Creative Re-subjectivations: Becoming-Animal in the Films of Matteo Garrone and David Cronenberg
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay considers the posthuman and ecological tensions pervading the respective filmographies of Matteo Garrone and David Cronenberg. Taking our cue from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, we investigate the recurring motifs and philosophical concerns that emerge from particular filmic ecologies and the characters inhabiting them. By displaying figures that appear dominated by fluxes of desires and passions they neither control nor manage through self-reflection and detached awareness, Garrone’s and Cronenberg’s cinemas challenge any image of rationality ostensibly embedded in the human. The encounters with the material and technological world that surround the individuality of characters do not necessarily define affirmative processes of becoming, but they do help us understand the dynamic nature of subjectivity and the always surprising possibilities for de-subjectivation and creative re-subjectivation. Here we focus on four works: Garrone’s The Embalmer (2002) and Dogman (2018), and Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) and Crash (1996).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".