Touch and Go

Abstract

This issue of Screen Bodies features articles that contribute to a group of closely related critical concerns, namely, the existential and political significance of tacticity, feeling, and the representation of embodied experience. In her article, “Feeling Like Death,” Caitlin Wilson examines the aesthetic strategies Agnes Varda employs in two early films, La Pointe Courte (1955) and Le Bonheur (1965), that emphasize “textures and tactility” in the portrayal of mortality, death, and mourning. Wilson shows how Varda uses haptic imagery and calculated cinematic techniques to convey an experience of grief that is “palpable as well as visible.” Wilson persuasively argues that Varda depicts the embodied feeling of mortality to create a heightened sense of intimacy between the films’ characters. Similarly, in her timely article, “Gut Feelings,” Jennifer Jasmine White argues that Sheena Patel challenges the trend towards emotional indifference or “flatness” in the emerging genre of “internet novels.” In contrast to the affectless, numb, and apathetic heroine characteristic of novels like Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts (2021) and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Patel's I'm a Fan (2022) features a more realistically emotional protagonist. White argues that the novel functions as an intervention that opposes affective indifference and the political apathy it inspires. She writes that most examples of the so-called internet novel, that is, literature that focuses on social media, influencer culture, and characters who are chronically online, suggest highly mediated social experience leads to emotional and political malaise. Patel rejects this trend and instead centers “the feeling body,” the embodied experience of life online, and the political agency it fosters.