A movie character is not an entity, but a dispositif. One that involves at least three elements.

Elements

1. A character is not initially a biography, individuality, body or iconography, but a symbolic circulation consisting of plastic elements, narrative schemas and semantic articulations. Often (and this could be a characteristic of one classical use of film), the circulation is intended to crystalize and produce synthesizing effects in the sense of a typical personification or the personification of a singular individuation. But many other models of circulation are imaginable: for instance, dissemination, fragmentation and removal.

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959): In cinema, anything can be a character, it suffices to throw out a name, any name, even to nobody in particular—“Mr. Kaplan!” and the story begins. A body joins the name and that's the end of it. A vertiginous fiction sucks it in and carries it away. The body keeps running after nothing, encountering empty signs (a grey suit, a hotel room…) to fill with its anxieties and desires.

Something merely needs to act as a sign for a circulation to begin grasping for motifs. These are connected in an attempt to create a scenario, as Roger Thornhill does in North by Northwest and Jeff does in Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954). This always works. Between two motifs, two events, or two situations, there is always a relationship to uncover (the Rear Window version) or produce (the North by Northwest version). Even more radically, Kōkaku Kidōtai (Ghost in a Shell, Mamoru Oshii, 1995) is the story of how in New Port City in the year 2029, the intense circulation of an extremely powerful spy program liberates itself from its own programming logic, becomes autonomous and engenders itself as a creature. This phantom created via centrifugation and parthenogenesis searches for a host body. It finds one that it destroys when they come into contact and the only one that will really host it belongs to a cyborg that manages to eliminate it but, as a result, will always remember it.

In Wharton's 1924 novella False Dawn, the “Halston Raycie house overlooked a lawn sloping to the Sound.” It seems to promise what Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester call, in The Meaning of Gardens (1990), an “idealized order of nature and culture”:

In the very next sentence, the narrator swiftly undoes the blissful pastoral mood—melding a noble idea, a tranquil place and a less alienated mode of human labor—with the mention of a notorious traitor: “The house, remodeled and enlarged by Mr. Raycie on his marriage, had played a part in the Revolutionary war as the settler's cottage where Benedict Arnold had had his headquarters.” The country house is not haunted by Arnold's ghost in any trite sense. However, the pointed reference casts a long shadow over the scrupulous evocation of the estate.

As False Dawn implies, not all cultivated sites are serene green enclaves that point to biblical “gardens enclosed” in Wharton's oeuvre. These localities can be charged with foreboding and paranormal auras that unsettle the characters that seek to dwell in, or preside over, them. Some gardens, like Aunt Elizabeth's mansion in A Backward Glance, even inspire Gothic “terror.” For critic Fred Botting, the “staples of the Gothic, are clearly identifiable in early Gothic texts,” since the “tradition draws on medieval romances, supernatural, Faustian and fairy tales, Renaissance drama, sentimental, picaresque and confessional narratives as well as the ruins, tombs and nocturnal speculations that fascinated Graveyard poets.” My final chapter will focus entirely on depictions of “ruins” in Wharton's oeuvre, and what Gothic elements seem to be woven into the very bricks and mortar of these crumbling structures.

Here I am more concerned with how Wharton's narrators evoke what we might term “Gothic gardens,” using verbal strategies that both register and subvert the vivid, even lurid paraphernalia of earlier “supernatural romance.” Wharton is especially adroit in selecting and stressing particular facets of the visible, concrete terrain—the unembellished, unremarked, borderless qualities of green spaces, bringing to mind poet Ian Hamilton Finlay's thesis that “certain gardens are described as retreats when they really are attacks.

Despite its connections to the Divine, the sublime is undeniably also a demonic aesthetic. In a tradition dating back to John Dennis, Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) – and specifically its depiction of Satan – was used as a paradigmatic example of the sublime. The English Gothic, similarly, regularly accords demonic figures a substantial degree of both physical and moral sublimity, as well as using ‘associative sublimity’ in the portrayal of the demonic, most notably in the consistent connection between sublime landscapes and demonic appearances, found in the mountaintop harangues of the Devils of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796) and Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya (1806). The theological implications of this seemingly inextricable connection between the sublime and both the Divine and the demonic has been left largely unaddressed in literary criticism.

One response, found in Samuel Monk (1960), is to elude the problem by noting demonic sublimity but ignoring its theological implications. Another popular approach is found in Robert Geary (1992) who stresses the sublime/demonic association, but elides its problematic nature by erasing the relationship between the Divine and the sublime. Relying on a largely secularized version of Rudolf Otto's concept of the ‘numinous’ (the experience of the beyond human), the ‘awefullness’ and majesty of ‘daemonic dread’ of Otto's theory are centred and their counterpart, the ‘fascinans’ is ignored. The ‘fascinans’ is the ‘attractive’ aspect, which, once rationalised or schematised, becomes attached to concepts of mercy, pity and love (Otto 1936, 16). This conflation of the numinous with the sublime, understood monologically as the ‘terror sublime’, allows the demonic to be unproblematically aligned with the sublime by ignoring sublime multiplicity and separating sublimity from the concept of the Divine. This separation leads to negatively coded discussions of the sublime as a source of terror, producing a conception of the Divine as an ‘immortal tyrant whose evil is not good’ (Byron 1841a, 321) and, on a human level, aligning the sublime's properties with patriarchal and colonial expressions of dominance, in the shape of the aristocratic tyrant.

Paris, July 17, 1998

Dear Tag,

You wanted a better understanding of what is involved in figurative analysis of cinema and I’m challenging myself to explain it to you in just a few words because, as you write threateningly in your e-mail with the subject line “Moving Medici”: “If you can't define it briefly in two or three words (and not two or three words in a figurative sense), you’d be better off considering another approach.” Although I do not see why an analytic desire should be summed up in a formula (partly watering it down), I will still force myself to do so because you and I like arguing and because we both agree on the basics: The attention given to the films is what matters most. Here is a possible abridgment, but you will see that at first glance it isn't necessarily going to illuminate you or satisfy you much: “To consider cinema from a figural angle.” So that the John Ford specialist does not jump on his high horse and the Rossellini biographer does not cover his face murmuring, “O Dio, grande Dio,” let me develop this a little.

First of all, figurative analysis is not a dogmatic method and it is not destined to become one. Its sole aim is to consider aspects and problems in films that have, paradoxically, been neglected. To this end, it relies on the application of several practical principles that do not form precepts. It is about analytic openness starting with the films themselves rather than terminological rules. (At most, its only irrevocable formula would be Gilles Deleuze's warning: “Experiment, never interpret.”) By means of introduction, here are four of its principles.

1. Figural Analysis. To consider, at least provisionally, that a film takes precedence over its context. This is a mere parenthetical in the infinite circulation that every image maintains with that which it is the image—but without it, we will never know what the image is telling us. Despite the great diversity of disciplinary approaches and ideological options, a powerful methodological doxa currently exists in the analysis of representations, a common adhesion to certain procedures stemming from a particular history of ideas.

You’re about to embark on your long-awaited Caribbean cruise vacation, beginning at the Port of Miami, destined to stop by the elegant and exclusive Cayman Islands. After cruising for two days, you spot Grand Cayman Island, surrounded by turquoise blue waters, lush vegetation and colorful buildings. The ship stops just before the island and anchors its position. A smaller boat comes to greet you at the bottom of the cruise ship's stairs, where you are taken onboard the small vessel. With the wind whipping in your hair and the ocean at your fingertips, you travel less than ten minutes before the small boat docks at the George Town Cruise Port. You disembark and are excited to begin your visit to Grand Cayman and indulge in the so-called “CaymanKind” experience, or the well-known warmth of the Caymanian people, and all that it has to offer. You hop into a taxi and begin your adventures swimming with stingrays at Stingray City, exploring crystal caves and relaxing at Seven Mile Beach. You return to George Town Harbour earlier than expected and observe visitors and locals alike snorkeling close to the port. You rent a mask, snorkel and fins, and directly from the port, snorkel the reefs surrounding the harbor, which are teeming with fish and pristine coral reefs. This concludes your visit to the Cayman Islands and you get in line to board the small boat to return to the cruise ship. Just before you embark on the small vessel, you snap an idyllic picture of the towering cruise ship from afar, resting neatly atop the crystal blue waters.

The Cayman Islands and Its Harbor

This would be a general experience that many cruise passengers would have visiting the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands consist of three Caribbean islands: Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brac. They lie directly south of Florida, approximately 450 miles away. They are a self-governing United Kingdom overseas territory. As such, they must comply with some international commitments and regulations as well as their own. The Cayman Islands have a population of just over 67,000 people, most of whom reside on Grand Cayman. Finance and tourism are the two economic pillars of the Cayman Islands.

There is not at first a character who is qualified and modified by certain actions and situations. There is initially a conception of an act informing a figure who remains absent from the speculative event. (If the Bressonian figure has a function, it is first to reserve a bit of an idea, a viewpoint, a moral: No classic symbol or allegory, it says less than what it deals with.)

What is theft? A problem of gestural techniques, the attack of a body. How does one establish a relationship with someone without being noticed? How does one divert the other person while simultaneously stealing?

In Pickpocket, the cuts assure the act. We see the full gesture; the description is analytic. At the same time, it is necessary to reconstitute the instantaneous character of this decomposition, reconstruct the absence of weight, restitute the invisible nature to the movement used. Morally scandalous, technically admirable, the act is actualized only to be reduced to the register of the imperceptible.

Thus, theft represents the secret, desperate dimension of human gestures. It reveals their structure: strange brushing of one body against another— in reality, this is only separation. It never overcomes the margin separating the shot from the reverse shot and remains senseless so long as one does not submerge it in indifference.

When he extracts a wallet from an inside pocket, it is almost as if the pickpocket were tearing out our hearts: He diverts us from the world as we would like it to be.

The concept of a pristine coral reef, untouched and unspoiled, feels like a thing of the past. While we know they must exist and hear stories about their majestic beauty, they feel far away. Depending upon how you define a healthy coral reef, it is debatable if the word “pristine” accurately describes coral reefs at all. While beautiful and intact reef ecosystems certainly exist, are these reefs truly unspoiled? They may encounter the odd abandoned piece of fishing gear, the curious lack of a once abundant fish species or unseasonably warm ocean temperatures. Thus, are these places still pristine, or have they shifted to become something new?

Many people might not know that until fairly recently, they could find a healthy tropical coral reef at the southern tip of Florida in the United States. Until the 1980s, this 360 linear mile barrier reef—the Florida Reef Tract—was world-renowned as a premier dive site, showcasing rich collections of species (known as assemblages) and dense coral cover. In fact, the Florida Reef Tract is the third-largest barrier reef in the world.

Growing up in South Florida in the 1990s, stands of elkhorn coral on the reefs of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) were expected to be seen on dives, with their yellow, branching arms stretching through the clear water upward toward the light. In summer of 2022, while on a research dive, I recall crying out and pointing to a stand of elkhorn to a student simply because it has become such a rare sight in this short time, that it warrants a celebration.

Over the last 40–50 years, close to 90 percent of the living coral cover that comprised the Florida Reef Tract has been lost (Figure 5.1), and new species assemblages have begun to take their place (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2022; Toth et al., 2019). Due to these significant changes, new forms of management have emerged to try and conserve what coral remains.

In this chapter, we explore two of the most visible and important case studies of coral reef management institutions from southern Florida: the case of the FKNMS and the case of the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative (SEFCRI).

Life Sketch and Works

Suzan-Lori Parks, the daughter of an Army Colonel, was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1964. As a member of a military family, Parks moved often, first to West Texas and then to Germany, where she settled during her teenage years. While attending German schools, Parks began to write short stories. When she returned to the United States, she attended Mount Holyoke College, where she studied creative writing with the novelist James Baldwin. Baldwin was the first to encourage her development as a playwright. At the time Parks had the habit of acting out the characters’ parts when she read her short stories in class.

Her first play, The Sinner's Place, was produced in 1984 in Amherst, Massachusetts. While at Mount Holyoke, Parks was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1985. She also studied at the Yale University School of Drama. After college, she traveled to London to write plays and study acting. Her second play, Betting on the Dust Commander, was produced in 1987, followed by Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, which won a 1990 Obie Award for Best Off-Broadway play of the year. Her play, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), explores the issues of racism and sexism that have been characteristics of her work from her earliest days as a playwright. These plays, like the others that followed, challenge the conventions of the modern theater as they address social issues such as slavery, gender roles, and poverty.

Parks won her second Obie Award for Venus (first produced in 1996), a dramatic account of how, in 1810, a Khoi-San woman was brought from South Africa to England to serve as a sideshow attraction. Her greatest critical acclaim to date arrived with the production of Topdog/Underdog, a play she began writing in 1999 and was produced Off Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in 2001 under the direction of George C. Wolfe. It is her first play to appear on Broadway, debuted in April 2002 at the Ambassador Theatre, and, shortly, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for drama, thereby making Parks the first African American woman to receive that award.

What is it in cinema that cuts up? What organizes the relations between part and whole, fragment and other, unity and punctuation, principle and secondary? What drives a filmmaker to confront two systems of proportion in one and the same film or to invent a discordant economy to show something about the body, time or the human community?

Roland Barthes’ response: “the knife of Value,” which is not used to slice between two paradigms, but cuts to the heart of a word, between uses, between meanings, between synonyms. As far as moving images are concerned, the knife can pass:

1. Between motifs: A fade to black in À propos de Nice ( Jean Vigo, 1930) separates two organisms absolutely—the grotesque body of pleasure and the merry face of labor. This produces a stylistic opposition between a shot of rupture, which opens a rift and stops analogies, and every other shot, which favour analogies. To take an example from a very distantly related kind of filmmaking (despite the echoes of Eisenstein's influence via the intermediary of camera operator Gabriel Figueroa), The Fugitive ( John Ford, 1947) has the same structure. Every shot is constructed using a clear partition between pure white and black, with one exception, where the blurring of contrasts and light on the character of Sergeant Juan-Raphael (Pedro Armendariz) listening to the gunfire that transfigures the priest (Henry Fonda) into a martyr, attests to his deep spiritual doubt. The film is therefore plastically divided between the certainty of faith or unwavering political fanaticism and the fleeting but final vacillations of all certainty. (I will also note that the way the narrative treats indestructibility—“I shot him a dozen times”—recalls the strictly figurative treatment of the immortal revolutionary soldier at the end of Dovzhenko's ApceHaл [Arsenal, 1929]).

2. Between shots: Film theories have often made a distinction between a classical regime of filmmaking involving continuity and a modern regime that privileges forms of discontinuity under the auspices of dissonance and continuity errors.

In Praise of Disorder

The army, ceremony, orders and everything related to the imprisoned general: Order is bad in this case.

Hordes, rituals, initiative and everything related to family: Disorder is good in this case.

Originally consisting of seven people—an officer, his soldiers and their prisoner—the small troop of heroes gradually enlarges over the course of its encounters, incorporating every marginality: a little boy, a French journalist, three lovers, an American deserter… And loses almost all of its initial members without abandoning anything of its force of attraction or dispersive powers. The bouncing jeep that transports the troop resembles the raft of the Medusa, but this unlikely community marked by war is more evocative of the structural genius of the Argonaut's ship.

Continuous Barbarity

A voyage through time employing the regressive plastique specific to John Woo's major epic films. Without origin or goal, the heroes encounter many mythological features along the way and penetrate ever deeper into the archaic. Machine guns give way to spears, grenades to torches, rapid gunfire to ancient forms of torture (sew open the enemy's eyelids for solar punishment). A rebel tribe comes out of the swamp the same way that the dragon's teeth, scattered by Cadmos and Jason, turned into warriors. Adults turn into Little Thumblings: The general scatters his decorations, a looter of corpses scatters his treasures. To escape the flames closing in on him, the little boy, Kenny, digs a hole in the ground. Impossible to sink lower or regress further back. Gaia, the earth: As if it were from her that all this evil came, out of her that these bodies ready for combat sprung, ghosts always already guilty of a past murder. Ground of mass graves, poisoned, deeply rooted mud, a universal tomb. There is no mother in the film. In her place, Gaia generates monsters (Titans, Cyclopes, superhuman children) and protects the most combative of them.

War Not Social Horror

Neither before it unfolds nor after it is over does the film consider peace. We are in a perpetual state of war, a war of everyone against everyone, the present against the past and reciprocal vengeance of chthonic forces against modern attacks.

Introduction

In this chapter I examine the problem of moral agency in the work of Alfred Hitchcock by focusing on a representative moment in one of his early British films, Blackmail (1929), his first sound production. Approaching Hitchcock's work in this way enables me to present a view of his films that is consistent with some of the literature extolling his continuing relevance to film studies, feminism, the field of communication, and even philosophy. It further allows me to take the discussion of moral and ethical themes in Hitchcock's work beyond conventional ethical precepts that are occasionally presented as being central to understanding his moral position, such as the theory of retributive justice. This is not to argue that justice, retribution, and punishment are unimportant motifs in Hitchcock's films. This is plainly untrue. But in the present chapter I want to resist the temptation to bifurcate Hitchcock's moral world into good and evil, or guilty and innocent, in order that I might highlight an over-looked element of moral thinking represented in his work. This is the view that Hitchcock's films frequently present moral agency in the context of concepts like indeterminacy, undecidability, and anti-foundationalism. Moral agency, I want to suggest, is a more complex problem – and a more ambiguous state – than is ordinarily recognized in the more conventional “redemptive” readings of Hitchcock's work. Conceptions of justice and punishment, whether these are presented as being meted out by the law or by fate, introduce a teleological scheme to the evaluation of the moral conundrums with which Hitchcock deals, a scheme that can often be a rather negligible aspect of his narratives. I believe it is important to recognize Hitchcock's tendency to privilege the inherent appeal of moral obligation at the expense of unreflective fidelity to ethical rules. To move the analysis of Hitchcock's moral theorizing beyond the hegemony of ethical certitude is one of the goals of this chapter.

Wharton's perception and relation to the mountain phenomena of her “homeland” differs markedly from her aesthetic engagement with Alpine topography. Sharon Dean notes how Wharton “preferred the rises and dips and curves against a backdrop of hills to the overpowering quality of mountains made visible in so many paintings and illustrations of America's western landscapes.” This is, however, a rather reductive view. It buttresses the stereotype of Wharton as a haughty cosmopolite who is far too genteel for North American soil, its rustic communities, earthy manners and idioms—an image that situates her as an advocate of James Fenimore Cooper's thesis that “any well-delineated view of a high-class Swiss scene, must at once convince even the most provincial mind among us that nothing of the sort is to be found in America, east of the Rocky Mountains.” In fact, Wharton's depictions of summits and ridges in the “New World” are dynamic, nuanced and highly variegated. A brief description of the landscapes of the American West, as in “The Journey,” is relevant here: “The train was rushing through a region of bare hillocks huddled against a lifeless sky. It looked like the first day of creation.” The stillness of this barren terrain is indicative of how Wharton views the American peak as a locus of unexplored possibility.

Wharton's rural New England narratives evoke and interrogate the second way of “writing peaks” that Leslie Stephen articulates in “The Regrets of a Mountaineer”—what he terms “the sporting view of the mountains.” He records how such authors “affect something like cynicism; they mix descriptions of scenery with allusions to fleas or to bitter beer.” Wharton's myriad accounts of the “New World” peaks often partake of this “cynical” element, incorporating the ornate yet ominous lexis synonymous with an “Old World” fin de siècle stylistic register. Nevertheless, it is not for the reasons Stephen alludes to: “they humbly try to amuse us because they can't strike us with awe.” Wharton's European texts furnish various expressions of “awe.” The New England narratives meanwhile reveal a different rhetorical and affective lexicon to portray these lofty landforms.

Stakeholder-driven Participatory Management Highlighted through Case Studies

Worldwide, coral reef management is increasingly becoming more participatory and drawing on adaptive management. As a reminder, participatory management refers to a form of management that shares the authority and responsibility of managing natural resources between the government and local communities and stakeholder groups (Kar, 2021). An important aspect is that it incorporates participatory governance which promotes and empowers the people (citizens and non-citizens alike) to participate in the decision-making process (). Often, only entities that significantly affect or are significantly affected by the proposed decision participate. Throughout this book, we’ve defined these entities as stakeholders (Decker et al., 2012). Our five case studies showcased stakeholder-driven policy-making at the national level through bipartisan legislation in the United States, at the sub-national level through participatory management in Florida, and at the local level through grassroots movements in Florida and the Cayman Islands, with Florida reefs depicted in Figure 10.1.

Our case study on bipartisan legislation in the United States showed that Republicans and Democrats are using coral reefs as symbols in policy-making to collaborate and cooperate on legislation regarding climate-vulnerable ecosystems and the impacts from climate change. For example, coral reefs are symbols of the unique cultural settings of American states across the nation. For Hawaii and Florida, coral reefs represent unique identities and are tied to their livelihoods and way of life. We also find that there is bipartisan consensus on the need to protect and conserve coral reef ecosystems through community-based management programs funded and supported by the federal government. This means that Congressional leaders are buying into the importance of enabling local communities to play a role in stewarding their coral reefs.

Our case study on the management of Florida's coral reefs examined two organizations: the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) and the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative (SEFCRI). We found that both organizations enacted participatory management styles via stakeholder engagement and involvement. We also found evidence of iteratively learning, or learning as they go, from both organizations, indicating adaptive management strategies. Finally, we identified that the FKNMS engages in a formal and centralized approach to managing the Florida Reef Tract, while SEFCRI engages in an informal and collaborative approach to managing Florida's northern reefs.