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The Other as Loathing and Abjection

‘Naked’ as the obverse of Horror Film

One cannot get rid of anything one cannot get over


anything, one cannot repel anything–everything
hurts. Men and things obtrude too closely;
experiences strike one too deeply; memory
becomes a festering wound
Friedrich Nietzsche

The limit is crossed with a weary horror: hope seems


a respect fatigue grants to the necessity of the
world.
The ground will give way beneath my feet.
George Bataille
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Introduction and Theoretical Framing

Kendall Phillips has noted that, ‘Genres are…“a loose evolving system of

arguments and readings, helping to shape commercial strategies and

aesthetic ideologies.”’1 Further noting that ‘if we talk about a film as if it

were a horror film—market it that way, respond to it that way, interpret it as

one—then it is, effectively, part of that genre.’2 He then goes on to argue

that certain Horror films ‘resonate’ with audiences and make up a ‘collective

nightmare’.3 These films capture cultural anxieties, fears and become part of

a cultural lexicon, in which they, through an understated allegory, represent

1
…quoted in Kendall Phillips Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture
p.5
2
ibid
3
ibid p.3
these cultural anxieties.4

It is the position of this essay that, this being the case, Naked is the obverse

of Horror film. However I am conducting a double movement, which I admit

from the beginning is logically incoherent. I will not argue for or against the

analysis that Horror films, as ‘collective nightmares’, maintain the singularity

of identity through the displacement of the Other into the horrific and

monstrous. I will instead Briefly outline why it is important to keep this in

mind and utilise it within an analysis whilst not allowing it to become a

complete system of analysis. In a sense I am asking us to sustain a state of

play between a system of analysis which locates the effects of film in terms

of its ‘content’: that is, its symbolic functioning within the individual and

culture, and a system of analysis which looks to its ‘form’: that is, its

physical structure, and immediate visceral effect on the viewer.

Implicit within this analysis are the political ramifications of films and film

theory. That is, the effect films have on collective ideas of identity

concerning sexuality, race, nationality and morality. And the effort of

cultural theorists to bring these effects out and apply them to the schema of

cultural criticism in general, especially concerning feminism and cultural

exclusion: that is, the Othering of certain aspects of society or the world,

maintaining a sense of self identity to the detriment of others.

4
ibid
One method of critique, and the one, it has been argued, that has been used

in Film criticism the most, is a psychoanalytical analysis of films. This

method diagnoses inherent symptoms of patriarchy and oppression, and the

‘fear of the Other’, which locates prescriptive, normative articulations of

dominant culture within Horror films. As an example Babara Creed who,

through, a reading of Kristeva, argues that the ‘ideological project’ of Horror

film is to ‘shore up the symbolic order by constructing the feminine as an

imaginary ‘other’ which must be repressed and controlled in order to secure

and protect the social order.’ 5


The danger with such analysis is, however,

that, in reading specific articulations of cultural norms into a film, the

critique actually compacts the totality of such social domination, by

retaining ‘a fixed dichotomy of self and other as well as gender binaries.’6 I

will expand, in the chapter on Abjection, on why Kristeva’s understanding,

and psychoanalyses’ generally, do not necessarily maintain these

dichotomies as fixed, but posit them, due to psychoanalyses’ position as a

‘limit discourse of modernity’, as contingent tools.7

It is the argument of this essay that both the work of Kristeva and Deleuze

operate from a general, not closed, economy, one which goes beyond the

limit of the text by maintaining a certain infidelity to the coherence of logic,

which is also at once rigorously coherent: a fidelity to the failure of

5
Babara Creed ‘Alien and the Monstrous Feminine’ in Annette Kuhn Alien Zone:
Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema p.140
6
Anna Powell Deleuze and Horror Film p.17
7
Sara Beardsworth ‘From Revolution to Revolt culture’ p.53
representation.8 In terms of my argument concerning Naked as the obverse

of Horror, I will argue that the psychoanalytical reading of Horror film, has a

great deal to say, but should be qualified, not only by its own logical fluidity

but, further, by an analyses of the corporeal aspect of film. In this sense I

will utilise Deleuze’s understanding of the place of the viewer and the

irreconcilable singularity of difference and mutual imbrications in the

relation between the viewer, the film, and culture—the material and

symbolic, sensation and signification—that makes any total diagnosis

impossible. Further I will utilise Kristeva’s Idea of abjection, to show how the

corporeal and symbolic are in a relation of play: at once irreducible, yet

constituting one another.

Gothic Horror Motifs in Naked

JOHNNY: I tend to skip a day now and again—you no what I mean? I used to be
a werewolf, but I’m all right NOW!!

Naked has certain parallels with the Horror genre, concerning motifs found

in both. This I would argue comes from Mike Leigh’s grounding within a neo

—Dickensian practice, which locates his films in the relations between

nineteenth century novel genres. The majority of his films have been about

the working class and their relationship to the upper, and upwardly mobile

classes, and Naked is no different. However the themes of Naked intersect

Leigh’s normal concerns with concerns ‘about the impending apocalypse,’9

8
For a greater explication of this see Jacque Derrida Writing and Difference p.348

9
Mike Leigh cited in …’’The Future is Now’: Naked
and further as Michel Coveney has noted ‘about alienation, sexual violence

and the city’. In this sense it is very much different to Leigh’s other films,

which though having to do with alienation, apathy, and disenchantment, do

not evoke such consonances with the Gothic novel at the turn of the

nineteenth century, which was concerned with the sense of fin de siecle, so

apparent in Naked.10

The two clearest motifs found in Naked, which have consonances with both

Gothic and Horror films and novels, are the ‘literary double’ and the ‘city of

dreadful night’.11 What is interesting in Leigh’s use of these motifs is how

they are locked into a realist paradigm they never slip into the monstrous or

fantastical, but maintain the horrific in a certain use of style and framing

which, I will argue later, through a reading of Deleuze, utilise the visual and

narrative styles of these motifs to create a sense of dread, fear and

foreboding, which place the horrific squarely in the real.

Firstly then, there is the ‘city of dreadful night’, a term I take from Lynda

Dryden’s analyses of the modern Gothic novel.12 It articulates the fears of

late Victorian England, and how these were cast through a relation between

the reality of London streets and the literary descriptions found in the Gothic

novel, for example the consonances social commentators found between

stories such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Jake the Ripper, who was thought

to be a ‘‘west end toff’ who enjoyed ‘slumming it’ in the debauched east

10
Linda Dryden The Modern Gothic Novel and Literary Doubles p.1
11
ibid p.15 and 74—108
12
ibid
end’.13 This was seen to further represent the inherent duality at the heart of

the late Victorian Metropolis. It was the Labyrinth of London, its ‘dark

recesses and narrow passage ways…suggestive of lurking horrors…regarded

as a haunted space,’14 And the seething masses of the proletariat, ‘domestic

“savages” which resided in the very heart of the civilised world, and even in

the heart of the modern civilised subject.’15

This locates the Gothic novels themes within a social context, which

intersects fears of the other, the masses, the alienation of modernity and

the threat of savagery, all of which are motifs that can be found in Naked. I

would argue however, that Mike Leigh takes these fears and turns them

back on the social commentators, now updated to a Post Thatcher London—

where the fears are repeated with unnerving similarity—utilising these fears,

as articulated in the Gothic novel, but inverting them: causing a trauma.

Where the Gothic novel articulated the fears of Victorian England, I would

argue, Naked articulates and critiques these fears in the labyrinth of

Johnny’s London. Johnny holds a liminal position, no longer a hidden,

spectral danger, but the protagonist: articulate and damningly critical of

everything, haunted now by the hidden presence of the monstrous flaneur,

Jeremy.

This leads on to the second Gothic motif: the literary double. In Naked this

motif is displaced into a realistic sphere, where the double is not Dr Jekyll
13
ibid p.50
14
ibid p.43
15
R. Mighall quoted in Linda Dryden The Modern Gothic Novel and Literary Doubles
p.44
turning into Mr Hyde through a bizarre experiment, but the setting of the

two male protagonists in a relation, not in the story of the film, but in the

structure of the film and in the symbolic reflection of the literary double.

Johnny and Jeremy seem to hold quite well to the distinction of the

nineteenth century flaneur and ‘troglodytic proletariat.’16 Both roam the

streets, are degenerate and misogynistic, and the defining difference is their

physicality and mannerisms: Jeremy is painfully posh, healthy, dressed well,

with a confident stride and snobbish air of self importance and ownership

associated with the flaneur. 17


Indeed, Jeremy is one of Mike Leigh’s most

brutal caricatures, a technique associated with Brecht’s idea of gestus or

‘quotable gestures’, which Leigh uses in most of his films to depict the upper

and aspiring classes.18 Johnny is unhealthy, unkempt, darts and shifts

erratically, slouches, and despite his verbal attacks has the air of an

insecure boy with a massive chip on his shoulder. Where they differ from the

Classic idea of a literary double is in the fact that Johnny is articulate, quite

loveable—in a way—and appears, through the caricaturing of Jeremy, more

real and authentic a human being, where as it is Jeremy who comes across

as an absurd pastiche of upper class snobbery and narcissism, in short, a

monster.

However it is the intersections between this caricature and the type of

personalities that I find most interesting. In the sex scenes Johnny’s

carnivorous and animal like violence pails in light of Jeremy’s calculated,


16
ibid p.78
17
ibid p.57
18
Richard Porton ‘Mike Leigh’s Modernist Realism’ in Ivone Margulies Rites
of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema p.167
detached and malicious violence. That is, the animalistic aspect of a Hyde

type character, found in the Gothic genre, is placed at a more human level

than the calculated violence of Jeremy through the realism given to Johnny

and denied Jeremy: Jeremy is made monstrous through the style of acting.

The literary double motif is also used within the character of Johnny himself,

more werewolf than Jekyll and Hyde, with the opening scene showing Johnny

at his most carnivorous, at night, the camera rushes up to the scene in a

dark alley, hand held it comes up on a view of Johnny’s back ‘to witness the

last seconds of a ‘rough fuck [that is taking place] under a streetlamp.’’19

The sex becomes non consensual as he becomes more violent. He is pushed

off and runs with the limping intensity of an animal on the run.

In the next scene we find him in London, in the morning where he engages

in a witty, flirtatious and fun dialogue with Sophie, a pretty and fun filled flat

mate of (we find out later) Johnny’s ex girlfriend Louise. The final part of the

dialogue Johnny says: ‘Will you tell me something, love? Are you aware of

the effect you have on the average mammalian, Mancunian, x-y-ly

chromosome, slavering, lusty male member of the species’ Sophie reply’s

‘Er… yeah’ to which Johnny replies, ‘thought so’20. At this point we cut

immediately to a close head and bust shot of Jeremy working on an exercise

machine in a brightly lit gym. I will come back to this scene, and the cutting

of the scenes between Johnny and Jeremy throughout the film, in Deleuze’s

19
Garry Watson The Cinema of Mike Leigh: A Sense of the Real p.105 [quoting Mike
Leigh Naked]
20
Mike Leigh Naked p.10
understanding of the montage, for now it is enough to say that Johnny’s

werewolf characteristics sustains the ambiguity in his character, and the cut

shot of Jeremy perpetuates such ambiguity.

Deleuze: the Naked Viewer

[L]ife goes beyond the limits that knowledge fixes


for it, but thought goes beyond the limits that life
fixes for it.
Gilles Deleuze

Deleuze’s understanding of Cinema is grounded in a peculiar materialism,

similar to Bataille’s, asserting the singularity and duration of sensation and

experience. This understanding is underpinned by his use of Henri Bergson’s

idea of Movement—image. Where the mind in everyday perception receives

an image, and then places it in an abstract time: it constitutes itself in the


very same manner as a cinema projection. 21 That is, cinema discloses the

inherent creativity and becoming in perception, both perception in the

subject and projection in cinema manifest the image–movement before the

constitution of the subject. In terms of the individual, this is achieved by the

functions of the body that make such perception possible; in projection, by

the technology of film.22 As Anna Powell has noted: ‘The movement–image

occurs both on screen and in us at the same time, and actually blurs any

distinction between inside and out.’23

If we look then at Naked, we find the aspects concurrent with the Gothic

horror genre utilising this aspect of Deleuze’s idea of movement–image. But

the scenes of sexual violence, and indeed the physically violent scenes, also

have this effect. They overload us, as we enter into this dialectics of

affection, ‘it is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but also

sometimes too beautiful, and which hence forth outstrips our sensory–motor

capacities.’24 In his discussion of German Expressionist uses of ‘montage’—

that is, the use of cutting and framing in the technique of film—the relation

and parallel velocity of Johnny and Jeremy in Naked, shows a use of montage

which disturbs the fit of both characters.25 The film maintains a separation of

the two stories with Jeremy’s holding a much smaller place. The first few

cuts happen in quick succession, both men proceed to seduce women: we

are forced to compare them, face their similarities and differences, until

21
Gilles Deleuze Cinema 1: The Movement Image p.2
22
ibid
23
Anna Powell Deleuze and Horror Film p.110—111
24
Gilles Deleuze quoted in Anna Powell Deleuze and Horror Film p.119
25
Gilles Deleuze Cinema 1: The Movement Image p.34
they finally converge in Sophie and Louise’s flat, in the final scenes of the

film. Johnny having been living on the streets for two days after having had

violent, though consensual, sex with Sophie. Badly beaten and ill, he sits

collapsed on the floor, Jeremy, Louise and Sophie standing over him: Jeremy,

in just tight black underpants. We have seen Jeremy rape a waitress, and,

after having let himself into the house, raped Sophie and stayed almost

oblivious to the damage he’s done: though enjoying himself non the less.

The two stories converging at this point, when Johnny has reached the very

bottom of his self loathing and abjection, Jeremy the very pinnacle of his

narcissism, and further; after we have been vicariously put through both;

affecting the viewer as if the convergence were a vanishing point of two

parallel lines.26 Jekyll finally meeting Hyde, but only Johnny recognizes the

other, they have never met, the recognition is beyond the film: outside of

the frame. Johnny has a fit, looks at Jeremy ‘A look of recognition and terror

creeps into his eyes.’27 Speaking to Jeremy, Johnny says ‘I know, I know, you

told me. I’m…I’m not here yet. I’m still wet.’ ‘(Tears well in Louise’s eyes.)’ 28

Johnny asks ‘What did she mean? Why not my brother? (crying) will it be

quiet now?’ ‘(He reaches for Jeremy’s hand)’29 Jeremy recoils, shouts ‘fuck’,

but maintains his detachment, stating after a while, ‘Your rather disgusting

aren’t you?’30

26
ibid
27
Mike Leigh Naked p.76
28
ibid
29
ibid p.77
30
ibid
A recognition of sorts, however the melodrama does not maintain a

hegemony as the caricature of Jeremy, a little while later, becomes such a

pastiche you can’t help smiling with incredulity at his complete innocence to

the whole situation. But only the animal appears human. As viewer we are

pulled through this dialectical tension and irresolvable duality, with nowhere

to stand, in relation to either protagonist: Johnny being truly liminal,

ambivalent, and Jeremy highlighting and contrasting Johnny’s misogyny.

Both Johnny in himself, and the two in relation, place the viewer in a state of

Abjection.

Kristeva: Naked Abjection

Celine’s effect is quite other. It calls upon what,


within us, eludes defences, trainings, and words, or
else struggles against them. A nakedness, a
forlornness, a sense of having had it; discomfort,
downfall a wound.
Julia Kristeva

Another central aspect of the film is Johnny’s dialogues, throughout the film

the various characters are bombarded with Johnny’s wit and scathing

observations, not only does this make the viewer ambivalent towards

Johnny; he is charming, yet ruthlessly unkind, but the other characters share

this ambivalence, and as much as they are involved with the character react

in certain ways to his charm and wit; compelled or repulsed, charmed or

hurt, inquisitive or confused; often all of these in various degrees. As a

viewer we must experience these feelings, as our corporeal sensations and


reactions, intersect with those on the screen, a visceral empathy develops,

the film brings us into a relationship with Johnny, and how we react will say

as much about us as about Johnny. Johnny’s dialogues articulate a modern

abjection: flawed and disturbing, with no place of certainty for either him,

his interlocutors, or us; the viewer.

Abjection betrays the inherent instability at the heart of identity found in the

western subject formation. The liminal re–articulation of identity formation

through exclusion shows an attempt to maintain self–certainty. In Julia

Kristeva’s analysis this self–certainty is constantly threatened, not, however,

by that which it excludes: that which it names as Other and banishes in the

name of the law, of meaning, but by the ‘conflicts of drives [that] muddle its

bed, cloud its water, and bring forth everything that, by not being integrated

in a system of signs.’31 Abjection is this ground on which the self constitutes

itself, and it is not an object, its relations precede meaning constituted

through the somatic movement of drives, it is other to ourselves.

Abjection conducts two movements, it establishes the law by somatic

inscription of the limit of transgression, setting up prohibition and the

sacred, thus maintaining cultural certainty and meaning, but in this somatic

inscription, sets the point of transgression, sets the coordinates for the

disintegration of ‘subject’ and ‘object’. In modern literature, Kristeva finds

an articulation of this disintegration, where ‘through that experience…

managed by the Other, “subject” and “object” push each other away,

31
Julia Kristeva Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection p.14
confront each other, collapse, and start again—inseparable, contaminated,

condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject.’32

In Naked we are traumatised by this sense of abjection, Johnny’s

interrogations come from nowhere, they are applied to all the characters no

matter there position in his life, whether they are vunerable or not. His

abjection, his interrogations point to the inherent stupidity and emptiness of

the world in which he finds himself and it attacks any certainty and identity,

which his subjects try to find. He attacks Louise for seeking stability in her

job and derides her for settling for such a boring station:

Johnny: …So…’ow are you?


Louise: Peachy—creamy.
Johnny: Are you really? I’m very pleased. So how’s, um…work?
Louise: It’s all right
Johnny: It’s all right
Louise: It’s all right
Johnny: Is it everything you hoped it would be?
Louise: Yeah.
Johnny: What did you hope it would be?
(Pause. Louise Exhales some smoke.)
I’m sorry—did you get that? Its everything she hoped it would be, but she
doesn’t know what she hoped it would be!33

And later:
Louise: …What are you doing in London, Johnny?
Johnny: What are you doing in London?
Louise: I’ve told you what I’m doing in London.
Johnny: You’ve told me nothing.
Louise: The last time I saw you, I told you—
(He throws the book down)
Johnny: Fuckin’ hell! Were you born irritatin’? What have you come downstairs
for anyway?
Louise: I fell asleep with the window open. I was cold. I came down. I’ad a

32
ibid p.18
33
Mike Leigh Naked p.12
pee. I’ve made some tea. I’m ‘ere All right?
Johnny: What’s that? The greatest story ever told?
Louise: I live ‘ere (pause) So what ‘appened? Where you bored in Manchester?
Johnny: Was I bored? No, I wasn’t fuckin’ bored. I’m never bored. That’s the
trouble with everybody—you're all so fucking bored. You’ve ‘ad nature
explained to you and you’re bored with it. You’ve ‘ad the living body
explained to you and you’re bored with it. You’ve ‘ad the universe explained
to you and you’re bored with it. So now you want cheap thrills and plenty of
‘em, and it dun’t matter ‘ow tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it’s new,
as long as it flashes and fuckin’ bleeps in forty fucking different colours. Well,
whatever else you can say about me, I’m not fuckin’ bored!
Louise: Yeah all right.
Johnny: So, ‘ow’s it goin’ for you?
Louise: It’s a bit borin’ actually. 34

In these dialogues we can see not only Johnny’s invective cutting wit and his

hatred of mediocrity, but also a critique of society as it was in post—

Thatcher England. We also see—as an aside I would like to dwell on more—

Louise’s role in the film. She understands and can handle Johnny, and at the

end of the film she offers him the opportunity to go back to Manchester, and

settle down, an offer Johnny mercilessly declines.

Garry Watson has argued that Johnny comes in a long line of ‘Abject hero’s’.

Who get their authority from the double ancestry of the ‘Kings fool’ and the

‘wild man from the dessert.’35 Watson sees in Johnny what Bataille called

‘unemployed negativity’ that is someone who has found that history has

finished, and there isn’t any work which is worth doing. 36 Johnny then

engages in what his role would be if he were employed: ‘Socratic debate’.37

In Kristeva’s reading of Celine we find a parallel to Johnny, Kristeva finds in

Celine an ‘eschewing [of] seduction in favour for cruelty’ yet, ‘it is

34
ibid p.20-21
35
Gary Watson The Cinema of Mike Leigh: A Sense of the Real p.107
36
ibid p.108
37
ibid
nevertheless haunted by the same concern—to touch the intimate nerve, to

grab hold of emotion by means of speech…contemporaneous, swift,

obscene’38 Further there is the Carnivalesque dialogism of Bakhtin, who’s

‘semantic ambivalence…pair the high and low, the sublime and the abject’

to which Celine invests the apocalypse.39 In Johnny’s position of ‘abject hero’

he removes himself, gives himself a distance from the world in which he

uncovers the Horror, the merciless loss and lack in the social, not in a

revolutionary manner, where another world is possible. His is an abject

critique, which involves himself more than anyone else. His invective

dialogue pierces the assumptions that hold people in the dark world of

hopeless desperation and alienation we find in Naked, where the hopes and

compromises hold and perpetuate the distance between the characters:

they cannot communicate with each other, lost, adrift; sad. Johnny’s

dialogues are at a distance, but it is a different distance than that of

alienation, his distance allows for communication; it is a ‘being—removed,

which causes horror to exist and at the same time take us away from it, grip

us with fear and in this very fright change language into a quill, a fleeting

piercing one, a work of lace, a show of acrobatics, a burst of laughter and a

mark of death.’40

38
Julia Kristeva Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection p.137
39
ibid p.138
40
ibid
Conclusion: The Viewers Naked Abjection

JOHNNY: Yeah. Yeah— thanks very much. (he leans


in the doorway.) It’s funny bein’ inside in’t it? ‘cos
when you’re inside, your still actually outside aren’t
you? And then you can say when you’re outside,
you’re inside, because you’re always inside your
head. D’you follow that?

Naked is a ‘journey without end’, its ambivalence is never ending and

Johnny’s character is unresolvable.41 It is a ‘narrative between apocalypse

and carnival.’42 Johnny, his interlocutors, the audience, and even the actors,

are left abject, traumatised, adrift. Gary Watson has noted how Naked tear’s

41
ibid p.141
42
ibid p.141
‘a hole in the symbolic order’.43 He notes how it received vicious attacks in

reviews when it first came out.44 And I have, speaking with friends, found a

poly–vocal response, with some saying that there parents found it very easy

to dismiss Johnny, as merely a misogynistic, pseudo–intellectual tramp, or to

dismiss the film: ‘where was the plot?’ was a response from one friend.

Further Mike Leigh’s directing style, which requires a huge amount of

emotional investment on the part of the actor, led to several of the main

actors needing a form of personal closure. This led to ‘Leigh spending the

day Naked had finished shooting, doing improves with Lesley sharp [who

plays Louise]…allowing her character an opportunity to resolve her feelings

about being abandoned once again.’45 David Thewlis said of his experience:

"You have to address the question - what's the meaning of life - but I was
asking it every day. Everything in life was called into question. I ate very little
in order to stay wired and spent all my time reading or smoking. I became
obsessed with death and kept thinking I was having heart attacks. I was so
freaked out, so distressed - I couldn't sleep."46

The analysis of Naked as the obverse of Horror Film, is then, an argument

against the coherence of the genre, the coherence of any analysis

concerning film, and the coherence of representation in general. It is the

obverse of horror because, where horror displaces our fears into the

monstrous other, Naked displays these displacements in front of us. In this

sense it manifests abjection, and any attempt to give a coherent analysis of

such a display is displaced in the very fragility and dynamism of the film and

the liminal position abjection places the viewer/ analyst. Films are, at once,
43
Gary Watson The Cinema of Mike Leigh: A Sense of the Real p.15
44
ibid
45
Amy Taubin quoted in Gary Watson The Cinema of Mike Leigh: A Sense of the
Real p.29
46
David Thewlis quoted in an interview by Charlotte O'Sullivan Plays and Players
(1994), Transcribed by Ceirdwyn, on http://david-thewlis.com/playsandplayers.php
symbolic and somatic, corporeal but bound within representation: Form

cannot be split from content. The form of naked cannot be split from the

Dialogue’s in Naked, the corporeal effects cannot be separated from the

symbolic functions within the viewer and culture. Yet they are distinct, in a

relation of proximity, and Naked lays this relation apparent, placing one in a

liminal position at the finitude of representation, which is the antagonism of

the real. Exposing all, naked; in abjection.

Bibliography
Beardsworth, Sara ‘From Revolution to Revolt culture’ in (ed) Tina Chanter
and Ewa Plonowska Zirarek Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: the Unstable
Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis p.37–56

Creed, Babara ‘Alien and the Monstrous Feminine’ in Annette Kuhn Alien
Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema

Deleuze, Gilles Cinema 1: The Movement Image

Deleuze, Gilles Nietzsche and Philosophy

Derrida, Jacque Writing and Difference

Foucault, Michel ‘A preface to Transgression’ in Language, Counter-Memory,


Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews

Leigh, Mike Naked

Kristeva, Julia Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection Trans. Roudiez, Leon


S Colombia
University Press New York 1982

O'Sullivan, Charlotte ’Plays and Players’ (1994), Transcribed by Ceirdwyn,


on http://david-thewlis.com/playsandplayers.php

Phillips, Kendall Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture

Powell, Anna Deleuze and Horror Film

Dryden, Linda The Modern Gothic Novel and Literary Doubles

’’The Future is Now’: Naked

Watson, Gary The Cinema of Mike Leigh: A Sense of the Real

Said, Edward W. Orientalism

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