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The Cinema of Things
 The Cinema of Things
Globalization and the Posthuman Object

Elizabeth Ezra
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK

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First published 2018

Paperback edition first published 2019

Copyright © Elizabeth Ezra, 2018

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an extension of this copyright page.

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regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have
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 Contents

Acknowledgments vi

Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 1

1 Consuming Objects 31
2 Exotic Objects 67
3 Part-Objects 95
4 Objects of Desire 129
5 Posthuman Objects 159

Bibliography 183
Filmography 197
Index 201
 Acknowledgments

This book began life as a collaborative project with Terry Rowden. As

sometimes happens with these things, Terry and I gradually came to
the mutual realization that we were writing two different books, and
we finally decided to let those books go their separate ways. Happily,
this book still bears the hallmarks of Terry’s influence on nearly every
single page, and I am enormously indebted to him for his unwavering
intellectual support and friendship over the years, through various
projects and across continents. It is no exaggeration to say that this book
could not have been written without Terry.
For their very helpful feedback on the manuscript, I would like to
extend huge thanks in particular to Sue Harris, Ana Salzberg, and Maggie
Flinn, as well as to an anonymous reviewer at the press. Conversations
with Antonio Sanchez also sparked a number of ideas that have enriched
the book. For their comments on various portions of the manuscript
through the mists of time, I wish to thank Dudley Andrew, Tom Conley,
Diana Holmes, Michael Rothberg, Max Silverman, and Carrie Tarr. I
am also grateful to Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury for her enthusiasm and
support for the project, which made all the difference. All translations
from the French in this book not otherwise credited are my own. Any
errors in this book are also my own.
Portions of this manuscript have appeared in different forms in the
following publications: Screen (“The Case of the Phantom Fetish: Louis
Feuillade’s Les Vampires,” 2006, 47 [2]: 201–11), Yale French Studies
(“Cléo's Masks: Regimes of Objectification in the French New Wave,”
2010, 118/119: 177–90), French Cultural Studies (“Posthuman Memory
and the Re(f)use Economy,” 2014, 25 (3/4): 368–86), and A Belle Époque?
Women and Feminism in French Society and Culture (“Becoming Women:
Cinema, Gender and Technology”), ed. Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr
(New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006). I am grateful to the
publishers for permission to reprint this material here. I am also pleased
 Acknowledgments vii

to acknowledge receipt of a generous grant from the Leverhulme Trust,

which allowed me to pursue research that proved vital for this project.
My family has endured this book for what must seem like ages. My
gratitude and love go to Simon, Nathan, and Paul, who constantly remind
me that life is (mostly) other than what one writes.
 Introduction: Cinema, Globalization,
and the Posthuman Object

This book traces the progressive redrawing of the boundaries between

humans and objects as represented in cinema from the end of the nine-
teenth century, when French cinema dominated the global film industry,
to the first decades of the twenty-first century, when Hollywood’s hold on
world film markets remains firm, despite some important competition
from other national cinemas. During this period, globalization has made
it increasingly difficult to distinguish the center from the periphery, a
pairing whose boundaries have been blurred by the overdetermined net-
works of communication that crisscross the planet. This period also coin-
cides with what Steven Connor calls “the thingly turn in recent theory”
(Connor 2009: n.p.). Human beings relate to things, objects, and stuff
in a number of ways: through hyperconsumption; through structures of
racial and sexual objectification that reduce people designated as “oth-
ers” to objects of fascination, sexual gratification, or labor; and through
information technology that replaces human agency with encoding. By
exploring the border zones between life (specifically human life) and
nonlife, it is possible to gain an understanding of the ways that com-
modities take on a life of their own, engulfing and ultimately replacing
the people they were meant to supplement; of the exploitation of human
beings for their use value as pure bodies, whether for entertainment, for
labor, or in war time; and of the creation of technological supplementa-
tion, digital worlds, and artificial life. It is possible, in other words, to
gain an understanding of the ways in which humans are prosthetically
engaged with life beyond the human in the global age.
In virtual realms such as economics, communication, and the media,
the obstructive force of national borders is becoming increasingly
limited. Whereas transnationalism’s mandate is to reconfigure the nation
into global viability, globalization’s mandate is to reduce the nation to
2 The Cinema of Things

pure nominalism. Globalization allows for the positive recognition

of landless aggregates and provisional assemblages as well as the all-
encompassing force of technology. If transnationalism has its greatest
use value in considering the movement of bodies and objects across
discrete but virtual lines, globalization is most useful for considering
how the world is becoming economically and technologically unified in
ways that smudge those lines into unreadability. The utopian imaginary
of transnationalism is that the (united) nations will take their place on
a monopoly board in which flows of diasporized capital and people
will move nonoppositionally through clearly demarcated and stabilized
national units. The utopian imaginary of globalization is that at some
point the strands of the global rhizome will meet and create a perfectly
networked path for unimpeded access and consumption.
Globalization, as the endpoint of capitalism, is revealed by the
various degrees and ways in which the porosity of national borders is
being exploited. The term “globalization” expresses the aporia of a
constant movement toward an imaginary wholeness and plenitude (a
unified “globe”), an endless supplementation that strives for wholeness
at the same time that it undermines the very possibility of wholeness.
Globalization, a very human endeavor, thus shares a supplementary
structure with humanity itself: the logic of the supplement underpins
the traditional definition of human beings as creatures who make and
use tools (Wynn 1994: 133–61). Although this definition has come to be
challenged in recent years (see Goodall 1992), its influence on philosophy
and anthropological humanism cannot be overstated. Tools extend
human capabilities, enhancing existing attributes and compensating
for perceived deficiencies; it is through supplementation that humans
both complete themselves and acknowledge their incompleteness. This
dynamic is the essence of supplementarity according to Jacques Derrida
(1997: 141–57; 313–16). The Derridean term “supplement” has itself been
supplemented in recent years by Bernard Stiegler’s term “prosthesis,”
which refers specifically to the relationship between humans and the
objects with which they surround themselves (Stiegler 1998, passim;
see also Wills 1995, passim). Like the supplement, which is intended
to enhance or complete something previously thought to be complete
 Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 3

but whose supplementation both reveals and creates its retrospective

incompletion, prosthesis is that which provides an alternative to
something deemed inadequate.
In an apparent paradox, the supplementary nature of the human
endeavor of globalization is precisely what makes us posthuman.
According to N. Katherine Hayles, “In the posthuman, there are no
essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence
and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism,
robot teleology and human goals” (Hayles 1999: 3). Like the posthuman,
globalization problematizes boundary maintenance, and both discourses
challenge and build upon the existing systems (whether epistemological
or world-historical) of humanism and transnationalism, respectively.
Where transnationalism produces an oscillation between the need to
transcend borders and the drive to maintain them, globalization is the
will to eradicate borders altogether. As the posthuman uses prosthesis to
extend beyond the human, globalization extends beyond the nation in
reconceptualizing life beyond the local.
Rosi Braidotti provides perhaps the pithiest definition of the
posthuman as “life beyond the self ” (Braidotti 2014: 13). The posthuman
is not a period “after” the human; it is a way of reconceptualizing what it
means to be human. It is to recognize, along with those anthropologists
who define human beings as tool-makers, that prosthesis makes the man
(so to speak). Or as Cary Wolfe puts it, the human “is fundamentally a
prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and
materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have nevertheless
made the human what it is” (Wolfe 2007: xxv). This symbiotic evolution
has been coterminous with globalization, which has transformed the
spheres of consumption, production, and reproduction. Commodities
and human beings alike are conceived as units to be slotted into this
ever-expanding global machine, and then replaced when necessary. This
supplementation is reflected in the key components of globalization:
hyperconsumption (the acquisition of more and more objects, images,
and experiences, whose attainment, far from satisfying the hunger for
more, merely increases it); the instrumentalization and exploitation of
“others,” who are designated as the “waste” products of globalization; and
4 The Cinema of Things

technological prosthesis, the creation of surrogate or “enhanced” human

beings through technological supplementation, artificial intelligence,
and genetic engineering.
There have been, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, many
attempts to characterize the new phase of capitalism that has followed
the Fordist capitalism of the early twentieth century and the consumer
capitalism of the postwar era. Names such as “disaster capitalism” (Klein
2008), “reticulated capitalism” (Stiegler 2010), “cognitive capitalism”
(Moulier-Boutang 2012), and, of course, “late capitalism” (Jameson 1991)
have all been used to describe capitalism’s new vaguely recognizable yet
utterly distinct guise, and all are more or less valid: it is no longer possible
to speak of capitalism as a singular, self-contained phenomenon, or, at
least, not a monolithic one. Capitalism’s staying power is attributable at
least in part to its protean capacity to change form, constantly reinventing
itself like an aging pop star. Capitalism’s latest guise is advanced
globalization, which is characterized by consumption (defined as the
use of commodities above and beyond the sole purpose of subsistence);
connection (the networked communities that are the digital era’s answer
to imagined communities); and corporation (new ways of perceiving
the human body in light of its biotechnologization). Globalization cuts
across national boundaries, and it cuts through the skin of the self. Its
waste circulates around the system, erupting from designated areas at the
most revealing moments.
Globalization moves beyond, and it moves within, like some
genetically modified creature that has escaped from the lab and crossed
state lines, and it is now worming its way into our hearts and minds.
Within globalization, life is essentially the incidental period between
makeovers. In this economy of transformation, once everyone has
become acclimated to the new you, it is simply time to create a newer
you. Celia Lury describes this dynamic at work:

Within the global imaginary, difference is subject to the dictates of

lifestyle, of consumer culture and commodification. The biological,
historical and social differences which had informed the categories of
type or kind, the categories of gender, race, class, sexuality and age, are
rendered amenable to choice. Once placed within the grasp of choice,
 Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 5

previously biological, political and social attributes of the individual

and collective body, including not only aspects of personal identity, but
also reproductive futures, individual health and well-being, and national
identity, are increasingly understood within a discourse of strategic,
voluntary transformation. (Lury 1998 quoted in Franklin, Lury, and
Stacey 2000: 75–76)

In consumer culture, everything is a lifestyle choice, because everything

can be bought or sold, coveted and then eventually discarded. It will not be
long, one can imagine, before “naturalness” has been completely devalued
and the attractiveness of a subject will be determined by the degree and
forms of supplementation to which his or her body has been subjected.
These evaluations will take place, no doubt, in relation to a continuum
that goes from the micro-prosthetics of wearing braces or contact lenses
to something akin to Robert Downey Jr.’s fully prostheticizing Ironman
suit. Supplementarity enables us to move faster, like the latest operating
system, and it slows us down with its crippling restrictions like a new
pair of stilettos. For the system to expand and prosper, it is enough that
consumers want to buy more shoes; it matters little whether they are
Christian Louboutins or Jimmy Choos.
Expansion is the primary form of movement in capitalism, in keeping
with globalization’s need to eradicate national borders, but this expansion
also entails a recognition and incorporation of the nonhuman. Peter
Sloterdijk, writing about the evolution of globalization over the last few
centuries, notes, “Since the start of the Modern Age, the human world
has constantly—every century, every decade, every year and every
day—had to learn to accept and integrate new truths about an outside
not related to humans. From the seventeenth century on, starting with
the European educated classes and increasingly affecting the informed
masses of the First World, the new psycho-cosmologically relevant
sentiment spread that humans were not the concern of evolution, the
indifferent goddess of becoming” (Sloterdijk 2011: 21). This “indifferent
goddess” favors humans no more than she favors other animals or indeed
inanimate objects; she does not distinguish between life and nonlife. The
contemporary manifestation of this evolution is the posthuman era,
which Donna Haraway has characterized in terms of “the boundary
6 The Cinema of Things

breakdowns between animal and human, organism and machine, and

the physical and nonphysical” (Haraway 1991: 149). For Braidotti, this
breakdown of boundaries is manifested as “a monistic ontology that
considers all matter as intelligent and self-organizing” (Braidotti 2014:
136). Similarly, Jane Bennett speaks, after Bruno Latour, of a “more
distributive agency” that would apply to both people and objects (Bennett
2010: ix). She attempts to overturn “the haunting association of matter
with passivity,” insisting on the “positive vitality possessed by nonhuman
entities and forces” (Bennett 2010: 49).
For others, the breakdown of the boundaries between the human and
the nonhuman entails a recognition of the central role that technology
(or “technics,” to use Stiegler’s term) plays in the development of human
life. Robert Pepperell sums up the posthumanist view of technics thus:

What makes us human is our wider technological domain, just as much

as our genetic code or natural environment. Throughout history, we have
sought to distribute our selves, our consciousness, and our intelligence
by a variety of means, including language, art, gesture, and music, by
encoding the content of our minds in some material substrate, and to
extend our physical abilities with tools. (Pepperell 2003: 152)

The extension of people’s physical abilities enabled by tools and prostheses

makes it difficult to distinguish between human beings and the technological
domain in which they are embedded. This technological domain is
represented both in and by cinema. I use cinema to mean the art form,
not the material from which or means by which it is made (film, video,
analog, digital) or the platform through which it is consumed, though of
course these affect the art form. If, as Stiegler has argued, consciousness
is structured like cinema (Stiegler 2011: 13), then cinema’s depictions of
aspects of globalization constitute an important gauge of prevailing global
thought processes. Cinema is the art form most congruent with the dynamics
of global modernity because it now offers the bank of representations in
relation to which the conceptual adequacy of positions in cultural theory
can be best ascertained and made available for review and critique.
The advent of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century marked
the birth not only of one of the first truly global industries, but also of a
mass medium by which globalization could be represented to the public.
 Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 7

The history of cinema has coincided with the development of advanced

globalization, and perhaps more than any other national cinema, the
American film industry has both represented and borne witness to
this evolution. But French cinema has also played a vital role in the
drive to globalization, by virtue of its influence, its early domination of
world markets, and the cosmopolitanism of many of its most eminent
practitioners. The Lumière brothers are commonly credited with holding
the first public film screening in 1895, thus ushering in the cinematic age
at what happened to be the height of the French colonial empire. Though
we now know that they were pipped to the post by the Skladanowsky
brothers in Berlin some two months earlier (Barber 2012: 14–17), France
was the most successful early adopter of the new technology, and the
French film industry was the biggest in the world until the eve of the First
World War, when it was eclipsed by Hollywood.
No cinematic traditions have to date been more globally influential
than the American and the French. Vanessa Schwartz has described the
“complex back and forth between France and America” at the origins
of the medium, and notes the close ties between the cinemas of the two
countries (Schwartz 2007: 5 and passim). France’s mighty global colonial
empire, which came to a violent end in the middle of the twentieth
century, here represents the Old Imperialism, and its objectifying
discourses center around exoticism. The United States, as the propagator
of a mighty global cultural empire, represents the New Imperialism, and
its objectifying discourses center around the consumption of objects
and human labor. Of course, this is not an exclusive dichotomy: the
French colonial empire was eclipsed in size by the British colonial
empire, and the UK has also had a “New Imperial” influence on world
music and television that belies its relatively small population (currently
around 60 million, provided the union does not break up in the wake
of the June 23, 2016 so-called “Brexit” referendum). There have no
doubt been a significant number of British films that have highlighted
the importance of Great Britain’s colonial past in the current era of
globalization (for a comparison between British and French films of this
kind, see Ezra and Rowden 2009). But although it has been necessary to
limit the scope of this study to two national cinemas, it is my hope that
the arguments made throughout this book could provide a springboard
8 The Cinema of Things

for the examination of similar dynamics (mutatis mutandis) in other

national cinemas.
Similarly, I confine my focus here to fiction films aimed, for the
most part, at popular audiences. In Hollywood, and even in France,
long known for its “art cinema,” films produced, packaged, and sold as
visual commodities to the masses for the purposes of entertainment
have tended overwhelmingly to be fiction films. It is those films that I
examine here, at key moments in French film history, and more recently,
in Hollywood cinema. As this book is by no means encyclopedic or
in any way aspiring to be comprehensive, it aims to examine a range
of films that best illustrate certain thematic points. The focus within
the Hollywood sections, with the exception of a film made during the
Second World War and brief mention of earlier films, is on films made
around the turn of the second millennium of the Common Era, in the
age of planned obsolescence and the rise of digital technology. I have
chosen films for their illustrative potential—not, in many cases, for their
status as great works of art.
Cinema is above all a medium that allows us to chart the dehumanization
of people triggered by hyperconsumption, which begins as the
supplementation of people by objects and results in the supplementation
of objects by people, who often become mere “operators” of technologies
that determine, rather than reflect, their identities. Along the way, this
path of objectification passes through the supplementation of some
people by others in arrangements that exploit the legacy of slavery during
the era of apartheid in the United States prior and leading up to the civil
rights era, or colonial exoticism in the case of France. The fetishization
of difference so central to exoticism also appears in war time, when
differences among individuals are disavowed and displaced onto groups,
which are differentiated en masse in an “us” versus “them” dichotomy.
Such a polarization of group identity is also key to the construction of
gender identity and the objectification of women as “objects of desire”—
and to the logical extension of this process, which is the construction of
artificial women per se. This objectifying trajectory concludes with the
construction of prosthetic personhood by means of artificial intelligence
and digital technology.
 Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 9

Things, objects, stuff

What shall we call the items that surround us, items with which we
interact or that lie beyond our reach? What shall we call the items, the
tools, broadly speaking, that humans produce, but that also produce us
in the sense that they define us as the makers of tools? Are they things,
stuff, objects, or, indeed, quasi-objects? All of these terms have been
proposed at one point or another, to the extent that the words themselves
have become things, commodities to be exchanged in the marketplace
of ideas.
Things are often defined in relation to what they are not. For example,
in his introduction to a 2001 special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled
“Things,” Bill Brown differentiates between objects and things. According
to Brown, a thing is a kind of objet manqué: “We begin to confront the
thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks,
when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within
the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition,
has been arrested, however momentarily” (Brown 2001: 4). Brown’s
definition, which evokes the Heideggerian Vorhandenheit, or presence-
at-hand, seems to be opposing the thing to the object in the sense in
which Baudrillard describes it. “The real object,” Baudrillard writes in
The System of Objects, “is the functional object” (Baudrillard 2005 [1968]:
50). If things are objects that give up the ghost, they still exist in relation
to the ghost they have given up, the function that defined the objects they
once were. In other words, things may not be fully instrumentalized, or
even fully grasped by human subjects, but they are still intertwined with
them. As Bruno Latour suggests, the distinction between things that lie
outside the scope of human interaction and objects that are handled by
humans may be a false one, because all things (and objects) are, in fact,
“quasi-objects,” or hybrid entities produced by the intersection of nature
and culture (Latour 1993: 50). “Quasi-objects” is a term coined by Michel
Serres, which has been taken up and popularized in the English-speaking
world by Latour, who writes, “Consider things, and you will have humans.
Consider humans, and you are by that very fact interested in things.
Bring your attention to bear on hard things, and see them become gentle.
10 The Cinema of Things

Turn your attention to humans, and see them become electric circuits,
automatic gears or software” (Latour 2000: 20). This imbrication of two
ostensibly different identities—the human and the nonhuman—is what
characterizes the posthuman. The border between things and objects is
similarly difficult to demarcate, as Steven Connor notes: “Things come
into visibility when the thought of them ruptures or ebbs. I should
make it clear at this point that, though I will refer at intervals to this
distinction between objects and things, I have no intention of observing
the distinction myself and will mix my usages promiscuously, as the
demands of my argument, or of alliteration, dictate” (Connor 2009: n.p.).
Like Connor, I think that the distinction between things and objects
becomes more slippery the harder we try to grasp it.
“Stuff,” on the other hand, designates an indistinct mass of items.
Daniel Miller, as though influenced by this lack of distinction, cautions,
“Don’t, just don’t, ask for or expect a clear definition of stuff ” (Miller
2010: 1). This warning, however, does not seem to have deterred
Maurizia Boscagli, whose book Stuff Theory is dedicated to the stuff. Her
concept of “hybrid materiality” (Boscagli 2014: 12) is useful here: she
presents “an already existing form of liminal objecthood, stuff, as a test
case for the new materialist designation of all matter as liminal, active,
rhizomatic, and emergent” (Boscagli 2014: 14). It might be argued that
all objecthood is liminal, and all things are a kind of stuff. Boscagli (2014:
11) further specifies that “stuff is better defined by its liminality between
the human and the non-human.” Just as stuff is liminal and emergent,
so the human ignores objects at its peril. For Latour, the human itself is
defined as a redistribution of agency from the human to the nonhuman.
The posthuman, in other words, is the new human: “Modern humanists
are reductionist because they seek to attribute action to a small number of
powers, leaving the rest of the world with nothing but simple mute forces.
It is true that by redistributing the action among all these mediators, we
lose the reduced form of humanity, but we gain another form, which has
to be called irreducible. The human is in the delegation itself, in the pass,
in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms” (Latour 1993: 138).
It is precisely the continuous exchange of forms between a whole range of
“mediators,” both human and inhuman, that this book seeks to address.
 Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 11

In philosophy, the most influential school of thought to emerge in

recent years around these questions is Object-Oriented Ontology
(OOO), also sometimes referred to as Speculative Realism. Developed
by Graham Harman (who attributes its origins to Latour—see Harman
2009: 14), OOO emphasizes the “autonomous reality” of objects (Harman
2011: 19) whose status does not rely on their relations with subjects.
Levi R. Bryant calls this lack of reliance on subjects a “finally subjectless
object” (Bryant 2011: n.p.), and certainly what all these theories have in
common is a non-anthropocentric view of the world. According to Ian
Bogost, “OOO puts things at the center of being. We humans are elements,
but not the sole elements, of philosophical interest. OOO contends that
nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally” (Bogost
2012: 6). Objects, it seems, do not need humans as much as humans
need objects.
For both Latour and Harman, everything and everyone is an object that
carries as much weight as every other object, and their books, like those
of their acolytes, abound with litanies of such objects. Bogost, author of
Alien Phenomenology, has developed what he calls a “Latour litanizer”
on his website, an automated generator of lists using random pages
from Wikipedia’s database. One such list, at once typical and unique,
reads: “Income Tax Act 1842, North Louisiana Historical Association,
ArtCrimes, Hendijan-e Sharqi Rural District, Project topic, Frank Angell,
Chrostowa, Lódz Voivodeship, Anna Corneficia Faustina, Baraan” [http://
bogost.com/blog/latour_litanizer/; accessed on July 30, 2016]. In contrast
to Latour, Harman identifies two separate categories of object: real objects
and sensual, or intentional, objects. Real objects are those to which there
is “no direct access” and which can “only be known indirectly” (interview
with Varn 2014: n.p.), while intentional objects are those objects that
exist in our perception of them: they are “objects lying before the mind”
(Harman 2011b: 173). Harman stresses the independence of objects from
both subjects and other objects, unlike Latour, who argues for the mutual
constitution of objects (indiscriminately nonhuman and human, abstract
and concrete) through their relations with other objects in a network
of “actants,” or agents of change that can be indiscriminately human or
nonhuman (Latour 2005: 54–55).
12 The Cinema of Things

Braidotti, Brown, and Bennett go even further in their placement of

objects on an equal footing with people in their advocacy of a form of
vitalist materialism, arguing that objects have an existence (one might
even say a “life”) of their own. Bennett, who acknowledges the influence
of Latour’s concept of actants, is similarly prone to litanization when she
characterizes vitality as “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities,
storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs
of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories,
propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett 2010: viii). Not only are
objects independent of humans; they have the capacity to effect change
when they come into contact with the human. Bennett emphasizes the
importance of “detecting . . . a fuller range of the nonhuman powers
circulating around and within human bodies. These material powers,
which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, in any
case call for our attentiveness, or even ‘respect’” (Bennett 2010: ix). What
might be called the impulse to empower the material world often forms
part of a larger ecological project seeking to recognize the essential role of
the nonhuman in human life, just as the role of the human in the material
world is reflected in the term “anthropocene,” which acknowledges the
impact of human activity on Earth’s climate and geology.
Increasingly, the agents and forces of which Bennett speaks, and
which circulate around and within human bodies, are technological. Life
has become not just imbricated with the technological, which it always
has been, but virtually unthinkable without technology, to the extent
that people have had to invent technological strategies to deal with the
decline of physicality that increased reliance on technology entails. Since
the advent of mechanization, human contact with work has become less
intensely physical and more gestural. The factory assembly line made
work more fragmented and repetitive (hence the “alienation” from the
finished product of which Marx spoke), and in the electronic age, people
have less and less contact with the labor process. As technology comes
to play a greater role in human life, strategies arise to compensate for
the perceived eclipse of human agency. Baudrillard has suggested that as
physicality diminishes, humans are reluctant to relinquish the last vestiges
of their agency in the functioning of objects: “Man has to be reassured
 Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 13

about his power by some sense of participation, albeit a merely formal

one. So the gestural system of control must be deemed indispensable—
not to make the system work technically, for some advanced technology
could (and no doubt will) make it unnecessary, but, rather, to make the
system work psychologically” (Baudrillard 2005 [1968]: 51–52; original
emphasis). Although Baudrillard wrote those words half a century ago,
they are even more true today, in the era of computers and smartphones.
Film studies has come up with its own way of compensating for the
reduction of physicality in modern life. In reaction to the diminishing
role of the body and the decline of indexicality in a technological world
dominated by automation and by digital media, theories of embodiment
and haptic cinema have emerged and developed in the last twenty years
or so (see Marks 2000; Beugnet 2007; Hansen 2004). Such theories
emphasize the role of the human body in the act of perception, and, more
generally, the phenomenological role of the affective and the tactile in
the reception of information. Laura Marks (2000) emphasizes the ways
in which the sense of touch is invoked in certain films, while Martine
Beugnet (2007) focuses on the synesthetic capacity of film, in its very
materiality, to activate senses beyond that of vision. Both insist on
acknowledging, in various ways and to varying degrees, the importance
of the human body—indeed, of the human—in spectatorship. Even more
recently, these theories have been complemented by theories of techno-
phenomenology, which recognizes the role of technologies as “constituent
parts of the relations that human agents maintain with their environments
in concretely embodied, practical situations” (Denson 2013: n.p.). As we
saw above, the human body is coming to be increasingly inseparable
from the technological. For Baudrillard, the gestures that represent the
diminishing “signs of [the body’s] presence” when faced with technology
are increasingly delegated to “objects whose functioning, in any case, is
independent from now on” (Baudrillard 2005 [1968]: 55). In 1968, these
gestures would have been the pulling of levers and pushing of buttons,
while today, these gestures are the swipes, pinches, and strokes that allow
us to access the (screen) world at our fingertips.
The “independence” of objects of which Baudrillard spoke are
invoked in the idea of the Internet of Things, in which increasing
14 The Cinema of Things

numbers of objects are connected to the internet and can communicate,

sending and receiving data to and from people and each other.
Objects thus acquire the capacity to act in unison, exhibiting “ambient
intelligence,” with “the physical world becoming one big information
system” (http://www.techopedia.com/definition/28247/internet-of-
things-iot). In the Internet of Things, conversations among objects
seems to bypass human intervention altogether, but of course, these
colloquia are held in the service of human beings, and made possible
by them. The Internet of Things is an electronic, digital version of
Latour’s Parliament of Things, in which things communicate with
each other, with or without human intervention. In the Parliament of
Things, according to Latour,

Societies are present, but with the objects that have been serving as their
ballast from time immemorial. Let one of the representatives talk, for
instance, about the ozone hole, another represent the Monsanto chemical
industry, a third the workers of the same chemical industry, another the
voters of New Hampshire, a fifth the meteorology of the polar regions;
let still another speak in the name of the State; what does it matter, so
long as they are all talking about the same thing, about a quasi-object
they have all created, the object-discourse-nature-society whose new
properties astound us and whose network extends from my refrigerator
to the Antarctic by way of chemistry, law, the State, the economy, and
satellites. (Latour 1993: 144)

This book takes its name from both the Internet of Things and the
Parliament of Things. Commodity culture and globalization have
ushered in a new era in the relations between people and things. If
humans have always been defined by prosthesis, the ways in which they
are defined by prosthesis are changing. As Bennett writes, “Humanity
and nonhumanity have always performed an intricate dance with each
other. There was never a time when human agency was anything other
than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity; today this
mingling has become harder to ignore” (Bennett 2010: 31). What is new
today is the hyperdevelopment of technology and the commodity culture
of planned obsolescence in which it is embedded.
 Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 15

Consuming objects

Andrew Cole (2015: 323) has written that the trend in philosophy to endow
objects with autonomy is akin to “commodity fetishism in academic
form,” and I share the same suspicion: namely, that the increasing
emphasis on things in philosophy is at the very least a reflection, and
probably a product, of commodity culture—in Heideggerian terms,
commodity culture would be the everyday context, or readiness-to-
hand (Zuhandenheit), that allows us to understand Being. Within global
capitalism, humans extend and supplement themselves primarily by
means of commodities. A key component of globalization is the primacy
of consumer culture, which has come to permeate virtually every aspect
of modern life. Consumption in the global era is defined by surplus:
the surplus value that creates profits for employers; the surplus income
that enables consumers to purchase goods above and beyond the bare
necessities; and ultimately, the surplus labor pools of the unemployed
that provide ready-made work forces when industries expand. “Surplus”
is a concept whose meaning extends from commodities to human beings,
bringing with it associations of reification and expendability. In the logic
of consumer culture, surplus is not just a question of having more than is,
strictly speaking, necessary; it is also the fact of wanting more, wanting
to supplement what one already has, however much that may be. The
supplement is the backbone of consumer culture. Its emotional logic is
this: “With the purchase of this thing or that thing, I will be ‘complete’;
no, it is the purchase of this other thing that will make me complete; no,
no—it is the purchase of this other thing, and this other thing, and this
other thing.” Consumer capitalism is thus foundationally invested in the
notion of prosthetic supplementation.
If the caricatural symbol of industrial capitalism was the hapless factory
worker being swallowed up by the cogs of the assembly line in Modern
Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936), the iconic image of consumer capitalism
is that of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City spending unimaginable
amounts of money on a pair of shoes that are minimally distinguishable
from the hundreds of other pairs she owns. Consumerism has a double-
edged status as both an enactment of desire and a mechanism of capture:
16 The Cinema of Things

someone who obsessively buys every book about Marxism is still a

consumer, just as the wealthy Middle Eastern women who wear designer
clothes under their burqas in Sex and the City 2 (Michael Patrick King,
2010) are still slaves to fashion. The fashion world is the very model for
supplementarity and planned obsolescence, presupposing as it does that
consumers will buy new clothes every year not because the old ones are
worn out, but for no other reason than that new ones are available. When,
in The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006), the office intern laughs at
the imperious magazine editor and her minions as they hesitate between
two belts that seem perfectly identical to her, it is because she cannot
decipher the miniscule but significant distinctions between them—
because, in other words, she cannot speak the language of fashion. Such
tiny distinctions are vital to a system of planned obsolescence, affording a
broad range of fashion “updates” that necessitate the purchase of new items
of clothing to supplement a wardrobe that seemed complete until the new
season was unveiled, but that subsequently seem woefully inadequate.
Fashion’s mandate is the creation of a product that demands constant
renewal in order to exist (last season’s fashions are no longer fashionable),
and accordingly, fashions are designed to go “out of fashion.” Boscagli
notes that, in the world of fashion, “clothes stand as the key element of
modern material culture both for turning women into a spectacle for
the male gaze, and for signifying the female desire for something other”
(Boscagli 2014: 82). The stereotypical female consumer is at once a subject
and an object of desire, states that are mutually reinforcing.
The spectacle that fashion creates, and the desire that it mobilizes, is
the appearance not only of beauty, but also of youth. In keeping with the
structure of planned obsolescence, aging is not compatible with fashion
(with the exception of the “vintage,” prized precisely because it is the old
become new—and, crucially, commodified—again). The antagonism
between aging and fashion is so potent that it extends metonymically
to the wearers of fashion: predominantly women who are themselves
typically deemed past their “sell-by date” once they have reached a certain
age (i.e., once they have reached menopause). The prevailing assumption
is that women past childbearing age have no need to be fashionable
because they themselves have gone out of fashion, at least in terms of
 Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 17

sexual desirability, and have little remaining use value. Yet, with the
widespread availability of birth control and medicalized abortion, women
have increasingly chosen (at least temporary, and sometimes permanent)
childlessness, thereby transforming reproduction into something that
can be selected from a range of possibilities. After menopause, however,
this choice is no longer an option, and women are often consigned to the
dustheap of romantic history. This is just another example of the logic of
obsolescence that infuses all aspects of life in advanced capitalism.
The flipside of consumption, and its logical extension, is the production
of waste, in both an industrial and a biological sense. Zygmunt Bauman
has noted that globalization is “the most prolific and least controlled
‘production line’ of human waste or wasted humans” (Bauman 2004:
6). Two films analyzed in this study illustrate the overlap between
consumption and excrescence—the 2011 box office hits Bridesmaids
(Paul Feig) and The Help (Tate Taylor). Bridesmaids literally combines
shopping and defecation in the iconic scene in which the eponymous
characters suffer an attack of explosive diarrhea (caused by food eaten in
an Argentinian restaurant) while trying on elegant dresses at an exclusive
bridal boutique. The plot of The Help revolves around the use of toilets
by African American domestic workers, and proliferates with references
to excretion. Both films allegorize the idea of waste. The surplus labor
pools that provide ready-made work forces when industries expand
are conceived as entirely expendable, entirely subject to the needs of
those who employ them—available to be exploited as needed, and then
ejected, like so much human waste, when their services are no longer
required or are somehow deemed intrusive or threatening. Even the
body itself acquires a use value and indeed an exchange value, as it is
reduced to an object to be traded across national and cultural borders.
Such commodification exemplifies the proliferation of what Ranjana
Khanna has called “disposable bodies” in late sovereignty (Khanna 2006:
n.p.). These bodies are the by-product of a system that prosthetizes
human beings and are the result of a crisis of boundary maintenance that
characterizes both globalization and the posthuman.
Increasingly, as biotechnological advances outstrip the availability of
the raw materials necessary to bring “substandard” bodies into existential
18 The Cinema of Things

parity with the full-bodied, body parts themselves are becoming atomized
marketable objects. In the hierarchy of global citizenship, paralleling, if
not superseding, Marxian notions of the laboring body, bio-objects like
organs, stem cells, and other body parts are becoming valued components
in the supplementation and survival of the bodies that matter by the
body parts of those that do not (see Ezra and Rowden 2009). The 2009
Jean-Pierre Jeunet film Micmacs à tire-larigot (Micmacs) examines the
status of human bodies in a globalized world, emphasizing the ways in
which humans and objects are becoming increasingly interchangeable.
While African and Middle Eastern children get their limbs blown off
in landmines made by multinational arms manufacturers, the owner
of one of these munitions factories collects the body parts of deceased
celebrities, like so many saints’ relics, as a hobby. This unusual pastime
emblematizes the commodification of human beings, their reduction to
items that can be bought and sold.

Exotic objects

One form that the commodification of human beings takes in the era of
globalization is exoticism, a discourse that is closely bound up with both
commodity culture and the rise of the mass media. From its inception
at the end of the nineteenth century, cinema lent itself to depictions of
people and places that were far removed from the daily lives of audiences
in the industrial world. Exoticism found its fullest expression in France,
where the birth of cinema coincided with the height of the French colonial
empire. The study of cinematic exoticism is key to understanding the
imbrication of race-thinking and mass culture, and it is a prime example
of the redrawing of the boundaries between human beings and objects.
This chapter focuses on two moments in the history of cinematic
exoticism in France, the interwar period and the end of the Algerian
War—but of course, exoticism existed long before the interwar period.
At least as far back as Montaigne’s sixteenth-century musings on the
inhabitants of Brazil (“Des Cannibales,” Montaigne 2000 [1580]), the
French were heavily invested in identifying cultural “otherness.” In
 Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 19

the period prior to the First World War notably, French culture was
permeated with expressions of exoticism. In cinema, the influence of
exoticism can be seen as early as the films of Méliès (see Ezra 2000b),
and was certainly apparent in the popular film serials of Louis Feuillade,
which contained many subtle allusions to non-French cultures. Costumes
reflected the influence of Japonerie (especially in the couture designs of
Marie Callot Gerbet), and more generally, they displayed the vogue for
exoticism in French fashion in the early part of the twentieth century,
notably in the influential designs of Paul Poiret and Jeanne Paquin, who
took their inspiration from the Ballets Russes productions in Paris of
Cléopâtre (1909), L’Oiseau de feu (1910), and Shéhérazade (1910) (see
Buxbaum 1999: 18). This exoticist trend in fashion was most apparent
in the wearing of feather headdresses by wealthy women in, for example,
the Fantômas films, which were made at the very end of the Belle époque
(whereas, by the time of Feuillade’s Les Vampires in 1915–16 and certainly
of his serial Judex in 1918, this fashion moment will appear to have
passed). The feather headdresses not only evoke Orientalist opulence,
but also evoke the image of the native American popularized by French
translations of James Fenimore Cooper’s stories of the Wild West and
by the tales of cowboys and Indians by nineteenth-century French
writers such as Gustave Aimard, Gabriel Ferry, and Paul Duplessis (see
Camurat 1993: 2.1.3). At the same time, the word “apache,” from the
American Indian Apache tribe, was used in turn-of-the-century France
to denote “hooligans,” or the criminal underclass. Richard Abel points
out that the fascination with l’apachisme was revived in 1912, with the
public execution of leaders of the anarchist, Paris-based Bonnot gang
(Abel 1996: 6). Fantômas’s band of criminal collaborators are referred
to as “apaches,” as is the gang in which Irma Vep travels in Feuillade’s
1915–16 serial Les Vampires, discussed in a later chapter. The fact that
it is wealthy people who wear “apache”-inspired headdresses suggests
a distribution of criminality and exoticism across the social divide,
underscoring the fact that, in the words of James Clifford, “cultural order
includes both the rule and the transgression” (Clifford 1988: 126). In a
similar way, the incorporation of the “exotic,” literally the outside, within
the intimate sphere of clothing or the household interior suggests a literal
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