CINEMATIC SABOTAGES: HITCHCOCK, TARANTINO, AND ALMODÓVAR

Abstract

This essay considers the theme of sabotage in Hitchcock, especially in his British film Sabotage, in terms of Manuel Asensi’s syllogistic theory. It also analyzes similar subversive themes in two contemporary movies, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver. The literal sabotage in Hitchcock’s film (the placement of bombs in relation to cinema) is combined with the murder of the husband (treating him like a piece of meat) in order to constitute a figure of radical cinema not only as anti-auretic art (in the sense of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction according to Walter Benjamin) but also, in terms of Manuel Asensi, as an athtetic text in which the enthymematic syllogism which informs the fascist model of the world (society and politics are like an artistic work based on pure forms) is deconstructed. Inglourious Basterds and Volver go further than Hitchcock’s Sabotaje by offering hospitality to the subaltern in the wake of sabotaged syllogisms. Criticism as sabotage allows us to see the subversive dimension of these and other films. At the same time, an analysis of cinematic sabotages may serve to illuminate the political impact of Asensi’s theory of criticism as sabotage.

The theoretical base of this article is Manuel Asensi’s book Crítica y sabotaje which demonstrates that literary and film works have a performative function. They are discourses which modelize subjects in the world. Such modelizations occur unconsciously inasmuch as each discourse contains a syllogism which implies a model of the world. Criticism as sabotage is an instrument for revealing these hidden modelizing syllogisms in works. Some texts such as the films studied in this article explicitly sabotage the models of the world that historically have served to repress us, in such a way that criticism as sabotage joins with the Walter Benjamin’s vision of a new art that would be capable of exploding the aura (the cult values inseparable from fascism) associated with classic art. As a mechanically reproduced art, cinema for Benjamin possessed this explosive potential. This is precisely the same sabotaging vision that we find in the films analyzed in this essay.