Images of neoliberalism: Reflections on "Ema" (Pablo Larrain), "A Fantastic Woman," and some related matters
The postmodern self, and its gender and social conditions, in recent films from Chile and some others
“Ema,” the remarkably energetic and chaotic new film from Chilean director Pablo Larrain (author of “Neruda” and “Jackie,” about the poet and First Lady, respectively), confirms my impression from the 2016 foreign Oscar winner “A Fantastic Woman”: Chile, the Latin American nation that most traumatically test-drove neoliberalism after the US-engineered 1973 fascist coup, is a land whose film auteurs have given us some striking parallels of young women who want it all and go for it, with all the ambiguity that American viewers may not expect but should. We have for some time now been in the age of enjoying (who doesn’t?) Quentin Tarantino’s revenge fantasies. We live in a society that is collectively ill at ease; this is fairly said. Certainly not a Trump, and probably not a Sanders either, would have gotten so far in more tranquil times. News items have included relentless iterations of enraged white male crazies with guns, making Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s portrayal of Travis Bickle (Robert de Niro) in in the 1976 masterpiece “Taxi Driver” now seem horrifying prophetic. The recent American film by Todd Phillips, “Joker” (reviewed on this site), self-consciously reiterates tropes from that film and Scorsese’s 1982 “King of Comedy,” starring a similarly unhinged de Niro, and it does so by stoking a national anxiety while telling us absolutely nothing about its causes, apart from the all-too-easily declared one of “mental illness,” which explains nothing, since the concept is not an explanation but a label that categorizes some things we wish we understood and don’t; it amounts to saying that crazy people sometimes do crazy things because they are crazy. And some people are ill at ease because they are sick in their minds. That is like saying that the reason it is so cold outside is because it’s the dead of winter.
You may already be wondering about something to do with gender in films like Larrain’s. I do think there is a common ground that films like this (and there is something of a genre here, in fact) have with some of Tarantino’s fantasies, like the “Kill Bill” duology, except that “Kill Bill” has a simpler politics, targeting misogyny and patriarchy. In “Ema” we don’t quite know what trauma, if any, motivated this young woman to become the kind of person she is. The film gives us an extended image of her, more than any narrative. In its pulsating, energetic scenes of Ema dancing the reggaeton with a troupe composed of women, kids at the school where she evidently teaches, and with scenes, taking place on a stage or in a gym, that are fairly consistent throughout, though interspersed with some minimally narratival encounters, as well as of her flame-throwing and having passionate sex with various male and mostly female partners, the film at first may seem to merely promise a delayed revelation. But all there is of one is some uncertain story about a nine-year-old boy she and her husband, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, apparently adopted and who now has departed their custody for someone else’s. This story is never much clarified, though he does appear at the end, and mentioned at the outset, his absent account appears to bookend her portrayal. The boy is the focus for her and her husband, from whom she may be getting a divorce, of some vague notions of injustice. The boy either committed a crime, for which he may or may not be responsible (burning someone with a torch is something she herself seems likely to have done), or was the victim of some injustice, which may or may not have been avoided. Her connection to motherhood and progeny, and part of her connection to the Bernal character, is what links her to an undeveloped potential for a tragedy or simply a story. This is a young woman, as attractive bodily as any dancer, with a smooth face and dyed blonde hair smoothed back, so that she seems like some of force of beauty and desire or will in your face with whomever, she is a force to be reckoned with. She gets most of what she wants. She’s given ample space in the film’s space and time to express with all the great energy of the dance what she can say and do with feet, body, and hands. It is wonderful to look at. You want to join in. I’ll bet dance classes in Chile are getting new applicants from viewers. I myself would go to any dance performance to see someone like this just perform the many brief routines that she presents in this film; they are like the musical and dance numbers in the best film musicals. And I was utterly entranced for about the first half-hour by how adeptly the filmmaker is teasing us through these scenes with their hints of a story to be developed as bursts of energy alternating with the curious complaints and accounts about the boy, who only appears, in a non-speaking role, near the film’s end.
In a way, this film does much more energetically and satisfyingly what “A Fantastic Woman” did in 2016. I wanted to say of that film what the pop singer Helen Reddy sang back in 1972, in a ridiculous lyric seemingly fitting an age of political and psychical faux courage and stupidity, “I am a strong, I am invisible, I am woman!” But don’t laugh too soon. This is an idea in our culture, that is perhaps deeper than feminism proper, even if it does have something to do with gender, and in a way that is perhaps surprising and discordant with some preferred ideological memes. Those who were around then remember the “me decade.” Its critique was well-developed in some films of the time, before being immortalized in social historian and public intellectual Christopher Lasch’s neoconservative/communitarian Marxist tract The Culture of Narcissism, which everyone read back in 1979. But is that what it is, or is there more to it?
“A Fantastic Woman” may in fact be a film about a fantasy, and a fantasy idea not just of womanhood, but also, more tellingly perhaps, of an individual will to triumph against all odds and obstacles. What could be more American? The eponymous young woman of this film is a trans. She’s cute. In the opening scenes, she is in a bar with an absolutely adoring older man, greying, perhaps in his forties. He gazes at her in silence. They return to, or arrive at, a hotel room, where he promptly collapses before they have sex. The collapse is fatal; she is now the bereaved woman and soon to become the aggrieved woman. His family does not like her, presumably for “what” she is, which is to them some scandalous embarassment. She is undaunted, and that statement could be the film’s true title. We see her leaning into a fierce wind; she leans forward, and is not swept back by what in French might be called le temps as both the environmental weather and the time, the times we live in. In another scene, she appears in front of a car driven by the family, and ascends up the windshield to hover above both passengers and us. This film is a fantasy, and its meaning is: as a transsexual, or as a woman, or just as a person, faced with adversity, on top of loss, she will be: undaunted. She will overcome. This is a woman’s fantasy, and it perhaps also could be a man’s, perhaps best realized through a female character, for reasons that we should perhaps find interesting.
First, the fantasy is appropriately neoliberal because the person who succeeds this way is not daunted or held back by circumstances, natural or social, and for that reason alone doesn’t really have to reckon with real conditions of social dependence and precarity at all. That makes her suitably representative of our fantasy, we precarious ones, who are affected by the things that happen to us, and don’t always or necessarily triumph over adversity. That precarity, and not some kind of autarchical independence, as political philosopher Judith Butler reminds us in her recent best-selling book The Force of Nonviolence, is the true normal human condition, recognition of which is perhaps key to a radical politics as distinct from a falsely liberal one. Our current Bernie Sanders moment, such as it is, should be considered partly a recognition of that.
But now, why a woman, and why a trans woman? I think her being trans at least highlights both her vulnerability, and maybe a choice of vulnerability, since like it or not women are more vulnerable than men, ideally in ways that involve more enjoyment than suffering, but as weaker, more susceptible at least to certain things (remember Andrea Dworkin, protesting “intercourse” itself for this reason?), and potential victims all the same. Secondly, a sex change marks one’s subjectivity as the effect at least of a certain plasticity, the recognition of which resides in such things as being able to change one’s sex. And that plasticity surely goes along with precarity: the human condition is partly a remarkable creativity that is constitutively linked, as Heidegger suggested, to our vulnerability to suffering and death. Today discourse often seems to run totally free of being bound anyhow to situations and even bodies with lives; and at the same time, there are more people who are vulnerable through poverty, migration, incarcerations, or selectively being allowed to die, than ever. A skeptical enthusiast might well wonder, if you can change your sex, what can’t you change? Maybe not your circumstances to fit your self, but perhaps your self to fit if not circumstances or opportunities, then your image of who you want to be. I mean to imply here no moral judgment as to whether people should or should not be able to change themselves so utterly (if the change is that total, which trends of gender indifference call into question at the same time that gender plasticity would escalate them) —it’s simply a fact, and perhaps a not uninteresting one, which has been explored a bit by some filmmakers (including Fassbinder in “In a Year of 13 Moons,” Almodovar, variously, and most of all in “All about My Mother,” and French director Bertrand Bonello in his interesting early film “Tiresias”) that some do). My claim is that this is not “just” a film about a trans woman. It is a film that can speak to you and me, and these are some of the reasons why. If something is interesting, its meaning exceeds what it itself says or is merely.
But why women and not men? I suspect the answer to this question is partly psychoanalytic, and there, as I am not an analyst, I admit I am slightly out of my depth. But my conjecture would be that: both women and men sometimes entertain fantasies about remarkably successful women, and there is some good reason why a female subject can figure in these fantasies in a way that men usually do not. I think if we take seriously the Lacanian idea that “castration” is a figure of lack, we can see that perhaps the psychoanalytic meaning of these images and stories is something like this: (It is a notion of masculine identity, developed in Lacan’s famous Seminar XX, “Encore,” that) there is at least one kind of man who is not subject to the law of castration that says men have a potentiality that is marked by the impotentiality and limit of finitude, and that man is a “woman.” The truth of such notions is surely in part that in a society that solicits victimhood precisely in lieu of the stance of the responsible citizen that links the ethics and politics it demands, rather than both linking and separating a psychology and a governmentally that it commands. Everyone knows that in some ways “I” or “we” (whatever “kind” of person we are, or understand ourselves to be) have it rough while someone else must have it easy; this is the resentment behind so much politicized violence, from Nazi anti-Semitism to the jerking right knee of so many American left-liberals, a matter on which I have written elsewhere.
In the psychoanalytic myth and its construction of male fantasy, the strange privilege of the figure of woman is an imaginary plenitude that denies or is exempt from lack. The “phallic” in this sense is the metaphor of a fantastical idea of a self, omnipotent, not lacking. And when it comes to theatrical demonstrations in all their potential monstrosity (from monstrare, to show), one is eager to be active and not passive, to do shit and not just have shit happen to you. Take what has happened to you and put it back out there: the seeing machine’s introjection of image is turned around into projection onto a screen, and as viewers we are active subjects through identification, as we know from Christian Metz and 70s film theory with all its sterile Puritanism. We live amid widespread images consumed and produced together in a social practice of shared projection, of an oppressive powerlessness that ultimately is just that of lived experience itself in all its unremarked passionate (suffering) passivity. It is often best remedied by being willing to take charge and perhaps push one’s own self-presentation into transgressively histrionic excesses. (On the failure and perverse successes of transgression, see most of the filmography of Lars von Trier; on allowing oneself its forbidden joys, see that of Tarantino).
Perhaps the greatest fable of this in the West is that of Joan of Arc, though of course she is an actor in a story of two parts. In part 1, she is uniquely able to lead because she is female and a virgin. This means (as Jacques Rivette’s “materialist” version, “Joan the Maid,” makes clear) that men will find her untainted by their own anxieties about war and sex. In part 2, she is tried and put to death by a patriarchy that considers her confidence or faith to be suspect because not subject to their authority. This second part of her story is the one told so dramatically in the Carl-Theodor Dreyer film “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” No viewer doubts that hers is the true faith, perhaps in a sense that exceeds what we might have thought that to mean, just as her face almost exceeds the frame in the film’s famous many pathetic close-ups.
Then there are the stories of woman artists who rise as a male artist companion falls: “A Star is Born,” “New York, New York,” “The Artist,” and “La La Land,” which all tell basically the same story. It’s a fairy tale. Another version is Sternberg’s “The Scarlet Empress,” about the rise of Catherine the Great and the fall of the hapless and stupid Czar Peter whom she rose to the throne by marrying. It can happen this way, and the story formula seems apt for our time, or for the first century of cinema that certainly was also, and especially in Hollywood, that of women. The most common story of women was told from the point of view of a man enchanted by a woman, and it had two major variants: 1) She will fuck you up, and that will be so wonderful (the formula of 30s screwball comedy), or 2) She will fuck you up, and that will be so horrible (Hollywood film noir of the 40s and 50s). In both types of scenario, the woman is a formidable power, like what Sophocles had the chorus of “Antigone” say about humanity. In the story of the man’s fall and the woman’s rise, part of what is enacted is the tragedy of a masculinity that turns out to be more vulnerable because of something to do with sexuality and the combination of it with the desire for success. Success is a woman. Or so it seems.
The best comparison to the Chilean films “A Fantastic Woman” and “Ema” might be Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “The Marriage of Maria Braun.” There, a woman who had an affair with an American soldier while her husband was a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp becomes a figure of postwar West Germany’s rise to power, culminating in national rearmament. Maria here uses all her feminine wiles and a keen sense of strategically taking advantage of every opportunity, as corporate executive and in the bedroom, to succeed while her husband is imprisoned a second time, when he takes the rap for her having killed the American soldier “Bill” (who as it happens is also Black). Maria is charming, and this is not lost on the audience. Like the first “Godfather” film, made a few years earlier, this film turns on the audience’s identification with a sympathetic figure who is also unscrupulous if not actually ruthless. The film ends in an ironic scene of explosion of her isolated and ample suburban house after the husband’s return from the third exile, in Canada, chosen in an agreement with the Franco-German industrialist Maria sleeps her way to the top with, after it is discovered that this Herr Oswald has named both of them as his heirs, and she then absent-mindedly lights a cigarette on a previously opened stove gas burner, while the radio announcer presents the end of a World Cup soccer match by shouting, “Deutschland ist Weltmeister!” and the film closes with echoes of the opening explosion in a tenement building during the last days of the war, with framed portrait images of various German Chancellors echoing that of the infamous wartime one. That Germany is now master of the world in a game being played is one of those cruel ironies Fassbinder loved, the great left-wing enfant terrible director who appropriately never failed to ruthlessly criticize certain persons who happened to be members of any special minority, not excluding his own as a gay man.
Maria Braun overcomes everything in her path, making her the formidable woman, who figures in the film as symbol of the renascent German nation. But there are numerous ironies in this, charming and funny as she always is (you can’t help rooting for her, who at one point delightfully calls herself “a capitalist tool by day and a secret agent of the working class by night, the Mata Hari of the economic miracle!”), and it all comes crashing down on her in the end. The suggestion is that postwar Germany is a nation living under a delusion mis-recognized in its own success.
“A Fantastic Woman” presents a success story with no real sense of its precarity or that of the heroine (instead, she is merely oppressed by the family’s refusal of recognition). But the film gains much in interest when that is considered. It is one of those stories that seems fully composed, with none of the irony it surely should have. “The Godfather” did that by overdetermining identifications with images of a model family led by a strong, self-confident, and canny young patriarch, and success in America in a film that reeks of normality, while at the same time making all that the focus of a traditional Hollywood narrative film that works through audience identification with images of the heroic, and so criticizes its own aesthetics as such. The film may not need to show a flip side or tain of this mirror, but it does in the image of Kay, the innocent wife, who is shut out of the men’s office at the end, with Michael saying she is “hysterical.” Suddenly, it is almost as if the true point of view in the film is hers, not his, or ours identifying with him, and against the counter-model of Sonny as the stereotypical passionate Southern Italian man whose operatic character is fixated on an incestuously tinted relationship with the sister he will protect from her husband by beating him up and threatening to kill him, leading to the poetic justice of his own death en route to do so; Michael is the contrast to this as the cold, controlled, cautiously scheming bourgeois Northern type, Sicilian only in name (in fact, in the scenes with Sicilian-bred Italians he fittingly speaks Italian (which was also the Florentine dialect) to their Sicilian), basically a type who may be identified with the political philosopher Machiavelli, who hailed from the northern city). The film works as it does because Michael is a figure of identification who will ironically be problematized, something Martin Scorsese would later do in his own gangster films and films of crazy loner losers like Travis Bickle of “Taxi Driver.” American men in particular still enjoy these films, and they know that their identifications are problematic, but the films would not work at all as they do without this, not to mention that many fewer tickets and concession stand items would be conceded to see these stories of men whose claim to greatness is really vanity and its male bonding rituals extended to screen figures, such as de Niro/Travis parodies in the famous mirror scene in “Taxi Driver” when he provokes his image as daring to look at him when he is "the only one here,” an image both confirming and accusing itself as such. Such is self-irony, most often coded as a male prerogative, or malediction (remember the early Woody Allen?), just as revelatory self-reflection in Shakespeare’s tragedies is generally a masculine trope, while knowing feminine desire runs through the making of the transvestite precondition of theater at that time the device that can give female identifications a comically rather than tragically ironic meaning, since they are readily wielded rather than introduced by unfortunate fate. As if men are subjected to recognitions, while women can wield them in a knowing art.
So why, in our time, do female heroes so often get a fundamentally non-ironic treatment in films that ask us to admire them as they half admire themselves? This is a question worth pondering.
Is it because of this notion of non-lack? I think so. And is that story true in any sense? Well, we certainly know that women can and do suffer as well as men, maybe more so, or with less need for disavowal. Indeed, lots of cinema and television have been devoted to, or exploited, as melodrama can sometimes be said to do, the fact of that suffering. We certainly know what are the social and political conditions and stakes of wanting a kind of revenge on the men who wanted to keep them down. Actually, one very good story of how the girls taking things into their hands might not succeed is “Thelma and Louise,” a film that may be celebrated as feminist but does not just show the ladies winning. Though actually the film is not about the irony of their success so much as that of their trying to escape lousy loser men and failing. What is celebrated is their will to try, immortalized in the final scene when they escape capture through a glorious death-drive suicide. Their triumph is to assert and claim their own desires.
I conclude that the idea of the woman who gets everything she wants is a fantasy. And whether that fantasy appeals mainly to women or to men and women both, its function is to protest against frustrations and precarity by incarnating a radically non-precarious existence. In fact, capitalism tends to promise that, but the promise is usually empty, and the failures that result are usually blamed on the individual persons suffering that failure. My hypothesis about the significance of both “A Fantastic Woman” and “Ema” is that they present such fantasies, with strong hints that they are problematic, and also responses to situations that may in fact be sadder than they will seem when readily overcome. While I found the heroine of “A Fantastic Woman” rather obnoxiously ridiculous, a view I don’t think every viewer or critic shares, “Ema” is just so energized with the excitement of its many dancing numbers and the passionate sex with multiple partners as well as the inflammatory blow-torch numbers, you can’t help but enjoy it, even if the story of the sometimes adoptive son introduces a strong note of anxiety into this frenetic not-quite-because-more-than paradise. I’m not sure that such a story isn’t destined to end with an exhausted whimper to top off all its banging.
The context is neo-liberalism. Historically, particularly from the Pinochet years of 1973-90, the Chileans know something about that (and its even more topical combination in their country and elsewhere with evocations of social and political fascism). As with Tarantino, viewers should be cautioned that they can have lots of fun on the ride, but they shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that inflammatory endings can burn not only like proverbial bushes communicating a great eternal truth, but also, more prophetically, because while it may be exciting to watch, it may be painful to go through. Nixon said of Chile when planning the coup that killed Allende and democratic socialism, “Make the economy scream.” (Not just the scream economical?). Energetic self-expression can liberate (it is not as if our societies do not offer passionate enjoyments), or it can burn.
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Reflections
The predominant personality types of our time fit the social and economic conditions of neo-liberal capitalism. They are less authoritarian in a rigid and disciplined sense than those of the Fordist era and the modern subjectivity that is often dated to Descartes and the scientific religion at the outset of the period of the modern absolutist state that emerged at the end of the Renaissance (manifestly in the work of the greatest early modern writer, Shakespeare). The new personality types are more flexible and plastic, and self-consciously creative, fitting new conditions of production, but also more vulnerable and precarious. This ipso facto means there is now more “mental illness” if that means subjectively experienced malaise or manifested failure or “breakdown.” Things fall apart, and may also be put back together: a “feminine” trope of poetic fabrication (text as woven, fabric as artifice). Personalities are more fluid and malleable, with less rigid boundaries; a self or identity may itself be something not just artificial but exchangeable, like a new job or freelance gig.
Persons now may be masks that are improvised. We are roles more than pre-existing identities, the old autonomous self that is figured imaginatively as a degree zero point of view itself lacking substance, a conceit most attributed to Descartes and the mostly English empiricist thought of the early modern period (the 17th and 18th centuries), and also widely recognized as a masculine fiction, or fiction of masculinity, as well as one of a property-owning subject unaffected at its origin by relationships with others and participation in a social world that he only joins in that explicitly fictional act that is the agreement to a social “contract” between such autonomous propertarian subjects. So many things have been said in the years since the decisive works of philosophy (Wittgenstein, Heidegger), art (in various ways, much of modernism), and social theory (now numerous forms of critique have filled out the picture with several overlapping variations), as well as in historical experience, above all that of the first two world wars, and the economic developments that revealed the beginning of the end of an explicitly colonialist capitalism along with traditional territorial agriculture-based societies and patriarchal gender relations, as we saw the rise of globalism and an information economy on the one hand, and the equality of women as perhaps the last century’s signal achievement, on the other.
In Roman thought, “persons” were both legal and theatrical conceits: being a person meant being capable of representing and giving an account of oneself in a court, and it also meant the appearance of a theatrical mask. It is a concept of representation. Obviously, along with the narrative notions of plot, character development, dramatic conflict, and the attainment through tragic experience of moral insight and post-traumatic catharsis, theater depends on that form of seeming and its relation to being that the actor on a stage playing a character may, as in some of Shakespeare’s Othello, incarnate in a strange self-division, implying a theoretical dualism.
Narrative film re-centers the experience of character and story on the viewer’s visual experience of a series of scenes and transformations of and within them through time. The characters can also be photographed in fragments and reassembled in any order whatever to present the story or sequence of events and situations that the filmmaker wishes to show, so the actor loses his integrity in the form of film by definition, while in the theater he is linked to it, to himself, by the necessity of being present to view on the stage in a living, moving, and speaking body that is that of the actor. For this reason, every staged performance of a character presents at least implicitly the duality of actor and character. Descartes’s “cogito” (“I think, therefore I am”) is theatrical in its way in positing the existence of the self that is there already speaking, at least to himself, and so is like a character wondering if he is an actor. The question whether there is also a world and other people is a form of the same question, and such an interrogation clearly situates the Cartesian adventure of thinking that passes through doubt to certitude as one that Heidegger, Foucault, and others have recognized as a paradigm of “representation.”
This paradigm has not disappeared in our time, but it has become more questionable. In Antonioni’s “Red Desert,” Guliana (Monica Vitti) says to herself (and the audience; she is looking at the viewer) at one point, “If you prick me, you do not bleed.” What seems like an obvious moral truth when Shakespeare’s Shylock insists that he is so sanguinary has lost its self-evidence. “Red Desert” is about the opening up of a world of the visible, as if truly seen for the first time, by a neurotic, bored and anxious, housewife who seems to find the world she inhabits, including both a cold husband and a kind but uncomprehending lover, unlivable, and not because of any injustice, just an inadequacy to her need for something like art. Corrado, the lover, notes that he want to find a way to live, and she a way to see, and these are the same. But the point of the film is to show that they are not; the film opens up a world of imagination that is irreducible to that of relationships and activities. This is what is criticized in Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” the alienated cabbie invokes what suggests the Lacanian version of theatrical self-representation as mere spectacle and delusion, effectively accusing the mirror image of looking back at him, as he resents his needing it. The viewer then gets a highly ironic version of a character in a film reflecting to us as viewers what he affirms through refusing as he looks at his own self-representation. This is not affirmation and confident self-construction, but an undoing of a paradigm of self and its relationships to itself and to world and others. In painting, this is the difference between Velasquez’s “Las Meninas” and Manet’s “Bar at the Folies-Bergères.” In the late modern period, the experiences of experiencing selves would tend to become unsettling and troubling merely.
But suppose we still have a social life, most of us, in which self-presentation has some importance, if only because in the modern world, unless we are peasants, we are constantly encountering strangers. There can be a need or desire to improvise a performance, perhaps to seduce the other person into giving you something you want, or to love or like you, which is a great concern of narcissists. People in the late modern world can worry a lot about their identities, and even seek to establish publicly some definite notion of who they are by virtue of their type of person, maybe using a demographical category, since, especially in America today, these categories are not just hotly contested in various ways, but social and political struggles are waged in their terms. If this means affirming and insisting on what “kind” of person you really are, we might call this a political authenticity. The more originally private forms authenticity takes as a project are often affairs of art and artists: we speak of a writer’s voice, which is not a matter of sincerity or lying, usually, but is one of a more and less of seeming to be as you are, and also realizing it through work. I suggest that authenticity is a theatrical project in essence (it links seeming to being), and it comes always implicitly paired with an opposite term, which we might call performativity. Performativity celebrates artifice and the self’s plasticity or malleability, and derives from the fact that a single person and body as an actor can play many parts. Authenticity is a demand: it says, be yourself. This demand is what Foucault called being tied to yourself and your identity. He rightly thought this a feature of practices of social control, partly following the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who spoke of “interpellation” or being called, as when another person says, “Hey, you there!” and for Althusser this is paradigmatically the police, calling you to a duty that is first of all to recognize that you are appropriately being called. Fans of certain traditional religious texts might also point out that God himself calls to certain people, first of all in Genesis, and the usual response was supposed to be “Here I am.” Persons and personality as being-a-person are effects of political practices and power relationships, or of ethical practices and moral responsibility, or both, and of course they are both, and presented and acting/speaking selves have taken various forms in the history of societies and persons.
Much in theater and film history makes use of these forms and conceits. I suggest that:
-Wherever social life involves representations of selves in terms that are partly contingent and plastic, authenticity and performativity are correlative possibilities, both of which are by themselves, and as exclusive of one another, impossible.
-Late capitalist society as it shifts from the modern Fordist model to a “postmodern” neoliberal model, will tend to problematize authenticity and promote performativity, along with flexibilty, acceptance of precarity, boundaries of the self figured as more fluid than solid, improvisation over repetition based on a prior model or “script” to be implemented, as a theory might be thought on a representationalist model to be applied in and as a practice.
-In this scheme, authenticity will tend to be presented as a project doomed to failure (see, for example, Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris,” where this is quite spectacularly demonstrated), while performativity occupies a place where success is more contingent and failure more likely.
Other aspects of a social shift in this period (the end of World War 2 serves as a convenient marker) can be pointed out. Gilles Deleuze suggested in “Postscript on Societies of Control,” that after the 60s, the society Foucault called disciplinary, and whose model was the mass production factory/prison/hospital/school, was being replaced by a more ex post facto “society of control,” where people are superficially free to do what they like, but mass surveillance using information technology is used to limit what they are able to do. I think we can add that in the period since the decade or so after the war, styles of personality and authority that were coded as masculine and also, I think, as European, came into crisis. The ideas of Europe were opposed in America mainly by our own national images of identity and constructions of alternatives attributed variously to theories of the feminine, of a lifestyle liberty including in sex, or fanciful New Age appropriations of one or more antiquities across the other ocean bounding our continent in cultures and languages that in fact have little affected the modern West outside of things like cinematic representations that are both far too modern and too hybrid to serve such a role. Europe has meant many things to Americans, including certain ideas of order and forms of social life rather more inured to conflict, and with not so much more prejudices as their taking different forms. Finding the singular cause at their origin may not be what we need to know.
Something is happening and we need to figure out what it is. People rightly worry about governments and their policies, economies and their risks and opportunities, winners and losers, quantities and distributions, but we also need to try to track shifting forms of life through the images and affects that present and represent for us its lived qualities.
I confess that I like the character of Ema in this film, have no wish to condemn or judge her too harshly, and I suspect neither do most viewers. The most attractive figures of what “we” are like today, the emerging global society that cannot fail to implicate us, as observers who are almost by definition participants in somehow analogous ways of doing things, this is what we must criticize first and foremost: not what we already know we must reject, but what we find attractive. Perhaps then it is not ugliness but beauty itself which most and most pressingly needs our critical thought and gaze. This is one of the stakes of film criticism, as we criticize what we love and enjoy, and what that pleasure helps us in understanding.