Violence as Embodied Neoliberalism in the Neurothriller

Abstract

Contemporary film-making is faced with a challenge: as news of violence, mass murder, and criminal horror constantly flood an ever-increasing number of screens worldwide – from cinema to television to cell phones – film violence risks being labelled irrelevant. Olivier Assayas and Yorgos Lanthimos respond to this challenge not by depicting ultraviolence in their films, as other contemporary film-makers like Darren Aronofsky have done, but by communicating an atmosphere of violent intensity and horror that, despite the absence of gore, colonizes the characters and permeates their reality. Two contemporary films, Assayas Personal Shopper (2016, hereafter PS) and Lanthimos The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017, hereafter The Killing), use suspenseful strategies to depict violent affect through the exchange of emotional and material goods. In both films, violent affect is bookended by a suspenseful mise-en-scène which cannot be separated from the workings of neoliberal economy: the body in suspense is revealed as a body in debt, while the evocation of violent affect is inseparable from capitalist debt. As Marco Abel writes, what constitutes violence and influences the response to it does not necessarily depend on a visual representation of violence, but rather on a pre-existing affect surrounding violence (5). In PS and The Killing, the cinematic birth and sustenance of this horrific affect is routed through cinematic suspense and tied to the debt economy of neoliberal family relationships. Most film studies scholarship discussing violence and affect centers on the ability of violence and horror to alter the spectator’s mood or on the influence of traditionally violent aesthetics in crime and horror films. While there is no doubt that violent affect has a profound effect on the viewer, films can also deploy suspense as a violent affect – a technique that is central to what Patricia Pisters terms the neurothriller: the suspenseful film that is constructed around affective evocation rather than emplotment. Thus, I read these films along the lines of what Pisters calls the “primacy of affect” in the neurothriller (1), in which affect is used as a lever to uncover contemporary neoliberal dynamics far more horrific than the supernatural horror that is often represented in films. As neurothrillers, the films I address