Revolutionary Romanticism and Cinema by Paul Dave

Author:Paul Dave
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030596460
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The orc armies of Jackson’s films are hordes in the sense that their masses are seen as malleable products of external powers, the evil Sauron and Saruman who raise and direct these armies from the summits of their two towers. Modern crowds, of which those of the Russian revolution are paradigmatic, acquire historical agency (in relationship with the political party). In displacing horizontality as the ‘cinematic being-in-the-world’—Whissel dates this to the early 90s, the period of the entrenchment of neoliberal regimes—New Verticality signals the eclipse of the modern revolutionary conception of history and projects a horde as the accompaniment of its fall (Whissel 2014, p. 28). But the Digital Multitude emblematises this regression in historical agency not just in its instrumental manipulability. There is also a parody here of the older idea of the force of past and subsequently occluded defeats of the proletariat whose unrealised ideals gather intensity and strength over time, until their moment arrives in a decisive act of confrontation with the powers of oppression. For the imminence of the overwhelming threat and disaster projected by the Digital Multitude is always anti-climatic. The old order is providentially saved, the multitude swept away, the horizon cleared. Last-minute rescue and survival intervenes, and what was ‘too late’—hope for the ruling order—becomes transformed into timely rescue. Both Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit adaptations are constructed dramatically around such appearances and disappearances of the multitude.

In other words, the Digital Multitude, just like New Verticality, signals the persistence of the old regime as much as its inexorable surpassing or defeat. And here it is useful to consider the concept of the Anthropocene which itself represents a knot of many contradictions including those of opposed assessments of historical agency and change, alongside the problem of the relationship of the category of universal humanity to class and capitalism. The Anthropocene’s emergence as a category represents a recognition of the prodigious and enduring agency of humans in relation to the planet’s ecosystems, but at the same time, it hangs over humanity like an ironic notification of a future anterior in which we have been reduced to a geological residue, a future fossil, one tragically signifying the degree to which we have become our own global civilisation’s hapless victims. This aspect of the Anthropocene is nevertheless concealed or disavowed through a fetishistic celebration of that same global civilisation of fossil capitalism. Buried within it, then, the Anthropocene sums up both an expansion of the power of human agency and its simultaneous contraction as evidenced in the debility of the political will and means to alter direction in the light of global warming. Not just effecting, but even imagining historical change in such circumstances becomes an irresolvable problem.

Mainstream film explores the dilemma signalled by the Anthropocene in disaster genres and the spectacle of crashing civilisations. Even though disaster spectacle is ultimately a spectacle of effects rather than causes, such genres help to expose the pretensions of ostensibly universal progressive narratives of historical development found in stadial conceptions of history.

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