Samuel Fuller's Schizo-violent Cinema and the Affective Politics of War

Abstract

This essay begins by considering Samuel Fuller's 1963 film Shock Corridor as a model of schizo-violence – a disorganised violence that eludes the Oedipal, moralising binary of action and reaction, and instead opens up the violent action to multiple becomings outside Oedipal and nationalistic framings. Through the de-Oedipalisation of the violent events punctuating American history, Shock Corridor performs a schizoanalytic model of desire capable of giving free rein to the force of traumatic affections. The latter part of the discussion situates Fuller's film and the contemporary US military machine as diametrically opposed in their approaches to what we might call ‘the affective politics of war’. Several contemporary scenarios revolving around both actual war violence and Kathryn Bigelow's film The Hurt Locker (2008) serve to show how the schizophrenising operations of the brain itself constitute the greatest obstacle in the military's efforts to contain or repress the traumatic affections generated by violence and war.