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Memento's Christopher Nolan is at it again. In Inception, instead of playing with time only, his exploration of the human mind is also spectacularly spatial. The movie, an action-packed Borges-meets-the-Matrix blockbuster, manages to be both emotionally intense and philosophically deep, gathering film critics and audiences in almost unanimous praise. It traps you in its maze only to release you two and a half hours later, breathless, due to an amazing screenplay – almost ten years in the making – and visionary images, alternating plot-effective slow-motion a' la Matrix with metaphysic landscapes echoing Antonioni and De Chirico.
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After last week's post about Demolition Man (1993) and the city of Los Angeles, today I'm writing about another action flick dealing with urban imagery, also come out the same year: Last Action Hero. Both movies are cop-tales, reterritorializing a way of dealing with crime and justice from one world to another. In Stallone's sci-fi exploit the change happens in time, while in the more sophisticated – and also more tongue-in-cheek – film starring future governor Arnold Schwarzenegger the jump is twofold: from reality to fiction and, quite significantly, from New York to Los Angeles. Before we go further about the retorritorialization I mentioned before, a short introduction to the movie's plot is necessary.

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Due to a mostly comedy-oriented film education as a kid, I had missed Marco Brambilla's action-classic Demolition Man (1993) back when I had the chance to catch it in its box-office semi-freshness (17 years ago it took a while before a movie passed from the movie theater to the TV screen). I have recently made up for this lack, and while the roughly-cut screenplay, the flat characters, and the unlikely fighting choreographies might have amused me much more when I was 10 years old, I have to be thankful I could enjoy a first impact with the movie after reading Mike Davis' City of Quartz and watching a couple of documentaries about the riots that shook Los Angeles in the 90s. In the analysis that follows, this article here has also been a big inspiration in terms of the movie's relationship with Hollywood and LA's urban and social landscape. (more…)

“Dreaming is work, you know – there I am in a comfortable bed, the next thing you know I have to build a go-kart with my ex-landlord. I want a dream of me watching myself sleep.” – Mitch Hedberg

What is probably the most fascinating thing about Deleuze and Guattari’s way of writing is the spatial vividity with which they literally build their concepts like organic sculptures. They place them in relationship to each other as suspended in a 3D space, taking form as they evolve from primitive solids into more sophisticated and combined abstract figures. In their last book What is philosophy?, almost a tutorial for designing philosophical interfaces, we can see this process clearly. The two French philosophers see what they do as creation rather than communication, and for this reason reading the first pages of the Anti-Oedipus can be at once confusing and liberating. But being the book a manifesto for schizoanalysis, this only makes it more consistent. (more…)

Arjun Appadurai‘s considerations on the work of imagination in modern societies are some of the most interesting and compelling passages of his book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. According to the anthropologist “imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies”.
Appadurai focuses in particular on collective imagination, as a tool to create diasporic public spheres through which globalized and often deterritorialized citizens share the same social imaginary.
As an Indian-born American academic, the scholar has been experiencing first-hand what it means to deterritorialize one’s ethnic and cultural background on a different context, and his particular case could be a perfect example of fulfilled American dream. But again the collective, massive dimension of imagination-induced agency is what really makes the difference in comparison to more ancient times: “the images, scripts, models and narratives that come through mass-mediation [...] make the difference between migration today and in the past”. Also, the American dream is all-too-real in our globalized times, and more in general “these new mythographies are charters to new social projects, and not just a counterpoint to the certainties of daily life”.
But migration to a richer country is not the only inherent phenomenon to the rise of imagination as a social practice, and the examples that Appadurai makes are not all positive. There are diasporas of hope, terror, despair.
In support of his thesis that modernity hasn’t seen a total victory of science over religion, as foretold by German scholars such as the Frankfurt school and Max Weber, he mentions Khomeini and the infamous outrage surrounding Salman Rushdie‘s Satanic Verses in the muslim world. We could easily add Al Quaeda and the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy as other instances of diasporic rage, but what’s important here is the relationship between media and social imaginary.
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