Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Following the unexpected success of Richard Kelly's cult début, Donnie Darko (2001), critics had
sophomore effort Southland Tales (2007) tipped to sink without trace. Ostensibly a dystopian satire of the
US military-industrial complex, in which 'someone in the ensemble (...) has to save the world from the
apocalypse'1, stunt casting and a genre-defying blurb had the commentators rattled. So it was to Kelly's
surprise that an early cut was accepted to the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Here, the hastily-completed film
garnered reactions that – 'except for a few staunch defenders — ranged from negative to vicious' 2. In the
wake of Cannes, Universal Pictures sold the distribution rights to Sony, who funded a substantial re-edit.
Kelly took the opportunity to consolidate the narrative: expanding the use of digital effects, and cutting its
length by twenty minutes. The Southland released by Sony was tighter, but still bafflingly inaccessible.
The critics remained unconvinced, and, after a limited release, the film sank back into obscurity.
And yet. In among the tide of critical, often angry reviews, there were hints of something more
interesting than a simple failure. A flavour of this can be seen in this passage, from Morris' review for The
Boston Globe:
'Even if the world Kelly concocted always seems screamingly incoherent, you have to hand it
to him. He's made a movie of our messy times that's too ambitious to settle for merely
capturing the mess. It actually is the mess.' 3
However counter-intuitive, this is a view repeated elsewhere. Conceding that the film fails as a cinematic
narrative, Morris is one of many who suggest that to judge Southland as a traditional cinematic object would
be missing the point. Couched in irony and otherwise highly critical, Crocker's review for Time Out London
1 Angela Doland, 2006, ''Southland' Imagines L.A. Apocalypse', Associated Press, 21/05/2006,
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/21/AR2006052100728.html> [accessed
16/04/2010]
2 Dennis Lim, 2007, 'Booed at Cannes, but Now the Real Test,' The New York Times, 28/09/2007,
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/movies/28lim.html> [accessed 16/04/2010]
3 Wesley Morris, 2007, 'Out on the edge, scavenging among 'Southland Tales,' The Boston Globe, 16/11/2007,
<http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie&id=10750> [accessed 16/04/2010]
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
agrees: by the final credits, suggests Crocker, 'this truly ambitious, truly flawed film finally disappears into
the 'time-space rift' (or whatever) to achieve some sort of cosmic transcendence.' 4
Curiously, the reasons that Southland failed as cinema a may be the same reasons it succeeds as a
form of 'cognitive mapping.' This is a film which allows us to apprehend what Jameson describes as 'the
incommensurability between an individual witness (…) and the collective' 5; with a partial and incomplete
expression of 'the absent, unrepresentable totality'6. Here, there are three broad factors which have allowed
Southland to approach Jameson's speculative aesthetic: the film is grounded in the logic(s) of hypermediacy;
its aesthetic is that of the supplement; and it uses branding and the tropes of conspiracy theory to construct
an affective map of contemporary capitalism. With these three logics emphasised at the expense of
'the plot, characters and actors are just the architectural framework over which Kelly has
spray-painted an impressionistic tapestry depicting post-9/11 America as it might have been,
or might yet become, or might really be if we could only see it clearly.' 7
Whatever the weaknesses of Southland in the eyes of a film-literate audience, there is much to suggest
that it provides a muffled answer to Jameson's rallying cry - enacting a partial, flawed 'cognitive mapping'
1. Hypermediacy
The opening sequence of Southland foregrounds its status as vernacular media. The setting is
Abilene, Texas, where two boys are videoing themselves in a mirror. Their camcorder is outdated, with a
date stamp encoding a sense of time and mediation into the footage. It is July 4th, 2005. Independence
Day. American flags, buffet food, a plastic figurine of Uncle Sam. A flash of light through window blinds.
4 Jonathan Crocker, 2007, 'Southland Tales (2006)', Time Out London, Issue 1946, 07/12/2007,
<http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/83350/southland-tales.html> [accessed 16/04/2010]
5 Frederic Jameson, 1992, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press), p. 10.
6 Ibid.
7 Andrew O'Hehir, 2007, 'Beyond the Multiplex', Salon.com, 15/11/2007,
<http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/btm/2007/11/15/southland/> [accessed 16/04/2010]
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
As the dust clears, the image resolves into a mushroom cloud – hanging over the horizon. Beginning with
a counterfactual event positioned as such that it can only be grasped in relation to 9/11, the film place us
in a difficult cognitive position. The nuclear attack is clearly important, but not part of our history.
Through estrangement, the viewer grasps that this is not a representation of our world, but possesses
insufficient data to grasp how it maps to the world of their embodied experience?
The answer comes in Kelly's use of digital effects. Once unsettled, 'we are barraged with graphics
and voice-over in a desperate attempt to get us up to speed.'8 A satellite image of Abeline pulls back to a
wider view of the United States, leaving the explosion behind. “In the aftermath of the nuclear attacks on
Texas, America found itself on the brink of anarchy.” A window opens, re-framing the aerial view as
backdrop to a digital interface. Branded the 'Doomsday Scenario Interface' (Illustration 1), its windows
rapidly multiply, inundating the screen with a flow overlapping photos, film clips, maps, charts, drawings,
and headlines. For Bolter and Grusin, these 'multiple representations inside the windows create a
heterogeneous space, as they compete for the viewer's attention.'9 This is the logic of hypermediacy – a
'style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium.' 10
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
In two minutes, the interface guides the audience through three years of alternate history, from the twin
nuclear attacks in Texas to the start of Kelly's actual narrative. From the information provided in this
sequence, Shaviro offers a summary of the Southland universe – distilling specific facts and details from a
torrent of hypermediacy:
The ‘war on terror’ has blossomed into a full-fledged World War III. (...) The draft has been
reinstated; martial law has been declared in some areas. Throughout the United States,
police surveillance is ubiquitous, and there is no interstate travel without a visa. All Internet
communication is monitored by a government spy facility called US-IDent. The police are
authorised to shoot on sight anyone suspected of terrorism. (...) International oil supplies
have been cut off, and the sinister Treer corporation holds a monopoly on America’s
alternative energy resources. The only opposition to this state of affairs comes from a
comically inept, confused and internally fragmented ‘neo-Marxist’ underground.' 11
Thus, the 'Doomsday Scenario Interface' provides a way for the viewing audience to quickly familiarise
themselves with the universe of Southland Tales. As a bounded and literal manifestation of cognitive
mapping, the hypermediatic visuals negotiates Jameson's original dilemma; cutting from the wide-angle
abstractions of the totality to the 'sealed subjective worlds' of Kelly's characters, passing – initially, at least –
as 'ships in the night, a centrifugal movement of lines and planes that can never intersect.' 12
While the narration of Pilot Abeline (Justin Timberlake) supplements the interface in a way which
meshes comfortably by the world-historical infodump, with the abrupt shift in scale that accompanies the
introduction of Boxer Santeros (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), amnesiac actor and son-in-law of the
Republican vice-presidential candidate, the final section of voice-over settles strangely. “The government
knew [Santeros] had crossed the border into California, but the circumstances of his return to the
Southland remained a mystery.” As narrator, to what extent is Abeline a directorial mouthpiece? The
dialogue implies a cognitive map incorporating knowledge held by the film's panoptic government. Certainly,
Kelly's is a setting in which Mason's suggestion, that 'a “cyborg's cognitive mapping” (…) may be the only
form (…) available in a multinational global society pervaded by technologies and simulacra' 13 rings true. The
11 Stephen Shaviro, 2010, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales,' Film
Philosophy, Vol. 14 (1), pp. 65-66.
12 Frederic Jameson, 1988, 'Cognitive Mapping,' in Nelson, Carey and Lawrence Grossberg, Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture (London: MacMillan), p. 350.
13 Fran Mason, 2002, 'A Poor Person's Cognitive Mapping', in Knight, Peter (ed.), Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
individual subject may be unable to account for the limitations of their map, but technology offers a solution.
With contemporary capitalist society so dependent on digital media, such technologies are – to quote
Jameson - potentially 'the representational solution as well as the representational problem of this world
system's cognitive mapping'14; the cybernetic logic of the interface compensating for the cognitive constraints
technophilia. Embracing the promise of hypermediacy, both organisations and individuals are seen
'multiplying mediation (…) to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as
reality.'15 Take Homeland Security controller, Nana Mae Frost (Miranda Richardson); at various points in the
narrative, we see Frost 'sitting in her command chair at US-IDent headquarters, monitoring the video feeds
on multiple screens that cover a large curving wall in front of her.' 16 (Illustration 2)
A potent and complex image, evoking of a host of other films and images. Shaviro is quick to compare
Richardson's performance with that of Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), but – in
terms of cognitive mapping – more useful parallels can be found in the technological imagery of The Matrix:
Paranoia in Postwar America (New York, NY: New York University Press), p. 53.
14 Frederic Jameson, 1992, p. 10.
15 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, 2000, p. 53.
16 Stephen Shaviro, 2010, p. 66.
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
From The Matrix: Revolutions, we can take the figure of the Architect; an avatar of the computer
programme which created and monitors the Matrix. He appears as a stern, bearded man in a white room,
against a wall-sized bank of television monitors (Illustration 3). Initially, these screens replicate the
confrontation between Neo and the Architect, as might CCTV, but there is a certain point beyond which they
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
In comparison, the example from Watchmen is comparatively prosaic – with millionaire genius turned
costumed vigilante Andrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) using his image and reputation as the heroic
Ozymandias to bankroll a global commercial conglomerate. In a scene toward the end, we see Veidt in his
Antarctic headquarters, watching a wall of television screens (Illustration 4). With each screen displaying
different footage, this stands as evidence of his capacity for hyperattention and, by extension, the threat
In each of these three examples, the screen or interface reinforces a desire for knowledge, and –
through knowledge – control. In this, only Nana Mae Frost's US-IDent can be said to manifest a truly
hypermediatic aesthetic; enacting 'the ultimate goal of cartography as described by Lewis Carroll, Borges and
others: developing a constantly updated map at a 1:1 scale.'17 In both remaining examples, a single, self-
contained image fails to encompass the absent totality, but this is less a result of their (limited) deployment
of hypermediacy than the supplemental logic they share with Kelly's depiction of US-IDent.
2. The Supplement
Characterising the film as a product of Kelly's desire 'to synthesize every strain of media and culture
(porn, politics, the Internet, the music video) into a single furious object' 18, Morris' review offers the
departure point for a halting delineation of hypermediacy from the supplement. US-IDent is hypermediatic,
governed by its users' insistence that 'the experience of the medium is itself an experience of the real.' 19 As a
media artefact, Southland Tales is supplemental. Kelly forges links, but there are no real, functioning
hierarchies; with 'images and sounds (…) linked together in manner of bricks or building blocks (…) the
connection among shots, or among elements within a shot, are only allusive and indirect.' 20 US-IDent is an
example of hypermedia, and hypermediacy is a specific instance of a broader, supplemental logic. As Shaviro
comments, Southland's visuals are 'paratactic and additive (…) filled with inserts; it overlays, juxtaposes and
17 Sébastian Caquard, 2009, 'Foreshadowing Contemporary Digital Cartography: A Historical Review of Cinematic
Maps in Films,' The Cartographic Journal, Vol. 46 (1), p. 54.
18 Wesley Morris, 2007, 'Out on the edge, scavenging among 'Southland Tales,' The Boston Globe, 16/11/2007,
<http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie&id=10750> [accessed 16/04/2010]
19 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, 2000, p. 70-71.
20 Stephen Shaviro, 2010, p. 72.
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
Here, the obvious cinematic touchstone is the work of Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein, but
Shaviro lends little credence to this comparison. Eisenstein made notes for a film adaptation of Marx's
Capital, but struggled with Jameson's dilemma – 'the growing contradiction between (…) a
phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the
conditions of existence of that experience.'22 But while Kelly and Eistenstein share the same problematic,
Shaviro warns against drawing too many parallels. Within Southland, the 'correspondences and connections
form something like an affective constellation (…) they are too dispersed, and too indefinite and arbitrary, to
work in the focused and organised way that Eisensteinian montage theory demands.' 23 Where Eistenstein's
images clash with one another, causing a 'break in the perception of something outside the logic of the
ordinary [through which] a restructuring of ordinary perception takes place' 24, Kelly rejects the dialectics of
the composite for an affective network of 'weak ties, such as we are accustomed to find on the Internet.'25
Within the film, these 'weak ties' are most visible in the links established outside the various
interfaces - particularly in Kelly's deployment of tropes, as part of a process Sterling haltingly dubs 'riffing':
'the academic version of the traditionally dominant form of Southern Californian cultural
expression (…) in which stable, time-tested elements of classic schtick are assembled, then
deftly combined and twisted so as to capture the latest version of the cultural-imaginary.
‘He’s the Pope.’ ‘And she’s a chimp!’ ‘And they’re both cops!’ ‘And this time – it’s personal!’' 26
Here, it is interesting to point to a concrete manifestation of the supplement within the film's universe,
through Boxer Santeros' dubious screenplay, 'The Power' (Illustration 5). An 'epic Los Angeles crime saga' 27
set in the near future, the script casts Boxer as Jericho Cane: a paranoid LAPD cop with supernatural powers,
21 Ibid, p. 71.
22 Frederic Jameson, 1988, p. 349.
23 Stephen Shaviro, 2010, p. 73.
24 Sergei Eisenstein, 1976, 'Notes for a Film of Capital,' trans. Sliwowski, Maciej, Jay Leyda and Annette Michelson,
October, Vol. 2, p. 6.
25 Stephen Shaviro, 2010, p. 73.
26 Bruce Sterling, 2009, 'SoCal DigiCult,' Convergence, Vol. 15 (1), p. 9.
27 Southland Tales, 2007. Film. Directed by Richard Kelly. US: Samuel Goldwyn Films.
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
tasked with saving the world. In its first appearance, it provides a source of humour, but as Southland
'zigzags towards catastrophe'28, parallels between Boxer's screenplay and the filmic world become
increasingly apparen as 'chains of cause and affect both multiply and break down entirely, in defiance of
However ridiculous, 'The Power' is thus best read as a synecdoche of Southland Tales; supplementing the
interface and experiential realities of Kelly's characters with a warped reflection of their universe – similar to
In addition to its aesthetic and structural logics, Kelly's map of contemporary capitalist society
also relies on the playful, often grotesque, use of brands and branding. In the 'Doomsday Scenario
Interface' (Illustration 1), graphics share space with logos for Panasonic and Bud Light, and – shortly after
– we see a 'military vehicle (…) emblazoned with an ad for Hustler magazine'30 (Illustration 6).
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
The film also includes examples of the celebrity-as-brand, with Santeros' rescuer – the self-titled Krysta
Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) – looking 'to leverage her semi-celebrity as a porn starlet not only by
recording songs and making a music video, but also by starring in her own talk-show-cum-reality-
television series, and by selling her own energy drink'31 (Illustration 6). Here, the superposition of Gellar's
known role as a TV actress with that of her character has a strange effect, allowing her to stand as a
'semaphore for American trash culture while simultaneously exploding [her] celebrity personae.' 32
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
In each of these examples, a supplemental logic provides an aesthetic not just of hypermediacy, but of
contemporary network capitalism. Konstantinou explains how 'Google and Starbucks (…) do not stand in
for or refer to the world system or consumerism (…) but rather are its real products, pieces of intellectual
property, reproducing themselves again in textual form'33. Like the music video or summer blockbuster,
branding is a machine 'for generating affect (…); at the heart of social production, circulation and
distribution (…) play[ing] a crucial role in the valorization of capital.' 34 This then, is branding as a political
economy of affect, ably demonstrating how the invisible totality of the market is not a conventional object,
but the product of social cosmology, inextricably linked to notions of affect, desire and subjectivity.
The transformation of subjectivity under 'late' capitalism is the foundation of Jameson's original
dilemma. With the individual unable to conceptualise the vast totality of the capitalist world-system –
necessarily remote to their own experiential reality – culture and society must strive against a 'paralysis of
the collective or social imaginary'35. In this context, suggests Jameson, it is not unexpected to witness a
resurgence of the conspiratorial narrative, as a discursive 'structure capable of reuniting the minimal basic
components: a potentially infinite network, along with a plausible explanation of its invisibility.' 36 Taken
alongside the dispersal and fragmentation of subjectivity, for which amnesiac movie star Santeros stands
as emblem, paranoia provides a useful – if fundamentally flawed – 'centering device for subjectivity by
allowing all the world's random events to be explained in terms of the paranoid's version of conspiracy.' 37
So when US-IDent employee Starla von Luft (Michele Durrett) meets Boxer Santeros on the
beach, she is clearly delusional. Her obsession with Santeros has caused her to assume the role of Dr.
Muriel Fox, a character from his screenplay, with the implied recentering of her subjectivity enabling her
to assert a sense of importance and purpose as part of a larger, conspiratorial narrative. However, within
Kelly's world, when she warns Santeros: 'They're listening; they're watching,' she is almost immediately
proved correct, as the screen shifts to the weapon sight of a distant observer (Illustration 9).
33 Lee Konstantinou, 2009, 'The Brand as Cognitive Map in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition,' boundary 2, Vol. 36
(2), p. 87.
34 Stephen Shaviro, 2010, p. 3.
35 Frederic Jameson, 1992, p. 9.
36 Ibid.
37 Fran Mason, 2002, p. 47.
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
While exploring the possibilities of an aesthetic of the absent totality, Jameson characterised the
paranoiac logic as a 'poor person's cognitive mapping'38. Mason critiqued this claim, arguing that Jameson
presupposed the possibility of an effective 'rich person's' cognitive mapping, accessible to the subject
'placed within the morass of postmodern information systems and simulations in which signals suffer
interference and thus intercut and merge'39. For her, conspiracy theory 'generates a map of the world that
is actually a map of a different world entirely, a parallel or imaginary world of misrecognized social
systems and power structures.'40 I would argue that Southland Tales is an example of such a parallel
world, with the timeline arranged such that there 'is no way back to suburban normalcy.' 41 In Kelly's
world, Boxer Santeros may be a paranoid schizophrenic and Starla von Luft may be delusional at best, but
– as it turns out – that does not mean they are necessarily wrong.
Using the relationship of the Trier Corporation and the Elliot-Frost presidential ticket to cast
aspersions on the crony relationship between business and government under the Bush administration
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
In his analysis of Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003), Konstantinou argues that that novel's real impact
is in 'the specific real-world resonances of his brand-laden vocabulary and the strangely alienating
feedback effects that comes with reading a novelization of one's present' 42. For me, the same applies to
Southland Tales. By rendering the 'extreme contemporary' as an aesthetic style, both Kelly and Gibson
have invited their audience to 'cultivate a particular ethos relative to their present moment.' 43
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
As Chocano recognises in her review for the Los Angeles Times, Southland Tales is an 'angry (…) yawp at
the state of the world, (…) cloak[ing] its outrage in nihilistic irony and layers and layers of allusion.' 44 With
the title logo (Illustration 11) borrowed from a map of the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, warped so as to
better equate area and population, it is obvious that this is a political film. Indeed, its cognitive mapping
of contemporary capitalism often functions less as epistemological process than critical commentary. As
an aesthetic project, cognitive mapping may have been originally intended as an attempt to grapple with
the incommensurability of the collective and individual experience, but as Shaviro argues of maps,
Southland Tales 'does not just replicate the shape of a territory; [but] rather, it actively inflects and works
44 Carina Chocano, 2007, 'Movie Review: Southland Tales,' Los Angeles Times, 14/11/2007,
<http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-et-southland14nov14,0,970418.story?coll=cl-movies-top-right> [accessed
21/04/2010]
45 Stephen Shaviro, 2010, p. 64.
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<http://www.timeout.com/film/newyork/reviews/83350/southland-tales.html> [accessed
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Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin, 2000, Remediation (London: The MIT Press)
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[accessed 16/04/2010]
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Lim, Dennis, 2007, 'Booed at Cannes, but Now the Real Test,' The New York Times, 28/09/2007,
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Mapping Capitalism Justin Pickard
Mason, Fran, 2002, 'A Poor Person's Cognitive Mapping', in Knight, Peter (ed.), Conspiracy Nation: The
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Shaviro, Stephen, 2010, 'Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales,' Film
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Southland Tales, 2007. Film. Directed by Richard Kelly. US: Samuel Goldwyn Films.
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The Matrix: Reloaded, 2003. Film. Directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski. US: Warner Bros.
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