Cinema as Skin and Touch: Arousing the Senses and the Quest for Release

Cinema as skin – can film studies get any sexier than this? I find this approach provocative if not ultra-appealing. It sets the ground of viewing films more than the image, in fact it interrogates the dominant sense of merely seeing to reach the realm of touch. Cutting across the perceived boundary and getting access into the skin. As quoted in class, Steven Shaviro argues: “The elision of the body is grounded in the idealist assumption that human experience is originally and fundamentally cognitive…it ignores or abstracts away from the primordial forms of raw sensation: affect, excitation, stimulation and repression, pleasure and pain, shock and habit.” Viewed from this lens, cinema is re-framed to be a more complex medium of communication – one that mediates between the external environment and the inner body. As skin, cinema negotiates the relationship between the outside, the society or the super-ego perhaps, and the inside, what I can only account as the Self. The skin then is crucial, being in the state of constant liminality, as it translates the world to the self to the point that the world ceases to exist outside but inside. Indeed, this proposition has fair grounds. In the phenomenological film theory, the images of films are not only seen but they elicit bodily responses – carnal and sensual.

I recall how Herbert Marcuse employed the same argument and then further relates how such cultural product actually connects to desire – in this case, to the desire of thee skin. In his essay, he maintains that the culture industry discourages the masses from thinking beyond the confines of the present. He agrees with the premise that mass culture makes an unbearable condition bearable by dulling pain and gradually blocking the desire. Putting a more nuanced layer of analysis, Marcuse appropriated Freudian tenets in his interpretation of the culture, and therefore of cinema, in an industrialized society. Marcuse introduced the term repressive desublimation, that is, when individuals are conditioned to accept what is spontaneously given to them, such as pornographic materials, which offer only a semblance of release and pleasure; without correspondingly giving absolute release and pleasure. In the industrialized society, “not all the time spent on and with mechanisms is labor time (unpleasurable but necessary toil), and not all the energy saved by the machine is labor power. Mechanization has also “saved” libido, the energy of the Life Instincts – that is, has barred it from previous modes of realization.” Thus, there is a wider range of controlled options to release desire and promote diluted forms of happiness, sufficing to eradicate the budding of revolutionary and radical ideas as well as the budding of general social grievance. Indeed, even in the workplace, hints of pleasure are institutionalized and even encouraged. “Without ceasing to be an instrument of labor, the body is allowed to exhibit its sexual features in the everyday work world and in work relations…the sexy office and sales girls, the handsome, virile junior executive and floor walker are highly marketable commodities, and the possession of suitable mistresses – once the prerogative of kings, princes, and lords – facilitates the career of even the less exalted ranks in the business community.” In other words, sexuality is commercialized and advertized in “socially constructive forms.” In this sense, instinctual energy are given a release but a mediated one, a quick release you say, one that more frequent, eventually becoming more mundane, but less gratifying. Coming back to films, I see the link cinema as skin to what Marcuse has explored on the repression of desire – taking into account then how films connect to the body and the skin, to use it, manipulate it for repression of the body and skin is also possible.

The film Antichrist captures exactly the ideas that surround this framework. Frankly, it is one of the best movies I have watched. It excellently navigated sensations such as grief, death, indifference, lack of desire to life, fear, malice, and raw sexual desire. The skin of the film reaches the skin of the audience, as such, as I watched it I felt the tinge not so in the level of cognition but more in my own skin – in fact, I felt I was challenged to confront my control of my own skin. The sense of touch is both stimulated and mutilated at the same time – thus giving way to both the confrontation of pain as well as of pleasure. The focus and the predominance of violent images and sexual scenes, put the sense of touch and the physicality of the skin at the very front of the audience’ cinematic experience. In the process of doing so, the spectator’s skin is also on guard – filled with anxiety, craving, rage, pain, and revulsion.