The University and Its Discontents

Void Where Prohibited

Here we embark on a technical point. The “nothing” I reference is not Biden’s nothing: “Nothing will fundamentally change.”13 Nor is it the university’s ultimatum: at risk of expulsion—or, worse, a cop’s knee on your neck, a taser, rubber bullets—say nothing, do nothing. The “nothing” I reference is the scintillating nothing from which, according to French philosopher and militant Alain Badiou, the truth event sparks.14

Badiou’s scintillating event sounds, on first hearing, like a philosophical flash without substance. In a sense, that is true. The event is rigorously philosophical and lacks the earthiness, rootedness, and embodied aspects of concepts like being-in-the-world, matter and mattering, situatedness, and standpoint. The event voids being-in-the-world and its phenomenological kin: mattering, situation, and position. The event is groundless and a-substantial, more so than other antiessentialist terms like performativity because, Badiou avers contra Judith Butler, bodies do not matter except as vehicles of the event.15 The event flashes up in exceptional moments, such as the student protest movement, which marks a clear break in history: before April 17 and after. It is baseless, a-substantial, and thus void for all intents and purposes. In Badiou’s philosophy, which is a militant philosophy of decision and fidelity, the event emerges from nothing. It does not belong to the situation (the ruling doxa) and so counts for nothing within the situation. As nothing, as uncountable, the event ruptures the situation (defined by global capitalism and its puppet show, democracy), proposing an alternative to the sterility of the present. In this unabashedly philosophical register, Badiou posits the event as the unconditioned, unaccountable, and extraordinary cause of the militant subject and their truth process. The event is the event of nothingness, of what is barred, disavowed, illegal, undocumented, and alien breaking in unannounced to rupture the situation where everything is permitted (so long as it advances the interests of capital), avowed (so long as it is devoid of any truth), legal (so long as it does not question the law’s stupidity), numbered, tallied, and scrupulously monitored to foreclose the event that student militants let on campus.

Why is this declaration, “We are all Palestinians,” so intolerable to those who judge it as evil, terrorist, and antisemitic, and who thus demand its censure?

I’ll skip to the short answer first: the signifier “Palestine” and the “all” of universal solidarity subjectivizes those ignited by a common lack or absence, what Badiou calls the null-set or void (the nothingness broached above) and which Todd McGowan, helpfully synthesizing Badiou and Jacques Lacan, calls the condition of nonbelonging.16 Israel’s decades-long theft of Palestinian land and brutalization and dehumanization of the Palestinian people have quite literally shunted Palestinians into a state of nonbelonging where they are dispossessed of their homeland, their livelihood, their basic necessities, such as food and water, and their humanity.17 The signifier “Palestine” is supercharged because it signifies the brutality of US imperialism and its proxy power, the Zionist colonial state of Israel, a joint evil whose bald disregard for human life is plain to see. We see it in the United States.

Student protestors, along with related movements, including Stop Cop City, were astutely pointing to the self-devouring nature of imperialist-Zionist warfare here in the United States. In Atlanta, Georgia, for example, a massive police-training facility is being planned for forested land neighboring a predominantly Black community. This facility, dubbed “Cop City,” will train police in military-style forms of killing sure to inflict the worst harm on Black and Brown communities. “Cop City” is also an environmental catastrophe, eliminating a large swath of the Weelaunee Forest. It is also tied to Israel, as the IOF trains Atlanta police in military tactics, including how to put down protests such as we have seen from Black Lives Matter and now the pro-Palestine movement. The snake is eating its tail. To say “free Palestine” is, in the eyes of the US-Israel compact, a terrorist act. To say “Stop Cop City” is also, in the eyes of the Georgia state government and the corporations who stand to profit from police militarization, a terrorist act. To assemble peacefully on campus and demand divestment from genocide is, in the eyes of the university, a terrorist act.

When students chose the side of the exceptional, the indiscernible, the generic-because-universalizable truth event, that a free Palestine and an end to the Israeli occupation is possible, a truth hitherto only imagined, they opted to stand with the impossible, what Badiou calls the null or empty-set because nothing properly belongs to it. These students sacrificed their bodies and futures (careerism) and risked police and legal violence, as well as surveillance by their university, so that a truth process could work through them. If this sounds like a Christian parable, where the body is sacrificed so that the Spirit may live, it is not far from it. Badiou’s avowed interest in the Christian parable of Saint Paul’s conversion and the resurrection of Christ supports, in philosophical terms, an atheistic account of sacrifice and rebirth—namely, of truth and the subjects who carry it—in the political sphere.18 Yet the event itself knows no particular faith or identity; it is indifferent to the identities of those who support it by proclaiming it. The statement, “We are all Palestinians,” cannot be tolerated by the ruling order because that order cannot assimilate it. It cannot be assimilated because, as a universalist declaration, it belongs to no one in particular. In Badiou’s words, “A truth concerns everyone inasmuch as it is a multiplicity that no particular predicate can circumscribe.”19

By contrast, the white supremacy that the police and US military enforce at home and abroad is a particularist political program feigning universal legitimacy through appeals to democracy, human rights, peace, and freedom—terms they have travestied by asserting their particular world order, where massacres take place elsewhere, on- and off-screen, disconnected from the rights and freedoms we enjoy (though less and less, depending on where you live and the color of your skin) at home. The liberal injunction is simple: There’s no such thing as society (Margaret Thatcher). There are only aggregates of particulars competing for their particular interests. Liberalism is a redundancy for capitalist ideology. The free Palestine movement broke whatever facade it had left.

The Liberal Double Cross

The horror genre, which sometimes doubles as a teen film, is well-known for putting young people in harm’s way. The basic premise is this: an aggregate of particulars (individuals) gathered into a group (a set) tries to escape a menacing force, be it human or supernatural, until only one is left standing. Recent horror films, as if sublating the horror genre’s liberal ills, have taken a self-reflexive approach.

Early in Danny and Michael Philippou’s horror film Talk to Me (2022), seventeen-year-old Mia (Sophie Wilde) and her friend Riley (Joe Bird) drive home at night down a dark, winding road in Adelaide, Australia.20 They have just left a party where a terrifying game has been played, replayed, and recast to social media audiences for “likes.” The game is simple but twisted. It involves a single white hand, a sculpture made from what looks like plaster or clay, which a single player must hold for no more than thirty seconds. The formal constraint matters: longer than thirty seconds, and it is game over for the user. During that thirty-second duration, the hand opens a portal to a netherworld only the user can see. The invisible becomes visible in this game of apocalyptic revelation. On the other side of this apocalyptic handshake, death grips the living. “Talk to me,” the player must say, as to a vampire, permitting entrance not to the user’s home but to their flesh. The dead enter, inhabiting the user’s skin while others sit and watch, livestreaming.

As Mia and Riley drive home from the party, they encounter a near-dead kangaroo sprawled out on the road. The deathly encounter is like so many from the horror film genre, including Get Out (2017), in which the Black protagonist, Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), encounters a dead animal on the side of the road while driving to the family home of his white girlfriend, Rose Armitage (Allison Williams).21 Chris meets eyes with the dead animal, and, at that moment, Blackness, animality, and death intertwine in a mordant version of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the chiasm: the crossing of inner and outer space. Merleau-Ponty illustrates, “When one of my hands touches the other, the world of each opens upon that of the other because the operation is reversible at will. . . . The handshake too is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching.”22 Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy (in contrast to Jean-Paul Sartre’s, for whom there is only nothingness grounding our existence) tries to pull back the instrumentalizing effects of Cartesian subject-object dualism (or thinking being versus nonthinking being) to revive our primordial entanglements (chiastic intertwining) with all there is. His phenomenology is a thoroughgoing naturalism in which being there (Da-sein) is essential to ethical being-in-the-world.23

In Talk to Me, a similar but decidedly uncanny dynamic plays out as the friends debate their ethical dilemma: save the dying animal or leave it to rot. Mia, who is Black, opts to leave. However, the entwining of Blackness, animality, and death has already begun.24 Merleau-Ponty does not account for the effacement of Blackness from the philosopher’s Being or, relatedly, its effacement from liberal notions of self-determination—figured in the film as a handshake or free exchange between two parties. The free exchange of goods does not apply in the film because it does not imagine a flat ontology of equal actors. Mia’s encounter with the dead animal prefigures her necrotization in a game that most others can enter and exit at will.

Whereas Merleau-Ponty imagines a world in which the invisible becomes visible through the even exchange of two hands touching, Talk to Me imagines a world in which the invisible grips back, dragging us down with it. Liberalism marks Mia for death as she struggles to let go of the white hand of death. Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, like Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market, is the liberal double cross.25 It promises visibility and prosperity to those who see themselves as individual actors, not receptacles for others, as is the case for Mia. The white hand kills those who cross it.

Critics have read Talk to Me as a commentary on social media culture and addiction, a thesis borne out by the digital medium that allows individuals in the film to watch, repeat, slow, and freeze the crossing of life and death. However, the film is also concerned with the ontological relay that the hand represents. By gripping handedness, we grip death and death grips back. However, death in Talk to Me is not final, nor is it the same for all. In Mia’s case, the hand does not let go.

The chiasm represented by the white hand of death crosses queer, Black, and Indigenous conceptualizations of life as living on after death.26 It encapsulates Jacques Derrida’s notion of “life death.”27 Whiteness, the film suggests, is a liberal apocalypse. Although it holds out human connection, it delivers destruction. This destruction is in contrast to the theorization of the hand (organ of thought and humanity) by philosophers whose hand is always implicitly white and revelatory (a point underscored by the film’s porcelain prop): Martin Heidegger, for whom the hand is never the paw,28 and Merleau-Ponty, whose theory of the “chiasm” detaches Blackness, which cannot be revealed,29 and sidesteps the unconscious, which is not an agent of revelation but, instead, repression.30Talk to Me shows that the philosopher’s hand is both a monstration (it reveals something about the world) and monstrous, signifying, in Saidiya Hartman’s words, white supremacy’s hold on the earth.31

Exigent Sadism

Sadism is not without its adherents. In their significant philosophical critique of sadism, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer claim that the Marquis de Sade takes to its logical conclusion Kantian rationalism (“Sade demonstrated empirically what Kant grounded transcendentally”), ending in fascism. Michel Foucault similarly turns on Sade wittily, remarking, “Sade: he bores us. He’s a disciplinarian, a sergeant of sex, an accountant of the ass and its equivalents.”32 Yet, despite these noteworthy rejections of sadism, the sadistic impulse remains an alluring conceptual spring.

Avgi Saketopoulou distinguishes “exigent sadism,” her coinage, from the “destructive sadism” that Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, and others denounce as fascistic. “Destructive sadism is oriented around mastery in the sense of being in control of oneself and of the other,” Saketopoulou argues.33 It “inflicts trauma, crushing the other’s subjectivity and injuring their autonomy.”34 Destructive sadism is an apt descriptor for the actions of the police, whose aggression toward student and faculty protesters evinced libidinal satisfaction, the satisfaction of inflicting trauma and “crushing the other’s subjectivity.” Among the many ills that come from a police state and militarized university, and among the many ideological justifications for their existence, we must not overlook the libidinal charge that comes from “owning the libs” and crushing dissent. Sadistic enjoyment, that is, police enjoyment, comes at the expense of others and therefore requires that there be others to injure.

By contrast, “exigent sadism,” according to Saketopoulou, “retains Sade’s commitment to self-sovereignty but not as something that is wielded over the other, nor as self-possession, but as a risk one also takes with oneself. Exigent sadism is not an imposition on the other but an offering, and it may or may not be accepted.”35 Practicing exigent sadism, as Saketopoulou conceives it, requires “surrender to the unknown.”36 Against the consent model, which maintains the ego’s unity and conscious will, and against the destructive model, which has no regard for the other, exigent sadism “imperils both parties.”37 It does so intimately and erotically. Saketopoulou writes, “The exercise of exigent sadism over another requires that one may first be able to exercise it over oneself. I do not mean this in the empathic sense of ‘knowing what it feels like.’ I refer to not allowing oneself to be inhibited by one’s morals or even ‘good’ politics in the aesthetic moment, not to wither under the fear of encountering opacity but to take a leap, following not logic but the poetics of being.”38

Saketopoulou’s preferred sadism is a tightrope act. It inflicts harm and touches traumas but never too much harm (violation) and only when the trauma is shared. It enacts “limit consent” while leaping into the unknown “without the vocabularies of the law, of healing, and of authority” to cushion the fall.39 It produces an “intimate connection” but not at the expense of erotic self-shattering.40 I have my doubts.

Consider Saketopoulou’s above caveat: “The exercise of exigent sadism over another requires that one may first be able to exercise it over oneself.” I am concerned with the temporality of this exercise, where “first,” exigent sadism is a relation over oneself, and second, it is a relation over another. Is this not Freud’s mature theory of masochism, that, first, there is self-destructiveness, and second, there is sadism? Exigent sadism appropriates much of what Freud and Lacan call masochism: self-destructiveness, undoing, ego-shattering, universality, and firstness. Could we not say that exigent sadism is a cleverly executed sleight of hand substituting for Freud’s mature theory that sadism is masochism turned outward? Yes and no. Part of what is lost in the turn to exigent sadism is the universality of masochism.

Saketopoulou’s argument suggests that “intimate connection” is achieved after the tightrope walk is completed, when the ego’s defenses have been dissolved and the enigma of the other and the self is unlocked. In other words, “first,” there is sadistic self-destruction, then there is connection. Masochism does not require this two-step. According to Freud, there is masochism, the drive’s subversion of the ego, and that is universal—full stop. Intimacy and connection and surrender to the unknown—these are ordinary, lived traumatic realities of a masochistic culture that refuses masochism and much prefers the flight into sadism, which is what the ego is. The ego only comes about through a destructive relation to the id, which it represses. I doubt that sadism can be a signifier for the Left because sadism is, in essence, the retreat from otherness, which is the hallmark of universality. By contrast, masochism is disturbing and ethical because it is truly beyond consent. I do not consent to being a masochist. The drive ensures I am whether I want to be or not. In Freud’s model, this is true of everyone. Masochism is ethical because it is immanent, painfully so, and extimate. The other’s masochism mirrors my own, whether or not I want it to, whether or not I agree to take the plunge with the other into the unknown. We’re there, and it sucks. Exigent sadism is still too willed; it disavows masochism to rediscover its awful intimacy secondhand.

Never Enough

Of the many filmic examples of sadism, few are as damning as Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987). The film begins in Morocco, installing the psychosexual drama in an orientalist frame common to the horror genre (e.g., The Exorcist [1973]).41 In the opening scene, two men exchange money for a puzzle box that unlocks otherworldly dimensions. The box, we learn, can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven—such is the masochistic bent of the film. The two men are barely visible except for their hands. The hands of Frank (Sean Chapman), who is purchasing the trans-dimensional box, are grimy and uncared for—the Westerner caked in the dirt of this foreign land, ideologically coded as the foreignness of the sexual. The Moroccan merchant says to Frank, “Take it. It’s yours.” Frank takes the box and walks off, after which, the merchant states (though Frank has already left and does not hear him), “It always was.” The addendum, “It always was,” sounds for no one (Frank has left the table) and everyone, including the spectator. We are included in the “It’s yours” intended for Frank, inserted in the absent position vacated by the pleasure seeker who says later, “It’s never enough,” referring to his sexual drive. This brief yet significant moment crystalizes the masochistic structure of film spectatorship, whereby the audience sits and passively watches as images work on them, exacting their erotic toll—a good approximation of what Saketopoulou calls “limit consent”: consenting to test one’s limits. We are implicated in this structure even though we believe ourselves to be active and agential, like Frank, who seeks and pays for admittance to whatever the box unleashes, just as the moviegoer pays for admittance to the film. But this commercial transaction masks the masochistic experience of film viewing, which unfolds without our control, exciting us to the extent that it surprises us, even hurts us. What is a great film, if not one that leaves a mark?

The box of horrors that Frank purchases leaves more than a mark. It dismembers him. Back at his quaint, suburban home, Frank performs a summoning ritual. Shirtless, surrounded by candles—the typical vibe of a demonic observance or sexy night at home—Frank unlocks the puzzle box’s forbidden portal to hell (or heaven, depending on one’s taste for torment). Hooks and chains descend from the ceiling, transforming Frank’s attic into a hellish sex club the likes of which New York City has never seen. Four demons called “Cenobites” appear, leather-clad “explorers in the further regions of experience,” who wear the badges of masochism on their flesh in the form of lacerations, neck and belly wounds in the shape of the vulva, and piercings. “The box, you opened it, we came,” says the lead Cenobite (Doug Bradley). “Now, you must come with us. Taste our pleasures.” The leader of the Cenobites, the High Priest, colloquially known as “Pinhead” because of the nails jutting from his skull, speaks in an elevated, punctilious manner about his sexual savagery. He is a consummate masochist who, in good Christian fashion, treats others how he wishes to be treated, pained to the point of ecstasy. Although he calls hell his home, he concedes that some might call him an angel (“Demons to some, angels to others”), particularly those who seek his and his associates’ sexual services.

No sooner do the chains and hooks descend from the ceiling than we are transported to the masochists’ chamber of horrors, where we not only meet the High Priest but also see him mete out unspeakable punishments to Frank. The latter reappears in pieces, flesh torn from the body. The High Priest reassembles Frank’s face, now a puzzle of skin, like a piece of kintsugi pottery or stained glass. The joinery sublimates sexual shattering into art, but it does not restore Frank, who submitted to violence that was destined, that was always already his. “It’s yours. It always was.” Such is the masochist.

What must be stated is that the High Priest and his colleagues are not the obverse to Frank, destructive sadists gratifying their lust. They are masochists, masochists who abide by the law of reciprocal violence and who are, indeed, adherents to a law that respects consent while satisfying desires that, in Saketopoulou’s “traumatophilic” sense, go beyond consent, gratifying sexual appetites that predate the ego and travesty the human beyond what most of us, even the kinkiest among us, would authorize. The angels of masochism, the Cenobites, operate within the law of contractual harm while gratifying sexual appetites that exceed the law and are unconscious. Their legalistic approach to sex is in stark contrast to the sadist who inflicts pain as a means of enjoyment.42 The Cenobites give pain to whoever seeks it out. They were once pleasure seekers themselves who sacrificed all (life, attachments) for the crack of chains and hooks mounted to flesh. Now, they reciprocate. Hellraiser is about the mutual aid of self-destruction.

Frank, however, betrays his masochistic yearnings and the always already of what (masochism) predates him. Frank flees the hellish chamber, flees, that is, the masochism of the drive, which, the film shows, drove him to a destined self-deletion that few can embrace. In this sense, the Cenobites are not simply demonic others sent from a distant realm. They manifest the distance that separates us from ourselves; they wear that distance on their flesh as if to say, here, look, this wound is (for) you. To be a masochist is to subtract oneself from the metonymy of desire (this is Frank’s problem, “It’s never enough”) and embrace the lack (wound) that is the masochist’s sole satisfaction. Herein lies the paradox of the two sides of desire, according to Lacan. A patient walks into analysis and says they are lacking; their desire always amounts to nothing: “It’s never enough.” To which the analyst must patiently respond: on the contrary, you, or the drive, are already satisfied, filled to the brim with lack. The drive satisfies itself on dissatisfaction; it enjoys in our stead.43 What is Pinhead if not one who has fully acquainted himself with this contradiction and legislates on behalf of the drive, the masochistic structure that puzzles us?

Frank, we said, is not fit to embrace masochism. We can say, following Freud, that whereas masochism leads Frank to the dungeon, sadism leads him out. Frank is the embodiment of masochism turned outward. Unable to sustain it, he escapes the otherworldly butcher shop and returns to life and his quaint suburban home, where he feeds on the deaths of others, deaths he compels, and the masochists who aid him.

Non-Fascist Life

As a figure of hierarchical and murderous authority, Frank commands the erotic investments of those who do his bidding, including his brother’s wife, Julia (Claire Higgins), who seduces men and lures them to the attic of her home, where Frank can kill and metabolize them. When we first encounter Frank, he is a putrescent puddle of blood and tissue, the morcellated body left over from the punishments he endured in hell. He feeds on others to recompose his flesh. Julia, with whom he previously had an affair, aids him. She is disgusted by Frank but also attracted to him; she is erotically disposed to recreate his former image.

Hellraiser offers a compelling example of the eroticism of power that Alberto Toscano analyzes in Late Fascism. Following Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari’s interest in developing a “non-fascist life,” Toscano considers the problem of contemporary fascism and its erotic appeal: What, he asks, explains the libidinal attachment to the fascist leader?44 Or, in the case of Hellraiser, what explains the libidinal appeal of Frank, who is physically and morally repulsive? Joining Deleuze and Foucault, Toscano wishes to “de-eroticize fascism.”45 “Nazism was not invented by the great erotic madmen of the twentieth century,” Foucault explains, “but by the most sinister, boring, and disgusting petit-bourgeois imaginable.”46 The conceptual problem raised by fascism is how desire could turn against itself. “We never desire against our interests,” Deleuze says to Foucault.47 How, then, can desire, say Julia’s desire, desire its oppression, as Julia desires Frank, who is not only violent but also “sinister, boring, and disgusting”?

Neither Toscano nor Foucault provide a compelling answer. That is because both take at face value Deleuze’s dubious claim that “we never desire against our interests.” This statement led Foucault to devote the rest of his career to articulating a non-fascist way of life centered on bodies and their pleasures: “We must invent with the body, with its elements, surfaces, volumes, and thicknesses, a non-disciplinary eroticism: that of a body in a volatile and diffused state, with its chance encounters and unplanned pleasures.”48 Although Foucault’s volatile body sounds appealing and is a close version of Freud’s polymorphously perverse corporeal surface, it neglects the contradictions of desire, the fact that we do (pace Deleuze) desire against our interests. “A non-disciplinary eroticism” does not challenge power; it complements it. The former needs the latter to eroticize “chance encounters and unplanned pleasures,” which on their own would be simply vanilla. Foucault’s “non-fascist life” is transgressive, yes, but transgression as a way of life maintains its opposite—fascism. The body, in its “diffused state,” gains erotic traction through the threat of the disciplinarian.

Toscano underestimates the erotic appeal of the fascist leader. No matter how repulsive and ridiculous the fascist leader, no matter how objectionable their sadism, their appeal derives from their ability to mobilize the masochism of their followers. In other words, contrary to Deleuze, we only desire what is against our interests. We desire against our interests as a way of sustaining our self-destruction.

Consider Julia. Julia’s disgust and anguish at murdering others do not hinder her desire for Frank. The obstacles to loving Frank (grotesque form, murder, infidelity) whet her appetite for destruction. Frank is her morbid jouissance in physical form, commanding her to enjoy at others’ expense. The fascist form, this undead, cadaverous parasite that is Frank, lives on and through the misplaced masochism of Julia, who does not see that her enjoyment depends on her self-sacrifice, not on the fascist, abominable Frank, who has betrayed his masochism by projecting it outward—sadism. The psychoanalytic point about primary masochism is that we enjoy not despite but rather through our dissatisfaction. The appeal of Frank or Donald Trump has less to do with the eroticism of power, as if power were the goal (it is not), and everything to do with the unconscious urge to self-destruct, which the fascist enables under the guise of paternal protection and traditional values. Enjoying Frank or Trump is not about activating fascist desire versus non-fascist desire. The rub is that there is only one desire, and it is masochistic: a desire against the self.

The trick is not to play Whac-A-Mole with desire but to see that desire is contradictory. The contradiction of desire—desiring what nearly destroys us—puts it at odds with fascism, which cannot sustain the contradiction of identity. Fascism upholds racial and sexual identities to escape the contradictions that undermine it. Frank could not sustain the enjoyment that decomposed his body. He turned to sadism to escape his self-shattering jouissance. Likewise, Julia would rather submit to an oppressive and violent authority than confront the monstrousness of her desire. Hellraiser teaches that oppressive systems flourish in the absence of those willing to avow their masochism, which is not about eroticizing power (power is unappealing) but about the eroticism of lack or powerlessness.

Sadism enables subjects to avoid their desire. A vote for Trump or any other fascist leader is a vote against one’s interests. Although this contradiction may seem like a failure of desire, it is desire hitting its mark (albeit unconsciously). Sadism enables subjects to enjoy their masochism indirectly. By contrast, a non-fascist life organized by masochism would not waste time de-eroticizing power because power holds no sexual appeal. Instead, it would try to organize around “common unhappiness”—the lack we share.49

Blank Desire

The film Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) offers a gripping account of the dangers of avoiding one’s primary masochism.50 John Cusack stars as Martin Blank, a professional killer who left his hometown of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, abruptly and mysteriously, without notice or communication, ten years prior to his return for a high school reunion. The reason he left remains ambiguous. He says repeatedly that he needed to get out. Although we learn from a conversation with his high school teacher that he was a promising student, expected to do big things, including going to Princeton, his whole life after high school has been a blank; neither his friends nor teachers know what happened to him, and his circumspection around the events precipitating his sudden departure and the hazy timeline he gives others suggests that he too does not know. He is a blank to others and to himself. Humorously, he is in therapy throughout the film. However, his therapist fears him, which, as he explains, makes the therapeutic session impossible. He cannot be an objective listener to a patient he fears, the therapist says. He sees Martin only because he fears for his life, and gives Martin exercises to cope with his anxiety, which he suffers acutely throughout the film. The therapist says, “Take a deep breath, and realize this is me breathing.” Martin says the words, but the ego psychology does not work. Martin is a lacuna, an absence even down to his clothes. He wears all black. His former high school teacher says he looks like a “mortician.” Because he is blank, he cannot locate himself or be the “me” his therapist coaches. All we or he seems to know about his past is that he experienced a crisis, joined the army, and became a hitman for hire. The film does not try to fill in the gaps. Indeed, it is the gaps, much more so than his glib character, that make him an object of curiosity and desire.

When we first encounter Martin, he is standing in a hotel room loading a sniper rifle. He’s on the job, peering through a window at his target, a man on a bicycle on the street below. Martin peers at the city life below through the gun’s telescoping lens. It is a voyeuristic relation not unlike L. B. Jefferies’s (James Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).51 Jefferies looks at his neighbors from a distance, obscured by darkness and curtains, without getting involved in the picture or the subjects he observes. Of course, he is involved whether he wants to be or not, and that is in part what Hitchcock’s great film shows. Martin similarly keeps others at a distance. If a job goes poorly and his employer is unsatisfied, it is not his problem so long as he did his part. When his victims plead for their lives and ask Martin why, he says repeatedly, it isn’t personal. For Martin, killing is a job and nothing more. He rationalizes his life as a killer by saying, “If I show up at your door, chances are you’ve done something to bring me there.” Like his own life, which remains an enigma, Martin is equally incurious about the lives of others. They are an assignment; that’s all.

Martin cuts all ties to his former life and others. He prides himself on this. When asked to join a union with other professional killers, he refuses, saying he likes being an individual, a solo guy. Interestingly, Martin’s subtraction from his former life has led him down a conservative path. He served in the army, became a contract killer, a self-interested entrepreneur, and made a lot of money in the process. Although Martin appears like a figure of radical nothingness, his absence has only enabled his capitalist way of life. He is a perfect emblem of the neocon Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip, “There’s no such thing as society,” there are only individuals, self-interested actors pursuing accumulation. Martin makes himself a blank spot, but in that blank, he is simply subsumed by his career. When others ask him what he does for a living, he tells the truth: “I’m a professional killer.” No one believes him, of course. They laugh it off as a joke. But the joke offers Martin the perfect disguise exactly because it is true. Martin’s job distills the capitalist relation. That’s why, despite being true, everyone must laugh it off to maintain the social performance.

We all participate in the capitalist system and are therefore stained, albeit indirectly, with the blood of that system, whether it is wars fought in foreign countries, systematic deaths due to racial violence, injuries and fatalities among Amazon warehouse employees on Amazon Prime day, or Apple factory workers killing themselves due to inhumane working conditions in China, where iPhones are assembled.52 We are all a part of a system that kills ruthlessly and unceasingly. Martin shortens the link between profit and death. For the social order to continue, he must be reduced to a blank, a joke, even when he tells the truth about what he does. As Martin explains, “It’s not personal.” It’s business as usual.

All of this changes when he returns to Grosse Pointe and finds Debi (Minnie Driver), his former high school crush, whom he stood up on prom night when he left town ten years prior. Martin and Debi’s romance rekindles immediately, even though she is still angry about being stood up and left without a word. Debi works for a radio station; she’s a DJ and, unlike Martin, her life is incredibly public. She shares her thoughts, feelings, and beliefs on the radio as part of her job and solicits feedback from her audience. Debi is not a well-crafted character. A feminist viewer must balk at the idea that she has been pining for Martin for ten years and instantly returns to him as soon as he is ready for connection. Still, her character provides an intriguing counterpoint to Martin, who rejects the social link and is visibly and audibly uncomfortable when Debi puts him “On Air” to interrogate him about where he has been. Listeners call into the radio station to tell Debi he is not adequately remorseful and that she should reject his advances. In short, the social link wants nothing to do with Martin. They are like the chorus in an Ancient Greek tragedy, providing moral instruction to the protagonist. We could also say that they function as Lacan’s big Other, providing instructions on what is sensible in the game of love and telling Debi how and whom to love. Debi may not be a feminist character, and she certainly has some of the trappings of the ’90s “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” cliché, but she does not fully consent to social norms or to Martin. In fact, she is drawn to what is excessive (and terrifying) in Martin, which Martin himself downplays and obscures.

When Martin returns to Grosse Pointe, he finds that everything is the same but different. He meets the same old people (teachers, friends, family) and sees the same old places. Yet, these are all just shadows of their former substance. In one incredible scene, he discovers his family home has been bought and transformed into a convenience store. He walks through what was presumably the front door of his childhood home, only to find that the place that once stored his past life has been emptied of memories and filled with potato chips, Gatorade, and condoms. He says, in what must be an allusion to The Wizard of Oz (1939), “You can never go home again, but I guess you can shop there.”53 If Martin is Dorothy (Judy Garland) and Grosse Pointe is Kansas, the convenience store suggests that home is no less a fantasy than Oz. Martin confronts the excesses of the capitalist system in its destruction and monetization of his former life. In a parallel with another film critical of the capitalist system, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Martin is in a position similar to George Bailey (James Stewart) after the angel Clarence (Henry Travers) shows Bailey what Bedford Falls would be without him.54 The Bedford Falls he knows becomes, in the fantasy sequence of that film, Pottersville, where all the excesses of capital (its corruption, squalor, and immiseration, all embodied in the villain, Mr. Potter [Lionel Barrymore]) are unleashed. Bailey confronts the trauma of his absence in that scene. Martin’s confrontation with the convenience store is similarly wounding, if muted by the humor of the film. Its true, disturbing excess only comes out when a hitman, hired to kill Martin, enters the convenience store (Martin’s childhood home) and starts shooting indiscriminately. At that moment, Martin encounters what he has been avoiding since the opening frame: his involvement in the picture, namely, his involvement in the violent excess that the killer has unleashed, the killer who is also an avatar of himself. Not only is Martin unable to keep the personal and the professional separate. As it happens, Grosse Pointe is not safer without him in it. Like George Bailey, Martin confronts the commercial violence of the corporation, which seems neutral enough, and the excessive violence that the capitalist system normally conceals, bursting forth in the fury of the hitman, his double.

Martin’s inability to keep these worlds separate comes to a crisis in the second half of the film when he takes Debi to their high school reunion. Thus far, Martin has maintained the illusion that he’s just an average, unthinking, emotionally dead man with a slightly alluring reticence that makes him seem vulnerable to Debi, who convinces herself he’s “not broken” after all, but fixable. The film indulges the spectator in a conventional, heteronormative romance in which the woman, who apparently had nothing going on before the man’s arrival, drops everything and forgives everything for the chance to reunite. At the reunion, Martin runs into an old friend who is married and now has a baby. This narrative (wife, family, baby) terrifies Martin, who has spent years cuttings ties with the world. Yet, his friend explains, it’s been great; she feels freer being in a relationship. The film hammers the idea that Martin is unable to unite. He rejects the professional union, initially rejects going to the high school reunion, rejects the union with Debi, and fears the union of marriage and family. In one of the film’s funniest moments, Martin’s adversary, Mr. Grocer (Dan Aykroyd), a fellow hitman, exclaims, “Workers of the world, unite!” The reference to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s The Communist Manifesto underscores Martin’s refusal of social, romantic, and economic solidarity. Nonetheless, he picks up his friend’s baby and, for an awkward minute, the film lets us believe that Blank is willing to give up his solitary existence for the fantasy that the child represents, famously articulated by Lee Edelman as the fantasy of futurity.55 In that bizarre moment, as the camera gives a close-up shot of the baby and a reverse close-up of Martin, who appears mesmerized, we believe the film is about to take a decisive turn. It does.

Martin and Debi begin kissing passionately. They abscond to the high school nurse’s office, where they presumably have sex between cuts of them undressing and reemerging disheveled. The film has apparently traded the blankness of its lead character for the romantic comedy lead that ’90s audiences would expect from John Cusack. Gone also is the excessiveness of that character, which we saw leak out in the convenience store shootout.

This turn to complementarity and wholeness (instead of hole-ness) changes dramatically in the film’s decisive scene. Martin, alone, revisits his high school locker. He breaks into the locker, where he finds an old joint of dried marijuana, which he had hidden there as a teenager. In a Proustian moment of olfactory memory, he briefly recalls his past, entombed in the stale weed, when out of nowhere the killer from the convenience store emerges. They fight and, eventually, Martin gets the upper hand. He pulls a pen from his jacket and stabs the killer in the neck. At that very moment, Debi emerges from an adjacent hall. The camera shows Debi turning the corner, her face looking directly at the camera. The next cut puts the spectator in Debi’s line of vision. We see Martin crouching above his victim, covered in blood, with an expression of cruelty and amazement on his face that radically distorts the picture, which had shifted into romantic comedy territory and which, more importantly, distorts the spectator’s picture of Martin. The image is brief but remarkably horrifying for a film that maintains a humorous facade. Martin pleads, “It’s not me,” referring to himself, the killer. Debi, who is horrified, runs out of the building. At this precise point, everything changes. The two worlds that Martin had tried to keep separate, the world of Grosse Pointe and high school romance, on the one hand, and the world of hitmen and capitalist violence, on the other, come together in a horrifying scene. What’s more, Martin becomes visible for the first time: visible as a murderer and yet unrecognizable. Debi, whose perspective we occupy, sees the person she loves as if for the first time. She sees, moreover, that her love is bound up with the excess that Martin had kept blank and that gave him an air of mystery. At the same time, Martin sees himself as the monster that Debi and the spectator see. These worlds do not go together, as Debi’s quick departure demonstrates. And yet, they do. Debi and the viewer confront what they have always liked about Martin and what the flight into romance lets them obscure: the violence of his character. Their involvement in that excess mirrors Martin’s recognition in the convenience store, where he sees himself in the killer who is shooting up his hometown.

When Debi confronts him shortly after the murder at the high school, he explains, “You do it because you were trained to do it, you were encouraged to do it, and ultimately, you know, you get to like it.” The crucial word here is “like.” Martin understands killing as something he is good at and enjoys. There is a nearly identical moment in the TV series Breaking Bad (2008–2013), when Walter White (Bryan Cranston) confesses to his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), that the reason he lied, murdered, and manufactured drugs is that he was good at it. He liked it. “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it” (“Felina” 2013).56 Like Walter White, Martin cops to the fact that it’s his enjoyment and nothing else that underwrites his life as a killer. The reason he is blank is that there really is nothing there but the libidinal satisfaction that comes from killing. Moreover, the film makes a general equivalent out of Martin’s violence, drawing a parallel to the other paid assassins, the corporations paying for the killings, the US military that trained him, and widespread state-sponsored violence. Throughout the film, two NSA agents follow Martin, waiting for their chance to shoot him. In one cynical but humorous exchange, the agent says to the other, “You have to wait until the bad guy kills the good guy, then when you kill the bad guy, you’re the good guy.” In other words, the content of the action doesn’t matter. The form matters. The film sees violence as widespread, and the only difference between good and bad is who kills first. The same is true of Martin. He doesn’t care about the content of the murder, whom he kills or why; he only cares about the form, the process and art of killing.

In the film’s final sequence, another reversal happens. Martin learns that his next target is Debi’s father, who is supposed to testify against corporate malpractice. Suddenly, the killing becomes personal, and Martin decides to protect Debi and her father. Notably, the film does not transform Martin; the blankness of his characters that turns out to be monstrous, his excessive enjoyment, does not go away. Instead, the film shows Martin and others relating to his monstrousness, even accepting it.

Martin fires his therapist. When Debi hears Martin’s explanation of why he kills, she’s horrified. When she learns that her father is in trouble, and Martin kills others to protect him and her, his explanation begins to make sense. She sees his violence as a job like any other job, and she chooses to accept it. The film’s final shot is of the two leaving Grosse Pointe in a car to begin a new life. The happy ending feels off. He’s just revealed that he’s a professional killer, a monster who enjoys killing for money. And yet they are putting all of that behind them to start a romantic relationship?

The film tells a happy ending but tells it slant. We are, in fact, still in the horrifying scene, where Martin’s murderousness intrudes on the image, yet the scene has shifted back to a romantic comedy. The latter does not simply gloss over the traumatic kernel of the film but accents it. We are no longer dealing with two separate worlds but one that is now askew, ex-centric, distorted by an ugly jouissance that is Martin’s enjoyment, as well as Debi’s and the viewer’s. Everyone who partakes in the smooth image at the end must also be perturbed by the anamorphic blot, which does not go away but sticks out, making not an illogical ending but a perfectly logical one, if we take the symptom to be reasonable. Before, the symptom was Martin, who becomes a kind of parapraxis or amnesia in the film. Whereas, at the end, we see a subtle but profound shift. Normalcy becomes the symptom. The happy ending is the burl growing around the blank (trauma): Martin looking back at Debi and us, showing us that the thing we abhor is what we have been desiring all along, our grotesque jouissance out there in the picture, looking back (Figure 1).

Notes

1. 1. Raz Segal, “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” Jewish Currents, October 13, 2023, https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide.

2. 2. Maya Stahl et al., “Hundreds of Protestors Occupy South Lawn, Call for Divestment from Israel During Shafik Testimony,” Columbia Spectator, April 17, 2024, https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/04/17/dozens-of-protesters-occupy-south-lawn-call-for-divestment-from-israel-ahead-of-shafik-testimony/.

3. 3. Wilfred Chan, “‘The Palestine Exception’: Why Pro-Palestinian Voices Are Suppressed in the US,” Guardian, November 1, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/01/palestine-us-activism-firings-speech.

4. 4. Moira Donegan, “Columbia University Is Colluding with the Far-Right in Its Attack on Students,” Guardian, April 19, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/19/far-right-columbia-university-student-arrests.

5. 5. It also harms the psychoanalytic clinic. See Hannah Zeavin, “Parallel Processes: The Palestine Exception in the Classroom and the Clinic,” n+1, no. 49 (2025), https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/politics/parallel-processes/; and Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022).

6. 6. Tandy Lau, “Columbia University Protest for Palestine Is Also Protest for Harlem Says Student Movement,” New York Amsterdam News, April 25, 2024, https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2024/04/25/columbia-university-protest-for-palestine-is-also-protest-for-harlem/.

7. 7. Anna Oakes and Claudia Gohn, “Inside the NYPD’s ‘Dystopian’ Raid on Columbia Student Protestors,” Hell Gate, May 1, 2024, https://hellgatenyc.com/nypd-raid-columbia-student-protesters-gaza-encampment-hamilton-hall/.

8. 8. Mario Telò, “Poor or Pure Form: On the Political Aesthetics of the Tent,” Qui Parle 34, no. 1 (2025): 21.

9. 9. Editorial Board, “UCLA Is Complicit in Violence Inflicted upon Protestors, Failed to Protect Students,” Daily Bruin, May 1, 2024, https://dailybruin.com/2024/05/01/editorial-ucla-is-complicit-in-violence-inflicted-upon-protesters-failed-to-protect-students; Timothy Pratt, “‘Like a War Zone’: Emory University Grapples with Fallout from Police Response to Protest,” Guardian, April 27, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/27/emory-university-georgia-police-campus-protests; Erum Salam, “U.S. Faculty Speak Up and Stand Alongside Student Gaza Protestors,” Guardian, April 27, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/27/us-faculty-university-students-campus-protests-gaza.

10. 10. Nick French, “The Obscene U.S. Profiteering from Israeli War and Occupation,” Jacobin, March 16, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/03/gaza-profits-bds-weapons-corporations; Francesca Albanese, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” United Nations Human Rights Council 59th session, June 16, 2025, https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5923-economy-occupation-economy-genocide-report-special-rapporteur.

11. 11. See Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (Verso, 2021): “The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people: those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements” (34).

12. 12. Catlin, “The Campus Does Not Exist.”

13. 13. Andrew Prokop, “Joe Biden’s Controversial Comments About Segregationists and Wealthy Donors, Explained,” Vox, June 19, 2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/19/18690910/biden-fundraiser-controversy-segregationists-donors.

14. 14. The event is “on the edge of the void.” Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (Continuum, 2005), 178.

15. 15. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993).

16. 16. Todd McGowan, Enjoyment Right & Left (Sublation Press, 2022), 14–15.

17. 17. See Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2020).

18. 18. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford University Press, 2003).

19. 19. Badiou, Being and Event, xiii. Mari Ruti affirms Badiou’s universalism while adding the important qualification that groups marginalized by racism, sexism, homophobia, and settler colonialism live closer to the state of exception than others. These particulars do not prohibit the event but rather lead, in Ruti’s view, to “a genuinely universalist universalism” (215). See Mari Ruti, The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (Fordham University Press, 2012), 202–15.

20. 20.Talk to Me, dir. Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou (Causeway Films, Head Gear Films, Metrol Technology, Screen Australia, and the South Australian Film Corporation, 2022).

21. 21.Get Out, dir. Jordan Peele (Universal Pictures, Blumhouse Productions, QC Entertainment, and Monkeypaw Productions, 2017).

22. 22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Northwestern University Press, 1968), 141–42.

23. 23. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward S. Robinson (Harper, 1962), 138.

24. 24. On Blackness, animality, and ecologies of fungibility, see Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York University Press, 2020); and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, “Black Ecologies (Humanity, Animality, Property),” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 29, no. 1 (2023): 129–39.

25. 25. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Hackett, 1993), 130.

26. 26. See, for example, Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016); Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017); Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019); and Salar Mameni, Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2023).

27. 27. Jacques Derrida, Life Death, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf, trans. Michael Naas (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

28. 28. Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford University Press, 2008), 27–62.

29. 29. According to David Marriott, Blackness is not in the world and does not enter an even exchange with others. Blackness, he argues, is what the world effaces in order to be a world of shared sense and visibility. “What would it mean,” Marriott asks, “to insist on a resemblance to that which escapes object, form, being”—“that is, to what is not there,” not Dasein, and not a being in the world? See David Marriott, Of Effacement: Blackness and Non-Being (Stanford University Press, 2024), 321.

30. 30. Although Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is invested in the invisible, there is nothing, strictly speaking, that cannot enter consciousness, according to Merleau-Ponty. The unconscious “flesh” in his theory is more accurately preconscious, and nothing inhibits its conversion into individual consciousness, the telos, if not the ground of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.

31. 31. Saidiya Hartman, “The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance,” Bomb, no. 152, June 5, 2020, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2020/06/05/the-end-of-white-supremacy-an-american-romance/.

32. 32. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), 69; Michel Foucault, “Sade: Sergeant of Sex,” in Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Semiotext(e), 1989), 189.

33. 33. Avgi Saketopoulou, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (New York University Press, 2023), 174.

34. 34. Saketopoulou, Sexuality Beyond Consent, 174.

35. 35. Saketopoulou, 182.

36. 36. Saketopoulou, 183.

37. 37. Saketopoulou, 183.

38. 38. Saketopoulou, 185.

39. 39. Saketopoulou, 183.

40. 40. Saketopoulou, 185.

41. 41.Hellraiser, dir. Clive Barker (Film Futures, New World Pictures, and Rivdel Films, 1987); The Exorcist, dir. William Friedkin (Warner Bros. and Hoya Productions, 1973).

42. 42. This notion of contractual harm is in keeping with Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between the masochist, on the one hand, who submits to the law so fully that they reveal the law’s absurdity, and the sadist, on the other, who subverts the law by upholding a higher principle, i.e., evil. Deleuze advocates the former, arguing that by submitting to the law, the masochist undermines its authority. Deleuze: “By scrupulously applying the law we [masochists] are able to demonstrate its absurdity and provoke the very disorder that it is intended to prevent or to conjure” (88). Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (Zone Books, 1989).

43. 43. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 165–66.

44. 44. Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii.

45. 45. Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2023), 135.

46. 46. Foucault, “Sade,” 188.

47. 47. Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” in Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Semiotext(e), 1989), 80.

48. 48. Foucault, “Sade,” 189.

49. 49. Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1893–1895), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2., ed. James Strachey (Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), 305. On “common unhappiness,” see Natalie Adler, “Cut to the Feeling,” Lux, no. 9. 2024, https://lux-magazine.com/article/return-to-freud/. On lack and solidarity, see Michelle Rada, “Overdetermined: Psychoanalysis and Solidarity,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 33, nos. 2–3 (2022): 1–32; esp. 2, 15.

50. 50.Grosse Pointe Blank, dir. George Armitage (Hollywood Pictures, Caravan Pictures, and New Crime Productions, 1997).

51. 51.Rear Window, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions and Paramount Pictures, 1954).

52. 52. Brian Merchant, “Life and Death in Apple’s Forbidden City,” Guardian, June 18, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract.

53. 53.The Wizard of Oz, dir. Victor Fleming (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939).

54. 54.It’s a Wonderful Life, dir. Frank Capra (Liberty Films and RKO Radio Pictures, 1946).

55. 55. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press, 2004).

56. 56. “Felina,” Breaking Bad, created by Vince Gilligan, season 5, episode 16 (High Bridge Productions, Gran Via Productions, Sony Pictures Television, and American Movie Classics, 2013).