Extensions of the Self

Abstract

This chapter extends the previous chapter’s concern with the Romantic imagination and the double into questions of closeness and distance as they arise in modernity, with particular reference to the haptic, 3-D and the sense of taboo: of that which is close enough to touch, but whose touching may either be impossible or induce the vertigo that prevents it. The films it will consider are La Double Vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Véronique) (1991), Exotica (1994), Ararat (2002), Fa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love) (2000), Orlacs Hände (The Hands of Orlac) (1924), Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) (1987), and Strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem) (1970). For all their variety, they are held together by a concern with touch, distance, identification and taboo; by the question of the degree to which their central figures may become plausible extensions of the spectator’s yearning self. All display the modernist ‘oscillation between close and distant vision’ discerned in Cézanne by Jonathan Crary (Crary, 1999, p. 340). (The same applies to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, one of this book’s key texts, the rapid oscillation of its ‘vertigo-effect’ approximating both simultaneity and the dizziness occasioned by the hand’s approach to the taboo object, the fetish.)