Book Review: Cinema Pessimism: A Political Theory of Representation and Reciprocity,by Joshua Foa Dienstag

At the core of Joshua Foa Dienstag’s remarkable new book, Cinema Pessimism: A Political Theory of Representation and Reciprocity, is the conjunction of cinema and democratic politics as representational practices. Cinema and representational democracy are both responses, varied though they each may be, to populations that exceed a reasonable capacity for self-presence (in the case of film) or direct democracy (in the case of politics). And while representation has remained at the core of political theory, even if only to be subject to critique, the representational dimension of cinema is rarely celebrated, or even accommodated as a necessary evil. Unlike representational democracy, cinema is rarely understood as a response, at least in part, to population swells over time and the class division that such swells inevitably effect.

Much more common to the history of film theory and philosophies of mass culture is a neo-Platonic skepticism about representation as a pernicious source of false consciousness and the maintenance of inequality. By the late 1960s, film theory became, and has remained, preoccupied with the deceptive pleasures of representational cinema, such that pain and self-denial becomes confused with emancipation. Only rarely do film theorists seem to wonder how an iconoclastic and fundamentally modernist relation to cinema could possibly beget a better order of the social, as if the point of film theory were only ever to declare one’s opposition to what cannot actually be bested or made more useful, as if representation works always against the unpredictability and inconsistency of social relations. And to be fair, the skeptical tradition of film theory was born of at least two major interventions in the lived experience of the totalitarian embrace and production of the mass-ness of the medium as an antidemocratic force: Siegfried’s Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler and Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, both of which were written under and against the Nazi regime in the height of its terror and both of which were published in 1947, as if to secure forever, and for good reason, a fear of what cinema can do.

And yet, it is important to distinguish what cinema can do, as a medium defined by its automatic character, from what it is guaranteed to do. For example, nearly lost in the history of film theory is the theoretical writing of the French playwright and filmmaker, Marcel Pagnol. Consider, for instance, how Pagnol understood in 1930 a use of cinema toward the democratic achievement of equality, insofar as equality can ever be approximated. Regarding cinema as an expanded form of theatre—one, moreover, that promises to solve the optical disparities sown by class division—Pagnol noted that:

These thousand people cannot all sit in the same place in front of the stage. Compare, for instance, the spectator seated in the first row on the right of the orchestra section and the gentleman seated high up on the left in the last row of the second balcony: we can be assured that they will not see the same play. And that’s the problem for the writer in the theater: his subject, dialogue, and rhythmic structure have to be valid for a thousand spectators, who are already different in age, education, and intelligence and none of whom will see the work from the same angle as his neighbor! ¹

As a mechanically reproducible, representational medium, cinema can be used to address the problem of inequality across a variety of domains—age, education, and class, given the pricing of seats, in which closer means more expensive. Film does so by being able to show everyone the play from the same perspective and scale. The levelling of difference, in Pagnol’s account of cinema, is strikingly different from the levelling of difference that worried Kracauer, Adorno, and Horkheimer. Pagnol is concerned with equality whereas the others are concerned with relations of identity. And yet, both concerns are valid. We need not choose between them, as if the work of politics consisted in deciding, definitively, which position one must remain beholden to, even when the conditions that compelled the articulation of one position or another may no longer remain in place.

For this reason, among others, Dienstag’s Cinema Pessimism should be regarded as one of the most important, most nimble political interventions in the history of political theories of cinema—worthy, that is to say, of Kracauer, Adorno, and Pagnol. And yet what rather importantly differentiates Cinema Pessimism from both of these traditions is the manner in which Dienstag figures the ontology of cinema as a social ontology, one that is not defined strictly in relation to the automatic character of the medium, but by the less predictable relation that pertains between humans and images in the reflection on—and constitution of—the social. When considered in relation to cinema’s ontology, the human has most often been understood as a subject-effect of the medium, such that the human becomes what the medium does, or else, in the case of phenomenological film theory, reports on sensation are offered independently of what might also be claimed for intersubjective, formal effects of cinematic representation. Or as Dienstag puts it, “. . . what we need to understand is not film in the abstract but in the interaction between human beings and their filmic representations” (3).

Many film scholars will object to such a statement, arguing perhaps that the question of representation has always been at the heart of film studies, insofar as identity politics has largely been regarded as a moral question of who appears and how “correctly” they do when they do. But the question I take Dienstag to be raising is not whether this or that representation is completely ethical or wholly inadequate in relation to what or whom it is meant to represent, but how must cinematic representation, no less than representational democracies, fail us in order to succeed, no matter how painful or pleasurable that experience may be. Rather importantly, the sense of failure that Dienstag pursues is related to his compellingly counterintuitive understanding of pessimism: “I understand pessimism as the opposite of optimism—which in this instance refers to the belief that a natural or positive relationship between representation and freedom exists, that they mutually support one another without remainder” (12). Cinema Pessimism is not an effort to resolve the democratic paradox so much as it is an effort to show us, by way of film, and expressly as a mass medium, how one lives through the successes and disappointments that follow from the relation between freedom and representation—from speaking and acting directly, or from being spoken to or acted for in precisely the manner that one desires.

Most striking, in this respect, is the role that eros plays in Dienstag’s theory of cinematic pessimism—and it plays this role as way of accounting not just for why we are drawn to images (no talk here, thankfully, of suture) but also what it means to be disappointed by them. In the opening chapter, Dienstag offers an ingenious reading of the film Her, Spike Jonze’s 2013 film about Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a man struggling with the end of his marriage, who writes personalized, handwritten letters on commission to people for a living and who also begins a romantic relationship with “Samantha” (voiced, unmistakably, by Scarlett Johansson), an “OS,” or an algorithmic operating system designed to satisfy his romantic and interpersonal needs. And she does, for a while. In relation to the moment in which Theodore tells Samantha, “You feel real to me,” Dienstag tells us—where other critics of the film prefer simply to pathologize the relation as yet one more instance of capitalism’s success, thus condemning cinematic representation tout court (no matter how much the critic seems to like and watch film)—that “this response indicates how much of our sense of reality we get from the emotional investment of others and seals something about their particular relationship” (25). Note that Dienstag does not take this moment of tenderness as an expression of alienation and self-deception that follows from the ways in which we are constituted by images, as it would be easy to do. Instead he regards this moment as a way of acknowledging an emotional response to a mechanized being that tells us something, but not everything, about our emotional capacities with the less (if only slightly so) mechanized beings in the world, who do not come to us as representations, but in the flesh, even though as language speakers we are always a product of technology, to some degree. For Dienstag, Theodore’s relation to Samantha is both an occasion for perfectibility, insofar as it presents Theodore (with hints of Adorno, surely) with the chance to learn something of who he is and what he needs. This includes, of course, Theodore’s disappointment, which stems from that same emotional investment and acts of self-reflection and self-construction. The failure that follows for Theodore, is, in Dienstag’s account, a particular product of Theodore’s jealousy, when he learns that Samantha has not just one lover, but thousands. Or as Dienstag puts it, “Since he is not capable of such polyamory, the fact that she has other relationships feels like a diminution of his” (32). About which, Dienstag tells us that: “Again, human limitation, rather than the perfidy of the representative, is the problem here” (32). That is to say, the problem is not that a representation serves more than one, which of course it only ever does, but that sometimes we feel injured in the realization that we are not being addressed directly, uniquely, and privately. But is that really a dig against representation? It was also working. In this sense, the cinephile who loves a film too much (a regular occurrence) suffers the same fate as the citizen who feels betrayed by their political representative. But the problem cannot be the fact of representation, so long as the possibility of liveness or direct democracy is off the table.

In Cinema Pessimism, eros emerges not only at the moment in which a representation is given or appears: it is also at play in the production of representation itself, and what that representation helps constitute. Eros lies importantly behind representative acts, including the constitution of the social itself. In his virtuosic reading of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, for instance, Dienstag understands the oddly cooperative love triangle between Doniphon, Stoddard, and Hallie as an expression of polyamorous maturity, one that allows the founding violence of the state to be performed, anonymously and as if off-screen, by Doniphon, so as to be represented as the heroic act of Stoddard, who is otherwise in possession of the qualities of a leader, save for a talent for violence. And while Hallie remains tied to Stoddard romantically, Doniphon remains on her mind and Stoddard’s. They talk about it. Eros, then, and in the form of polyamory, becomes a way of significantly complicating the question of sovereign violence and state constitution. And I want to emphasize that in Dienstag’s account of the role that representation plays in the production of the social, he features, in this love triangle, something crucially important: the idea that failure and disappointment are built into representation itself, even when representation is constitutive of the social and of the state. For me, this radically changes the questions we can, and should, ask about the relation between law and violence, sovereignty and the logic of exception. Is it any less a habit to refer back, always, to Agamben, Schmitt, and Benjamin when thinking about sovereignty than it is to Adorno, Horkheimer, and Kracauer when reckoning with the authoritarian potential of cinema?

To be clear, eros is not the only way that Dienstag addresses the importance of failure and the de-emphasization of personal need in the production and experience of representation. For instance, in his astonishing reading of Blade Runner (as difficult a needle to thread as there probably is in film criticism), the replicants become an occasion to consider the difference between mutual surveillance and mutual self-regard, the latter of which describes genuinely ethical responses to the inescapable fact of the image as constitutive of being, the personal and the social. There is no room for such a thing in skeptical accounts of the image. And yet, how can we deny the role that images play in our lives? Can one think without an image, even if all alone on the proverbial island that no one really wants to go to anyway? Likewise, in his surprising account of the Up series, Dienstag makes the crucially important observation—with respect to the fact that this series involved the revisitation of its documentary subjects at seven-year intervals—that “Unlike a map, which renders a physical landscape as a physical replica, there is really no danger that film will ever perfectly represent its object—at least not when its object is a subject—for the subjectivity of persons, although a phenomenon of duration like film, is not a phenomenon of the same nature” (121).

The imperfection of cinematic representation is not, as Dienstag makes clear, an occasion for special concern, merely pessimism—but only insofar as pessimism implies that in film, just as in representative democracies, we do not always get what we want. Or when we get what we want, we have to give up a little of something else that might matter to us so that others can have something, but not all, of what they want or need, too. And if what we give up, ultimately, is the narcissistic satisfaction that follows from, or compels, a belief that what appears, appears just for us, what, exactly, will we be missing out on?