Abstract:
This thesis examines the experience of inhabiting composite material/mediatised space through the lens of contemporary cinema. More specifically, it explores how films that parallel the increasing prominence of ubiquitous media and augmented reality technologies in real life offer fresh approaches to issues of embodiment, materiality and subjectivity that differ from those offered by a set of earlier and well-analysed science fiction narratives, exemplified by The Matrix (The Wachowski Siblings, 1999), which used cyberspace as their defining metaphor. While some of the films analysed here directly address technology, I contend that even those that do not explicitly allude to ubiquitous media explore composite, layered spaces through their usage of elements such as colour, symbolic graphics and music. These films offer a vision of a composite space characterised less by parallel levels of reality, associated with a binary dualism between body and mind, than by intertwined layers of embodied material and mediatised space; as such these more recent films require scholarly attention in order to revisit and update existing analysis of cinematic remediation of contemporary mediated experience. The films collectively demonstrate the characteristics required to inhabit and negotiate composite layered spaces successfully, such as the ability to distribute one’s subjectivity between several perceptual channels and to multiply one’s self across spaces and networks whilst maintaining a sense of cohesive bodily and subjective integrity. The thesis argues that these films approach the issue of how composite material/mediatised spaces may provide a liberating opportunity to extend one’s spatial agency and thus have more control over the mental negotiation of material/mediatised environments, but may conversely threaten agency as users’ proprioceptive/digital subjectivity becomes fragmented. In this way, composite space may subsume mental and bodily agency, even whilst offering the promise of complete customisation and personalisation of one’s environment. The films analysed offer diverse and contradictory perspectives on this issue. The thesis is made up of close textual analysis of a range of mostly twenty-first century films sourced from both science fiction and other diverse genres, which are unified by their focus upon the potential of composite space to extend and/or fragment bodily and subjective agency.