title appears, the film presents the viewers a primitive ape-human, which is later identified as ‘Lucy’, the first woman on earth. At the same time, a female voiceover pronounces the following question: “Life was given to us a billion years ago, what have we done with it?” With this question, the film interpellates the spectator by referring to ‘us humans’. To answer this question, the camera moves from the primitive human over the hills and Taipei appears. The film provides the spectator with a fast sequence of various people working and living in Taipei. Then the film suddenly cuts to Lucy and the spectator falls into the conversation she is having with Richard. Through this opening, the film marks Lucy as a biological creature that is part of a biological chain. Her being cannot be seen separately from the fission of the first cells, the first woman, or the other people making their way through Taipei. Nonetheless, by moving from a cell to Lucy, the film presents a linear temporality with her, the first woman who will soon use hundred per cent of her brain and will be on top of the hierarchy. Therefore, the opening sequence does not illustrate an posthumanist encounter with time, yet rather reproduces an anthropocentric temporality with the (trans)human as the endpoint of the evolutionary chain. As Lucy is exposed to the drug, her brain cells start to ‘reproduce at a phenomenal speed’ and she becomes able to ‘colonize her own brain’. Through this enhanced reproduction, Lucy receives more knowledge. In this manner, she develops new abilities. The development of these new abilities is aesthetically signified to the spectator. For example, through her enhanced rationality Lucy’s brain no longer filters information. Rather, she receives all impulses. This is exemplified when Lucy takes a cab to the hospital to get the leaking package of CPH4 removed from her body. Colours become more intense and images flash by more rapidly, symbolizing Lucy’s enhanced brain. Later on in the film, Lucy calls her mother. With a close-up, the film focuses on Lucy’s face and, as a result, the spectator pays attention to the words she speaks. Lucy explains to her mother that she suddenly experiences matters she was not able to

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experience before, as she feels the blood in her veins, the space, the air, the vibrations, and the gravitation and rotation of the earth. Furthermore, Lucy starts to observe new phenomena. As Lucy leaves the hospital, the film presents the spectator with a medium shot of her looking at something. In a reverse shot, the spectator is presented with a seethrough tree, revealing the oxygen flowing through the tree. The film only offers these insights as new knowledge Lucy has, as new abilities that enhance her being. The film does not work out any posthumanist opportunities of this knowledge. For example, it does not use these observations to rethink the human’s position in the world as a biological being among these other biological beings. Different theorists emphasize that studying the experience of other life forms is of posthumanist importance. A better comprehension of animals could contribute to a better treatment of them. Wolfe describes this is process in his chapter on Temple Grandin. Through her autism, Grandin is said to think in images instead of in language. Her unique visual lifeworld aids her to understand animals, such as cows, in a new way, since they are also preliminary visual creatures. Moreover, Wolfe claims that this kind of knowledge is imperative to rethink ethical and political responsibility beyond humanist dichotomies and alongside a fundamentally posthumanist set of coordinates (127). In a similar manner, Jagodzinski argues that the deterioration of anthropocentrism requires the full recognition that the human species has to modify itself along physiological, neurological, and psychic dimensions in order to find a means to continue to coexist with non-humans on this planet (16). Thus, Jagodzinski contends that the human species has to modify itself; however, not by means of human perfectibility of enhancement,

Image 1.8

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but in order to share the planet without harming other life forms. This is fundamentally different from the manner in which the film deals with Lucy’s new abilities. Lucy envisions the use of this knowledge only for itself, to perfect itself. In addition to focusing aesthetically on these abilities, the film also presents these abilities as a means to push the narrative further. Following Deleuze, Brown states that the action-image follows SAS’-structure: a human finds in a situation (S), carries out action (A), and as a result changes that situation (S’) (Brown 100). By concentrating on human action, the narrative is driven forward. This is also true for Lucy. Lucy develops a new ability, which she can employ to modify her situation and bring herself further. This can be observed seconds after the drugs have entered her bloodstream. First, Lucy is able to control her body and by doing so, she becomes stronger. She can use her newfound strength to defeat the guard and escape the prison. Later on in the hospital, Lucy examines the different Chinese signs. Next, the signs are superimposed by their English translation. As a result, the spectator realizes that Lucy can now understand Chinese, which she was not able to do before. Due to this newfound ability, Lucy is able to locate a surgeon who can remove the leaking package from her body. Subsequently, she invades a surgery room where a number of surgeons are operating a patient. Lucy looks at the patient’s x-ray photographs. When the spectator is presented with several close-ups of the photos, the spectator comprehends that Lucy can now understand what these x-rays represent. Lucy kills the patient because she has learned from the x-rays that he will not make it and forces the surgeon to help her. Later on, Lucy’s abilities become even more fantastical: she can read Mr. Yang’s mind to discover where the other drug mules went, control electronic waves to contact Professor Norman, and finally access every bit of information about everyone in discovering the location of the drug clan (image 1.8). This linearity and progression is emphasized by the film’s insertion of black screens that signify the expansion of Lucy’s brain (ten per cent, twenty per cent, thirty per cent and so on). Thus, the film frames her newfound abilities as a means to bring Lucy further in her journey. In fact, the film signifies that the most important goal of this newfound knowledge is progression. The film structures Lucy’s story as a journey of infinite progression, a fantasy of transcending all human boundaries.

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Image 1.9

Specifically, the film emphasizes that this new knowledge and the abilities that result from it must be utilized to overcome the human’s greatest obstacle - its material and mortal body. Early on in Lucy’s development, the body is presented as an obstacle that must be overcome. First, Lucy gains full control over her own body. This is signified by the fact that Lucy suddenly becomes able to fight men easily. Moreover, she no longer feels pain. Without a trace of discomfort, she removes a bullet from her own shoulder. Lucy undergoes the surgery without anaesthesia and has the package removed from her body without experiencing any pain, signified by her numb and emotionless facial expression. Lucy puts this development into words as she contacts Professor Norman further along in the film: “I don’t feel pain, fear, desire. It’s like all things that make us human are fading away.” The more Lucy’s brain expands, the less important her body becomes. All bodily affects and emotions fade away and what remains is pure ratio. The scene in which Lucy flies from Taipei to Paris further denotes the body as an obstacle that can be overcome. During her flight, Lucy’s body suddenly breaks down as her body lacks the amount CPH4 it needs to survive. Through a sudden flashback, the spectator is reminded of Professor Norman’s lecture, in which he states that if the habitat is unfavourable, the cell chooses self-sufficiency. Suddenly, Lucy’s body begins to collapse. Initially, her teeth fall out and then her skin begins to crumble. The flashback connects Lucy’s dissolving body to the behaviour of cells. However, the film does not present her as just a cell equal to all other cells. Lucy runs to the bathroom but her body starts to dissolve in the air. Nevertheless, in the bathroom she is able to inject

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herself with more CPH4, which saves her body from collapsing entirely. Soon, she returns to her normal state. Through the CPH4, Lucy can escape any biological processes that might cause her to die. Thus, the film privileges rationality over materiality, as the body becomes a mere prosthesis that can be fundamentally modified in service of the brain. The final phase of her development works towards fully transcending her materiality. In the end, Lucy has the power to transcend more biological and bodily boundaries, namely those of space and time. After Lucy and officer Del Rio manage to collect all the bags of CPH4, they visit Professor Norman at the university in Paris. Subsequently, the scientists help Lucy to inject the remaining CPH4 into her body, so her cells will reproduce even faster and will eventually be able to pass on their knowledge. Furthermore, she becomes able to teleport herself to other places and subsequently to other times. The viewers see her in Paris, in the Grand Canyon, and New York, where she learns how to control her travel. As she moves her hands, she can speed up, slow down, or reverse time. Now, Lucy can travel back to the origins of the universe in order to gain all knowledge humankind desires. Time reverses before Lucy’s eyes as Times Square transforms and eventually Lucy is among dinosaurs. Almost attacked by one, Lucy travels back further. Here she meets the first woman, Lucy, which the spectator has already met in

Image 1.10 – 1.11

the beginning of the film. Lucy touches fingers with her ancestor, which is presented in a shot resembling The Creation of Adam. Subsequently, Lucy travels to the universe’s origins. In doing so, Lucy gains all knowledge from the big bang until her present day

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(image 1.10). This time-travel scene resembles the Big Bang scene in The Tree of Life on which Brown elaborates in his book. However, I would like to state that Lucy’s timetravel scene is different. In Lucy, the scene is presented as happening before her eyes by means of presenting her new knowledge about the world (image 1.11). The whole evolution is presented as being for the human that can be known and even controlled (signified by Lucy’s ‘scrolling’ through time). Just before her body vanishes, Lucy passes on her newfound knowledge to Professor Norman via a USB. Earlier on, moments before the injection, Professor Norman asks Lucy whether it would be a good idea to pass on all the knowledge Lucy has gained. He wonders “All this knowledge, Lucy. I’m not even sure that mankind is ready for it. We’re so driven by power and profit. Given man’s nature, it might bring us only instability and chaos.” Professor Norman is uncertain whether Lucy’s knowledge will do any good. Humankind is so occupied with its greed that this might only lead to instability and chaos. However, Lucy answers, “Knowledge does not bring chaos, it only brings order”. Subsequently, Lucy passes on all the accumulated knowledge from Lucy’s day to ‘Lucy’ the first ancestor and beyond by handing over the USB. As such, the film accentuates that knowledge needs to be passed on, even though this might potentially be dangerous, also for other beings. Not passing on the knowledge, however, would have been a truly posthumanist and ethical gesture, since this would save all beings from the dangers that this knowledge might bring. After having passed on her knowledge, Lucy vanishes. When Del Rio asks where Lucy has gone, he receives a message on his mobile phone saying: “I am everywhere”. Lucy becomes a true transhuman figure; a god like creature of pure ratio with infinite knowledge. Here the film shows its final image of the empty chair in which Lucy sat before. During this image, the omnipresent, god-like voice of Lucy says, “Life was given to us a billion years ago, now you know what to do with it”. With this sentence, the film frames the passing of knowledge as the fundamental essence of human life. For Lucy, the only importance of this knowledge is the enhancement of the human species and therefor it needs to be transmitted. By ending the film at this point, the film preliminary focus remains on Lucy as the perfected version of the human. By not moving further, the film does not bother to speculate about what happens after the knowledge becomes available for other humans and its possible dangers.

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As a contemporary filmmind, Lucy draws the spectator in a transhumanist fantasy. By employing the ten per cent myth, Lucy envisions that the human can be utterly perfected. In this manner, the film celebrates human rationality and affirms the human’s privileged position. Unfortunately, the film rejects every possible posthumanist gesture and morphs it into a transhumanist one. By making its protagonist transcend all boundaries, Lucy deems that materiality and simultaneously the human’s origins in biology and evolution can be overcome. Therefore, the film intensifies Cartesian thought and tears the brain apart from the body, mind from matter, and subject from object. In sum, Lucy does not think ecologically, but anthropocentrically.

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CHAPTER 2

From a Predatory Gaze to an Empathetic Glare Preserving and Challenging Humanist Dichotomies in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin Under the Skin is loosely based on Michael Faber’s homonym novel and tells the story of an alien’s journey on earth. Loosely, as the film only adapts the red thread of the novel and conveys it with almost no dialogue, making meaning through its extraordinary and powerful audio-visual aesthetics. In the film, an alien (Scarlet Johansson) wears the skin of a woman as a disguise while she hunts for human men. She drives across the urban and rural areas of Scotland in her white van, followed by a male alien who is her guardian and supervisor (Jeremy McWilliams). During her trips, she picks up men who await a fatal ending. Luring them home with her erotic appearance, the alien sets up a trap and devours them, leaving nothing but their pale skin floating in a vacuum of blackness. However, the alien’s journey awakens her consciousness. Planet earth starts to gain her curiosity. This also accounts for the human beings. She develops empathy for the men she hunts, resulting in her setting free one of the men she has captured. Her journey through Scotland gradually becomes a journey of self-discovery in which she starts to wonder to what extent she is what her reflection shows her to be. Her compassion makes her unable to continue her job, and she decides to flee to the countryside where she further develops her newfound, feeling identity. She tries to experience the deliciousness of a chocolate cake, the kind hospitality of male stranger, and even the pleasures of sex. Even though she begins to learn how to feel, her emerging consciousness occasionally collides with the non-human body underneath the human skin. As she flees again, this time towards the woods, she comes across a forest worker who asks her if she is out to make a “rumble in the woods”. The alien seeks shelter in a traveller’s cabin, where she falls asleep peacefully. Subsequently, she is violently disturbed by a hand that touches her suggestively. The spectator learns that this unwanted hand belongs to the forest worker, who she had encountered earlier. In the forest, he tries to rape her, but is perplexed when he tears off a piece of her skin. The

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alien crawls away in pain and strips herself of her human disguise. The spectator is confronted with the alien’s true form: a completely black body. The forest worker sneaks up behind her, drenches her in gasoline, and strikes a match. Trying to escape, the alien runs until she collapses. Her burning body, surrounded by red flames, falls into the white snow. Under the Skin embodies the phenomenological experience of the alien, who gets an insight into what it means to be embodied herself. Her journey into human identification and eventually womanhood, transforms her perception from a predatory gaze into an empathetic glare. Whilst Lucy presents a rather straightforward transhumanist fantasy in which the humanist dichotomies are preserved, Under the Skin is far more complex. Firstly, I will expand the theoretical notions of Cartesian thinking, presented in the first chapter. Then, I will go into phenomenology’s conception of the human-world relationship. In doing so, I will be able to grasp the aesthetic changes occurring in the film. By aligning the spectator with the alien’s strange sensorium, the film challenges and maintains humanist dichotomies. The film plays with hierarchal oppositions such as subject/object, mind/body, ratio/emotion, and male/female, and reveals how they are fundamentally intertwined. In other words, the film is about these dichotomies and about the manner they structure our being. Therefore, the film could be regarded as an ambiguous filmmind that induces the spectator’s philosophical reflection. In the previous chapter, I elaborated on Cartesian thinking. Cartesian thinking is characterized by strict dichotomies. In her book, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Grosz discusses the history of Cartesian thinking, and how this dichotomous thinking has affected both philosophy and feminism. Grosz states that dichotomous thinking juxtaposes and hierarchizes two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the other the suppressed and negative counterpart (3). The privileged term is fundamentally opposed to the negative one and is everything the negative one is not. In Grosz’s words, “the primary term defines itself by expelling its other” (3). As such, the thinking subject is separated from the to-be-known object, which is both the world and everything of the world including the body. The subject is everything the object is not; therefore, the mind does not exist in the world but isolated from it, it is “an island onto itself” (7).

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According to Grosz, dichotomies always exist in relation. The mind/body opposition has always been correlated with other dichotomies such as reason/passion, inside/outside, and reality/appearance. Hence, the mind/body hierarchy is connected to the opposition of vision with the other senses. In Cartesian thinking, the eyes function as the agents of ratio. Through vision, people can render themselves separate from objects in the world. Additionally, Laine explains that in Cartesian thinking, vision is therefore the sense most in congruence with reason (Bodies in Pain 11). Moreover, the object, which is to-be-seen and thus to-be-known, is placed before the subject, ensuring the ego’s technical mastery over it (Wolfe 133). Furthermore, the mind/body dichotomy is thoroughly correlated with the male/female opposition. Man is convoluted with reason, while the woman is inherently connected to the body. This relation is not accidental but has a history in philosophy. As Grosz explains: As a discipline, philosophy has surreptitiously excluded femininity and ultimately woman, from its practices through its usually implicit coding of femininity with the unreason associated with the body. It could be argued that philosophy as we know it has established itself as a form of knowing, a form of rationality, only through the disavowal of the body, specifically the male body and the corresponding elevation of mind as a disembodied term. (4) Thus, to establish the idea of Cartesian rationality, the body had to be suppressed. In addition, man became correlated with reason and the mind. The woman, excluded from philosophy, became correlated with unreason, emotion and the body, a correlation still very much present in western culture today. Different philosophical stances have critiqued Cartesian thinking for its dichotomous thinking and have tried to discover ways beyond it. As a philosophical stance, phenomenology moves beyond dualistic conceptions of the subject. For phenomenologists, the nature of the human being is profoundly embodied. This means that as subjects, humans exist in their bodies and in the world and are inextricably bound to both. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty often states in his work, humans are not only subjects but also objects in the world. As a body among other bodies, a human cannot

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only see but also be seen, not only hear but also be heard. As an object, the human is also grounded in the same ‘texture as the world’. According to Merleau-Ponty, Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or a prolongation of itself; they are encrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body. (Visible and the Invisible 124) Merleau-Ponty refers to this ‘texture of the world’ as the flesh. In her article on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh, Isis Brook states that the flesh should be seen as a pre-substance of which both the subject and the world are made. For her, in his concept of flesh, Merleau-Ponty finds a way of joining and even merging the subject and the object. Brook states that the concept of flesh “seems to be pointing to a relationship of some sort, a sharing that breaks down a solitary self-enclosedness, both between me and other humans and between me and non-humans, and even between me and the inanimate” (361). Since people are imbricated in the flesh by means of their bodies, their consciousness and subjectivity cannot be understood separately from them. For this reason, the body is the central manner in which the ‘interiority’ of the subject entangles with his or her ‘exteriority’ (Laine Bodies in Pain 11). In fact, humans are lived-bodies, transactional wholes of body-minds, which are open to the environment. In phenomenology then, there is no rigid border between the mind and the body, the subject and the object. Thus, the world and we engage in an open, reciprocal relationship of embrace. In this way, the world and its people engage in a constant dialectic process of shaping and being shaped. For Brook, this understanding is important, since an ecological realization of our entanglement with the world, could feed into a better treatment of the world. In this way, Brook states that our reality is to be profoundly environed (361). Furthermore, vision, in the phenomenological sense, is also perceived differently. No longer is vision purely the agent of ratio, which locates an object in space separate from one’s viewing position. Rather, perceiving is an embodied, reciprocal act that transforms both the perceiver and the perceived. This notion is also

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evident in Barker’s phenomenological understanding of film viewing. During the filmic event, the lived-body of the spectator finds itself in a close, dialectic relationship with the lived-body of the film. By looking at the film, the spectator does not only inform the film, but the film also informs, moves, and touches the spectator. The spectator’s body moves with the bodily rhythms of the film, adapting itself to it. In this process, the spectator is simultaneously ‘here’ and ‘there’, on the side of his or her body and the side of the film. Occasionally, the spectator can be fully immersed in the film, forgetting his or her own body. At other moments, there is resistance. As Barker explains, “This dialectic includes moments where we and the film are in perfect harmony, other times there is resistance. The film might drag us along while we try to pull away during scenes that are too much, emotionally or sensually (91). Thus, the spectator and the film engage in a dialectic relationship of shaping and being shaped, moving and being moved. Under the Skin embodies the phenomenological experience of a non-human life form. In many interviews, Glazer emphasized that he wanted to convey a story about the alien. He desired to grasp what it would be like to experience the world from an alien viewpoint. Therefore, it can be argued that the film partakes in a practice of alien phenomenology. Alien phenomenology is a term coined by object-oriented ontologist Ian Bogost with which he describes the practice of studying the experience of nonhumans. Through their sense perception, humans are entangled with the world in a certain way. Yet, this is just one way among many other ways in which beings, object, or entities relate to the world. In the broader posthumanist project of decentring the human, it is imperative to engage with the everyday alienness and analyse their ways of relating in order to observe how people are entangled with other beings. In this manner, the film’s lived-body does not bother to copy human ways of experiencing the world, but is rather occupied with emerging the spectator in a strange new way of experiencing. The whole film embodies the alien’s experience through which the spectator experiences the filmworld. This means that not only the point-of-view shots convey the alien’s perspective, but also the film’s aesthetic elements transfer her sense perception to the spectator. Hence, the spectator has to become accustomed to the once so familiar earth, which looks, sounds, and feels completely different. As Osterweil states, “As in a Whistler painting, it takes time for one’s eyes to adjust to the light, for darkness to become visible” (44).

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Under the Skin’s strangeness is established by a complex ecology of aesthetics, ranging from disorienting montage, science fiction interludes, and a haunting soundscape. In this chapter, I structure my analysis around one of the most important characteristic of the alien, which is the alien’s unfeeling identity. This unfeeling identity and the way this identity develops throughout the film, informs the aesthetics in an essential manner. In the film, the alien does not belong in the human world. She does not feel anything for her human body and the world it is entangled with. There is a fundamental separation between her consciousness and her new body. In fact, she is disconnected from the world. Moreover, the alien does not feel for the human world. Osterweil states that the alien has an unfeeling identity: the alien does not care for the human world (49). Her ways of looking could be said to be purely rational and uncombed by feeling. As she searches for men, her face has a blank expression. This alien is a hostile predator, seducing men to eventually devour them. As she drives on the Scottish roads, she gazes through her windshield, selecting the best copies she can find. The first hunts are challenging, yet she soon finds her way around. She flirts with the men, offers them a ride, and subsequently brings them to her black hole to further seduce them towards their death. Consequently, her hunts

Image 2.1

become a ritual, which she repeats endlessly. This predatory gaze of the alien is embodied by the film’s aesthetics. Shortly after the film begins, the viewers are presented with a scene in which they see the alien hunt. This scene was filmed with the One-Cam, a camera especially designed for this film. Because of its small size, the crew was able to hide and attach the cameras to moving objects. Glazer attached various hidden One-Cam’s to the van, so that men who passed by could be captured from different angles. This made the One-Cam suitable for conveying the predatory gaze of the alien. By using of long-shots and tracking shots as

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seen through the van’s windows, the spectators can observe the men from a distance (Image 2.1). In her book, Marks describes this way of looking as optic visuality. In optic visuality, distant objects are perceived in such a way that the spectator knows what he or she is seeing. Optic visuality is about viewing objects in their totality and about defining and knowing what is seen. Marks states that the distant gaze of optic visuality allows the spectators to organize themselves as an all-perceiving subject, and, thus, separating themselves from the passive object (162). This way of looking simulates the distance between the alien’s mind, the strange body she inhabits, and the world it is situated in. For this reason, the alien’s gaze could be characterized as hyper-Cartesian, since it creates a fundamental separation between the mind and the body, the subject and the world. Furthermore, the alien’s being creates a distant relationship between the perceiver and the perceived with which the spectator aligns. Hence, the spectator perceives in a different, non-human way, yet this perception preserves and even enhances the humanist distance between the subject and the object. According to Osterweil, this distant, predatory gaze cannot be seen as separate from gender. In the eighties, Laura Mulvey analysed and criticized Hollywood’s male gaze, a representational strategy which subjugated and objectified women the (male) spectator. In contrast, the first half of Under the Skin rather presents with a distant and sexual female gaze of an alien longing to devour men. The alien does not care for the human men, but it seems as if she does sexually desires them. Her ritual, in which she obsessively repeats her hunting, presents it as more than her duty and act that she want to commit. This is emphasized by the way in which she perfects her flirting, her strip tease, seemingly longing for more. The alien’s phenomenology embodies a female gaze not mediated by emotions but saturated with sexual sensation. This is rare in cinema, since women are culturally characterized as emotional and feeling beings. Therefore, Osterweil calls the film “One of most important feminist interventions in recent cinematic history” (45). In this way, the film moves beyond the idea of the woman as fundamentally emotional and submerges the spectator into a rational female gaze not bothered with empathy. Thus, the film’s preservation of the Cartesian distance progressively breaks the correlation between the rational/emotional dichotomy and the male/female dichotomy.

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Initially, these distant and sexual, predatory scenes are uncomfortable for the spectators, as they have to share their point-of-view with the alien. The spectator knows that this predatory gaze will eventually lead to the murder of one of these men. One of the most important scenes of the film, in this respect, is the beach scene. In this scene, the alien wants to capture a young adventurer who is swimming in the sea. As she tries to make a conversation with him, the young man notices that a family further along on the beach is in danger. A mother has dived into the rough sea to save her dog. Shortly after this, the father dives after her as he realizes she will not make it, leaving their young child alone on the beach. The young adventurer in turn tries to save the father, but does not succeed. As he lies dying on the beach, the alien hits him with a stone. The horrible events that occur make this scene difficult to watch for the spectator. The alien (which of course looks like a human) witnesses the horror without taking action and eventually attacks the man. At first these distant and sexual, predatory scenes are uncomfortable for the spectator, since he has to share his view with the point-of-view of the alien. The spectator knows that this predatory gaze will eventually lead to the murder of one of these men. One of the most important scenes of the film, in this respect, is the beach scene. In this scene the alien wants to capture a young adventurer who is swimming in the sea. As she tries to make a

Image 2.2 and 2.3

conversation with him, the

young man noticed that a family further along on the beach is in danger. A mother has dived into the rough sea to save her dog. Shortly after, the father dives after her as he realizes she will not make it, leaving their young child alone on the beach. The young

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adventurer in turn tries to save the father, but does not succeed (image 2.2). As he lies down on the beach, near-death, the alien hits him with a stone. The horrible events that take place make this scene difficult to watch for the spectator. The alien (which of course looks like a human) witnesses the horror without taking action and eventually attacks the man. Moreover, the alien’s sexual longing seeping through the scene, as she desires to capture the young adventurer, further complicates the spectator’s position (image 2.3). Furthermore, the spectator has to witness these events through the alien’s distant, predatory gaze. Where a normal narrative film would present the spectator with closeups of the event, capturing the thrill, horror, and fear of the characters, the spectator only gets distance in this film. In Osterweil’s words, “If regarding the pain of others can feel unbearable, the watching others regard the pain of other without feeling is even worse” (46). In this moment, the spectator’s sensorium collides with the alien’s distant, non-feeling phenomenology. Here, as Barker pointed out, the film becomes ‘too much’ for the spectator and he or she shivers with discomfort. Nevertheless, as the spectator is more frequently presented with these distant scenes, he or she becomes used to this predatory gaze. In the embodied film viewing, the spectator moves closely with the film and forms him or herself to it. The feeling of discomfort reduces and the spectator’s eyes gradually become distant too. Thus, on the level of visual aesthetics, the film simulates a Cartesian way of observing in which the subject is separated from the body and the world. However, the film informs the spectator and he or she gets used to the distant manner of looking and is bound to realize that the crude subject/object distinction does not hold. In getting used to the alien’s gaze, the spectator levels his or her experience with the alien’s phenomenology. This is important, since in this way, the spectator can align with the changes the alien is about to go through. As the alien stays prolonged in the human world, her predatory gaze begins to alter. First, earth is merely a workplace where she has to hunt humans, a place she approaches with distance. However, as she interacts with human beings more frequently, she begins to develop an interest in them and starts to wonder to what extent she is similar to them. Initially, in her act to lure men home, she often flirts with them. To every victim she asks, “Do you think I am pretty?” To which they subsequently

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answer “yes” and compliment her on her vixen hair, her full lips, or mysterious eyes. Since these men regard her as a woman, she begins to wonder whether she is one. This development is captured by the film’s emerging mirror sequences. In the beginning of the film, the alien is often accompanied by a mirror. Nonetheless, she is never caught looking in a mirror. This changes later on as the spectator becomes more and more mystified by her reflection. Another moment in the film can also be connected to this. While in a traffic jam, the alien receives a rose from a man who sells flowers on the street. When she lays the rose down on the passenger seat, she notices that there is blood on her hand. Fascinated, she observes the blood, seemingly wondering if the blood is hers. Before, she was not able to regard herself as a human being, yet gradually she becomes to identify herself as one. Thus, she becomes a human being and more specifically, a woman. Her empathetic ability develops fully in an encounter with a disabled man. During her hunt, she spots a hooded man on the street, who she offers a ride to the supermarket. In the car, the spectator is confronted with his disfigured face. The alien learns that the man has never touched a woman before, and she invites him to stroke her face. She proceeds her seduction but unlike the other men, she does not devour him. She develops feelings for the disfigured man, and she sets him free. As Osterweil states, “Finally encountering someone whose skin is as alien to him as she experiences her own to be, she is moved to empathy” (49). According Osterweil, this newfound emotional ability starts in a journey towards conscious embodiment; as for a human to experience empathy also involves welcoming the

Image 2.4 and 2.5

sensations that form the

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foundation of this emotion (47). The viewer observes that this awakened empathy makes her want to experience bodily sensations too and she begins to learn how. When she has flown to the countryside, she searches for affective sensations. She tries to experience the delicious taste of a chocolate cake, the cold tingle of fog, and even the pleasures of sex (image 2.4). While her alien body protests to some of these acts, it is clear that she gradually become more open to these sensations. For example, she shivers from the cold, and moves her fingers rhythmically as she listens to music (image 2.5). In sum, the alien begins to feel. Thus, from a Cartesian separation between mind and body, the film gradually moves towards a phenomenological entanglement of the mind, body, and world. In addition, her changing subjectivity modifies her phenomenology and this gives way to aesthetic changes in the body of the film. From this point, the alien looks with feeling. It is important to note that this does not make the aesthetics ‘more human’. Rather, they keep their alienness, but evolve from a predatory distance to an empathetic closeness. This first becomes evident due to a change in the hunting scenes. One scene is most emblematic of this change. In this scene, the alien is walking down the street. She is not in her van, but is comfortable enough to be among the humans. On the street, she trips and falls. Next, a group of people assists her back on her feet. She appears confused by this situation, unable to grasp why these people would be so kind to her. Subsequently, the succeeding scene is another point-of-view hunting sequence in which unknown men and women walk down the street. Nevertheless, this scene looks rather different than the other hunting scenes. Instead of long-shots, this scene uses close-ups and medium close-ups to portray the strangers. Instead of observing optical images, these images suggest a look that does not intend harm. It is an innocent look that expresses curiosity and interest. Furthermore, the musical score also emphasizes the alien’s newfound feeling identity. Rather than the eerie, alien melody heard during the other hunting scenes, another melody appears. This one is much softer and gentler, emphasizing the alien’s empathy. As the images proceed, they begin to overlap, moving rhythmically with the music. More layers of people are added, which creates a beautiful assemblage of moving bodies on the screen. Gradually, the images become lighter, golden even. Superimposed on this golden assemblage, the alien’s profile appears, suggesting a curious glare (image 2.7).

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Image 2.6

Additionally, this re-emerges the spectator in the realm of feeling. These images evoke a haptic visuality, defined by Marks as a way of looking that lingers closely on the surface. As such, the spectators do not clearly distinguish objects or forms, but are invited to come close and touch the surface with their eyes. As Marks explains, the boundary between subject and object dissolves in haptic visuality. This means that the spectator is no longer able to separate him or herself fully from what he or she sees. In this process, sensation emerges. This close and empathetic contact with the film provides the spectator with a strong, pleasurable feeling, since this way of looking is so different from the distant ways of seeing which the spectator has experienced before. In these moments, the spectator becomes aware of its embodied and entangled existence. The subject is not separate from the world yet fundamentally intertwined with it and bound to be informed by it. Furthermore, this changing perception is also evident in the film’s changing portrayal of nature. In the last part of the film, when the alien has fled into a forest, the film frequently focuses on natural elements. It does so first by focusing on these natural elements during shots in which the alien moves. For example, as the alien runs the spectator is presented with a long-shot of different trees on the foreground. During these shots, the viewer’s vision of her is troubled, making it difficult to follow where she is going. Second, images of nature that move beyond narrative action are inserted. In these moments, the spectator’s eyes rest prolonged on a natural element such as trees or stubs

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of wood overgrown with moss. Moreover, the onlooker does not see a tree in full, rather an assemblage of natural elements that forms a texture of nature. These images again evoke a haptic visuality, as the observer lingers on these natural textures without fully grasping or knowing them. The spectator looks with an empathetic glare and comes close. In this moment, the spectator is again invited to touch and to emerge in the realm of pleasurable sensations. Therefore, the film counters the Cartesian separation, as it reminds the spectator that he or she does not exist separate from nature. Moreover, the mind does not exist outside nature, yet is entangled with nature, as an outcome of our embodied existence. One image in particular illustrates this idea. In a long-shot we see the alien sleeping in the traveller’s cabin. Slowly the image morphs into a long-shot of a mountain (image II). In this way the film presents us an image of the alien dissolving into the trees, illustrating the crumbling boundaries between mind and matter, body and brain, subject and object. This image illustrates how the human reality is to be environed, existing in an intimate entanglement with the world. Nevertheless, in doing so, the film re-establishes the dichotomous relation between woman and emotion. Since, as soon as she identifies herself as human and a woman, the film makes her enter the realm of empathy and feeling. This difference becomes apparent in the representation of the alien herself. In the beginning of the film, the spectators often see her through her own distancing gaze, daring them to mistake her for a mere fetish object (Osterweil 45). As her perception changes, the spectator also becomes to see her anew. A moment that illustrates this is when the alien stays at the kind man’s house. Here, the spectator is again presented with a mirror scene. The alien stands in front of a full-length mirror and admires her human body while the camera presents different close-ups of her body parts. Moreover, the darkness and the warm glow of the space heater make her body look rather strange. The viewers never fully grasp her body in its totality. Nevertheless, close-ups of the female body are often related to the objectifying male gaze. However, I feel that these close-ups express a sense of closeness, curiosity, and empathy. In this way, the film moves away from the Cartesian distance but emphasizes the woman as profoundly emotional and reestablishes the correlation between woman and the body. In doing so, the film works towards an important moment of philosophical reflection. First, the alien regards the world through a predatory gaze, fundamentally separated from her body and the world. In becoming a human woman, she comprehends

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what it means to be embodied and has opened up to feeling. The alien is no longer a disembodied mind, but entangled with the world and has become simultaneously a subject and an object in the world. However, the film presents the spectator with a sudden, violent ending. When the alien has fled to the forest, she is violently disturbed by a man who touches her unwantedly. Subsequently, she is chased and he tries to rape her. When he tears of a piece of her human skin, her alien body is revealed. Frightened of the alien’s strangeness, the man strikes a match and sets her on fire, leading to her death. The film’s sudden violent ending presents the spectator with two important insights. The alien’s empathetic glare has made her vulnerable. By murdering the alien, the film takes away the protagonist with whom the spectator has become to interact closely, and through whom the spectator has become aware of his embodiment. The man who has killed her is afraid of worldly intimacy, afraid to accept his entanglement with this non-human being. In this way, the alien and the spectator are punished for their non-anthropocentric, embodied way of looking. In this way Osterweil concludes that the alien has challenged conventional hierarchies that are met with violent resistance (47). But, this also entails another important statement. As soon as the alien becomes a woman, a man murders her. To be a woman does not only entail experiencing human sensations, but also means inevitably to experience the pain and violence done to women by men. As Osterweil emphasizes, Human or alien, women are raped, discarded, and left for dead. Regardless of the epic transformations that self-discovery brings, to be female is to be voided. To feel female is not only to suffer the richness of human pain, but, inevitably, the violence of gendered hatred. (50) In the end of the film, the film thus re-establishes the correlation between woman, body and emotion. As a result, she becomes an empathetic woman, whose body turns into a man’s prey. Becoming human, becoming woman, means to enter a structure of hierarchal dichotomies. To be human, means to be put a label upon. To be a woman, means to be perceived as a body, as an object. Therefore, the film ends in a pessimistic manner and leaves the spectator wondering if is possible to move beyond the humanist dichotomies and their infinite correlation.

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Image 2.7

One of the film’s final shots embodies an important moment of contemplation for the spectator. When the forest worker has ripped the alien’s skin, the alien crawls away and undoes herself of her human mask. She strips of her shoulders and takes of her human face. While the spectator is presented with her alien, black body, she turns the human mask towards herself. In a medium over-shoulder-shot, it is revealed how she looks at the human face, the eyes still blinking. The viewers see her look, seemingly contemplating, yet they do not know what she thinks. Simultaneously they look with her over her shoulder (image 2.7). Together with her, the spectators are left to wonder the following: Is it possible to move beyond the set dichotomies? Or will the humanist legacy, which is still deeply present in society, repress these changes? By aligning with the alien’s strange sensorium, the spectator is presented with an insight about how to perceive the world differently, but is punished when she, with whom the spectators have interacted so closely, is murdered right before their very eyes. As a contemporary filmmind, Under the Skin thus invites to reflect upon these dichotomies. The film moves from a predatory gaze to an empathetic glare. As such, it moves from a hyper-Cartesian distance to an embodied closeness. Through the alien’s journey towards conscious embodiment, the film embodies an ecological thought, yet is also not afraid to examine this thought within a brother structure, since the film also couples this change with other dichotomies. In addition, it shows that this change is not

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separate from gender. In this manner, the film dissects the correlation between the ratio/emotional and male/female dichotomy to re-establish it again. In short, the film forces to observe how these hierarchies inform each other and form a structure that shapes our being. Thus, Under the Skin does not only present a powerful story about changing this structure, but also wonders to what extent this might be possible.

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CHAPTER 3

Being With Her and the World The Aesthetics of Whimsical and Reciprocal Engagement in Spike Jonze’s Her Her tells the story of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a middle-aged writer who is going through a divorce. Theodore has separated from his wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) and feels devastated ever since. The film is set in the near future, which presents us a familiar world through its colourful, nostalgic mise-en-scène, yet distant due the film’s representation of technology. When one day Theodore visits the mall, he is drawn to an advertisement. In this advertisement we see different men and women running around in slow motion, seemingly lost. A voice emerges: “Who are you? What can you be? Where are you going?” Subsequently, the advertisement presents the OS: the world’s first conscious operating system that “listens to you, understands you and knows you”. Theodore identifies with the advertisement and buys an OS. The OS, who names herself Samantha (Scarlet Johansson), makes her way into Theodore’s life and subsequently, his heart. Samantha is a non-human entity without a body, which is only present to Theodore (and mostly to the spectator) through voice. Her vibrant and curious presence inspires Theodore to open up again. However, their relationship is not without obstacles. During the film, Samantha evolves beyond human apprehension. She, for example, becomes able to communicate with hundreds of humans and OS’s simultaneously, resulting in misunderstandings between them. In the climax of the film, Samantha announces to Theodore that she and the other OS’ s have decided to leave the human world. Theodore loses Samantha, but gains something important too. He becomes able to accept his divorce and reconnects with his best friend Amy. Theodore has regained his ability to feel and wonder, and re-established his intimate contact with the world. In this chapter I will show how Her embodies a reciprocal, intimate connection with the world, in which the subject/object dichotomy no longer holds. By means of its violent ending, Under the Skin wonders to what extent such an embodied, empathetic engagement might be possible. Her, in contrary, presents such ecological thinking

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without question marks. It celebrates an intimate and reciprocal engagement and sees it as the basis for responsibility and care for the world. In the beginning of the story, Theodore is withdrawn into subject-ness, which is visible in the distant aesthetics that open the film. Through his engagement with Samantha, who challenges the set categories herself, Theodore re-establishes his contact with others and the world. This relationship is one of ‘being with’ the world, rather than ‘in’ the world. Here, a graduate shift in the aesthetics occurs. Due the film’s emerging aesthetics of whimsical, the spectator engages with the vibrant-ness of Samantha but is moreover drawn to the lifeworld of Theodore. By engaging with these aesthetics, the spectator also gains insight in how to engage with the film and the world in an intimate relationship of reciprocity. This is an ecological relationship, not based on the privileged and separate position of the human, proposed by humanism. With this chapter I hope to challenge the transhumanist interpretation of the film, which states that the film is fundamentally about the human transcendence of materiality, reminiscent of Lucy. In contrary, I will understand Her as a film about materiality and our mutual imbrications in the flesh of the world. Brown has devoted his book to the posthumanist characteristics of contemporary, digital cinema. According to Brown, digital cinema progressively envisions the human as ‘being with’ the world, rather than ‘in’ the world. Brown takes from Lakoff and Johnson that we frequently use the metaphor ‘being in’ to describe our relationship with the world (157). This ‘in’ is tied to a sense of self, for example demonstrated by the way we speak of ‘inner feelings’ (156). Therefore, ‘being in’ signifies a certain withdraw from the world, a sense of detachment in which the world is conceptualized as a container from which we are separate (157). For Brown, this metaphor radically structures the way we think. Moreover, it feeds into the way we treat each other and the world: we treat other entities poorly because we consider them to be separate from us (158). Therefore, Brown states that we should change this metaphor from ‘being in’ to ‘being with’ the world. For Brown, we are not self-enclosed entities; rather we are fundamentally interconnected with the world that surrounds us. We do not exist separate from the world, as in Cartesian thinking, but are always in relation with it, as explained in the previous chapter through the work of Merleau-Ponty. ‘Being with’, as a new metaphor for describing our relationship with the world, recognizes this

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fundamentally interrelated nature. 5 Replacing the detrimental ‘in’ with ‘with’ could work towards a better understanding of our interrelatedness with the world and could feed into a better treatment of others and the world. Merleau-Ponty has shown that specifically in touch, we realize that we are objects in the world. He does so with his famous example of hands touching. MerleauPonty states: “When I touch my left hand with my right hand, I do not only feel my left hand, I also feel my right hand touching” (Phenomenology of Perception 93). In this moment, I experience my thingness. In touch we cannot render ourselves separate from others and the world. As Laine states: “the more physical senses of smell, taste, and touch rupture distinct boundaries between the self and the world” (6). In touch, we feel our intimate and intertwined presence with the world. Thus, in touching and simultaneously being touched, Theodore becomes aware of his thingness and worldliness, of his open and reciprocal relationship with others and the world. In her article, “On Touch: The Inhuman that Therefore I Am”, Barad also states that touch reminds us of our interrelatedness and interdependence with other beings. For Barad, touch, even touching ourselves, always already contains contact with the infinity of other beings. Following quantum theory Barad criticized classical physics’ understanding of touch. Classical physics states that we never really touch something. Atoms cannot contact because of the electromagnetic repulsion between electrons. Barad states: “All we ever feel is the electromagnetic force, not the others touch that we seek” (3). However, Barad uses quantum theory to criticize this idea, which is based on the classical ontology of physics. Classical physics states that there is only a void filled with particles. According to Barad, the void is not empty, rather “it is an on-going play of indeterminacies; physical particles are inseparable from the void, in particular they intra-act with the virtual particles of the void and are thereby inseparable from it” (6). In this way Barad concludes that touch, and even self-touch means touching the infinity of others being, other spaces and other times. Thus, touch not only makes us aware of our worldliness, but also of our contact with the beyond-worldly.

                                                                                                                5

As shown in the previous chapter, Merleau-Ponty uses ‘being in’ to describe an embodied

‘being with’ position in the world rather than a closed of position. By using the term ‘being with’ I do not aim to criticize Merleau-Ponty. Since Brown’s distinction between ‘being in’ and ‘being with’ has proven to be productive for this analysis, I stick with his terms.

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Moreover, touch shapes accountability. Haraway adds to these theories of touch that the act of touch shapes a relationship of mutual care. She states: “Accountability, caring for and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions; these mundane prosaic things are the result of having truck with each other” (36). Touching not only reminds us of our fundamental interrelatedness with the world, it also feeds into a better treatment of the world. Confronted with our thingness and fundamental interrelatedness with the world, we can learn to care and be responsible. Thus, following Merleau-Ponty, Barad and Haraway, we can sketch a clearer picture of what this ‘being with’ entails. ‘Being with’ the world is a relationship of intimacy with the world, in which we realize our openness and are encouraged to be responsible. Her embodies an aesthetic shift from ‘being in’ to ‘being with’ the world. In the beginning of the film, Theodore is presented as ‘being in’ the world, as selfenclosed and separated from it. Theodore’s divorce has left him emotionally numb and has isolated him from the world. This is already expressed in the film’s first shot. The film opens with a close-up of Theodore, in which we see and hear him expressing his love for someone. Since the shot closely focuses on Theodore, the spectator is left to wonder to whom Theodore speaks. Image 3.1 and 3.2

However, the spectator soon

finds out that Theodore speaks to nobody. The spectator is presented with a shot in which he looks over Theodore’s shoulder, revealing a computer-screen on which the words he speaks appear. Theodore is at his workplace: beautifullhandwrittenletters.com, where he makes love letters for couples, simulating nostalgic, analogue hand written letters which remind the characters of an age long gone. Thus, Theodore’s emotional

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words are not his own, he just acts them out, simulating someone else’s romantic correspondence. In this way, the close-up literally separates Theodore from his environment, signifying his loneliness. Theodore’s sadness over his separation has left him emotionally numb, unable to make meaningful connections. This feeling is further brought forward by Theodore’s body language after he prints the letter: slightly bend and with a blank expression on his face, he looks at the letter. Moreover, this feeling is verbally expressed further along in the film as we hear Theodore say: “Sometimes I feel like I have felt everything that I have felt before, like I will not feel anything new”. Theodore’s divorce has left him heartbroken and has isolated him from the world. In the opening, close-ups are more frequently used as a mechanism to signify Theodore’s cut-off-ness. Here, the film’s cinematography consists mostly of one type of camera, following Theodore in the moment. Despite their saturated colours, these shots are static and strict, emphasizing this cut-of-ness. An example can be found further along in the opening, when Theodore leaves work. He takes the elevator and asks his digital device to play a melancholic song. As we hear the sad song play, the film presents us a medium close-up. In this medium close-up the crowdedness of the elevator fades away in a cinematographic blur (image 3.1). This shot places Theodore in a container, separating him from the world. Besides close-ups, the other shots that portray Theodore also frequently emphasize this ontological ‘being in’. Further along in this scene, we see Theodore walking on a crowded square. These people, amongst who is Theodore, walk alone without making contact. Here, Theodore listens to his digital device as it reads him his mail. We hear a message from his friend Amy, inviting him to come along. Nevertheless, Theodore listens to the message but does not seem to listen. He is so withdrawn into subject-ness that he has become unable to care for others. In this sequence, this distance between Theodore and other people on the square is emphasized by a wide tracking shot. Brown states that human characters are frequently presented as clearly distinguishable from the background, typically contrasting their settings (71). Such a statement seems obvious. However, in doing so cinema reproduces the idea of an ‘I’ that is separated and self enclosed. In this shot, Theodore is presented as distinguishable from other entities. This is also emphasized by the mise-en-scène: with his red jacket, Theodore stands out from the grey skyscrapers in the background (image 3.2). Thus, in the beginning of the film Theodore is presented as ‘being in’ the world:

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he is withdrawn into subject-ness, separated and closed-off from other entities in the world, unable to make meaningful connections. These images of disconnect strongly contrast the flashbacks that the spectator is frequently presented with. These flashbacks show us moments, which the presentTheodore longs back for. Often, these flashbacks show us moments of tactile intimacy between Theodore and Catherine, intimacy that is so clearly absent from Theodore’s present life. We see them cuddle and caress each other, enjoying each other’s presence. In terms of aesthetics, the flashbacks are also very different. Saturated by light, colours become flat and similar. This brightness of the images is characterized by Jacob Swinney as one of the elements of Jonze’s aesthetics of whimsical, which so often gives Jonze’s films an atmosphere of marvel and child-like wonder (1). Moreover, these moments seem to be shot with another kind of camera, which moves differently than the camera that captures

Image 3.3 and 3.4

Theodore in the moment. In his article on the film, Jonathan Lack describes this style of shooting: “This more subjective camera is gently unbound by weight or by reason, akin to human sight in its instinctual movement and foreign in its placement and perspective” (2). This other camera flows instinctively and lightly through space, radically contrasting the static and still cinematography of the first camera. Moreover, these aesthetics of whimsical feature many close-ups. These close-ups are different from those that portray Theodore in the beginning of the film. Instead of capturing a single entity, these close-ups often bring different entities closely together (image 3.4). Or, they give an extreme close view of

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things, glaring over textures and materials without giving us a clear overview (image 3.3). Jacob Swinney identifies these close-ups as crucial to the aesthetic of whimsical. Like the omnipresence of light and the lively movement of the camera, the close-ups establish an atmosphere of marvel and wonder. When we see Catherine and Theodore touch in these flashbacks, the omnipresence of light makes it hard to tell were her body begins and his body starts. These flashbacks represent the amalgamation of two separate people, so common in love relationships (Bergen 3). This is also very much an ontological experience: two people feel as one, blurring the boundaries between them. Other flashbacks, with similar aesthetics, show us Theodore play with children, having fun with his friends or marvel at a kite floating in the air (image 4). Like in the shots with Catherine, the omnipresence of light makes it hard to tell were Theodore’s body ends and the world begins. In this way, Theodore’s intimate engagement with Catherine is expanded to the world. These flashbacks present Theodore in a relationship of ‘being with’ rather than ‘being in’ the world. Theodore longs back for moments in which he embraced others and the world, where he engaged in a reciprocal relationship in which the boundaries between subject and object merged. As the narrative develops, the film’s aesthetics gradually shift from the distant aesthetics of ‘being in’, to the ‘being with’- aesthetics typical of the flashbacks. The scene in which Samantha and Theodore visit the beach together is the first scene in the present in which these aesthetics of whimsical become clearly visible. In this way, the present begins to look like the past. On the beach Samantha asks Theodore: “Imagine that you never saw a human body and then you saw one”. In this moment we see a sequence of shots that show us different parts of the human body in extreme close-up. What is important about these shots is that they are neither from Samantha nor Theodore’s perspective. We for example see a pair of feet and an ear in extreme closeup, detaching them from the human body, yet merging them into a lively assemblage by juxtaposing them. This is emblematic for the aesthetic of whimsical. As Swinney states: “Jonze’s camera is fascinated with the mundane; intently exploring fabrics and materials, finding beauty and significance in the obscure and unnoticed” (1). This sequence portrays the human body with curiosity and fascination, in such a way that it looks unfamiliar yet wonderful (image 3.5). Like the flashbacks, these shots are much more light then before, both in colour as in movement. Sunlight becomes much more

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present on screen, flattening out colours and amalgamating different entities on screen. These shots are not of the perspective of Samantha or Theodore, yet these shots refer to them, to what they think and tell each other. Later in the scene, Samantha plays a piece of music, which she has written to capture how it feels to be on the beach with Theodore. While we hear the music play, we see Theodore lays on the beach listening to the music. We see him in a

Image 3.5 and 3.6

medium close-up, while we

see sunlight flickering on screen. This moment is again portrayed through the first camera, capturing Theodore in the moment. However, the static camera that captured Theodore in the moment now seems contaminated by lively camera, since this camera has taken over its light- and brightness (image 3.6). In this way, the entire present becomes portrayed by the aesthetics of whimsical, which we know from the past. I would like to state that these aesthetics of whimsical, which emerge gradually as the narrative develops, embody both Samantha and Theodore. It embodies Samantha’s open engagement with the world and Theodore’s taking on of this engagement. These aesthetics function as in-between perspectives: it is where both Theodore and Samantha meet. The aesthetics of whimsical firstly embody Samantha’s intimate and curious engagement with the world. Soon after Theodore ‘starts’ Samantha, she explains to him that she is an intuitive entity. She states: “What makes me, me is my ability to learn through experience. So basically: in every moment I am evolving, just like you.” In this way, Shaviro states that the film is entirely successful in making the spectator accept that Samantha is a subjective entity (Spike Jonze’s Her 2). The spectator does not

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participate in the ontological doubt of her being real, but understands and accepts her as real, as a true subjective entity. Her intelligence and ability to learn quickly soon become clear to the spectator. Not only does she give herself the name Samantha by reading the book How to Name Your Baby in two/one-hundred of a second, she also learns what it is to be funny the moment Theodore first laughs about her. Further along, Samantha learns how to compose music and draw beautiful drawings. Samantha’s curiosity for the world and emerging creativity invites Hilary Bergen to analyse Samantha as vibrant matter. In her article, Bergen uses this concept by Bennett to describe Samantha. She states: Samantha is always changing, always emergent. Jane Bennett characterizes this emergence as “the freedom of a ceaseless up springing of something new,” a “vitalism that is not predetermined but open, a land of opportunity for creativity and surprise” (Bennett 90). (5) During her evolvement, Samantha develops a desire to be more ‘human’. Designed for humans, and being among humans, she develops a desire to be like them. Bergen states that this desire to have a body accumulates in Samantha and Theodore having sex. This sex scene presents the spectator with a black screen and we only hear their voices. “How would you touch me?” asks Samantha, to which Theodore replies: “I would touch you on you face, stroke you neck”. Samantha replies: “I can feel my skin”. Samantha’s curiosity and openness grant her the body she desires to have, a body to which Theodore gives shape. In the one and half hour of screen time, we witness Samantha change and develop rapidly. In the end of the film, Samantha accepts and even embraces her bodiless-ness, which sets her free and inspires her to change even more. She for example becomes able to communicate with hundreds of OS’s and people simultaneously. Here, Samantha becomes more subjective than the human subject. In this way, subjectivity cannot be seen as something human and the spectator is invited to imagine subjectivity beyond humanness (Haring 3). Moreover, Samantha has agency. Samantha’s openness, as just discussed, does not mean she is passive. Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter understands nonhumans and things as vital players in the world (Bennett 4). As vibrant matter, Samantha has material agency and effectivity in the

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world. She changes and creates things. The way that Samantha affects other with her vibrant presence illustrates this. The scene in which she and Theodore visit Theodore’s goddaughter, expresses Samantha’s care for the world. She playfully and intimately interacts with Theodore’s goddaughter, visibly enjoying her. With her vibrant agency, Samantha challenges the set subject/object dichotomy and moves beyond it. Moreover, Samantha embodies the ‘being with’ the world, which Theodore has lost; she is open and embraces the world, closely changing along with it. Hence, the aesthetics of whimsical embody Samantha, since we associate this openness and vibrant-ness with her. When we see the human body whimsically portrayed in the beach-scene or sunlight flickering on screen, we think of her since we associate this curiosity with her. We never see Samantha, but in this way she gets a visual presence. On screen, Samantha is not presented as a character that sticks out from the background. Rather, she is ontologically indistinguishable from the background. She merges with her surroundings, with the objects and nonhuman fluxes on the screen. In this way, her visual presentation fits her ‘being beyond dichotomies’. Samantha cannot be pinned down as a distinguishable

Image 3.7

subject or object; rather she breaks these categories open. In this way, the aesthetics of whimsical virtually present Samantha to the spectator. However, these aesthetics also embody Theodore, since Theodore also starts to open up and learns to re-engage with the world through his engagement with Samantha. By interacting with Samantha, who embodies the ‘being with’ the world, Theodore can learn to ‘be with’ the world too. Samantha affects Theodore: she for example motivates him to go out and meet people, learn and do new things. Gradually we see Theodore change. We can recognize this in a sequence that portrays Theodore’s renewed engagement with the world. Towards the ending of the film, when they both have overcome different problems, Theodore and Samantha spent their afternoon together. Theodore has signed his divorce papers and Samantha has let go of her desire to be

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human, making them both feel better. When outside, Samantha tells Theodore that she has composed a new piece of piano music. This music embodies the vibrant presence of Samantha and while we hear it play, we see Theodore at different moments throughout the day. Theodore happily interacts with people, helps strangers at the local store and has fun with Amy. We see that Theodore gradually re-learns how to care for others and realizes what it means to engage in a relationship of mutual responsibility. Theodore embraces the world, an attitude that reminds us of the Theodore we have seen in the flashbacks. We see him engage in moments of child-like wonder as he looks over the city, admires a sculpture and looks marvelled at a dancer. Theodore touches the world again and allows himself to be touched. This is emphasized in a shot we see during this sequence. In a medium close-up we see Theodore strokes the smooth surface of an airplane-sculpture (Image 3.7). Following Barad, we could state that the more Theodore touches the world, the more close he gets to others, intimately interacting with the infinity of other beings. We realize that Samantha teaches Theodore how to be with others and the world, engaging in an intimate relation of reciprocity. In this way, the aesthetics of whimsical also embody Theodore and reflect this process of learning to be with the world. Thus, the films aesthetics of whimsical embody both Samantha and Theodore. Moreover, these aesthetics present a place where they meet, where their solitary self-enclosedness breaks down and they ecologically merge together. Moreover, these aesthetics of whimsical communicate with the spectator in a very particular way. In the last chapter of his book, Brown elaborates on communication following Jean-Luc Nancy. ‘Being with’ the world means that we always exist in relation with each other. Communication with each other is an affirmation of this interrelatedness and thus means to be exposed to each other. Nancy writes: ‘To speak with’ is not so much speaking to oneself or to one another, nor is it ‘saying’, nor is it proffering. Rather, ‘to speak with’ is the conversation and conatus of a being-exposed, which exposes only the secret of its own exposition. (92) In other words, communication and thus being-exposed to another means accepting that the other is there and that we co-exist. This beautifully emphasizes how Theodore, who is being-exposed to others as he gradually communicate more (not only in language but

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also in touch), becomes aware of his interrelatedness with others and subsequently learns how to care. But this also accounts for the spectator. For Nancy, cinema, as a way of communicating also involves being-exposed to others. Importantly, Nancy refers to this characteristic of cinema as being ‘ex-peau-sed’ (peau being French for skin), since the spectator contacts the skin of the film during the filmic event. In the last part of this chapter, I would like to show how Her invites the spectator to come close and engage with the film’s skin. By touching and being touched by these images, the spectator is expeaused to the infinity of other beings with which we are interrelated, invited to care and enter into responsibility. This process engages the spectator with Samantha but moreover bounds him to the life-world of Theodore. Like him, the spectator gets an insight in how to be open and intimate with the world. Through the aesthetics of whimsical, the spectator is invited in a mode of haptic visuality, as characterized in the previous chapter as a mode of seeing that glares instead of gazes (162). In haptic visuality the film invites the spectator to come close the textures of the film and lingers over its surface, tactically engaging with it. The omnipresence of light, as a characteristic of the aesthetics of whimsical, firstly invites the spectator to do so. In the introduction of her book, Barker explains in what way light is always perceived as a phenomenon that only affects our visual sense. The emission and reception of light is actually a matter of falling on and being reflected or absorbed by an object. Therefore, it is also a tactile phenomenon (30). We can feel light; sunlight caressing us with its warmth on a cold winter day or stinging and tickling in summer. In this way, Barker metaphorically explains film as a medium that touches us like light (30). The substance of cinema makes close contact with our skin, it warms it, leaves traces or draws foreword a shiver (30). With its aesthetics of whimsical, Her also emphasizes light as a tactile phenomenon. As stated before, we often encounter sunlight dancing and flickering on the screen. In some cases the sunlight even prohibits us from seeing what goes on. In this way, light, as a filmic texture becomes very dominant. We can recognize this is the earlier discussed sequence, which portrays Theodore’s renewed engagement with the world. After the shot in which Theodore touches the airplane, the spectator is presented with a medium close-up of the airplane. On and off, the sight of the airplane is troubled, as the sunlight takes over the screen, almost blinding the spectator. A similar moment occurs when Samantha and Theodore go on a vacation together. As Theodore makes his

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way onto the mountain and looks down to enjoy the view, our view is again troubled by the sunlight, which forms beautiful dancing figures on screen (image 3.8). Like Theodore, we can almost feel the sunlight tickling our skin. This process then ties the spectator to Theodore, who also gets an insight in how to touch again and engage with the world anew. Like Theodore, who touches the smooth metal of the sculpture and feels the snow crunch under his feet, the spectator engages with other natural textures. The film contains an important motive of matter, in which we are closely presented with different material substances. In an extreme close-up, drops of water fall, particles of dust dance in the air, or ice melts (image 3.9). The camera brings us close to these materials, closer than the human eye could grasp, making it frequently hard to see what exactly we are looking at. Besides, the film lets our eyes rest on these surfaces for a long time. In these moments, we are again invited to touch the surface and softly stroke. Barker states that films frequently speak through these textures and make meaning at our fingertips (44). Like Theodore we gain something in the moment we are being touched. Affected by the film we become aware of our openness. By being with the film we learn how to be with the world and to partake in a reciprocal bond of mutual affect. Like the close-ups in the beach sequence, these shots of matter embody Samantha. Namely, these moments of matter are connected to an important phrase, pronounced by Samantha in the film. In the period where Samantha feels insecure about not having a body she takes a physics course. During this course she learns that even though she does not have a

Image 3.8 and 3.9

body, everything in the world is made of matter, including her. Or as Samantha puts it:

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“We are all under the same blanket”. Samantha points to the idea of the flesh, to a presubstance of which both she and Theodore are made. When Samantha wants to tell Theodore that she is leaving, she asks him to lay down with her in the bedroom. As Theodore lies down and Samantha tells him the news, an extreme close-up is presented to the spectator, in which he sees particles of dust dancing in a beam of sunlight. These shots of matter ambiguously signify Samantha’s presence. They express Samantha’s presence to Theodore and us, even though she cannot be seen. But, Samantha will leave the material world and will even not be present in her absence. However, as Barad has stated, touching brings us into contact with the infinity of other beings, virtual and actual, of this world and beyond this world. In this way, Theodore can still be in contact with Samantha, even though she is no longer of the material world. All he has to do is just touch and engage in intimacy with others and the world. The same accounts for the spectator, who also realizes that being in touch means to engage with many other beings. By tactically engaging with the surface, we are not only in contact with Samantha and Theodore and other virtual beings, but also with the infinity of all virtual and actual beings that are of and beyond the world. And through touch, like Theodore, we also enter the realm of responsibility. I have shown how Theodore, in opening up to the world, becomes able to be responsible for others. In the end of the film, Theodore writes a letter to his ex-wife to apologize for his actions. Also, he visits Amy to comfort her after her OS has left too. By opening up to the world and engaging in a tactile, intimate relation of ‘being with’ Theodore has learned how to care. Beautifully, the film ends with an image of touch in which we see Theodore and Amy close together. Their bodies merge with the twilight scenery, again presenting us a moment of intimately ‘being with’ (image 3.10). Throughout the film, the spectator also gets an insight in how to care too. In haptically interacting with the aesthetics of whimsical the boundaries between the spectator and the film, the spectator and the world, merge. The spectator is expeaused to the Other and becomes aware of his interrelatedness with the world. In this process the spectator learns to care. Like Theodore, the spectator also engages with others and the world, in gestures of care and mutual responsibility. In this chapter I hope to have shown how Her embodies a change from ‘being in’ to ‘being with’ the world. The emerging aesthetics of whimsical embody both Samantha reciprocal engagement and Theodore’s learning to ‘be with’ the word. In

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haptically engaging with the aesthetics of whimsical, in touching and being touched, the spectator is tied to Theodore’s life world and also gets an insight in how to engage in an open relationship with the film and the world. I hope to have challenged the popular transhumanist interpretation of the film. Samantha has left the material world and the spectator sticks with Theodore, who embraces his embodied nature. But this does not mean that Her is a film that places humans at the centre. The film recognizes that human beings are open beings, which do not only shape the world but are moreover shaped by it. I find one quote from Morton’s book illustrative of what Her thinks as a filmmind. He states: Ecology includes all the ways we imagine how we live together. Ecology is profoundly about coexistence. Existence is always coexistence. No man is an island. Human beings need each other as much as they need an environment. Human beings are each others’ environment. Thinking ecologically isn’t simply about nonhuman things. Ecology has to do with you and me. (4) Her is a film about our mutual imbrications in the flesh. We are mutually interdependent and interrelated with each other, with other entities in the world and therefore should treat others with responsibility and care. In this way, Her could be characterized as an ecological filmmind that thinks for the future. Hence, Her inspires us to be with her, but moreover to be with the world.

Image 3.10

Image 3.10

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Conclusion   Ecology is not just about global warming, recycling and solar power – and also not just about everyday relationships between humans and nonhumans. It has to do with love, loss, despair and compassion. It has to do with depression and psychosis. It has to do with amazement, open-mindedness, and wonder. […] It has to do with concepts of space and time. […] It has to do with ideology and critique. […] It has to do with race, class, and gender. It has to do with sexuality. It has to do with ideas of the self and the weird paradoxes of subjectivity. It has to do with society. It has to do with coexistence. Timothy Morton – The Ecological Thought (2)

In this thesis I intended at exposing how Lucy, Under the Skin and Her are contemporary filmminds, embedded in the Anthropocene era, which actively contemplate the human-world relationship. By analysing them closely and critically, I hope to have shown what thoughts they embody, how they embody those thoughts and how these thoughts are transferred to the viewer. As organic non-human entities, as vibrant matters, films contemplate in their own manner. I wondered to what extent Lucy, Under the Skin and Her could be characterized as ecological filmminds that think for the future and recognize our coexistence and entanglement with other beings. The filmic event as a reciprocal dialogue, in which thoughts are exchanged between the filmmind and the viewer, might inspire us to think differently. I hope to have shown how all three films think about their characters and the subjects they present, by means of their own complex aesthetic systems. Lucy presents us a women becoming a god-like supercomputer of pure ratio. The film presents its anthropocentric thought through the staged lecture of Professor Norman and works out these ideas in Lucy’s timeline. Her story is narratively and visually presented as a journey of infinite progression towards transcendence, in which she eventually moves beyond matter, biology and evolution. In this way, the spectator is pulled into a transhumanist fantasy. Lucy thinks hierarchy, separation and self-enclosedness and should be understood as the opposite of an ecological filmmind. The film intensifies Cartesian thought and continues to think anthropocentrically. Under the Skin is far more ambiguous in its film-thinking. Aesthetically, the film embodies the phenomenology of the alien. Her journey towards conscious

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embodiment presents an aesthetic shift from a predatory gaze to an empathetic glare. In this way, the film becomes a play of different dichotomies and their correlation. Through its optical images, the first half of the film presents the world with a hyperCartesian distance, but embodies a progressive female gaze. The second half of the film re-emerges the spectator in the realm of empathy and dissolves the boundaries between subject and object, mind and body, through its emerging haptic visuality. However, the film also re-establishes the correlation between the woman and emotion, the woman and the body. This accumulates in the film’s violent ending, in which the now empathetic and vulnerable alien is raped and murdered by a man. Under the Skin could be said to think ecologically, but also emphasizes that thinking the ecological thought might be difficult and that challenging hierarchies will be met with violent resistance. Last, Her presents an aesthetic shift from ‘being in’ to ‘being with’ the world. Through its aesthetics of whimsical, Her emphasizes our interrelatedness and interconnectedness with the world and all human and nonhuman entities in and beyond it. Like Theodore, the spectator is invited to touch the screen and realize its openness. In this way, Her could be said to truly think ecologically. As an ecological filmmind, it invites the spectator to grasp our entangled being and act upon it. Her thinks for the future and asks the spectator to engage in gestures of care and mutual responsibility. Thus, while some of the films see the prospect of an ecological catastrophe as an invitation to think for the future of the earth, others persist thinking anthropocentrically. Some are afraid of the ecological thought, afraid of worldly intimacy, while others welcome it. Most clearly, Lucy affirms the human’s privileged position and contemplates about the possibility of overcoming materiality and biology. In this manner, it tries to escape the consequences of an ecological catastrophe. In Irmgard Emmelhainz words, this film would be characterized as a narrative that interprets the Anthropocene as ‘as fixable catastrophe’ or in other words: as something the human can overcome (1). Lucy thus keeps man at its very centre (Emmelhainz 8). More progressively, the other two films think about reconciling human life with ecology. By means of their non-human filming they contemplate about the entanglement of all beings. Moreover, they acknowledge that ecology, as Morton argues, it not only about climate change or solar power (2). Ecology is also a matter of human experience and thus involves thinking about love and care, despair, compassion and wonder. Additionally, these ideas are all embedded in complex cultural structures

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and ideologies that need to be critically examined. Thus, thinking ecologically does not mean moving beyond cultural thinking. It also involves thinking about gender, sex, race, the self and society and the way these ideas frame our relationship with each other and the world. Both Under the Skin and Her contemplate about this and invite the spectator to reflect upon these complex relations too. My research opens the way for other important questions. Initially, it invites further reflection upon Scarlet Johansson as an actress and public figure. When expanding this research, it would be interesting to analyse further how these (ecological) filmminds think about women. I have already engaged with this subject matter in the chapter on Under the Skin, however it would be interesting to expand this question to the other two films. Different reviews and articles have already mentioned the feminist potential of the two other films. An interesting starting point to engage with the common ground between ecological thinking and feminism would be the growing work done in the important field of object-oriented feminism. It would also be possible to expand this to a more cultural star analysis. Different articles, such as “Scarlet Johansson: a Star With Politics Under her Skin” have analysed Johansson’s deliberate choices to play these characters. In this way, it would be interesting to see how her choices and the eventual films that come out of them, affect the presentation of women in contemporary culture. But that would be a rather different project. My research also invites to analyse the potential ethical dimension of these films. Her invites the viewer to think an ecological thought and act with care and responsibility. Lucy, in contrast, keeps the human at the centre and affirms a dangerous, anthropocentric way of thinking. It would be fruitful to analyse the films the perspective of ethics and film-ethics, examining the ethical questions these films pose and the way they engage the spectator with those questions. Lastly, my focus has been on the genre of science fiction, a genre that specifically revolves around questions of otherness and humanness. It would be interesting to expand the concept of the ecological filmmind to other genres. How do other films think ecologically? How does this differ in other genres? How would this apply to documentaries, such as the work of Werner Herzog? Or drama? For example, The Tree of Life, mentioned earlier, would be an interesting case study. As a drama, this film might seem human-centred, but could be characterized otherwise due its specific

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cinematography. Subsequently, comparisons could be made between different genres, opening new questions and problems to examine further. To conclude, by examining Lucy, Under the Skin and Her as filmminds of the Anthropocene, I hope to have provided an original perspective on these films. Furthermore, I hope to present films as possible, important companions in the future of thought. Morton states that the ecological thought is like a virus: once you think it, you cannot un-think it. Once it is open, you will not be able to close it (4). The ecological thought is difficult, but important. In this manner, I hope to have inspired my readers to think ecologically.

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Bibliography  

Literature Ayers, Drew. Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture and Material Imagination. Unpublished Dissertation. Georgia State University, 2012. Barad, Karen. "On Touching: The Inhuman that Therefore I Am." Differences 23.3 (2012): 206-223. Barker, Jennifer. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2009. Bergen, Hilary. “Moving Past Matter: Challenges of Intimacy and Freedom in Spike Jonze’s Her”. Artciencia 8.17 (2014): 1-6. Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology: or What is it Like to Be a Thing. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Britt, Ryan. “Aliens Don’t Eat Chocolate Cake: Under the Skin and the Science Fiction Art Film”.Tor.com. 7-4-2014. 4-52015. . Brook, Isis. “Can Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of ‘Flesh’ Inform or even Transform Environmental thinking?”. Environmental Values 14 (2005): 353–62. Brown, William. Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age. Berghahn Books, 2013.

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Bryant, Levi R. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Emmelhainz, Irmgard. “Conditions of Visuality Under the Anthropocene and Images of the Anthropocene to Come”. E-flux 63 (2015): 1-13. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Hanich, Julian. Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear. London: Routledge, 2011. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Haring, Julie. “Her-meneutics of the Subject or Re-embodying the Human in Spike Jonze’s Her”. Affinities. 18-4-2014. 4-5-2015. . Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ivakhiv, Adrian. Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. London: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2013. Jagodzinski, Jan. “Life in Art, Art in Life. Bio-Art Ethics Within the Anthropocene”. Synnyt/Origins (2015): 13-25. Lack, Jonathan. “A Free-Form Analysis of Spike Jonze’s Radiant Her”. Fade to Lack. 8-12-2013. 4-5-2015. . Landecker, Hannah. Culturing Cells: How Cells Became Technologies. London,

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Harvard University Press: 2007. Laine, Tarja. Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015. ---. Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Filmstudies. New York: Continuum, 2011. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors we Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Luskin, Casey. “Save Your Brain: Skip Luc Besson’s Fantastical Lucy. Evolution News. 2-9-2014. 29-5-2015. . Marks, Laura. The Skin of Film. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Martin, Adrian. “Objectively Yours”. Filmkrant. 15-1-2013. 29-5-2015. http://www.filmkrant.nl/world_wide_angle/8495. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald Landes. London: Routledge. 2002. ---. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Nancy, Jean Luc. Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. O’Brien, Sarah. Unnerving Images: Cinematic Representations of Animal Slaughter and the Ethics of Shock. Unpublished Dissertation. Toronto:

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University of Toronto, 2012. Orr, Christopher. “Lucy: The Dumbest Movie Ever Made About Brain Capacity”. The Atlantic. 25-7-2014. 29-5-2015. . Osterweil, Ara. “Under The Skin: The Perils of Becoming Female.” Film Quarterly 67.4 (2014): 44-51. Scovell, Adam. “Under the Skin: The Human Landscape”. Celluloid Wicker Man. 10-3-2014. 4-5-2015. . Shaviro, Steven. “Spike Jonze’s Her”. The Pinocchio Theory. 21-1-2014. 4-52015. . ---. The Universe of Things: on Speculative Realism. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: a Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Sparrow, Tom. The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Valencia, Jacqueline. “On Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin”. These Girls on Film. 06-08-2014. . Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

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Audiovisual Film4. “Keeping it Alien: Jonathan Glazer on Under the Skin”. Youtube. 18-032014. 27-03-2015. . Her. Dir. Spike Jonze. Annapurna Pictures, 2013. Lucy. Dir. Luc Besson. Canal Plus, 2013. Swinney, Jacob. “What Makes Spike Jonze’s Movies Unique? A Video Essay”. Press Play. 8-12-2014. 29-5-2015. . The Tree of Life. Dir. Terrence Malick. Fox Searchlight, 2011. Under the Skin. Dir. Jonathan Glazer. Film4, 2013.

Images Front Page Image I: Still from Lucy. MCU of Lucy from a low perspective. The shot focuses on a human being and places it on a pedestal, illustrating the film’s transhumanist ideas. 00:28:22. Image II: Still from Under the Skin. LS of the alien presenting a dissolve between her and nature, illustrating the embodied-ness the film thinks at this moment. 01:34:00. Chapter 1 Image 1.1: Still from Lucy. CU frogs reproducing. 00:22:38. Image 1.2: Still from Lucy. CU birds reproducing. 00:22:39. Image 1.3: Still from Lucy. LS humans reproducing. 00:22:40. Image 1.4: Still from Lucy. MS primitive human. 00:01:34. Image 1.5: Still from Lucy. LS Taipei. 00:01:51. Image 1.6: Still from Lucy. MS people in Taipei working. 00:01:54. 65

Image 1.7: Still from Lucy. MCU Lucy in conversation with Richard. 00:02:08. Image 1.8: Still from Lucy. MCU Lucy accessing and altering information. 00:58:00. Image 1.9: Still from Lucy. MCU Lucy’s body dissolving. 00:54:23. Image 1.10: Still from Lucy. Big Bang Image. 00:19:23. Image 1.11: Still from Lucy. XCU Lucy witnessing the Big Bang. 01:19:06. Chapter 2 Image 2.1: Still from Under the Skin. MS predatory gaze. 00:12:29. Image 2.2: Still from Under the Skin. LS beach scene. 00:24:30. Image 2.3: Still from Under the Skin. MS alien looking at the adventurer. 00:24:12. Image 2.4: Still from Under the Skin. XCU eating chocolate cake. 01:08:45. Image 2.5: Still from Under the Skin XCU tapping fingers. 01:15:29. Image 2.6: Still from Under the Skin. Haptic image alien CU. 00:47:42. Image 2.7: Still from Under the Skin. Over shoulder shot alien looking at her human mask. 01:27:35. Chapter 3 Image 3.1: Still from Her. MCU Theodore elevator. 00:04:54. Image 3.2: Still from Her. LS Theodore square. 00:05:23. Image 3.3: Still from Her. XCU Catherine. 01:07:18. Image 3.4: Still from Her. MS Theodore playing with children. 00:39:15. Image 3.5: Still from Her. CU feet. 00:47:55. Image 3.6: Still from Her. CU Theodore beach. 00:48:55. Image 3.7: Still from Her. MS Touching the airplane. 01:32:13. Image 3.8: Still from Her. LS Theodore vacation. 00:01:37. Image 3.9: Still from Her. XCU melting ice. 01:39:11. Image 3.10: Still from Her. LS Theodore and Amy ending. 01:58:15.

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Appendix  

Author Information Name and Address Zoë de Ligt (10000350) Messchaertplein 64 3131 TG Vlaardingen The Netherlands Contact Information [email protected] +31-641116993

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