Queered Cinema: Film, Matter, and Matthew Barney

This essay makes two propositions; or, rather, this essay makes one proposition with two parts. First, I propose that queer theory might help us understand the cinematic work of Matthew Barney, especially how that work might signify, or fail to signify. Second, Matthew Barney's work might help us understand the place, or the movement, of the signifier within queer theory. These proposals (or this double proposal) require some explication of Barney's largely inexplicable films and specifically some scene analysis. Before that, however, I begin by defining one of the objects of analysis here, and that object is film.

The term film yields, at least, two meanings. The first is film as a kind of coating—of dirt, for instance, or blood, Vaseline, sweat, or, less literally, despair. Thus, film can be considered as a membrane, coating, emulsion, or skin, even if temporarily worn. The second, more familiar to aesthetic interpreters, is film as a projected medium: one wherein light is shown through celluloid filmstrips to create a diaphanous projection boasting a picture that appears to move. Film as moving picture. This filmed image, indeed, presents its viewers with an almost seamless flux of movement and, when synched with sound, with an apprehensible facsimile of the visible and aural world. It might be both odd and intellectually challenging to align these two "types" of film at once: film as visceral coating and as immaterial projection. Further, what interests me is how this material, or nonmaterial, of film works in relation to its signifying function.

Indeed, to name the improbable juxtaposition of heterogeneous filmic material and narrative sign system is to name the most conspicuous feature of the filmic work of the artist Matthew Barney. In particular, the symbolic, ritual-bound, and contingent sign is reproduced within the films in spectacular, nearly frenetic, fashion. Yet, there is a visible excess of a kind of material that will not signify within this symbolic universe; this material seems pointedly filmic. That is, within the mise-en-scène there is an excessive show of film as both lubricious coating and projected phenomenon. Thus, on the opalescent rectangle of screen, a visible movement suggests conceptual rupture within the communicative function, the narrative, and the signifying system of representation. My question is whether we might call this phenomenon, this crisis of signification, queer.

Here is the basic stipulation. Across five films called CREMASTER 1–5 (1994–2002), named after the muscle that raises or lower the testicles, Matthew Barney produces a type of film with seeming material heft. First, these films present a variety of images that depict or reflect a "world" that leaks, stains, and traps its participants in the muck of material, task, and time; they present myriad materials that are semitransparent, on the verge of being formless, and that coat the ostensible objects on the screen. The films suggest this, of course, despite the fact that cinema itself boasts no filmic residue. Second, these films also seem to make explicitly visual their status as a disembodied—projected—medium, the other type of film. So, if Barney seems to thematize the material of film, then he also makes it visible within the rectangle of screen, making filmic material significant, if not exactly a signifier, within the moving tableau.

To explain this further, I will concentrate on CREMASTER 3 (2002, 182 minutes), which, despite its numerical moniker, was the last film produced in the series.¹ Moreover, instead of concentrating on that film's entire sprawl and structure, I will limit my discussion to two scenes, even if the term and concept of a scene seems woefully inadequate to delineate what, exactly, goes on in the film. In the first situation described, then, the encounter with a figure—an entity we might normally call a character—allows us to experience many of the most salient qualities of Barney's filmic work.

In addition, the operating method of this essay seeks to mirror that of the film. Instead of considering the film as a narrative arc, one with progressive comprehensibility, and, as a result, adopting a critical stance that traces...