I am writing something that may be co-authored with another person and which gathers much of my blog writing on sex/sexing, kissing, the event (here and here) and an ethics of care towards the shared/social(romantic) event.
It is on Paul Thomas Anderson’s third film Punch Drunk Love. I am aiming for an absolute cracker. Organising concept: “post-romance”. Here is a brief extract from the undercooked draft:
Paul Thomas Anderson’s third film Punch Drunk Love captures some sense of romance in a post-romance world. It is not surprising it opens with a car crash for the film takes romance on a post-Crash detour. Crash – both as film and novel – serves as an exploration of surfaces and desire in a world at the intersection of the accident. Jean Baudrillard, in his infamous essay on Crash (novel), dwells on the repositioning of the accident:
Is no longer at the margin, it is at the heart. It is no longer the exception to a triumphal rationality, it has become the Rule, it has devoured the Rule. […] Everything is reversed. It is the Accident that gives form to life, it is the Accident, the insane, that is the sex of life. (Baudrillard, 1994: 113)
After the SUV rolls over, a taxi pauses long enough to drop off a harmonium – a cross between an organ and a piano, but smaller than both. The harmonium is a harmony machine; it breathes and wheezes to gather potentiality consonant sound waves of heterogeneous frequencies and to produce a unique musicality of multiplicative resonance. No reason is given for the harmonium in the workings of the plot. Another accident without any explanation, like the SUV crash, but this time it is an accidental harmony-machine. The accident is a disorganising collision of excess force, while the accidental harmony-machine is a synthesising organisation of force. One produces only abolition, while the other produces a multiplicative affirmation.
Baudrillard’s ramblings are strangely suited to discourses emerging around the idea of emergency either a ‘state of’ or in terms of time or governmentality, etc.
The exact definition of ‘post-romance’ is very Deleuze-o-centric and will have to wait until the final product! But I am sure you get some idea from the above to the line of argument I (or we?)shall develop. I did a little on romance genre in a feminism unit as an undergrad so I am going over some of the old books.
EDIT June 12: No, I’ll be writing this one alone. lol…