• 1 Pascale Ferran, “Violence économique et cinéma français,” Le Monde.fr, 26 février 2007, https://www (...)

2However, there are films whose narration and fictional worlds hint both at their own presence and at the physical presence of the screen as a flat, impenetrable surface, at times pulling us inside the fiction and at others excluding us. This is the risky game Jim Jarmusch has been playing with his spectators ever since Stranger than Paradise (1984). In his films, we are both drawn into the fictional world of the film (thanks to the emotional content, the identification with the characters, and the power of the music) and reminded that we are watching a film; at times we are told so in so many words, at times we are trapped outside the fictional space by certain filmic devices. His works exemplify this tension for a variety of reasons. First, because they represent what Pascale Ferran1 calls “film du milieu”: independently produced, stylistically innovative, and yet narrative, fictional and shown in cinemas and, in most cases, attracting enough spectators who remain seated to the end of the film, and might even come back to see Jarmusch’s next work, and in doing so, make his filmmaking modestly profitable. Secondly, these films dwell on the question of the subject: the I. The cinema viewer’s I and the Eye of the camera or of the character (depending on the identification process) may indeed coincide, especially when we analyse filmic reception with semiological and psychoanalytical tools.

• 2 André Gardies, L’Espace au cinéma, Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993, 81.

3If we define a border with the tools of topology, it is seen as the limit of a closed space. In the physical world, the screen is the border of a two-dimensional space in which the film is projected. On the other side of the border, there is a three-dimensional world that we usually call “reality.” Such a view goes against the cinemagoer’s experience, as is clearly shown in Woody Allen’s film, where the screen is the border between two three-dimensional spaces. In André Gardies’s work on cinematic space,2 the screen is, clearly, if not a border, an interface separating two half spheres, one belonging to the non-filmic reality, the other, mentally rebuilt and depending on the spectator’s presence and gaze. This puts two seemingly heterogeneous spaces on the same level. Whether the hemispheres are connected, separated, or united depends on the way our eye works: but what do they tell us about the I, about us as a cinematic subject?

• 3 Jacques Lacan, RSI : séminaire, 1974-1975, Séminaire 1974–1975, Paris: Association freudienne inter (...)
• 4 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, 1, Points 5, Paris: Seuil, 1992, 177.
• 5 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Suture I & II,” Les Cahiers Du Cinéma, May 1969.
• 6 Serge Tisseron, Comment Hitchcock m’a guéri : que cherchons-nous dans les images ? Paris: Albin Mic (...)
• 7 Madelon Sprengnether, Crying at the Movies: A Film Memoir, vol. 1, Saint Paul (Minn.): Graywolf Pre (...)

4Our topic connects the physical situation of the cinemagoer with the topology of psychological entities as defined by Jacques Lacan, in which the orders of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic are thought of as places in our psyche that define our mental structures. He develops these ideas in the R.S.I. seminar (1974–1975),3 and in the L’Insu4 seminar. When applying Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller to filmic analysis through the notion of suture in Les Cahiers du cinéma,5 theoretician and film critic Jean-Pierre Oudart was already linking psychoanalytical theory and film viewing. Slavoj Žižek bases much of his thought on this principle. French psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron6 moves very smoothly from the creation of mental images to the reception of cinematic image, as does Madelon Sprengnether in Crying at the Movies.7 Using all this background as our underpinning, our topology will show how the screen can work actively as a border that is felt and can at times be crossed.

• 9 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, London: Routle (...)
• 10 According to Louis Seguin, the cinema is an ontological machine that allows us “to cross the mirror (...)
• 11 Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte, Points, Paris: Seuil, 1982, 25.
• 12 Ibid., 22.

6In a classical movie, you see a speaker from a given point of view, while the addressee is not visible in the frame, and the effect which is produced is called “the Absent One.” We ask: “Who is this person talking to?” and start wondering about form, that is to say, cinematic enunciation rather than content. However, when in the reverse shot we are confronted with a character standing where “the Absent One” was supposedly standing, what was perceived as a problem of enunciation is now transferred to the level of fiction and dialogue. The enunciative system, the apparatus, becomes invisible, as is normal in classical Hollywood cinema9 for instance. The onscreen space is continuous: there is no “gap,” no hole, no visible manipulation of images; we, the spectators, are at the centre of a fictional world that unfolds by itself. The borders mentioned in the introduction are now far away from us, they are not relevant to our understanding of the film. Hence, one hypothesis of this paper is that in mainstream cinema the screen is not really a border as it is not relevant to the spectators’ reception.10 In the same way, this corresponds to a psychological situation where the subject is complete and centred on her or himself. The system of suture accounts for our pleasurable involvement in many films, that we probably compare (but neither Žižek nor Oudart go as far as this) with a total self-centredness, the absence of a “hole” in our psyche, the complete mastery of language – in other words to the delicious wishful thinking of a comfortable position from which nothing escapes. In the words of Roland Barthes, sutured filmic texts are “textes de plaisir”11 and not “textes de jouissance.”12

• 13 Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forres (...)

9We then realize that the world unfolding on the screen contains a kind of hole, since part of its space is only a construct of our minds: this becomes clear when Eva is looking towards the camera inquiringly as if to try and take in the smallness and shabbiness of the rooms she has to occupy for ten days. This hole is the place where “I,” the cinematographic subject, am standing, on my side of the “fourth wall,” outside the fictional world and in front of the screen as a border, a limit I am not invited to cross, since there are no reverse shots. In this instance, the hole in the fictional space (first due to the lack of reverse shot and second to the black screens that isolate each sequence), means that the off-screen space will never find its way back onto the screen: the world cannot be grasped totally, some of it will escape. This hole corresponds to the Lacanian Real, which, by definition, is what cannot be imagined or understood. According to Jacques Lacan, “The Real is what resists symbolisation absolutely.”13 As Susan Hayward explains:

• 15 In Lacanian theory, the subject, I, is not a given but a construct, as explained by the “mirror sta (...)

10Indeed, experiencing such a gap may result in either a form of “angst” or, even worse, the impossibility of locating the Ego/self/I at the centre of one’s world (with the impossibility of using language as an extreme consequence). The subject cannot be built:15 a question that has fascinated Jim Jarmusch from the very beginning of his career when he shot with fellow screenwriter Sarah Driver a film about schizophrenia called You are not I (1981).

• 16 Marc Augé, Non-lieux: introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, La librairie du XXe sièc (...)

13Paradoxically, this dual opposition between the spectators’ world and the fiction lets us see something rather amorphous, such as the void of the lake or, earlier in the film, the wasteland in front of the airport. These are “non-spaces” or “non-places,”16 for example, during her trip to Florida, Eva comments: “I thought we were going to Miami, this is nowhere.” In other words, the fixed screen border in Stranger than Paradise makes a certain number of things feasible, such as facing the void.

• 17 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, London: A&C Black, 2001, 208.
• 18 A “film takes our very distance and powerlessness over the world as the condition of the world’s na (...)

15Even if in later films Jim Jarmusch goes back to the use of the reverse shot, he still does not immerse the spectator in fiction. He uses a certain number of devices that make the screen into a border for the spectator. The lateral tracking shot creates a surface that is parallel to, and a metaphor for the screen: in Stranger than Paradise it is the iron shutters of shops, in Down by Law, the facades of wooden houses. This irreducible distance breaks the vision-action links or sensory-motor links, as described by Gilles Deleuze in the Movement Image.17 We may either see this as a crisis in an idealistic cinema where action and vision go hand in hand, as Gilles Deleuze does, or, like Stanley Cavell, as the accurate reproduction of our condition within the world – we cannot act on it, and images reveal all that can be seen.18

• 19 Edward Twitchell Hall, The Hidden Dimension, New York: Anchor Books, 1990, 120.

20Lateral tracking shots and perpendicular streets leading our Eye to the depth of the other side of the screen remain a relatively stable solution to negotiating the dialectics of immersing the spectators or excluding them, holding the fictional world at arm’s length. The spectators are sheltered in what Edward Hall calls the far phase of the personal distance.¹⁹ In this solution, the perpendicular streets are there, but no character or camera-Eye could see them. This also occurs in later films such as Only Lovers Left Alive (2011) where the two heroes cruise around a distant Detroit. This could have been an immersive and self-sufficient fiction, but contemplating it sufficed for the participation of Jarmusch’s spectators.

• 20 Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film Art: An Introduction, 8th edition, New York: McGraw-Hill (...)

23The scenes in which he visits the Reina Sofia art museum offer very striking editing, and completely upset our perception of the screen border. On each of his three visits to the museum, Lone Man stops in front of one painting that catches his attention. Thematically speaking, these paintings are related to his own life: they provoke intense contemplation. When he stops in front of Juan Gris’s Violin (1916) (18:28-19:01), first we see painting and viewer in profile view: it thus defines “the axis of action,”²⁰, on one side of which a conversation is normally shot. The mise-en-scène turns what happens between Lone Man and the Work of Art into a form of communication (one of the very rare ones that occur in the film). In the following shot, the angle on the painting remains oblique as advised by editing manuals. But the reverse shot on Lone Man becomes completely frontal: it coincides with the “axis of action,” and so do all the other shots of the painting and its viewer. As a result, everything happens along the same axis; the rest of the space (the museum surroundings) is irrelevant. Furthermore, the character is completely static, which reinforces the symmetry between him and the painting. The camera zooms both on The Violin and on its viewer as if they were being hurled at each other.

• 21 Slavoj Žižek, “I Hear You with My Eyes,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, by Renata Salecl and Sl (...)
• 22 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi Co (...)

24According to Jacques Lacan, and as extensively explained by Slavoj Žižek, the Eye is on the side of the subject, whereas the object “returns the Gaze”²¹: here the “f” holes of the violin are the counterpart to the dark eyes of the character. The escalating visual tension shows that something makes sense for Lone Man. The distance will eventually cease to exist, the surface of the painting and the face of the viewer being one and the same. At this point, the gaze (that requires a minimal distance) is impossible: the sequence is over. This moment of sudden truth also relies on the protracted shots of the character’s face. According to Gilles Deleuze’s theory of faciality,22 his face is like a wall with holes (the eyes) that swallow up signifiers, here, the painting.

• 23 Lacan uses the metaphor of a quilting point or more literally of an upholstery button; the “point d (...)

25Narratively speaking, the contemplation sequence at Reina Sofia has its realization in the prediction by a minor character, that “the violin [would] find [him]” and announces the moment when Lone Man is met by a man carrying a violin. For the spectator it is impossible to understand how Lone Man and this character meet: they do not use mail or phone. Their encounter depends on codes, on idiosyncratic habits, such as eating pieces of paper. Should the filmic grammar be respected in relation to the painting, this would add an extra layer of strangeness to the unfolding of the movie. But here we are pulled into the screen and, at the reverse shot, hurled back into our seats, all the more so since the music intensifies as the scene progresses. In the frontal reverse shots, the system of suture does not apply: the world escapes in the direct contact between the gaze and the object that becomes all important, a “point de capiton”23 that sucks in everything we thought we understood and expands into an illumination that mobilizes the fictional world, leaving us bewildered or in awe.

• 24 Howard Hampton, “Spooky Action at a Distance,” Film Comment 51, no. 1 (February 2015): 47.

31In Only Lovers Left Alive, generic conventions naturalize the absence of consistency of the space. To begin with, music takes the lead in the opening credits and this sequence, like others in the film, borrows the aesthetics of a video clip. Editing and camera movement are synchronized with the steady beat of a version of Wanda Jackson’s song “The Funnel of Love,” originally released in 1961, which has been “remixed, slowed-down, and feedback-dosed to give it a seductive drugginess as the two [heroes] awaken in spacey unison.”24 There is no pretence that this will open for us a unique and unified fictional world whose space would have physical properties similar to the ones we live in. The sensations attached to the timbre of the music, the fuzzy chords and the screeching voice envelop the listener in a mantle of sound, together with the lyrics which tell us that we are indeed “in the funnel of love,” where we are “spinning around and around,” and the camera follows suit. From an overhead angle on a spinning turntable, it smoothly cuts with the same overhead angle and starts spinning quietly to reveal a female figure lying supine in an oriental décor, then smoothly cuts with the same spinning movement on a male figure also lying supine in more occidental settings. There is no way that we may place the turntable anywhere in the world of fiction, but all this is made acceptable by the fact that we are still in the opening part of the film and that the music has more narrative power than the rest at that point. The improperly sutured space finds a generic and narrative justification. We fluidly suspend any disbelief and prepare to go into, if not the funnel of love, at least into the groove of the film’s style and atmosphere.

• 25 Céline Murillo, Le cinéma de Jim Jarmusch: Un monde plus loin, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016, 38.

33In the same way, when the vampires feed, drinking a very precious glass full of human blood, the ceremony ends in an ecstatic direct address (23:25-24:00). Looking directly into the camera is a sign of their losing control. This is a description of their mental states: we are focalized through them. Jarmusch uses an irregularity in the apparatus to create a special meaning that does not aim at unsettling the viewer, yet the screen borders flutter for a second before the film goes back to normal. As opposed to The Limits of Control, here, for the vampires, understanding the world is unproblematic, as they are more or less all-knowing. They may take planes across the world and read whatever book they want, use modern or old-fashioned equipment. But there are two parallel worlds, theirs and that of the normal humans they see as “zombies.” Their world is quietly present yet as aloof as the Detroit city lights floating in the distance. 25

• 26 Richard Brody, “The Dead Don’t Die,” Reviewed: Jim Jarmusch’s Fiercely Political Zombie Comedy,” Th (...)
• 27 Josh Levin, “How Did Movie Zombies Get so Fast?,” Slate Magazine, 19 December 2007, https://slate.c (...)
• 28 Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003 (...)
• 29 David Roche, “Resisting Bodies: Power Crisis / Meaning Crisis in the Zombie Film from 1932 to Today (...)

35The Dead Don’t Die is a tongue-in-cheek, highly referential and reflexive zombie film with a heavy political undercurrent. Zombie films may be considered as a subgenre of horror movies, characterized by cannibalistic reanimated corpses. Jarmusch’s movie harks back to the traditional George Romero Dawn of the Dead (1978) which uses very slow zombies with a consumerist drive26: these “shopping-mall-bound corpses ride escalators in an endless loop and wobble listlessly to Muzak.”27 The only serious element is the consistent anti-capitalist satire eloquently expressed by Hermit Bob (Tom Waits), who remarks that the undead are “still hungry for more stuff” in accordance with Robin Wood’s analysis of Dawn of the Dead: “The zombies instead are a given from the outset; they represent, on the metaphorical level, the whole dead weight of patriarchal consumer capitalism.”28 Here, Jarmusch goes back to reflecting on absence of, or resistance to, signification. The zombie disorder is not the result of a zombie master with a consistent plot, but “simply caused by (dis) order,”29 here taking the form of “polar fracking,” that upsets the circadian rhythm.

• 30 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Radical Thinkers 36, (...)
• 31 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Léon Roudiez, European Perspectives (...)

36Going back to psychoanalytical theory, the horror connects the I, the subject, with the Thing, that is unknowable, and part of the subject’s inner realm. In Žižek, who reworks at the same time Kant and Heidegger, “the ‘Thing-in-itself” is therefore strictly ontic, it is the part of the ontic (of “innerworldly” entities) that must fail to appear”³⁰ within physical reality. However, gruesome horror extensively “appears” in the film and makes the film reflexive and unstable. The horror starts with murders first attributed by the general public to “a wild animal or several wild animals.” These characters see the murders as abject in the sense given by Julia Kristeva: “by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder.” 31As such, these murders are put away beyond the pale of humanity.

• 32 Stefan Gullatz, ‘‘En-Gendering’ Philosophies of Horror: A Zizekian Perpsective,” Offscreen 19, no. (...)
• 33 Benjamin Noys, “The Horror of the Real: Žižek’s Modern Gothic,” International Journal of Žižek Stud (...)

37One police officer is the first character to give another explanation, one that uses the knowledge of horror fiction: Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) declares calmly: “I am thinking zombies.” Zombies, being located at the frontier between human and non-human, are a way of renegotiating our rejection of the horror, be it the Real or the Thing when it appears32 in the realm of (diegetic) reality. For some characters, like Mindy, the female police officer, Zombies break the power of speech33 and action: she, as she should in a classic horror film, is transfixed, vomits, cries and screams, and is generally unable to act rationally.

• 34 Ibid.
• 35 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Theory and History of Literature ; v. 2, Minne (...)

38If, as Lacan says, truth is structured like fiction,34 it is quite logical that Ronnie (Driver) should search solutions in imaginary creatures and fictional works. This naturalizes the existence of Zombies in the diegetic reality. For some characters, they are no longer unknowable, unthinkable, unpresentable. They are threatening but not horrifying to people like Ronnie or the attendant of the gas station who sells and collects horror films and books and memorabilia. Horror fiction is part of these characters’ horizon of expectation.35

• 36 Alain Chevalier, “Pour le regard inconfortable et productif de Galilée. Distanciation et critique d (...)

39In the same way, the characters are deemed competent to deal with zombies and the spectators no longer need the pretense of suspense nor of the closed space of fiction nor the stability of the character to remain interested. Jarmusch rejects the traditional Aristotelian conception of drama that relies on the illusion that we are watching an action that is taking place.36 First the fiction slightly cracks as Ronnie declares in a Pirandellian manner that he knows the film’s theme song and the ending. If characters believe that they are in a film, it becomes (rather) logical to use film for their own knowledge, but also, it all becomes extremely unstable: if actors know they are in a film, how do they continue acting? When one mentions later that he knows the theme song, who is talking? Is it the actor or the character or a superimposed persona, “Driver playing Ronnie”? This instability points to the fact that we, spectators, are watching a film.

• 37 Brody, “The Dead Don’t Die.”

41This may remind us of Brechtian distancing, which demands that the spectators reconsider what they have taken for granted and look at the world enquiringly. But here, as opposed to what Paterson does in Paterson, it is not to make meaning, but to reveal the lack of. The “fracked” fiction reveals, as in Jarmusch’s first films, absence of meaning and emptiness. Richard Brody from the New Yorker notes: “Jarmusch transmutes the long-term fantasy of environmental horror into the real-life and immediate horror just below the surface of daily life – and the inescapable doom that it entails into a vision of the emotional and spiritual void at hand.”37