Language, spectacle and body in Anthony Drazen's Hurlyburly

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Notes

Elizabeth Walden

Department of English and Cultural Studies

Bryant College

1150 Douglas Pike

Smithfield, RI 02917‐1284

USA

E‐mail: [email protected]

This paper has benefited from the comments of Angelaki's anonymous reviewers.

I am not claiming that this paper represents Deleuze's view of cinema or of body. And indeed to the degree that Deleuzians explicitly reject phenomenology, I am working against the tradition tied to his work (cf. Olkowski). Rather, I take inspiration from Deleuze's insistence that cinema inform philosophy and from the quotation serving as this paper's epigraph, which evokes the spirit of recent interest in thinking the body including, but not restricted to, Deleuze's own.

This paper owes a great deal to the work of Laura Marks whose loving attention to the materiality of film and the filmic experience I consider exemplary. This last body, the materiality of the film, is something I consider significant to the issues raised in this paper, but cannot pursue here (cf. Marks).

Apparently for many, however, it requires turning away. When I have mentioned working on this film, many people have expressed disgust with it and a surprising number said that they left the theater before the film's end.

This quotation, and all further quotations without page references, come from the film's dialogue, much of which was improvised by the actors.

The claim that feelings inform reason has been part of a certain strand of feminist criticism for decades, and now seems to be a commonplace in various discourses: in ethics (Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought insists upon the cognitive content of emotions and the necessity of processing emotion for ethical and political thought), in cognitive science (Demasio makes a convincing case that emotion is necessary for rational behavior), and even popular culture (cf. Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence and its various spin‐offs).

Hurlyburly seems like a timely film, not only because of the extreme form of the Spectacle it presents but also because the news that disturbs Eddie is of Gulf War I, weapons of mass destruction, and the sowing of domestic fear through perverse preoccupation with horrible crimes and bizarre cults.

I take this quotation from Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (234–35); they have a keen sense of language within its evolutionary and biological context, which ties it closely to embodiment.

Rabe talks about how he discovered the validation for the play's title when he found this line in Shakespeare's Macbeth (Rabe 371).

Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception 215.

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Notes on contributors

elizabeth walden

Elizabeth Walden Department of English and Cultural Studies Bryant College 1150 Douglas Pike Smithfield, RI 02917‐1284 USA E‐mail: [email protected]