Tiffany Young
Dr. Sarah Arroyo
ENGL 696
December 16, 2014
Modern Cinema: Rhizomatic Realities of Multiplicities in the Time-Image
Modern cinema is in a state of perpetual becoming. It changes and flows with as many
characteristics and directions as those who are involved in its creation and interpretation.
Cinema has moved from a movement-image concept, involving spaces and places that we
accept as real and which subordinate time, to a time-image, in which time dictates the terms
of the movement unpredictably and examines places that are unfamiliar to us, creating spaces
of rhizomatic possibilities. Cinema has become more like our thoughts, a mirror to our
internal multiplicities caused by the various unending offshoots of tangents, than a
straightforward and linear history of events.
A rhizome is a convoluted mass with no beginning and no end, only offshoots in
various directions following no pattern or predetermined placement. Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari believed that this type of thinking promoted being. They described this type of
rhizomatic thought as something that was truer to the natural process, incorporating plateaus
and compiled with multiplicities. In “Introduction: Rhizome,” from their book A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the plateaus are “always in the middle, not at the
beginning or the end” and that rhizomes are “made of plateaus” (21).
Deleuze and Guattari explained that they were writing A Thousand Plateaus in the
form of a rhizome. They described how they would tackle a plateau each day, writing a few
lines, and sometimes using hallucinogenics to help them find the infinite lines. Their use of
hallucinogenics might be seen as their rebellion against the social standings as well as
attempting to open the mind to possibilities or ideas that are lost as individuals become
adults, bending to the norms.
Deleuze continued the rhizomatic concept into his exploration of cinema pre- and
post-World War II in his two volume series Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2:
The Time-Image. He presents image/matters, which would be film, and matter/images,
objectified in the observers. As summarized by Helen Buttel in “General Studies – Cinema 2:
The Time-Image,” Deleuze’s theory presented cinema as coinciding with the “belief in a
logical, orderly movement of events” prior to the war. This belief was shattered by the
destruction that remained as the wake of conflict, leaving cities both empty and in the process
of being rebuilt (321). This gave rise to situations that could not be explained and forced
many into the role of “viewers rather than doers” (321). Cinema mimicked the disjointed
features of reality by presenting scenes devoid of humanity or using close-ups that
dismembered parts of the body, leaving the viewer to connect the meanings to a form of
understanding. Buttel suggests “the creative power of the false” is Deleuze’s “highest
purpose of great filmmakers” (321).
In “The Memory of Resistance,” D. Rodowick explains Cinema 2 presents “thought
as experimentation, where truth is to be created rather than discovered” (418). He states that
we are not thinking and thought is external, coming from the other. Time is never linear but is
“a set of mutations…” and “incommunicable… whatever is divided by time cannot resolve
into a unity… it mutates, multiplies, and differentiates itself” (420). Cinema creates
possibilities while presenting fictional probabilities and becomes the external other
reterritorializing our thoughts into becoming.
Several articles have taken on the monumental task of viewing cinema through
Deleuze’s philosophy in an attempt to explain the time-image, matter/image and
image/matter, and time as a type of magic that can free us from living in a linear moment-to-
moment. The articles give examples of films that support the idea that cinema is in a state of
perpetual becoming instead of death, exemplifies rhizomatic plateaus and multiplicities that
encourage the continuance of the time-image in modern cinema, and fill us with possibilities
that our past has a direct relation to our future through the present thereby embodying the
time-image.
Life and cinema as art are linked together through becoming because while cinematic
art imitates life, it also is actively and creatively manipulating or restructuring reality. Pamela
Gravagne uses Strangers in Good Company (1990) to show how cinema can “alter our
perception and experience of time and ageing” and presents the idea that life in every aspect
is “an open-ended and unpredictable process of becoming” (41-42). This Canadian film casts
seven ordinary elderly women, whose bus breaks down near a house in a rural area, providing
them a place where time stops and they learn to stop being sick old women and become
something unfettered by age. Gravagne shows time as being complex and multidimensional,
not sequential or predictable, as the women realize growing old is not the next step in life but
instead that they have meaning in a perpetual continuation of life. This is the foundation of
the time-image, the rhizomatic continuum full of possibilities where “identity is no longer
based on being” in a linear reference, “but on a becoming that is constantly changing due to
the thinking and action that time and change provoke” (52).
Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, with its convoluted pathways and plateaus, can be
seen in the movie Memento (2000). Leonard, played by Guy Pierce, is a man suffering from
short-term memory loss caused by a head injury coupled with the traumatic murder of his
wife during a home invasion. He feels guilty for not being able to save her and is searching
for her killer. His condition makes his quest for vengeance almost impossible, requiring
Leonard to keep accurate notes of his findings. He compiles this information into various
paraphernalia, including tattoos of the facts, Polaroids with comments on the back, post-it
notes, and maps with notations. It quickly becomes apparent that not only are these methods
not completely incorruptible, but the people helping him my not be as reliable as he would
like them to be, including himself.
There are several scenes where Leonard must begin again, relearning people, places,
and events. Diran Lyons pointed out, in the article “Vengeance, the Power of the False, and
the Time-Image in Christopher Nolan’s Memento – A Note on Ressentiment at the Beginning
of the New Millennium,” that Memento “feeds us… linearity paradoxically…: sporadic
reinsertions into indeterminate positions in the past,” and that these leaps eventually return to
“the beginning of a clip… already witnessed, demanding… a bounding backward to a further
unidentified point, ad infinitum” (129) This continuous return to a blank slate of memories
for Leonard and a previous moment already witnessed by the audience creates a rhizomal
interplay of logic and understanding that confuses the audience while delivering just enough
information for an individual viewer to eventually work out a controversial ending. Even this
ending is based on viewer’s assumptions of Leonard’s sanity, culmination of events, and
whether he really has short-term memory loss.
The parsing together of scenes out of sync, each a segment presenting events prior to
the one just seen, separates image/matters, requiring the viewer to work through the evidence
with Leonard. In “Techno-Cinema,” Jamie Bianco states “the time… will validate only the
‘substance’ of Leonard’s manufactured signs” that he has compiled as mementos (385). The
viewer must, according to her, “learn to remember to forget… become forgetting,” like
Leonard’s perpetual state, so that we can “continue and… act anew” (385). This nonsequential space-time setting forces the audience to make connections based on ever new
evidence provided by past events creating constantly changing possibilities and probabilities
that may or may not be Leonard’s true character and actions.
Plateaus are realized during Memento when Leonard is accumulating information,
temporarily remembering what has just happened. He takes these moments of lucidity to
make concrete notes and leave reminders of the facts he has accumulated up to each point of
in his temporary coherence. Leonard tattoos the facts of his wife’s murder on his body. For
each person he meets, he takes a Polaroid picture and writes information about the person on
the back to let him know whether he can trust the person or how the individual can be of help
to his investigation.
Every time Leonard returns to a point of beginning his memories again, he must rely
on these notes or the people around him to refresh his memory of where everything stands.
His life revolves around these multiplicities that create him each time he starts over,
recreating himself again and again. These multiplicities lead to the plateaus and continue the
rhizomal maze of continuity he follows unerringly.
Leonard seems child-like in his trust early on in the movie. As the movie progresses,
the characters who are close to Leonard destroy their credibility and reliability through their
own actions as they use Leonard’s confusion and loss of short-term memory to try to get him
to kill others. A darkness within Leonard begins to show in his actions, such as what notes he
writes on the Polaroids that are not true, which causes the audience to distrust his motives and
reasoning. Whether this inner characteristic is caused by those he trusts using him and
thereby somehow influencing something deeper within him that retains a memory of their
manipulation or Leonard’s own personality coming to the forefront, is never concretely
proven, a rhizome of multiplicities within himself.
Leonard holds a gun to one of these untrustworthy companions, Teddy, played by Joe
Pantoliano, who suggests that it is Leonard’s nature that keeps Leonard trapped in a loop of
constantly searching for the killer. Teddy has helped Leonard in the past, claiming he helped
Leonard find and kill the murderer already, but that Leonard enjoyed killing so much that
Teddy helped him continue killing other undesirables. However, Teddy proved an unreliable
character in some of his previous dealings with Leonard, trying to turn Leonard against
others. This multiplicity of characteristics within Teddy sheds understanding on the complex
levels within Leonard and leaves the audience wondering whether Teddy is telling the truth
about not only killing Leonard’s wife’s murderer, but also about Leonard’s deep-seated
characteristics. Teddy may simply be trying to convince Leonard not to kill him (Teddy) by
confusing the facts or he may be buying time, waiting for Leonard to forget again and
become confused about what he is doing.
The twists and turns in the logic, chronology, and the events and true personalities of
characters produce a literary and aesthetic creation of rhizomal plateaus full of multiplicities
that are confusing and never-ending in Memento. The complexity created through memory
loss lays the foundation for these confusing paths that never end in a fulfilling and expected
movie ending. The audience is left feeling lost and wandering with answers that only ask more
questions.
Time travel’s possibilities and paradoxes have intrigued many people, including
science fiction fans and scientists, and provided a cinematic visual of Deleuze’s rhizome.
With the changes that could make the past, present, and future a complete tangled and chaotic
conglomeration of never-ending conduits, a rhizome of truly impressive magnitude, it is no
wonder cinema has embraced temporal distortion industry on several occasions. Andrew
Jaffe, in “The Time Lord and Fellow Travellers,” emphasizes this entanglement when he
explained the complications inherent in changing events using time travel. He presents the
idea of intervening in the past to change the present and future and that when viewed through
this scenario if you killed your ancestor, for instance, “the Universe becomes one in which
you were never born. So you never went back in time, so you didn’t kill your ancestor, so you
were born, so you were able to travel through time, so you did kill your ancestor…” and so
forth (621). This convoluted idea of rhizomatic multiplicity is only the beginning of the
complexities when looking at time travel and provides cinema with a foundation of Deleuzian
philosophy that mimics a rhizome and supports his theory of the time-image evolution in
cinema.
Using one show that has seems almost straight from, or at least that parallels well with
Deleuze’s theories, Doctor Who (2005) has become almost a perfect example of depiction.
As a Time Lord, the Doctor has special relation with time and space. He and, sometimes
more correctly, his blue police box spaceship called the TARDIS (Time and Relative
Dimension in Space), have a sense of when time is out of balance and displace themselves to
the moment in the past, present, or future where he must set things right. When events in the
timeline that are considered fixed, comparable to Deleuze’s plateaus, become threatened, the
Doctor arrives and usually bungles his way to smoothing out the events and keeping history,
or the future, going in the right direction.
There are moments that can be affected by changes without upsetting these fixed
moments. These periods of event changing correlate with multiplicities, becoming an event
with infinite possibilities and angles, even though only one is usually presented to the
audience. An example of the inherent multiplicities involved in these changes is shown
during Season Five. Amy Pond is first seen as a little girl with a crack in her wall leading to
an alternate reality. She encounters the time travelling doctor after his eleventh regeneration,
which will be expanded on later, causes his TARDIS to crash in her backyard. After spending
time discovering what the Doctor does or does not like to eat, and that young Scottish girls
are allowed to cook over a gas stove in the middle of the night, he explains that the TARDIS
needs to go on a quick time jump to recover from his rather destructive regeneration.
Five minutes later, the Doctor arrives back, only to discover that there is a
polymorphic creature with transference issues, who escaped from a prison through the trans-
dimensional crack in the wall, now residing in Amy’s home… and that Amy is twelve years
older. It seems those rhizomatic offshoots in the time space continuum took a shortcut back
and miscalculated which exit in the wormhole was the correct plateau. They manage to return
the creature and save the earth before jumping in the TARDIS to have adventures through
time, all with the understanding that Amy will be returned within minutes of when she left,
the night before her wedding to Rory.
Eventually Rory tags along in the fun, a Time Lord child is conceived between him
and Amy thanks to the TARDIS, and then time is thrown into a catastrophic meltdown
through various events. It seems the crack in Amy’s wall is not just between dimensions but
is also a rift in the space time continuum. Everything that gets close to the crack, which has
appeared across the universe and in different times, is actually engulfing events, objects, and
people, causing them to have never existed. Rory became one of the casualties of the rift.
However, it seems that he is a fixed point, or at least fixed person, in the continuum,
returning as a robotic Roman centurion centuries before his and Amy’s original timeline,
creating a whole new level of events. This causes an alternate relationship in the space time
continuum of their timeline, a multiplicity of becoming with plateaus of its own.
Many of the events affected by the rift revolve around disasters the Doctor veered
back onto the correct fixed point path. It soon becomes apparent that, if the Doctor never
existed, all the stars in the universe would have long ago burned out. This event is felt in
every corner of time and space, undoing everything the Doctor ever did and rewriting a
history without him. This rewrite begins creating possibly thousands of multiplicities in a
rhizomatic pile of time and space. The Pandorica was created to imprison the Doctor and
thereby diverting the universal disaster. It was created with several traps to keep him from
escaping including deadlocks and time stops along with matter lines and a restoration field.
Amy replaces the Doctor and Rory keeps watch over the box for the next couple of millennia.
A temporal paradox begins to be created as the Doctor convolutes events along his
own timeline, reminding Amy to remember while spreading hope throughout the universe,
and eventually returns us to the TARDIS blowing up and destroying the universe to the point
that it never existed. Amy, of course, remembers the Doctor, which brings him back to
existence, but with the TARDIS still in the process of blowing up. The Doctor takes the
Pandorica into the TARDIS to save the universe because it contains the beginnings of the
universe in it, which will be scattered across time and space, recreating everyone except the
Doctor.
Amy, Rory, and Dr. River Song, Amy and Rory’s grown daughter, manage to
preserve a chunk of space outside of time, events happening while time loops in a split
second. This gives everyone time to figure out how to save the Doctor and return him to the
space time continuum. This offshoot from events that have transpired return time to a more
stable and flowing continuity.
Not only do all of these events represent a rhizome of complicated plateaus that lead
to multiplicities of events and possibilities, they represent the Doctor and his companions on
a continual journey of becoming. At the end of Season Seven, the Doctor must cross his own
timeline again, the forbidden place of his burial. He arrives on Trenzalore, the place where he
“died,” and enters his tomb to find a glowing blue light of spinning rhizomatic representation
of his life. The Doctor explains that this mass is him and every line of his past, present, and
future that were and might have been, the tendrils growing out of the rhizome and
intersections where they cross creating plateaus with multiple possibilities (see picture
below).
This reminder of the Doctor’s past brings with it his characteristic ability as a Time
Lord to regenerate. The events mentioned here happened during the Doctor’s eleventh
incarnation. Each incarnation he has met companions and learned to become more. He leaves
behind his immaturity, hatreds, and biases. Each event and companion becomes part of who
he is and what he is becoming. What is seen is a Time Lord who cares nothing for the people
he travels with fleeing from the war that destroyed all the Time Lords (sort of) and grows into
something more human, more caring. He becomes more with each incarnation but will never
fully be human, so he continues on his path of becoming.
The TARDIS has her own multiplicities across various episodes. As a living
spaceship with space time continuum manipulation abilities, she can take the Doctor anytime
he, or she, wants to go. Her characteristics do not end there, though. Eric Griffith stated in
“Why Watch Doctor Who” that “the inside of the ship changes even more often than the
Doctor himself,” lending to the idea that she is representive of Deleuzian multiplicities (2). At
one point, the TARDIS’ consciousness is transferred into a corporeal form. She learns to
speak, think, and even bite. When the Doctor regenerates, the change causes damage to the
TARDIS. As a matter of evolution, she pops out of the time continuum to correct herself and
returns with a control room that looks different, more modern. Her personality becomes
layered and more complex, allowing the TARDIS to become more, much the same way as
the Doctor.
The show itself has been written and directed by several people. These visions of the
Doctor have created a character of vast and never-ending possibilities of multiplicities, as
indicated by David Haskins in “The New Man: The Regeneration of Doctor Who.” When the
show changed hands from Russell T. Davies to Steven Moffat, one Doctor died and another
took his place. Davies version of the Doctor revolved around unrequited love with a darkness
and bleakness that surrounded the Doctor, who was portrayed subtly as being lonely. When
Moffat took over at the death of the tenth doctor, he aimed the show more toward children
with the idea of the Doctor as the “magic man from space” with his companions Amy – the
girl who waited and Clara – the impossible girl (133).
Doctor Who is great example of time leading the movement of cinema. Each episode
is dependent on when the Doctor and his companions go, not where they land. It is time that
needs fixing. The events are byproducts of time being broken. Each time is a fixed moment of
becoming that continues to another and can split in any direction; it is a plateau waiting and
holding every multiplicity of every event waiting for the Doctor to choose when it will go,
but not where it will go.
Modern cinema has truly entered the age of the time-image. Each show mentioned has
presented various components found in A Thousand Plateaus and Cinema 2. From the
storyline in Memento unfolding backwards and supplying the previous events after the
results, to time becoming multidimensional in Strangers in Good Company and implying life
is continuous instead of being about becoming old and dying, these movies provide an insight
into Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming that continues without end and proves that modern
cinema is no longer focused on the movement-image of pre-World War II. The rhizomatic
temporal travel and paradoxes associated with Doctor Who allow the audience to grasp a
small section of Deleuze’s rhizome and makes becoming more personal, reminding us that
we change with each relationship we make or lose and every event that affects us, even when
we do not realize it.
l
The rhizome of the life of Doctor Who.
Works Cited
Bianco, Jamie S. “Techno-Cinema.” Comparative Literature Studies, 41.3 (2004): 377-403.
Web. 13 Dec 2014.
Buttel, Helen Thwaits. "General Studies - Cinema 2: The Time-Image." Journal of Modern
Literature, 17.2/3 (1990): 321. Web. 13 Dec 2014.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: The University of
Minnesota Press, 1987. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: The Athlone Press, 1986. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota
Press, 1989. Print.
Doctor Who: The Complete Fifth Series. Dir. Steven Moffat. BBC Home Entertainment,
2010. DVD.
Gravagne, Pamela H. “The Magic of Cinema: Time as Becoming in Strangers in Good
Company.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 8.1 (2013): 41-63. Web.
13 Dec 2014.
Griffith, Eric. "Why Watch Doctor Who?" PCmag.com (2013) ProQuest. Web. 13 Dec. 2014.
Hoskin, Dave. “The New Man: The Regeneration of Doctor Who.” Metro Magazine 169
(2011): 130-133. Web. 13 Dec 2014.
“The Name of the Doctor.” Doctor Who: The Complete Seventh Series. BBC Home
Entertainment, 2013. DVD.
Jaffe, Andrew. “The Time Lord and Fellow Travellers.” Nature. 502 (October 2013): 620622. Web. 1 Dec 2014.
Lyons, Diran. “Vengeance, the Power of the False, and the Time-Image in Christopher
Nolan’s Memento – A Note on Ressentiment at the Beginning of the New
Millennium.” Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. 2.1 (2006): 127 – 135. Web. 27
Nov 2014.
Memento. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Lions Gate, 2000. DVD.
“Pandorica.” TARDIS Data Core. Wikia. Web. 13 Dec 2014
Rodowick, D. N. “The Memory of Resistance.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 96.3 (1997):
417-437. Web. 13 Dec 2014.