The Paradox of Film: An Industry of Sex, A Form of Seduction (On Jean Baudrillard's Seduction and The Cinema)

Film-Philosophy 14.
2010
The Paradox of film: an industry of sex, a form of

seduction (on Jean Baudrillards Seduction and the
cinema)
M. Hunter Vaughan
Washington University in St Louis
Jean Baudrillard, the misfit. Jean Baudrillard, who told us that the Gulf War
never happened, who drew our attention to the perils of a civilization that
choses to lead a virtual existence in an arena of images and simulacra - this is
the Baudrillard we are mostly familiar with.
champion of appearances?
But Jean Baudrillard, the
Baudrillard, more-feminist-than-the-feminists?
This Baudrillard remains buried in the stacks of a prolific career spanning

over forty years and involving some of the most radical systematic
deconstructions of Western culture, society and politics.
Baudrillard has
primarily been heralded as an enemy of the world of images, the surface

superficiality of consumer culture; it stands as no surprise, then, that in most
theoretical assessments of his work there is little mention of Seduction (orig.
1979), a text aimed at restoring a great amount of value to the surface of
things.1 While apostles of Baudrillard such as Norman K. Denzin tend to
offer brief and, in this writers opinion, erroneous summaries of seductions
potential of unmasking the order of appearances (1991, 32), Seduction has
yet to be understood as a praise for the world of appearances, play, and
reversibility, as encouragement for the resistance of the orders of law,
De la sduction was originally published in France by ditions Galile in 1979; the

version used in this essay is the first American translation, trans. Brian Singer (New
York: St. Martins Press, 1990).
Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615
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Film-Philosophy 14.2
certainty, and production.2
2010
In the following pages, I hope to introduce
readers to a fascinating but often overlooked text of Baudrillards and, in

doing so, to demonstrate that Baudrillards text offers a unique and yet
unexplored insight into the dichotomous and contradictory nature of cinema
- this medium which as an instrument of popular culture acts according to
the modern logic of production, but as a form owes more to the
transformative and playful semiology of the pre-modern.
Paradox of the dream factory

It must be acknowledged that the concepts set forth in Seduction are
somewhat anomalous to Baudrillards more well-known work on simulacra
and the hyperreal, a division that Douglas Kellner has etched out in his
influential article on Baudrillards philosophical trajectory.3 Though only
glossing over the text, Kellner notes that Seduction provides a turning point
away
from
Baudrillards
sociological
writing
philosophical and literary discourse. (2006, 14)
and
towards
more
It is important not to
mistaken this work - nor the claims and clarifications attempted in this
article - for Baudrillards later writing on simulation and simulacra, which
provide a more obvious platform for critiquing image-culture. As Catherine
Constable notes, in the later work signs and metaphors become spectacle
rather than artifice, but in Seduction Baudrillard attempts to understand
artifice as being comprised of subversive qualities such as ephermerality,
transition, and play. (2009, 215)
Baudrillards Seduction offers first and foremost a deconstruction of
the twentieth-century culture of production and gratification: in other words,
of sex and capital, dominant tendencies that form foundations rather than
2
Denzins Images of Postmodern Society, written in as a dialogue with Jean

Baudrillard (1991, vii), offers a perfect example of how Seduction is ostracized from
most works using Baudrillard: while the book offers very interesting concepts of
simulacra and simulation, its use of seduction is entirely lacking a proper reading of
Baudrillards text and ends up relegating itself to an analysis of how capitalism
seduces Charlie Sheens character in Oliver Stones Wall Street (1987). See ibid., 834.
3
See Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard After Modernity: Provocations on a
Provocateur and Challenger.
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surfaces of our discourse and praxis. Sex and capital are viewed as absolute,
unwavering, orderly.
Seduction, however, exists on the surface, denying
absolute anchors in meaning and self-definition. This difference takes on

added prescience as the world of surfaces and the world of the real become
more and more interchangeable or, as it may be, in competition for our
favor. In his opening page Baudrillard defines seduction as the artifice of the
world, claiming that all things wish to lose themselves in appearance.
(1990, 1) This is a particularly poignant claim in the context of looking at
imagistic or image-based media, such as cinema and photography, and in
light of the twentieth centurys mass medial obsession with images. In the
words of Tom Gunning, cinema arrived (not coincidentally) just as Western
civilization sharpened its lust of the eyes, and late-nineteenth and early
twentieth-century imagistic culture expresses an almost unquenchable desire
to consume the world through images. (1989, 746)
This argument is
nothing new to the Baudrillard reader, and is in fact central to his writing on
simulacra and simulation; so how does seduction differ? Seduction differs in
that here Baudrillard has not yet conceded the surface world of appearances
to the forces of homogeneity and dominant ideology. Instead, he views in
seduction the possibility of reclaiming the lost art of play, nonsense, and
indeterminacy.
This play of surfaces and signs, for Baudrillard, was
acculturated into a larger order set in place to deny the very threats of
polysemy and play made possible by the seductive force of images, as we will
see in the role of psychoanalysis and the centralization of sex and production
in twentieth-century discourse on gender politics. Baudrillard laments that
the past centurys obsession with revealing the machinery of the unconscious
and making sexuality a public forum of debate has circumscribed our natural
indeterminacy to a phallic order of law, consequently assimilating the
potential liberty of woman through the institutions of psychoanalysis and
feminism.
The hypocritical insistence on truth provided by psychoanalysis reacts
conservatively to our natural tendencies to defy unwavering absolutes. To
seduce, on the other hand, is to die as reality and reconstitute oneself as
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illusion. (Baudrillard 1990, 69) To vacate the false absolutism of the real in
exchange for a world of images indebted more to artifice than to an ontology
of the real: does this not make one think of cinema, and in particular the
popular cinema of mainstream Hollywood? In these pages I hope to set up a
dichotomy as introduced in the title of this article, which I believe
Baudrillards notion of seduction brings us to the heart of. Cinema as a form
that is based in constant change, indeterminacy, and appearances; and,
cinema as an industry organized to lodge its artificial constructs as truth. Let
us begin with the latter.
Baudrillards fascination with seduction provides us with a powerful
tool in the analysis of a paradoxical technological art that Hortense
Powdermaker described in her 1950 study as a dream factory, a
conceptualization of this duplicity of art and industry that John Belton has
since applied as a definitive term for mainstream Hollywood.4 Cinema is
modeled as an industrial practice that follows the assembly-line production
and mass marketing practices of the late industrial period; however, the
product that it spits out is not a tangible object, but instead a series of myths
and illusions. Cinema is a dream factory. This is as true for the actual film
texts, characters, and stories, as it is for the fictitious reality erected to keep
the public enthralled with its majesty, the constellation of blinking lights and
painted masks that seduces us like moths to a flame: the star system.
Baudrillard even refers to the system of cinema idols as the only important
constellation of collective seduction produced by modern timesour only
myth in an age incapable of generating great myths. (1990, 94-5)
Baudrillard is strikingly uncritical of this, in fact seemingly more in awe,
though I would prefer to cite it as the detrimental path taken from a possibly
fruitful fork in the road.
The devious nature of the star system represents the dangerous side of
seduction, as it demonstrates how such an arena of illusion can be used to
oppress and to exploit the masses through ignorance and to secrete
ideological propaganda into a package that distracts with its pretty colors
4
This term is best described in Beltons textbook, American Cinema, American

Culture 3rd ed., pp.64-7.
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and ornate wrapping. This strategy for profit takes on as-of-yet unexplored
ethical ramifications when the players involved take their personas beyond
the border of Hollywood and into the world of international policy and
public affairs, a mode of engagement increasingly popular and successful as a
new form of star takes shape in this new century. Take for example films
starring - and often vehicles for - Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt, who in public
aspire to the pretension of being Hollywoods political and international
consciences, and whose marketing networks often use the clout of their
extra-filmic activities (Amnesty International, Hurricane Katrina relief) to
raise the bar of their films to think pieces or important works. However,
films of international political intrigue involving these stars - respectively, for
example, A Mighty Heart (Michael Winterbottom, 2007) and Babel
(Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu, 2006) - do not step outside the capitalist
standard of economic inequality provided by salary differentiation, and in
most cases advertise the films not according to the issues they confront but,
instead, according to the classical marketing aesthetics of the star system:
blown up close-ups of beautiful white people.
This is a paradox that is deeply problematic, permitting the Hollywood
industry to enact a farce upon the public that seduces capital from the hands
of filmgoers - and in doing so escalates the economic gap that separates the
dream from the supposed dreamers - on the hypocritical pretense of
progressive political views. Because of this clear application of the seductive
nature of the star system to Baudrillards larger philosophy of the image, this
is the most common reference to Baudrillards theory of seduction in filmphilosophy. But this is only one side of the seduction of cinema, the
menacing part of the fascinating dichotomy that divides the potential of this
medium from the reality of how it is incorporated into an industrial model
for hyper-capitalism.
And, what is offered here is only a philosophical
critique of the industrial practices that historically grew to become the norm
of large-scale studio cinema. But what of the seductive nature of the image
itself?
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I hope in the pages to come to complement this critique of popular

cultural practices - which is reiterative of the typical readings of Baudrillards
philosophy - with what Baudrillard glorifies in this text as the resistant and
subversive capacity of seduction, play, image. Catherine Constable situates
seduction - an inverse power, a reactive reversibility - on the side of
intellectual terrorism practiced by the subversive critical theorist. I hope here
to extend this concept of seduction to the nature of film form and its
proclivity - albeit regulated by the industry and culture of which this industry
is a part - not for representation but for aesthetics, not for permanence but
for transformation.
These dichotomies form the very foundation of the
concerns of French writers such as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancire,

whose recent work focuses on the betrayal of cinemas industrial preference
for (ie ability to profit from) traditional regimes of representation, despite its
aesthetic capacity to move away from these.5 The form of cinema, on the
other hand, represents the aspect of cinema increasingly praised by the recent
acolytes of Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and Rancire: a form
consisting
reversibility.
of
constant
flux,
perpetual
transformation,
and
innate
Indeed the term indeterminacy is central to Deleuzes
development of Bergsonian image-philosophy, as well as to Rancires theory

of how, by surpassing the limitations imposed by subjective perception,
cinema reinstates polyvalence to reality. (Rancire 2001, 236)
These are
issues that must be dealt with later in this essay; first, let us consider the
larger network to which cinemas industrial suppression of this polyvalence is
related.
Sex, Sense and Nonsense

While Baudrillards oft-cited critique of image culture may provide a useful
perspective on Hollywood practices, for example, my goal here is to unearth
the misplaced message of Seduction, the praise of indeterminacy, and to build
from this a conceptual framework for the diversity and flexibility of film
5
See Gilles Deleuze, Cinma I: l'image-mouvement and Cinma II: LImage-temps,

and Jacques Rancire, Le Fable cinmatographique.
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form.
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Baudrillards entire praise of seduction, we will find, is that it
functions according to these very principles: it is fluid, contradictory, playful,

and dialogic, resistant to any single meaning.6 As such, Baudrillard claims,
seduction takes place through its very resistance to certainty, revelation, and
permanence: in a way, through its nonsense. The notion of nonsense has
been central to twentieth-century skeptical philosophy in general (see the
existentialism of Camus, the later Wittgenstein, Lyotards postmodernism),
and through the constantly fluctuating nature of its perspectives and
significations cinema in particular seems to provide for the dissolution of any
interpretive position determined by one fixed meaning. Among the more
systematic thinkers of polyvalence, Wittgenstein writes: Dont for heavens
sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your
nonsense. (1980, 56) The problem with our civilization, according to the
philosophical tradition of Nietzsche and Foucault, is that we are afraid of
our nonsense, and consequently we bind it into the order we impose on the
world.7 Praising the indeterminate nature of film form, Baudrillard writes:
the cinema has never shone except bythe pure vibrancy of non-sense.
(1990, 96) However, the indeterminate nature at the foundation of its form
is constantly tailored, gathered, and smoothed over, in the form of subjective
representations, contrived closures and happy endings.
The Western cultural process of systematizing and smoothing over the
ambiguity and flux is often traced back to the periods of the Renaissance and
Enlightenment, be it in terms of specific cultural procedures (Erwin Panofsky
and the use of perspective in Renaissance painting) or larger socio-cultural
meta-narratives (such as Foucaults analysis of taxonomy during the
Enlightenment).8
Baudrillard updates this argument for the twentieth-
The term dialogic here pays great homage to the literary analysis of Mikhail
Bakhtin, whose theories of dialogism and polyphony describe the circuitous and
interactive nature of meaning-creation.
7
Foucaults workas well as that of many other French post-structuralistswas
greatly inspired by the methodological premise of Nietzsches On the Genealogy of
Morals, which looks at the socio-historic process through which conventions of right
and wrong (as well as institutions to enforce them) have evolved.
8
See Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form and Michel Foucault, The
Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
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centurys arrival of Freud and, later, the sexual revolution, both of which are
marked by the triumph of discourse over nonsense. Nowhere is this more
pronounced for Baudrillard than in the advent of psychoanalysis and the
modern obsession with exposing and analyzing the unconscious. The process
of interpretation at the center of psychoanalysis, Baudrillard claims, allows
for the pursuit of an excess of mythical meaning in place of the frightening and yet innate - abyss of appearances. In resistance to the unknown and the
reversible, we have erected the towers of desire and sex, which externally
manifest tangible signs of production and unidirectional power:
Our center of gravity has been displaced towards a libidinal economy

concerned with only the naturalization of desire, a desire dedicated to
drives, or to a machine-like functioning, but above all to the imaginary
of repression and liberation. (Baudrillard 1990, 96)
Barudrillards critique of psychoanalysis and the dominant patriarchal

language of sexuality in the twentieth century offers a unique conjunction
between methodology, paradigms of thought, and symbolic culture.
The
very concepts of desire and the unconscious, which Baudrillard descriptively

refers to as a psychic metaphor of capital on the rubbish heap of political
economy, (1990, 39) are simply the ideological tools necessary to restore the
phallic principle of power - which is irreversible, cumulative, and immortal against what Baudrillard understands as the feminine principle of seduction,
which values appearance, play, and indeterminacy. Freud, the Adam Smith
of psychoanalysis, helped Western society to bring sex and sexuality to the
discursive surface, which led to a centurys obsession with sexual discourse.
It is exactly because of this, argues Baudrillard in most Nietszschean terms,
that we need a critique of sexual Reasona genealogy of sexual Reason.9
(ibid., 36)
Baudrillard writes: perhaps we have been wrong all along, and femininity has been
dominant, equating it to madness as a dominant natural trait that must be
oppressed and institutionally alienated in order to preserve the order of the status
quo. (1990, 15-6)
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If we grant meaning only to what is irreversible: accumulation,

progress, growth, production, then it is necessary for us to situate sexuality
within these paradigms.
(ibid., 47)
That is to say, while the twentieth-
century sexual awakenings of psychoanalysis and the sexual revolution offer

claims to breaking down the taboo of sexual discourse, what they ultimately
managed to accomplish is the subservience of seduction to the order of desire
and sexuality.
The sexual revolution achieved this through constructing
models of production and management to tether all liminal and subliminal

pleasure, and in the attempt to liberate sex as a discourse we have produced
a world in which sex is ubiquitous, but only in forms of generalized
simulation. Baudrillard points to Pasolinis Sal or the 120 Days of Sodom
(Sal o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 1975) as a perfect illustration of this
condition in which the violent exteriorization of sexuality has made it only
accessible in a state of grotesque masquerade. The film, which focuses on a
fascist allegory of sexual abuse and sadism set in an Italian villa in which
fascist officers exact a series of increasingly violent sexual assaults on
children, reduces the relation produced through sexual interaction to a pure
functionality, wherein pleasure is revealed as a technological product of a
machinery of bodies. (ibid., 27) Baudrillard continues this argument on to
the arena of pornography, which over the past four decades has managed to
extend the ubiquity of sex to nearly every facet of our audio-visual culture.
However, pornography is slightly beyond the scope of this essay, as it
embraces very different codes of industrial configuration and audio-visual
language; it is worth noting, however, the extent to which pornography and
mainstream entertainment have begun to merge, as illustrated by the
increasingly lascivious nature of primetime network and cable television
programming.
According to Baudrillard, this proliferation of images of desire has
only rendered us more than ever incapable of understanding desire, for it has
repressed the possibility of alternatives. However, Baudrillard reminds us
that there is indeed an alternative, one that psychoanalysis cannot know
because its axiomatics are sexual. (ibid. , 7) Indeed, Baudrillard reminds us,
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these axiomatics - while offering the pretense of a discursive equality of the

genders - are built upon the Freudian monolith that there is one sexuality:
masculine. Just as the sexual liberation movement helped to secrete a new
order for controlling the discourse of sexuality, so did the womens liberation
movement posit the discursive foundation for a patriarchal order. Inherent
in the entire premise of womens liberation and the sexual revolution, so
direly tied to the advent of psychoanalysis, is the continuance of a system of
repression and inequality. Nowhere is this more evident than in the history
of Hollywoods representations of the strong female character who is
ultimately appropriated by the narrative drive of dominant values and whose
independence is almost unanimously folded in the end into the normative
order of sex and gender (see the films of Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich,
Katherine Hepburn, Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts, Jolie and others). The threat
of any overturning of such a phallic register of closure and totality must be
normalized, which has been provided through the development of feminism
and the womens movement.
This is the crux of Baudrillards argument, and the task of his book is
much directed at challenging feminisms complicity with the order of truth;
the womens movement, he argues, failed to realize that a discourse of sexual
equality was a mode of capitulation, of abandoning their true tools of
resistance. They do not understand that seduction represents mastery over
the symbolic universe, while power represents only mastery of the real
universe. (ibid., 8) This is extremely important - perhaps optimal - in any
application of Baudrillards theory of seduction to cinema: the feminine
arena of seduction holds its power not in the phallic register of the real, but
in the symbolic world of signification, signs, artifice. As opposed to the
masculine arenas of power, certainty, and production, the unique and great
quality of femininity (according to Baudrillards assessment, which at times
reads along an anachronistically essentialist tone) is its rooting in uncertainty
and impermanence, most fully manifest in the world of signs. Baudrillard
argues, in fact, that femininity and seduction share something fundamental
with signs themselves, a certain indeterminacy; signs are not destined to fall
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into fixed relationships, as so many chose to interpret Saussure, but instead

are constantly slipping, shifting, reversing.10
The Ambivalence of Film Form

Perhaps the signs want to seduce, perhaps they desire, more profoundly than
men, to seduce and be seduced. (Baudrillard 1990, 103) While Baudrillard
demands a rather dramatic leap of conceptual logic, his point should not be
wasted on the student of film: after all, what is he describing other than the
semiotics attempted five years later in Gilles Deleuzes Cinma project, a
relational and shifting semiotics to address the constantly fluctuating nature
of the film sign, a sign which is constantly in question and constantly
gravitating toward change? This is not simply a question of simulation or
simulacrum, but something that specifically looks at the mutable and
transformative nature of the sign, offering a particular conjunction with
recent film-philosophy. While it may be complicated to understand how a
sign desires something, it helps to follow Deleuzes suggestion that we assess
the film sign in terms of its process of change and instability - ultimately, in
the tradition of Pierce, according to its system of relation to other images - as
opposed to one fixed binary relation that produces a definite and permanent
meaning. From this observation Baudrillard calls for the need for an inverted
semiology, a semiology of impermanence and flux.
Much as the Baudrillardian inverted sign defies the binary model of
Saussurean linguistics - as well as the bulk of structural semiotics that used
this as a starting point - seduction defies the split of a binary relationship.
Seduction thrives on the duel as opposed to the exchange or the binary, and
in the duel opposition is replaced by a seductive reversibility. Again pointing
to the reason why this must be suppressed in the name of order, production,
fixity: It is seduction that prevails in the long term because it implies a
10
Saussurean linguistics, which asserts the binary relationship between signifier and
signified, was initially adopted as the primary model for other schools of semiotics,
including the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss, but has experienced strong
decline through the period of deconstruction and post-structuralism, each of which
generally afford the sign a far less rigid capacity for polyvalence.
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reversible, indeterminate order. (Baudrillard 1990, 22) I would argue that

the characteristics for which Baudrillard champions seduction are the very
same characteristics that make film form so intriguing to late twentiethcentury philosophy. The constantly transformative and polysemous nature
of film form has been centrally championed by French film-philosophy for
the past thirty years, perhaps most explicitly in the works of Jean-Louis
Schefer.11
Schefers entire project aspires to relinquishing the power of
rationality over our understanding of cinema, opting instead for a more

direct and pre-conscious analysis of the cinematic experience - a critical
stance aligned with a less narrative and mimetic mode of exzpression. For
Gilles Deleuze, the struggle between the pure aesthetics of becoming in
cinema and the representational logic of narrative cinema summarizes the
great dialectic in the mediums history, and a certain victory of the former
marks the multi-tiered postwar dissolution of the movement-image and the
gradual advent of the time-image, the former being defined through classical
hierarchies and sensory-motor logics of action, narrativity, and image
sequentiality, while the latter is defined through a deconstruction of the
binaries between subject and object, inside and outside, real and imaginary.12
And, so, Baudrillards seduction: There is no active or passive mode in
seduction, no subject or object, no interior or exterior: seduction plays on
both sides, and there is no frontier separating them. (1990, 81)
This description of seduction evokes the central arguments of filmphilosophy for what cinematic form may provide for renewing our
conceptualization of the world and our experience of it.
This is most
fervently argued by Deleuze, who insists not - as is the oft-erroneous

interpretation - that cinema destroys the notion of subjectivity altogether, but
instead that cinema encourages and aids us to challenge and to dismantle the
fixed and impermeable binaries that are inherent in classical or traditional
11
See in particular Du monde et du movement des images.

Deleuze 1985, 15. This argument casts an intriguing alignment between Deleuze,
Baudrillard, and Merleau-Ponty; while neither Deleuze nor Baudrillard could be
considered in any way pertaining to the school of phenomenology, they nonetheless
pursue the same overall goal of breaking down classical binaries between subject and
object, inside and outside, physical and mental.
12
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notions of subjectivity.13
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These very binaries tumble with the setting of
image after image, perspective upon perspective; even the most debated of
subjective shots in cinema, the male gaze in the cinema of Hitchcock, is an
alignment of at least three subjects: the character, the apparatus, and the
spectator, and as Tania Modleski has pointed out the positioning of
cinematic subjectivity - be it the source of viewing or the focal point of action
- is in constant flux.14
This flux extends to the status of sex and sexuality; while seduction
may be aligned with the feminine, that does not necessitate that its
participants be women, as it breaks the distinctive sexualization of bodies.
As such, for Baudrillard, seduction provides a sort of trans-sexualization, in
which the body is unmarked because it is never produced. Herein lies a
problem, of course, for the cinema, which is both a manifestly artificial
product and, yet, sutures this within its own form so as to guarantee the
transparency of its constructedness. Is a body produced in the cinema? After
all, the body of the character is indeterminate in that it is caught in constant
motion and split between an array of images; the body of the text is
produced through the process of shooting and editing, and yet the text is in
constant flux between different states of subject-object alignment; and the
spectators body is implicitly produced by being positioned through a series
of vantage points, and yet as Modleski and Linda Williams have helped point
out there is a sort of transsexual osmosis between sado-masochistic pleasures
and revulsions at work in the phenomenology of the viewing experience.15 A
phallic industry, Baudrillard might say, and a feminine form.
Film form is by definition inconstant, indeterminate: it changes frames
once every twenty-four seconds as its physical base constantly unrolls and
passes before the projectors lamp. Its shots and sequences constantly change
positions, angles, perspectives, scenes, temporalities.
And at its most
intriguing, film is not a medium of what is seen - it is what is not seen, what
13
See Temenuga Trifonova 2007, 226.

See in particular Modleskis reading of Rear Window (1956) in The Women Who
Knew Too Much.
15
See Tania Modleski, The Terror of Pleasure: the Contemporary Horror Film and
Postmodern Theory and Linda Williams, Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.
14
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is hinted at but not fully revealed. One of the great effects of this dominantly
ocular-centric medium is the very expressivity built into its blind spots.
Seduction, Baudrillard notes, removes something from the order of the
visible; it is a play of veils, refusing to tear away the veil in the name of
some manifestation of truth or desire. (1990, 33-4)
This is cinemas
seduction: despite its ocularcentric premise, it functions through a constant

bait-and-switch, convincing us to keep watching by holding out on us.
Cinema, as Metz once hinted, is the ultimate striptease.16 This is not simply
when a character is literally undressing on-screen (as does of course happen);
I refer to the function of off-screen space, of orchestrated crossing, of lenses
and special effects that seduce us into the filmic moment by transforming the
image into pure visual sensation or distorting the clarity of representation,
and of course of the processes of editing and temporality that use the very
transition of meaning and the suspension of the unknown to keep us glued to
our seats.
And is it not this very quality that seduces, and this that in
Baudrillards terms is so seductive, so feminine about cinema? The slippage
of time, matter, and meaning - the power of the insignificant signifier.
(Baudrillard 1990, 74) It is the nonsense that seduces us, that keeps us in our
seats; only when the nonsense becomes sensed, when the narrative has given
meaning to the images by making them arrive at a point of satisfaction,
when a story has been fully produced, or as Rancire might say when it has
restored the representative regime of art - only then can the film end, and we
can go home. But recently much cinema - as well as scholarship on cinema has resisted this destiny, focusing instead on the nonsense of the purely
visual, the cinema of sensation, or at least allowing more slippage in the
codes of cinematic mimesis that dominated many decades of international
film.17 This recent return to the aesthetic, the anti-representational, makes
16
See Christian Metz 2002, 105.

A perfect example of these turns can be found in what I have written of elsewhere
as postfeminist film theory, which includes the works of Laura Marks, Barbara
Kennedy, Martine Beugnet and others, and embraces phenomenological as well as
Deleuzean approaches to the conceptualization of the viewing experience where
17
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Baudrillards celebration of seduction all the more pertinent to renewing our

understanding of cinema and the moving images capacity for diverse
meaning.
Seduction at the Movies

Baudrillards Seduction has a multi-fold relevance to film theory and
analysis. We can look at industrial mechanisms such as the star system in
terms of conventional Baudrillardian cultural concepts such as simulacrum
and the falsity of appearances.
However, I have just complemented this
critique of the ritual nature of Hollywood branding with a consideration of

the seductive nature of the film image, based in the indeterminate aspect of
its form. Referencing other proponents of cinemas ability to reconfigure
classical philosophical frameworks, we saw how film form can help to break
down the binary concepts of real/imaginary, subject/object, interior/exterior,
providing instead a mode of signification based in constant reversibility,
transformation, and polyvalence.
Lastly, we could look at the role that
seduction plays in the content of film texts, both in terms of specific

aesthetics as well as narrative structure.
A great example of the visual seductiveness of film resides in from
Sergio Leones Once Upon a Time in the West (1968): Jill McBain (played by
Claudia Cardinale) has left her bordello in New Orleans and traveled alone
out west to join her husband and his family, only to find them having been
brutally murdered. Discovering her husbands plans to use his frontier post
to develop a town along the expanding rail system to the Pacific, she insists
on staying to carry out his dream, despite the warnings of the locals and the
ominous threat of the men who killed her husband and family. In her most
isolated moment of desperate reflection, she lies on their neatly made and
unused nuptial bed; we view her from above, through the filigree lace of the
beds canopy, a delicately patterned film between our eyes and her own.
Cardinale is an exceptionally beautiful woman, capable of inciting enormous
unconventional film texts are concerned, especially those that forego narrative
anchoring and the quest for mimesis and produce instead a cinema of pure sensation.
55
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amounts of desire, and therefore sometimes relegated - even later in this film
- to the cinematic gratuity of sexual activity. But this moment, when we see
her but do not see her, when her beauty and her thoughts - alongside the
films narrative and logic - are masked, frozen momentarilythis is
seduction at play. A seclusion that will soon be broken, a helplessness that
will become ruthless agency, a gaze that meets ours and yet eludes it, a visual
world unfolding behind the ambiguous sheath of a transparent lens: cinema
that removes something from the visible.
In many cases what is removed from the visible is the certainty of its
purpose or status - that is to say, its narrative determination or its mimetic
reference. As Rancire might say, moments like this remove the overriding
power of representation and replace it with the seduction of pure visual
signification, removing the vampiric bite of narrativity that has led to
cinemas downfall in terms of what it may have done to progress humanitys
understanding of how the image can interact with ethics and history.
(Rancire 2001, 28-36). And what of the purely visual? Baudrillard locates
the purely visual encounter at the center of seduction, although his is an
encounter of visualities more than of pure visuality. The seduction of the
eyes, Baudrillard writes, is the most immediate, purest form of seduction.
(1990, 77) Two looks join in a duel, sensual but disconnected, caught in a
game that has not yet realized itself in any official capacity or through any
mode of production.
The seduction of the eyes is central to most theories of film, from Dziga
Vertovs kino-eye to Laura Mulveys male gaze. The film image is at once
both the subject and object of an act of looking, and often film narratives are
focused specifically on the act of looking, the search or the investigation
often being central to film plots. The films of Alfred Hitchcock are a perfect
example of cinemas fascination with looking, with voyeurism and
exchanged glances, of which no film is more exemplary than Vertigo (1958).
It should not be overlooked that Vertigos opening credit sequence moves in
close-up along the face of a woman; when it comes to rest on her eye, the
camera plunges into an animated abyss of psychedelic spirals. Much of the
56
2010
film consists of a retired detective (Scotty, played by James Stewart) watching

a younger woman (Madeline, played by Kim Novak) whom he believes to
be under the supernatural and suicidal hold of an ancestors spirit. He hopes
that, by watching her, he will come to understand her and be able to save her
from her madness; however, in the wake of her apparent suicide he can only
try to recreate someone else in her image. His failure exemplifies Deleuzes
historical notion of the collapse of classical cinema into a cinema of broken
links, failed heroes, and purely visual images that are no longer bound to the
logic of narrative resolution. (Deleuze, 1983: 266-77)
Vertigo is a film obsessed with surfaces, about a man whose search to
reveal a secret and subsequent attempt to recreate a dead lovers appearance
plunges him into madness.
What seduces him is, originally, Madelines
madness; what seduces us as viewers is their seduction, the duel between

their respective insanities, the reversibility at play. Their eyes first meet after
Madeline has jumped into San Francisco Bay; Scotty has fished her out and
returned her to his home, where he undressed her and put her to bed. She
awakens to the sound of the phone, and they exchange a look born from
deceit: Scotty believes that Madeline does not know that he has been
following him, and she knows that he does not know that she has been
playing a role to fool him. The duel of the look, Baudrillard notes, holds its
power in the fact that it maintains a secret, just as Madelines secret holds
Scotty. Numerous times Baudrillard refers to this secret that rests under the
surface of appearances as the vertigo of seduction, this pull of the unknown
tied to humanitys fascination with darkness, nothingness, and selfdestruction; as in the case of Madeline, we seduce through weakness, death,
vulnerability, through the void that haunts us. (1990, 83) This seduction is
evident in the sublimated fascinations of our culture, in cinema as much as
elsewhere: infidelity, sexual aggression, and the downfall of the highest
persons (be they mobsters, politicians, clergymen, or business moguls) are
among our most popular and recurring themes. This vertigo of seduction
operates, according to Baudrillard, like slow-motion film, making sure that
this plummet into the void has the time, prior to completion, to make its
57
absence felt.
2010
After Madelines death, Scotty finds a woman, Judy, who
resembles her, and becomes obsessed with recreating Judy in Madelines

image. When this transformation is complete, his first glimpse of her is in
slow motion, an elongation of the moment that accentuates the absence of
Madeline as well as the sacrifice of Scottys sanity in exchange for the illusion
of manufactured production.
However, Baudrillard would argue that it is not Madeline that seduces
us, but rather her artifice; this is of course the entire theme of the film, the
seduction of artifice. Madeline is fake (a role played by Judy), just as Judy
must become; but then, in fact, Judy - like any screen character - is fake as
well, an ivory statue that Pygmalion (in this case, Hitchcock) has adorned
with make-up and jewelry, signs of status and the air of majesty. Indeed the
entire seduction of cinema, from its dueling gazes to its narrative myths to its
mansions in Bel Air, rests in the very fact that it is artificial and therefore
calls into question the very constructedness of the reality principle; as
Baudrillard argues quite convincingly, this seduces us in the cinema because
we are suspicious of the very existence of the real. Comparing this to the
trompe-loeil effect, Baudrillard notes that it is the very lack of reality that
seduces us. Though not referring specifically to cinema, he echoes the early
Gestalt formalism of Rudolf Arnheim when claiming that we are bewitched
by the missing dimension.18 (Baudrillard 1990, 67)
This enchanted simulation produced through play and appearance is
also at the heart of politics (at least since Machiavelli), which Baudrillard
refers to as a simulation model of actualized impressions that functions
purely through the secret of appearances. This final point - the extension of
the question of film, artifice, and seduction to the arena of politics - provokes
questions of ethics, ideology, and cinema that are not quite within the scope
of this essay. However, it is certainly worth noting the seductive capacity of
cinema to function within this realm of appearances, of propaganda, at the
hands of a phallic system of patriarchy and capitalism. Indeed Baudrillard 18
In Film as Art Arnheim extrapolates on the merits of cinema as an art form,

stressing that what in fact makes it art is the very lack of a third dimension, the
artificiality of the image.
58
2010
be it in reference to the star system, political propaganda, or any such

ambivalent and manipulative use of the moving images seductive power helps to shed much light on the paradoxes of an industry of sex and power
based on a form that is seductive and indeterminate in essence. Ultimately,
cinema is our great symbolic slight-of-hand: it offers us the world, but hides
the secret that this world is false, seducing us - and making us complicit through the knowledge of this hidden secret. At its most seductive, it is the
eclipse of a presence (Baudrillard 1990, 85), the hypnotic flickering of
images that secretes a string of holes and slippages into the illusion of
movement and continuity, that uses images and sounds to mimic a proximity
to an alternate reality. However, this eclipse in and of itself holds a great
potential for the subversion and reversal of dominant power and the law of
production: while it may be limited in the hands of a patriarchal and
capitalist industry, this form is defined through empty spaces, flickering
appearances, the ephemeral play of light that defies any permanence of
perspective or certainty of signification. This is the aspect of seduction that
remains subversive in the moving image, and the aspect of Baudrillards
image-philosophy that can be used not to critique our visual culture, but
instead to encourage the diverse and radical employment of its abilities.
59
2010
Bibliography
Arnheim, Rudolf (1957) Film as Art.
Press.
Berkeley: University of California
Baudrillard, Jean (1990) Seduction. Brian Singer, trans. New York: St.
Martins Press.
Belton, John (2008) American Cinema, American Culture 3rd Ed. New York:
McGraw Hill.
Constable, Catherine (2009) Jean Baudrillard in Film, Theory and
Philosophy. Felicity Colman ed. Durham: Acumen, 212-21
Deleuze, Gilles (1983) Cinma I: l'image-mouvement. Paris: Les ditions de
Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles (1985) Cinma II: LImage-temps. Paris: Les Editions de
Minuit.
Denzin, Norman K. (1991) Images of Postmodern Society. London: Sage.
Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books.
Gunning, Tom (2006) An Aesthetic of astonishment: early film and the
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[http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol3_1/kellner]. Accessed
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Metz, Christian (2002) Le Signifiant imaginaire. Paris: Christian Bourgois
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Modleski, Tania (1986) The Terror of Pleasure: the Contemporary Horror
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Modleski, Tania (2005) The Women Who Knew Too Much. London:
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Nietzsche, Friedrich (1996) On the Genealogy of Morality. Douglas Smith

trans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Panofsky, Erwin (1991) Perspective as Symbolic Form. Christopher S. Wood
trans. New York: Zone Books.
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Rancire, Jacques (2001) Le Fable cinmatographique. Paris: ditions du
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Schefer, Jean-Louis (1997) Du monde et du movement des images. Paris:
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Film-Philosophy 14.

The Paradox of film: an industry of sex, a form of

But Jean Baudrillard, the

This Baudrillard remains buried in the stacks of a prolific career spanning

primarily been heralded as an enemy of the world of images, the surface

De la sduction was originally published in France by ditions Galile in 1979; the

certainty, and production.2

In the following pages, I hope to introduce

readers to a fascinating but often overlooked text of Baudrillards and, in

Paradox of the dream factory

philosophical and literary discourse. (2006, 14)

Denzins Images of Postmodern Society, written in as a dialogue with Jean

Seduction, however, exists on the surface, denying

absolute anchors in meaning and self-definition. This difference takes on

This play of surfaces and signs, for Baudrillard, was

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

This term is best described in Beltons textbook, American Cinema, American

And, what is offered here is only a philosophical

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

I hope in the pages to come to complement this critique of popular

These dichotomies form the very foundation of the

concerns of French writers such as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancire,

Indeed the term indeterminacy is central to Deleuzes

development of Bergsonian image-philosophy, as well as to Rancires theory

Sex, Sense and Nonsense

See Gilles Deleuze, Cinma I: l'image-mouvement and Cinma II: LImage-temps,

Baudrillards entire praise of seduction, we will find, is that it

functions according to these very principles: it is fluid, contradictory, playful,

Baudrillard updates this argument for the twentieth-

Our center of gravity has been displaced towards a libidinal economy

Barudrillards critique of psychoanalysis and the dominant patriarchal

very concepts of desire and the unconscious, which Baudrillard descriptively

If we grant meaning only to what is irreversible: accumulation,

That is to say, while the twentieth-

century sexual awakenings of psychoanalysis and the sexual revolution offer

The sexual revolution achieved this through constructing

models of production and management to tether all liminal and subliminal

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

these axiomatics - while offering the pretense of a discursive equality of the

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

into fixed relationships, as so many chose to interpret Saussure, but instead

The Ambivalence of Film Form

reversible, indeterminate order. (Baudrillard 1990, 22) I would argue that

Schefers entire project aspires to relinquishing the power of

rationality over our understanding of cinema, opting instead for a more

fervently argued by Deleuze, who insists not - as is the oft-erroneous

See in particular Du monde et du movement des images.

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

These very binaries tumble with the setting of

And at its most

See Temenuga Trifonova 2007, 226.

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

seduction: despite its ocularcentric premise, it functions through a constant

See Christian Metz 2002, 105.

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Baudrillards celebration of seduction all the more pertinent to renewing our

Seduction at the Movies

However, I have just complemented this

critique of the ritual nature of Hollywood branding with a consideration of

Lastly, we could look at the role that

seduction plays in the content of film texts, both in terms of specific

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

film consists of a retired detective (Scotty, played by James Stewart) watching