ABSTRACT
This chapter explores three films—Sucker Punch (Snyder, 2011), Spring Breakers (Korine, 2012), and Baby Driver (Wright, 2017)—that parallel the relationship between digital subjectivity and embodied experience engendered by such mobile listening technologies as the mobile phone, MP3 player and iPod, illustrating how music and sound can create the illusion of increased agency in composite material/digital spaces by enabling perceptive and subjective negotiation of space. The chapter analyses the way in which the films remediate the perceptive and subjective distribution implied by the iPod and the mobile phone by using the performance and/or playback of sound and music as interfaces that partially dislocate characters and allow them to be present in different ontological and phenomenological levels simultaneously. However, in all three films it is ambiguous as to whether this negotiation of embodied space is merely perceptual and thus whether this seemingly empowering negotiation may in fact leave the protagonists open to physical exploitation. This theme of perceptual agency is explored in relation to issues of gender, identity, and subjectivity.
