“A Deeper Breath”

Abstract

Kiss Me Deadly (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1955) gives us a world of venality, corruption, and sexual violence, a world in which greed and self-interest determine all relations. Programmatically, Kiss Me Deadly is a film about bodies: about the masculine body, construed as inviolate, and the feminine body, fatally permeable. It is therefore also a film about how and why the integrity of the masculine body will be maintained: it will be maintained by the repression of feminine sexuality, the repression of bisexuality, and the repression of homosexuality. Commodities will assert the power and integrity of this masculine body: cars, clothes, and technology are summoned to testify to the integrity of this body, its fulsomeness. This is, then, a materialist film, in both its content and its critical agenda. The film enacts a critique of how consumer culture functions to speak to and through the masculine ego and its gestalt; it is also materialist in its focus on the suffering consequent to this construal of the body, as brutality is punctually meted out upon other bodies. Bodies here labor, dance, suffer, and kiss. But if it is a film about the materiality of commodities and bodies, how they are subject to violence and exchange, then it is also a film about something in excess of the material that comes to possess flesh and goods—and film.

For philosophy to be deep, a deep breath is called for.

—Theodor Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics