The mind-game film in the age of the anthropocene : at the limits of productive pathologies

This thesis transforms Thomas Elsaesser’s (2021) theory of the mind-game film by extending it to the conditions of the Anthropocene (as crisis imaginary). I argue that the scale, complexity, and contradictions of the anthropocentric era, with its non-human temporalities and ecological catastrophes, render classical mimetic modes of representation inadequate. In contrast, the mind-game narrative – a narrative mode that suspends causal logic and refuses imaginary resolutions – fragments subjectivity and non-mimetic representation by offering a productive framework for articulating the incomprehensibility of planetary crisis. Through close readings of televisual narratives (including Dark [2017-2020], Pantheon [2022-2023], and Severance [2022-Present]), video games (including The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope [2020] and The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe [2022]), and speculative filmic texts (including The House [2022], Aniara [2018], and Last and First Men [2020]), I examine how mind-game narratives manifest an ecological entanglement between human and non-human systems, often depicted within closed temporal loops. Across these symptomatic case studies, Elsaesser’s concept of productive pathologies is rendered obsolete, due to a limitation of how productive a pathological identity can be within an irreversible extinction scenario. The limitation of productive pathologies foregrounds the subject’s disintegration as a response to environmental precarity and the inability for human mastery. Mind-game narratives thus operate as speculative experiments in negativity, performing an ethics of unknowing: at the epistemological level, it is a structural refusal of redemption in the face of planetary collapse, and, ethically, it is an active post-confrontation choice to return to illusion rather than survive a post-Anthropocentric reality. By reframing mind-game phenomena beyond the human scale (species-time), this thesis presents a critical and speculative response to the Anthropocene condition, mapping a transition from the breakdown of an anthropocentric mindset, to posthuman and post-Earth spatio-temporalities.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Author dc:creator

• de Carli Ball, Maria

Contributors dc:contributor

• Buckland, Warren
• Russo, Paolo

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/ex8e-f070

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:5728125c-aabc-4eb1-82c9-abf8b2493abe:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1