Strange Fascination: Kipling, Benjamin, and Early Cinema

Abstract

Published less than a decade after the Lumière brothers mounted the first public exhibition of the cinematograph, Rudyard Kipling’s short story “Mrs. Bathurst” (1904) offers one of the earliest and most troubling accounts of the seductive allure of the virtual—the immaterial realm disclosed by projecting an image onto a reflective surface, such as a screen in the case of the cinematograph, or by illuminating the pixels of a liquid crystal display in a mobile device or computer monitor. As Slavoj Žižek writes, the “virtual,” in this sense, is not simply a product of our increasingly sophisticated means for projecting images; it is also and perhaps more importantly a distinctive fantasy, one that has a history stretching from “prehistoric Lascaux paintings to computer-generated Virtual Reality.”¹ What defines this fantasy is the presence of a frame that offers, in its most elementary form, a way of distinguishing between self and other, between where one is and where one is not (and cannot be). “Is not the interface of the computer,” Žižek writes, “the last materialization of this frame? What defines the properly ‘human dimension’ is the presence of a screen, a frame through which we communicate with the ‘suprasensible’ virtual universe to be found nowhere in reality.”² Where many theorists—from psychoanalytic film scholars of the “suture school” to contemporary theorists of cyberculture—have tended to understand the fascination of the screen in terms of a narcissistic identification with the image it makes present, and in terms of the libidinal pleasures of mastery that such an identification affords, Kipling’s story suggests something altogether more radical.³

The things I look at see me just as much as I see them.

—Valéry

N.B. The images associated with this chapter are housed in the digital annex at www.virtualvictorians.org .