85
NL 18 pp. 85–101 Intellect Limited 2020
Northern Lights
Volume 18
© 2020 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: https://doi.org/10.1386/nl_00015_1
Mary Harrod
University of Warwick
From postnational mobility
to posthuman fluidity:
Unfixed identities and social
responsibilities in Personal
Shopper (Assayas, 2016) and
Happy End (Haneke, 2017)
Abstract
This article approaches contemporary European cinema as transnational cinema from
an angle informed by gender and sexuality studies. It is underpinned by a fluid conception
of identity, which it identifies with its objects of study, in terms of production
context, market positioning and also form and theme. Specifically, I approach comparatively
the embrace of postnational textual identity alongside posthuman – especially
post-gender – characterization by two of the most visible recent European auteur films,
Olivier Assayas’Personal Shopper (2016) and Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2017).
I consider the ideological implications of the narratives’ explorations of immorality in
a contemporary western context marked in both films by the breakdown of communication
and a related failure of ethical responsibility, often constellated in relation
to technological advancement. The article draws on the Continental theories of Slavoj
Žižek and to a lesser extent Jean Baudrillard and Zygmunt Bauman to illuminate the
extent to which these films’ subtle and conflicted yet tenaciously enduring nostalgia
Keywords
transnational
posthuman
gender
sexuality
Assayas
Haneke
European cinema
Mary Harrod
86   Northern Lights
	 1.	 My thanks to Dorota
Ostrowska for this
observation.
for earlier ideals of European community is discernible via or inseparable from regret
at the loss of an imagined ‘natural’ mode of embodiment, including more traditional
gender roles. It finally reflects briefly on the related question of the attitudes towards
European cinema itself, as well as cinemas associated with the past more generally,
which these films display and invite the audience to share.
Personal Shopper (Assayas, 2016) and Happy End (Haneke, 2017) represent films
by two of the most major veteran auteurs in European cinema. As such, they
can be seen as direct successors to the 1960s and 70s wave of (relatively) massexportable
European art films – indeed Assayas has often discussed his work
explicitly in terms suggestive of an Oedipal relation to the French New Wave.
Yet they are explicitly marked by the global, including beyond Europe, in various
ways. These include their instantiation of what Mette Hjort (2010: 20–21)
calls‘cosmopolitan’transnationalism (a word I use interchangeably with postnationalism),
linked to the directors’global mobility: both have not only been
involved in multi-territory (mostly) European co-productions, but Haneke
has also worked in the United States and Assayas set and filmed some of his
stories in the Far East. Even more striking, though, is the pronounced transnational
character of the formal and thematic content of the films under scrutiny.
For Personal Shopper, the most immediately obvious non-European cultural
interlocutor is the United States, through the casting of Kristen Stewart in
the eponymous lead role and the related use of English as the film’s main
language. However, East Asian culture and cinema also inform the narrative,
through generic references to horror cinema from the region and especially
Japanese classic Ringu (Nakata, 1998), which like this film uses a technological
interface as a portal for threats to the protagonist’s life. Not only that, but even
Personal Shopper’s theoretically iconic European city settings of London and
Paris undergo the ‘abstracting effect’ (Jones 2012: 27) of Assayas’ storytelling
and tend towards generic spaces rather than retaining culturally specific place
value. Both comprise many interior shots of boutiques and outdoor Parisian
scenes make use of mounted camera mid-traffic shots evocative of many busy
first-world metropolises; the view from an apartment there is meanwhile so
generically picturesque as to resemble a matte shot (Figure 1).1
Happy End is in dialogue with France’s former colonies, through the
secondary but important presence of a family of North African domestic
Figure 1: Paris is unrecognizable as the artificial-looking, delocalized backdrop to
Kyra’s apartment in Personal Shopper © Metrodome Distribution.
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www.intellectbooks.com   87
employees in the French household it depicts, a detail that reminds us of
Europe’s porous borders prior to post-1990 accelerated globalization. It also
references Africa more generally, thanks to a final sequence where subSaharan
migrants invade a bourgeois wedding party. Elsewhere, both narratives
unfold extensively in non-places proper (see Augé 1995: 35–40): Eurostar
trains and terminals in Personal Shopper and the border-zone of Calais in
Happy End. Consequently, the transport technologies that emblematized technological
advancement under modernity, but whose ongoing improvement
daily furthers human interconnectedness, provide the initial context for the
depictions of globalized postmodernity these films offer up. However, this article
will argue that the narratives foreground more insistently what Zygmunt
Bauman (2007: 57) has called‘subjectivity fetishism’, in connection with transnational
capitalism and media culture. This designates a contemporary situation
whereby identity is paradoxically asserted through consumption and/or
electronic media. As I will show, this is a source of moral panic in both films,
in ways intimately connected with constructions of characters’ embodiment,
notably through gender and sexuality.
Given this engagement with moral questions, it is useful to situate these
films specifically within a reappraisal of Enlightenment understandings of
human identity couched in an ethical framework. As Temenuga Trifonova
notes in the introduction to this volume, the figure of the migrant
challenges us to rethink concepts like ‘European identity’, citizenship,
justice, ethics, liberty, tolerance and hospitality in the post-national
context of ephemerality, volatility and contingency that finds people
looking for firmer markers of identity.
I understand migration here not only in the sense implied by the aforementioned
scene in Haneke’s film (and addressed by most other contributions to
this special issue), linked to economic or political refugees, but also more literally,
with the migrant as a figure for the more broadly defined mobile subject
of globalization, as the US ex-patriate protagonist of in Personal Shopper
represents. To put it another way, Haneke’s film centralizes the problem of
human mobility across borders as the latest trauma with which Europe in
particular, and therefore European cinema as a discursive agent, must grapple.
This is apparent if we recall Thomas Elsaesser’s (2015: 23–30) arguments
about how three major narratives of trauma recurrent in European cinema
are emblematically figured in Haneke’s 2009 Das weiße Band. These are, first,
bio and body politics, arising substantially from an ageing population (and,
as his chapter elsewhere brings out, having as its flipside a fetishization of
youth that we shall see chimes – albeit sometimes dissonantly – with these
films’ preoccupations); second, the Holocaust; and third, the confrontation
with Islam, which is coloured by postcolonial dynamics. A few years later, it
is fitting that such narratives are joined and perhaps superseded in memorability
by the latest European trauma of the migrant crisis, thanks to the fact
that Happy End is set in Calais around the unspoken presence of the Jungle,
situated as adjacent to the bourgeois household it focalizes, and encroaching
into it in the deeply uncomfortable-making final sequence described above.
These aspects of the film were moreover emphasized by marketing materials
such that the setting itself functioned as a kind of high concept. Thus, the
film was widely touted as ‘set in the Calais Jungle’, while the poster shows
Mary Harrod
88   Northern Lights
the head table at the closing wedding party looking out towards the camera
at a fixed off-screen point that represents the migrants’ position hovering
at the venue’s entrance, evoking the inside-outside dynamics discussed by
Elizabeth Ezra in this special issue – with the audience uncomfortably more
inside than out. The official trailer mimics the central family’s extraordinary
wilful blindness about the poverty and oppression on their doorstep by not
alluding directly to the Jungle or migrants. Not only is it likely that Haneke’s
core audience might wish to see his take on this acute and widely discussed
social issue, whose cultural purchase has been evidenced by the impact of
photographs of migrants (such as the reaction to the press circulation of the
child Aylan Kurdi’s body washed up on the beach), but the film’s ‘narrative
image’ (Ellis 1981: 30) provides something like the saleable narrative hook
of the mystery thriller, by pointing towards an unspoken central presence/
absence that the ‘culturally literate’ viewer is invited to enjoy cleverly filling
in for themselves.
However, this article takes another leaf out of Elsaesser’s (2015) chapter
by adopting his proposed methodology of ‘enlarging the context’ of
European cinema studies to think about how a film such as Personal
Shopper, which deals with the market forces regulating global movement
more generally, also speaks to ethical questions running to the heart of
European identity and indeed encounters with the other in a philosophical
sense. It thus focuses on how social changes under globalized late capitalism
and perhaps especially advanced technology change the meaning of
subjectivity and therefore notions of ethical subjectivity, with implications
for how we conceive self-other dynamics based on social inequity which,
not incidentally, the figure of the economic migrant or refugee potently
evokes. Indeed, it is noteworthy that the metaphorical shadow cast by the
Jungle in Happy End, from the boundary limits of the cinematic frame and
privileged western subjects’ moral conscience, works like the trope of the
return of the repressed in tantalizingly enigmatic form in Caché (Haneke,
2005) – not least because the comparison with that film’s allusion to the
barbarities and shame of France’s imperial history in Algeria underlines
migrants’ kinship with former colonial others from a European perspective.
In both cases others’ low status is figured by their geo-cultural identities,
which have arguably come to stand in for traditional class ones under neoliberalism
as an ideology that tends to deny class relations as such. My
approach accords, then, with Trifonova’s view that ‘it is becoming increasingly
difficult to separate stories about migration from stories about life
under neo-liberalism in general’. It is intended among other things to
demonstrate that it is rewarding for analyses concerned with geo-cultural
values to look beyond films’ overt engagement with political issues to
consider how these may – perhaps increasingly – be displaced onto more
subtle questions of identity, including revealing how formal elements can
be geo-culturally loaded in this domain.
Capitalism, advanced technology and (ethical) violence
Both films under discussion depict blatant ethical failures. Personal Shopper
focuses on a young American woman, Maureen (Stewart), living in Paris
and working as a shopper for a celebrity It-woman figure named Kyra. It
soon emerges that she has recently lost her twin brother to a congenital
heart condition that she shares. While she professes to hate her job and
From postnational mobility to posthuman fluidity
www.intellectbooks.com   89
have anti-capitalist leanings, her apparent motivation for doing it is to stay
in Paris so she can spend time visiting her brother’s house outside the city
and attempting to connect with him beyond the dead. Notwithstanding her
anti-consumerist pose, Maureen has a penchant for trying on the designer
clothes lent to Kyra without the latter knowing. More seriously from a viewpoint
concerned with moral lapses, she is conned by a boyfriend of her boss’
named Ingo (Lars Eidinger) who uses an untraceable number to send her text
messages that seem as if they might be from her dead brother, in order to get
information that will allow him to murder Kyra and steal some high-ticket
Cartier jewellery she has been lent for a social event. During this interaction,
Ingo also persuades Maureen to go further than she has previously done in
wearing Kyra’s clothes, as well as to sleep – and masturbate – at Kyra’s apartment
on the sly, ethical transgressions that later cause her embarrassment
when she is questioned by the police.
Happy End offers a satirical portrait of the bourgeois family in the grand
tradition of European auteurs from Luis Buñuel to François Ozon via Reiner
Werner Fassbinder – and Douglas Sirk, evoked by numerous shots of opulent
but enclosed interior spaces and reflecting surfaces, reminding us of the
always already global character of film culture. At the start of the film during
an intra-credit prologue, we see home video footage of a woman performing
her pre-bed washing ritual through a smartphone video interface, accompanied
by on-screen textual commentary as coldly and factually dispassionate
as hygiene rituals themselves:‘spit … water … gargle … towel … hair … put
away hairbrush … night-cream … check reflection … piss … flush … and out
of there … lights off’(my translation) (Figure 2).
The amateur filmmaker then moves on to discussing and showing the
results of poisoning a hamster with antidepressants stolen from their mother,
whom we consequently deduce the filmed figure to have been, as well as
now making openly critical comments about said mother’s self-indulgence
and negligent parenting since being left by her husband. In this way, a causal
relationship as well as felt equivalency is established between the suffering
of the evidently disturbed child and that of the caged hamster. Shortly after
this uncontextualized opening, we are given to understand that the camerawoman
is 13-year-old Ève (Fantine Harduin), who goes on to (perhaps
Figure 2: The opening shots of Happy End evoke sterility in conjunction with mediation
© Artifical Eye.
Mary Harrod
90   Northern Lights
inadvertently) murder her mother by a similar method. She therefore goes to
live in a mansion in Calais with her father Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz), alongside
her stepmother and new baby brother – new because she, like Maureen
of Personal Shopper, has lost a brother previously. Also in situ are her father’s
extended family, including his elderly father Georges, played by veteran New
Wave actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, who spends much of the film trying unsuccessfully
to euthanize himself (as he did his wife in Amour [Haneke, 2012]),
as well his businesswoman sister Anne (Isabelle Huppert) and her troubled
son, Pierre (Franz Rogowski). A key subplot concerns an accident that takes
place at a building site belonging to Anne’s company and for which Pierre is
probably responsible. A worker is badly injured and Anne pays him off with
no real apology.
It is evident that worldliness, wealth and financial greed are connected to
the collapse of ethics in both these films – including in ways imbricated with
European values, both traditional and, especially, globalized. The key miscreant
in Happy End is Huppert’s characteristically hard-nosed matriarch Anne,
also the bride in the iconic migrant scene where she is marrying a lawyer from
outre-Manche, who shows no true remorse for the grave injury her construction
business has caused. This event is strikingly shown in an(other, typically for
Haneke) uncontextualized static long take, and a long shot, on what looks like
CCTV footage, accompanied by radio coverage of football results that ironically
evokes a space for performing European identity as positively inclusive
in both national and class terms. In Personal Shopper, it is Ingo, who kills Kyra
in a bloodbath, as well as exploiting his knowledge of Maureen’s bereavement
trauma to induce her to bring him luxury brand jewellery by convincing
her she might be meeting her dead brother. However, they are not the
only offenders. Thomas from Happy End is also shown to be duplicitous if not
amoral, despite (or in the European art-as-critique tradition, appropriately for)
his status as a highly respected surgeon, associated with the cornerstone of
western society that is the medical institution. Having left Ève and her mother
in a clearly suboptimal domestic situation and maintained little relationship
with his daughter, he looks set to wreak havoc on his second family, since in
the style of the true Gallic romantic he is now having an affair, with a musician
named Claire (Hille Perl). Meanwhile in Personal Shopper, Kyra – with a
generically western first name and (like Ingo) a nonspecific mittel-European
accent – is the personification of globally consumable Eurotrash, exploiting
French and British fashion brands to promote her media image. Her character
is constructed as a self-serving diva who treats her employees and associates
without consideration, referred to by a magazine employee as reputedly
‘a monster’.
This is one of the more explicit moments in the film at which a lack of
ethics is framed in terms of a disconnect from embodied humanity: as a loss of
the ‘moral gravity’ (Sobchack 2004: 158) provided by the corporeal experience
of personhood. Central to this notion is the fear that this foundation is gravely
threatened in an era in which immateriality may be increasingly socially
determining. It cannot be coincidental that the only scene during which Kyra
is depicted at any length directly has her on a telephone call – apparently
to a humanitarian organization with which she is associated as a benefactress
but, evidently, for PR purposes – discussing the behaviour of primates:
humans’forefathers, also contrasted with futuristic technology from an evolutionary
perspective in one of cinema’s most iconic scenes in 2001: A Space
Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968). That her conversation here revolves around some
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www.intellectbooks.com   91
	 2.	 With more obvious
relevance to Personal
Shopper, the figure
of the girl has often
been theorized as
representing neoliberalism’s
ideal
subject, thanks to what
Simone de Beauvoir
has famously referred
to as the constructed
nature of womanhood
and to girls’ status
as in the process of
becoming.
(presumably) endangered gorillas’ refusal to be photographed, in one case
apparently due to ‘depression’, and involves her lawyer brandishing contractual
obligations for them to be physically present, foregrounds in an absurdist
mode the linkage between alienation from authentic experiences and moral
bankruptcy.
Posthuman girlhood dehumanized
If money is the root of several characters’‘evil’ behaviour in Personal Shopper
and Happy End, digital media present dangers to young female characters
specifically. Further, these ‘posthuman’ devices are arguably set up as dehumanizing
by the films in ways that are intended to heighten the uneasy affects
circulating around such technologies when they are used by girls or young
women, who are typically associated with embodiment, including physical
and metaphorical softness, nurturing qualities and especially sexuality.
Such a use of young women and girls to depict the discomfiting matrix of
social changes and cultural emphases associated with advanced capitalism and
technology can be usefully situated in several contexts. Female characters have
historically been expedient vehicles for negotiating fears about technological
change, given women’s overidentification with the natural and corporeal (see
Huyssen 1982).2
Children are also obvious figures for pre-lapsarian authenticity
at odds with advancements in human technological intervention into the
natural world. Indeed, just as Haneke has already debunked the presumed
innocence of children in general to shocking effect in Benny’s Video (Haneke,
1992) and Funny Games (Haneke, 1997), where this debunking is linked to
entertainment technologies, as well as in Das weiße Band, Happy End does not
limit its potential critique of the latest technological‘threats’to the social order
to girlhood.Thus, at one point an unidentified adolescent online video-diarist,
presumably aYouTuber and so successor to Kyra as cultural influencer, narrates
his life in uncomfortably self-deprecating terms that chime with moral panics
over young people’s exposure to online self-harm as an extreme example of
the self-curation social media encourage. Both Personal Shopper and Happy
End also draw on the tradition of the figure of the uncanny child of either
gender in transnational cinema described by Jessica Balanzategui (in which
account the Japanese horror movies already cited as an influence on Assayas
feature prominently). For Balanzategui, this figure,
untethered from specific national contexts, comes to be a cipher through
which ontologies of childhood and progress can be rewritten in the new
millennium, heralding a globalized, postmodern era in which linear
teleological frameworks and clearly defined national identities fall away.
(2018: 225)
Nonetheless, Maureen and Ève’s figuration of fears about technology is
lent resonance by their phenomenological embodiment of referential spheres
apparently antonymical to the latter’s posthumanizing qualities, and gender
as well as age contributes to this effect. In the first film, while Maureen is in a
long-distance relationship, she spends most of the film avoiding communication
with her boyfriend and when they do speak it is via a shaky and delayed
Skype interface that dislocates vocality from embodiment. As so often in
Haneke, communication is here reduced to empty and often equivocal banalities.
Elsewhere, Maureen spends any spare time not dedicated to attempting
Mary Harrod
92   Northern Lights
to communicate with a ghost on YouTube investigating spiritualism and art.
As Nikola Mijovic has observed, not only is the character’s evident anomie
intimately bound up with her over-investment in gadgets, but indeed – citing
Murray Leeder – we can see the trope of the ghost itself in Personal Shopper
as a further ‘figure for the alternating disjuncture between body and spirit
wrought by modern communication technologies’(in Mijovic 2017: 21).
Alongside the downplaying of corporeality and sexuality, Maureen’s femininity
is de-emphasized. While Cristina Colet’s assertion that she ‘swings
between male and female gender but is neither one or the other’ (2017: 74)
is perhaps extreme, Stewart’s styling in jeans, sneakers and bomber jackets
is markedly androgynous. Androgyny squares, too, with the queer associations
of the actress’ persona as both prominently bisexual and the star of the
Twilight series, whose queer fandom has been explored by Bethan Jones (2014)
and where, significantly, her character is also linked to non- – perhaps post- –
human identity as an immortal vampire. Furthermore, Stewart’s César Awardwinning
role in Assayas’ own previous largely English-language feature The
Clouds of Sils Maria (Haneke, 2014) has been interpreted as centred on the‘the
discovery [of] the lesbian as an Other who both is and is not herself’(Bradbury
Rance 2019: 45).
If Maureen’s associations with the motor-scooter she rides around Paris
flirt with a butch identity, her predilections for smoking and wearing stiletto
heels, including the first time she illicitly tries on garments of Kyra’s, suggest
a fascination not only with classic consumer fetish objects (shoes) but also
specifically with phallic prostheses. Indeed, Maureen’s status as a repository
for anxiety makes her a kind of illegitimate descendant of the phallic femme
fatale of film noir, with genealogies diverted in the sense that anxiety is now
also constructed as experienced by the character – so effectively that Graham
Fuller (2017: 23) suggests Stewart is peerless in embodying the‘cosmic dread’
of our era. The ‘restless and mildly awkward’ (Mijovic 2017: 20) physicality
she lends to a character in constant motion between London, Paris and the
French countryside conveys lostness and confusion, while her jittery delivery
style, where she falters then words pour out, seems to stand in metonymically
for Assayas’ very approach to narrative construction, withholding information
(as does Haneke) only to deliver key details en passant such that ‘we
seem to happen upon moments within a rush of time’ (Jones 2012: 27). Like
Steven Shaviro in his analysis of financial flows‘[as] the motor of subjectivity’
(2010: 8) in several recent western cultural artefacts including Assayas’ eponymously
postnational Boarding Gate (Haneke, 2007), I here emphasize the
experiential qualities of Assayas’ film as much as any figurative ones, consonant
with its identity as part-thriller. The director’s well-documented view of
actors as embodied individuals, with freedom to improvise, rather than mere
role-players, dovetails with my arguments that his films display and can elicit
a sense of a yearning for greater corporeal‘authenticity’.
If Personal Shopper’s very plot draws on a repertoire of generic tropes
evoking fear, uneasy affects are perhaps most evident for Haneke’s film in
sequences where media technology is most dominant and particularly the
opening one, whose off-screen voyeur perspective equally directly evokes the
horror genre, and which I suggest is at least as important as its titular final
one – after all, Haneke likes to misdirect our attention. But while the mystery
at the heart of Personal Shopper is whether Maureen is in contact with a nonhuman
entity after all, via social media or otherwise – a possibility ultimately
left open for the audience as well as her by ongoing apparently ‘supernatural’
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events – in Happy End it is almost more difficult to believe that the disturbing
material offered up at the start might be more than a hoax, and linked to
a major ethical transgression in the shape of matricidal and later also suicidal
impulses, let alone authored by an innocent-looking young girl. Moreover,
where Maureen’s sexuality was rendered bloodless and perverse, diminutive,
small-featured and doll-like, Ève is notably desexualized for a contemporary
child of just two months off 13, with typical outfits comprising an androgynous
oversize sweatshirt as nightwear or a smocked dress gathered across the
chest to fit a flat bust (Figure 3). The combination of elements associated with
her character is particularly jarring in a scene in which the young murderess
picks up and rocks her crying baby brother in her step-mother’s absence,
ostensibly to comfort him, but also picked out as by one reviewer as‘puls[ing]
with anxiety as well as tenderness’ (Nayman 2017: 53). The discomfort elicited
by this‘denaturalization’of Ève’s identity reinforces the film’s generalized
suspicion of alienation from the body.
Sex and spirituality
The rhyming of anxiety with ‘disturbance’ to (sexualized) gender roles and
posthuman technology in Personal Shopper parallels certain recent currents in
Continental theory. Most strikingly, in his meditation on the posthuman, Slavoj
Žižek’s asks the question: ‘What if sexual difference is not simply a biological
fact, but the Real of an antagonism that defines humanity, so that once sexual
difference is abolished, a human being effectively becomes indistinguishable
from a machine?’ (n.d.) Žižek bases his discussions on the fact that Alan
Turing’s famous imitation game designed to distinguish man from machine
was in fact originally intended to differentiate the sexes. This equivalency is
echoed in Assayas’film when Ingo is pursuing Maureen by text message and,
trying to decide whether he is Lewis, she asks, ‘R you a man or a woman?’.
When Maureen’s only answer is the flippant,‘[w]hat difference does it make?’,
her response is to switch to the question of ‘R u you real?’, then ‘R u alive
or dead’? This contiguity suggests the instinctive interchangeability of these
questions, that is, the inherently post-gendered nature of posthuman entities,
from ghosts to technological devices. Given the stressful experience of viewing
Figure 3: Pubescent Ève is visually infantilized in Happy End © Artifical Eye.
Mary Harrod
94   Northern Lights
Maureen’s evidently disturbing interaction with her phone in this sequence,
which includes her maniacally pacing and fidgeting, even shaking, and at one
point turning it off and attempting to block the interlocutor, it is easy to see
gender equivalency constructed as an aspect of threatening posthumanism in
both Žižek and this film. Posthuman literally designates the technologies here
extending and reconstructing the self but overlaps, again, with metaphorical
ideas of ‘inhuman’ behaviour, understood as unethical. Likewise, for Žižek
technology compromises spirituality, which in western philosophy connotes
moral superiority:
is it not that once the socio-symbolic order is fully established [through
the digital realm], the very dimension which introduced the‘transcendent’
attitude that defines a human being, the uniquely human sexual
passion, appears as its very opposite, as the main OBSTACLE to the
elevation of a human being to the pure spirituality, as that which ties
him/her down to the inertia of bodily existence?
(Žižek n.d.)
In the work of both Žižek and Jean Baudrillard, writing two years later, the
figure of the clone emblematizes the culmination of fears about technological
posthumanism, for the former signalling ‘the end of what is traditionally
designated as the uniquely human spiritual transcendence’ (Žižek n.d.) and
for the latter representing an ‘infinitely more subtle and artificial prosthesis
than any mechanical one’(Baudrillard 2002: 20).
Although there are no clones in the films under discussion, in light of the
proximity between ghosts and digital technology in the film, the spectre of
cross-gender twins in Personal Shopper represents a comparable menace to
embodied specificity. Moreover, the linkage between technological prosthesis
and the compromise of ethics is apparent in this film’s most famous scene,
where Maureen’s ethics fail in the face of the temptation posed by posthuman
technology working directly on her body to reconstruct her subjectivity.
Thus, when the text messages tell her to put on her boss’ clothes, she does
so then masturbates in Kyra’s bed as if identifying fully with the latter and
enjoying it, in a scene in which erotic desire is entirely synonymous with nihilistic
self-obliteration (as opposed to ‘healthy’ heterosexual union). It is worth
noting here that this identification is not cross-gender, reminding us that the
real transgression as this film sees it is any kind of getting beyond the limits
of one’s own body, ‘personal frontiers [being] shattered’ (Mijovic 2017: 20),
with gender-shifting merely being one expression of this.The overlap between
technological devices and clothing as commodity objects with prosthetic
potential for the performance of the self reaches its acme in scenes in which
Maureen wears Kyra’s clothes. At the apartment she rigs herself up in a bondage
harness-like dress with sheer outer-layer, phone in hand (Figure 4). Later,
at the hotel, she chooses to slip onto her naked torso and photograph for Ingo
a vintage Chanel dress covered in metallic discs described as both ‘sensual’
and yet‘not easy to wear’by a boutique employee and by Catherine Wheatley
(2017) as nostalgic but also futuristic (Figure 5). This sequence is moreover
triangulated with allusions to spirituality through cross-cutting with an online
dramatization of a séance.
Importantly, the sexual thrill Maureen gets from walking in someone else’s
metaphorical and literal shoes stems from narrating what she’s doing to the
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unknown messenger (Ingo) on her phone. Such a suggestion bears out claims
about the increasing interpenetration of public image curation and subjectivity
dating back at least as far as Jürgen Habermas’ mid-twentieth-century work
in this area and re-emphasized by new media and Internet studies concerned
with the rise of self-invention, maintenance and branding in the digital age,
especially among young people (e.g., Senft 2012; Mendelson and Papacharissi
2010). As Camilla Sears and Rebecca Godderis (2011: 183) explain in their
post-Foucauldian description of the ‘electronic panopticon’ of reality television,
awareness of being constantly watched (here, including in the mind’s
eye) regulates individuals’ behaviour. Conceiving digital culture as promoting
self-surveillance underlines its status as the successor to other disciplinary
institutions – Big Brother’s kinship with the Church. Imagined surveillance,
as well as its paradoxical connection to lived experience, is perfectly evoked
by Stewart’s performance, at times combining an aforementioned naturalness
with its very opposite,‘self-consciousness with just“being”in front of the
camera’. For Mijovic, this ‘could even mark a new stage in the craft of acting,
which may not have been possible before the emergence of the generation
that she belongs to – those who have grown up in front of digital cameras’
(Mijovic 2017: 20).
An attitude of disturbance at perceived human disconnection from the
body through technological self-narration specifically is equally in evidence
Figures 4 and 5: Like technology, clothes prosthetically reinvent the self in Personal
Shopper © Metrodome Distribution.
Mary Harrod
96   Northern Lights
in the plotline in Happy End concerned with Thomas’ affair with Claire. Like
Maureen’s relationship, this liaison is, as far as we see, conducted exclusively
via intensely personal online messages, such as:
Claire:
life at last
no
beyond life
whatever happens
even if you forget me one day
I’mYOURS forever.
everything’s blurry
my eyes are swimming with tears, my darling.
Thomas:
i’m thirsty for your tears and I don’t want you to cry.
but I’d like to see you pissing with pain so I can comfort you.
i‘d like to hurt you because I can’t be inside you
entirely inside you.
Claire:
don’t hide even your most outrageous desires from me
use me
a gift…
(my translation)
This dialogue’s blend of visceral, sado-masochistic pornography (‘see you pissing
with pain’,‘I’d like to hurt you because I can’t be […] entirely inside you’)
with clichéd romance (‘YOURS forever’) and pseudo-spirituality (‘beyond
life’) echoes Žižek’s description of the role of sex in defining the self precisely
through the negation or absence of self that is implied by the erotic (especially
‘use me’). Here, however, the intensity of the sentiments is undercut by the
bare functionality of their mode of communication, filmed such that the screen
is again entirely populated by the device interface, in a dull, static long-shot.
These aesthetics and a context of serial uxorial neglect, not to mention the
fact that at one point Ève reads the age-inappropriate messages (and, worse,
is unfazed, thinking only about the affair’s potential practical implications for
her), frames giving in to such drives is as a hollow and ersatz form of potentially
socially destructive self-gratification: precisely as described by Žižek, in
Happy End sexuality, when mediated by technology, paradoxically loses its
transcendent power and instead merely ‘ties him/her down to the inertia of
bodily existence’. The film offers no positive model of embodied humanness
between the self-conscious denial of sexuality by the girl figure unwilling to
join the desultory adult world presented to her (cf. Nayman 2017: 53) and the
perversion of the transcendent possibilities of erotics into a base and tawdry
compulsion.
In both these films, then, there is a sense that true ethics relies on a reified
notion of the body inimical to contemporary scientific and technological
advancement. This may not be surprising, given the suspicion of bio-medical
scientific institutions already touched on in Haneke and co-implicated with
the well-known pro-euthenasia stance also conveyed in Happy End, alongside
Assayas’ long-standing association with Situationist thought. Nonetheless,
From postnational mobility to posthuman fluidity
www.intellectbooks.com   97
criticisms can be made of such an attitude. Queer theorists such as Jackie
Stacey and Lee Edelman have seen more positive aspects to the possibility
of a world unfettered by so-called reproductive futurism than have Žižek
and Baudrillard. From a gender studies perspective, these narratives are situated
at an equally distanced remove from the feminist utopia described by
Donna Haraway in ‘A manifesto for cyborgs’ (1985), where the posthuman
was seen to offer a potential way out of the impasse of gender differentiation.
Maureen’s proto-post-gender identity or Ève’s status as simultaneously preadolescent
and world-wearily beyond such considerations might have been
imagined differently as a source of liberating potential. Although the latter
character’s name – departing from the selection of Haneke regulars (especially
Anne and Georges, in multiple films) – is no doubt intended ironically,
from this perspective it is highly appropriate. The Cyborg may not ‘recognize
the Garden of Eden’, symbolizing gender oppositionality and a non-estranged
relationship to the body, or‘dream of community on the model of the organic
family’ (Haraway 2004: 9); however, these films at times seem to invite us to
do just that.
European values, European cinema
These analyses bear out Elsaesser’s (2015: 23) identification of a key strand of
contemporary European cinema that lends itself to film studies’ contemporary
fascination with‘skins and screens’. At the same time, the centrality of themes
of masochistic self-negation to both Personal Shopper and Happy End resonates
with a defining trait of the continent’s cinema as a whole also picked
out by Elsaesser and others (Harrod et al. 2015: 2, 11): a tendency for selfdeprecation
– but one couched in a kind of self-knowing superiority inseparable
from privileged entitlement and by extension an investment in maintaining
the status quo, which, in her forthcoming book The Figure of the Migrant in
Contemporary European Cinema, Trifonova cogently dates back at least as far as
Pascal Bruckner’s scathing commentary on the disingenuous‘tears of the white
man’ in the colonial era. It is not difficult to accuse Personal Shopper of hypocrisy,
trading as it does on the visual allure of the fashion labels whose industry’s
effects it invites its viewer to scorn. As for Happy End, Sight and Sound’s
review echoes my sense of implied authorial self-critique in suggestive terms,
claiming that the film marks a new approach for Haneke in adopting a stance
towards its audience that is in fact‘less imperious’as more generous – perhaps
empathetic – than in previous works (Nayman 2017: 53). It is true that potential
authorial co-implication with Happy End’s viewer contrasts, for example,
with the ‘fascist’ stance of Caché, which made similar use of embedded media
of enigmatic origin to condemn Europe’s actions on the global stage historically,
but where only Haneke himself escaped censure (Wheatley 2006: 36).
Nonetheless, somewhat paradoxically, constructing its implied perspective in
alignment with its audience’s could be seen precisely to address a spectatorial
position of self-congratulatory knowledge (even if based on awareness of
chagrin through enmeshment in circuits of inequality that naturalize human
callousness), rather than circumvent the existence of such a position.
Just as colonial imperialism and fascism are underpinned by paternalistic
rhetoric, if I have connected themes in the films under scrutiny to nostalgia
for a time of greater gender differentiation, among other embodied values,
an inevitable implication of this is nostalgia for a more adequately authoritarian
patriarch, whether this be for real‘pillars of the community’who have not
Mary Harrod
98    Northern Lights
	 3.	 This paragraph has
been updated since 	
the original publication
of this article. The
following text has 	
been omitted due 	
to a factual error: 	
‘[...] and it appears no
accident that at one
point the television
in Happy End shows
news coverage of
a pre-cursor to the
far-right separatist
movements sweeping
across Europe and the
Western World today,
in the shape of the UK’s
Scottish Referendum.
If Happy End betrays
such sentiment, it here
also imputes this very
clearly to its viewers
by placing the camera
in the position of the
television set.’
	 4.	 See, for instance,
Christopher Sharrett’s
(2006: 15) analysis
of this question in
reference to European
culture in Haneke.
failed in their ethical duties in Happy End or for Ève and Maureen’s mourned
proto-patriarchal male siblings –‘future boss[es]’(author’s own translation), as
Anne describes Ève’s risibly inadequate-to-the-role drunkard cousin Pierre –
without whom these characters are shown to be vulnerable and adrift. These
absences can be read as evoking Christian belief – faith in a listening God
rather than Lewis’recalcitrant if not illusory ghost – but also, perhaps, the loss
of stronger identity and leadership, for which the films consequently betray
intermittent regret.This is timely given the rise to western political dominance
of autocrats in very recent years.3
It is important to emphasize that the nostalgia on display reproduces the
mode’s original structural profile, as a longing for something never experienced
– an ill-defined pre-lapsarian fantasy, rather than any former era. These
films offer condemnations rather than alternatives. Indeed, much scholarship
on Haneke has centred on the totalizing nature of his social critique, encompassing
high and low culture, tradition and modernity.4
Assayas’ film could
be seen to bring together his two key modes of film narration, ‘people chasing
each other across the globe with guns and expense accounts’, generally
in peril, and the much more appealingly presented old European world of
‘people talking in cafes’(Jones 2012: 34) – or in this case, a country manor and
later a ramshackle house in the Parisian suburbs, where Maureen interacts
with Lewis’girlfriend. However, that these locations involve the film’s clearest
suggestions of ghostly activity signals this world’s self-consciously, irretrievably
past status – like maternal heritage in L’Heure d’été (Assayas, 2008) or the
cinematic past of silent filmmaking in France, overwritten by postmodernity,
in Irma Vep (Assayas, 1996).
The latter film is a good example of the recently accelerated intersectionality
of transnational and cinematic cultures, when Les Vampires (Feuillade,
1915) is reimagined drawing elements from Hong King action cinema through
the casting of Maggie Cheung as the star in its imagined remake. This overlap
occurs because the same technologies that have created the global village
have re-shaped the content and relativized the status of cinema as an imagebased
medium, as Haneke and Assayas are acutely aware. Thus, Personal
Shopper includes both long periods of an almost black screen during some
haunted house sequences and famously a sequence of text messaging (incidentally,
a communication mode already in obsolescence) lasting more than
20 minutes, while as indicated Haneke outdoes even himself with embedded
screens in Happy End. The result for two filmmakers highly invested in visual
images once again leaves open a space for nostalgia, explored in microcosm by
one scene from the later film. During the (presumed) YouTube clip described
earlier, nostalgia for a better time of early childhood is implicitly paired with
cinematic nostalgia. This is because the boy’s self-critical monologue, whose
emblematic status for fears about the socially destructive character of social
media I have outlined, involves looking back over photos of his younger self
and mocking his hairstyle, to strains of Richard Sanderson’s ‘Reality’. Not
only does this evoke an illusory and romanticized past in which, ‘there was
something special in the air’ and ‘[d]reams are my reality//the only kind of
real fantasy’, but the dreamworld described by the song is synonymous with
a specifically cinematic imaginary of youth, through its status as the theme
tune to classic early French teenpic La Boum (Pinoteau, 1980). The fact that
this reference would be very familiar to French viewers but almost nobody
else suggests the imbrication of temporal nostalgia with geo-cultural longing
for an era of national cinema paradigms. In a similar fashion, Personal Shopper
From postnational mobility to posthuman fluidity
www.intellectbooks.com    99
does not shy away from leaving commentary over a YouTube video describing
the artist Hilma Aft Klimt in Swedish, just as the film’s German-speaking
audience would be positioned to glean significant extra resonance from the
use of Marlene Dietrich’s rendition of ‘Das Hobelloid’, concerned with the
levelling of different identities as well as with the death drive, during the
pivotal scene where Maureen wears Kyra’s dress.
Yet just as the YouTuber’s ‘nostalgia’ is offered highly ironically through
his scathing commentary, such a deliberate deployment of elements drawn
from many cultures underlines the fact that in the end it is in its postnational,
indeed post-European, reach that contemporary genre-inflected
(relatively), accessible art cinema’s potential lies for these filmmakers. Kent
Jones (2012: 22) has discussed Assayas’ cinema in terms of an investment in
‘the sense of personal agency shared between characters, the phantom awareness
of how one measures up against other people, within society, as a citizen
of the world’. World citizenship is the literal meaning of cosmopolitan identity
and I would suggest that, for all their critiques of bourgeois global elites,
both Assayas and Haneke use transnationally positioned cinema as a way to
address the experience of living under globalized postmodernity – as Shaviro
also argues for Assayas – along with the dizzying multiplicity of ethical problems
which today’s alienating multinational, multicorporate, multilingual and
multimedia world implies. They are also quicker to embrace the productive
possibilities of the evolution of cinema – what haptic theory dubs‘the body of
the film’ – than that of the human bodies on-screen, whether by converting
the signature stately establishing long take, with its connotations of mastery,
into a live digital interface (Haneke), or having the plot hinge on a moment
where there is literally ‘nothing to see’ (Assayas) (Wheatley 2017, describing
a track from the lift of the hotel where Maureen awaits her interlocutor to
the building’s automatically opening and closing doors, again eliding ghostly
presence with technology gone awry). Taking seriously Marshall McLuhan’s
(1967) dictum that‘the medium is the message’, then, at a formal level, including
as linked to postnational address, Haneke and Assayas attempt to tackle
the chaos of hypermobile postmodernity on its own terms for better as well
as worse. It only remains for them to extend a comparably open-minded and
playful attitude to its mobile subjects.
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Harrod, Mary (2020), ‘From postnational mobility to posthuman fluidity:
Unfixed identities and social responsibilities in Personal Shopper (Assayas,
2016) and Happy End (Haneke, 2017)’, Northern Lights, 18, pp. 85–101, doi:
https://doi.org/10.1386/nl_00015_1
CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Mary Harrod is associate professor of French studies at the University of
Warwick. Much of her research to date has focused on gender and cultural
studies approaches to popular (trans-)national genres, especially in France and
Hollywood. Complementing numerous journal articles and book chapters, her
book publications comprise the monograph From France with Love: Gender and
Identity in French Romantic Comedy (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and the co-edited collec-
tions The Europeanness of European Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and Women Do
Genre in Film and Television (Routledge, 2017, winner of the British Association
of Film,Television and Screen Studies Best Edited Collection Prize 2019). She is
currently working on the monograph Genre, Pastiche and Women’s Filmmaking
in Hollywood for Palgrave Macmillan.
Contact: School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick,
Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.
E-mail: m.g.m.harrod@warwick.ac.uk
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7962-0074
Mary Harrod has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.