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45 NCJCF 10 (1) pp. 45–61 Intellect Limited 2012 New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film Volume 10 Number 1 © 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ncin.10.1.45_1 Keywords Harmony Korine waste ethics affect new materialism feel-bad cinema Tina Kendall Anglia Ruskin University Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste absTraCT This article considers questions of affect and ethics in relation to three films about waste: Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (1999), Lucy Walker’s Waste Land (2010), and Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009). Drawing from new materi- alist models, the article situates the ethical import of these very different films in rela- tion to the way that they present waste as a vibrant and affectively charged medium through which we might rethink relations between people and things. It argues that a careful evaluation of the way these films generate and manage affect is crucial to an understanding of the kinds of ethical work each might be said to perform. While The Gleaners and I and Waste Land emphasize the uplifting feelings that can be generated from trash if we learn to see it differently, Trash Humpers rejects the activist, humanist ethos of Varda’s and Walker’s films in favour of an avant-garde impulse to degrade and defile. However, despite its nihilistic approach to its subject matter, this article argues that Trash Humpers’ feel-bad aesthetic does not rule out the possibility of ethical engagement. Rather, it offers important insights about the role of negative affect within an ethics of waste. This article considers questions of affect and ethics in relation to three films about waste. Specifically, it examines Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009) alongside two documentary films about trash: Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners & I (2000) and Lucy Walker’s Oscar nominated Waste Land (2010). Both documentaries have attracted a great deal of popular and

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  • 45

    NCJCF 10 (1) pp. 4561 Intellect Limited 2012

    New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film Volume 10 Number 1

    2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ncin.10.1.45_1

    KeywordsHarmony Korinewasteethicsaffectnew materialismfeel-bad cinema

    Tina KendallAnglia Ruskin University

    Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste

    absTraCTThis article considers questions of affect and ethics in relation to three films about waste: Agns Vardas The Gleaners and I (1999), Lucy Walkers Waste Land (2010), and Harmony Korines Trash Humpers (2009). Drawing from new materi-alist models, the article situates the ethical import of these very different films in rela-tion to the way that they present waste as a vibrant and affectively charged medium through which we might rethink relations between people and things. It argues that a careful evaluation of the way these films generate and manage affect is crucial to an understanding of the kinds of ethical work each might be said to perform. While The Gleaners and I and Waste Land emphasize the uplifting feelings that can be generated from trash if we learn to see it differently, Trash Humpers rejects the activist, humanist ethos of Vardas and Walkers films in favour of an avant-garde impulse to degrade and defile. However, despite its nihilistic approach to its subject matter, this article argues that Trash Humpers feel-bad aesthetic does not rule out the possibility of ethical engagement. Rather, it offers important insights about the role of negative affect within an ethics of waste.

    This article considers questions of affect and ethics in relation to three films about waste. Specifically, it examines Harmony Korines Trash Humpers (2009) alongside two documentary films about trash: Agns Vardas Les glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners & I (2000) and Lucy Walkers Oscar nominated Waste Land (2010). Both documentaries have attracted a great deal of popular and

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    1. The paradigm of the new materialism includes work by a diverse range of theorists; it draws from, and overlaps with, recent philosophical work in speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, media archaeology, ecotheory, and other discrete but interrelated traditions. For the purposes of this article, I focus especially on Jane Bennetts influential book, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), which has influenced debates across several of these strands (see also Bryant et al. 2011; Coole and Frost 2010; DeLanda 2000; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012; Bolt and Barrett 2012).

    critical attention for their deeply moving portrayals of marginalized subjects who make their living from what other people throw away. The Gleaners and I is a road movie of sorts, in which film-maker Varda drives across the French countryside and cities in order to document how different communities of people have learned to fashion a living from refuse. It has been praised for the sensitivity that it brings to its subject matter, and for the complex ways that it weaves together reflections on trash and decay with meditations on mortality and finitude, through an emphasis on Vardas own process of aging, and on the power of film as an art of salvage (Fischer 2012: 120). Walkers Waste Land takes a similar approach, looking at the community of catadores, or trash pickers, who make a living sorting through rubbish in the Jardim Gramacho, the worlds largest dump in Rio de Janeiro. Like The Gleaners and I, it engages directly with the ethical significance of waste, in a documen-tary and explicitly humanist framework to construct an emotionally charged appeal to spectators.

    Korines Trash Humpers, by contrast, is a tongue-in-cheek, fictional film about people who like to hump trash. In his review of the film, Peter Bradshaw describes Trash Humpers as a continuous, 78-minute afflict-a-thon. It sendeth acid rain on the just and the unjust. It is a downpour on those who admire good taste, and those who admire bad taste (Bradshaw 2010). This film follows what the DVD booklet refers to as a small gang of elderly Peeping Toms through the shadows of a nightmarishly familiar suburban landscape as they dry hump garbage cans, fellate tree branches, apply liquid dish soap to pancakes, smash up television sets and fluorescent light bulbs, yelp like hyenas, tap-dance chaotically in parking lots, power-wash wheel-chairs, and engage in other unusual, debasing and violent rituals (Korine 2009). Described by Korine as a film unearthed from the buried landscape of the American nightmare, or as something found somewhere and unearthed; an old VHS tape that was in some attick [sic] or buried in some ditch, and shot using obsolete technology (degraded VHS camcorders), the film explores the meaning of trash across a complex array of registers (Korine 2009).

    How might we evaluate the ethical significance of waste in these three very different films? This article situates the ethical import of these films in relation to the way that they present waste as a vibrant and affectively charged medium through which we might rethink the relationship between people and things. Despite contrasts in tone, mode of address, aesthetic technique and contexts of production and reception, each of these films is preoccupied by the question of how people might live differently with waste. At a very basic level, then, these films highlight what Gay Hawkins, in The Ethics of Waste, calls the ethico-political challenge of waste: imagining a new mate-rialism that would transform our relations with the things we pretend not to see (Hawkins 2006: 81). My essay reads these films in light of recent new materialist critiques, which have highlighted the significance of waste as part of a broader effort to revisit some of our basic definitions of matter. While the specific contexts and theoretical orientations of such enquiries have been wide ranging and diverse, a shared goal of this work has been to conceive materi-ality less in terms of binaries and hierarchies between people and things, to think instead in terms of the sets of relations, networks and assemblages that connect all matter on a plane of immanence.1

    In this article, I consider how these films about waste do more than just reflect the range of ecological, economic or ethical questions that cluster around trash; they are themselves ethical to the extent that they contribute

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    new sensibilities and invite new ways of thinking and feeling about trash and about the human subjects who form relations with it. I am particularly interested in the role of feeling within this process, and in thinking through the different ways that these films about waste mobilize affect as part of their ethical implication of the spectator. Indeed, this interest in thinking through the ethical dimensions of affective spectatorship strongly motivates my selec-tion of films. Despite the case that I have made for affinities on the level of basic subject matter, we also need to acknowledge just how wildly these films contrast in terms of their aesthetic and affective approaches. I argue that a careful evaluation of the way these films generate and manage affect is crucial to an understanding of the kinds of ethical work each might be said to perform. Cinematic ethics, in this context, refers at once to the sensory and affective dimensions of the spectator-screen relationship, and to the questions of responsibility, self-reflexivity, desire and engagement with otherness, which are foregrounded when considering our intellectual (and emotional) attachments to art and culture (Downing and Saxton 2010: 1).

    new maTerialisT eThiCs of wasTe There is to date a rich critical history that addresses the ethical and political significance of waste, disgust and abjection in relation to aspects of human subjectivity and to notions of cultural and social value (Douglas 1966; Bataille 1985; Kristeva 1982; Laporte 2000; Benjamin 1999). However, the recent new materialist turn across the social sciences and humanities has prompted a re-evaluation of some of our most deeply held assumptions about presumed divisions between human and non-human life. One key feature of this approach has been to emphasize the inherent creativity and agency that is integral to even the most passive and inanimate seeming matter. Waste occu-pies a strategic position within these debates because it is the kind of matter we frequently take to be at the antipodes of human life: dead, inert, disgusting and without value, meaning or agency of any kind. New materialist theory seeks to challenge or complicate these understandings of waste, which cast it as the purely symbolic Other of human agency, endeavouring to show how waste is also lively matter, which shares in some of the creative activity we tend to assume is a distinctive marker of human life.

    As Hawkins notes in The Ethics of Waste, such binaries are implicit within many dominant accounts of rubbish, from discourses surrounding environ-mental politics to critiques of consumer capitalism. In these accounts, there is a tendency to lock trash into a binary of things vs humans, in which all of the agency, privilege and value rests on the human side of the equation; waste is simply that which must be managed, relegated to the outside, or just overlooked. Along these lines, Hawkins notes: waste is a central character in an already well-established disenchantment story, which presumes a funda-mental dualism between human culture and non-human nature (Hawkins 2006: 89). And as Jane Bennett notes in Vibrant Matter (2010), it is precisely this image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter that feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so, she notes by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of non-human powers circulating around and within human bodies (Bennett 2010: xi). In this framework, Hawkins notes, waste can only be bad; it makes us feel bad, its presence disgusts and horri-fies us, it wrecks everything (Hawkins 2006: 910). The problem with such

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    disenchantment stories for both Hawkins and Bennett, is that in making us feel bad about waste and wasting, it becomes too easy to slip into arrogant self-centeredness or nihilism. Hawkins notes that instead of inspiring posi-tive action, a politics based on the imperative to reform the self in the name of nature can easily slide into moralism or resentment, distracting attention from how we actually live with waste and blinding us to the ubiquity of ethi-cal work (Hawkins 2006: 1213). And in a similar vein, Bennett argues in The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001), the characterization of the world as disen-chanted ignores and then discourages affective attachment to that world (2001: 3).

    In place of this image of a disenchanted world, new materialisms develop their account of ethics from a basis of acknowledging the agency and vibrancy of matter. As Bennett notes, for vital materialists:

    [T]he starting point of ethics is [] the recognition of human participa-tion in a shared, vital materiality. We are vital materiality and we are surrounded by it, though we do not always see it that way. The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern non-human vital-ity, to become perceptually open to it.

    (2010: 3)

    As Bennett suggests here, this ethical model is not dependent on the cultiva-tion of a conscious moral attitude that seeks to do ones bit for the planet, but proceeds from a more basic level of embodied receptivity to the liveli-ness of matter. Such an ethics calls for a perceptual praxis: the cultivation of a disposition of anticipatory readiness and a perceptual style open to what Bennett calls the affective force of thing-power: the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to mani-fest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our experience (2010: xiv).

    The medium of film would appear to lend itself particularly well to this ethical task of cultivating our perceptual ability to discern non-human vitality (2010: 3). Indeed, many canonical film theories have defined cinema precisely in relation to its ability to foster a renewed attentiveness to materiality, to bring spectators into intimate contact with what Siegfried Kracauer calls the refuse of existence (1960: 54). In what follows, I draw from this new mate-rialist model of ethics to explore how these three films about waste respond to this challenge. Following Bennett and Hawkins, I consider how these films engage with the disenchantment stories that cluster around waste, and consider the aesthetic and affective strategies each adopts to explore relation-ships between people and things. In doing so, however, I want to question some of the implicit assumptions about the ethical value of negative affect that often underpin these theories. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost note in a recent collection of essays on the new materialism, the prevailing ethos of new materialist ontology is more positive and constructive than critical or negative (2010: 8). Indeed, for both Hawkins and Bennett, it is the mood of enchantment premised on a joyful and affirmative recognition of human participation in a vital, shared materiality which operates as the hinge for ethical responsiveness and political action. Although they do admit of bad feelings in small doses, these theories have a tendency to downplay the value of negativity on the grounds that negative affect and critical thinking may not sustain the ethical task of fostering deep or meaningful attachments between

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    humans and the material environment. While we certainly need theories that can guard against the feelings of moralism and resentment that disenchant-ment stories might call into play, I echo Timothy Mortons claim that an ecologically informed ethics must include darkness as well as light, negativity as well as positivity (Morton 2010: 16). Negativity can be a useful bedfellow for an ethics of waste, because, as Sianne Ngai argues in Ugly Feelings, nega-tive affects are marked by an ambivalence that will enable them to resist being recuperated as a salve or solution to the problems that they diagnose (Ngai 2005: 3). In this sense, they can also be said to retain a political utility, training us not just to the vitality of matter, but to the all-too-human prac-tices, processes, and thoughts that occlude or despoil it.

    Furthermore, we need to remain equally wary about the effects of the feel-good emotions that are often marshalled when waste is framed cinematically in more affirmative terms, as a source of enchantment. Indeed, there is also a whole discursive tradition running counter to these disenchantment stories that emphasizes precisely the vitality and utopic convertibility of waste. These cultural accounts play instead on what I call redemption narratives stories that mine the connection between salvaging and salvation, foregrounding wastes ability to redeem human lives in a parallel process through which waste is recognized as a vital resource. While the focus in these narratives on the protean liveliness of waste has the potential to suspend or challenge ontologi-cal distinctions between humans and things, very often they generate a reas-suring image of waste that is hospitable to human needs and amenable to our emotional investments. While such stories retain a powerful emotional resonance, they can also make trouble for a new materialist ethics of waste, since wastes latent vibrancy in these narratives is frequently gauged in rela-tion to human needs. In these stories, waste is still often passive and inert matter until it is converted into value, redeemed by human acts of generosity, care, or agency. We need to see how both of these narratives work, then, as different sides of the same coin: while disenchantment stories picture waste as symptoms of socio-economic or ecological discontent, redemption narra-tives present it in terms of a cathartic working through, offering redemptive solutions to these same problems. At the same time, we need to recognize that the affects that these narratives generate and mobilize in the form of feel-bad or feel-good emotions are a vital component of the ethical work they may be understood to perform. The task for a cinematic ethics of waste, from this point of view, would be to resist the process by which the sensory and affective force of thing-power settles down into neatly packaged emotions that offer no challenge to our ways of thinking about humannon-human relations.

    In what follows, I will consider the very different aesthetic and affec-tive strategies these films develop as part of their exploration of the ways we might relate to rubbish. Although The Gleaners & I and Waste Land are very different in the way that they imagine relations between people and things, both films emphasize the life-affirming feelings that can be generated from encounters with trash if we learn to see it differently. By contrast, Trash Humpers offers very little, if anything, in the way of a feel-good factor that might be extracted from a revitalized attentiveness to rubbish. Instead, Trash Humpers is a distinctly feel-bad film, which rejects the activist and explic-itly humanist ethos of Vardas and Walkers films in favour of an avant-garde impulse to sully, degrade and defile (Lbecker 2011). However, despite its nihilistic approach to its subject matter, I argue that Trash Humperss feel-bad aesthetic does not rule out the possibility of ethical engagement. Rather, it

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    offers important insights about the role of negative affect within a cinematic ethics of waste.

    feel-good eThiCs: (The Gleaners and I)In The Gleaners and I, Varda documents a wide variety of gleaners as they go about their daily routines. Some gather agricultural waste deemed unfit for consumption and left to rot in fields, while urban gleaners forage for food leftover from farmers markets or dumped in household bins. Others, such as Varda herself, incorporate trash and found objects within decorative or artistic work. It is a powerfully moving film, regularly described by critics and view-ers in superlative and distinctly emotional terms. Meredith Brodys review in the Chicago Reader calls it a [b]eautiful, absorbing, and touching [] experi-ence not to be missed, while A. O. Scott observes in the New York Times that although the film looks at difficult social issues, The Gleaners and I is never depressing. Even at their most desperate [] Ms. Vardas gleaners retain a resilient, generous humanity that is clearly brought to the surface by her own tough, open spirit (Brody 2000; Scott 2000). A vital part of the films allure for these critics is the way that it seeks to convert the negative affective reso-nances of waste found in environmental discourses the sort that make us feel bad into a more uplifting, feel-good cinematic experience for spectators. As I will argue, The Gleaners & I creates this affirmative experience with extraor-dinary subtlety and intelligence, calling for a renewed attentiveness to waste that also challenges common sense ideas of what it means to be human.

    The Gleaners and I plays a prominent role in Hawkinss The Ethics of Waste. She notes that the achievement of Vardas film is to open up the question of the person-thing relation in such a way that we are able to see the complexities of a different and radical ethics of waste at work (2006: 81). What makes this ethics different and radical for Hawkins is the way that the film asks us to look past disenchantment stories, to notice waste in ways that disrupt the bound-aries between subject and object, human and non-human, useful and useless, dead and alive (2006: 86). Paradoxically, Varda accomplishes this questioning of boundaries between human and non-human through an explicitly human-ist framework, emphasizing how the distinctly human values of compas-sion and generosity are vital for an ethics of waste. In her reading, Hawkins focuses in particular on one of the most frequently discussed episodes from the film, in which Varda visits a field where potatoes deemed unfit for sale are dumped and left to rot. In this segment, Varda conducts interviews with a range of people, including farmers who discuss the supermarket-imposed constraints on what is saleable and what is not, and groups of gleaners who collect potatoes that have to be thrown out as a result, including one man who, as we learn, gleans potatoes in order to serve them in a soup kitchen for the homeless. These interviews are interspersed with shots that picture the process of potato harvesting, and others that show potatoes that have been dumped in a field unperturbed by gleaners. Varda uses these potatoes as a means of telescoping the extraordinary range of meanings, values and uses that humans establish with things that, for one reason or another, are thrown away. Through the various interviews, the discarded potatos mean-ing is situated alternately as crop, as livelihood, as commodity, as a source of nutrition, as something to be gleaned, or as unsalvageable waste.

    These competing frames of reference testify to the diversity of meanings, values, uses and relations that humans establish with the material world.

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    They also indicate the inherent instability of the concept of waste, since what is taken for granted by one person as being unfit for human consumption is seen as a perfectly valuable source of nutrition for another. It is precisely this semantic instability that Vardas film seeks to highlight as the film unfolds. Her investigation into waste and the uses that various people find for it expands to include interviews with a range of people, including legal experts who define waste from a juridical standpoint, the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, who talks about waste within a psychoanalytic framework, to ordi-nary people who challenge definitions of waste through their acts of gleaning. Amongst these subjects, Varda explores their motivations for recuperating rubbish, to find some who glean out of necessity, others who glean as a form of activist protest against the fast-paced cycles of consumption and waste that sustain consumer capitalism, and still others who glean materials for artistic work. While ostensibly the aim of such interviews would be to clarify and pin down the subject matter being investigated, the effect in Vardas film is precisely the opposite: as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern in any objective sense what waste is, since it can always be recu-perated for use. And indeed, an important aspect of Vardas radical ethics of waste relates to the trouble she makes for our common sense ways of appre-hending and evaluating what trash is at a very basic level. What The Gleaners and I suggests instead is that waste is nothing more or less than a by-product of human attention and affection: it is what we designate as unworthy of our concern or feeling. And this understanding of waste as a corollary of human attention and affection is central to Vardas ethical and aesthetic project in this film. Indeed, the films central metaphor connects activities of gleaners who seek out residual value in what has been thrown away, with Vardas own process of gathering up and saving images of the marginal and overlooked. Both Varda and the gleaners embody an ethical sensibility founded on a will-ingness to notice and to care for what is overlooked: in Bennetts terms, to become perceptually open to wastes vitality and possibilities. The film also seeks to implicate spectators into this ethical project, asking us to invest our attention and emotion in subjects that we might otherwise choose to ignore.

    A key moment in which the film solicits the spectators emotional involve-ment occurs towards the end of the potato sequence. While conducting an interview with one of the gleaners in a field of dumped potatoes, Vardas attention is arrested by a heart-shaped potato amongst those thrown away for failing to conform to supermarket standards. Foraging through the pile further, Varda discovers several heart-shaped potatoes, which she bundles together into her bag, takes home, and films. Varda zooms in on the heart-shaped potatoes in close detail, and as she does so, she muses about connec-tions between these heart shaped potatoes and the forms of charity and generosity that they could sustain if they were not dumped in remote fields and left unseen. This prompts a new series of interviews with gleaners who pick up potatoes as part of their voluntary work with charities, including one man who does so to serve in a local charity soup kitchen. These interviews invite a strong emotional response, bringing together the plight of those who have nothing to eat, with the generosity of charity workers who reinvest in waste as a resource for helping others. The heart-shaped potatoes in this sequence take on emotional value as symbols of the virtues of compassion and care that is at the heart of the films ethical aesthetic. It is a powerful rhetorical gesture, which taps into the pathos of what is thrown away, and seeks to convert it into feelings of responsibility, generosity and care for fellow

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    humans. This is one of the ways that The Gleaners and I is frequently read: Virginia Bonner notes that the film works to cultivate a humanist awareness of, and interpellation into, a community of gleaners, humanitarians, fellow humans (Bonner 2009: 124).

    Such an emphasis on waste as a corollary of human attention would appear to sit uncomfortably with a new materialist ethics of waste, suggesting as it does a human-centric imposition of meaning and value onto the materiality of the vegetable. And yet, the potatoes in this sequence yield other possibili-ties for Hawkins. She argues that the anthropocentric framing of the wasted potatoes is held in check, counterbalanced by an emphasis on the materi-ality of waste, and its capacity to exceed human designs. Key for Hawkins is the haptic address that is created in scenes in which we are brought into close proximity with the sensuous, tactile materiality of the potatoes. Here, the exclusively human framing of the potato gives way to a different form of perception, which encounters the potato as something alien and strange, and at least momentarily as resistant to human needs and meanings. As Hawkins enthuses, it is hard not to become caught up in the emotion of this scene: we experience Vardas sensuous enchantment with the potato through the cinematic process of being affected, being altered by feelings (2006: 84). And it is precisely this possibility of being emotionally affected that opens the way for ethical response in Hawkinss model. Affect, she notes can be the impulse for new relations and the motivation for a different ethics, a sudden inspira-tion for a new use (2006: 36).

    Crucially, this same experience of sensuous, affective spectatorship is rendered in subsequent scenes from the film, in which Varda turns the camera on herself, to consider the texture of her own skin in relation to the potatoes. In picturing her own flesh in the process of becoming-waste, she re-distributes the sorts of agencies that we normally ascribe to people and things, showing how thing-power resides in both human and non-human matter. This creates for a highly complex mood or tone; while the emphasis on loss, decay, ageing and death creates a sense of melancholy, such disenchanting feelings are held in check by the films emphasis on the vibrant, energetic material processes that animate both human and non-human matter. It is this gesture of creating new relations between people and waste, while suspending their hierarchi-cal meanings, which is the source of the films ethical value for Hawkins. The feel-good aspect of the film arguably sustains that project, by moving specta-tors gently towards an affirmative recognition of our deep imbrication with the materiality of waste and with things we choose not to see. While it constructs a moving, uplifting message about humans and waste, this film rejects the kinds of hierarchies that underpin most humanisms. Instead, it negotiates a revised understanding of the human that is enhanced and expanded through an ethical aesthetic that recognizes both disenchantment and thing-power as a property of both human and non-human life.

    feel-good moralism: (WasTe land)Like The Gleaners & I, Walkers documentary Waste Land engages directly with the ethical questions that subtend our relations with waste. Even more so than Vardas film, Walkers Waste Land trades on the pathos of waste, and directs its production of affect towards feelings of empathy for the trash pick-ers whose livelihoods depend on finding value in what is thrown away. This strong emotional address is central to the way that the film has been marketed

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    and received. The films tagline, for example, explicitly addresses the spectator in strongly emotional terms, telling us: What happens in the worlds largest trash city will transform you. Critics have likewise situated the film in relation to the way it taps into the power of waste to move spectators emotionally. John De Fores review for the Hollywood Reporter, for instance, argues, squalor and garbage make for a surprisingly heartwarming tale, noting that it is a joy to watch despite the abject poverty it contains (De Fore 2010). In a review for the Huffington Post, Jason Silva calls Waste Land the Slumdog Millionaire of documentaries: an inspiring, deeply moving crowd-pleaser that manages to uplift the spirit while set against the backdrop of garbage (Silva 2010). As these reviews make clear, the film foregrounds the redemptive meanings of both trash and art, seeking to convert both into a powerfully moving emotional encounter. But, as I will argue, while it is an intensely moving film, Waste Land does very little to redraw relations between human and non-human life, or to implicate us ethically in what is shown. Rather, the film foregrounds the cathartic, redemptive capacities of art to transform feel-bad poverty and human suffering into an uplifting, feel-good message, while absolving us of responsibility for what we see.

    The subjects of the film are artist Vik Muniz and the trash pickers of the Jardim Gramacho, who are the subjects of his latest project entitled Pictures of Garbage. Born in Brazil and based in Brooklyn, New York, Muniz has garnered an international reputation for his unique photographic-cum-sculptural process, which consists of reconstructing famous paintings from a wide range of mate-rials, including diamonds, dust, sugar cane, lunch meat, wire, chocolate sauce, junk, tiny toys and so on, and then re-photographing them. Munizs work plays on a number of tensions, including contrasts between the three-dimensional, tactile and aggressively material-based set-ups, and the two-dimensional, deceptively flat glossiness of his resulting photographs (Smith 2011). While his subjects are diverse, his formal approach consistently interrogates the trans-formative possibilities of the art of salvage. In Waste Land, film-maker Walker follows Muniz as he travels from his home in Brooklyn, New York, back to Rio de Janeiro, hoping to give something back to the community where he was born. He travels to the slums outside of Rio, to photograph a selection of trash pickers who work in the Jardim Gramacho, hoping, he says, to change the lives of a group of people by using the same materials that they deal with everyday.

    Scenes early in the film introduce us to the individual stories of the pick-ers, letting us in on details of their lives as they go about the business of sorting through the rubbish looking for recyclable materials. In these shots, the film captures something of the cinematic richness and intensity of the Jardim Gramacho setting, as hulking trucks file in to deliver fresh material to a vast, seemingly endless sea of rubbish. The scale of these scenes is espe-cially impressive, framing waste as a cinematic spectacle that is both awe-inspiring and anxiety inducing in its vastness. Such moments, when waste is framed on such a monumental scale, confront spectators with snippets of the kind of intimate, sensory thing-power that a cinematic ethics of waste is charged with disclosing. There is something about how small and vulner-able the pickers look against the shifting mountains of rubbish that creates a striking sense of wastes uncanny agency and vitality, calling into question just how much control or mastery human subjects really do wield in the face such colossal chaos. But while these moments have the potential to confront us both viscerally and intellectually with the vibrant creativity of matter, and to question the place of humans at the putative centre of the universe, the

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    film largely fails to deliver on this critique. As the film progresses, it is clear that Walkers main interest in filming waste remains squarely on the human interest angle of the catadores experience, and on the sentimental reac-tions that their stories might generate. In other words, Walker is interested in the power of redemption stories to transform viewers by moving them emotionally. Such an aim has ethical ambitions, but the film instead drums up emotional response as a source of moral empathy, which, as Michele Aaron argues, forgoes the ambiguity and labour of ethical reflection in order to dictate or guarantee a less-challenging univocal response (Aaron 2007: 117). Throughout the film, we are repeatedly encouraged to sympathize with the plight of the pickers and their dreams of leaving the Jardim Gramacho for a better life. At one point, one of the catadores addresses Muniz, telling him candidly, this is no future; subsequently, as he takes her portrait, he asks her to think about what she will do when she gets out of the Jardim Gramacho. What this means is that far from asking spectators to recognize all of the ways that human lives are bound up with waste, and to acknowledge our place within the economic system that produces such hardship in the first place, the film instead focuses our attention on the possibility that hardship can be redeemed once this waste land is left behind.

    This background prepares for, and lends emotional weight to, Munizs Pictures of Garbage art project, which springs from Munizs ethical sense of responsibility and from a desire to give something back to the community where he was raised. The film details Munizs artistic process step-by-step, beginning with scenes in which we see the artist as he meets the pickers in the dump. After choosing which of the catadores he will photograph, Muniz arranges his subjects, using props found in the dump, into poses that re-create classic paint-ings, including one of Tiao, which is made to resemble Jean-Louis Davids The Death of Marat, and another picturing Suelem and her two children in a pose reminiscent of a Renaissance Madonna and child painting. Subsequent scenes focus on the next steps in Munizs artistic process, in which large-scale sketches of the original photographs are produced and placed on the floor of a large warehouse. The rough sketches are then filled in using a range of different waste materials that the pickers themselves have gathered and arranged following Munizs instructions. Later, these trash art installations are re-photographed, mounted and framed, and sold at auction in London at the Phillips de Pury auction house. We learn that Muniz donates 100 per cent of the proceeds back to the workers of the Jardim Gramacho, to improve their lives.

    This film shares the compassionate and explicitly humanitarian ethos of The Gleaners & I, aiming to engage the social consciousness of its viewers by inviting us to see the consequences of the Wests massive overproduction of disposable goods. In doing so, it proposes waste as a figure through which we might visualize the unvisualizable networks, flows and forces that comprise our global world system: as the films official trailer notes, looking at waste opens a way of tracing connections between the poorest people living in Rio slums, with the world of high end contemporary art. By foregrounding the uneven distributions of wealth and privilege between these two contexts, and calling attention to Munizs dilemma over the impact that his interventions will have is he falsely raising the catadores hopes of a better life? How will they cope with the attention they receive? the film purports to raise a series of thorny ethical questions about the material and social relations that are mediated by trash. However, the emphasis on redemption and the cathar-tic role of emotion in this film tends to distract attention away from such

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    questions. Rather than cultivating a sensibility that would allow spectators to recognize their implication in what is shown, or to redraw relations between humans and non-humans, the film focuses on cathartic, emotional response as a salve for capitalist disenchantment. Indeed, the film casts Muniz as a saviour figure, absolving spectators of their ethical responsibility by proposing the artist as the agent of redemption. The trailer consolidates such associa-tions in particular through cuts between Muniz and Rios iconic Christ the Redeemer statue, and through the inclusion of Mobys God Moving over the Face of the Waters as the musical track to accompany these images.

    This emphasis on transfiguration and redemption is also consolidated through time-lapse sequences, in which we see the large-scale drawings made from the photographic portraits of the catadores slowly being filled in by different waste materials gathered from the dump. Here again, while these portraits have the potential to emphasize the way that humans are deeply bound up with waste, and to caution against attempts at drawing clear divi-sions between human and non-human materiality, Walkers interest lies else-where. In keeping with the films emphasis on redemption, these portraits instead endorse the inherent dignity and resilience of human life, its ability to overcome material hardship. They do so, however, on the condition that the materiality of waste is made to disappear. As the portraits begin to take shape, the camera films them from a position high up on a scaffold alongside Muniz, which gives both the artist and spectators the proper distance necessary for the images of his subjects to emerge. We can only really see these Pictures of Garbage on the condition that we are distanced from the scene, and that the rubbish recedes into the background. While Munizs aesthetic technique gestures towards the aesthetic vitality of waste, the films redemption narra-tive pushes it into the background, resurrecting it in the form of a human face. So doing, the film shores up notions of human dignity, the endurance of the human spirit, and the capacity of art to transform lives.

    These scenes also foreground emotional response, and invite spectators to participate in the emotional journeys of the trash pickers. The scene in which Suelem sees her portrait as it emerges from the rubbish for the first time asks us to linger over her tears as she is overcome with emotion at seeing her image transformed into a work of art, while similar scenes at the auction house in London explicitly mobilize our emotional response when Tiao witnesses his picture amongst those that are sold for exorbitant amounts of money. I would suggest that what viewers find so emotionally moving about such moments, and about the films project as a whole, is the way that it refers us back to comfort-able certainties about human dignity and endurance, rather than prompting any kind of ethical challenge to our ways of imagining relations between humans and waste. The redemption narrative produces a reassuring image of waste, making us feel good, but also absolving us of any responsibility. Although this film emphasizes the ethical questions that subtend our relations with waste, it reproduces effects that Hawkins ascribes to feel-bad disenchantment stories: it slide[s] into moralism, distracting attention from how we actually live with waste and blinding us to the ubiquity of ethical work (Hawkins 2006: 13).

    feel-bad eThiCs: (Trash humpers)Like The Gleaners & I and Waste Land, Korines Trash Humpers pictures a community of people who forge novel alliances with waste, and who thus re-define trash as a resource. However, while the former two films argue for

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    recognition of wastes transformative and uplifting potential, Korines film undercuts such life-affirming pretexts. Instead, the film confronts audiences with wastes distinctively feel-bad associations, presenting it as a source of libidinal gratification and as a pure expression of the Ids destructive bent. No mere metaphor, Trash Humpers delivers on what is advertised in the title: interspersed through the film are scenes in which a band of degener-ate vandals wearing geriatric masks (played by Korine and his wife, Rachel, amongst others) are pictured in public spaces getting their sexual kicks by dry-humping rubbish bins and black refuse sacks, as well as fences, trees, prostitutes and mailboxes. Elsewhere, the humpers wreak havoc on their surroundings, smashing up electrical equipment in parking lots, defecating in driveways, peeping voyeuristically into other peoples homes, and defiling pretty much everything they come into contact with. In keeping with film-maker Korines reputation as enfant terrible of the American indie film scene, Trash Humpers seeks to confront spectators. At the world premiere of his film at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009, for instance, Korine stated that his intention as a film-maker is always to provoke a real reaction. He went on to extrapolate: I cant imagine making something and not wanting people to feel it even if a large portion of the audience doesnt want to have anything to do with the feeling (Korine in Brooks 2009). Critical accounts of the film are divided, but a sampling of reviews suggest that the film is at the same time provocative and predictable; both crass and intelligently conceived; simultaneously funny and boring to the point of tedium; and that in spite of these qualities, there is something about it that is fascinating and horrify-ing, and that sticks with us well after the event of watching. In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen remarks, as eager as I was for the movie to be over, its dirty rummage-sale images wont go away. Trash Humpers leaves the residue of an authentic nightmare. Youll want to shower afterward (Ansen 2009). As these remarks suggest, Trash Humpers taps into waste as a power-ful source of disenchantment, mobilizing negative affect into a contagious experience that spectators cannot quite shake off. As I will argue, this affec-tive response relates to the radical way that the film imagines the relationship between people and waste.

    Trash Humpers explores the meaning of waste across a range of thematic and formal registers. Like Korines earlier films Gummo (1997) and julien donkey-boy (1999), Trash Humpers draws on metonymic connections between waste and the kind of white trash freak show imagery that is a staple of popular American television shows such as The Jerry Springer Show (Simons-Sorota, 1991-Present) or Jackass (Jonze, 2000-2002) (Halligan 2005: 183). As in Korines previous films, Trash Humpers uses these implicitly racist and class stereotypes in a deeply ambiguous way, offering up its redneck char-acters as a voyeuristic source of both fascination and horror, and declining to send any reassuring messages about how to interpret them. At the same time, the film pursues an exploration of waste and obsolescence on a formal level, through its use of a degraded VHS camcorder for primary filming, and through the films extratextual framing as a found object unearthed from a ditch or an attic. The combined effect of these devices is to mark what we are seeing as authentic dispatches from the trash humpers private video archives. This means that as spectators we are invited to look on voyeuristically at the trash humpers, and at the variety of performances that they document, which range from the eccentric, to the oddly disturbing and the violently extreme. Indeed, the film plays on our desire to gawp at the shocking antics of its

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    less-than-human characters and the trashy world they inhabit, while remain-ing at a distance from them.

    Scenes from early in the film trade on the absurd humour implicit in Korines literalization of the imagined relations of proximity between humans and waste that are implicit in the white trash stereotype. The films open-ing sequence consists of a series of relatively brief shots that introduce us to the humpers and their curious pastimes. We catch an initial glimpse of a humper (Herv) crouching on the driveway of an ordinary suburban middle-class American home in what looks to be an attempt at defecation, with his crutches splayed in front of him. Subsequent images picture another humper (Momma) clandestinely dry-humping rubbish bins in a pristine suburban alley-way, and later the other two humpers (Buddy and Travis) join in by attempt-ing to fornicate a pile of black rubbish sacks. Later, we are invited to laugh as the humpers perform random stunts, such as when the humpers power-wash a wheelchair at the car wash, when they smash up a derelict house, or as they laze around on rooftops or under freeways, drinking and setting off firecrackers. Many of these episodes derive their humour precisely from the unusual relations that the humpers establish with their material surroundings, and with waste in particular. In one key scene, which takes place in a floodlit parking lot, the humpers watch as Buddy raises a large television set above his head, sending it hurtling onto the pavement. The other humpers goad him on, shouting barely decipherable Cmons and Yeahs. The camcorder docu-ments this strange performance, as a high-fi radio is thrown onto the demol-ished television set, and as Buddy and the other humpers kick and stomp on the obsolete electrical equipment. While the DVD booklet refers to such antics as constituting an ode to vandalism, the accent in such sequences is less on a feeling of disaffected aggression as it is on a playful or even joyful exuberance (Korine 2009). And indeed, the scene culminates in an improvised tap-dance performance, in which Buddy and companys arms and legs flail wildly while they shriek like hyenas. These scenes are both disturbing and oddly compel-ling for the ways that the trash humpers reject the prescribed uses of objects, releasing them, as Walter Benjamin might have it, from the drudgery of being useful and reinventing them as performative and playful (Benjamin 1999: 9). These early sequences invite us to share in the hilarity, but only as distanced onlookers. We are encouraged to laugh at the crass humour of the Jackass-style stunts, or to look on with the kind of fascinated disgust that we might reserve for watching animals in a zoo. These scenes play on the voyeuristic pleasures that might be derived from watching the humpers from a position of distance and superiority, in which our own full humanity is affirmed in contrast to the entertaining spectacle of less-than-human trash.

    In contrast to both Vardas and Walkers films, Trash Humpers works by transforming this crass humour into a much darker, more ambivalent response. Later scenes in the film work to expose this position of security by foregrounding the spectators complicity with the spectacle that is unfolding not just in front of our eyes, but also for our eyes. Significant in this respect is the dramatic shift that occurs roughly 30 minutes into the film, where the humpers antics stop being prankish and funny, and open onto more violent and disturbing terrain, which confronts us with, and works to short circuit, our earlier affective response. In the midst of a typical scene in which the humpers are pictured wreaking havoc outdoors, we are suddenly confronted with what looks like a naked body sprawled awkwardly in a grassy ditch. As we watch this image, we hear Travis who is ostensibly positioned behind

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    the camcorder, and responsible for documenting what we are seeing blithely singing a disturbing lullaby about three little devils who jumped over the wall/ lopped off his head/ and murdered them all. Beyond this aural cue, there is very little information to contextualize or lend meaning to this image. A later sequence plays on this snuff motif more directly, as we are led into a scene in which the humpers attempt to film a dog. The humpers camera follows the dog as it rushes around a domestic interior, until suddenly the dog leads the camera to a man lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. Again, we hear Traviss voice from behind the camera saying, damn, you all killed this dude, damn. Theres a head fucking fracture. But after this moment of disbelief, the humpers response to this incident moves into darker, and much more disturbing terrain, as Travis puts the camcorder aside in order to pose with the other humpers next to the dead body, exclaiming, make sure my hair looks good and look Ma, Im dead!

    This sequence exposes the safety of the spectators voyeuristic position, since it foregrounds bloody murder as a humorous and entertaining specta-cle that in keeping with the humpers earlier stunts is performed specifi-cally for our enjoyment. Indeed, in both narrative and aesthetic terms, the killing and filming of human death in this sequence is on a par with acts of non-human destruction that we see throughout the film. There is no modu-lation of the humpers emotional response to this event, which might give it a special meaning or privilege within the narrative, and aesthetically, the scene is filmed in the same haphazard, fragmented and cursory manner as the humpers other escapades. In flagrant violation of the terms of classi-cal narrative, there is no build-up to this scene; we see only the aftermath. Neither are we provided with any further development or narrative resolution that would lend meaning or emphasis to this event. What this means is that in the films aesthetic and affective economy, a human life is exactly equivalent to a smashed light bulb, a derelict building, obsolete electrical equipment, empty beer bottles, or any number of wasted items that make up the films mise-en-scne. Indeed, what is so disturbing about this scene is the way that it refuses any qualitative distinctions of any kind, soliciting the same affective response as earlier sequences, inviting us to laugh indiscriminately at the characteriza-tion of both human and non-human life as equally spent, squalid and worth-less. In this way, Trash Humpers rejects the ethos of human generosity and care that informs The Gleaners & I and Waste Land, in favour of an aesthetic of absolute indifference, in which both human and non-human life is radically desublimated. While critics have frequently taken issue with Korines deploy-ment of white trash freak show imagery, I would argue that his films are less interested in reifying race and class based distinctions than they are in exam-ining relations between people and their material environments, while inter-rogating discourses of human dignity and challenging our most fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human.

    Undeniably, this presentation of humans and things on a horizontal plane makes for a distinctly feel-bad viewing experience, because of the way it refuses the cathartic and redemptive mission of art to compensate for ecologi-cal forms of disenchantment. The films feel-bad aesthetic poses a serious chal-lenge to a new materialist conception of a vibrant ethics of waste, because of the way that it rides roughshod over the very notions of vitality and positivity that inform such critiques. However, in presenting human and non-human life as equally squalid, Trash Humpers mobilization of negative affect does not rule out ethical engagement entirely. On the contrary, as scholars such

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    as Ngai, Timothy Morton, Michele Aaron and Nikolaj Lbecker have argued, bad feeling may even nurture ethical reflection because of the way it resists facile moralizing and proposing easy solutions to the problems it addresses (Lbecker 2011: 167). While the film clearly does not advocate a positive ethi-cal agenda, Trash Humperss emphasis on bad feeling may nevertheless cata-lyse a different sort of ethical response, which recognizes the deeply unsettling inhuman forces that subtend our most human desires. This feel-bad ethics would recognize the levelling force of the inhuman as a means of safeguard-ing against anthropocentric ideas of human mastery and self-aggrandizement. If we are to unsettle the centuries-old belief in the privileged place of humans within a universe of passive matter awaiting inscription, it may be that we need an ethical aesthetic that is able to risk pushing more radically against some of the comfortable certainties and affirmative feelings that work to sustain it. We need an aesthetic that works not (simply) by elevating matter to the level of the human, but (also) by estranging and desublimating our understandings of what it means to be human in the first place. In making us feel bad, Trash Humpers necessitates a different approach to ethics: one that works not simply by cultivating our ability to discern non-human vitality, but also by bringing us into contact with the ambivalent, disturbing, desublimating and thought-provoking image of the inhuman that is also a facet of material life.

    aCKnowledgemenTsI am grateful to Tanya Horeck, Milla Tiainen, Joss Hands, Neil Archer, Simon Payne, Nikolaj Lbecker and to New Cinemas anonymous reviewers for their comments and constructive advice on drafts of this article.

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    newsweek/2009/10/15/shock-and-yawn.html. Accessed 18 October 2012.Bataille, Georges (1985), The use-value of D.A.F. de Sade, in Visions of Excess:

    Selected Writings 192739 (ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 91102.

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    Bradshaw, Peter (2010), Trash Humpers, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/movie/132756/trash-humpers. Accessed 25 September 2012.

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    Brooks, Brian (2009), Harmony Korine: Im not going to lie and say that I dont like provoking an audience, http://www.indiewire.com/article/harmony_korine_they_were_the_neighborhood_boogeymen_who_worked_at_krispy_k. Accessed 17 October 2012.

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    Simons-Sorota, Adam (1991-Present), The Jerry Springer Show, Philadelphia: NBC Universal Television Distribution.

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    suggesTed CiTaTionKendall, T. (2012), Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste, New Cinemas

    10: 1, pp. 4561, doi: 10.1386/ncin.10.1.45_1

    ConTribuTor deTailsTina Kendall is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for Film Studies at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research interests include European and American cinema and film-philosophy. She is particularly interested in theories of affect, ethics, and in new materialist theory. She is co-editor of The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), and editor of the disgust issue of Film-Philosophy (15:1). Her work appears in New Review of Film & Television Studies, Other Voices, Cinephile, and in a range of edited publications. She is currently working on a study on boredom in contempo-rary cinema.

    Contact: Department of English, Film and Media, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, CB1 1PT, U.K.E-mail: [email protected]

    Tina Kendall has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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