Identification and Contagion in Anna Rose Holmer's The Fits
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Abstract
“Identification and Contagion” asks the question of how film can address the body of its viewer in an ethical dimension. Because contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have insisted that being in public means always being a raced and sexed body, film's ability to address audiences as though they were perspectives divorced of corporeal matter must be considered an ethical problem. The 2016 film The Fits provides a model of how a film can formally and thematically address an embodied audience. At the level of form, characters stare out through the camera at the audience, returning their gaze. Through the use of staging that places the camera (and therefore viewers) between characters, the film's director Anna Rose Holmer suggests an equivalence between the characters which are under observation and the audience. Furthermore, the film's treatment of the theme of conversion disorders implies a form of transmission between bodies that does not require physical contact to take place. Freudian psychoanalysis describes how such symptoms can pass from person to person even through a medium such as film. A recent example of conversion disorder in New York demonstrates how even watching a video of a person suffering hysterical symptoms can cause a viewer thousands of miles away to contract the same symptoms. The Fits therefore provides a model for how film can formally and thematically address an audience ethically at the level of their presence as bodies in social space.
Contributor Notes
Macy Todd is an assistant professor in the English Department and director of the Film Studies minor at SUNY—Buffalo State. His research interests include early and transitional film, genre studies, and psychoanalysis. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Senses of Cinema, Umbr(a), and English Literature in Transition. His current book project is tentatively titled There was I: The Problem of Identification in Narrative Cinema.