Aggro Dr1ft, the Intolerance of Harmony Korine

Film still from Harmony Korine, Aggro Dr1ft (2024).

After the first public screening of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance on August 4, 1916, at the Orpheum Theater in Riverside, just outside Los Angeles, the audience reaction was far from favorable. Intolerance was one of the most highly anticipated films at the time. Its predecessor, The Birth of a Nation—the infamous white-supremacist epic that would revive the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s—had just become the first major blockbuster of the nascent American film industry, and Intolerance’s sky-high production costs made it one of Hollywood’s biggest productions. Stories from the time claimed that its set reconstructing the ancient city of Babylon on Sunset Boulevard, more than three-hundred feet high, remained visible across Los Angeles for several years. Still, even a favorably disposed spectator like Lillian Gish, Griffith’s muse and the protagonist of many of his films (she played a small but pivotal role in Intolerance), remembers that the screening was an “exhausting experience that seemed to last forever.”1 Stanford’s then president, David Starr Jordan, also recalled the screening as an unbearable six-hour experience (despite the fact that it lasted less than half of that).

What didn’t work in the film? With Intolerance, Griffith tried to combine four different narratives that could very well have constituted four separate films: the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE; the St. Bartholomew massacre of the Protestant Huguenots ordered by the Catholic Queen of France Catherine de Medici in 1527; Christ’s passion; and a “modern” story set in the US about the fall and redemption of a young couple who are both striking workers, and who almost get crushed by the moral puritanism of their bosses. Because of this strange structure, the film violated some of the golden rules of Hollywood classicism that were just taking shape: it was not sufficiently narrative driven; the moral lesson sidelined the development of the characters; and above all, the viewer’s ability to identify with the story was frustrated by the frequent shifts from one narrative to the other (at a pace that accelerated as the film progressed). Cecil B DeMille recounted that “audiences left the theater simply bewildered by [Griffith’s] attempt to tell all at once four separate stories, from four widely distant periods of history, linked together only by a common theme, which it took some mental effort to keep in mind.” What connects the four sequences is not some unifying narrative event, but a qualitatively different connective principle, one that is image-based. Hollywood opted to go in different direction: “The one secret of success in picture making is sound dramatic construction,” DeMille continued, “and Intolerance showed that Griffith did not have that gift.”2

It wasn’t until Miriam Hansen’s masterful 1991 book Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film that Intolerance was recognized as a modern movie, one that seminally challenged some of the fundamental assumptions of classical narrative cinema. In Benjaminian fashion, Intolerance represents an alternative tradition that could have become the history of American cinema: a timeline detached from the dominant one, remaining dormant throughout the twentieth century and waiting to be reclaimed. It’s a question that has haunted film studies for almost a century: why did cinema end up taking that particular formal articulation, among the many possible ones that had been envisioned during the silent era? Why did cinema, as Godard says in Histoire(s) du cinéma, end up being an illustration of the stories of nineteenth-century novels, thus failing to live up to its potential for invention in its own century? Therein lies the problem: as Hansen beautifully puts it,

Griffith understood that parallelism [between different story lines] undermines the diegetic effect, the effect of continuity and presence that ensures the viewer’s temporary belief in the truth of the fiction. Instead of relying on the identity and positivity of its images, Intolerance invests meaning in the gaps between its diverse fictional materials, requiring the viewer to make the connections.3

The question at stake here is a foundational one: What is the connective principle that brings a series of images together? What is the logic of their relationship? Is it possible to imagine a relationship between images that does not succumb to the model of representational naturalism?

Even when, in the 1920s, Hollywood classicism and the law of continuity became the rule, another “bastard” and repressed countertradition remained alongside it. This can be seen in what Lacan would have called partial “object-gazes”—vanishing points of anxiety, inarticulable on the screen and nowhere to be found in the frame but whose distress traversed classical and then modern cinema for decades (Ford, Hitchcock, Lang, Bresson, Dreyer, Ozu). Godard in Histoire(s) tried to make a counter-history of these, beyond all narrative purpose and irrespective of film history. One of the great lessons of psychoanalysis is that what is repressed always returns, even after the death of the patient themself, or even—as in this case—beyond the alleged end of cinema as we are experiencing it today with the hegemony of the digital. While the digital image has on the one hand strengthened, more than ever, the illustrative and narrative-driven approach (see the enormous success of TV series), there are artists on the margins of the digital landscape who are trying to take another path.

That is what Harmony Korine has done in recent years: he’s been tearing down all the main features of what we used to call film, and what he has emerged with is Aggro Dr1ft. The film has only a skeletal plot, one of utter banality—an assassin named Bo has to kill a crime boss who lives in a mansion full of strippers in cages. The film also replaces the traditional photographic basis of the cinematographic image with thermal cameras and AI-generated visual motifs. Korine has repeatedly said, “I don’t watch movies anymore. I’m bored by them.”4 He has claimed that with Aggro Dr1ft he is after a certain modulation of light and a new frontier of the image, where there is no longer a subject looking and interpreting images from the outside. There is rather a total immersion in a world of images, one that looks more like a video game than a classical movie.

Already in Spring Breakers, Korine challenged the limits of classical continuity: flashes of images from the end of the movie were inserted at the beginning, seemingly foreshadowing the conclusion. And often the characters were accompanied by a cloud of voices, where what was diegetic and what was extra-diegetic blended into each other in an almost hallucinatory atmosphere. AggroDr1ft explicitly flirts with the imaginary of synthetic drug hallucination and with a mode of manipulating the viewer’s emotions that no longer seems to pass through the mediation of language, story, and characters, but that directly engages the sensations of spectatorial experience.

Indeed, one might wonder whether it still makes sense to watch such an indefinable aesthetic object while sitting in a movie theater, or whether Korine is now fully beyond the limits of cinema. Not only do his public statements go in this direction (“We wanted to see what comes after cinema”); his filmmaking process does as well. To shoot Aggro Dr1ft, Korine founded a company called EDGLRD, which is as far from a film production company as one can get. Instead of having screenwriters, producers, cinematographers, and set designers, there are game developers, software coders, VFX masters, and graphic designers. The guiding idea is that the art world and the world of image production are now indistinguishable from the tech world, and in order to be faithful to the discontinuity provoked by the digital image, it is necessary to change the form in which images are produced and marketed. Korine often says that nowadays there are more “cinematic” ideas on Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok than in films proper, and that we shouldn’t take for granted that the most appropriate form for digital images is a two-hour scripted fiction film.

If Korine’s world seems frivolous (trap music, gangs, strippers) his (implicit but no less coherent) philosophical assumptions are far from banal. The formal dimension of Aggro Dr1ft not only questions the subjugation of images to narrative, but also renders film “spatial” and synchronic. If cinema has always been a medium of time, of repressed phantasms of the past, of the unconscious, and in a certain sense even of death, what kind of images are we dealing with when time is so radically disjointed and spatialized (as in a video game, where the formal organizing principle is movement in space and not the irreversibility of the passage of time)? As Korine said in an interview, “What if ‘past’ does not exist?”—what if we are in a continuous present, where the viewer’s interpretation of images no longer matters? What if the image is no longer in front of the viewer but envelops them through a jungle of screens? What if these screens do not pose a question to the viewer but act as instruments for triggering bodily sensations?

Even though Aggro Dr1ft seems to epitomize futuristic cinema, the idea that the image can be a tool of immediate identification (even of jouissance) rather than a signifier to be interrogated comes from cinema’s remote past. Hansen reminded us that Griffith in Intolerance aspired “to authorize a new language of images, a language that would recover a prelapsarian transparency and univocity.”5 The connecting principle of the four different story lines in Intolerance can be seen as an attempt to think cinematographic language as a universal visual language, radically different from any textual practice—hence the metaphor of the fall of Babylon, where this universal language collapses and morphs into the opacity of different dialects.

Korine’s gesture seems avant-garde and futuristic precisely because it looks not so much to a future so visionary as to be unacceptable today, but to a past so remote it’s been repressed and forgotten. Perhaps Aggro Dr1ft is really Korine’s Intolerance, in the sense that, like Griffith in 1916, he seeks to break with the illustrative image and the law of continuity in order to explore a new relationship between images. According to this idea of cinema, images should be free to articulate themselves according to connections that are not prescribed by narrative classicism. They should embody a universal visual language that is freed from mediation and opacity, ambiguity and misunderstanding. It is the idea, which cyclically returns in the history of cinema, of a direct and prerational connection with images that impact the senses without mediation—an idea so old that it cannot but appear as new.