Affective Cinema: Old Joy’s Undefined Tension

Tension in even the most relaxing settings. Tension when nothing’s directly there. Yet it’s a feeling that the nostalgic affection of past friendship attempts to overshadow, as drops of fond memory seep into the lives of even those who have grown furthest apart. Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006) follows Mark (Daniel London), a man on the cusp of fatherhood, as he reunites with his old friend Kurt (Will Oldman), a drifter lonesome and unbound. As they venture from their industrialized setting and into the alluring unfamiliarity of the Oreganian forest, their attempts to revive a once meaningful bond become plagued by an undefined strain evident in every facet of the film’s texture. Old Joy depicts only the remnants of a prior, off-screen friendship, leaving its tension not seen but felt. As the evident emotion becomes addressed only by the spectator, the film surpasses the mere sight and sound communicative properties embedded in its medium by inviting the viewer to sense its diegesis instead. Paralleling its characters with two distinctly juxtapositional settings, Old Joy blends affective and phenomenological techniques with its minimalist narrative to express a tension not merely seen but experienced.

The audio-visual expression of cinema naturally elicits a visceral reaction within its viewers. The representation of an injury on-screen may prompt a bodily wince or the display of a dramatized, resonating emotion may induce a feeling comparable to the diegetic portrayal. Phenomenology is concerned with this very evocative quality of the film medium. The cinematic concept seeks to understand how individuals perceive and interpret the world around them, emphasizing the first-person perspective and its subjective experience rather than objective reality. The conscious human experiences of sensations such as touch, smell, and temporality accompany and influence the audio-visual facets of the medium. Through this approach to spectatorship, representations on screen become subjective to the lived experience of the viewer. Phenomenology then follows how bodily and sensuous experiences influence the nature of spectatorship. Film Scholar Jenny Chamarette defines the implications of this relationship:

Inevitably, this preoccupation with the body also leads to a concern with the senses, and sensations that are called upon, in the experience of film viewing and filmmaking. One of the most successful ways in which film scholars employing phenomenological frameworks have approached film is via an understanding of the ways that the senses and the body, and not just the brain (which we conventionally associate with the housing of the mind), produce knowledge and understanding.  Hole, Kristin and Jenny Chamarette. 11/2016. The Routledge Companion to Cinema & Gender. doi:10.4324/9781315684062.

Old Joy intends to be emotionally interpreted and experienced through this bodily phenomenon, rather than a mere textual or cognitive analysis of its relatively simplistic plot. The film renders a poignant evocative response without overtly displaying any form of incitement through its phenomenological framework. This quality derives not only from the film’s writing, sound, or visual imagery but also from an accumulation of sensuous and implied details. Altering our viewer experience through only subtle intuitive features, Old Joy utilizes the non-diegetic perception to emphasize its implied tension. 

The film leverages its tonal atmosphere to embody this phenomenological involvement. A sensual and entrancing response is established through the film’s sound, which starts even before its imagery. Viewers hear bells chime and children play behind the opening credits. Eyes closed, we see Mark meditating in his yard. A close-up shot alternates from his face to the depiction of the surrounding nature. Ants crawl around the grass as he seemingly attempts to relax. The viewer very quickly becomes attuned to the rhythm of the natural setting. Throughout, the same melodic opening sound plays. Quiet and soothing natural auditory tones — laughter, chirping birds, and cars driving by — offer a familiar setting. The amplified sound places the viewer in the same intimate comfort as Mark on-screen, until, suddenly, the audience is jolted from their own relaxation by the blaring drill of a blender. Mark’s wife, Tanya, appears inside, casually making a smoothie. While nothing abnormal occurs within the diegesis, the jarring nature of this sequence prefaces the film with a feeling of disorientation and unrest. Mark and his wife are separate and uninfluenced, but the audience is left divided between two juxtaposition sensations. Our non-diegetic comfort is pulled out beneath our feet by diegetic action. 

The film’s ability to influence our feelings and our sensations stems from its affective nature. According to philosopher Steven Shaviro, affect theory refers to the formulation of emotional states through external influences.

If emotions are personal experiences, then affects are the forces (perhaps the flows of energy) that precede, produce, and inform such experiences. Affect is pre-personal and pre-subjective; it is social, or even ontological, before it is strictly individual. Affect isn’t what I feel, so much as it is what forces me to feel. Affect in this sense is not necessarily conscious; but conscious experience may well issue from it.  Shaviro, Steven. “Affect vs Emotion.” The Cine-Files. Accessed May 5, 2024. https://www.thecine-files.com/shaviro2016/.

Old Joy's affective quality provides the groundwork for a phenomenological interpretation through its focus on the subjectivity of perception. In this opening sequence, spectatorship is the mere evocation of a complex emotional response. To do this, the film uses a combination of both medium-specific and phenomenological textures. By prompting a sensuous experience, the film establishes an affective relationship with its viewers. As the film progresses, an unexpected call from Kurt prompts a defining reunion. He proposes a one-night camping trip to visit a nearby hot spring. Reluctantly, Mark agrees. 

Through a diegetic lens, Old Joy grounds its emotional division in a depiction of these two seemingly disparate characters. Mark is a husband with a child on the way. He listens to talk radio on the way home from his stable, full-time job and leads a woodworking class on his days off. On the contrary, Kurt’s seemingly carefree attitude evades such conventionality. He wanders from job to job, location to location all in an attempt to establish some form of meaningful connection. The two men, once bonded by adolescence, now embody opposing values. Mark’s traditional path of life progression contrasts Kurt’s counter-cultural attempts to escape the same conformity. 

Outwardly, Mark’s obligation to the past and Kurt’s longing to return to it appear the same. On the road, they both exchange trivial jokes and reminisce on old stories. But their exchange continuously alternates between effortlessness and discomfort. Kurt and Mark mask their true perceptions of each other under the guise of old friendship. What exactly provokes the shift in their relationship is next explicitly represented. Still, viewers are able to subtly recognize idiosyncrasies in their interaction. Though left unaddressed by the diegesis, the film’s environmental setting offers subtle notions that prompt an ever-increasing tension between Kurt, Mark, and the spectator. As Reichardt seemingly pays homage to Tarovksky’s Stalker, they travel from the urban and into a seemingly separate “zone”. Through this, the film is able to further embody affect through the establishment of two distinct environments — the industrial and the natural. Each ultimately provides a silhouette for the film’s unstated turbulence.

These conflicting environments are the film’s greatest instrument of affect. Exiting their totally urban residence, Mark and Kurt follow a road where industrialism fades and the natural becomes increasingly prominent. As Mark drives, the viewer is engulfed with the diegetic sound of the car’s interior. Although the spectator is situated to view the car from the outside, we are auditorily placed into the back seat. Subtle ambient car noises sound behind the prominent presence of the radio. Engulfed into the diegesis, we, too, are forced to listen in on the call-in governmental commentary and lazy socio-economic political statement exclaimed on air by call-in radio narrators. As fellow travelers in Mark’s old Volvo station wagon, we both see and hear a divided America. Outside, we pass through industrialized factories, abandoned buildings, and steel bridges. Old railroad tracks line the highways and powerlines blur into the tree branches. The viewer is placed in the position of a passenger looking out the window as long shots document the sem-trucks, pavement, and machinery attempting to coexist with lush Pacific Northwestern nature. 

The inclusion and emphasis of these district settings contribute to the tonal expression of the film. Spectators move away from the gaudy, urbanized metropolitan area and to the quiet contemplative nature of the Oregon wilderness. This juxtapositional, serene setting provides a backdrop of natural beauty that’s tinged with a sense of isolation and fading tranquility. The established atmosphere, even in the most peaceful setting, evokes this sense of unrest within its spectator. The influence of the setting’s affect on the diegesis and the spectator can be assessed through the German phenomenological Stimmung, which means mood, attunement, or atmosphere. Stimmung accounts for the subjectivity of experience by applying the aesthetics of mood to the film’s world. Theorist Robert Sinnebrink details the nature of this quality: 

In the cinema, Stimmung refers to the power of the image to evoke atmosphere or mood, whether through action, gesture or facial expressiveness – or the vivid life of material objects that conjure up a world, revealing the dense materiality of a milieu. From this point of view, Stimmung defines a properly cinematic aesthetic with the power to evoke atmosphere or to disclose an experience of world imbued with subtle varieties of mood.

 Sinnerbrink, R. 06/2012. "Stimmung: Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood." Screen (London) 53 (2): 149. doi:10.1093/screen/hjs007.  Sinnerbrink, R. 06/2012. "Stimmung: Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood." Screen (London) 53 (2): 148. doi:10.1093/screen/hjs007.

Thus, Stimmung serves as the accumulation of a film’s expressiveness and the affective responsiveness of the viewer. Spectators are able to feel this affective weight through intertwining tonal registers. Stimmung, in relation to mood, “is not simply a subjective experience or a private state of mind; it describes, rather, how a (fictional) world is expressed or disclosed via a shared affective attunement orienting the spectator within that world”. Old Joy develops this aesthetic and tonal attunement with its audience through the film’s sonic, visual, and phenomenological portrayal of the settings, calling for a spectatorship where we project our own mood on its diegesis. 

After getting lost, tensions nearly boil over when the two characters set up their campsite. Again, the spectator views the film from the backseat as Mark pulls into an area left in disarray. Remnants of human intrusion, trash fills the otherwise serene opening. Kurt and Mark start a fire and sit on the adjacent rotting couch. “It’s not like there’s any big difference between the forest and the city, though” Kurt states. “It’s all one huge thing now — there’s trees in the city and garbage in the forest. What’s the big difference?” His rhetorical question knowingly describes their current situation — both geographically and emotionally. Atmospheres blend, obscuring the line between their distinctions. As bystanders peer on from the other fire, we are able to decode their behavioral facades and verbal allusions through the affective of the previously established settings. The two settings — the city and the forest — each form a Stimmung that defines oppositional moods and affective tension within the spectator. 

Like Mark, the city embodies the industrial conveniences of conventional modern life. Mark is the city — urban and conformed. Kurt follows the forest's bohemian volatility. He attempts to live in its elusive, untamed nature. Still, Kurt appears to think that the forest and the city, he and Mark, are the same — merely two modes of the same medium. Ultimately, both locations stem from the same place. Yet Mark’s ever-present distance communicates his attempts to distance himself from these origins. His unspoken reluctance is shouted through the film’s affect. His continuous attempts to maintain an image that drastically differs from Kurt's become apparent far beyond his actions. Viewers are never shown the pair's commonality or their supposed disconnect. Instead, we are left only to feel the deterioration of their friendship as the auditory, visual, and emotional atmospheres act as affective influences that build throughout the film. 

At the fire with Kurt and Mark, some viewers may feel the radiating heat or cold fresh air. The continuous crackle behind Kurt’s voice heightens his monologue and Mark’s silence. Their interaction — from Kurt’s groans to Mark’s deflecting laughs — appears on-screen in real-life temporality to emphasize the palpable tension. For the first time, the film’s invisible distance is pierced by the words “I miss you, Mark…There’s something between us and I don’t like it. I want it to go away.” Finally, Kurt verbally expresses the feeling the phenomenological framework has implied throughout the film. The spectator, serving as an uninvolved character within the diegesis, is able to identify this tension long before it’s addressed. Though, just as quickly as it boils over, the tension becomes suppressed again — acknowledged and culminating within the viewer, only to be ignored again by the diegesis. 

By the pinnacle of the film’s sensorial apparatus, Kurt and Mark finally reach their originally intended destination. At the hot spring, they prepare their bath, hang up their backpacks, and methodically undress. They enter their respective pools, completely nude. Throughout the sequence, like the majority of the film, only natural sounds occur — humming insects, footsteps on the wooden surface, and the continual rush of the water. Again, we become attuned to the rhythm of the environment. Reichardt emphasizes the natural setting through visual representations of the running water splattering on the wooden shelter, steam diffusing from the spring, and the quiet surrounding dense, green forest. The scene begins with the resonance of the senses. By highlighting the corporeal affects of the setting, viewers may feel a visceral perception of humidity, the damp wood, or the hot running water. Film Scholar Giuliana Bruno defines these perceptible atmospheric attributes as “affects indeed ‘in the air.’ They are ambient matters, transmitted not only in but also as atmosphere, receptively and by way of a cultural dispositif.” Old Joy lays these ambient qualities and bodily sensations as the groundwork for its ultimate emotionally phenomenological expression. 

We see Mark and Kurt wade in silence. Again, eyes closed, Mark attempts to relax. While the opening scene emphasizes environments at odds, he now becomes totally engulfed in the natural world. The film follows the same structure — close-ups alternate between his bodily presence and the nature surrounding it. Yet, Kurt restlessly leaves his pool. He interrupts the tranquility with another monologue. Though, this time, Mark appears completely unbothered. Despite the distraction, he appears, for the first time, blissful and content, temporarily liberated from the shackles of worry and responsibility that burden his urban life. Even so, his peace abruptly ends as Kurt approaches him from behind and places both hands on his shoulders. Because the audience also becomes in sync with the natural tempo of the environment, we become hyperaware of Kurt’s actions as well. “Just settle in,” he reminds us. Mark grimaces, and his clear unease evokes a tension so palpable that it seeps into the bodies of every viewer. Given the accumulation of tension throughout the entirety of the film, this climax prompts us to expect some form of release through, perhaps, violence or verbal altercation. Yet, as Mark relinquishes his clenched fist and again slows his breathing, the audience realizes such clarity will never come. More imagery of the environmental setting is displayed, and the scene ends. The men leave the hot spring, jovial facades still intact. The unbearable emotional weight causing even the spectator to tense up in anticipation, ultimately, stems from nothing. 

These phenomenological aspects of the diegesis prompt the film’s unaddressed tension to be experienced both physically and emotionally. The film's mood, atmosphere, and tone evoke an affective quality that allows its spectators to feel the implications the characters seem too afraid to acknowledge. Not even the guise of obligation, nostalgia, or longing can cover the pressure of this unseen force. Visual and auditory facets may heighten our sensations, but the film prompts its audience to viscerally embody spectatorship by taking on the burden of its emotional weight.

By withholding memory and context, Old Joy leaves us only to grasp upon the illusion of affection.