Richard Burt
“It’s a Beautiful Monster”:
Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf, Formal Materiality, Paramediality,
and the Hard Drive Rotations of Film and Media History
“To parody Kant’s stylistic procedure of dictionary definition: the radical formalism that animates aesthetic judgment in the dynamics of the sublime is what is called materialism. Theoreticians of literature who fear they may have deserted or betrayed the world by being too formalistic are worrying about the wrong thing: in the spirit of Kant’s Critique, they were not nearly formalistic enough.”
--Paul de Man, “Kant’s Materialism,” in Aesthetic Ideology (1996), 128
“Late in the writing of this book I became aware of Paul de Man’s use of the term “formal materialism,” notably in Aesthetic Ideology. . . . I do not intend my own use of formal materiality to imply any overlap with the particulars of de Man. ”
--Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008),11, footnote 17
“Will we one day be able, in a single gesture, to join the thinking of the event to the thinking of the machine? Will we be able to think, what is called thinking, at one and the same time, both what is happening (what we call an event) and the calculable programming of automatic repetition (we call that a machine)? . . . [The commonly used words organic and inorganic attributed to matter or to the material body] carry an obvious reference, either positive or negative, to the possibility of an internal principle that is proper and totalizing, to a total form of, precisely, organization, whether or not it be a beautiful form, an aesthetic form, this time in the sense of the fine arts. This organicity is thought to be lacking from so-called inorganic matter. If one day . . . the event and the machine . . . were to be thought together, you can bet that not only . . . will one have produced a new logic, an unheard of conceptual form; against the background and at the horizon of present possibilities, this new figure would resemble a monster.”
--Jacques Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits’)” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, (2001), 277-78
All Out Formalism: Making Things Imperfectly Queer
Historicist film criticism typically historicizes a given film intertexutally, that is, by reading it in relation to similar kinds of films released around the same time, with the film’s production linked to marketing strategies related to the film’s theatrical release. The typically successive release of different editions of a film in standard definition DVD (SD-DVD) and high definition DVD (HD-DVD) after its theatrical release has complicated this practice by fragmenting film and by providing for multiple horizons of reception, a temporality of return comparable to Freud’s uncanny.[1] Given that film has always been a medium of reanimation, a Freudian non-linear account of the compulsive repetition of film in different versions, digital afterdeaths as much as afterlives, becomes a necessary corrective to the linear temporality uncritically employed by historicists. We may add take note of corollary shifts from standard definition DVD (SD-DVD) to high definition DVD (HD-DVD) and from analog to high definition television broadcasting; the proliferation of screen sizes from Imax to iphone; the fluidity of screens and their storage sources (a high-definition DVD disc or a cable television “on demand” broadcast, for example); and the option given the HD-DVD viewer to edit the film into “Reader’s Cut,” as it were, a montage composed by the viewer from preselected sections of the HD-DVD. These corollary shifts all require a deepening engagement of film theory and new media theory, an engagement that will allows us to consider the mechanisms and matter of film media storage. Through this engagement, we may extend an analysis of what Gerard Genette calls paratextuality (1997) in the book to include film and DVDs and define the field of cinematic paratextuality in what Gene Youngblood (1970) calls “expanded cinema” to include what I call paramediality, a term I will define shortly.[2]
Before proceeding further, I want to take a detour of sorts away from cinema into a discussion of a war being waged between new media theory and literary theory, the former offering a history of media as a replacement for literary theory, a thing theory stripped of (mis)reading in favor of description, augmentation, and assemblage, all with an ethical charge.[3] By taking this detour, we will arrive at an understanding of queer movie medievalism related more to formal and technological considerations than to a thematic of sexual identity and reproduction. This improbable detour is required given that film theory itself has come under fire, especially its psychoanalytic versions, in the name of empiricism and cognitive science.[4] D.N. Rodowick’s acknowledgment in his The Virtual Life of Film (2007) that film is no longer a modern medium but has become historical with the result that the central question of film studies becomes “What was cinema?” rather than “What is cinema?” elicits a corresponding shift in film theory itself in the wake of digital media such that, as Rodowick puts it, “the contemporary image is inseparable from the computer” (125): instead of asking “What is film theory?” we now have to ask “What was film theory?”[5]
A short detour from digital cinema to deconstruction and new media theory will, I think, reenergize and expand film theory while refusing to divide cinema from media studies and literary theory from book studies. Film and media theorists tend to view cinema as the central metaphor for new media and the computer interface, as we shall see, they also acknowledge the equal standing of the book as metaphor.[6] While Paul de Man (1979, 1996) and Jacques Derrida (1977, 1993, 1996, 2005) engaged media and the matter of writing, including postcards, text machines, the mystic writing pad, television, the telephone, the fax, video, typewriter ribbons, email, telegraphy (and telepathy), and computer screens, all being part of what Derrida calls the “graphosphere” (2005), new media theory has been far less receptive to deconstruction.[7] Symptomatically, media theorists engage deconstruction, especially Paul de Man’s (1996) counter-intuitive divorce of graphic materiality from writing matter and phenomenality from materiality, in order to resist it. To be sure, media theorists often cite Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida and sometimes even summarize their work, but only in order to quarantine and thereby dismiss it in favor of a literal account of the machine and data storage mechanism.[8] The neurotic symptom of new media “theory” frequently takes the form of disavowal, and might be only slightly caricatured as follows: “I know I need to show that I know about this stuff, but I don’t need to think about it or (re)read it or read anything by de Man or anything Derrida wrote after 1984.”[9] This resistance to theory is predictable, of course. After all, what else is deconstruction (and psychoanalysis as well) but resistance?[10]
Despite my misgivings about the new positivism, scientism (cognitive science), and empiricism underwriting the object or “thing theory” of new media studies and post-theory film studies, the frequent misunderstanding of metaphor in film and new media theory, and the substitution of the good mourning, non-melancholic media user derived from ego psychology and New Age g(l)o(w) with the digital flow spiritualism for the psychoanalytic media loser, I don’t wish to fight a rearguard action in defense of literary theory or film theory so much as return to cinema, and specifically Beowulf: The Unrated Director’s Cut DVD and HD-DVD editions, to engage a theoretical problem concerning aesthetics, formalism, and materialism apparent in my three epigraphs that I think is now at center stage in film (post-)theory.[11] Drawing on cognitive science and empiricism for support, post-theory film theorists and new media theorists alike confidently assume they know what matter and materiality are, what “the body” is, where data storage mechanisms are located, what a machine is, and what the subject is (a rational agent without an unconscious).[12] Similarly, new media theory with equal confidence opposes Cartesian disembodiment of favor of a phenomenological embodiment. By contrast, deconstruction, especially de Man, turns to “materiality without matter,” as Derrida (2001) puts it, that brings cognition into question and takes both a turn from an aesthetics of the beautiful to an aesthetics of “monstrosity,” to use Derrida’s (2001, 187-88) figure. In addition to dismissing psychoanalysis as unscientific, new media theorists have ignored de Man’s turn from totality and metaphor to fragmentation and metonymy registered in freeway sign metaphors of disfiguration, mutilation, and dismemberment that define materialism not as empirical matter but as the destructive literality and inscription of the letter.[13]
To be sure, this resistance to deconstruction has been in some ways quite productive. Greater attention to the hardware to software interface and a critique of “screen essentialism” (Kisrchenbaum 2008), a focus on the screen as computer interface, that is, rather than on the data processing mechanisms behind the screen, is highly valuable, but only if we avoid arriving at an equally reductive “mechanism essentialism,” a cognitivism reduced to scientism, a formalism reduced to intellectually thin descriptivism, and a film history reduced to its production history.[14] To avoid these reductions, we must reread both hardware to software and graphic user interfaces as figures of inscription, while taking into account a problem of cognition raised both by de Man’s favoring of metonymy over metaphor and by Derrida’s (2001) turn to literal metaphoricity.[15] The close engagement with canonical texts from inside advocated by de Man (1996, 72, 186) and the “purely internal reading” practiced by Derrida (2001) are similarly valuable.
In the present essay, I want to focus on Beowulf to undertake a practice of close reading in film and media studies that is even more internal than either deconstruction or media theory. To paraphrase de Man’s words in my first epigraph, the problem with deconstruction (and I would add, film theory) is that it is not internal enough. Deconstruction tends to avoid examining the paratext (Genette 1997) even though the action in de Man’s writings, as Derrida (2001) observes, is often in his footnotes. At stake in my reading of Beowulf is the possibility of putting through a connection between the internal matter of media and the internal reading practice of deconstruction as ideology critique: de Man’s (1996) aesthetic ideology (“transcendental philosophy as the critical philosophy of metaphysics,” 71) is opposed to what Kirschenbaum (2008) calls “medial ideology” (ideology critique here taking the form of a pre-Althusserian demystification of commodity labor favoring the bodies of the producer and user and the parts of the product, and that defaults either to a celebratory interactivity of the user or a paranoiac standardization of the software program). In my view, any serious ideology critique needs to take a hard drive detour from politics to the ontology of the storage disc (both computer hard drive and DVD) and its allegorical return on the screen in the figures of letter, red and gold disc, coin, and halo.[16]
I will look at what I take to be the queerness of Beowulf’s (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2007) less in terms of the ways in which its representation of (techno)sexuality puts heteronormative patriarchal reproduction into question than in relation to what I call “paramediality” in digital cinema. (I do make intertextual connections between Beowulf and others films to historicize and interrogate its queerness, the difference being that the other films I examine have little or nothing to do with medievalism, the connections I draw related to their paratexts and paramedia.) Specific to standard and high definition DVDs, paramediality acts out a kind of paratextuality taking the form of promotional macrotrailers alerting the viewer who pauses to watch to a new, putatively superior storage medium, initially standard definition DVD, then, more recently, standard definition and high definition HD-DVD and Blu-ray. These paramedia resemble paratexts: like film trailers, they are placed at the beginning of some DVDs as their default beginnings (rather than the DVD menu) and are followed by a series of film trailers until the (customarily animated) menu appears. Although they are located outside the film, these paramedia trailers are not what Genette (1997) calls “peritexts” (a subset of the paratext that forms part of the published text, as opposed to “epitexts” such as interviews or audiocommentaries that follow in the wake of a book’s publication or a film’s release): unlike peritexts such as prefaces and title pages on books or title sequences in films, paramedia are unrelated to the film on the DVD; rather, paramedia engage DVD and HD-DVD as new media that work like the older
media of analogue video and standard definition DVD they respectively replace. Only standard definition and high definition DVDs have paramedia trailers (videos and laserdiscs did not have them, and print books don’t have similar promotions for electronic books, for example.) In addition, in presenting cosmogonies of digital cinema, paramedia trailers invite us to consider critically the untheorized metaphor of computer “cosmogony” (Manovich 2001, and the separate analog and digital cinema “cosmogonies” (Rodowick 2007, 130), or “world” of cinema as opposed to the “universe” of the computer (Rodowick 2007, 174). Attention to paramedia helps us to historicize a film not only intertextually, then, but intermedially as well. Through paramedia, that is, we may historicize and make sense of media transitions in both film / data storage--from movies on celluloid to movies on video, laserdisc, DVD, and HD-DVD—and film exhibition—from theatrical screen to flat screen computer monitors and flat screen television sets.[17] In the process, practicing historicism itself transforms into a looping repetition: call it practicing ([p]re)historicism.