Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Alanna Thain. Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 328 pp.

Review by Rick Warner

14 June 2018

Suspense, understood as the viewer’s felt condition of unknowingness, marks virtually all film experience—beyond the confines of the “suspense thriller” genre—and yet it has been taken up rather sparingly by film theorists. With this ambitious and insightful study, Thain redefines suspense as more than just a narrative system that governs our knowledge as a film progresses. She deems it a disruptive, repetitious “manner of event” that experiments with nonlinear time in order to undo psychological identification, unfix subjectivity (for dramatic characters and the viewer alike), and awaken perception to the lived experience of “anotherness.” Thain casts her book as an intervention into three intersecting “turns” that have preoccupied film and media scholarship in recent years: affective, corporeal, and postcinematic. More specifically, her redefinition of suspense is deeply informed by Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy (including his work with Félix Guattari), Brian Massumi’s affect theory, Linda Williams’s notion of body genres, and Nicole Brenez’s method of figural analysis. Thain interweaves these approaches for the purpose of illustrating how films—especially films that reimagine Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in one fashion or another—execute an elaborate temporal process of “double vision,” an expressive logic of multiplicity that includes not only formal doublings but also the audience’s repetitious acts of “rereading” and “looking again.” Her account shows how suspense is less a prescribed genre than an intensive “force” that traffics in sustained irresolution, brings to bear circuitous functions of time, and unleashes affective potentialities with a power to renovate our very sense of self in corporeal relation to the world. “Suspense,” for Thain, names nothing less than “a technic for an attentive awareness to the minor form of difference that (re)constitutes a body in time, a feeling of futurity immediately impinging on the body’s stability and reopening it to intensive relationality.” 

In her first chapter, Thain expertly engages with received explanations of cinematic suspense that regard Hitchcock’s films as privileged examples. Whereas others have read suspense primarily along epistemological lines, stressing audience identification with the viewpoints and situations of characters with firmly defined identities onscreen, Thain uses Hitchcock’s Vertigo and other films to carve out a more philosophical conception of suspense that emerges precisely where identity loosens, mutates, multiplies, and opens onto complex affective pathways of becoming-other. Her productive reframing of Hitchcockian suspense sets the terms for the case studies in her subsequent chapters, works that include David Lynch’s Hollywood trilogy (Lost Highway [1997], Mulholland Drive [2001], and Inland Empire [2006]), Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000), Christian Marclay’s 24-hour looped video installation The Clock (2010), and Rian Johnson’s Looper (2012). By Thain’s lights, these audiovisual experiments “remake” Vertigo insofar as they enact variations on Hitchcock’s spiral conjugations of past and present experience, self and (an)otherness, movement and stasis, life and death. Bridging these chapters is the argument that cinema, as the suspenseful and suspensive medium par excellence, enables us to think and intuitively feel our own enfolded relationship to time and its recursive workings. For Thain, this is a relationship whereby we rediscover ourselves as bodies caught up in a durational process that empties identity into difference, granting us the rare and direct experience of "auto-alterity." This transpires not through recognition but through encounters with creative anamorphoses and reprisals that flummox our habits of perception.    

Bodies in Suspense offers a thrilling display of erudition on every page. In addition to her careful use of Deleuze and his precursors such as Henri Bergson and Baruch Spinoza, Thain makes recourse to many prominent theorists along the way, including but not limited to Vivian Sobchack’s film phenomenology, Thomas Elsaesser’s conception of mind-game films, Laura Mulvey on cinematic delay in the digital age, and feminist interpretations of the femme fatale figure in film noir. Thain digresses to shore up her arguments with brief but focused readings of other films, such as the use of first-person camera in Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), or the suspenseful thwarting of recognition and comprehension achieved by Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975). There is much in her book to delight the cinephile reader, but it should be noted that close familiarity with Deleuze (beyond his cinema books) and Deleuze-inspired affect theory is needed to follow the turns in her discussion and the neologisms she deploys. Itself nearly a model of the forms it investigates, Thain’s book coils around key terms and motifs, using a slightly hermetic vocabulary of concepts that develop through recurrence. “Immediation,” “the crime of time,” “auto-affection,” “aberrant movement,” “dysnarrative”: these and other locutions resurface at critical junctures in sentences that have a poetic, but at times nebulous, feel to them. One should also be advised that this book frontloads a theoretical framework into which each film must neatly fit. Thain begins in medias res with a fascinating analysis of the opening of Inland Empire, using the film to furnish what becomes her theoretical perspective, but thereafter in her account films come second to an overarching methodological scheme that has to be corroborated, sometimes forcibly. On occasion it seems as if the films themselves only matter insofar as they allegorize Deleuzian notions of difference, multiplicity, and falsification.    

But the merits of Bodies in Suspense far outweigh the limitations, making the book indispensable to current scholarship concerning the affective dimensions of film expression and spectatorship. The book also makes valuable contributions to studies of both Hitchcock and Lynch. Thain’s most impressive chapter uncovers fresh ways of thinking about gender, genre, and affect in Lynch’s reflexive portrayals of Hollywood as dream factory. Lynch’s three enigmatic films are handled with a delicate touch that allows them to keep their eccentric qualities as examples of suspense (here in her argument, theory and audiovisual object are given equal weight, the one illuminating the other in reciprocal harmony). Considering Lynch’s audition scenes (or scenes that feature performance within the diegesis), uncanny atmospheres, identity swaps and schisms, and games with the human body and voice vis-à-vis recording and communication technologies, Thain makes Lynch’s entire oeuvre newly intelligible.  

Written in an aphoristic style, Bodies in Suspense is a pleasure to read. Thain’s articulate prose is such that even when her book becomes something of a tortuous “lost highway” in its own right, it holds together by virtue of a densely layered argument that, like a good suspense film, rewards repeated engagement.