Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World

APOCALYPSE - CINEMA

PETER SZENDY

2012 AND OTHER ENDS OF THE WORLD

APOCALYPSE - CINEMA

Translated by Will Bishop

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This book was originally published in French as Peter Szendy, L’apocalypse-cinéma: 2012 et autres fin du monde © Capricci, 2012.

This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange). French Voices logo designed by Serge Bloch.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Szendy, Peter.

[Apocalypse-cinéma. English]

Apocalypse-cinema : 2012 and other ends of the world / Peter Szendy ; translated by Will Bishop. — First edition.

pages cm

"This book was originally published in French as Peter Szendy,

L’apocalypse-cinéma: 2012 et autres fin du" — Title page verso

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-6480-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8232-6481-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Science fiction films—History and criticism. 2. Apocalypse in motion pictures. I. Title.

PN1995.9.S26S9413 2015

791.43’615—dc23

2014030503

FOR GIL ANIDJAR

CONTENTS

Foreword: One Sun Too Many

by Samuel Weber

Chapter 1

Melancholia, or The After-All

Chapter 2

The Last Man on Earth, or Film as Countdown

Chapter 3

Cloverfield, or The Holocaust of the Date

Chapter 4

Terminator, or The Arche-Traveling Shot

Chapter 5

2012, or Pyrotechnics

Chapter 6

A.I., or The Freeze

Chapter 7

Pause, for Inventory (the Apo)

Chapter 8

Watchmen, or The Layering of the Cineworld

Chapter 9

Sunshine, or The Black-and-White Radiography

Chapter 10

Blade Runner, or The Interworlds

Chapter 11

Twelve Monkeys, or The Pipes of the Apocalypse

Chapter 12

The Road, or The Language of a Drowned Era

Chapter 13

The Blob, or The Bubble

Postface

Il n’y a pas de hors-film, or Cinema and Its Cinders

Notes

Index of Films

FOREWORD: One Sun Too Many

Samuel Weber

And truly, I saw something, the likes of which I never saw.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

What in daguerreotype must have felt inhuman, not to say deadly, was the (moreover prolonged) looking into the camera, since the apparatus [Apparat] records the human image without returning its gaze.

—Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire

The apocalypse is in fashion. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when it first became evident that human beings had acquired the power to destroy life on earth, and to destroy it in a spectacular and rapid manner, apocalyptic thoughts and images have increasingly proliferated and, at least in certain parts of the world—a world soon to be globalized—progressively fascinated what was once called the popular imagination. No wonder, then, that the most popular medium of the post–Second World War period—cinema—and today its audiovisual successor should have become the vehicle for deploying visions of the end of all visibility and for providing material for imagining the unimaginable. In an essay that takes up this tendency and examines it critically, and which also informs much of Peter Szendy’s remarkable construction of an Apocalypse-Cinema—namely No Apocalypse—Not Now!—Jacques Derrida argues that there exists a secret, more or less implicit, affinity between literature and the nuclear referent of apocalyptic self-destruction, since, precisely by virtue of its totality, the latter can be represented only via a certain fictionality and thus retains a literary quality. In Apocalypse-Cinema Peter Szendy argues that a similar affinity exists between the apocalypse and cinema—between anticipations, intimations, or representations of the end of the world and what could be called the finitude of the film as a structure delimited in time—in short: between the end of the world and the end of the film. His emblem and experience of this apocalyptic end is the dark screen that separates the final image of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia from its credits—a blackness that lasts somewhat more than ten seconds, in which von Trier’s film is no longer really cinema any more but rather a cinema of the after-all.

Szendy thus reminds us of an aspect of the apocalypse that is often forgotten in its common usage. This usage generally reflects two moments. First, as Szendy writes, "In Greek apocalypsis means revelation, unveiling, uncovering." Revealing, unveiling, uncovering—these words indicate why a medium such as the cinema could stand in a privileged relation to the apocalypse. But the etymology of the Greek word also suggests something else: In order for something to be unveiled, uncovered, or revealed, it must in some sense or other have already been there all the time. It cannot simply be thought as the advent or announcement of something entirely new—even or especially if this newness involves the destruction of the existing world. Second, and no less important, is that the apocalyptic revelation—at least as it comes down to us from what is probably its most important textual articulation in the Book of Revelation of St. John, the book that concludes the New Testament—is not simply an uncovering of what has been but a manifestation of what will be: of what is to come, after all, if we understand all here as applying to all previous life on earth. In short, the apocalypse involves a revelation both of the end of one world and the beginning of another.

In the account of St. John, the one is essentially related to the other. What is to come involves the retribution and reward of what has been: the damnation of the sinful and the saving of the faithful. The apocalypse, at least in its Christian origins—and this still holds in different ways today, even in an apparently secular culture (which may or may not be specific to those parts of the world informed by biblical traditions)—involves a violent, destructive but potentially—selectively—redemptive transition from one world to another, from one life—that limited by guilt, sin, and its consequence: mortality—to another and possibly better one.

But in many of the films examined in this book, it is the end as such, the end itself, that tends to overshadow its aftereffects: This is the ambiguity of what Szendy, playing on a French idiom, calls the after-all (après-tout). If, after all, there is only the end, then how is this end to be imagined, represented, depicted? Does the apocalypse entail the end of everything, everyone, or is it just the end of some one, anyone: the one required to experience something like an end?

This is a question that Derrida, in the essay already mentioned, and which informs many of the arguments and interpretations elaborated in Apocalypse-Cinema, dares to address in what is perhaps one of the most provocative passages not just in this essay but in all of his writings:

My own death, so to speak, as an individual can always be anticipated phantasmatically, symbolically too as a negativity at work.… Images, grief, all the resources of memory and tradition, can cushion the reality of that death, whose anticipation remains therefore interwoven with fictionality, or if you prefer, with literature; and this is so even if I live this anticipation in anguish, terror, despair, as a catastrophe that I have no reason not to equate with the annihilation of humanity as a whole; this catastrophe takes place with each individual death. There is no common measure able to persuade me that a personal mourning is less grave than a nuclear war.¹

If Derrida can state that he—and with him, presumably any singular living being—has no reason not to equate the anticipated catastrophe [that] takes place with each individual death with annihilation of humanity as a whole, it is because the death of that singular being takes with it a world—which for that being was also the world. It is the point of view of such a singular living being that then becomes a condition for thinking, experiencing, and depicting involved in Apocalypse-Cinema.

Each Time Unique, the End of the World is the English title of a collection of texts written by Derrida to commemorate the passing of friends and colleagues, and from which Peter Szendy quotes the following memorable passage:

Death, writes Derrida—and not only the death of a human but that of every living being (animal, human, or divine)—death declares each time the end of the world in totality, the end of every possible world, and each time the end of the world as unique totality, therefore irreplaceable and therefore infinite.²

If Szendy also argues that film (as) a Western invention … is no doubt profoundly Christian, the contrast of Derrida’s linkage of the end of a singular life with the end of a unique world, with the Revelation of St. John the Divine, points to the force field in which Apocalypse-Cinema plays itself out. The vision retold by John is both cosmic and judgmental: The apocalypse is also the scene of the Last Judgment, in which the guilty and the sinful will be punished and the virtuous and faithful rewarded—rewarded with that Eternal Life in a passage that Derrida cites without comment at the conclusion of his own essay:

One day, a man came, he sent missives to the seven churches. People call this the Apocalypse. Seized by the spirit, the man had received the order: What you see, write in a book and send it to the seven churches. When the man turned around so as to know which voice was giving him this order, he saw in the middle of seven golden candlesticks, with seven stars in his right hand, someone from whose mouth emerged a sharp double-edged sword, and who told him, among other things, I am the first and the last. I was dead and here I am alive.³

The apocalypse revealed to John, and that he then passes on to posterity, is thus repeated and recalled by the fourteen (2 × 7) chapters that compose Apocalypse-Cinema, but with a significant difference. The I who was dead and who can now say that here I am alive—the resurrected I of the Christian Gospel, here survives as the cine-eye⁴ that conditions the incinerating cinefication of the representable world.

Writing about photography, Walter Benjamin observed that what can be terrifying about the eye of the camera—the apparatus as he calls it—is that it does not return the glance of those it records. At the somewhat apocalyptic conclusion of Apocalypse-Cinema, Peter Szendy takes this thought one step further, in envisaging a world in which I, a machine—quoting Vertov—am showing you the world as only I can see it.⁵ But if this apocalyptic or postapocalyptic world is one in which sound has faded into silence and where the view of the point of view associated with a self-conscious I has also burned in the holocaust of cinefication, what survives are the ashes of images that signify in cinefying—and which hold open the possibility of being read—even if there are no subjects left to do the reading.

This is a chilling commentary on a process that Walter Benjamin already saw at work in the emergence of the nineteenth-century novel: What draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.⁶ But the incineration and ashes that traverse the films discussed in Apocalypse-Cinema throw out little warmth for their viewers. To be sure, this will not prevent viewers from seeking precisely to warm their frosty lives on the more or less spectacular end of the world that they can see and hear—and in that sense, provisionally survive. But Szendy’s readings and stagings of the films discussed in this book make clear just how tenuous and temporary such a consolation has to be. Apocalyptic cinema thus strives not merely to represent apocalypse, in whatever form, nor just to tell about it, but to enact it, with as great an immediacy as is possible for an audiovisual medium. For as such a medium, apocalypse-cinema is involved not just in representing the end of a world or of worlds, but in traversing them, cutting across their boundaries in search of its own enabling limits.

Retracing this process, Szendy uncovers the cinematic consequences of the Nietzschean insight that seeing is always seeing the abyss, that discursive language is the attempt to paper over the void, and that, therefore, music can cross over the abyss of the interworlds and become the postapocalyptic marker par excellence.⁷ If apocalyptic cinema is thus constantly striving to test the limits of signification, this is nowhere more palpable than at the beginning and end of the film that, as already indicated, stands for Szendy as the exemplary incarnation of apocalypse-cinema: Melancholia. Life and death, death and life of the filmic image: Such is the story, the only story perhaps, that all apocalypses portrayed on screen tell. They narrate the end of the cineworld.⁸ The music that frames Melancholia, Wagner’s prelude to Tristan and Isolde, is clearly associated with that story, and even more, with its link to erotic yearning that ends in death. But what is striking is the contrast, especially in the prelude to the film, between Wagner’s prelude, a classical instance of what the composer called unending melody,⁹ and the images that it accompanies. Whereas one of the chief characteristics of the prelude’s unending melody is that it seems to progress in a continuous, uninterrupted flow, the images that we see are anything but uninterrupted—until, of course, the final scene, in which the swelling melody is brutally interrupted by a most nonmelodic explosion marking the fatal collision