Bodies and Perspective in Marsh’s “Theory of Everything”

  James Marsh’s Theory of Everything is not really about Stephen Hawking, or the growing celebrity of his brilliance, or the (im)possible reconciliation of Christianity and cosmology, or even the challenges of his marriage to Jane Wilde. All of these thematics are present, but all remain sentimental and broadly impressionistic, like the grainy yellow filter Benoît Delhomme uses for the Hawking marriage.  I would venture to argue that the film is ‘about’ disability per se, in light of its obsessive use of extreme close-ups on fragmented body parts. The repetitive fracturing, distorting, and magnifying of bodies pull viewers in to a visceral attentiveness to physical capacity in a way that troubles the ableist assumption of smooth loops between thought, intention and bodily response without sequestering that troubling only in Stephen’s (Eddie Redmayne) increasingly incapacitated physicality. It is Jane (Felicity Jones) who says she needs help; it is Jonathan (Charlie Cox) who says he can’t continue assisting the family. Incapacities seep out of bodily contours and become relational inflections.

 But as much as disability studies will certainly do amazing things with this film, ultimately the message seems to me to be time. Riffing on Hawking’s famous title, A Brief History of Time, especially the finitude and perspectivism underscored by the ‘brief’ in that title (inserted by Stephen as a kind of afterthought), the film opens and closes with images blurred to the point of incomprehensibility, and many many scenes include shots like this one of Stephen and his friend Brian (Harry Lloyd), in which the foreground or background is blurred out to create a cone of perspective around Stephen or Jane. Combined with dialogue that is filmed in shot/counter-shot of disembodied heads and the other extreme close-ups of bodily fragments, the film conveys the brevity of life and limitation of perspective as the brute facts against which are pitted the hugeness of the sheer joy of being-alive, the hunger for intellectual engagement and problem-solving, and the unboundedness of all sorts of loves. We live outside of ourselves, but our bodies and, well, time itself, pull us back into ourselves like a quantum instantiation of the swirling spiral of relativity’s expanding and contracting universe.

Photo #1, http://www.eonline.com/news/566822/stephen-hawking-biopic-the-theory-of-everything-trailer-released-movie-stars-eddie-redmayne-watch

Photo #2, http://www.eddieredmayne.org/?p=1901

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The Affects of Scholarship

What is the affective nature of scholarship? A current graduate student posed this question recently in response to a panel she’d just attended that claimed that “all scholarship is love” [This is a paraphrase of Holly White paraphrasing the panel].

All scholarship is love?

Holly pursued her thoughts to an interesting cul-de-sac that led her to ask whether religion scholars might themselves be considered the ‘fandom’ of religion. It was a curious line of thought to listen to because the previous night I had listened to a former graduate student and now colleague (Donovan Schaefer) give a thoughtful delineation of the joy of scholarship as an internally diverse affect divided between excitement and pleasure. Excitement, Donovan said, was produced for him by apprehending a situation, seeking its outer edges and then seeing how to push them. Speaking for myself, cultural studies scholarship generates pleasure from the play of concepts, the intellectual-aesthetic task of juxtaposing concepts and bodies differently, noting their interrelations and assessing how the different aspects of those interrelations appear by means of different conceptual and practical configurations.

Religion scholarship as fandom seems something else altogether, an affective intensity of engagement that forms around ways in which the object of scholarship works on the scholar, as opposed to how the scholar is working on the object. Perhaps this insight needs a certain assuaging of the subject-object binary by saying something about how fandom devolves from celebrity and celebrity culture, thereby constituting—or instaurating—fans and the structures of fandom from the various cultural auras of celebrity. In light of this nuance, the scholar is constructed as a fan, she is given over to the spectacle, and aura, and even consumption of the religious artifact (or group or event) being studied, before questions or methods of analysis are developed.

Other scholarly relationships persist, too, of course. Consider, for instance, a Christian theologian (it does not seem prudent to extend this rumination to other forms of theology, if indeed there are other non-Christian theologies). For the theologian, a register or horizon of normativity precedes and shapes the conditions of scholarship. Theology trains scholars in humility, inculcates the affect of responding carefully to something like orthodoxy, even if the positioning functions to ameliorate the tightness or tyranny of this orthodoxy. Theology marshals a severe weight of historical sedimentation of discourse, institutional authority and controversies over variant practices. This weight bears upon the singular body of the theologian, bound as she is in space and time and yet called by the very task of theology itself to craft and deepen a relationship with eternal, with the eternal God.

The affects of feminist scholarship are situated opposite the affects of theological scholarship (a difference that raises interesting questions for the task of the feminist theologian). Feminist discourse trains the scholar-teacher to narrate her subjectivity, to articulate her own past history of the forces of her subjectivation in order to justify the set of questions and methodological framing of her analysis. Scholarship requires a transparency, not about the aura of the object or history and tradition of the object, but about the subject performing the labor of its production. Affectively, this transparency about the subjectivity of the scholar performs a claim to ethico-political openness that grounds the scholar-teacher’s hope for social transformation.

Scholarship is love, then, only as love is a complexly multifacted affair.

What kinds of loves galvanize your own research?

Disgust in God Loves Uganda

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Ahmed, disgust, God Loves Uganda, Kuntsman

In her Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Migranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and Beyond (Peter Lang: 2009, 50-52), Adi Kunstman draws tellingly on Sara Ahmed’s discussion of disgust in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: 2004) to note how textual forms of anti-homosexual hate speech both reify the object of disgust (gay, lesbian or queer bodies) and rebound back on the communities that speak and publish them, strengthening the borders of the assaulting communities and also materially calling them into sustained being. For Etienne Souriau (Les Différents modes d’existence, 1943; La Correspondance des arts, 1947) this double constitution is instauration—the simultaneous creation of an object and subject, in this case the disgusted object of the queer body and the pure community that bounds and protects itself through feeling disgust at it. Hate speech instaurates the hater and the hated, the disgusted and the disgusting.

Though Kunstman does not underscore the importance of screens in these particular paragraphs on disgust, her book does emphasize the importance of screen textuality in generating what she calls “homes.” Cyberspace, for Kuntsman, offers unique, non-fungible ways in which individuals can come to a sense of personal and collective belonging through screen presences and screen interactions. Recognizing this fact, she seems to be arguing, should attune scholars and activists to the ways in which online flaming isn’t just like a violation of personal bodily space, but really is an intimate assault.

The paragraphs in Kunstman brought to mind the recent documentary God Loves Uganda (Roger Ross Williams, 2013), a film that is a kind of PTSD experience for those of us who have seen Jesus Camp (Ewing and Grady, 2006), perhaps especially because of the role of Lou Engle (leader of the Evangelical Christian group The Call) in both films, though GLU focuses more on IHOP (International House of Prayer) than The Call.

The disgust circulating diegetically in the film is decidedly instaurative: IHOP forms as a viable community (congregating in the US, dispersing to Uganda, collecting money, spending money, praying together and training Ugandan missionaries) in and through its desire to completely eradicate homosexual activities in Uganda. Their disgust at homosexuality materially generates their mission and core identity and also funds and ideologically supports a parliamentary bill that will make homosexuality illegal and will enact the death penalty on repeat or serial offenders (extra-diegetically, the bill became law on 2/24/14). But the film also opens another loop of disgust, that between the white and African evangelical actants and non-evangelical viewers of the film. I am disgusted at their disgust, a fact that produces no small amount of irony. What am I protecting in my visceral separation from the ardent evangelical message? Whatever the answer—however smart and right the answer—the affective dynamics are still disturbing.

One scene in particular drove home this doubly doubled disgust and returns me to Kuntsman’s careful attention to screens: a Ugandan preacher anticipates a tolerant response to homosexuality by mockingly referring to sodomy as ‘what goes on in the privacy of the bedroom’ (I am paraphrasing from memory). “But what, he intones, does go on in those bedrooms???” It is a shocking and ugly turn, from a common liberal bourgeois gesture toward the quiet unaskingness that allows the civility of civil society (profoundly insufficient, but better than lynching) to a voyeuristic lure. The preacher makes good on the temptation embedded in the question. As I watch the screen, a screen behind the preacher displays unflattering pictures of two men engaging in sex acts. The preacher’s words scale down to simple, sheer assertions; argument is unnecessary, it seems, before this evident disgust.

And for me too: my cognitive reaction flattens into a sheer affective refusal, a disgust at the disgust he is embodying and proselytizing. A difference, perhaps, but it remains unseen: The preacher’s disgust trembles with an aura of excitement that his country might turn his disgust into legal hatred. My disgust trembles in fear at the same possibility.

Love in the movies: “Interstellar” and “Birdman”

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affect

Love pervades Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014) and soars through Birdman (Alejandro Iñáritu, 2014; with the divine E. Lubezki as DP). Or rather “love” saturates these recent releases…and it is a ‘love’ that breathes only in a trembling tango with death.

Interstellar might be seen to posit that only science can save us. The film’s political interventions into our off-screen, real-life climate-change-denying government are allusive, signaled by the fact that NASA has become a secret agency, and by Cooper’s (Matthew McConaughey) line, “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” The film keeps its political frame oblique and, while maintaining steady pressure on the earth’s predicament (regardless of who or what made it so), it turns to the affective dynamics internal to the only pragmatic response to terrestrial devastation and human extinction: escape to another planet. Substituting scientific “anomalies” for angry aliens, and climate degradation for asteroids barreling towards earth, the film refreshingly provides apocalypticity without apocalypticism (theory folks will forgive me). Brand (Anne Hathaway) voices the film’s affective counterpoint to its embrace of pure reason—the latter symbolized by the massive physics equation plodding across multiple chalkboards in her father’s office—when she speaks passionately that “Love is the one thing that transcends time and space.” The plea for the power of love is balanced by Brand’s assertion to Cooper that there is no evil in space except what we humans take with us, a claim grimly proven by the aptly named Dr. Mann, brilliantly played by Matt Damon. The sophistication of the film lies in its placement of love and evil within an evolutionary frame, but loosely not reductively, so that viewers can sense how a biological ‘explication’ of emotionality lies in a different register from a physical explication of gravity (say) and makes all the difference in how the truths of science are or are not received, deployed, and trusted. Still, for a film putatively about the survival of the entire human race and about the importance of love, Interstellar is bizarrely individualistic. Though the affective motor of the film is driven by relationships, the loved ones almost never connect; they see each other in memory and on screens (indeed, the opening screen-faces talking about dust evoke the 1930s dustbowl of the Midwest and introduce from the outset a folding of space-time that the film sustains to its end). Names, steles, and spaceship fragments substitute for corpses or photographs. Love is evolutionarily crucial but trapped in disconnection. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” indeed. The collective enterprise of species survival is mirrored by the rage faced by each mortal body cut off in death from his or her loves.

Birdman is so stunningly awesome that any commentary will only ever scratch the surface of this film. Touching only on its affective dimensions, it might seem that love is solidly subordinated to relevance and authenticity—the desire to be a real artist; the scorn of celebrity (popularity) in the protection of art (prestige); the slippery, syncopated line between being and performing (the being of performing or the performing of being)—but the stable axis of all the film’s mirrorings, foldings, parallelisms, and repetitions is Carver’s “What we talk about when we talk about Love”, so that it seems most productive to consider how the film foregrounds the question of love and then probes and tarries with the manners, dispositions, bodies, and delusions that devolve from the hungry ache of love’s lures and desires.

Nostalgia and Fantasy in “Pride”

Matthew Warchus’s Pride (2014) is a comedy with serious undertones. Set in London and Wales, the film loosely hearkens back to a real moment of solidarity between London gays and lesbians and the striking Welsh mine-workers in the mid-1980s. The gays get to be flamboyant, the lesbians are serious and comparatively dogmatic, and the Welsh are both unbelievably accepting and wearyingly spiteful toward their homosexual saviors. The one clip of Maggie Thatcher talking on a television news program viscerally raises the specter of her hideous, hateful soul and suggests (perhaps) that spectacular political alliances occur only in the face of horrendous political leadership.

The alliance is, truly, spectacular. It is imagistic and sparkly more than substantial, held together by a repeated motif (up to and including the film’s final image) of two hands clasping in a basic gesture of solidarity. It is an affectively compelling image even as it remains short on detail or sustenance. The comedy is fun but it’s hard for the fun to stay in focus when it’s so reliant on reactionary nostalgia (union songs and ardent support for righteous causes) and full blown fantasy (the Welsh will accept gays and lesbians after one evening of dancing disco together? really?).

The gays and one lesbian who begin LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) try to convince their LGBQ friends gathered at a queer bookstore to support the striking miners. They argue directly out of a shared patterning of structural oppression: ‘The cops that used to follow us and arrest us and beat us up,’ Mark (Ben Schnetzer) says, ‘are over there now, bullying the miners. We should help them because we know what it’s like to be bullied that way’ (I am paraphrasing from memory).  Retorts from the crowd–‘When have the miners ever supported us?’; ‘I know those guys: they beat me up every day, to and from school’–yield absolutely no effect on LGSM enthusiasm. It is a fight that should be made, they assume, because they swim with the miners in the same sea of oppression, regardless of the stark differences between the two sets of contexts, bodies, and vulnerabilities. They do not assert that all police brutality and social rejection are the same so much as that the obvious differences simply don’t matter in light of the sheer (repeated, familiar, awful) facts of brutality and rejection. It’s a hard stance to sustain, however, in light of the film’s portrayal of a number of ways that those differences do indeed materially shove and warp the interactions between the two groups.

The film floats to an ambiguous end. The LGSM’ers head to the next year’s London Gay Pride march and are told to discard political activism for the simple good feelings of community bonding, even though political activism generates the only substantial form of good community feelings shown in the film. They are told to go to the “back” of the parade with the other “fringe groups” who insist on political messaging. The friends nearly give in to despair, but sadness is swept away in a moment of high reactionary nostalgia, when the Welsh miners come streaming in by the bus load to “show solidarity” with Gay Pride. Hugs and smiles all round.

But the larger ambiguity, of course, is the low rumble of AIDS, present from the middle of the film onwards like a horror film’s subsonic pulse. What place will be afforded this kind of large-scale cross-group solidarity when AIDS descends in full force? How substantial will be the miners’s reciprocity in the face of medical brutality, and not police brutality? That one LGSM member carries HIV and another will die imminently from AIDS–at the age of 26–are facts kept to jolly, pithy sentences strewn over their laughing faces at the Gay Pride march. And that the film does not quite end at that march, but telescopes massive, organized social solidarities down to one recently-out gay man and LGSM’s founding lesbian might also be seen to telescope the neoliberal decade of consumerism and self-entrepreneuralism down to two individuals–friends but never lovers–alone together against the world’s general indifference. Poignant, but hardly funny.