{"id":143,"date":"2016-04-11T08:00:02","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T08:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/?page_id=143"},"modified":"2016-08-08T11:18:01","modified_gmt":"2016-08-08T11:18:01","slug":"3-3-benson-allott","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/3-3-benson-allott\/","title":{"rendered":"3.3 The CHORA Line: RealD Incorporated"},"content":{"rendered":"
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BY CAETLIN BENSON-ALLOTT<\/h6>\n

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What the majority of spectators seem to want and value from animation is not a gloss on \u201cmetaphysical effort\u201d but rather . . . \u201cmetaphysical release.\u201d
\n<\/em>\u2014Vivian Sobchack, \u201cFinal Fantasies\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Be careful what you wish for.
\n<\/em>\u2014Coraline<\/p>\n

Before Avatar<\/em> (James Cameron, 2009) grossed $2.7 billion in worldwide ticket sales, Henry Selick\u2019s Coraline<\/em> (2009) was widely hailed as the best 3-D movie ever made (\u201cAvatar<\/em>\u201d). By offering uncanny adventure \u201cfor brave children of all ages,\u201d Coraline<\/em> bestowed digital stereoscopic filmmaking with artistic and cultural prestige, affirming exhibitors\u2019 and cinemagoers\u2019 growing interest in digital projection.<\/p>\n

Film distributors were already sold; for the previous eleven years, they had pressured exhibitors to adopt a digital delivery and projection system and abandon expensive celluloid prints. They also wanted exhibitors to pay for this technological overhaul even though the theater-owners did not foresee any recompense in replacing their existing celluloid projectors with digital substitutes. RealD gave theater-owners a reason to convert when early experiments in polarized stereoscopic image projection, including Chicken Little 3D<\/em> (Mark Dindal, 2005) and Beowulf 3D<\/em> (Robert Zemeckis, 2007), demonstrated that more viewers would come out\u2014and pay more per ticket\u2014to see movies in digital 3-D.[1]<\/a> Subsequently Coraline<\/em>, Up <\/em>(Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, 2009), Avatar<\/em>, and Alice in Wonderland<\/em> (Tim Burton, 2010) launched a genre of high-profile, high-concept digital 3-D movies and confirmed that RealD projection can be exceedingly profitable for all involved.<\/p>\n

Ironically, the spectatorial pleasures of digital 3-D cinema are nowhere near as clear as the profits, although scholars have now\u00a0begun to explore what value\u00a0this third dimension adds to the spectatorial experience (see Elsaesser; Higgins). Previous incarnations of 3-D cinema\u2014such as the red-and-cyan anaglyph system of the 1950s or the (analog) polarized Stereovision of the early 1980s\u2014came and went quickly and without lasting industrial or aesthetic impact, but RealD proved much more popular with viewers, popular enough that major studios (specifically Dreamworks Animation SKG) converted to entirely 3-D production. In 2010, Samsung introduced consumer-grade 3-D HDTV sets to capitalize on the success of digital 3-D cinema. Thus it is time investigate what sort of desire digital 3-D produces and satisfies in its spectator and how it integrates itself into Western systems of representation. To paraphrase Vivian Sobchack\u2019s earlier work on 2-D digital animation, we need to ask what we want from RealD and what RealD wants from us: what new dimension is it opening up (Sobchack 172)? Henry Selick\u2019s Coraline<\/em> occasions related questions about desire, space, and embodiment through its representation of a young girl opening the door onto an Otherworld concealed within her own. Unlike previous RealD features, Coraline<\/em> harnesses the uncanniness of stereoscopic animation and uses it to acknowledge and produce a locus for the digital uncanny.[2]<\/a> It manipulates biocular vision\u2014the human physiology that enables depth perception and thus \u201c3-D imagery\u201d or stereoscopy\u2014to offer viewers a new receptacle of uncanniness for digital mimesis, namely, the 3-D image\u2019s virtual depth of field. By exploiting biocular vision as binocular vision, the movie returns our visual perception to us as mediated spectacle and as uncanny in the Freudian sense. In both its optics and its metaphysical tropes, Selick\u2019s movie suggests that RealD is \u201cnothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it\u201d (Freud, \u201cUncanny\u201d 363-64). In short, Coraline<\/em> promotes the uncanniness of the digital image to give its spectator a new experience of\u2014one might even say a new standard for\u2014visual verisimilitude to replace indexical realism now that the latter has been rendered obsolete by digital image capture, distribution, and exhibition.<\/p>\n

Coraline<\/em>\u2019s narrative also provides context for these metacinematic reflections by narratively and figurally taking up an ongoing debate about the relationship between form, matter, and femininity. Both the film\u2019s title and its representation of the new dimensionality of the image cite Plato\u2019s chora, <\/em>the receptacle \u201cat the very foundations of the concept of spatiality\u201d (Grosz 9). Its story thus invokes recent debates among Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, and others about the chora<\/em>\u2019s significance as a metaphysical figure\u2014an unintelligible space that gives form to matter\u2014and a trope within traditional patriarchal theories of representation. Grosz also suggests that the chora <\/em>\u201ccontains an irreducible, yet often overlooked connection with the functions of femininity\u201d (24), which emerges in Coraline<\/em> as the Beldam, a wicked witch who lives outside yet supports the materialist and gender-normative fantasies of Coraline<\/em>\u2019s world. Through the Beldam, Coraline<\/em> gives the chora<\/em> a voice and a character, one who wants to imagine herself as an Other Mother and her house as a nurturing receptacle outside the ever-changing world, but who is ultimately undone by her desire to incorporate as well as produce. As the maternal threat of jouissance<\/em>, the Beldam provides Coraline<\/em> with an occasion to perform material excess and a means to represent both the allure and the horror of virtual worlds.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

The virtual depths associated with the Beldam render the digital 3-D image visible as a dematerialized inscriptional space in which relationships between Form and Matter, ideal and embodiment, can be worked out. To that end, the gendered terms of Coraline<\/em>\u2019s narrative invite the spectator to reconsider the patriarchal dynamics behind Western metaphysics of representation. By focusing on Coraline<\/em>\u2019s depiction of the Beldam and the formation of her character, I suggest that the movie uses its chora<\/em> to produce a post-cinematic \u201cbridge between the intelligible and the sensible, mind and body\u201d that can replace celluloid\u2019s indexical invocation of the material while also providing catharsis for that loss (Grosz 112). The movie realizes these tensions through its digital approach to stop-motion animation, which enables it to contemplate figurally the transition into and out of materiality. Coraline<\/em>\u2019s stop-motion technology blends computer-designed profilmic models and computer-generated imagery (CGI) to place the uncanny frisson<\/em> of stop-motion in conversation with the uncanny surplus of digital 3-D projection. Thus as it shifts between digital and analog image production, the movie invites its spectator to meditate on the psychic dynamics of dimensionality\u2014not to mention the gendered dynamics of materiality. As Sianne Ngai has argued, the inherent instability of stop-motion produces a tendency towards excessive movement, an excessive animatedness that she links to long-standing racist stereotypes (89-125). For the spectator, stop-motion resembles an apparatus always on the verge of escaping, running amok, subverting the social hierarchies of the bodies and matter it is asked to produce. Coraline<\/em> builds on the racialized overtones of excessive animation and the uncontrollable animatedness of its stop-motion to capture the instability of matter and image, as well as the inherent uncanniness of the body, and offer them back to the spectator as the post-cinematic experience.<\/p>\n

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Technically, any film not computer-animated or illustrated by hand could be described as stop-motion; at its most basic level, \u201cstop-motion animation\u201d describes any filmic record of a physical, profilmic model that moves or is moved between frames. The earliest surviving stop-motion movie dates from 1902 and revels in the expressive potential of material manipulation. In \u201cFun in a Bakery Shop\u201d (Edwin S. Porter), a baker smothers an intruding rat with a lump of dough and then delights in molding the latter into a series of facial likenesses. Subsequent animators advanced this technique with puppets and model animation, which uses internally-framed dolls to create the illusion of motion. Because model animation requires extremely exacting adjustments between shots, 1940s stop-motion artists turned to swapping out different modular components of a doll between shots, also known as replacement animation, and their 1970s counterparts tried Claymation, which uses wire skeletons coated in plasticine to increase pliability. Although replacement animation first entered Hollywood through George Pal\u2019s Puppetoons in 1940, it did not yield a full feature until Henry Selick\u2019s The Nightmare Before Christmas<\/em> (1993). Selick continued to explore replacement animation in James and the Giant Peach<\/em> (1996) and Monkeybone<\/em> (2001) before turning briefly to computer animation for Coraline<\/em>\u2019s predecessor, Moon Girl<\/em> (2005). In this digital short, a young boy travels to the moon, meets its current protectress, and helps her defeat the evil ghosts who would darken it. Moon Girl<\/em> anticipates Coraline<\/em>\u2019s interest in the relationship of (outer) space to image production, and it also marks an important evolution in Selick\u2019s approach to animation. Before RealD brought stereoscopy into the twenty-first century, computer animation was widely marketed as \u201c3-D animation\u201d because it employs virtual 3-D models to produce its 2-D graphics. Selick\u2019s brief foray into computer animation for Moongirl<\/em> thus suggests an aesthetic preparation for Coraline<\/em>\u2019s subsequent experiments with perspective. As animation legend Ray Harryhausen recently observed, \u201cmany of the techniques used in stop-motion animation are part of the process in preparing CGI work\u201d (qtd. in Wells 97), and both Moongirl<\/em> and Coraline<\/em> invite the spectator to reflect on the fluidity between matter and image, modeling and 3-D image production, that defines the latter film.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Selick\u2019s 2009 stop-motion feature is visually distinct from yet shares many production techniques with the other computer-animated features released that year. Most computer-animated films use virtual models designed through mathematical (usually Cartesian) coordinate systems to make two-dimensional images look three-dimensional. These virtual models are often based on artists\u2019 three-dimensional sculptures, and in that sense, CGI animation captured the designation \u201c3-D animation\u201d because it looked like stop-motion animation (or at least more like it than cel animation ever could) while offering the smooth transitions and impossible effects typically associated with cel animation. Today, stop-motion is able to mimic computer-animation\u2019s smoothness and surrealism by (re)materializing digital models. 3-D printers, colloquially known as \u201cfabbers,\u201d enabled Selick and Laika Studios to manufacture quickly the thousands of modular components needed to animate a feature-length stop-motion film. Without digital models and 3-D printing, Laika could never have produced the 15,300 faces necessary for Coraline<\/em>\u2019s twenty-one characters to replicate human speech and expressions.<\/p>\n

Thus Coraline<\/em>\u2019s blend of computer-designed stop-motion puppetry and computer-aided special effects returns three-dimensional animation to its historic medium while also bringing the latter into the future of three-dimensional film: RealD. RealD is the most popular format for digitally projecting stereoscopic images, and although it has competitors, such as Dolby 3D and MasterImage 3D, it controlled 85% of US theatrical 3-D exhibition as of 2011 (Bond). Most of its perceived competitors are actually licensed corporate partners\u2014e.g., Disney Digital 3D\u2014or are not actually digital, such as the original IMAX 3D system. RealD uses a liquid crystal adapter attached to a digital projector to polarize 144 frames per second in opposite directions, half clockwise and half counterclockwise (see Cowan). For a viewer wearing RealD\u2019s polarized glasses, each eye picks up only every other image, while the distance between images onscreen creates a variable illusion of depth. Because RealD uses polarization instead of the traditional red-and-cyan anaglyphs of the 1950s, it produces higher color saturation and sharper image resolution than its predecessor. RealD also alleviates the eyestrain and \u201cghosting,\u201d or fringes of color around imperfectly aligned 3-D images, that bothered viewers of previous 3-D platforms, and it allows the viewer to turn or tilt her head without ruining the illusion. In short, RealD enables the 3-D viewer to experience herself as three-dimensionally enworlded, to inhabit the embodied spectatorial practice foreclosed by previous 3-D technologies. A viewer can now move in three dimensions while watching a movie that features and is about three-dimensionality; for the first time, she can experience 3-D vision as properly uncanny, rather than simply unwieldy.<\/p>\n

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Figure 1 – Coraline, the stop-motion star of CORALINE (Henry Selick, 2009 – frame grab image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Coraline <\/em>engages RealD\u2019s new three-dimensional visuality with a narrative about the problems of gender, vision, and identity. It dramatizes the chora<\/em> line, or the contested genealogy of materiality and maternity, femininity and form. The movie begins when its eponymous young heroine (voiced by Dakota Fanning, see Figure 1) moves with her parents into the Pink Palace, a subdivided mansion outside Ashland, Oregon. Its opening vista also announces its entry into film history, because the establishing shot of the Pink Palace recreates Gregg Toland\u2019s famous establishing shot of Xanadu, the stately pleasure-dome of Orson Welles\u2019s Citizen Kane<\/em> (1941) (see Figure 2). In Citizen Kane<\/em>, Toland vertically pans up a series of increasingly ornate fences before Xanadu finally appears, an architectural behemoth, behind Charles Foster Kane\u2019s monogrammed gate. The mansion reigns over a series of abandoned animals and pleasure craft like a warning: be careful what you wish for. Toland\u2019s Xanadu is a matte painting, but its vertical stature and superimposed foregrounds nonetheless introduce the viewer to the film\u2019s innovative deep-focus cinematography, the technique that would make both Toland and Citizen Kane<\/em> legendary. Coraline<\/em> cites this innovation through its establishing shot of a similarly menacing mansion on a hill, and its house likewise heralds the arrival of a new form of visual pleasure. For as the family\u2019s silver VW Beetle weaves up through the foreground, past the sign for the Pink Palace and into Coraline\u2019s new milieu, the viewer becomes aware of the various planes of image within a 3-D motion picture. The film thus draws on Toland\u2019s celebrated deep-focus cinematography to contextualize RealD stereoscopy as another technological advancement in cinematic art. Citizen Kane<\/em> becomes the background for Coraline<\/em>\u2019s 3-D gimmickry, the credential behind more typical conventions, such as aiming sewing needles and other protrusions at the viewer\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n

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Figure 2 – CORALINE (Henry Selick, 2009 – frame grab image) cites CITIZEN KANE\u2019s legendary deep-focus cinematography as a historical precedent for its stereoscopic artistry.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Unfortunately, Coraline<\/em>\u2019s characters begin their adventures on a less optimistic note. Coraline\u2019s parents (voiced by Terri Hatcher and John Hodgman) were recently involved in an automobile collision that the film implies may have been Coraline\u2019s fault. Her mother is now confined to a neck brace and incapable of turning her head (unlike the viewer). Between unpacking and finishing an overdue writing assignment, she has little time to attend to her daughter\u2019s loneliness and frustration, which only increase when Coraline meets her new neighbor, a know-it-all boy named Wyborn (voiced by Robert Bailey, Jr., see Figure 3). Wyborn\u2014also known as Wybie\u2014introduces himself by making fun of Coraline\u2019s dowsing rod and calling her a water witch. He later apologizes by giving her a doll, but Coraline\u2019s dissatisfaction continues to mount until she discovers a child-sized door hidden beneath the living room wallpaper. Her mother brusquely reveals the door\u2019s bricked-over passageway, but Coraline\u2019s neighbors\u2014Mr. Bobinsky (voiced by Ian Shane), the irradiated and irrational shut-in in the attic, and Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (voiced by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French), the bickering former burlesque queens who live in the basement\u2014nonetheless warn her not to go through it. Naturally, Coraline goes to bed that night thinking of nothing else and subsequently dreams (or discovers) that the small door leads to an Otherworld.<\/p>\n

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Figure 3 – Wyborn Lovat, Coraline\u2019s critically underappreciated friend. Frame grab from CORALINE (Henry Selick, 2009)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This Otherworld is an exercise in cinematic spectacle and the uncanny wonders of RealD. Coraline\u2019s transition into her new world begins when she follows one of Mr. Bobinsky\u2019s never-before-seen trained mice and glimpses it disappearing, impossibly, behind the bricked-up door. When she opens the door, a long pillowy purple tunnel unfurls in front of her, its dynamic dilation suggesting that this is no ordinary vaginal passageway (see Figure 4).<\/p>\n

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Figure 4 – The pillowy purple vaginal passage way to the Other Mother\u2019s Other World. Frame grab from CORALINE (Henry Selick, 2009)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In its 3-D undulations, the tunnel both resembles and surpasses the fleshy gates of hell that carry off little Carol Anne in Poltergeist<\/em> (Tobe Hooper, 1982). Coraline might not appreciate that comparison, however, as she seems pretty touchy about her name; for some reason, the people in her real world keep calling her Caroline. Coraline soon discovers that in the Otherworld, everyone knows her name . . . and what she likes to eat and how she likes to garden and why she feels unsatisfied at home. Her spectacular reception begins in the kitchen, where her Other Mother (also voiced by Teri Hatcher) immediately greets Coraline with a cornucopia of delectable comfort foods and, with the help of Coraline\u2019s Other Father (also voiced by John Hodgman), showers her with the attention she desperately craves. Entranced, Coraline soon returns to the Otherworld for more attention and s(t)imulation. Her Other Mother seems perfectly prepared to oblige, producing for Coraline a veritable wonderland of delights, delights that also happen to play to the strengths of RealD. At the Other Mother\u2019s behest, Coraline\u2019s Other Father flies her through a glowing garden of animated flowers and tickling vines (see Figure 5); later an ersatz Wybie escorts her to see Mr. Bobinsky\u2019s mythical mouse circus (see Figure 6) and a revival of Spink and Forcible\u2019s old burlesque acts, including a trapeze number in which they shed their aging, overweight bodies and emerge the starlets they may never have been.[4]<\/a> These phantasmatic visions defy the laws of botany, biology, and physiology; they are wonders, and as such they emphasize the wonder of RealD cinema: reality, uncannily enhanced.<\/p>\n

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Figure 5 – Coraline\u2019s Coraline-shaped garden. Frame grab from CORALINE (Henry Selick, 2009)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 6: The \u201cOther\u201d mouse circus for which there may be no original. Frame grab from CORALINE (Henry Selick, 2009)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Coraline returns from her tour, the Other Mother offers her an opportunity to join this spectacular world forever, but in order to become part of the ensemble, Coraline must give up her role as a spectator. Specifically, she must allow its matriarch to sew buttons over her eyes. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud encourages his reader to regard such threats as castration anxiety, but Coraline<\/em> will pursue a less phallocentric metaphor. After Coraline refuses to become part of Other Mother\u2019s world, she attempts to return to her \u201cnormal\u201d world by going to sleep but quickly finds that she can no longer slip between states so easily. Coraline then tries to leave Other Mother\u2019s terrain on foot and discovers that this world responds to laws of psycho-aesthetic\u2014rather than terrestrial\u2014distance. As Coraline marches away from the Other Mother\u2019s unheimliches<\/em> Heim<\/em>, the woods around her devolve, becoming increasingly pale, unearthly, and abstract. At first, they seem to reveal themselves as images, specifically as storyboard sketches of trees, but later they dissolve entirely, leaving Coraline lost in a blank white field. Fortunately, a wise feral cat (voiced by Keith David) arrives to talk her through her predicament; he explains that the Other Mother \u201conly made what she knew would impress you.\u201d When Coraline asks why the Other Mother wants her so badly, the cat corrects her solipsism; the Other Mother does not desire Coraline specifically, just \u201csomeone to love\u2014I think. Something that isn\u2019t her. Or maybe she\u2019d just love something to eat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coraline finds out precisely what that<\/em> means when she and the cat arrive right back where they started. Enraged by Coraline\u2019s resistance, the Other Mother throws her through a mirror into a dimly lit holding cell between image regimes until she can \u201clearn to be a loving daughter.\u201d Had she read her Freud, Coraline might recognize the Other Mother\u2019s conflicting desires as incorporation, as the desire to fuse with and cannibalize a love-object (see Freud, Totem and Taboo<\/em>). During incorporation, the subject takes in an outside object but cannot integrate it. As Derrida explains, such abortive assimilations both fortify and threaten the ego:<\/p>\n

Incorporation is a kind of theft to reappropriate the pleasure object. But that reappropriation is simultaneously rejected: which leads to the paradox of a foreign body preserved as foreign but by the same token excluded from a self that thenceforth deals not with the other, but only with itself. (xvii)<\/p>\n

To wit: the Other Mother confines Coraline to the mirror room, her chamber of incorporation\u2014what Derrida calls \u201cthe crypt . . . the vault of desire\u201d (xiv)\u2014both to exile and to contain her. There Coraline meets the Other Mother\u2019s other \u201cchildren,\u201d all of whom have given up their eyes to the Other Mother, whom they call the Beldam. The Other Children explain to Coraline that after they let the Beldam sew buttons over their eyes, they forgot their names and eventually lost their bodies as well\u2014a cryptic introduction to matter and metaphysics, if you will. The ghosts beg Coraline to find their eyes and thereby release what remains of their souls, but she demurs\u00a0until she discovers that the Beldam has trapped her parents in a snowglobe. Then, armed with a magic monocle made of salt-water taffy, Coraline returns to the Otherworld to reexamine the three spectacles that previously captivated her: the garden, the mouse circus, and the burlesque show. Each one turns out to be animated by a brightly colored marble (one of the ghosts\u2019 eye-souls), but when Coraline confronts the Beldam with her plunder, the witch does not simply release her prisoners as promised. Instead, she shatters the illusory Otherworld and reveals the sticky spider\u2019s web undergirding its architecture of incorporation. Here, RealD and Renaissance perspective unite to reveal the depth of the trap Coraline has wandered into (see Figure 7). Coraline tries to climb the sides of this monstrous grid, but her only egress is the vaginal tunnel, now brown, desiccated, and cluttered with cobwebs. When Coraline tries to close the door on this barren canal, she inadvertently catches the Beldam between worlds, severing the Beldam\u2019s right hand. In the film\u2019s d\u00e9nouement, Coraline must dispose of this claw by returning it to another infertile vagina, this time an abandoned well. Only then are the Pink Palace and its occupants safe from feminine incorporation.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

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Figure 7: Coraline races to escape the Beldam\u2019s stereoscopic web of de-formation. Frame grab from CORALINE (Henry Selick, 2009)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Throughout this narrative, Coraline<\/em>\u2019s figural focus on webs, wells, caves, and portals unifies its metaphoric and technological interests. As Wired<\/em> columnist Frank Rose observes, the digital 3-D \u201cis even better [than its predecessors] at sucking you in\u2014into the endless shadows of a cave or into the vortex of a shrieking face.\u201d Scott Higgins notes that Coraline<\/em> capitalizes on 3-D cinema\u2019s \u201cshoebox diorama effect as an aesthetic choice rather than as a deficiency . . . by exploring flamboyant depth effects that remain anchored to character experience\u201d (200). These effects also allow the film to comment on Western theories of perspective that have long emphasized depth over protrusion. From Leon Battista Alberti\u2019s De pictura<\/em> (1435) to the contemporary cinema screen, dominant representational traditions have conditioned viewers to experience the film image as a window, and the very physics of projection make it extremely difficult for a film image to successfully occlude that frame and appear to pop into the theater.[6]<\/a> For that reason, stereoscopic illusions of depth have always looked more believable than emergence effects, which extend images out at the audience. In fact these would-be protuberances are recognizable as a convention of US 3-D filmmaking precisely because of their failure, because they make the spectacle of 3-D visible instead of blending into the diegesis. Coraline<\/em>\u2019s many caverns and cavities do not exactly disappear into the narrative either, but they make visible the narrative\u2019s investment in what its technology makes possible. Moreover these stereoscopic vaginal spectacles reveal how contemporary philosophical debates about the chora<\/em> elucidate recent crises of faith regarding the post-cinematic image, particulary the crisis of form and indexical reference brought on by digital media.<\/p>\n

The chora<\/em>\u2014or kh<\/em>\u014dra<\/em>\u2014refers to the metaphysical crucible in which form is imprinted on matter, \u201cthe space within which the sensible copy of the intelligible is inscribed\u201d (Caputo 99). The term originates in Plato\u2019s Timaeus<\/em>, during the eponymous character\u2019s discourse on the origin of the universe: how demiurge created the gods, who were unchangeable and unchanging, and the world, which changes. In this cosmology, ideal and unchanging Form must be imparted to changeable Matter. The space within which this happens, although part of Matter, cannot take on any of the Forms that pass through it; thus Timaeus characterizes this space\u2014or interval, since it represents both a physical and a temporal alterity\u2014as that which \u201ccomes to be but never is\u201d (par. 27d).[7]<\/a> It exceeds representation and cannot possess any characteristics of its own, yet somehow it still seems to have a gender\u2014or rather its narrator is unable to conceive its passivity outside a binary gender system. As \u201cthe receptacle of all material bodies,\u201d the chora<\/em> is inherently both unintelligible and feminine:<\/p>\n

[T]he mother and receptacle of every created thing, of all that is visible or otherwise perceptible, we shouldn\u2019t call it earth or air or fire or water, or any of their compounds or constituents. And so we won\u2019t go wrong if we think of it as an invisible, formless receptacle of everything. (par. 51a)<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, Timaeus describes the chora<\/em> as \u201cthe nurse of creation\u201d (52d) that can only be \u201cgrasped by a kind of bastard reasoning\u201d (52b). These metaphors, although not intended to describe the chora<\/em> as it actually is, nonetheless produce a system of associations based on female anatomy and patriarchal interpretations of femininity. They thereby reduce both the chora<\/em> and the feminine to passive and unimpressionable blankness.<\/p>\n

In recent years, some French, Australian, and US theorists have reinvigorated chora<\/em> as a key concept for understanding the exclusion of women and the feminine from Western metaphysics, an exclusion that characterizes Coraline<\/em>\u2019s Other Mother as well. These reinvestigations, most profitably led by Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith Butler, often begin by departing from Jacques Derrida\u2019s reading of kh<\/em>\u014dra<\/em> as the ungendered, inassimilable origin of diff\u00e9rance<\/em> in Western philosophy. For Derrida, kh<\/em>\u014dra<\/em> is an aporia, that which philosophy cannot incorporate and is undeserving even of a definite article:<\/p>\n

The definite article presupposes the existence of a thing, the existent kh<\/em>\u014dra<\/em> to which, via a common name, <\/em>it would be easy to refer. But what is said of the kh<\/em>\u014dra<\/em> is that this name does not designate any of the known or recognized or, if you like, received types of existent. (236)<\/p>\n

Because \u201cwhat there is<\/em>, there, is not,\u201d kh<\/em>\u014dra<\/em> cannot have a gender, which means\u2014according to Derrida\u2014that all the gendered metaphors Timaeus uses to describe kh<\/em>\u014dra<\/em> are catachreses; they mislead the reader into an overly definite sense of kh<\/em>\u014dra<\/em>\u2019s nature.[8]<\/a> For Derrida, Plato\u2019s feminine figures only represent barred destinations of incorporational desire; like the children the Other Mother craves, they are held at a distance that both underscores their inadequacy and sustains a fantasy of materialization.<\/p>\n

Derrida\u2019s attempt to cleanse kh<\/em>\u014dra<\/em> of gender has been rebuked by an international coterie of feminists, whose critiques contextualize my reading of the Beldam as a figure of the chora<\/em>\u2019s disavowed epistemological value, labor, and desires. For instance, Julia Kristeva uses the chora<\/em> to describe the psychical space and developmental process of signification, a process in which the mother plays a pivotal role. In the chora<\/em> stage, an infant both finds all its needs satisfied by a (nondifferentiated) maternal body and experiences the first breaks between itself and that material plentitude. These breaks initiate the process of semiogenesis and subjectification (Kristeva 37). Kristeva emphasizes that \u201cthe mother\u2019s body is therefore what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations,\u201d making it \u201cthe ordering principle\u201d that precedes and underlies figuration and specularization (37). Her reading interprets Derrida\u2019s extra-grammatical aporia as the founding state of semiosis and inaugurates an important debate about the chora<\/em>\u2019s gender (Is it maternal? Is it feminine?) and its ideological role (Can it experience desire or only produce it?) that ground other feminist interpretations of the chora<\/em> and my reading of the Beldam.<\/p>\n

Many feminist philosophers read the chora<\/em> as a symptom\u2014even the origin\u2014of the routine exclusion of the feminine from Western (which is to say patriarchal) metaphysics of representation. Historically, this critique begins with Luce Irigaray; as Judith Butler explains, Irigaray understands the chora <\/em>to be \u201cwhat must be excluded from the domain of philosophy for philosophy itself to proceed\u201d (37), but she reads that exclusion as the very process through which the chora<\/em> becomes (dis)figured as the feminine. Irigaray argues that feminine metaphors for the chora <\/em>are both catachreses and precisely on point: to the extent that the chora<\/em>\u2019s role in figuration can be understood as \u201cparticipation by the non-participant\u201d (Irigaray 175), it makes the female present only to exclude it from the process of generation.[9]<\/a> In other words, the chora<\/em> manifests the patriarchal metaphysics endemic to Western theories of representation. As a metonymy for the maternal\u2014and thus the feminine\u2014in the origins of Western metaphysics, the chora<\/em> dehumanizes, disempowers, and dematerializes women, placing them outside the real in some Other Space. Like the Other Mother, the chora<\/em> exists beyond and beneath material existence and makes the latter possible, but only to be excluded from it. Her necessity contains the terms of her exile, and as Coraline <\/em>suggests, any conscious resistance to that ontological servitude amounts to villainy.<\/p>\n

Coraline<\/em> is a movie about world-building, about the desires behind the image and its relationship to space, and the Other Mother captures the ways that women have systematically served and been excluded from that discourse. The Other Mother is<\/em> the chora<\/em> endowed with voice and rage. In \u201cWoman, Chora<\/em>, Dwelling,\u201d Elizabeth Grosz contends that Western philosophers designate the chora<\/em> as a kind of barren femininity, an ungrounded, unspecified condition that can generate but cannot participate, \u201cwhose connections with women and female corporeality have been severed, producing a disembodied femininity as the ground for the production of a (conceptual and social) universe\u201d (113). This nonspecificity marginalizes the feminine and essentially reverses its generative powers: \u201cThough she [the chora<\/em>] brings being into becoming she has neither being nor the possibilities of becoming; both the mother of all things and yet without ontological status, she designates less a positivity than an abyss\u201d (Grosz 116). Once the\u00a0chora<\/i>\u00a0is designated an abyss, its\u00a0labor is systematically obfuscated and the chora<\/em> can be dismissed as \u201ca space of duty, of endless and infinitely repeatable chores that have no social value or recognition, the space of the affirmation and replenishment of others at the expense and erasure of the self\u201d (Grosz 122). As part of an origin story for the universe, then, the chora<\/em> both does work and obscures work, the work required of women for the perpetuation of their own effacement.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Were she a philosopher, the Beldam might make a similar point: endlessly engaged in a production of the sensible, she exists as that which must be expelled and repressed for the real world to maintain its heteronormative futurity. Like the chora<\/em>, she is an Other Mother vilified for her (allegedly) illegitimate desire to take in or take on materiality. Constantly looking for something to call her own, she tries to incorporate spectators into the worlds she materializes for them, but once they become hers, she finds that they are not enough: being cannot live up to form. Thus although she identifies herself as an Other Mother, it is equally helpful to call her by her other name: the Beldam. Originally used to designate any great- or grand-mother, by 1586 beldam<\/em> began to refer to \u201cany aged woman,\u201d but especially \u201ca loathsome old woman, a hag; a witch, [and] a furious raging woman.\u201d[10]<\/a> Thus she is both a figure of nurturance and reproduction and explicitly marked as barren. As Coraline\u2019s Other Mother, the Beldam represents both the return of the maternal plenitude Coraline\u2019s real mother cannot offer her (because she has a job and because Coraline is no longer an undifferentiated infant) and the threat of that plenitude. The Beldam is jouissance<\/em>, and she makes jouissance<\/em> visible through her ultimate annihilation of the symbolic Otherworld.<\/p>\n

The Beldam is also the force of creation that begins Coraline <\/em>and establishes its metaphysical conceit and stereoscopic aesthetic. Although the viewer does not know it at the time, the Beldam is actually the first character to appear in the movie, which begins with two disembodied needle-hands deconstructing a young girl doll via fantastic emergence effects. Viewers do not meet the Beldam face-to-face until Coraline goes through the portal into the Otherworld where the Beldam is once again cooking something up, trying to entice Coraline with her ideal home-cooked meal. At her first appearance, then, the Beldam creates an existential crisis for Coraline, who must learn to value material reality over virtual ideals.[11]<\/a><\/p>\n

Belief in ideal forms is precisely what trapped the three Other Children, who haunt Coraline<\/em> as narrative and figural failures. They failed to appreciate their imperfect material lives and to discern the Beldam\u2019s desire, which is how they became trapped in her world of illusions. They are also aesthetic failures, their dialogue mawkish and their models hackneyed and unattractive. Nonetheless, the precise nature of their figural failure enables important observations about the film\u2019s metaphoric investment in celluloid materiality. When Coraline first discovers the Other Children, hiding under a sheet inside the Beldam\u2019s mirror-limbo, they resemble bobbing balls of light. After Coraline exposes the Other Children, they start\u00a0to float and flicker around her, their images ghosting like bad 3-D anaglyphs. In short, the movie uses a defect of stereoscopic celluloid cinematicity to suggest that these children have passed away. Whereas Coraline\u2019s model exudes reliable material fortitude, the Other Children flicker, like poorly projected film, and thereby connote death within the film, the death of film, and the death that has always haunted film. Their limbo is the lifedeath<\/em> Alan Cholodenko describes as undergirding all animation, \u201cthe spectre in the screen [that] gives all form, but is \u2018itself\u2019 never given as such\u201d (\u201cThe Spectre\u201d 47). The ghost children invite one to reread the cinema for the inanimation haunting all animation, to regard the projector as an apparatus that gives existence to intelligibility, that\u2014like the chora<\/em>\u2014must be excluded from the representable world and its animating principle.<\/p>\n

Yet by setting the ghost children apart as failures, Coraline<\/em> reverses the power structure inherent in animation\u2019s lifedeath and Plato\u2019s chora<\/em>. Unlike her precedents, Coraline<\/em>\u2019s Beldam is both a crucible of materiality and spectacle and capable of divorcing intelligibility and sensibility when she feels she is not being appreciated. As Coraline races to defuse the Beldam\u2019s world of wonders, the Beldam vents her frustration by dematerializing it, first erasing color and then tearing up the woods and gardens around her Pink Palace, leaving only a gray haze (see Figure 8).<\/p>\n

\"\"
Figure 8 – Coraline tries to outrun the spectacular dematerialization of spectacle in Coraline. Frame grab from CORALINE (Henry Selick, 2009)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This ruination very much resembles a conceptual inversion of Dorothy\u2019s escape from the grey plains of Kansas in Victor Fleming\u2019s Wizard of Oz<\/em> (1939), as now the Technicolor Oz is being pulled out from under the little girl who could not appreciate it. Inside the Pink Palace, the Beldam demolishes her domestic spectacle as well, ripping up the floorboards and stripping the paper from the walls. Previously, the Beldam had always been an engine of materialization; now she throws that engine into reverse, the maternal jouissance<\/em> withdrawing its previous support of the symbolic and thus destructuring her world. To be sure, Coraline<\/em> does not sympathize with the Beldam in this rebellion; it represents her exposed web as a space of decay and absorption (desanguinated bugs and all). When the chora<\/em> demands acknowledgement for her work, Coraline<\/em> characterizes it as a space of selfish<\/em> reception. Thus it leaves the Beldam trapped alone in her own web, blind and maimed, even as it gives her a chance to articulate her desire: \u201cDon\u2019t leave me, don\u2019t leave me. I\u2019ll die without you.\u201d Coraline is hardly sympathetic to the chora<\/em>\u2019s line (what child wants to hear that its mother has needs too?), but by offering its material functionary a chance to explain, the movie indicates a desire\u00a0to understand its own uncanny animating principle. Like the filmmakers themselves, the Beldam has brought dolls and worlds to life for her spectator\u2019s amusement. Coraline rejects such ersatz-worlds as crypts she can escape from. She would like to believe that by exiting the Beldam\u2019s web she can exit the system, but Coraline<\/em> suggest incorporation is not so easy to evade.<\/p>\n

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To be more precise, Beldam\u2019s desire to incorporate Coraline into her crypt exposes a political uncanniness in stop-motion animation and ultimately digital 3-D as well. Derrida suggests that during incorporation, \u201c[t]he dead is taken into us but doesn\u2019t become a part of us. It occupies a particular place in our body. It can speak on its own. It can haunt and ventriloquize our own proper body and our own proper speech\u201d (qtd. in Cholodenko, \u201cThe Crypt\u201d 101). Derrida\u2019s metaphor also describes the excessive material presence through which stop-motion becomes political\u2014the way in which it materializes and excessively animates the social world that produced it. As Sianne Ngai has suggested, replacement animation enables past\u2014but evidently not dead\u2014stereotypes about the racialized body to erupt across its surfaces. Coraline<\/em> toys with the trope of animatedness that Ngai unpacks and extends her theory of excessive animation to the feminine, the chora<\/em>, and thus the impact of Western metaphysics on post-cinematic systems of representation.<\/p>\n

Ngai pursues the political implications of excessive animation\u2014which she calls animatedness\u2014as \u201cone of the most \u2018basic\u2019 ways in which affect becomes publicly visible in an age of mechanical reproducibility . . . a kind of innervated \u2018agitation\u2019 or \u2018animatedness\u2019\u201d (31). Tracing excessive animatedness through nineteenth- and twentieth-century US cultural production, Ngai borrows Rey Chow\u2019s figure of the \u201cpostmodern automaton\u201d to read stop-motion as a metaphor for the mechanization of the female and working-class body under modernity. Chow contends that modern visual culture provides both the logic and the locus for contemporary regimes of difference, that \u201cthe visual as such, as a kind of dominant discourse of modernity, reveals epistemological problems that are inherent in . . . the very ways social difference\u2014be it in terms of class, gender, or race\u2014is constructed\u201d (55). Specifically, Chow argues that \u201cOne of the chief sources of the oppression of women lies in the way they have been consigned to visuality . . . which modernism magnifies with the availability of technology such as cinema\u201d (59-60). Ngai argues that different forms of visual production engender different modes of constructing the other and that stop-motion \u201ccalls for new ways of understanding the technologization of the racialized body\u201d (125). Ngai goes on to examine how the body becomes a technological object for the performance of race (or, one might argue, for the performance of maladaption to US racism) in FOX\u2019s stop-motion sitcom, The PJs<\/em> (1998-2001). Chronicling the misadventures of a disenfranchised public-housing community in Detroit, The PJs<\/em> requires characters\u2019 mouths to move very quickly to deliver its comedic dialogue, yet such rapid replacement animation leads to visible modular instability. As conversations progress, characters\u2019 mouths become excessively mobile, even volatile, and for Ngai, this excessive animation suggests \u201can exaggerated responsiveness to the language of others that turns the subject into a spasmodic puppet\u201d (32). Such unintended animation contributes to the show\u2019s critique of racism, as \u201cin its racialized form animatedness loses its generally positive associations with human spiritedness or vitality and comes to resemble a kind of mechanization\u201d (32). Excessive animatedness thus elevates stop-motion above the innocuousness of advertisements and children\u2019s programming and emphasizes the genre\u2019s commentary on the social body, on the body as a cog conditioned by the social machine.<\/p>\n

Ngai\u2019s analysis of The PJs <\/em>marks a significant break with previous analyses of stop-motion animation, which tend to focus on its industrial history and its uncanny timelessness. Indeed, not only does Ngai call attention to the social and political implications of animation as a technology of vision, but she also suggests that the uncanniness of animation metonymizes the uncanniness of the subject under industrialized capital. In the twenty-first century, this subject no longer produces wealth through labor but struggles with quandaries of consumption, representation, and virtual existence. Coraline<\/em> exposes this production of difference through its representation of African-American characters not present in Neil Gaiman\u2019s original novel. These characters, Wyborn Lovat and his grandmother, own the Pink Palace where Coraline lives; in fact, the film hints that Ms. Lovat (voiced by Motown artist Carolyn Crawford) began fighting the Beldam long before Coraline arrived. Ms. Lovat only chimes in as an off-screen voice for most of the movie, but when she finally does appear, her skin color and accessories make race retroactively visible in the film. Indeed, Ms. Lovat marks Wyborn as African-American for audience members who may not previously have acknowledged him as such. For although Wyborn is the only brown character in most of the film, another is blue-skinned, and others have blue hair, so his brown skin and brown mop-top may not suggest blackness to a viewer not used to recognizing race in animation. With the arrival of Ms. Lovat, the race that was always implicit in Wyborn\u2019s excessive animation becomes visible. Not only does Ms. Lovat look darker than Wyborn, she also physiologically resembles a PJs<\/em> character. She even wears a gardenia in her hair, an homage to both Billie Holiday and Hattie McDaniel, who wore the flower while accepting her 1939 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.<\/p>\n

For the spectator who has been looking for it, however, race has always been visible in Coraline<\/em>, politicizing its animation from the opening scenes of the movie. Its first shot depicts an African-American doll floating down through an open window to be grasped by the Beldam\u2019s needle-fingers. These hands then begin dissembling the doll\u2019s clothes and features, removing form from matter, before exposing the hegemonic whiteness of US film by reconstituting the doll as Caucasian (and specifically as Coraline). This (de)materialization sequence is crucial for the movie\u2019s artistic and political projects because it binds the production and obfuscation of race in Coraline<\/em> to its new 3-D aesthetic. The scene works on the doll\u2014and the viewer\u2014with both classic 3-D projectiles (in this case a needle poking up through the doll\u2019s button-eye and waving toward the viewer) and deep focus shots of the doll descending into and floating out of an open window. These virtual expansions of screen space inaugurate a new approach to 3-D visuality, wherein the screen becomes a receptacle for the nebulous materialization of the image. Because this prologue reinscribes screen space as receptacle during a scene of feminine production, moreover, it fosters a political association between chora<\/em>, race, and materiality in animation that frames the film\u2019s depiction of its central African-American character, Wyborn.<\/p>\n

Wyborn first arrives in Coraline<\/em> dressed as a \u201cspook\u201d; outfitted to resemble a ghost, in a black fireman\u2019s coat and a welder\u2019s mask painted to resemble a skull, he appears on top of a cliff, rearing up his bicycle as lightning crashes and Coraline gasps. Once she recovers from her fright, Coraline immediately begins undermining\u2014or unpacking\u2014Wyborn\u2019s name; she ignores his preferred nickname, Wybie, and calls him \u201cWhy-were-you-born\u201d instead. As cunning as this sobriquet might sound, it obscures the degree to which the film uses race to signal ontological uncertainty. Not only is Wyborn an annoyingly animate little boy, he is also excessively tied to the film\u2019s representation of its own animation process. Wyborn unwittingly brings the Beldam\u2019s doll to Coraline, and his gift reminds the spectator that Coraline is herself a doll while naturalizing her dollhood by comparison. Wybie also becomes the model against which Coraline\u2019s animatedness develops, where animatedness is defined (by Ngai) as \u201cthreatening one\u2019s own limits (or the roles in which one is captured and defined) not by transcending these limits from above but by inventing new ways of inhabiting them\u201d (124). In the Otherworld, the Beldam produces an Other Wyborn to guide Coraline through her cinema of attractions; however, this Wyborn\u2019s mouth is sewn into an exaggerated rictus that emphasizes the horror of being animated (as opposed to being animate). Thus Wyborn\u2019s name and his epistemological role in the film indicate his centrality for understanding the greater visual and material crisis in Coraline<\/em>. Wyborn brings out the animatedness in Coraline<\/em> and in Coraline; his character produces the connection between Selick\u2019s movie and Ngai\u2019s affect theory that ultimately unveils the contemporary stakes of the chora<\/em> for digital mediation.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n

Thus Wyborn\u2019s politicized embodiment helps the spectator understand Coraline<\/em>\u2019s architecture as a film and its commentary on contemporary theories of gendered architecture and materialized form. Coraline<\/em> draws its viewer into the experience of scenic space and narratively thematizes that experience, and by attending to that intersection, we can better understand our spectatorial investment in digital 3-D. Coraline<\/em> reminds its viewer that embodied experiences of vision and animatedness do not come without social conditioning. It reproduces the lived experience of biocular vision as virtual and fantasmatic and in so doing, it allows the spectator to acknowledge that such embodied participation in vision is necessarily uncanny. Simultaneously, it proffers the chora<\/em> as the guiding structure of a paradoxical desire for incorporated spectacle and incorporation into spectacle. The film thus enables viewers to experience the desire for RealD as an extension of an existing trope for understanding the deep interweaving of gender and representation that persists into the digital. Moreover, Coraline<\/em>\u2019s return to the uncanny trope of the chora<\/em> can direct us toward a new theory for the uncanniness of digital spectatorship and a new investment to replace many viewers\u2019 loss of faith in the photographic index.<\/p>\n

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Coraline<\/em> negotiates the relationship of form to matter no matter which platform one sees it on, but its significance for spectatorial investment in digital cinema is most pronounced when the film is exhibited in RealD. Through Coraline<\/em>, the RealD viewer receives a visual exercise in the relationship of image to matter for digital cinema; the film provides metaphors for those questions through its narrative and its excessively digital and excessively material production techniques. Coraline<\/em>\u2019s figural and dramatic chora<\/em> invites the spectator to reconsider the crisis facing cinematic indexicality. Since the early 1980s, media critics have questioned how digital image capture, processing, and exhibition\u2014and their allegedly \u201cinfinite capacity\u201d to manipulate an image\u2014would affect the truth-value of photochemical photography. Such ruminations demonstrate that digital imagery has undermined the spectator\u2019s historical faith in the photograph as indexical record. As Philip Rosen explains, photographic indexicality\u2014\u201cminimally defined as including some element of physical contact between referent and sign\u201d\u2014represented the standard of historiographic probity from roughly the 1830s through the 1980s, but lately its credibility has come unmoored (302). Rosen points out that digital image production and exhibition do not necessarily carry their viewer any further from the profilmic referent than analog transcription, but they may make the image\u2019s capacity for duplicity more visible. Popular US film genres have also shown a marked predilection for \u201cdigital mimicry,\u201d exploiting CGI\u2019s capacity for hyperrealism in blockbusters like Independence Day<\/em> (Roland Emmerich, 1996), Spider-Man<\/em> (Sam Raimi, 2001), and Transformers<\/em> (Michael Bay, 2007) (see also McClean). These films use digital image production to bolster photorealism, and thus indexicality, as a representational norm or standard, even as indexicality also stands as the limit they must overcome (Rosen 309). Moreover, the very crispness and \u201cperfection\u201d of computer graphics also induce digital skepticism that prevents many post-cinematic spectators from psychically investing in digital projection. As Sobchack so eloquently explains, the cold perfection\u2014the \u201cdeathlife<\/em>\u201d\u2014of computer animation fails to provide its viewers with any substitute for or diversion from the loss of the impossible fantasy of indexicality (180).<\/p>\n

Coraline<\/em> incorporates this \u201cdeathlife\u201d\u2014or digital uncanny\u2014into its third dimension; it constructs the 3-D screen as receptacle for a new experience of form and matter. It exploits the instability of the index while experimenting with the chora<\/em> as a potentially more useful metaphor for the relationship of image to matter for this platform. Recall that Coraline<\/em> was made with digital stop-motion, with digital illustrations that produced plasticine models that later became digital photographs. The movie\u2019s whole technique is premised on the uncanniness of the motion picture\u2019s precarious relationship to indexicality, but it also creates an image that can reassure the viewer that there is a referent for digital 3-D\u2019s uncanny screen depth. At root, the trouble with RealD\u2014like 2-D digital imagery before it\u2014is its uncanny loss of indexicality: how can a digital motion picture reproduce the viewer\u2019s faith in a mimetic image famously devoid of film\u2019s characteristic indexical trace? Stereoscopic visual technologies aim to produce a more material experience of vision than their two-dimensional counterparts, but digital 3-D projection does so\u2014and does so more successfully\u2014by (further) cleaving the image from material, profilmic referents. Lev Manovich, D.N. Rodowick, and others have already demonstrated that the digital photograph is neither more nor less indexical than the chemical photograph, but Coraline<\/em> precipitates a new theory of digital spectatorship based on the historically unstable relationship of form to matter. In Coraline<\/em>, the chora<\/em> returns to replace the index as the dominant metaphor for the relationship of image to matter in cinema. It does so through RealD\u2019s illusory spaces and its stop-motion dolls\u2019 uncanny physicality. By mimicking materiality on screen, Coraline<\/em> provides the spectator with a locus\u2014a stain, if you will\u2014in which to locate her anxieties about visuality and material existence.<\/p>\n

Even if the juggernaut of Hollywood studio marketing succeeds in overshadowing Coraline <\/em>and relegating it to the footnotes of future histories of digital stereoscopy, this low-budget independent animation nonetheless constitutes a pivotal moment in the history of digital projection, an important metacinematic contemplation of the pleasure of post-cinematic spectatorship. The movie not only positions its new exhibition platform in relationship to previous cinematic innovations like deep focus, it also enables us to see digital cinema through older philosophical inquiries into the relationship of image to matter. Moreover, the political overtones of its production medium should remind the spectator that \u201cthe production of the West\u2019s \u2018others\u2019 depends on a logic of visuality that bifurcates \u2018subjects\u2019 and \u2018objects\u2019 into the incompatible positions of intellectuality and spectacularity\u201d (Chow 60)\u2014or in the case of the chora<\/em>, into incompatible categories of intelligibility and femininity. Coraline<\/em> allows us to screen the problematic tropes governing Western metaphysics of visuality; it reminds us that these issues condition our relationship to the image just as much as the RealD spectacles perched over our eyes. Like the Beldam, we have filled our virtual receptacles with ghosts who whisper: the pleasures of new media are built on ancient regimes of power and visuality.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201c3D.\u201d Box Office Mojo<\/em>. Web. <http:\/\/boxofficemojo.com\/genres\/chart\/?id=3d.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAvatar<\/em>.\u201d Box Office Mojo<\/em>. Web. <http:\/\/boxofficemojo.com\/movies\/?id=avatar.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Bond, Paul. \u201cRealD CEO Michael Lewis.\u201d Interview with Michael Lewis. Hollywood Reporter<\/em>, 16 Aug. 2011. Web. <www.hollywoodreporter.com\/news\/reald-ceo-michael-lewis-223427<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Bordwell, David. Pandora\u2019s Digital Box<\/em>. Web. <www.davidbordwell.net\/books\/pandora.php<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex<\/em>. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.<\/p>\n

Caputo, John D. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida<\/em>. New York: Fordham UP, 1997. Print.<\/p>\n

Cholodenko, Alan. \u201cThe Crypt, The Haunted House, of Cinema.\u201d Cultural Studies Review <\/em>10.2 (2004): 99-113. Web. <http:\/\/epress.lib.uts.edu.au\/journals\/index.php\/csrj\/article\/view\/3474\/3612<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

—. \u201cThe Spectre in the Screen\u201d Animation Studies<\/em> 3 (2008): 42-50. Web. <http:\/\/journal.animationstudies.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/ASVol3Art6ACholodenko.pdf<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Invention in Contemporary Cultural Studies<\/em>. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Print.<\/p>\n

Cowan, Matt. \u201c3D Glossary.\u201d RealD\u2014The New 3D<\/em>. 1 Feb. 2008. Web. <www.reald.com\/Content\/Presentations.aspx<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine<\/em>. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.<\/p>\n

Derrida, Jacques. \u201cFors<\/em>: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.\u201d The Wolf Man\u2019s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy<\/em>. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Print.<\/p>\n

Elsaesser, Thomas. \u201cThe \u2018Return\u2019 of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century.\u201d Critical Inquiry<\/em> 39.2 (2013): 217-46. Print.<\/p>\n

Foreman, Adrienne. \u201cA Fantasty of Foreignness: The Use of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender to Solidify Self in Henry Selick\u2019s Coraline<\/em>.\u201d Red Feather Journal<\/em> 3.2 (2012): 1-15. Print.<\/p>\n

Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo<\/em>. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1990. Print.<\/p>\n

—. \u201cThe Uncanny.\u201d The Pelican Freud Library<\/em>, vol. 14. Eds. Albert Dickson and James Strachey. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Penguin, 1985. Print.<\/p>\n

Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft<\/em>. Cambridge: MIT P, 2009. Print.<\/p>\n

Grosz, Elizabeth. \u201cWoman, Chora<\/em>, Dwelling.\u201d Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies<\/em>. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.<\/p>\n

Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure<\/em>. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.<\/p>\n

Higgins, Scott. \u201c3-D in Depth: Coraline<\/em>, Hugo<\/em>, and a Sustainable Aesthetic.\u201d Film History<\/em> 24.2 (2012): 196-209. Print.<\/p>\n

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman<\/em>. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Print.<\/p>\n

Kristeva, Julia. \u201cThe Semiotic and the Symbolic.\u201d The Portable Kristeva<\/em>. Ed. Kelly Oliver. Trans. Margaret Weller. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Print.<\/p>\n

McClean, Shilo T. Digital Storytelling: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film<\/em>. Cambridge: MIT P, 2008. Print.<\/p>\n

McClintock, Pamela. \u201cStudios, Theaters Near Digital Pact.\u201d Variety<\/em> 10 Mar. 2008. Web. <www.variety.com\/article\/VR1117982175.html?categoryid=2502&cs=1<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Myers, Lindsay. \u201cWhose Fear Is It Anyway?: Moral Panics and \u2018Stranger Danger\u2019 in Henry Selick\u2019s Coraline<\/em>.\u201d Lion and the Unicorn<\/em> 36.3 (2012): 245-57. Print.<\/p>\n

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings<\/em>. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. Print.<\/p>\n

Plato. Timaeus and Critias<\/em>. Trans. Robin Waterfield. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.<\/p>\n

Rose, Frank. \u201cBeowulf <\/em>and Angelina Jolie Give 3-D a Second Chance in Hollywood.\u201d Wired<\/em> 15.11, 23 Oct. 2007. Web. <www.wired.com\/entertainment\/hollywood\/magazine\/15-11\/ff_3dhollywood<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory<\/em>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Print.<\/p>\n

Sobchack, Vivian. \u201cFinal Fantasies: Computer Graphic Animation and the [Dis]Illusion of Life.\u201d Animated Worlds<\/em>. Eds. Suzanne Buchan, David Surman, and Paul Ward. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. Print.<\/p>\n

Wells, Paul. Animation: Genre and Authorship<\/em>. New York: Wallflower, 2002. Print.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

The author wishes to thank South Atlantic Quarterly<\/em> for permission to adapt this article from a 2011 special issue on \u201cDigital Desire\u201d edited by Ellis Hanson.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Digital 3-D movies can make three times as much per screen as their 2D versions, which explains why distributors and exhibitors embraced digital projection. In the early 2010s, distributors also offered exhibitors financing packages to subsidize their transition to digital projection. See Rose; Bordwell.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Coraline<\/em> thus resolves the shortcomings of digital animation that Sobchack identifies in her case study of the early digital feature Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within <\/em>(2001), which she argues failed (both critically and financially) because it removed the indexical trace of hand-drawn cel animation without providing an alternative locus for the uncanniness of cinemagraphic motion.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> To be clear, I am arguing that Coraline<\/em> progressively\u2014even radically\u2014reinterprets an age-old patriarchal trope of Western metaphysics. I am aware that other critics critique this film for its allegedly conservative, even reactionary gender representations. However, these scholars focus almost exclusively on the film\u2019s central character and her narrative without considering its animation or stereoscopic techniques. Thus they miss its important formal experiments with representation as such. See Halberstam; Myers.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> This sequence is bawdy, but just bawdy enough, because Coraline <\/em>cannot afford either a G or a PG-13 rating in the US. While G indicates a film is appropriate for \u201cgeneral audiences,\u201d PG-13 suggests that it may contain objectionable violence, sexual activity, or language. PG\u2019s \u201cparental guidance\u201d warning suggests that a film will be neither tediously tame nor offensively titillating, making it the most profitable and hence most desirable rating for many US filmmakers. While analyzing the corporate deal that would bring RealD to Regal, Cinemark, and AMC theaters across the US by 2009, Variety <\/em>columnist Pamela McClintock cites a recent study by Nielsen Co. that discovered that \u201cfamily-friendly, PG-rated films without profanity generated the best box office results.\u201d McClintock\u2019s article ties PG-ratings to RealD as the financial future of the studio system; indeed, eight of the top ten RealD movies have been rated PG or PG-13. See also Box Office Mojo<\/em>\u2019s article on \u201c3D.\u201d<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Barbara Creed offers perhaps the most cogent analysis of femininity, Freudian incorporation, and maternal monstrosity in The Monstrous Feminine<\/em>, wherein she points out that many cultural narratives about subject-formation hinge on the defeat of a mother\u2019s consuming desire.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> For more on window metaphors in Western visuality, see Friedberg.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> He goes on to explain that \u201cit only ever acts as the receptacle for everything, and it never comes to reassemble in any way whatsoever any of the things that enter it\u201d (par. 50c).<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Derrida writes, \u201cTo that end, it is necessary not to confuse it in a generality by properly attributing to it properties which would still be those of a determinate existent, one of the existents which it\/she \u2018receives\u2019 or whose image it\/she receives: for example, an existent of the female gender\u2014and that is why the femininity of the mother or the nurse will never be attributed to it\/her as a property, something of her own\u201d (237).<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> She contends that \u201c[chora<\/em>] is an approximate name chosen for a general conception; there is no intention of suggesting a complete parallel with motherhood . . . by a remote symbolism, the nearest [its philosophers] could find, they indicate that Matter is sterile, not female to full effect, female in receptivity only, not in pregnancy\u201d (179).<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a>\u00a0Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>,\u00a02nd ed.,\u00a0s.v.\u00a0“beldam,” Online at:\u00a0<<\/a>http:\/\/dictionary.oed.com\/cgi\/entry\/50019862<\/a>>.<\/a><\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> This is where my reading of Coraline<\/em> departs from those of Judith Halberstam and Lindsay Myers, who consider Coraline<\/em> a fundamentally conservative film. Halberstam argues that Selick\u2019s movie is \u201cabout the dangers of a world that is crafted in opposition to the natural world of family and the ordinary\u201d (180). In fact, the Otherworld is crafted to reflect the ideology dominating Coraline\u2019s real world, the ideology she must learn to see past. Halberstam\u2019s reading ignores Coraline\u2019s growth over the course of the film; Coraline\u2019s adventures in the Otherworld teach her to reject the heteronomativity she thought she wanted and to value community as much as her own ego-satisfaction.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Adrienne Foreman draws our attention to a third, more problematic use of racialized imagery in Coraline<\/em>, namely the mystical black cat voiced by Keith David. Foreman suggests that \u201cthe cat is racialized in his position as well as his voice\u201d because he plays the role of \u201cthe magic negro\u201d whose supernatural powers help the white protagonists achieve her goals (12). The cat is the first character to see through the Beldamn\u2019s tricks, suggesting perhaps the crucial role race needs to play in our understanding of politicized regimes of vision.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Caetlin Benson-Allott<\/strong> is Director and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing<\/em> (2013) and Remote Control<\/em> (2015). Her work on spectatorship, video technologies, sexuality, and genre has appeared in Cinema Journal<\/em>, Film Quarterly<\/em>, the Journal of Visual Culture<\/em>, and Feminist Media Histories<\/em>, among other journals, and in multiple anthologies.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Caetlin Benson-Allott,\u00a0\u201cThe Chora<\/em> Line: RealD Incorporated,\u201d in Denson and Leyda (eds),\u00a0Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016). Web. <http:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/post-cinema\/3-3-benson-allott\/<\/a>>. ISBN 978-0-9931996-2-2\u00a0(online)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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