Re-membering Psycho: aesthetic regimes and affective resonances in The Bourne Identity.

Trevisanut, Amanda

I am watching Doug Liman's 2002 film The Bourne Identity. (1) I am approximately a quarter of the way through and the amnesiac protagonist Jason Bourne arrives at his unfamiliar Paris apartment with Marie, his newly acquired female sidekick. She asks to use his bathroom. It should be a fairly innocuous moment: taking a shower is perhaps the most quotidian of human undertakings. However, the legacy of that shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho (2) imposes itself on my memory; it seems embedded in the texture of Liman's film. As in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, 'cinema asserts itself as aberration of movement and dispossession of point of view'. (3) The camera is restlessly searching out its subject in each shot. The intensifying pace of the editing, the fragmented framing, the cinematic cuts that fragment the body of Bourne--which offer me a multiplicity of perspectives from which to look at him while he talks on the phone--aesthetically mimic the demise of Psycho's protagonist, Marion. Similar to Psycho's shower scene, the cinematography in The Bourne Identity violently disorients me, refuses to hold me at a distance but also refuses to stabilise my point of view. My skin prickles with anticipation knowing that danger is imminent--the pressing memory of Psycho is, to quote Bill Schaffer, 'the fate of my affect, the shape of a feeling that will live in me, become part of my life'. (4) I experience the affective resonance of Psycho as textual--that is, embedded on the surface of The Bourne Identity. However, the textual echo of Psycho resonates with my body; The Bourne Identity calls forth from my sensorium a response that is familiar, a response that is remembered.

As has been demonstrated by the cinematic scholarship of Vivian Sobchak (5) and Linda Williams, (6) taking time to reflect upon our own subjective experiences of the cinema highlights the inadequacies of traditional theories of spectatorship. What I hope to foreground with my own subjective experience is the embodied and affective nature of postmodern cinema. Affect is a concept perhaps most comprehensively developed by philosopher Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. (7) Massumi extrapolates how 'the body doesn't just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts, it infolds volitions and cognitions that are nothing if not situated.' (8) The implication is that cognition, emotion and feeling are recursive processes; they are 'higher functions' used to process and evaluate an affective moment, whereby one pathway of expression or action is selected from many possible pathways. Furthermore, all potential actions and expressions, though not actualised, remain with us virtually, as potential, giving the 'body's movements a kind of depth that stays with it across all its transitions--accumulating in memory, in habit, in reflex, in desire, in tendency.' (9)

Like Sobchak in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, my focus on affect seeks to highlight the centrality of the body to the cinematic experience, and how

   in experience, lives vision in cooperation and significant exchange
   with other sensorial means of access to the world, a body that
   makes meaning before it makes conscious, reflective thought. (10)

Sobchak's emphasis on how vision is only one sense that operates in concert with other bodily senses to create meaning undermines the pre-eminence of visual regimes in traditional psychoanalytic and semiotic approaches to the cinema. (11) In the spirit of Sobchak's attempt to write the sensorial body back into cinema, (12) I aim to illustrate how theorist Fredric Jameson's focus upon visual aesthetics in postmodern cinema occludes the embodied experience of spectatorship, and thus fails to identify how postmodern cinema relies upon subjective memory for its affect. This is not to diminish the significance of vision for the cinematic medium, for 'in an ocularcentric culture, people will experience and produce the world as a primarily visual world'. (13) Rather, I aim to illustrate how the aesthetic characteristics of postmodern cinema--of aural and visual simulation of existing images either through parody or pastiche, of prefabricated images, of intertextual references and of bricolage--are designed to resonate, that is to trigger, familiar sensorial responses in the spectator. As I will demonstrate, reading the embodied and remembering subject in relation to postmodern film implies the specificity of the temporal and spatial context of reception, which compromises Jameson's elaboration of how the contemporary cinema reproduces consumer capitalist ideology.

NEGOTIATING THE VIRTUAL AND THE 'REAL'

For Fredric Jameson, the socio-historical context of late-capitalist ideology inhibits the ability of the individual to properly negotiate the difference between virtual and 'real' (14) experiences. In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson contends that the commodification of various artistic forms has invariably resulted in the 'waning of affect':

   Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity
   production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing
   fresh waves of ever more novel seeming goods ... at ever greater
   waves of turnover, now assigns an increasingly structural function
   and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. (15)

The waning of affect is posited as a crisis of postmodern identity whereby art, fulfilling its new function in commodity culture, is no longer able to offer us critical distance. The immediacy and pervasive nature of the moving image is seen by Jameson to compromise the sense of retroactive distance required to understand the 'real' and 'authentic' conditions of contemporary society and culture. What is intriguing about Jameson's position is that his focus upon affect explicitly acknowledges the corporeal presence of the spectator; however, the visual regime of postmodern cinema is seen to overwhelm the individual to the point of passive reception. Jameson's spectator is denied the cognitive space for thoughtful ref lection and, in this sense, his elaboration of how the postmodern cinema collapses the distinction between the virtual and the 'real' is not unlike cinematic theory inaugurated by Jean-Louis Baudry (16) and Christian Metz, (17) whereby the perceiving 'I' is reduced to the seeing 'eye'.

Traditionally, the cinematic apparatus has been theorised as an ideological apparatus, whereby captive or passive spectators are interpolated into the diegetic world on the screen before them. Baudry, in his 1975 essay 'The apparatus: metaphysical approaches to the impression of reality in the cinema', (18) and Metz in his 1983 text Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, (19) detailed the way in which the subject identifies directly with the camera: two separate all-perceiving eyes united by the screen image. As the historical research of Guiliana Bruno (20) and Anne Friedberg (21) has shown, the innumerable variations in contemporary environments of spectatorship undermine the credibility of apparatus theory. Both Bruno and Friedberg consider space as a means for thinking through how spectators negotiate their simultaneous relation to the virtual worlds represented in film and their 'real' conditions of existence. As I will demonstrate, this not only has implications for apparatus theory, but also for the theoretical critique of postmodern cinema.

In The Virtual Window: from Alberti to Microsoft, Friedberg offers a historical and material account of the functionality of the window, and in doing so offers a new paradigm for theorising the cinematic apparatus. Friedberg characterises the window as a permeable interface, and draws parallels between the representational qualities of the window and the screens that increasingly populate public and private structures. From its inception '[t]he window was a membrane between the inside and the outside, and light was the material that modulated this relation.' (22) In foregrounding the transformative quality of glass, Friedberg suggests that what is seen through the window is a virtual image. The modulation of light through glass affects the perception of what is seen through it, obscuring and highlighting various aspects of the 'reality' beyond. Her emphasis is not simply on what is seen through the window, but also what it brings into a given space. Furthermore, the advent of glass buildings such as London's Crystal Palace altered the experience of perspective itself: rather than gazing through a framed aperture in the wall 'the spectator's gaze traced the wall as "the eye sweeps along an unending perspective".' (23) This shift in the architectural function of glass indicates how the window is a surface which elicits multiple perspectives that are directed outwards as well as inwards, not unlike a screen. A subject's movement through contemporary spaces does not indicate an inauthentic experience of 'reality' so much as an ability to cohere multiple perspectives, a bearer of a fluid gaze that moves continually between virtual and physical spaces.

The succession of shots in Psycho's shower sequence demonstrates Friedberg's fluid gaze. As I observe Marion undress and step into the shower, it is as though my gaze is tracing her reflection in the shards of a shattered mirror. As Marion turns on the taps, her face and shoulders are centrally framed, and she tips her face up toward the stream of water. This shot is succeeded by an apparent point of view shot of the showerhead, which is succeeded by another close up of Marion washing her neck with soap. This is succeeded by a profile shot of Marion washing her extended arms and turning to face a different direction with the shower wall behind her, which is followed by a slightly tighter shot of the same action. The subsequent profile shot of the showerhead is followed by another profile shot of Marion, but from the opposite side with the shower curtain directly behind her. In this shot Marion is quite oddly framed, her head occupying the right hand corner of the screen with the expanse of curtain behind her. It is in this space that the silhouette of Norman Bates materialises, and the camera slowly zooms in on the figure, excluding Marion from the frame. In a quick succession of stilted movements and cuts, I am situated in an unstable proximity to the protagonist; I look at Marion's movements and the claustrophobic space that she inhabits from an impossible array of positions. I am refused a stable point of view, and the only element of the sequence anchoring my senses is the constant sound of the water running--that is, until Bates pulls back the curtain and Bernard Herman's infamous stabbing score imposes itself.

Before Bates even begins his frenzied attack on Marion, Hitchcock has begun his attack on the established convention of continuity editing. Spatial continuity is eschewed in favour of a mosaic of images exposing the seamless construction of classical cinema, which 'appealed more to narrative identification than to body identification'. (24) In spite of the film's abrupt break with narrative and formal convention--as Friedberg's window paradigm suggests--the viewer is able to negotiate the unusual succession of shots. What Friedberg's theoretical model allows for but does not elaborate is how the viewer is able to do this. In Touch: Sensory Theory and Multi-sensory Cinema, Laura Marks offers an elaboration of what she terms 'haptic looking', which dovetails neatly with Friedberg's elaboration of the fluid gaze:

   Haptic images invite the viewer to dissolve his or her subjectivity
   in close and bodily contact with the image. The oscillation between
   the two creates an erotic relationship, a shifting between distance
   and closeness. But haptic images have a particular erotic quality,
   one involving giving up visual control. The viewer is called on to
   fill the gaps in the image, engage with the traces the image
   leaves. (25)

When Bates begins to stab at Marion, the pace of the editing intensifies and no single shot clearly depicts the action. The viewer is offered perspectives of the action from every conceivable angle; each shot is partial, fragmented, and varying in proximity to the frenzied action. Each cut to the next shot frustrates viewer attempts to visually discern the action. The speed of the editing prevents the viewer's ability to adjust to each new vantage point, which absolutely undermines the sense of unassailable distance that demarcates the spectator from the screen. The sequence is exemplary of haptic looking, in that the viewer is forced to 'fill the gaps' in the image, to cohere the succession of images by appealing to the sensory response of their own body. The symbolic representation of murder on the screen is partial, incomplete. The sense of anxiety and shock that has become synonymous with the sequence is a result of its formal construction, its fragmented framing and rapid editing, which draws the viewer into a 'sensory participation with its world' (26) at the moment of corporeal assault.

This sequence in Psycho demonstrates how cinema appeals to the active participation of the spectator. It suggests how the body's sensorium enables the fluid movement between the virtual space on the screen and the 'real' experience of the lived body in space. It illustrates how the spectatorial experience is determined not only through a visual connection with the screen, but also through sensory connection. The cinematic image elicits a polysemy of perspectives, which is in turn modulated by the cultural and personal history of the spectator, in a manner that is analogous to the way Friedberg describes the modulation of light through glass, which both obscures and highlights various aspects of 'reality'. The formal techniques employed in Psycho's shower scene are exemplary of modernist attempts to disturb the ideological function of classical narrative cinema. However much these techniques transmit affect, their co-option by postmodern cinema is considered by Jameson to diminish their ability to initiate reflection in the viewer; convention renders these formal techniques politically impotent. Ultimately, Jameson is making a distinction between the everyday transmission of affect and the perceived artistic imperative to affect political reflection in audiences.

THE MEMORY OF AFFECT

A central tenant of Jameson's 'waning of affect' is that the logic of late-capitalism demands the reproduction and invocation of past images to keep pace with consumer demand, which ultimately and absolutely compounds the deterioration of social cohesion and the timely process of 'authentic' cultural innovation. This argument builds upon Jameson's earlier essay 'Postmodernism and consumer culture', where he posits that cinematic techniques such as pastiche are indicative of how 'we are condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past, which itself remains forever out of reach.' (27) The commodification of the image of the past, or rather, a past image, is seen to annihilate the original referent, jeopardising historicity through over-mediation, which in turn retards the development of an aesthetic that is able to represent 'our own current experience'. (28) The continued remediation of the historical image is seen to diminish its affective power over time. Thus, the crux of Jameson's position is not simply that there is insufficient time and space for autonomous thought, but also that the image is being emptied of its meaning through inane repetition. Jameson's 'waning of affect' describes how contemporary artistic forms have ceased to fulfil a critical function and instead fulfil a new function as a commodity item. Consequently, history--that is, 'real' history--has been displaced by an incoherent string of empty signifiers. My assertion at the beginning of this essay that The Bourne Identity relies upon my memory, my experience, of its filmic predecessors for its affect absolutely challenges Jameson's understanding of postmodernism as a socially atomising, ahistorical and apolitical product of late-capitalist consumer culture.

Contemporary scientific theories of memory are instructive in this context. Memory is a significant paradigm for considering the embodied subject, in that it does not simply designate remembered images of an archived past but, rather, memory is a dispersed function of the brain, which is:

   A generator of ref lexes, responses, drives, emotions, and
   ultimately, feelings: memory involves both (the perception of) a
   certain body state and a certain mind state. (29)

Memory is implicated in the ways that we conduct ourselves in a restaurant, at home, in the workplace, or a theatre; it manifests in our unique mannerisms and habits; when we endeavour to walk, drive, use a fork, and talk--in all of these activities we engage memory without necessarily recollecting the events that precipitated the knowledge of how to do them. The potential affect of the image, of the postmodern cinema, is intimately bound to subjective memory in all of its manifestations. Memory thus facilitates a shift in theoretical focus from the affect of the image on the spectator to a more interactive model that seeks to understand how the spectator negotiates aesthetic regimes. When the viewing subject is reconfigured as the remembering subject, the rubric of spectatorship comes to embody the experiential and the cognitive, and indicates historical and spatial specificity. Therefore, the focus upon memory enables an understanding of how the spectator is able to negotiate multiple perspectives and multiple temporalities by acknowledging the contingency of meaning.

What is particularly relevant about memory as a paradigm for subjectivity is that, as argued by neurobiologist Jose van Dijck, there is 'no such thing as "location" for memory'. (30) Memory being immaterial and intangible can be described as occurring at the nexus of mind/body, materiality/technology, and cultural forms/relationships. (31) All memory does not exist simultaneously in the conscious mind. A person's ability to recall and remember is contingent upon their interaction with cultural objects, within particular spaces and milieux that trigger memory and responses at the appropriate times. Material objects don't carry any inherent meaning/s; they become significant through interaction, use and memory which are ultimately formed by context. Van Dijck's elaboration of what is known as 'reconsolidation theory' illustrates how memory is always mutable and subject to change, how each moment of recollection necessarily alters a memory and renders it new. Van Dijck's nexus of memory is co-extensive with Friedberg's analysis of the window/ frame as a paradigm for cinematic spectatorship. The films, spectators and spaces come to mean and make sense only in relation to one another. Techniques of repetition and remediation whereby 'the textual reference is reencoded in a new text' (32) do not empty a film of meaning by unmooring images from their correct temporal location. The screen/image is always located within a particular cultural space; it is engaged by a community of people following predetermined routines and practices. And therefore film will always have significance beyond what is prescribed by the surface of the celluloid. Like the dual visual regime inaugurated by Friedberg's window, film provides a view to a virtual world, but it also brings that virtual space into the physical and corporeal space of spectatorship.

I experience the Paris apartment sequence in The Bourne Identity as a metonym of Psycho's shower scene. In doing so, I am engaging my memory of Psycho, I am 'reconsolidating' my memory of watching the film, and I am engaging the film as an object with cultural and personal significance. When Marie turns the bath taps, I aurally register the constant sound of water f lowing; the sound resonates with my memory of the sound of the water in Psycho's shower scene. As Bourne talks on the phone, he is represented via a succession of images which fragment his body, each shot relentlessly moving around and about him, mimicking the formal construction of the shower scene, refusing spatial orientation and heightening my sense of anxiety. As Bourne passes through the corridor of the apartment we follow his indecipherable gaze toward the frosted glass door at the end of the passage. The door reminds me of the shower curtain, ready to reveal the shadow of a sinister figure lurking beyond. Bourne moves through to the kitchen, turns on the taps and he selects a large kitchen knife, all the while talking to Marie as if to create a diversion. They meet in the hallway. He is concealing the knife behind the doorframe that he is leaning on; the camera catches a close-up of the knife dropping, its point sticking in the floorboards. The dynamics of this scene are necessarily different from Psycho, yet all the signifiers are there. They persist. They prick my memory. The formal construction of the scene, the knife, the sound of the water, the whiteness of the apartment which reminds me of the bathroom in room one of the Bates Motel, the door/curtain; all of these signifiers combine to elicit a familiar feeling of dread.

The metonymy layers the original film with a new narrative, one that invokes a point of comparison and indicates that I am participating in a cultural practice. It makes me aware that I am searching for the Bourne identity in the same place that I 'began to anticipate "Mother's" next attack' and, consequently, I 'register the rhythms of anticipation, shock, and release.' (33) When Bourne selects a knife I am reminded of the knife that Bates plunged into Marion's body. That The Bourne Identity's hero and protagonist wields the familiar knife undermines my identification with him as the hero of the narrative. Likewise, the frosted glass door that appears to me like the shower curtain, pricks my memory of Bates' silhouette and coaxes me into questioning on which side of the curtain I stand--with the victim or the with perpetrator? The doubling and reconfiguration of the familiar formal and symbolic signifiers in The Bourne Identity indicate that this more recent film does not displace or replace its predecessor but exists alongside it, in a kind of simultaneity. The Bourne Identity is a palimpsest: it calls forth the mnemonic traces of Psycho's images to heighten the sense of duplicity that structures its narrative concern. Who is Jason Bourne? And at what cost do I identify with him?

THE COMMODIFICATION OF HISTORY

The ways in which The Bourne Identity engage my memory of Psycho suggests how reproduced and commodified images of the past do not necessarily inaugurate a retreat from the social world, but a new way of participating in it. (34) Like Friedberg, Alison Landsberg seeks to overcome Jameson's arbitrary delineation of the 'real' and the virtual to instead consider how cinematic technology has altered social participation. Landsberg contends that the immediacy of the cinema's aesthetic regime--the conventions utilised to immerse the spectator in the diegetic experience--alters what counts as experience. Rather than prohibiting reflective engagement with the text, the experiential nature of spectatorship translates into what she terms 'prosthetic memory'. (35) Landsberg's elaboration of prosthetic memory is exemplified by Bill Schaffer's recollection of viewing Psycho as occurring at the 'threshold of an experience', a moment of '"'real" affective risk' that although 'it may be retrospectively rationalised', cannot be cancelled as an 'affect as memory'. (36) In other words, that I remember the sensations induced by viewing Psycho points to the transformative affect of the image in spite of the fact that the narrative details an experience that I 'did not live'. (37) Landsberg's paradigm of prosthetic memory hinges on the understanding that postmodern cinema is an aesthetic regime with affective consequences. Prosthetic memory is thus congruent with van Dijck's claim that memory occurs at the nexus of mind/body, materiality/technology, and cultural forms and processes. The fact that my memory is spiked through the repetition and reproduction of Psycho's images and formal qualities in another film 42 years after the original was produced indicates the participatory nature of postmodern cinema; it points to the way that my memory is reconsolidated; and it illustrates how my affect is structured by cultural practice. Even if The Bourne Identity is not identified by another spectator as bearing the legacy of Psycho, it bears the hallmarks of generic 'familiarity and iconography', (38) of vulnerability and pleasure that call upon memory, that enable the spectator to anticipate the rhythms of the film.

In understanding film spectatorship as an experiential, cultural practice, Landsberg departs from Jameson's understanding that the commodification of images undermines society's cohesion as well as its ability to maintain an active relationship with its heritage. Ultimately, the way that Jameson situates postmodernism as a radical break with modernism imagines a schizophrenic breakdown of the experiential as it has traditionally been understood, without recognising the ways in which 'technologies of the "postmodern" moment might themselves change what counts as experience.' (39) His explicit focus upon nostalgia films, which he says invoke a sense of 'pastness' negating the possibility of engaging with 'real history', (40) blind him to the ways in which cinematic spectatorship has a history that is maintained by the memory of spectatorial subjects. Williams alludes to this history when she asks 'what was Psycho on the first viewing and what has it become since?' (41) Her preliminary answer is that subsequent viewings have rendered it 'the familiar antecedent for familial "slice-and-dice" horror' which contrasts with the excitement and mystery that people experienced when they went to see 'a Hitchcock thriller with a twist' in 1960. (42) Although the content of the film has not changed with the passing of time, the changing status of the film between 1960 and 1998 (the historical context from which Williams writes) does insinuate a dynamic sense of history.

Williams' question and answer illustrate how the ability to repeatedly view the same film does not negate a sense of history per se, but rather opens up a point in history to continual reinterpretation. As Kia Lindroos explicates, Walter Benjamin understood the linear and hegemonic narrative of 'universal history' to be dependent upon a perceived 'mimetic bond between reality and its representation'. (43) Benjamin's explication of 'cultural history' suggests a paradigmatic shift from a 'historical toward a political perception of time', one which leaves historiography open to later interpretations of events. (44) The ability of the image to arrest 'fragments and moments from the past' and allow them to 'recur in the present experience' (45) does not empty the image of meaning, as Jameson would have it, but rather multiplies its potential meanings. Memory--that is, the act of remembering--maintains a sense of temporal continuity, of the original moment of exhibition. What changes with temporal context and repetition is the affect on the viewer, and the way in which the film is read in relation to other films:

   if it is popularly remembered that Psycho altered the bathing
   habits of a nation, it is less well recalled how it fundamentally
   changed viewing habits ... Anyone who has gone to the movies in the
   past 20 years cannot help but notice how entrenched this
   rollercoaster sensibility of repeated tension and release, assault
   and escape has become. (46)

The context that Williams explicates in this passage is one in which she can experience repeated viewings of Psycho alongside films that it has influenced. This enables her to read and remember Psycho as a landmark film that taught us how 'to scream'; (47) indeed, she reads it as her point of rupture between the modern and the postmodern because she sees it as reintroducing an affective cinema that persists today.

This last point is precisely what is at issue for Jameson. Post-modernism simultaneously indicates a rupture and a continuum between what was so shocking and confronting about modernism: how techniques utilised to inculcate a sense of shock for the purposes of ideological critique have since been recuperated. That is to say that, for Jameson, modernism's aesthetic of rebellion has since become an aesthetic of sanction. As Williams states, Psycho is intriguing in the context of this argument precisely because it was produced at the cultural and historical junction that Jameson identifies as the shift from a modern to a postmodern sensibility. The shocking nature of Psycho was in no small part attributable to Hitchcock's innovative subversion of narrative conventions (the death of the protagonist mid-way through the film) and editing techniques (the refusal to stabilise the spectator's point of view), and thus fulfils the criteria of affective art as articulated by Jameson. However, Hitchcock's commitment to innovation and shock was explicitly deployed for mass appeal: a distinctly postmodern objective. What Williams adroitly illustrates is that affect is not simply the endgame of a filmmaker's commitment to subvert the status quo. It is for this reason that the co-option of affective images and formal techniques by mainstream cinema does not preclude the end of a political or even a historical consciousness.

When I recognise The Bourne Identity as bearing the aesthetic legacy of Psycho, I am acknowledging the later film to be the history of the former, but in a manner that reflects my 'postmodern' experience, my cultural and my subjective memory. On 23 May 2008 I watched Psycho and then I watched The Bourne Identity, and since then I have also read Linda Williams' essay, 'Learning to scream'. (48) It is commodity culture that specifically facilitates my concurrent access to these texts, in spite of the fact that each text was a product of disparate socio-historical contexts. This extra-textual juxtaposition has enabled me to understand how the shower scene in Psycho altered viewing practices in a way that affects the manner in which I watch movies today. It may be fair to say that when I watch Psycho I am not shocked or horrified in the same way that 1960s' audiences were, because I grew up watching its filmic progeny. That said, to admit a difference in affect is to acknowledge my specific socio-historical context. Although Jameson is not necessarily incorrect to suggest that the political affect that was once associated with the formal techniques of modernist cinema has been negated, his argument that the postmodern aesthetic is ahistorical fails to consider how commodity culture has altered the way in which audiences are able to engage with their cultural history. More than a case of a history from which I am arguably distanced by the march of time, the ways in which Liman has utilised techniques inaugurated by Hitchcock offer me an experience of the rollercoaster in a contemporary setting. This reproduction or pastiche--call it what you will--ultimately renders the legacy of Psycho dynamic, vital and relevant to my so-called postmodern environment. Rather than replacing the earlier film with the later, my ability to access and engage with both films is indicative of how late-capitalist commodity culture enables me to remember my encounter with a historical image/object as an experiential and affective one, a cultural one, as well as a historical one.

Amanda Trevisanut

Media and Communications

ENDNOTES

(1) Doug Liman (dir.), The Bourne Identity, 2002.

(2) Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), Psycho, 1960.

(3) Bill Schaffer, 'Cutting the f low: Thinking Psycho', Senses of Cinema, no. 6, 2000.

(4) Schaffer.

(5) Vivian Sobchak, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, University of California Press, Berkley, Los Angeles, London, 2004.

(6) Linda Williams, 'Film bodies: Gender, genre, and excess', in Julie F Codell (ed.) Genre, Gender, Race, and World Cinema: An Anthology, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, Oxford, Carlton, 2007. Originally published in Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1991, 2-13.

(7) Brian Massumi, 'The autonomy of affect', in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke University Press, Durham, London, 2002, 30.

(8) Massumi, 30.

(9) Massumi, 30.

(10) Sobchak, 59.

(11) See Jean-Louis Baudry, 'The apparatus: Metaphysical approaches to the impression of reality', in Phillip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Columbia University Press, New York, 1986, 299-318. Originally published in Communications, no. 23, 1975, and translated in Camera Obscura, no.1, 1976, 104-28; and Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, MacMillan Press, London, 1983.

(12) Consonant with Frederic Jameson's elaboration that the postmodern era has resulted in the 'waning of affect', Sobchak states that 'at this historical moment in our particular society and culture, we can see all around us that the lived body is in crisis.' Following Jameson, Sobchak characterises the shift from modern to postmodern aesthetics as a shift from the cultural dominance of the cinematic to the cultural dominance of the electronic, whereby the 'techno-logic of the electronic ... dominates the form and in-forms the content of our cultural representations,' which ultimately 'tends to marginalize or trivialize the human body.' Although this essay takes inspiration from Sobchak's critique of psychoanalytic and semiotic models of cinematic spectatorship, her position on spectatorship in the postmodern era stands in obverse relation to the aims of this essay and, unfortunately, a direct engagement with her argument is outside the scope of this essay. See Vivian Sobchak, 'The scene of the screen: Envisioning photographic, cinematic, and electronic "presence"', in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 2004, 161.

(13) Laura U Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Duke University Press, Durham, London, 2000, 203.

(14) This essay utilises inverted commas when making reference to the 'real' in an effort to acknowledge the problematic and slippery nature of the term. The position taken by this essay is that the distinction between what is 'real' and what is virtual is arbitrary and subject to the perspective of the individual.

(15) Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London and New York, 1991, 16.

(16) Baudry.

(17) Metz.

(18) Baudry.

(19) Metz.

(20) Guiliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, Verso, New York, 2006.

(21) Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2006.

(22) Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 111.

(23) Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 113.

(24) Laura U Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, 2002, 7.

(25) Marks, Touch, 8. Although Marks develops the concept of haptic cinema in relation to experimental video makers who produce work outside of the popular cinema industry, her model is instructive when thinking through the affective quality of Psycho's formal techniques.

(26) Marks, The Skin of the Film, 214.

(27) Frederic Jameson, 'Postmodernism and consumer society', in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture, Pluto Press, 1985, 118.

(28) Jameson, 'Postmodernism and consumer society', 117.

(29) Jose van Dijck, 'Memory matters in the digital age', Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science and Technology, vol. 12, no. 3, 2004, 353.

(30) van Dijck, 353.

(31) van Dijck, 361.

(32) Anne Friedberg, 'The end of modernity: Where is your rupture?' in Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1993, 177.

(33) Linda Williams, 'Discipline and distraction: Psycho, visual culture and postmodern cinema', in John Carlos Rowe (ed.), "Culture" and the Problem of Disciplines, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, 92.

(34) Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, Columbia University Press, New York, 2004, 46.

(35) Landsberg.

(36) Schaffer.

(37) Landsberg, 28.

(38) Friedberg, 'The end of modernity', 176.

(39) Landsberg, 33.

(40) Jameson, 'Postmodernism and consumer society', 116.

(41) Williams, 'Discipline and distraction', 100.

(42) Williams, 'Discipline and distraction', 100.

(43) Kia Lindroos, 'Aesthetic political thought: Benjamin and Marker revisited', Alternatives, no. 28, 2003, 239.

(44) Lindroos, 239.

(45) Lindroos, 239.

(46) Linda Williams, 'Learning to scream', in Kim Newman (ed.), Science Fiction/Horror: A Sight and Sound Reader, BFI, London, 2002 [1994], 72.

(47) Williams, 'Learning to scream'.

(48) Williams, 'Learning to scream'.