Eerie Totality in Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama

The terrorism it depicts, while it shares certain characteristics as a coordinated attack with multiple targets, has little in common with that of the Islamist suicide bombers who stood outside the Stade de France in Saint-Denis and the gunmen who opened fire in the Bataclan theatre, among other locations, on November 13th, 2015. The characters are implicitly positioned against an unarticulated totality of capital that markedly and paradoxically is felt through its absence and omnipresence as a non-subject. Nocturama is an example of “the eerie” in the form of a non-horror film that nevertheless peers into the horrors of capitalist totality as represented by a paradoxical presence-absence. In order to proceed, it is necessary to breakdown the film’s bifurcated structure and to engage with a textual analysis.