Stray aesthetic in the cinema of Andrea Arnold

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to contribute to the scholarly examination of the nonhuman in the cinema of Andrea Arnold by reading her work through the figure of the “stray”, proposed by Julia Kristeva and developed by Barbara Creed in her exploration of “stray ethics” in the Anthropocene. Through a close analysis of Arnold’s three films, Dog (2001), Wasp (2003) and Fish Tank (2009), I argue that Arnold’s sensory-driven cinema transcends the focus on the human body and its phenomenological rhythms through which it is commonly read by offering instances of what I dub non-anthropocentric “stray visuality”, realised through her treatment of the environment (both “built” and “natural”) and the nonhuman beings that inhabit it. I assert that Arnold’s filmmaking confounds these overlapping binary oppositions in complex ways that are deeply implicated in current philosophical debates about the ecological.

Keywords:

• stray visuality
• ecology
• aesthetics
• Andrea Arnold
• animals
• non-anthropocentric cinema

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Author note

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands. Her primary research is in film studies and cultural studies, with an emphasis on women’s cinema in the USA, UK and Spain. She also has an interest in questions of embodiment, affect and the senses, as well as in ecological thought. She has published several book chapters and journal articles on Kathryn Bigelow, Andrea Arnold, Sofia Coppola and Isabel Coixet in Film-Philosophy, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of British Cinema and Television, among others. She has co-edited, with Mary Harrod, Women Do Genre in Film and Television (Routledge, 2017, winner of first Prize in the BAFTSS Best Edited Collection competition) and published her monograph Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Edinburgh University Press, 2018, Honourable Mention in the ESSE Awards). In May 2020, she was awarded a “Knowledge Generation R&D” Grant to be Principal Investigator on the 3-year research project, “Cinema and Environment: Affective Ecologies in the Anthropocene”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Notes

1. Lawrence borrows the term “ecological attentiveness” from McMahon’s (2014b) study of the cinema of Claire Denis, which itself builds on what Jane Bennett refers to as “a more distributive agency” in her work Vibrant Matter (2010, ix; emphasis in original).

2. Kristeva continues: “Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder” (Kristeva 1982, 12–13). In Kristeva’s thinking, “straying” is part of human condition, that is to say, we always straddle borders between animal and human, nature and culture. Yet, as Creed observes, if we fail to return to the symbolic order, we will be banished (Creed 2017, 27).

3. Creed observes that “when a woman becomes an exile, she exchanges the male symbolic of law and language for a female landscape, which is closer to the natural, organic world” (Creed 2017, 35). Such a remark could be linked with Thornham’s (2016) exploration of landscape in Wuthering Heights through the concept of the haptic. Yet, as Marks (2000) observes, haptic visuality cannot be limited to the assumed “feminine” qualities, and should be viewed through strategic lens.

4. I use the word “figure” in Donna Haraway’s sense, as a “material-semiotic knot” (Haraway 2008, 4), to explore the entanglement of the material and the semiotic. That is, the stray as a figure is not to be understood as a mere representation of something, but rather as a creature that is both human and animal, natural and cultural, real and imagined.

5. Examples are not hard to come by in Arnold’s cinema: Mia, as well as travellers, in Fish Tank, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Star and her homeless human and nonhuman companions in American Honey.

6. What is more, two of these films, Wasp and Fish Tank, share Arnold’s frequent collaborator, the director of photography Robbie Ryan. He also worked with Arnold on Red Road, Wuthering Heights and American Honey, and undoubtedly contributed to Arnold’s aesthetic (which she often dubs in interviews “poetic realism”).

7. See also Hanson’s (2015) examination of “edgelands” in Fish Tank.

8. Scholars have focused, for example, on Arnold’s phenomenological representations of adolescent female experience (Hirsch 2014; Bolton 2016; Ince 2017) and her transgressive depictions of the sexual encounter (Horeck 2011).

9. For a summary of the field, see McMahon (2015). As Cassandra Guan and Adam O’Brien observe in their Screen dossier dedicated to cinema’s natural aesthetics, an ecological approach to the study of moving-image media is not easy to define: “In some scholarly accounts, ecology stands for a concern with the material conditions and environmental impact of cinema as a mass-based industrial medium, while in others it signals a commitment to post-human ontologies and affective networks, sometimes in opposition to socio-semiotic modes of interpretation. Similarly, the production category of ‘eco-cinema’ has been largely held together by topical concerns rather than by any coherent approach to film form” (Guan and O’Brien 2020, 273). My own approach privileges the questions of film aesthetics and representation, with close reading as a method, and emphasises the manifold material-semiotic discourses at work in Arnold’s films.

10. In her study of Milk and Fish Tank, Jacobs (2016) draws on both phenomenological understandings of film viewing and Pick’s (2011) notion of “creaturely cinema” in order to explore the ethical dimensions of Arnold’s treatment of the sexual maternal body, which Jacob argues enables a particular affective and embodied experience of corporeal vulnerability.

11. Interestingly, the cover image of Pick’s book shows a stray fox on a tombstone in the Jewish cemetery in Hackney.

12. There are several possible problems of understanding vulnerability as a universal mode of exposure and, as Pick herself acknowledges, of approaching animals in a “powerless way” (Pick 2011, 5). See McMahon’s (2019) conceptualization of “animal worlds” for a different approach.

13. Bolton calls Fish Tank “phenomenological experimentation” (Bolton 2016, 76); for Jacobs, Arnold’s films operate on “a tactile, phenomenological level” to produce “an embodied alignment between the projected subject and the viewing subject” (Jacobs 2016, 161).

14. In this sense, straying can be considered not only a mode of artistic creation but also a mode of reception. In this article, for the lack of space, I focus mostly on the former.

15. As one of the peer reviewers observed, it would be possible to think about the stray in connection to process philosophy, and not as a mere tension between symbolic order and its disruption. Stray-ness might operate, for instance, according to Donna Haraway’s conceptualisation of sympoietic emergence, as becoming-with a variety of “expandable set of players” (Haraway 2016, 65). See also Komsta and Atasoy’s (2022) recent reading of Diane Cook’s novel The New Wilderness through the lens of the figure of the female stray and stray ethics, which the authors associate with the non-anthropocentric relationship between human and nonhuman animals. Drawing on Haraway, they propose that “the figure of the stray has the capacity to function as an important model of Anthropocene identity”, that is, a sympoietic identity (Komsta and Atasoy 2022, 4). While I agree with the authors’ observation that straying could be associated with conscious “acts of defiance directed at the dominant power structures [and] the anthropocentric exploitation of human as well as nonhuman actants” (Komsta and Atasoy 2022, 4), Arnold’s films push the figure of the stray in a different direction.

16. As Creed defines it: “Entangled looking is about becoming animal, about asking us to adopt a look of greater reciprocity supporting common histories, origins, sensibilities, desires and (perhaps more diversely inscribed) forms of intelligence” (Creed 2018).

17. As Gorfinkel reminds us (2016, 130), wandering is a primary feature of modern art cinema.

18. This is in contrast to Walter Benjamin, who in a tribute to flânerie famously said “Paris taught me this art of straying” (quoted in Creed 2017, 17). Interestingly, as Creed reminds us, in nineteen-century Paris many artists and intellectuals romanticised the stray dog due to its outsider status (Creed 2017, 159).

19. The scene evokes Star’s similar liberation of an insect in Arnold’s most recent feature film to date, American Honey (2016).

20. The children say earlier in the film that their mother’s love interest, Dave, looks like the famous footballer, and Zoë resembles Victoria Beckham.

21. This desire is also expressed in more open compositions including birds and a floating balloon towards the end (a visual detail also appearing in Dog).

22. Leah’s encounter with the stray dog brings to mind Levinas’s encounter with Bobby, when he was a Jewish prisoner of war. As Creed relates, “only the dog understood, or acknowledged, one creature to another, that the Jewish prisoners were fellow beings. Bobby did not do this through facial expressions—or at least any facial expressions Levinas recognised—but through gesture and body language (waiting, jumping, barking in delight)” (Creed 2017, 91).

23. Nwonka, conversely, has argued that Arnold’s aesthetic produces an “objectification of the subject”, rendering characters like Mia as “insects under a magnifying glass” (Nwonka 2017, 74). Nwonka links Arnold’s poetic realism to a disavowal of class politics. See Forrest (2020) for a contrasting view.

24. At the moment of writing, Arnold has released a documentary film entitled Cow (2021), in which we are offered another instance of looking with animals.

25. In this sense, Arnold’s eco-aesthetic goes beyond an ecocinematic tendency that privileges duration. See Landreville’s (2019) critique of the normalised association between long takes and environmental ethics stemming from Bazin’s idea of cinematic realism.

26. For Creed, “to stray is a possibility for all living creatures, whether human animals, nonhuman animals—such as birds, fish, insects, spiders—or plants” (Creed 2017, 7). Indeed, many animals in Arnold’s films can be seen as “anthropogenic strays”, that is, as “a result of the effects of human actions on nature” (Creed 2017, 11). For example, wasps—which are as ecologically relevant and endangered as bees—are increasingly threatened with the loss of habitat due to human activity. In addition, in Arnold’s short film, they are represented as wandering away from where they are “supposed” to be. The dog, the humankind’s companion-species par excellence, is in Arnold’s short film homeless and left to its own fate, and thus linked to a broader commentary on social precarity under neoliberalism. The caravan of travellers in Fish Tank visually associates the horse with labour. As McMahon reminds us in her reading of The Turin Horse, a film that references the whipping of a horse that was said to have caused Nietzsche’s mental breakdown, animal labour was essential in the staggering rate of human development achieved during the agricultural and industrial revolutions: “Horses worked hard, for incredibly long hours, and suffered intensely, as suggested by their drastically shortened working-life spans” (McMahon 2019, 104). The image of the horse in Fish Tank, as a traditional motif of rural transport opposed to the modernity of the car, evokes a preindustrial agricultural world. Here, however, the horse becomes stray, in a similar way to his stray owners. The horse might also be read, at least implicitly, as gesturing towards the contemporary relations between labour, survival and precarity.

27. Precarity and precariousness are distinct, if overlapping, terms. While precarity and precariousness tend to be used interchangeably, in this article I understand precarity as closely intertwined with the sense of insecurity, induced by neoliberal violence, and precariousness as an ontological condition shared by all human beings, as theorised by Butler (2012), and here extended to all forms of life. Needless to say, human beings are not the only affected by neoliberal violence, as scholarly reflections on the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene clearly demonstrate. However, as Creed proposes, the stray is both marginalised and resistant: “The stray is not necessarily a victim, a creature unable to assert or defend a position. […] A stray ethics reminds us that many (but not all) strays are both vulnerable and strong. Fragility does not mean a loss of resilience” (Creed 2017, 100).

28. As Driscoll and Hoffmann explain in reference to zoopoetic reading, “we need not fear or mistrust the metaphorical, symbolic and allegorical meanings embodied by literary animals, so long as we do not make the mistake of reading these nonhuman presences only or simply as metaphors” (Driscoll and Hoffmann 2018, 4). They write: “our encounters with animals in ‘real’ world are also both material and semiotic, and hence […] the relationship between ‘real’ animals and ‘literary’ animals is not that of an original to a copy, but rather reciprocal and irreducibly entangled” (Driscoll and Hoffmann 2018, 6).

29. This corporeal mimesis might be read as problematic, due to the historical animalisation of both women and working-classes, the latter routinely branded as untamed, abject and dangerous even within 21^st-century social discourses. Arnold simultaneously acknowledges and subtly challenges such class-related prejudice, for example through dialogue that is full of animal-inspired insults (in the Fish Tank’s opening line Mia tells her friend: “ring me back, you bitch” and later tells Conor that he smells like “fox piss”).

30. In Red Road, Wuthering Heights and American Honey, animals are associated with male protagonists’ sexual desire: Clyde is visually associated with a fox, Heathcliff with dogs and rabbits, while Jake with a wolf (he literally howls at the moon).

31. Mia’s sister, Tyler, asks if the fish is dying, to which their mother responds sarcastically that it is “dancing”, thus linking the struggling creature to Mia’s earlier dance performances.

32. Arnold’s “animal filming” is akin to Hélène Cixous’s conception of “animal writing”: “[To write] You need a body that uses all its senses, that feels its heart beat, that follows the path of the blood under the skin, that follows the rhythm of the breath. […] A bit like a dog in nature: they do not trample it, they scratch it, smell it, listen to it” (quoted in Segarra 2021, 56).

33. Haraway’s usage of the term extends the meaning of “creature” to all life forms, including “microbes, plants, animals, humans and nonhumans and sometimes even to machines” (Haraway 2016, 169), while silencing its association with “creation”.

34. See also MacDonald’s (2013) reflection on ecocinema and its “retraining of perception”.

35. Other contemporary British directors engaging with edgelands include Lynne Ramsay, Shane Meadows and Clio Barnard, among others.

36. In Fish Tank and in Wasp this being-with is underscored in dance scenes (Mia dancing with her mother and her sister, and Zoë dancing with her children in the parking lot).

37. See also Hanson’s (2015) discussion of this quote in the context of Hamid Naficy’s “accented cinema”.

38. Arnold’s stray aesthetic, which refuses to idealize edgelands while bringing to the fore their liveliness, resonates with what Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova conceptualise as the “bleak joy”, understood as “a way of thinking things that are commonly and culturally figured as negative without losing the force of their impact but also without succumbing to the luster of mere doom” (Fuller and Goriunova 2019, xii). In their book on ecological aesthetics, which gives special consideration to “the aesthetic dimensions of ‘bad things’” (xii), such as ecological damage, they argue for the fruitfulness of an approach that establishes “an interplay between an ecological materialism that is necessarily bleak, mineral, and appreciative of disaster on the one hand and the inheritance of the monist theorists of affirmation that find potentials and actualizations of a joyful conatus in being on the other” (xii). I thank the peer reviewer for bringing this book, as well as Mark Fisher’s work on the weird and the eerie, to my attention.

39. As Fisher claims, “conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity” (Fisher 2016).

40. In his later work on edgelands, Edensor views these spaces as specifically English. He writes about Fish Tank: “[it] evokes a generic English contemporary landscape replete with a host of mundane settings that diverge from any notion of a romantic urban and rural Englishness […]. There are poorly maintained post-war housing estates, with their scruffy communal play areas and run-down stairways and balconies, and the low-key shopping precincts typical of many urban English areas” (Edensor 2015, 68).

41. See Dillet and Puri (2013) on “left-over spaces” in the Dardennes’s films. In contrast to Dog and Fish Tank, the non-place of the parking lot in Wasp is posited as a space hope, given the film’s implied happy ending.

42. This is what Creed refers to as “unsettling the settled” (Creed 2017, 101). As she writes, “the project of erecting boundaries to keep the other (strays, animals, refugees, indigenous peoples, exiles, women, the poor) at bay in order to assert the primacy of the so-called civilised human animal over all other signifies a failure of empathy that now threatens to undermine all forms of life in the Anthropocene” (Creed 2017, 100).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the research project “Cinema and Environment: Affective Ecologies in the Anthropocene” (PID2019-110068 GA-I00 / MCIN / AEI / 10.13039/501100011033), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.