Unwatchable

Unwatchable

Unwatchable

Edited by Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Baer, Nicholas, 1985– editor of compilation. | Hennefeld, Maggie, 1984– editor of compilation. | Horak, Laura, editor of compilation. | Iversen, Gunnar, 1959– editor of compilation.

Title: Unwatchable / edited by Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018009950| ISBN 9780813599595 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813599588 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Image (Philosophy) | Visual communication—Psychological aspects. | Representation (Philosophy) | Visual perception—Philosophy. | Mass media and the arts. | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Television / History & Criticism. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies. | ART / Criticism & Theory. | PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / History & Criticism. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture. | ART / Film & Video.

Classification: LCC B105.I47 U59 2019 | DDC 153.32—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009950

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2019 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Individual chapters copyright © 2019 in the names of their authors

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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CONTENTS

Introduction: Envisioning the Unwatchable

NICHOLAS BAER, MAGGIE HENNEFELD, LAURA HORAK, AND GUNNAR IVERSEN

Part I: Violence and Testimony

1 Theorizing the Unwatchable

Unwatchable W. J. T. MITCHELL

The Gaze from Within BORIS GROYS

The Unwatchable and the Unwatchable STEFANO HARNEY AND FRED MOTEN

Melting into Visibility ALENKA ZUPANČIČ

Pro Forma MEGHAN SUTHERLAND

2 Spectacles of Destruction

Terminal Radiance JONATHAN CRARY

Unwatched/Unmanned: Drone Strikes and the Aesthetics of the Unseen POULOMI SAHA

Breakaway ALEX BUSH

The Watchability of the Unwatchable: Television Disaster Coverage MEIR WIGODER

3 Bearing Witness

The Incommensurable PETER GEIMER

Not Seeing Is Believing: The Unwatchable in Advocacy LESHU TORCHIN

Even If She Had Been a Criminal: A Past Unwatched FRANCES GUERIN

Deframing Evidence: A Transmission from Los ingrávidos FEDERICO WINDHAUSEN

Alan Kurdi’s Body on the Shore EMILY REGAN WILLS

4 Visual Regimes of Racial Violence

Held Helpless in the Breach: On American History X STANLEY WOLUKAU-WANAMBWA

The Flash of History: On the Unwatchable in Get Out JARED SEXTON

Nothing Is Unwatchable for All ALEXANDRA JUHASZ

Empathy. Complicity. MICHAEL BOYCE GILLESPIE

5 Spectacularization and Resistance

Entertainment Value ALOK VAID-MENON

Holocausts, Hallowe’en, and Headdresses ALEC BUTLER

Unwitnessable: Outrageous Ableist Impersonations and Unwitnessed Everyday Violence DANIELLE PEERS

Part II: Histories and Genres

6 The Tradition of Provocateurs

The Two Unwatchables ASBJØRN GRØNSTAD

Real Horrorshow AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT

Asymmetries of Desire: Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom MAURO RESMINI

Unstomachable: Irréversible and the Extreme Cinema Tradition MATTIAS FREY

7 Enduring the Avant-Garde

Unwatchability by Choice: Isou’s Venom and Eternity CHRISTOPHE WALL-ROMANA

The Refusal of Spectacle: Debord’s Howls for Sade KENNETH BERGER

Warhol’s Empire: Unwatched and Unwatchable J. HOBERMAN

Warhol’s Empire NOËL CARROLL

Watching Paint Dry ERIKA BALSOM

8 Visceral Responses to Horror

Peekaboo: Thoughts on (Maybe Not) Seeing Two Horror Films VIVIAN SOBCHACK

Why I Cannot Watch B. RUBY RICH

Apotropes GENEVIEVE YUE

9 Pornography and the Question of Pleasure

I Am Curious (Butterball) SUSIE BRIGHT

At the Threshold to the Void BILL NICHOLS

10 Archives and the Disintegrating Image

Restoring Blood Money ELIF RONGEN-KAYNAKÇI

Turning Garbo Watchable: From Swedish Bread Bun to Hollywood Goddess JAN OLSSON

Twilight of the Dead PHILIPP STIASNY AND BENNET TOGLER

Part III: Spectators and Objects

11 Passionate Aversions

Sad!: Why I Won’t Watch Antichrist JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Transforming Nihilism NATHAN LEE

Oh, Inventiveness! Oh, Imaginativeness! Precious Cinema and Its Discontents: A Rant JULIAN HANICH

The Biopic Is an Affront to the Cinema JEFFREY SCONCE

12 Tedious Whiteness

White Men Behaving Sadly JACK HALBERSTAM

You Is Kind, You Is Smart, You Is Important; or, Why I Can’t Watch The Help BRANDY MONK-PAYTON

Two Tables and a Ladder: WCGW? MEL Y. CHEN

13 Reality Trumpism

TV Trumps LYNNE JOYRICH

The Once and Future Hillary: Why I Won’t Watch a TV Miniseries about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election ABIGAIL DE KOSNIK

14 Pedagogy and Campus Politics

Why We Can’t Take a Joke RAÚL PÉREZ

The Bridge and Unteachable Films JENNIFER MALKOWSKI

Squirming in the Classroom: Fat Girl and the Ethical Value of Extreme Discomfort KATARIINA KYRÖLÄ

15 The Triggered Spectator

What Is an Unwatchable Film? (With Reference to Amour and Still Alice) E. ANN KAPLAN

Watch at Your Own Peril BARBARA HAMMER

Sects, Fries, and Videotape SAMUEL ENGLAND

Off Watch REBECCA SCHNEIDER

Acknowledgments

Filmography

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

Unwatchable

Introduction

Envisioning the Unwatchable

NICHOLAS BAER, MAGGIE HENNEFELD, LAURA HORAK, AND GUNNAR IVERSEN

In August 2017, the satirical newspaper the Onion published an article titled Most Americans Now Getting Their News While Peeking Out between Fingers. Quoting a fictional research report, the article described typical responses to current events among media consumers in the United States: Whether in print, online, or televised form, our research indicates that 80 percent of Americans engage with news by cupping their hands over their eyes and occasionally steeling themselves to glance at the content before them.¹ When the news presents a ceaseless onslaught of shocking headlines, sometimes staying informed necessitates braving quick glances from between one’s fingers, like moviegoers often do while watching horror films.²

The Onion’s fake news story was aptly illustrated with the picture of a man gaping reluctantly at his smartphone. Rather than looking awry or with downcast eyes,³ he uses his fingers as a makeshift frame for narrowing the aperture, as if to form a protective shield against retinal assault or partake in a childlike game of peekaboo. This act of covering one’s eyes has become a representative gesture in our contemporary media culture of proliferating screens and virally circulating images, where potentially traumatic content is never more than a click, scroll, or swipe away. The Onion’s illustration suggests that if the smartphone has become the prosthetic extension of one of our hands, the other hand is used to maintain a visual filter.

Used with permission granted by Onion, Inc., The Onion © 2018.

The idea of filtering has acquired new meanings via the social media platforms that claim a central role in our daily lives and political discourse. In the Onion photo, the man’s right hand might be seen as a placeholder for the digital algorithms and settings that track our habits and tailor our news feeds to our stated interests and assumed demographic preferences. Such media operations have come under scrutiny at a time when the Internet appears less as a new public sphere than as a medium of corporate profit, ideological manipulation, and partisan division.⁴ For all its satirical bite, the Onion article notably elides the number of American news consumers who are untroubled by current headlines, or who receive different ones altogether.

It is a luxury to choose whether and how to confront the headlines that affect others firsthand, both in our own regions and across the globe. In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag cautioned against generalizing about contemporary viewing habits on the basis of those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain.⁵ For all too many people, war and terror are not sensational news stories but unresolved histories and lived experiences that can never be filtered at will. The horror of disbelief many of us feel when confronted by the current headlines may well signal a naïveté or complacent oblivion about entrenched realities.

Yet even the most horrific scenarios have served as enduring sources of fascination. Simply decrying the media’s aestheticization of violence and suffering ignores the long traditions of religious iconography and artistic renderings that make spectacles of gruesome scenes, not to mention the industries of news, entertainment, and sports that entice viewers through titillating content. While many cultural critics fear the increasing habituation to images of brutal violence, others provide more hopeful perspectives. For philosopher Stanley Cavell, our ongoing capacity to feel revulsion at the horrors around us suggests that we haven’t become fully inured or desensitized—that we may yet be able to change an often-uninhabitable world.⁶

Offering multidisciplinary approaches to the vast array of troubling images in our global media and political environment, this book posits the unwatchable as a concept that has gained currency in recent years, but that has also remained latent across the history of aesthetics. In what moments are we justified in covering our eyes, and when is it crucial to look intently upon the face of Medusa? If aesthetic judgment involves beholding an object, what kind of critical discourse is sparked by refusing one’s gaze? Is the unwatchable that which exceeds traditional aesthetic frames, infringing on our reality? And what is the link between the unwatchable as an aesthetic category and the unwatchable as the possible basis for political transformation?

Countless phenomena can be deemed unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police abuse, and from graphic horror films to incendiary artworks that provoke mass boycotts, many of the images in our media culture might strike us as unsuitable for viewing. Yet what does it mean to proclaim a media object unwatchable: disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible? And unwatchable to whom: an individual student requesting a trigger warning or an entire religious community that prohibits visual representations of its prophet? A U.S. president who deems a satirical impersonation of himself on Saturday Night Live unwatchable or those who avoid his ubiquitous presence due to moral outrage and visceral disgust?⁷ In our contemporary moment of shocking geopolitical developments and constant media stimulation, the concept of the unwatchable has become more urgent than ever to examine.

It is worth recounting some of the headlines that might have compelled American news consumers to cover their eyes in August 2017, when the Onion ran its satirical piece. On the very day the article appeared, a Unite the Right rally occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Galvanizing far-right groups (e.g., Klansmen, neo-Nazis) who propagated racist, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic banners and slogans, the event further escalated when a white supremacist rammed his car into a group of counterprotesters, causing one death and dozens of injuries. Responding to the events, President Donald Trump bafflingly condemned hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.⁸ This news story unfolded during an already tumultuous month across the globe, which included Brexit negotiations, ongoing crises and civil conflicts, terror attacks, the drowning of hundreds of refugees, devastating natural disasters, and rising nuclear threats between North Korea and the United States. Even if one wanted to be privy to the horrors of the world, what should one watch?

The accumulation of horrific, seemingly unimaginable developments in recent years has converged with a massive shift in our media environment. When Sontag wrote in 2003 that nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround,⁹ she could have hardly anticipated the changes effected by the smartphone and tablet along with platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. If daily life was once structured around the morning paper and the nightly news broadcast, it is now punctuated by relentless and unpredictable media alerts flashing from abundant devices. Digital culture has brought new levels of exposure to violent phenomena, which are documented firsthand and immediately circulated in intimate, uncensored detail. Observing these trends, one commentator has noted, If J.F.K. were assassinated today, we wouldn’t be poring over a single, grainy Zapruder film; we’d have scores of high-definition smartphone videos taken from all angles and thousands of eyewitness tweets.¹⁰

It is perhaps in response to heightened media competition that a new extremist cinema has emerged over the past two decades, one characterized by transgressive representations of graphic sex and brutal violence. These shock tactics are associated with auteurs such as Catherine Breillat, Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noé, and Lars von Trier, as well as with national or regional cinemas—whether the New French Extremity,¹¹ the new-brutality film of Hollywood,¹² or the East Asian horror films billed as Asia Extreme.¹³ As numerous critics and scholars have argued, such films challenge established genre designations along with the divides between high and low culture, art and popular entertainment. With their aggressive confrontation of viewers, they also probe cinematic ethics and compel a rethinking of theories of spectatorship and affective experience.¹⁴

Two approaches to extreme or unwatchable cinema are suggested by Asbjørn Grønstad and Mattias Frey, both of whom have contributed new essays to the present volume. In Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-millennial Art Cinema (2012), Grønstad examines the wave of films that render the act of viewing disturbing, painful, tedious, or otherwise problematic, thereby jolting spectators into critical and ethical awareness. Evoking the scene of eye mutilation in Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929), Grønstad argues that the razorblade gestures of these films should be seen as part of a tradition that extends back to modernism and early experimental cinema, which likewise sought to negate scopophilic pleasure.¹⁵ Shifting focus from aesthetic and hermeneutic considerations to economic and institutional factors, Frey’s Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today’s Art Film Culture (2016) offers a macro-study of controversial arthouse cinema on the basis of discourses around its production, distribution, and reception.¹⁶

While building on these studies, the current volume radically expands the conceptual parameters of the unwatchable. Rather than limiting the concept to twenty-first-century art cinema, we emphasize its broader import at a time when viewers encounter difficult content across a wide range of spaces and media forms—from cinema, television, and video games to museums and classrooms to laptops, smartphones, and social media platforms. Moreover, we stress the term’s heuristic value in relation to the shocking and seemingly unfathomable political developments of recent years, as the lines between fact and fiction, politics and media showmanship, reality and horror show have gradually dissolved.

In claiming the unwatchable as a critical term in our global media and political environment, this book raises a host of questions. Should one distinguish between weak and strong senses of the unwatchable—that is, between images that are merely difficult to behold and ones that are truly impossible to bear? Or between contextual and absolute definitions of the term, separating the content that particular individuals or groups find unwatchable from phenomena that breach the very physiological or metaphysical limits of vision? Is the unwatchable less a descriptive than a prescriptive claim, implying aesthetic, moral, or political judgment? What unique position does it assume in a conceptual force field that also includes the invisible, unseen, unimaginable, and sublime? And, finally, if theory (from the Greek theoria, which meant to behold or look attentively) implies a visual relationship between thinker and object, is theorizing the unwatchable itself a paradox or contradiction in terms?

This volume refrains from offering a single, unified definition of the unwatchable, allowing its essays to deploy the word in an exploratory and often conflicting manner. Thus, whereas Alenka Zupančič upholds the category of the objectively unwatchable against a neoliberal rhetoric of individual pain and self-care, other contributors detail the images that have unsettled them or their students, offering accounts of spectatorship that are irreducibly or even incommensurably personal. And though some authors use unwatchable in its commonplace meaning—as that which is too tedious, disturbing, revolting, or offensive to watch—others focus on images that are literally unobservable due to bad production values, material degradation, censorship, or the receptive thresholds of the human retina. For many, the unwatchable implies a dynamism and duration specific to audiovisual media, while others do not hesitate to integrate the concept into discussions of iconoclastic paintings and shocking photographs.

Even as we allow disparate meanings to accrue around the unwatchable, we aim to establish three semantic points upfront. First, while the prefix un- expresses negation, the watchable and unwatchable are dialectically intertwined and often coterminous: to describe something as merely watchable is to damn with faint praise, while the more explicitly pejorative unwatchable can serve (however ironically) as the ultimate temptation to watch or imagine. As the next syllable of the word suggests, the unwatchable privileges the visual realm, yet the phenomena that it describes are almost always audiovisual, involving the acoustic and other sensory dimensions and prompting fully embodied, kinesthetic responses. Finally, the suffix -able highlights questions of ability and disability, calling attention to the capacities and limits of the human perceptual apparatus (as juxtaposed, for example, with machinic vision) as well as the different modes of experiencing the world studied by critical disability scholars.¹⁷

The first recorded uses of the unwatchable date back to the nineteenth century, when the word described territories outside surveyable view,¹⁸ and several essays in this book thematize the etymological connotations of watching as a state of being alert, on one’s guard, and able to keep a person, thing, or place under surveillance.¹⁹ The Google Books Ngram Viewer reveals that the adjective unwatchable began to gain currency in publications only in the late 1960s and has seen a remarkable increase in usage over the past half century.²⁰ Primarily referring to film and television, unwatchable is now defined by the Oxford Living Dictionary as too poor, tedious, or disturbing to be viewed.²¹ The wide range of content that can fall under this definition is evoked by the disparate works that have adopted Unwatchable as their title, from a 2006 John Waters exhibition to a 2011 British short film about rape and blood minerals in the Congo (which Leshu Torchin discusses in her essay for this volume on advocacy media).²²

The rising discourse of the unwatchable since the 1960s may be attributed in part to unprecedented levels of image saturation. Even before the popularization of digital media, the introduction of television into the domestic sphere (and the later proliferation of cable news channels) had the effect of rendering horrifying events viscerally accessible—from the Vietnam War to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. And yet, as one of our book’s contributors, W. J. T. Mitchell, has noted, this trend fits into a broader historical pattern: The deeply ambivalent relationship between human beings and the images they create seems to flare up into crisis at moments of technical innovation, when a new medium makes possible new kinds of images, often more lifelike and persuasive than ever before, and seemingly more volatile and virulent.²³ Within this framework, the discourse of the unwatchable may be a cipher for the highly fraught position of images at critical junctures in the history of media and aesthetic theory.

An ambivalent combination of fascination and anxiety toward images can be discerned as far back as Plato’s Republic. In book IV, Socrates recounts the story of Leontius, who is at once seduced and repulsed by the sight of corpses: He had an appetitive desire to look at them, but at the same time he was disgusted and turned himself away. For a while he struggled and put his hand over his eyes, but finally, mastered by his appetite, he opened his eyes wide and rushed toward the corpses, saying, ‘Look for yourselves, you evil wretches; take your fill of the beautiful sight.’ ²⁴ While the story demonstrates the soul’s tripartite division into rationally calculating, spirited, and appetitive elements, it also represents the author’s own palpable dilemmas. Much as the conflicted Leontius alternates between covering and opening his eyes, between turning away and approaching the scene, Plato seeks to restrict mimetic arts in his ideal state even while narrating through imitation and using imagistic stories and myths.

Conceiving of images as mere copies and vehicles for sensory deception, Plato feared our easy susceptibility to illusion and irrational instincts. Aristotle, by contrast, offered a more expansive sense of mimesis, which he viewed as an imitative techne or art resulting in an aesthetic spectacle that is clearly distinct from the world of actual occurrences. In chapter IV of Poetics, Aristotle describes mimetic activity as an essential component of human nature and explores the pleasure we find in even the most gruesome of aesthetic objects:

We take pleasure in contemplating the most precise images of things whose sight in itself causes us pain—such as the appearance of the basest animals, or of corpses. Here too the explanation lies in the fact that great pleasure is derived from exercising the understanding, not just for philosophers but in the same way for all men, though their capacity for it may be limited. It is for this reason that men enjoy looking at images, because what happens is that, as they contemplate them, they apply their understanding and reasoning to each element (identifying this as an image of such-and-such a man, for instance).²⁵

In contrast to the account of Leontius in Plato’s Republic, Aristotle argues that we experience pleasure not through indulging our base desires, but rather by bringing our cognitive capacities to bear on identifiable material, even if the content is unpleasant in nature. Crucial here is that the images are enjoyable as long as the viewer recognizes them as mimetic representations enclosed within the aesthetic sphere, separated from the realm of historical reality.

While Plato and Aristotle emerged from an ancient Greek culture that treated the gods as both visibly manifest and representable in plastic, anthropomorphic form, the Israelites introduced a Second Commandment (Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing)²⁶ that was restrictively aniconic or iconophobic by comparison. Even if the biblical prohibition on graven images has rarely been taken literally by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, their restriction has spawned a dialectic between idolatry and iconoclasm, such that images, in Mitchell’s words, have been both adored and reviled, worshipped and banned, created with exquisite artistry and destroyed with boundless ferocity.²⁷ The religious taboo against image making has animated numerous controversies in recent years—including debates about the problematics of Holocaust representation,²⁸ scandalous artworks such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary,²⁹ and the blasphemous cartoon depictions of Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo.³⁰

As Peter Geimer contends in his essay for this volume, the virulent responses to offensive or shocking images also indicate the persistence of magical attitudes in our contemporary image culture. The ongoing capacity of photographs to prick or wound viewers—even in a digital age of heightened awareness of the possibilities for manipulation—attests to the continuation of a realist tradition that had conceived the photographic image, as Roland Barthes wrote, as "an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art."³¹ Using the same example as Plato and Aristotle, Barthes theorized the uncanny ability of the photographic image to certify the real presence and life of a human subject at a past moment: "If the photograph … becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing."³² Insofar as photographic representation is thus a form of reanimation, it can restore a magical belief in the potential for contact with the dead.

The question of magic has also been central to the philosophy and history of art over the past decades. In The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986), Arthur C. Danto introduced the category of disturbational art to describe works that integrate disturbing elements of reality (e.g., obscenity, bodily fluids, actual pain and mortal danger) and thereby disrupt the divide between life and art, reality and mimesis.³³ Much as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger initiated a philosophical return to a pre-Socratic moment, disturbatory works reactivate a magical, prerationalist theory of images. David Freedberg’s The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (1989) encouraged art historians to abandon the common distinction between aesthetic functions and religious or magical uses, considering the widest possible spectrum of images and taking seriously less intellectualized modes of response that continue into the modern age, however overlooked or repressed.³⁴

Whereas Freedberg drew attention to the full range of human responses to images, others have focused on questions of vision and visuality.³⁵ Of the books that helped inaugurate visual culture as a scholarly field in the 1990s, Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993) is most directly related to the concerns of the present volume, arguing that sight—described by René Descartes as the most comprehensive and noblest of the senses in his Discourse on Method (1637)³⁶—came under critical scrutiny in the twentieth century, most notably in French intellectual life. Offering a synoptic survey of antivisual discourses, Jay examines thinkers across various realms (e.g., art, cultural criticism, feminist theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, poststructuralist and social theory) who waged an attack on the hegemony of vision in modernity.³⁷ Insofar as sight had been privileged not only in Cartesian thought but also in the project of Enlightenment, the critique of ocularcentrism often assumed, in Jay’s words, a self-consciously Counter-Enlightenment tone.³⁸

Downcast Eyes raised a set of concerns that remain central to scholarship on twenty-first-century visual culture, from Irit Rogoff’s Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture (2005) to Frances Guerin’s edited volume, On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture (2015).³⁹ Why, these writers have asked, do we increasingly avert our gaze from images? Is the act of turning away a signal of disengagement and inattention, or can it also serve as a political gesture or alternative form of participation? Has the crisis of visual primacy compelled a retraining of our sight or facilitated the shift to a more embodied, multisensory mode of experience and knowledge? With a nod to Jay, we could add, does the refusal to watch intersect with disillusionment in the Enlightenment ideal of rational transparency? Have we returned to the original meaning of the unwatchable, finding ourselves in an age of what Jürgen Habermas has called the new unsurveyability (die neue Unübersichtlichkeit)?⁴⁰

Drawing from Hans Blumenberg’s Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (1996),⁴¹ Jay has identified two distinct modes of aesthetic spectatorship in the modern age. The first is a tradition that includes Enlightenment thinkers such as Ferdinando Galiani. Here the viewer’s enjoyment is linked to a state of disinterested contemplation and judgment, whereby even scenes of horror and violent destruction remain bearable because of their containment within an aesthetic frame. This secure position of dispassionate observation is dismissed by the second mode of aesthetic experience, associated with Nietzsche and modernist movements like Surrealism and Futurism. In this latter, increasingly dominant perceptual regime, viewers are no longer firmly separated from the simulated disaster, relinquishing their critical distance and—in a phrase that Jay borrows from Adrienne Rich—diving into the wreck.⁴² For Jay, the aesthetic medium that helped popularize such immersive spectatorship was film.

Emerging alongside other mass-cultural entertainment forms (e.g., amusement park rides) at the end of the nineteenth century, cinema deemphasized passive, contemplative vision in favor of a more immediate, sensory-affective impact and the corporeal integration of the spectator into the events on-screen.⁴³ With its vertiginous, disorienting motion, film dissolved the Cartesian or Kantian subject, eroding the distinction between viewer and viewed, spectator and spectacle. Even if the shift to narrative features gave rise to an internationally dominant classical cinema, the earlier attractions-based cinema survived in various genres (e.g., action, avant-garde, comedy, horror, melodrama, pornography) that provoke tactile, cinesthetic responses, to use Vivian Sobchack’s term.⁴⁴ Often deemed excessive, these genres are characterized by an aesthetics of shock and visceral sensation—one that can hardly be aligned with classical aesthetic principles, as both Miriam Hansen and Linda Williams have emphasized.⁴⁵

Early film theorists who sought to define the new mode of sensory perception and experience shaped by motion pictures often juxtaposed the capacities of the film camera with the perennial limitations of unaided human vision. In the manifesto Kinoks: A Revolution (1923), for example, Dziga Vertov heralded the camera as a mechanical kino-eye that significantly improves upon the human eye, overcoming its imprecision and limited spatiotemporal parameters.⁴⁶ (As Noël Carroll argues in his essay for this volume on Andy Warhol’s eight-hour Empire, the camera eye is further separated from human vision through its sheer perceptual endurance.) Similarly invoking another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye, Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility contended that the advent of cinema had facilitated the discovery of the optical unconscious through techniques such as the close-up and slow motion.⁴⁷

The link between the unconscious and visual media also assumed a role in André Bazin’s Ontology of the Photographic Image (1945), where the French film critic wrote, If we were to psychoanalyze the visual arts, the practice of embalming might be seen as fundamental to their birth.⁴⁸ Distinguishing the temporal art of cinema for its mummification of change,⁴⁹ Bazin nonetheless expressed concern about the implications of representing real death on-screen. In Death Every Afternoon (1951), Bazin recalled a 1949 newsreel showing the public execution of alleged communist spies in Shanghai: The film did not even leave out the gesture of the policeman who had to make two attempts with his jammed revolver, an intolerable sight not so much for its objective horror as for its ontological obscenity.⁵⁰ Beyond the dreadfulness of the botched act itself, Bazin suggested, was the more fundamental indecency of reproducing and repeating the singular, ultimate moment of death, the unique moment par excellence.⁵¹

Perhaps the most sustained theorization of cinema’s relationship to the unwatchable, however, comes in Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), discussed by Meir Wigoder and Genevieve Yue in their essays for this volume. Asserting cinema’s predilection for disastrous events that overwhelm consciousness,⁵² Kracauer devoted a section of his book’s epilogue to the myth of Medusa, a Gorgon whose face was such a petrifying sight that Perseus had to use Athena’s reflective shield in the act of slaying her:

The moral of the myth is, of course, that we do not, and cannot, see actual horrors because they paralyze us with blinding fear; and that we shall know what they look like only by watching images of them which reproduce their true appearance. These images have nothing in common with the artist’s imaginative rendering of an unseen dread but are in the nature of mirror reflections. Now of all the existing media the cinema alone holds up a mirror to nature. Hence our dependence on it for the reflection of happenings which would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life. The film screen is Athena’s polished shield.⁵³

For Kracauer, film bears the unique capacity to mediate an encounter with horrific, real-life occurrences that would otherwise remain unwatchable. Implicit in this passage is the challenge that cinema poses to Aristotelian and Kantian aesthetics: inextricably bound to the very lifeworld that the viewer inhabits, film images move beyond the aesthetic realm into the order of mirror reflections, collapsing the opposition between reality and mimesis, parergon and ergon.

While Kracauer identified the face of Medusa with documentary images—the slaughtered animals in Georges Franju’s Le sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949), the human corpses in film footage of Nazi concentration camps—contemporary scholars have emphasized the potential of fictional genres to provoke reflection on historical atrocities that are often deemed beyond the pale of consumption. As Adam Lowenstein argues in Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (2005), postwar horror films repeatedly allegorized historical traumas, confronting audiences with overdetermined images of graphic violence and carnage.⁵⁴ Such an allegorical mode of reading informs the present volume’s essays on more recent horror films—whether Ringu (Ring, 1998), which Yue analyzes in relation to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, or Get Out (2017), interpreted by Jared Sexton as a statement on the continuing legacy of racial slavery.

Films such as Ring and Get Out, wherein the act of viewing is linked to a state of docile powerlessness and existential threat, also recall a common trope of spectatorship as a form of masochism. Like the protagonist of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), the cinematic viewer is at the full mercy of the filmmaker, passively submitting to a regime of visual assault.⁵⁵ Implicit in what Bazin (with a nod to Antonin Artaud) called the cinema of cruelty,⁵⁶ the trope of sadomasochism came to the fore in the 1970s psychoanalytic film theory of Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and others, who conceived film spectatorship in terms of perversion.⁵⁷ It is in this vein that Lesley Stern would invoke the quintessential perverse pleasure of cinematic viewing, where we choose (no longer compelled by the parental voice) to watch even though it is painful or discomforting. For it is also pleasurable. What was once, in the past, unwatchable or unendurable becomes an image that fixates, from which we cannot tear ourselves away.⁵⁸

Few films have enacted the structure of perversion as unbearably as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), which Mauro Resmini analyzes in his essay for this collection. Revisiting Pasolini’s scandalous film in 2004, Sontag lamented that its scenarios of brutal violence and sexual humiliation have become all too domesticated in the United States:

America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun. What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings—as in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last, near-unwatchable film, Salò (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era—is now being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or venting. To stack naked men is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show.⁵⁹

Writing shortly after the publication of the Abu Ghraib photos, Sontag condemned conservative efforts to frame American soldiers’ torture of Iraqi prisoners as typical behavior (like the more recent attempt by Donald Trump to dismiss his recorded boasting of sexual assault as mere locker room talk). For Sontag, the Abu Ghraib pictures also portended a shift in the status of images in our digital media environment, where violent computer games are a dominant form of teenage entertainment, pornography is freely accessible on the Internet, and photographs and videos are shot and disseminated more immediately than ever before.⁶⁰ Now that images are ubiquitous and eminently watchable, Sontag suggested, we move into a contested terrain of ethical and pragmatic questions, negotiating both what and how to watch.

Recent transformations in the nature of