Rupture, Suture, Nietzsche: Impossible Intersubjectivity in Alien

Film-Philosophy

Dominic Lash¹ 

[1] University of Bristol;

关键词: suture;    intersubjectivity;    Jean-Pierre Oudart;    Alien;    Friedrich Nietzsche;    Stanley Cavell;   

DOI  :  10.3366/film.2021.0174

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The concept of suture has long been an important and controversial concept in investigations of the relationships between narrative, diegesis, character, and spectator. The dominant understanding of suture has paid more attention to its Lacanian derivation – and to the account given by Daniel Dayan – than to the work of Jean-Pierre Oudart which first introduced suture into Film Studies. This article, however, follows the recent work of George Butte, who argues that the way Oudart understands suture is very illuminating for the study of the complex forms of intersubjectivity that cinema so readily, and so richly, dramatises – famously (but by no means exclusively) by means of shot/reverse shot figures. It argues that certain key moments in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) activate ideas of corporeality, desire, and intersubjectivity in ways that contribute to a wider thematic and figurative nexus at work in the film directed at the exploration of impossible intersubjectivities. The article also proposes that, via this nexus, the film offers an intriguing instantiation of Nietzsche's notion of the “human, all too human”, thereby demonstrating that there is much more in Nietzsche of relevance to Alien than the xenomorph's superhuman “will-to-power”. The android Ash's admiration for the alien's lack both of conscience and consciousness ironically indicates his own all-too-human recognition of the superfluity but inescapability of his own consciousness. The article concludes by drawing briefly on the work of Stanley Cavell on acknowledgment, proposing that much of the horror of Alien lies not only in how bodies are ruptured but in the fact that some subjectivities cannot even be sutured.

【 授权许可】

Unknown