Anti-humanist narratives: greed and source code

Abstract

This essay explores specific, rare, antihumanist narrative possibilities in Hollywood cinema that occur in the early decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, signified by two films: Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and Duncan Jones’s Source Code (2011).1 We contend that these films, separated by almost a century, mark two moments in which the normative humanism of Hollywood has been penetrated: once by Naturalism and once by Code. Both share a narrative logic in which human agency is in question, though the former constitutes a recognizable school while the latter is more a condition under which cinema operates, and which becomes thematic material in a body of films. They share, however, a capacity for a political aesthetics predicated on antihumanist representation, which has not been much explored in Hollywood’s narrative and diegetic lineage. The two specific moments marked by the films examined in this essay reveal the intellectual, technological and cultural conditions of possibility for the salience of such representational interventions in Hollywood narrative cinema.

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