Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

The Mind-Game Film 31Discipline and Control, Teach and Train?On the one hand, thus, we are dealing with pathologies (of subjectivity, ofconsciousness, of memory and identity): indications of crisis and uncertaintyin the relation of the self with itself and with the world (and byextension: of the spectator with the screen). On the other hand, theseapparently damaged minds and bodies are capable of displaying remarkablefaculties at times, being in touch with agents from another world (TheSixth Sense), intuiting imminent disaster (Donnie Darko), or startingpopular protest movements (Fight Club). Their disability functions asempowerment, and their minds, by seemingly losing control, gain a differentkind of relation to the man-made, routinized, or automated surroundings,but also to the more “cosmic” energies, which usually centeron the new physics of time travel, curved spaces, stochastic systems, andwarps in the universe. In other words, these pathologies are presented tothe spectator in some sense as productive pathologies.This would indicate that “trauma” is not only something that connectsa character to his or her past, but also opens up to a future. It suggests aFoucault-inspired approach: Foucault sought to explain mental pathologiesin terms of bodily regimes, discourses, and institutional practices, whichgo beyond the individual instance, and inscribe pathology “productively”– in terms of the micro-politics of power – into society at large. Given theresonance that his theories have had in most humanities fields, we shouldperhaps read the mind-game film also across the paradigms of “discipline”and “control.” For instance, seen from the Deleuzian interpretation ofFoucault’s shift from “disciplinary” to “control” societies (Deleuze 1992),these pathologies of the self are a way of making the body and the sensesready for the new surveillance society. They inscribe “index and trace” inthe form of Aufschreibsysteme (systems of inscription) on the individualbody, much the way that Kafka depicts the governor in The Penal Colonybeing inscribed by his own machine, or the way Leonard in Memento hashis body tattooed, in order to remember not to forget, much the way heuses his Polaroids. A line could even be drawn from Walter Benjamin’stheories of the technical media and the body (around concepts of “shock”and the “optical unconscious”), which (in German philosophy) leads tothinkers like Friedrich Kittler, Klaus Theweleit, and Peter Sloterdijk, withtheir interest in extending “materialities of communication” to writingand literature (their examples are drawn, besides Kafka, from modernist