Bruno Dumont’s excursion from the Nord Pas de Calais to Twentynine Palms in the Californian desert can be read as proof that molecularity isn’t enough to save us from bad films, or instances of what Deleuze calls “organised ineptitude” (367). If localised violence and sexuality “in what is represented” characterise bad cinema, he writes in Cinema 2, “[R]eal cinema achieves another violence, another sexuality, molecular rather than localised” (367).
A man and a woman are on a scouting trip for locations to be captured in photographs for an unspecified project. They fail to locate anything which will suffice but their quest had, at any rate, receded very rapidly as they became subject to the forces of the desert.
In particular the forces to which the characters succumb reflect the altered density of the contemporary world, even its deserts, in the face of the colonisation of the wilderness by the possibilities of modern transport, settlement, infrastructure and communications. It is indicative that the camera which might have been used to scout for locations and to capture them fro future reference remains invisible throughout the film as if to underline the alienation from their environment (and hence from their object) experienced by these subjects, who are defined nonetheless by these lost relations.The most significant precursor for Twentynine Palms in terms of its geographical setting and place in the filmmaker’s emerging oeuvre is – as many have pointed out - Zabriskie Point. In Zabriskie Point Antonioni is drawn to the desert as a space in which character dissolves. For Pascal Bonitzer his cinema is in pursuit of the non-figurative, which one might describe in Lyotard’s terms as the figural (a concept revisited by Brenez too). Deleuze cites Bonitzer’s account (Deleuze 1986: 119) before going on to forge the link so central to the cinema books: in such a recourse, Antonioni, with his spaces and people adrift in ‘deconnected’ spaces, is registering a crisis in the action image. The rambling, strolling characters are not found in motivated sensory motor situations but rather in pure optical and sound situations (120).
To a degree this remains true of Twentynine Palms. However the utopian dimensions of Zabriskie Point as registered in the cataclysmic finale are atrophied in Twentynine Palms: its version of the cataclysm is rendered in the denouement which sees violence erupt in the liminal space of the motel (a ‘non-place’ in Marc Augé’s formulation). Both films share a tendency to deconnected spaces, characters sheared off from the socius and to pure optical and sound situations divorced from the sensory motor schema.
In some senses what has changed between Antonioni’s film of 1969 and Dumont’s of 2003 is the restriction of the space for action in the sociopolitical domain. While the central couple remains in the earlier film the space for a performative intervention, in Twentynine Palms there is less space in which such occupation might occur. The desert too is striated and blocked, whereas in Zabriskie Point barren spaces are invoked as smooth spaces of ‘flight’ or of potential – if impossible – ‘burrowing’ (see Orr 1993: 150).
Preparatory to the first of two shocking turns of event, David banishes Katia from the motel room leaving her prey to possible abduction on the highway. Seeking her out he confronts her and as she lies on the highway strikes her several times about the head.
Then follows David’s subjection to a rape which Katia is forced to watch. Finally the scene which delivers the film’s brutal ending. Unfortunately we are firmly in the domain of cliché here. The sensory motor schema may be subject to rupture in the emptied, oneiric open spaces through which and in which the characters are filmed traversing and pausing, but via clichéd psychosocial types Dumont bridges these divides. If, for Deleuze, ‘cliché is the sensory-motor image of the thing’ (Deleuze 1986: 20), despite its daring, Twentynine Palms remains content with such clichés. Death is an a priori form which Dumont’s film stamps upon ‘a life’. In short it operates as a form of reactive judgement rather than an affirmative and evaluative point of view. Dumont’s decision to embed the irrational violence of its final sequences in the non-place of the motel is, curiously, of a piece with the reinscription of it (the motel) as displaced domestic sphere (one is perhaps reminded of Irigaray’s description of the home – or, here its replacement - as place of ‘murderous control’). Correlatively, in the desert encounter brought about by the ‘trajective-domestic’ capsule of the 4x4 driven by the couple, a ‘psychopathic’ homosexuality (a cliché Dumont’s film shares with Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction) is figured as that which precipitates the disfigurement of the norms which are (barely, and until a certain point) holding out in the motel. Dumont is not interested in Godard, and it shows.
[An aside: there is a short distance between provocation of the sort Noé inscribes in his countdown to enable the audience to leave the auditorium and the self-congratulation that greets a job excessively done].
There is a monstrosity specific to each film, but whereas in Zabriskie Point the explosion remains aberrant and in some sense nonsensical - but, importantly, outside judgement - in Twentynine Palms the abject capitulation is to normative [albeit ‘monstrous’] heterosexuality, an acquiescence accompanied within the film by a form of judgement. It is a film drained of vitality presided over by organs and seized up subjects in subject-object relations whereas to some degree Zabriskie Point veers towards dis-organised bodies in a domain bereft of the loci that would facilitate subject-object relations.
Twentynine palms may be read as exploring the encounter between a type of vitality and a mode of atrophy, or between force and form. The force is sexual desire denuded of social mores. The imperatives of form trace themselves over the forces. In the Nietzschean idiom developed by Deleuze what arises here is a reactive formation, which as Brian Massumi reformulates it, is a mode of ‘back formation’ (Massumi 2002). Twentynine Palms continues Dumont’s reflection on the human being’s capacity for violence. It is also in the words of the director his attempt to deliver his ‘truth’ in a ‘form’ derived from Hollywood. This film, by one of recent French cinema’s least cinephilic directors (Frodon 2003: 20), is presided over by a ‘logique hétérosexuelle’ which, despite the film’s moves in the direction of an abstraction not necessarily at odds with what has here been identified as an aesthetics of force, retains the gridding implied by this logic. For Deleuze
Il y a une grande différence entre les virtuels qui définissent l’immanence du champ transcendental, et les formes possibles qui les actualisent et qui le transforment en quelque chose de transcendant (Deleuze 1995a: 7).
Dumont’s contribution to what I propose might be called a ‘cinethology’ examines the body as a mobile zone consisting of ‘poles, zones, thresholds, and gradients’. The body in each case is ‘traversed by a powerful non-organic vitality’ (Deleuze). If Dumont’s film comes close to an abstraction of the sort that might disclose something of that vitality, it is nonetheless in the detail that it implodes.
