Rapt in (destructive) plasticity: Demonlover and the annihilation of cinematic form

Abstract

ABSTRACT Expanding upon Faure’s and Epstein’s writings on the plasticity of the cinematic image, this article updates this concept for the post-cinematic image of the internet era via an analysis of Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover (2002). In doing this, it connects plasticity to Deleuze’s work on the cinema and his assertion that ‘the brain is the screen’. Rather than a continuation of the optimistic narrative Deleuze traces for the cinema in the face of major catastrophe, we see in Demonlover a bleak vision for both the future of the cinematic image and humanity in the late capitalist era. Rather than a salve against catastrophe, Demonlover, embodies this catastrophic state diegetically through the metamorphoses of its main protagonist as well as formally. The film thus comes to be characterised by a form of plasticity that doubles down on the destructive potential implicit in Faure’s and Epstein’s writings yet only formulated decades later by Catherine Malabou in an attempt to account for the psychic operations of post-traumatic subjects she calls the new wounded. This is destructive plasticity; this kind of plasticity governs the operations of the world we observe in Demonlover and the logics of the new regime of the image it presents to us.