Tyson: The film, the image, the man, the word, the force

This article examines James Toback's remarkable documentary of world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson, specifically its manner of conveying, through style and content, the process of subjectivity. Tyson's life is the stuff of tragedy: his heroic strength, his rise and fall as a boxer, his fatal flaws, the tragic exploitation of him. Yet on a philosophical, structural level the tragic drama that Tyson plays out is the drama of subjectivity, the drama of the name, an abyssal and, for Tyson, painful and exteriorized structure of subjectivity. Exposed to a profound force of fear early in (and throughout) life, Tyson transforms fear into fearlessness by mastering the affective force that makes relations between self and other. Toback's use of shifting split screens, among other techniques, draws viewers into a place of force, emphasizing the source of Tyson's power. Finally, however, the dominant image of the documentary of Tyson's worn and pained visage, laboring over his own breath, demonstrates the abyssal drama of a self who attempts to consume all others in order to manage its own constitutive loss. In this image of Tyson as self-documentarian is embodied the drama: the documentary, as it multiplies self-images, continues to divide and threaten a self whose greatness was built on a powerful, but unsustainable, refusal to be divided and threatened.