Screen Bodies

This issue of Screen Bodies begins with a group of three articles that examine the representation of women in recent horror cinema with an emphasis on the experience of female embodiment in late capitalist society. Megan Kenny's “All I Wanna Do Is Make a Meal of You: Feminist New Wave and the Rise of the Cannibal Woman” is a significant contribution to the growing scholarship on Barbara Creed's theory of the Feminist New Wave and its central figure, the monstrous-feminine. Kenny offers an incisive reading of three films—Trouble Every Day (Denis, 2001), In My Skin (de Van, 2002) and Raw (Ducournau, 2016)—that have also been associated with French Extremity, or what Tim Palmer calls “cinema of the body.” Each film focuses on the awakening of the female protagonist and uses cannibalism as a metaphor for women's transgressive desire, pleasure, and the exploration of identity. Creed argues that Feminist New Wave films feature a heroine's journey of confrontation, revolt, and self-transformation. Kenny shows how these films diversely deploy the figure of cannibalism to represent the lived experience of womanhood in capitalist society and the characters’ revolt against it.

The Feminist New Wave refers to a movement defined by Creed as films directed primarily by women that explore central female characters in revolt against patriarchal values challenging what it means to be a woman under these conditions. Three films are explored in this article; Trouble Every Day (2001), Dans Ma Peau (2002), and Raw (2016), films that can also be classified under the French Extremity movement. All three films focus on a woman's cannibalistic awakening, using cannibalism as a metaphor to explore wider social concerns. This article explores how the cannibal trope is used to interrogate the experience of being a woman under capitalism, the impact of cannibalism on social bonds and the interconnection between sexuality and cannibalism.

In Coralie Fargeat's 2024 film, the titular “substance” is a seductive product that promises Elisabeth Sparkle, a fitness instructor and television icon played by Demi Moore, a “younger, better, more perfect” you. Fargeat's film is the first of its kind to use body horror as a powerful condemnation of the ever-accelerating commodification of women's appearance under late capitalism, and the violence inflicted on its constituents. This article explores a history of feminine expression of violence inscribed on the self through art and film, especially in the New French Extremity. Turning to a discussion of the abject and the monstrous-feminine using the work of Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed, this intervention shows how Fargeat's deployment of body horror graphically brings into sharp focus the violence of the ideal female commodified body, ending in an explosive confrontational indictment of what Laura Mulvey calls “to-be-looked-at-ness.” This article seeks to complicate and elaborate on the accelerated commodification of the female body as demonstrated by Fargeat's mobilization of the body horror genre.

As one of the most notorious franchises in horror history, Saw has been the subject of public discourse since its debut in 2004. While some ponder Jigsaw's morals and appreciate the movies’ emphasis on the necessity to be grateful for one's life, others dismiss the franchise as “torture porn,” simply created to satisfy the wants of a depraved, primarily male audience. Women's presence throughout the films brings up several questions about gender representation: Is the mutilation of women's bodies for the male gaze inherently harmful? How do female figures in the series both play into and subvert stereotypes and tropes in the genre? In what ways have the films influenced societal perception and successive works’ portrayal of women? The Saw movies walk a fine line between creating strong female representation in the horror space and playing into stereotypes and exploiting female suffering for profit, ultimately doing more harm than good.

Claire Denis's 2019 film High Life follows inmates on death row on an interstellar journey tasked with the mission of energy extraction from a black hole. The world of High Life lies at the end of the trajectory that Achille Mbembe might call “becoming Black of the world,” whereby logic of anti-Black dehumanization that manifests in the history of slavery to carceral politics reaches its end, and life itself becomes instrumentalized: every aspect of the prisoners’ life is under exhaustive control, as they head toward certain death with the sole purpose of exhausting another stellar phenomenon of its energy. This article offers a reading of High Life as a film that uses the director's characteristic emphasis on the body to counter the politics of exploitation and control that shapes its narrative. In particular, the article examines the black hole and the imagination of its explosion as facilitating a redistribution of sense and epistemological possibilities in a world becoming Black.

Comparatively analyzing the representation of bodies in atomic bomb films, Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023) and Women in the Mirror (Kagami no onnatachi, Yoshida Yoshishige, 2002), this article examines how the aesthetics of cinema can intensify the spectator's ethical experience. Yoshida argues that the ultimate ethics in cinematic aesthetics lies in how filmmakers formulate cinema as an open text. However, are open texts possible? Can images be autonomous? It is possible to leave an image's meaning undecided and ambiguous, but does that mean this image is open as a text? Can a viewer freely interpret the image? If a film is read beyond or irrelevant to its context, should such freedom be allowed? Even if open texts are possible, is such an action to make open texts ethical, especially when those texts are regarding atomic bombs? This article explores how to answer these questions.

In Black Mirror's episode “Be Right Back” (2013) and Spike Jonze's film Her (2013), protagonists Martha and Theodore suffer the loss of a romantic partner and are therefore prone to seek the company of advanced machines in order to work through their trauma and to alleviate their loneliness. Portraying human–robot relationships as an increasingly accessible, collective experience, “Be Right Back” and Her operate on a dialectic between embodied and digital space, in which performance is key. I demonstrate how this dialectic complicates the human–robot relationships once the machines no longer fulfill the humans’ desires and how both “Be Right Back” and Her use this supposed distinction between the embodied and the digital to self-reflexively discuss the immersive performative qualities of television and film.

Melodrama can be a productive genre for excavating and troubling social categories beholden to white heteropatriarchy, but the genre's disruptive power is not typically extended to trans films. Rather than utilizing melodrama's archetypal emotional spectacle to draw attention to genders’ incoherence, mainstream cinema relies on melodramatic tropes and sentimental pedagogy to engender pity for the preternaturally melancholic trans figure. Anxiety about the trans body, whether personal or cultural, therefore becomes the definitive mode for representing trans experiences on-screen. Given the genre's transnormative history, in particular its ambiguous treatment of trans femininity, how might filmmakers reclaim melodrama's critical social voice in service of a more radical trans agenda? And how might interventions by other spectacle-driven genres, like the musical, facilitate a more productive engagement with trans culture?

In survival horror games, the player is supposed to win by surviving but in Red Barrel's 2013 game Outlast, that is not the case. In building an argument from Frantz Fanon and queer gameplay studies, I propose that Outlast subverts typical gameplay mastery of winning to subject player embodiment to Black memory and Black suffering through playing wretched. I contend that with playing wretched, the player does not become Black but experiences the structural positioning of blackness through the game's restrictions of player agency and the abject violence the player-character undergoes. The game engulfs the player within a narrative that draws from painful histories in the United States, like the 1932 Tuskegee Study, to remake the player into a tool of decolonization. The game and its use of player embodiment upends what it truly means to survive after enduring trauma, after playing and being played as one of the wretched.

Scientia Sexualis Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, California, USA) 5 October 2024 to 2 March 2025