Touch and Gesture: On the Borders of Intimacy

If the Internet might well claim to be the medium of public intimacy par excellence, with humans exposing their most intimate moments to legions of strangers and often receiving such warm and welcoming response that it feels like one really could be close to half of the world, then my own interest in the subject of intimacy is less "intimate." Partly symptomatic and partly generic, it situates itself more on the meta-level of the discipline of film studies and does not attempt to explore intimacy in the context of family, domestic space, and the inner life. Instead, I want to probe the intricate relationship between the cinema of intimacy and the intimacy of cinema.

Why "Intimacy" Now?

My main definition of intimacy I borrow from Laura Berlant:

To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way. Usually, this story is set within zones of comfort: friendship, the couple, and the family, animated by expressive and emancipating kinds of love. Yet the inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding public-ness.

(281)

Berlant here suggests an inherent tension, if not a willed paradox and contradiction, namely that intimacy is a closeness that demands or desires to be opened up, either from within, by those who seek this proximity and want to share and show it. Or it is opened up from without, by those who want to intrude on it, who feel threatened by it, or envy it. This is why I associate borders and edges with intimacy, and why it can already imply its own negation, its own vulnerability, and its transience. In fact, one might say that at the outer boundary of intimacy (and thus its always looming horizon) is "shame": when exposed from without, and—when exposed from within—its implicit and ever-present obverse is a transgressive self-abandon, bordering on abjection. Berlant hints at something similar when she goes on:

Intimacy builds worlds; it creates spaces and usurps places meant for other kinds of relation. Its potential failure to stabilize closeness always haunts its persistent activity, making the very attachments deemed to buttress "a life" seem in a state of constant if latent vulnerability. … It becomes clear that virtually no one knows how to do intimacy … and that the mass fascination with the aggression, incoherence, vulnerability, and ambivalence at the scene of desire somehow escalates the demand for the traditional promise of intimate happiness to be fulfilled in everyone's everyday life.

(282)

This suggests that intimacy should be a cinematic topic par excellence, since the very definition of intimacy as proposed by Berlant implies a tension and mutual interdependence between public and private that is nothing less than foundational and constitutive for the cinema, which is, after all, our last public sphere, where the private is depicted, experienced, and negotiated as private. This in contrast to television, where the private becomes a public performance, when we think of sitcoms with their laugh track, or of politicians who have to stage huge multi-million spectaculars for the TV networks, in order to show off the real person, the intimate family man, the private self. As Thomas Friedman of The New York Times put it in 2012: "This is a Presidential election where both candidates are running as 'I'm not Mitt Romney.'"

So why has "intimacy" not been a major concern in film studies? My own answer is in response to a slightly different question: Why "intimacy" now? The special issue of Critical Inquiry from which I just quoted, as well as several conferences besides this one, testify to a special interest, and maybe even a particular urgency inherent in the topic. This is why I said that my interest in "intimacy" is as a symptom: symptom of a shift, a crisis and a change in register and attention. To be more specific, I venture that, in...