tandfonline.com – Contingency, causality, complexity: distributed agency in the mind-game film

Abstract

This essay complements my earlier symptomatic, sociological and economic reading of mind-game films (‘The Mind-Game Film’ 2009) with a reassessment of their status as a privileged (though minoritarian) object of study for contemporary cinema from a philosophical perspective. This essay also updates the analysis given in the 2009 essay, mindful that there have in recent years been a number of popular big-budget films that qualify as mind-game films. Finally, the essay presents twelve key features of mind-game films: (1) multiple universes, (2) multiple temporalities, (3) causality between coincidence and conjunction, (4) feedback: looped and retroactive causalities, (5) mise–en–abyme constructions, (6) the observer as part of the observed, (7) living with contradictions, (8) imaginary resolutions no longer dissolve real contradictions, (9) antagonistic mutuality under conditions of distributed agency, (10) agency – with the self, against the self, (11) time travel films as black boxes and (12) the mind-game film as pharmakon. Ultimately, mind-game films amplify ontological instability and dismantle both the sovereign subject and its antidote, the divided self of modern subjectivity, in view of accepting more complex but also self-contradictory, more limited but also more extended forms of agency.