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“I’m in Love With My Car”: Revisiting the Aesthetics of Petroleum in Crash (1996), Death Proof (2007), and Titane (2021)

2023; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 41; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509208.2023.2176116

1543-5326

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz,

Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgementsThis article has benefitted from the insightful reading of my colleagues Andrea Ruthven and Marta Segarra, and the anonymous peer reviewers. I wish to sincerely thank them for their helpful comments and suggestions.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the project “Cinema and Environment: Affective Ecologies in the Anthropocene” (Grant PID2019-110068GA-I00 /MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.Notes on contributorsKatarzyna PaszkiewiczKatarzyna Paszkiewicz is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands. Her primary research is in film studies and cultural studies, with an emphasis on women’s cinema in the USA, UK and Spain. She also has an interest in questions of embodiment, affect and the senses, as well as in the ecological thought. She has published several book chapters and journal articles on Kathryn Bigelow, Andrea Arnold, Sofia Coppola and Isabel Coixet. She has co-edited, with Mary Harrod, Women Do Genre in Film and Television (Routledge, 2017, winner of first Prize in the BAFTSS Best Edited Collection competition) and published her monograph Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Edinburgh University Press, 2018, shortlisted for the ESSE Awards). In May 2020, she was awarded a ‘Knowledge Generation R&D’ Grant to be Principal Investigator on the 3-year research project, ‘Cinema and Environment: Affective Ecologies in the Anthropocene’, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.Notes1 In 1993, Jane Campion’s The Piano shared the award with Farewell My Concubine. Like Kathryn Bigelow (another “first” woman to win an important award, a best director Oscar for The Hurt Locker), Ducournau and her filmmaking have been described as “muscular” (Page 2021 Page, Thomas. 2021. “Julia Ducournau Explains the Crippling Love Beneath Her Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy Titane.” CNN, December 20. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/julia-ducournau-titane-interview-palme-dor-oscars-intl/index.html. [Google Scholar]), an adjective that points to the cultural gendering of genres.2 In his influential essay “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel,” Ghosh offers a critique of the failure of literary fiction to address what he dubs the “oil encounter,” which makes reference to the American oil interests in the Middle East. Yet, as Ghosh suggests, it is not only in relation to this particular encounter that literature has failed to sufficiently express oil.3 As she writes, “‘oil’ has become synonymous with the world, in a large, Heideggerian sense of the human enframing and revealing of earth, thus the world we know” (LeMenager 2014 LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. New York: Oxford University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 68). However, as LeMenager and other scholars emphasise, not everyone has equal access to oil and its products. What is more, we do not suffer from the risks involved in the fossil fuel extraction and consumption in the same way.4 If a demonstration of this were needed, one could mention Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent stifling of European fossil fuel supplies which seriously affects the oil prices. On Europe’s democracies as carbon democracies, see Bruisch and Beuerle (2022 Bruisch, Katja, and Benjamin Beuerle. 2022. “Putin’s War in Ukraine and Europe’s Carbon Democracies.” Energy Humanities, March 14. https://www.energyhumanities.ca/news/putins-war-in-ukraine-and-europes-carbon-democracies-paying-the-price-of-half-hearted-climate-politics. [Google Scholar]). As LeMenager stated in a recent interview, her 2014 book “eerily predicts the Trump era, in its fascination with how the emotional dimensions of extractivist culture, the dependence of that culture upon narratives of lucky strikes, upon hyper-masculinity, upon mediation and speed, continue to hijack the present moment” (in Ramuglia and LeMenager 2018 Ramuglia, River, and Stephanie LeMenager. 2018. “Cli-Fi, Petroculture, and the Environmental Humanities: An Interview with Stephanie LeMenager.” Studies in the Novel 50 (1): 154–164. doi:10.1353/sdn.2018.0008[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 157).5 In effect, oil is everywhere, in cinema and in life, and yet, surprisingly, film studies has had little to say about it to date. Some recent exceptions include, in addition to LeMenager’s work, Carolyn Fornoff’s article on petrocinema in the Mexican context (2021 Fornoff, Carolyn. 2021. “Mexican Cinema as Petrocinema.” Studies in Spanish & Latin-American Cinemas 18 (3): 377–387. doi:10.1386/slac_00063_1[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Belinda Smaill’s (2021 Smaill, Belinda. 2021. “Petromodernity, the Environment and Historical Film Culture.” Screen 62 (1): 59–77. doi:10.1093/screen/hjab002[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) work on oil documentaries.6 Several critics drew a comparison between the scene depicting Alexia’s car accident in Titane, after which the protagonist gets implanted a metal plate in her head, and the representation of car crashes in Cronenberg’s film, in which many of the characters require metal prosthesis. In both cases the collisions seem to trigger carnal impulses and non-normative sexualities.7 I use the word “strange” in the sense of its frequent use in queer ecology to critique “natural” categories of gender, sexuality, the natural world, etc. (see, for instance, Nicole Seymour’s Strange Natures, 2013 Seymour, Nicole. 2013. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Such an orientation, as L. D. Mattson and Jeremy Gordon observe, can help us “attend to the strange, essential vibrancy of human and more-than-human relations and, maybe, foster monstrous kinships and nonnormative futurities” (Mattson and Gordon 2022 Mattson, L. D., and Jeremy Gordon. 2022. “Becoming Mutant: Metamorphoses for a Waterworld.” Environmental Humanities 14 (1): 29–48. doi:10.1215/22011919-9481418[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 36). On queering kinship, see Judith Butler’s “Is kinship always already heterosexual?” (2002 Butler, Judith. 2002. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” differences 13 (1): 14–44. doi:10.1215/10407391-13-1-14[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), in which she extends the notion of kinship beyond patriarchal heteronormativity and consanguinity to consider what she calls “modes of intimate alliance.”8 Cinema—and films about cars in particular—can make oil palpably material and embodied for the viewers as well, as phenomenological film theories and the framework of the haptic could demonstrate. Yet, for the purpose of this article, in my reading of Titane I am not as concerned with how the film affects the viewer at a sensorial level as with how the film’s aesthetics can be read in respect to petrocultures and (auto)mobility.9 See, for instance, Archer (2017 Archer, Neil. 2017. “Genre on the Road: The Road Movie as Automobilities Research.” Mobilities 12 (4): 509–519. doi:10.1080/17450101.2017.1330988[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).10 Importantly, Detroit is also one of the many sites plundered by Europeans, who decimated local populations and paved the way for extractivism and Western modes of accumulation. Addressing the immense human costs of “the emergent petrosphere,” Stacey Balkan observes how “the influx of former slaves to Detroit in the form of cheap labor would allow for its material prosperity and eventually lay the foundation for Henry Ford’s empire wherein emergent forms of labor solidarity aligned with a newly conceived American dream” (2019 Balkan, Stacey. 2019. “Inhabiting the Chthulucene: Forging Tentacular Intimacies at the End of the World.” ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 26 (4): 1–21.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 13).11 As Belinda Smaill also argues in her investigation into historical petrofilm culture, “oil cinema” or “petrofilm” does not necessarily need to “visually evoke oil” as “a material substance” to be considered as such (2021 Smaill, Belinda. 2021. “Petromodernity, the Environment and Historical Film Culture.” Screen 62 (1): 59–77. doi:10.1093/screen/hjab002[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 59). However, Smaill’s focus is specifically on films produced by oil companies, and the resulting film and circulation practices. In my discussion, I do not wish to claim that Titane, Death Proof and Crash, as films about cars, are representative of the emergent category of oil cinema, but rather consider the critical possibilities that arise from reading these texts from the petrocultural optics.12 As Wenzel puts it, the “great paradox of fossil fuel imaginaries,” in life and in the cultural texts we produce, is that oil is “at once everywhere and nowhere, indispensable yet largely unapprehended, not so much invisible as unseen” (2017 Wenzel, Jennifer. 2017. “Introduction.” In Fueling Culture, edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, 1–16. New York: Fordham University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 11). The task of the cultural critic, then, would be to uncover, or to “unearth,” the role that oil plays in literature and film, at the social, political and aesthetic levels.13 See also Paszkiewicz 2021 Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna. 2021. “Cinema and Environment: The Arts of Noticing in the Anthropocene.” Res Rhetorica 8 (2): 2–21.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar].14 As LeMenager writes, “Perhaps the insight here is that the human body has become, in the wealthier parts of the world, a petroleum natureculture, to use Bruno Latour’s term for the inevitable intermixture of the self-generating (organic) and the made” (2014 LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. New York: Oxford University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 69).15 The cinematic crash is one of the earliest and most recurrent tropes in film history: from the cinema of attractions to slapstick comedies, as well as experimental films and videos. Even the 1960s–1970s road movie occasionally engages with car accidents, complicating the road-pleasure complex. LeMenager observes in reference to road fiction: “Road novels of the 1920s, such as The Great Gatsby (1925) and even Oil!, are as interested in car accidents as are the road novels of the 1950s and the 1970s, when the oil crisis coincided with postmodern meditations on grisly road death such as J. G. Ballard’s Crash (1973)” (2014 LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. New York: Oxford University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 90). It is also worth mentioning that car accidents are still a leading cause of death in the US, “forcing questions about human consumption, the price of the mediated self, made possible by cheap fuel” (2014 LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. New York: Oxford University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 92).16 For a more detailed account of the scholarship on the gendered nature of petroculture, see Allan (2020 Allan, Joanna. 2020. “Light, Energy, and Gendered Oil Gluttony: Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s Challenges to Petrocapitalism.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 66 (1): 101–121. doi:10.1353/mfs.2020.0004[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), in particular, her reflections on how the global and colonial workings of petroviolence are closely intertwined with the gendered violence.17 The term “rollin’ coal” makes reference to causing exaggerated pollution through the use of car for pleasure or as a form of conservative protest against environmentalism. As Daggett explains it, it “means retro-fitting a diesel truck so that its engine can be flooded with excess gas, producing thick plumes of black smoke. Coal, which is not actually burned, functions as a symbol of industrial power expressed as pollution” (2018 Daggett, Cara. 2018. “Petro-Masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47 (1): 25–44. doi:10.1177/0305829818775817[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 40). Daggett draws a connection between petromasculinity, excessive pollution and climate denial.18 See, for instance, Mattson and Gordon (2022 Mattson, L. D., and Jeremy Gordon. 2022. “Becoming Mutant: Metamorphoses for a Waterworld.” Environmental Humanities 14 (1): 29–48. doi:10.1215/22011919-9481418[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).19 “Most girls wouldn’t know these films,” says Kim in Death Proof.20 Death Proof includes direct references to Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980), Wolf Creek (McLean, 2005), Dawn of the Dead (Snyder, 2006), Scary Movie 4 (Zucker, 2006), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (Liebesman, 2006).21 Her horrid death brings to mind Star (2001), Guy Ritchie’s six-minute ad for BMW, in which the driver (Clive Owen) carries an arrogant star (Madonna), eventually punishing her by driving at high speed through the city, tossing her all around the backseat. As Devereux argues in reference to this video, the gendered space of the car operates as the “violent affirmation of women’s subordination” (2017 Devereux, Cecily. 2017. “Made for Mankind’: Cars, Cosmetics, and the Petrocultural Feminine.” In Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, edited by Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, 162–186. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. [Google Scholar], 165). Sarah S. Jain comments in her in-depth analysis of the same video that the dreadful ride can be understood as a rape scene, which is meant to “curb women’s physical, economic, and social mobility” (2005 Jain, Sarah S. 2005. “Violent Submission: Gendered Automobility.” Cultural Critique 61 (1): 186–214. doi:10.1353/cul.2005.0035[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 194). It also illustrates the well-known discourse that “every woman knows not to get into a strange car with a man she does not know” (199), which stems from the histories of violence against women, but which also reaffirms the “perils for women in cars” narrative.22 Un Chien Andalou (1929) is an early example of this association between sexual violence and car crashes, in which a man is aroused by watching a woman being hit by a car.23 However, the word “alexia” also points to the inability to read or to speak as a result of a mental condition. It comes from Greek a- (“not”) and lexis (“speaking” or “reading”).24 The scene evokes the New French Extremity Baise-moi (2000), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s mix of the road movie and rape-revenge film that shares with Titane its interest in female agency, gendered vulnerability and penetrability of the bodies.25 The music video for the song features the lead singer sitting on a car in a funeral procession.26 The song, which is also scored in the opening sequence, but performed by 16 Horsepower, tells the story of “a poor wayfaring stranger, traveling through this world below.” The song thematizes Alexia’s journey and her being-towards-death.27 Another reading of that scene could be that the men look away because Alexia/Adrien’s dancing reveals the men’s homoeroticism, which can be deduced from their hypertrophied homosociality and their worship of their father, Vincent.28 Kinship’s equivalent term in French (parenté) is etymologically related to the Latin verb pario (to give birth), and thus seems to emphasise the “biological” forms of kinship. Interestingly, during the birth scene, Vincent is soaked in Alexia’s fluids (mostly motor oil, which in the film replaces blood), an image that could imply that their kinship is based on the exchange of fluids and ultimately, at least metaphorically, on blood ties. As Marta Segarra argues, all “intimate bonds are always blood ties, although not in the usual, heterosexual sense that has defined family relations” (2021 Segarra, Marta. 2021. Comunidades con acento. Barcelona: Icaria. [Google Scholar], 122).29 Patricia Yaeger coins the term “energy unconscious,” building on Fredric Jameson’s “political unconscious,” to interrogate the simultaneous omnipresence and absence (or silence) regarding oil within a given text (2011 Yaeger, Patricia. 2011. “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 126 (2): 305–326. doi:10.1632/pmla.2011.126.2.305[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 306 and 309). The term has been further elaborated by Graeme Macdonald (2013 Macdonald, Graeme. 2013. “Research Note: The Resources of Fiction.” Reviews in Cultural Theory 4 (2): 1–24. [Google Scholar]). Roman Bartosch (2019 Bartosch, Roman. 2019. “The Energy of Stories: Postcolonialism, the Petroleum Unconscious, and the Crude Side of Cultural Ecology.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 6 (2–3): 116–135. doi:10.5250/resilience.6.2-3.0116[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) has more recently introduced the “petroleum unconscious” as a further critical concept to underscore “the difference between the positively connotated notion of energy and the nearly invisible, often displaced workings of oil retrieval and its political and (post)colonial implications” (132).30 See https://www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/crash-david-cronenberg-jeremy-thomas.31 As Ghosh adds: “Its sources are mainly hidden from sight, veiled by technology, and its workers are hard to mythologize, being largely invisible. […] Oil refineries are usually so heavily fortified that little can be seen of them other than a distant gleam of metal, with tanks, pipelines, derricks, glowing under jets of flame” (2016 Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 75).32 Raw tells the story of Justine (Alexia’s sister) during her first year at veterinary school. Initially, the narrative suggests that Justine develops a craving for human flesh when forced to eat a raw rabbit kidney. But toward the end of the film, it is revealed that the craving was transmitted to her and Alexia by blood, through their mother. Titane also suggests that the protagonist’s craving for cars precedes her traumatic event.33 However, Ducournau’s Titane takes a step further: it binds the emergence of non-normative sexuality and vehicular fetishes with childhood.34 At first glance, the sexual politics of Cronenberg’s car crashes are similar to those in Death Proof. However, in contrast to Vaughan and other characters in Crash who yearn for the ultimate death on the road, Mike does not want to die. In the final car chase he breaks down in tears and assures that “he was only playing around” when he realises that he is overpowered by women.35 It has been reported that 13 people fainted during the film’s premiere at the Sydney Film Festival (Moran 2021 Moran, Robert. 2021. “It Has Film Festival Audiences Fainting in the Aisles. But How Bad Is Titane?” The Sydney Morning Herald, November 8. https://www.smh.com.au/culture/movies/it-has-film-festival-audiences-fainting-in-the-aisles-but-how-bad-is-titane-20211108-p596ud.html. [Google Scholar]). Writing for BBC Culture, Nicholas Barber calls Titane “the most shocking film of 2021” (Barber 2021 Barber, Nicholas. 2021. “Titane: The most shocking film of 2021.” BBC Culture, July 15. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210715-titane-the-most-shocking-film-of-2021. [Google Scholar]).36 See Halberstam’s 2022 lecture on “Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse” at the Wallach Art Gallery (Columbia University): https://wallach.columbia.edu/events/wallach-talks-unworlding-aesthetics-collapse.