Inspired by the real story of Erika Eiffel, or rather, the woman known for ‘marrying’ the Eiffel Tower - Jumbo takes us on a whirlwind tour of human abject, where abject is understood in the post-structuralist sense of the word, as that which is cast off and separated from conventional societal norms and rules. Within the depths of this abject, we can exhume three main themes: human connection (or lack thereof), human dependency (bordering into love), and that of human morality (what we ought or not to do). These connecting themes are weaved together via giallo-horror colours, and a persistent - unsettling - late 80s staging with references to the libidinal violence of Ballard’s Crash. Here, our young protagonist, Jeanne, is afflicted by an unspoken condition which tumults her into a deep and fetishistic relationship with the cold, hard, metallic presence of an amusement park ride she names Jumbo. 

Human Connection (Or Lack Thereof)

Wittock paints a disquiet set, where everything seems a bit ‘off’ - including human relationships. There’s a lack of a father, looming over both Jeanne’s and her mother’s lives. There’s also the spectre of loneliness, embodied in two different ways by both characters: the mother, filling this lack with countless encounters with the opposite sex, the daughter, filling the void with the safety and reassurance of objects. Opening oneself to another human means being prepared for potential disappointment, humans are messy, unpredictable, erratic. Objects, on the other hand, perform their function without resistance - they are what they are - stable, comforting, secure. This might explain why Jeanne falls (quite literally) head-over-heels for the amusement park’s tilt-a-whirl ride. Humans are defined by lack. From the very first stages of our life, lack informs desire, wants, needs. We learn to understand the language of our body: hunger, tiredness, love - from temporarily having to go without it when we’re babies. And so we are thrust into the world of language, trying to articulate our needs - first by crying and wailing, then by asking, and finally, by demanding. 

And yet language, with its complexity, will never completely fill that latent desire, some things cannot be expressed via language - only touch. Perhaps that’s why Jeanne doesn’t talk much, but feels alive when in the presence of her favourite metallic ride. Humans, having disappointed her all her life, her mother too preoccupied in finding human connection in one-night stands, her father long gone - mean Jeanne is only comfortable with an object. The object thus becomes the object-cause-of-desire, or what Lacan referred to as the objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire. An impossible desire, where impossibility itself is what carries the libidinal thrust forward. Disheartened by human connections, Jeanne would rather ascribe to an object-oriented-ontology, where objects are imbued with a status and significance of their own, than have to contend with other humans’ unpredictability. 

Human Dependency (Bordering Into Love)

But if we think about it, in a world dominated by machines, is it really that peculiar to confuse dependency with love? We spend most of our days interacting with machines, communicating with humans via the mediation of the screen, and living vicariously through the simulacra of our social media profiles. Despite this, the film’s central premise is still one of total absurdity and abjectity in the face of a vis-a-vis encounter with the non-human. An encounter still too othering, for the leap of faith between depending on machines for our day-to-day lives and loving a machine, is still too much of an abyss. That’s why Jeanne’s mother is portrayed as dependent on her lovers, in a compellingly similar way in which Jeanne herself is dependent on her machine. But malaised love is dependency, and thus it must be true that for Jeanne to find the ability to depend on someone, she too must resort to sick love. 

Whilst society judges women for seeking dependency in love, despite the last hundreds of years having set up women to do just that, society at large is still not ready to confront the inevitable conundrum of objectophilia. Can you love that which is not human, let alone inorganic? In the realm of object-oriented-ontology, can the tilt-a-whirl ride presence itself in a way that is sensuous to the human? For Harman, (the philosopher who brought us this odd ontology) objects have sensual and real qualities, ‘sensual’ in the sense of their appearance and how they interact with us, but ‘real’ insofar as they will never be fully accessible to us, for they retain their own reality or ‘thingness’. Did Jeanne tap into this realness? Or did the machine tap into hers? In the world of object-oriented-ontology, humans are objects, and thus are no different from Jumbo, a speck of dust, or a rock. If that’s the case, perhaps loving a machine and being dependent on it is no different from loving and being dependent on any other human. 

Human Morality (What We Ought or Not to Do)

But is it morally sound to love that which cannot reply? The film is ambiguous as to whether the machine’s consent to love is but a hallucination, “say green for yes, red for no”, or whether it’s manipulated by the park’s leader in an attempt to please Jeanne. As Jeanne’s seemingly worsening mental health takes a downward spiral, the characters around her show their disdain. “Lock her up”, “put her in the looney bin”, “get out of my house” - society is shown as antagonistic to her amorous pursuits. We enter the realm of morality - a code of conduct, written by religion, laws, and a social contract, which dictates what behaviours are socially acceptable. Can Jeanne’s abject love be integrated within these social norms? Most moral codes dictate what’s good or bad, what can be done, and what cannot - usually, bad things are those that bring forth negative effects on humans and their society. Wittock here skillfully inserts a poignant scene, Jeanne’s mother lits a cigarette, smokes a puff, then immediately banishes the cigarette stamping it out with her high-heeled boots. 

This cigarette, symbolises a defining moment, it represents the climax when the mother realises that we all partake in things that hurt us every day. Smoking, now openly considered a societal ill, is still accepted as the symbol-image of libidinality, of stress, of sexual tension, of pause, of toughness. The object cannot be detached from its object-image, it has entered the Symbolic world of language and allure. And so it is with this puff of smoke that the mother finally sees into her daughter’s world for the very first time. If cigarettes can represent the libidinal then so can the tilt-a-whirl. Let the marriage of objects and their acceptance into the rich Symbolic world of language begin. 

And so the wedding between machine and Jeanne is not merely an intra-object phenomena, but also a beautiful leap from the up-until-now impenetrable world of Jeanne’s mind which struggles to communicate via language, with that of her mother’s - all mediated by a machine.