Abstract
Deleuze observes that when one is caught in a Vicious Circle, and trapped in the topology of a Möbius strip, one can get out only by breaking open the space itself. “It is only by breaking open the circle,” Deleuze writes, “by unfolding and untwisting it, that the dimension of sense appears for itself”.1 To reintroduce Euclidean geometrics, the strip must be first cut, then unfolded and rotated through an external axis; external, that is, to the surface of the strip itself. There are two ways to “break” the past. The first way is to simply break with it, quite literally, as is the case with retroactive continuity, in which a filmmaker alters the official series timeline to effectively shift the canon in a new direction, usually to accommodate a reboot or revival of a franchise. When a film franchise is rebooted, it is often the case that the new film will open with the destruction of a key image tied to the earlier series, marking the ending of the popular franchise to be “reborn” in the present film. One of the more ingenious of these images of rebirth occurs in the opening shot of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the prequel to the cult television series. The opening credits play over static from a television screen which, following the directorial credit, is brutally smashed along with a young woman who is violently murdered. Lynch is saying: forget television; film can go much further.
One must multiply the sides, break every circle in favour of the polygons.
(Deleuze)
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Notes
The Logic of Sense, ed. by Constantin V. Boundas, trans. by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Continuum, 2009), 23. Deleuze’s solution to the problem of the Möbius band and its paradoxes of sense reflects Hitchcock’s “perfect cure for a sore throat”, a cure of which Norman Bates would have approved. “Cut it”.
Cited in Patton , “Future Politics”, in Between Deleuze and Derrida, ed. by Paul Patton and John Protevi (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 15.
Speaking in Andrew Abbott, On the Edge of “Blade Runner” (TV Movie, UK, 2000).
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1987), 29.
Marty Roth, “Twice Two: The Fly and Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, in Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, ed. by Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 239n.
An idea which resonates wonderfully with Freud’s question “What good is a legend to a people that makes their hero into an alien?” See Freud , The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XXIII (1937–1939), trans. by James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001).
The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Russell Grigg (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2007), 46.
Cited in Femi Oyebode, Sims’ Symptoms in the Mind: An Introduction to Descriptive Psychopathology, 4th ed. (Edinburgh: Saunders Elsevier, 2008), 89.
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 307.
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© 2014 Daniel Varndell
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Varndell, D. (2014). The Grandfather Paradox. In: Hollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137408600_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137408600_7
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