Falling in Love Without Falling in Love: Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel

This chapter offers a critical reappraisal of Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel (1998), framing it as a radical experiment in science fiction cinema that challenges both narrative and ontological conventions. Adapting William Gibson’s cyberpunk short story, Ferrara constructs a fragmented, noir-inflected film maudit that eschews plot coherence in favour of disorientation, affective excess, and formal dissolution. Shaviro argues that the film explores the intangible networks of global capitalism, surveillance, and memory, using its stylisation and sleaze to reflect the volatile affective states of its characters. Through performances by Willem Dafoe, Christopher Walken, and Asia Argento, the film embodies a paradoxical space where erotic desire, technological abstraction, and noir fatalism collide. Employing science fiction as a framework, Shaviro positions the film as a response to the impasse of modern genre cinema, where the spectacular is replaced by spectrality, and action gives way to haunted introspection. Ultimately, New Rose Hotel is presented as Ferrara’s most daringly experimental work—one that reveals how cinema, like memory and desire, is haunted by absence, fragmentation, and the impossibility of closure.