Minor Projections: Cinema, Interiority and the Thinking Other

Minor projections are media encounters with forms of othered interiority and intelligence that produce the spectatorial question, does this thing think the same way that I do? Theories of cinematic spectatorship lean on bodies they can see and sort: gendered, racialized, made to stand for a story or idea. This dissertation argues that, beyond its representation of externalities and surfaces, cinema uses their display to conjure thinking.

As title and critical framework, “minor projections” builds on previous theorizations of the “minor” in Cathy Park Hong’s “minor feelings,” Christine Kim’s concept of “minor publics” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature.” I use “projection” in two senses of the word: the classic psychoanalytic sense in which a subject attributes their own feelings or thoughts and tendencies onto an other, and the cinematic projection of images through light onto a screen. Beyond Asian American theory, I explore moments in which the interiority and thinking of all kinds of marginal subjects and outsiders are invoked. Throughout the manuscript, I thus turn to liminal figures such as animals, robots and automata, serial killers, and children. Operating at the margins of both society and subjectivity, where ascriptions of inner life are not self-evident, these minor figures provide a way into the dramas of interiority and thinking. My methodology involves formal, narrative and cultural analysis across four chapters and a wide array of examples taken from popular culture, Hollywood, science fiction, animation, children’s films, and bystander intervention training media to contend that cinema routinely occasions interiority and projection. Beyond questions of representation, cinema is not only about thinking; it is thinking.

The first chapter looks at the trope of the big-headed child across Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow to examine how this figure generates fantasies of inner life. Chapter two discusses Hanya Yanigahara’s A Little Life and Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, novels both written by Asian-American women which feature protagonists whose racial identities are withheld. Framed against pandemic-era anti-Asian bystander intervention training media and Queer Eye’s collision with the novel A Little Life as wearable fandom, I propose reading these characters as hypothetical Asians—not to essentialize their authors, but to reveal how often Asian-American assimilation is predicated on self-disavowals and the commodification of pain. Chapter three pairs Kogonada’s After Yang with the museum exhibit Body Worlds to explore Chineseness in relation to both living bodies and human remains. In these contexts, the Asian body surfaces as an automaton-like object of instruction and then disintegrates, becoming a non-agentive resource whose suffering can be used pedagogically or aesthetically. My fourth chapter expands to a longer history of robots, automata and cinematic fantasies of artificial intelligence.

Through these studies, Minor Projections asks what kinds of thinking, vacancy and oblivion are not only representable but imaginable. The dissertation contends that the threshold of what counts as a subject of thought is constantly reshaped by cinema and its adjacent media forms.