fabric, of mud and flesh.”2 “Poems will be written about the curves of the performers' buttocks as they're outlined by candlelight; about the atmosphere that surrounds the dropping away of each item of clothing; about the immediate tactile shock when flesh first touches flesh in close-up.”3 A completely different kind of film, Jan de Bont's Speed (1994), elicits the following: “Viscerally, it's a breath-taking trip.”4 It's “[a] classic summertime adrenaline rush.”5 “This white knuckle, edge-of-your-seat action opus is the real thing,”6 “[a] preposterously exciting thrill ride that takes itself seriously enough to produce gasps of tension and lightly enough so you giggle while grabbing the armrest.”7 “We feel wiped out with delirium and relief. The movie comes home in triumph and we go home in shreds.”8Reviewers of Paul Anderson's film adaptation of the kung-fu video game Mortal Kombat (1995) emphasize “a soundtrack of…primitive, head-bonking urgency”9 and endless scenes of “kick, sock, pow…to-the-death battles,”10in which “backs, wrists and necks are shattered with sickening cracking sounds.”11 And, of John Lasseter's full-length computergraphically animated feature Toy Story (1995), another says:
A Tyrannosaurus rex doll is so glossy and tactile you feel as if you could reach out and stroke its hard, shiny head…. When some toy soldiers spring to life, the waxy sheen of their green fatigues will strike Proustian chords of recognition in anyone who ever presided over a basement game of army…. [T]his movie…invites you to gaze upon the textures of the physical world with new eyes. What Bambi and Snow White did for nature, Toy Story, amazingly, does for plastic.12
What have we, as contemporary media theorists, to do with such tactile, kinetic, redolent, resonant, and sometimes even taste-full descriptions of the film experience?
I
During earlier periods in the history of film theory there were various attempts to understand the meaningful relation between cinema and our sensate bodies. Peter Wollen notes that the great Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, fascinated by the Symbolist movement, spent the latter part of his career investigating the “synchronization of the senses” and that his “writings on synaesthesia are of great erudition and considerable interest, despite their fundamentally unscientific nature.”13 Gilles Deleuze writes that Eisenstein “continually reminds us that ‘intellectual cinema' has as correlate ‘sensory thought' or ‘emotional intelligence,' and is worthless without it.”14 And, in a wonderful essay using the trope of the somersault to address the relation between cinema and the body, Lesley Stern describes how, for Eisenstein, the moving body was “conceived and configured cinematically…not just [as] a matter of representation, but [as] a question of the circuit of sensory vibrations that links viewer and screen.”15 This early interest in the somatic effects of the cinema culminated, perhaps, on the one side, in the 1930s, with the empirical work done in the United States by the Payne Studies—several of which quantitatively measured the “galvanic responses” and blood pressure of film viewers.16 On the other, qualitative side, there was the phenomenologically inflected materialist work done in the 1930s and 1940s by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. Benjamin, in his famous “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” speaks of cinematic intelligibility in terms of “tactile appropriation,” and elsewhere he speaks to the viewer's “mimetic faculty,” a sensuous and bodily form of perception.17 And Kracauer located the uniqueness of cinema in the medium's essential ability to stimulate us physiologically and sensually; thus he understands the spectator as a “corporeal-material being,” a “human being with skin and hair,” and he tells us: “The material elements that present themselves in films directly stimulate the material layers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entire physiological substance.”18
Until quite recently, however, contemporary film theory has generally ignored or elided both cinema's sensual address and the viewer's “corporeal material being.”19 Thus, if we read across the field, there is very little sustained work in English to be found on the carnal sensuality of the film experience and what—and how—it constitutes meaning. The few exceptions include Linda Williams's ongoing investigation of what she calls “body genres”;20 Jonathan Crary's recognition, in Techniques of the Observer, of the “carnal density” of spectatorship that emerges with the new visual technologies of the nineteenth century;21 Steven Shaviro's Deleuzean emphasis, in The Cinematic Body, on the visceral event of film viewing;22 Laura Marks's works on “the skin of the film” and “touch” that focus on what she describes as “haptic visuality” in relation to bodies and images;23 several essays by Elena del Rio that, from a phenomenological perspective, attempt to undo “the rigid binary demarcations of externality and internality”;24 and forthcoming work from Jennifer Barker that develops a phenomenology of cinematic tactility.25 In general, however, most film theorists still seem either embarrassed or bemused by bodies that often act wantonly and crudely at the movies, involuntarily countering the fine-grained sensibilities, intellectual discriminations, and vocabulary of critical reflection. Indeed, as Williams suggests in relation to the “low” body genres of pornography, horror, and melodrama she privileges, a certain discomfort emerges when we experience an “apparent lack of proper esthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion.” She tells us: “We feel manipulated by these texts—an impression that the very colloquialisms of ‘tear jerker' and ‘fear jerker' express—and to which we could add pornography's even cruder sense as texts to which some people might be inclined to ‘jerk off.'” Bodily responses to such films are taken as an involuntary and self-evident reflexology, marking, as Williams notes, sexual arousal on “peter meters”; horror in screams, fainting, and even heart attacks; and sentiment in “one-, two-, or three handkerchiefs.”26
For the most part, then, carnal responses to the cinema have been regarded as too crude to invite extensive elaboration beyond aligning them—for their easy thrills, commercial impact, and cultural associations—with other more “kinetic” forms of amusement such as theme park rides or with Tom Gunning's once historically grounded but now catch-all designation, “cinema of attractions.”27 Thus, scholarly interest has been focused less on the capacity of films to physically arouse us to meaning than on what such sensory cinematic appeal reveals about the rise and fall of classical narrative, or the contemporary transmedia structure of the entertainment industry, or the desires of our culture for the distractions of immediate sensory immersion in an age of pervasive mediation.
Nonetheless, critical discussions often also suggest that films that appeal to our sensorium are the quintessence of cinema. For example, writing about Speed, Richard Dyer relates the Lumiere audiences' recoiling in terror from an approaching onscreen train to IMAX and Showscan, proposing that all cinema is, at base, a “cinema of sensation.”28 Indeed, he argues that the cinema's essence is to represent and fulfill our desire “for an underlying pattern of feeling, to do with freedom of movement, confidence in the body, engagement with the material world, that is coded as male (and straight and white, too) but to which all humans need access.”29 However, although Dyer acknowledges the importance of the spectator's direct bodily experience of cinema, he is at a loss to explain its very existence. He tells us: “The celebration of sensational movement, that we respond to in some still unclear sense ‘as if real,' for many people is the movies.”30 The dynamic structure that grounds our bodily response to cinema's visual (and aural) representations is not only articulated as a continuing mystery, but its eidetic “givenness” to experience is also destabilized by the phrase “as if real”—the phrase itself surrounded by a set of scare quotes that, questioning this questioning of givenness, further plunges us into a mise en abyme of experiential undecidability.
This “still unclear sense” of the sensational movement that, “as if real,” provokes a bodily response marks the confusion and discomfort we scholars have not only in confronting our sensual experience of the cinema but
