Sorry, We Missed You (Ken Loach, UK, 2019)

Ken Loach is probably the last marxist filmmaker in the Western hemisphere, and that makes him probably one of the last practicioners of the social realist style. Loach may be considered as the contemporary cinematographic equivalent of the nineteenth century 'social realist' novelist and serial writer Eugène Sue (1804-1857), author of, among other works, Les Mystères de Paris (1842-1843), in which he described and denounced the miserable living conditions of the lower classes in Paris. In their booklet The Holy Family (1844),  Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels' criticized Eugene Sue for turning his characters into caricatures and unfortunately, this criticism also applies to Loach's SORRY, WE MISSED YOU (UK, 2019). Loach characters are stereotypes that seem to be drawn from the vast literature on the working conditions of what Guy Standing called The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

For those viewers who missed or skipped the vast body of publications and TV reports on the 'gig' economy - of which Uber is the best known example - the delivery depot boss of , Maloney (Ross Brewster), provides the spectator in a job interview with the main character Ricky Turner (Kris Hitchen), a crash course in the brave new world of the post-industrial and service oriented economy. In this new economy, workers do not 'work for' but 'work with' a firm, and they don't 'work' but they 'perform a service'. They do not get a salary or wages, but 'fees'. The firm does not employ them, but they are self-employed entrepreneurs who are 'masters of their own destiny' and 'make their own choices'. And, as self-employed entrepreneurs, workers in gig economy firms are not colleagues who can be united in a common cause, but rather competitors who vie for the best assignments, put their own particular interests first, and are not prepared to help one of their co-workers out when he or she is in trouble unless they get an appropriate fee for that, as Ricky soon finds out on the work floor of PDF.

And, as Maloney explains, the heart that makes the firm tick is a mobile digital scanner which plans their routes, tracks their movements, and monitors their breaks (after two minutes of a break it starts beeping). The name of the firm PDF, then, not only stands for Parcels Delivered Fast, but also hints towards the digital technologies that made the rise of the gig economy possible in the first place. Without mobile phones, digital scanners, GPS technology, RFID sensors and what have you 'platforms' like Uber, Deliveroo and fill in your own favorite example, would never have come into existence, and, as has been extensively discussed in the literature on the gig economy, these digital 'surveillance and control' devices have also introduced new practices and technologies of Taylorist discipline.

In line with the neo-liberal ideology that underlies the new gig economy, a job is no longer a set of tasks a worker performs in an agreed upon number of working hours in exchange for a wage, but an opportunity for the self-employed entrepreneur to invest in a bright future in which he or she can start their own firm, or rather, their own 'franchise'. And indeed, in order to be able to start working 'with' PDF, Ricky has to make an investment and buy a van and since he is already debt ridden he has to convince his wife Abby (Debbie Honeywood) that she will have to sell her car. As Ricky will find out in the remainder of the film, this investment and the investment of his own work will not yield the promised returns, but the whole system of fees, fines and compensations that constitutes the gig econmy - damage or loss of equipment, packages, or missed working days have to be paid for or compensated by the 'self-employed entrepreneurs' themselves - operates to the effect that the more work one 'invests' in the job, the greater the debts the gig entrepreneur incurs. And, as it should be in a social realist drama, Ricky is the (stereo-)typical character whom all the negative features of the gig economy befall.

Through Abby, who Ricky persuades to sell her car with promisses of a better future, Ricky's family  enters the scene. Not only is Ricky's family a prototypical, indeed 'ideal' nuclear family with a father , mother and a sun and a younger daughter, but this 'Holy Family' also stands for the new working class that no longer works in manufactories and industries, but in what is called the 'service industry'. Whereas Rick works for a private, commercial economy, though, Abby works for what is supposed to be a public service: she is a care-worker who works for a care agency, and since public services have been devolved to the private sector, it comes as no surprise that the working conditions Abby has to deal with are not that much different from those Ricky is up to. Abby, too, has targets to meet, her visits to her patients are too short to provide more than the necessary care, and she must always be available through her mobile phone in case emergencies emerge.

All the effects of work in the new economy on the private lifes of workers in the service industries that are quite familiar from the relevant literature, fall upon Rick and Abby: long working hours (fourteen to sixteen hours a day), no time for a proper private life, and, of course no time for paying proper attention to the needs of their children. And for those spectators who are not yet fully aware of the miserable situation Rick and Abby find themselves Loach drives these points home by letting Ricky and Abby converse in their spare moments together in dialogues that  sound like quotes from manifestos on the conditions of the precariat class.

It will come as no surprise that under these circumstances this 'holy family'  will come under pressure and under the threat of falling apart. And given the rather schematic and stereotypical rendering in this film of the working and living conditions of the precariat it will not come as surprise either that the fault lines in this family develop along quite predictable (and Freudian) lines: Ricky and Aby sun Seb (Rhys Stone) rather spends time painting graffitis on walls than attending school, gets suspended and is eventually arrested for a petty crime (the theft of a couple of paint cans), which costs Ricky a lot of money because he has to take leave of his work in order to attend the interview of his son at the police station and was not able to find a replacement, thus incursing even greater debts. Eventually Seb drives his father so mad that he hits him, which, of course reminds Abby of her own father who in good proletarian tradition beat her up when he was drunk. None of cliches of the working and lower class miseries are spared. And, as it should, it is the female part of the household that tries to keep the family together and to rain in the mutual anger between Ricky and Seb. This image of the nuclear family is not only quite stereotypical, but almost ancient and archetypical. Could it be that Loach is mostly interested in the lower class because it is a social repository of rather traditional values of honest labour, the family as the cornerstone of social cohesion and women as the ultimate care-takers? The division of social labour inside this film's family seem to suggest as much.

And since Ricky is the stereotypical representative of the precariat, he has to have all possible mishaps and misfortunes coming on him, so he indeed gets assaulted and robbed by couple of thugs who, in passing not only molest him but also destroy his precious scanner. On top of the day off he has to spend in hospital, he receives a phone call while waiting in that hospital - an opportunity for Loach to offer a peek into the rather dreadful state British health care for the lower segments of society is in - in which Maloney tells him that he for the stolen passports and the destroyed scanner he will have to pay no less than 1500 pounds. Although Ricky's mishap brings the family together again, Ricky, desparate as he is, takes no time to convalesce and against his family that tries to stop him he drives away in his van, half-blinded towards a future where there seems to be no light at the horizon.

There are just a few features from the literature on the gig economy and the precariat that are missing in this film. According to that literature, the long working hours, scarce payments and uncertain futures cause disproportianate alcohol and drugs abuse among the precariat. Not so in Loach's holy family that, in the best traditions of social realism, is, of course, a well intending, decent and (over) responsible small community onto whom the outside world in general and the gig and service economie in particular inflict the worst plagues the precariat can happen. But this yields melodrama from the classical Hollywood sort, or, even worse, socialist realism of the sort practiced in the first decades of the twentieth century, rather than a convincing picture of contemporary family life.

It is tempting to step into the footsteps of Marx and Engels and criticize Loach for not offering any perspective on a way out of the misery of the precariat. This, however, would be asking too much, since not a single coherent political answer has been provided from the left to the socially, economically and cuturally rather devastating effects of the neoliberal post-industrial economy which is quite a different beast from the rising industrial and capitalist society of Marx' days. Raising awareness of the appalling conditions under which a large part of the precariat works and lives might be a first step towards finding an appropriate response to the current social and economic system, and that is certainly what this film succeeds in doing. But it is precisely this zeal to promulgate the fate of the precariat, that makes this film into an illustrated manifesto that presents the spectator with talking and moving pamflets rather than convincing characters. And, as manifesto's usually do, it aims at an immediate, emotion driven outrage on the part of the spectators rather than inviting a more reflexive analysis of the events on screen.

And, maybe more disconcerting, and as is more often the case in social realism of the socialist or Marxist sort, and as already suggested above, one cannot entirely get rid of the impression that the film is plea for the restoration of classical values of labour and family as they were honored and abided in the post-war, social-democratic wellfare state. But economically as well as culturally the welfare state seems to have been for ever relegated to the past. Or did we miss something?

Light of My Life (Casey Affleck, USA, 2019)

To those who expect that a movie that tells a story that is set in a post-apocalyptic world - the apocalyps being caused by nuclear warfare, alien invasion or a lethal virus, as in this film - is almost by definition a fast-paced, special effects laden action movie the very first scene of Casey Affleck's film LIGHT OF MY LIFE (USA, 2019) will give sufficient cause to leave the cinema. Probably more than any other film has ever done before, the opening scene of this movie offers the spectator an explicit foreboding of what is to come and what is and what is not to be expected. In a position that remains unchanged for about twelve minutes, the camera offers a perpendicular view on a father (Casey Affleck) and his seven year old daughter Rag (Anna Pniowsky) who lie closely together in a sleeping bag, while the father, lit by just a small flashlight, tells his daugher a long and convoluted story that is loosely inspired by the biblical story of Noach's arch (one of the oldest apocalyps sagas).  This scene states in a clear and unambiguous way that the film that you're going to watch will not be your typical apocalyps movie, but something completely different.

More than in most classical Hollywood movies, the first scene  already contains all the main elements that will be elaborated in the remainder of the film. As Rag asks her dad if it isn't very unlikely that after the apocalyptic flooding in Noach's story only two specimen of each species survived, she not only questions the premise of the story he is telling her, but also the very premise of the movie itself. Indeed, it is quite unlikely that a rapacious virus would only kill females and all females on earth on top of that. As dad (who remains nameless throughout the movie) explains that this is possible because Noach's arch is in the end just a story, he also hints the spectator that since this movie is also 'just a story', its premise does not necessarily have to be likely. And as he also explains to Rag that stories are important, because they bring people together, expand their world, and are fun to tell or to listen to, it becomes clear that the film is not only a story itself, but that it will also offer reflexions on the functions of stories, and, perhaps even more importantly, on the very stuff stories are made of: language.

As in this opening scene, (spoken) language is the only medium of communication used in the rest of the film: there are no telephones, no laptops, no internet, or other electronic or digital devices in this story world, although going by the cars and the scarse images of a town Dad and Rag visit to do some shopping, this world must be more or less contemporaneous to the actual one. It is through language that Dad teaches Rag, indeed, language (as he makes her spell out a number of 'difficult words' during one of their first trips in the woods); through language Dad gives Rag instructions, and scolds her if she doesn't follow those; through language he transmits knowledge to her as he explains to her where babies come from and how they are made; through language he tries to describe her mother to her; through language he misleads the few other men they encounter about Rag's gender; and it is through language that conceptual differences as those between morality and ethics - another major theme of the film - can be made in the first place (and  language allows for more subtle and nuanced differences than the rigid binary yes/no options of the digital programming languages, since, as the film will later on demonstrate, the answers to ethical questions can not simply be logically derived from moral principles). It is, in short, through language that knowledge, stories and memories are transmitted from generation to generation, and it is through - or, as Lacanians would say, 'into' - the symbolic order of language that children become integrated into the chain of generations. It is by assuming the word 'love adventure' that according to Dad Rag's mother (Elisabeth Moss) used to turn all adventures and misadventures into joyful and shared experience, that Rag in the very last image of the picture takes over her mother's position. And indeed, as he arrives at this grandparent's home and is welcomed by three men who have moved into - or, in more contemporary parlance, 'squatted' - this house four years ago when they found it abandoned and empty, it turns out that these men literally live by the Word: it is the Word of the Lord that makes them hospitable, supportive and protective.

In many, if not all respects, LIGHT OF MY LIFE  opens up towards a past that most future oriented and technology based science fiction and apocalyps movies seem to want to 'overwrite' and erase. With its absence of modern electronic and digital communication media and it's use of rather primitive 'analogue' techniques such as the alarm system made of tin cans that Dad 'installs' around their tent or the houses they temporarily stay in, and it's focus on traditional forms of story telling and it's references to biblical stories, this film is an plea for the revaluation and redemption of ancient and fundamental, if not archaic building blocks of human civilisation and society. This goes for the style of the film as well: long uninterrupted shots that make the intimate relationship between Dad and daughter almost palpable, wide shots that give ample space to the landscapes they pass through, an almost Hitchcockian close focus on the perspectives of Dad and Rag which makes the spectator share the uncertainties and fears of these protagonists, all these elements of style and content make LIGHT OF MY LIFE  the opposite of the action and special effects laden blockbuster and super hero movies that Hollywood  has been spawning over the last three decades.

The film is contemplative, rather than action oriented, reflexive more than narrative (the story itself being very simple and meager), philosophical and questioning, rather than practical and solution oriented (as most classical and modern Hollywood movies are), dialogic rather than monologic, because it allows the spectator the time and space to reflect on what happens on the screen and therefore, paradoxically, more 'interactive' than many hi-tech modern scifi or super hero movie. Even when, at the end of the film, Dad gets engaged in a fight with three intruders of his grandparents' home who had already killed Tom, the man of the Word and his companians, a large part of this violent altercation is shot from one point of view, but, more importantly, this scene serves to demonstrate the issue of morality and ethics raised in the very beginning of the film. Although Dad has earlier in the film stated that he would not harm people - men, in this context - who might assail him, however mad he may be, he abandons this moral principle for the ethically justified sake of the life of his daughter. The function of this most violent action scene of the film, then, is to drive this philosophical point home.

However, in all its archaism and restoration of some of the arch-values and practices of mankind, there is certainly one major question to be raised. As already said, the premise of the film - only and all women have been killed by a mysterious virus - may seem unlikely and only justified by the fictional nature of the movie, but it certainly allows to picture a world from which women are absent and where men, because they are feeling 'lonely, sad, and scared' as Dad explains to Rag, become aggressive. Even the Word of the Lord - which is, after all, the Word of a Man - does not suffice to compensate for the absence of women and to rain in the aggressive urges of men, as the cruel murder of the faithful Tom and his companians shows. As was already presaged in one of the stories Dad told Rag, in which it was not the smart male fox but his female partner that eventually saved the day (without getting the credits for it, though), in what seems to be 'a man's world' (to quote James Brown) it are the women who bind communities by raining in the aggressive urges of men and taking care of their own and other people's needs. 

Without women, a society falls apart and into a Hobbesian natural state of 'war of every man against every man'. In the film, it is Rag who eventually saves the day by shooting down the intruder who is on the brink of killing her father, and because by saving her father she also at the same time goes his rules because earlier he explicity prohibited her to touch Tom's gun -thus offering another example of the difference between morality and ethics - this scene is also a re-enactment of an archaic theme: Rag, who also wounds her father, metonymically 'kills' him and thus enters the symbolic order. And, as already described above, by assuming the word 'love adventure' from her mother, she takes (symbolically) her place. Contrary to Freudian or Lacanian theory, then, it is not men, but women who are the guarantees of law and order, and of civil society in general. And since Rag stops the violence by using violence herself, this seems to suggest that the era of male dominance is definitely over: Rag exemplifies the transformation of women from the weak, vulnerable - and virgin - creatures that need to be protected by men into the stronger and smarter personalities that will turn the adventures and misadventures of man-kind into 'love adventures', thus preventing men to fall back into the Hobbesian state of nature.

Although this might seem an emancipatory view on and acknowledgment of the role of women of society, one still wonders if this also rather archaic typology of women as well as of men, corresponds to the realities of today's societies. Of course, as is made abundatly clear in the film, fictional stories are at liberty to depict societies in any way they deem fit and that does not have to have any connection to the 'real' world at all. However, the film brings too many cultural, biblical, philosophical and - yes - societal issues into play to plausibly maintain that there is no relationship at all. And at some point in the film it seems as if the maker is very much aware of the unease that the depiction of a close and intimate relationship between a father and a daughter may raise in contemporary culture. When Dad and Rag are lying on their sleeping bag in their tent, Dad says to Rag that he likes very much being with her. And Rag responds: "Me too". By inverting the meaning these two words nowadays have in the public debate, the movie may not only pre-emptively ward off possible criticism, but may also very well, al be it covertly, take a position in that debate. And hasn't Affleck been sued twice for alleged sexual harassment (both cases were settled out of court)? The film certainly still leaves a lot to think about.

All in all  LIGHT OF MY LIFE  turns out to be a very ambiguous movie but its ambiguities and ambivalences are consistent with the in-between world the movie depicts. The story world of LIGHT OF MY LIFE is caught - and maybe even trapped - in a state in which  ancient and archaic values have been submerged by the dust of history, as is demonstrated quite literally by the family pictures Dad and Rag find in their temporary home and that show already yellowed images of the classical family that once lived there and never will return (Rag finds the corpses of the mother and daughter in the barn). But it is a world in which a future is glooming in phantasies about technologies in which science and technology replace humans in even the ultimate act of love: the act of procreation, as in the words of the store keeper from whom Dad and Rag receive their supplies and who says that babies are being engendered in laboratories in China and California (and it is hard not to see a clear reference to Silicon Valley in this premonition). And here the film most certainly touches upon a much discussed paradox of contemporary culture and society: will the wonders of science and technology that are promised to take over many if not all of human activities not at the same time undo those activities and efforts from what makes them most human: their affective, binding, and communicative dimensions and turn mankind - and that word seems to be most appropriate in this context - into lonely, sad, scared and ultimately aggressive creatures? Or will there be eventually a light in our lives?




 

Once Upon a Time in.......Hollywood (Q. Tarantino, USA, 2019)

The year 2019 is one of commemoration: 50 years ago, in 1969, the love and peace hippie culture experienced it's apex at the Woodstock music festival - and the epic chronicle of that event, Michael Wadleigh's WOODSTOCK (USA, 1970) has been duly re-mastered and re-released to celebrate the festival's 50th anniversary - while twenty years ago, in 1999, cinema definitely entered its digital age with the release of the first episode of THE MATRIX (Wachowski Brothers, USA, 1999), which is also celebrated with a 'digitally remastered' re-release. However, 1969 also marked the end of the period that is now known as 'the sixties': the stabbing of a stoned young woman by one of the Hells Angels, hired for security by The Rolling Stones for their 'free concert' in Altamont (in front of the camera of the Maysles brothers who documented the event in GIMME SHELTER (USA, 1970)) brought the flower-power period to a tragic and violent end.
 This contradiction between the blossoming of an alternative culture based on love, drugs, free sex and the rejection of property and consumerism on the one hand and hatred of and violence against those who did not share these counter-cultural values was maybe even more tellingly - and shockingly - incarnated by the hippie commune around Charles Mansion who sent out the members this commune to murder the actress Sharon Tate, the wife of Roman Polanski. And since Polanski, the young director of the succesful art movie ROSEMARY'S BABY (USA, 1968)  - ironically a film about the kind of satanism that inspired Manson - was himself  hailed by Hollywood as the harbinger of a new kind of filmmaking that would appeal to a younger generation that had lost interest in the Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn sort of movies that Hollywood still churned out in the fifties and sixties, one might argue that in the Manson murders, as in the stabbing at Altamont, the alternative cultures of the sixties turned against themselves and brought themselves to an end. The mainstream film industry had to wait for  the generation of the 'movie brats' - Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, De Palma, Cimino - for a 'New Hollywood' to take off.
 It is this ambiguous sense of celebration and awe, but also of commemoration and effacing, of historiography and phantasy, of reconstruction and imagination, of, indeed, truth and fiction that is at the heart of this Tarantino movie. As the very title of the film, ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD already suggests, the movie is trip down memory lane, but, as the title also explicitly makes clear, the world to the movie returns to is not only a defintely foregone world, but also to a very great extent an imaginary, fairy tale world, or maybe even a mythological world in which, as the French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss had argued, irreconcilable contradictions are overcome and resolved. One of these contradictions is in the very making of the film itself. Honoring cinema's ontological obligation to photographically and hence realistically reproduce reality as it appears in front of the camera, Tarantino refused to use computer-generated images (CGIs) and digital technologies to reconstitute the Los Angeles of the end of the sixties or to create the special effects that have become the stock of Hollywood movies since THE MATRIX. In this respect Tarantino is a Dogma-filmmaker après la lettre, but as Lars von Trier, he does not let this commitment to photographic realism get in the way of building a phantasmagoric resurrection of a Los Angeles not as it actually was or maybe not even as he actually remembers it, but the Los Angeles as he has always imagined and longed for - a fairy tale LA. 
 This movie's LA is, however, an LA on the cusp of vanishing. In this LA the youth culture of the sixties in general and the hippies in particular only play a marginal - but eventually a lethally threatening - role, quite literally so as one of the hippie girls is repeatedly encountered on the sidewalks by Cliff (Brad Pitt) as he drives his friend and 'boss Rick's (Leonardo di Caprio) car through the city and as it appears that they do not live in the city but on the Spahn Movie Ranch, fifty kilometers north of LA. However, though literally excentric and marginal, these hippies - members of the commune headed by Charles Manson - now occupy a derelict location where just a short while ago Western TV shows were shot: the place and its occupants stand for the gap between a Hollywood film culture of the fifties that already had to concede prominence to TV shows in the sixties and a youth culture that has no interest in Hollywood movies at all (when Cliff arrives at the farm, a group of hippies are watching a pop music show on TV). 
 The same contradiction between what has come to be called the old 'classical Hollywood' and the new Hollywood that should again attract a younger audience to the cinemas is mirrored by the arrival of Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) as Rick's new neighbours in LA. Whereas Rick Dalton used to be the star hero of the TV series BOUNTY LAW but is now on his way down  and only gets asked for guest appearances in other stars' series in which he has to play the bad guy who always gets to be defeated at the end, Polanski - as already mentioned - was hailed to Hollywood to give the film industry a fresh boost that would allow it to reconnect with the new youth culture. And, up to a certain degree, this contradiction is also mirrored in the two main characters of the movie, the 'has-been' movie star Rick Dalton and his stunt double Cliff Booth who, as both confirm in a TV interview in the beginning of the film, 'carries Rick's load'. Whereas Rick is averse to hippies, as he makes abundantly clear several times in the movie, and especially in his brief confrontation with Charlie Manson (Damon Herriman) when comes to explore the surroundings of his and his neighbour's houses late at night in a rather noisy car, Cliff is willing to give the hippie girl Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) a ride to the Spahn Movie ranch, to buy an LSD cigarette from her, and to try and smoke it later on the fateful night when Charlie's hippies attack Rick's house where he then finds himself. Cliff, then, has a streak of hippie culture and, one surmises, if only Rick would have some of his athletic and casual cool, he might have made it in the new Hollywood instead of getting stuck in his fifties and sixties 'classical' manners. Partly because of his 'cool', and partly because most of the movie's story evolves around him, Cliff plays a more eye-catching role than Rick, which only fits the declining career of the latter who is pretty much aware that he has become a 'has-been' (and it testifies to Di Caprio's acting skills that he conveys this second-rate status of his character more than convincingly).
 Tarantino, however, definitely takes sides in this multi-layered texture of contradictions, and he is with Rick and his double rather than with the (then) new youth culture that, together with new media like the TV in the sixties and the digital technologies at the end of the twentieth century, would bring the classical Hollywood culture to an end. Cliff's visit to the Spahn Movie Ranch, where he insists on seeing the old owner George Spahn (Bruce Dern) much against the will of the hippie commune, is filmed in a long-drawn way and in wide shots as if a shoot-out were imminent that would be worthy of a Sergio Leone Western (although, of course, the success of spaghetti Westerns also contributed to the demise of 'classical' Hollywood). Cliff turns out to live in a decripit trailer next to a classical, but also seemingly dilapitated drive-in movie theatre (on the screen of which one sees a commercial rather than a scene from a feature film), and it is the classical stunt man Cliff who takes on Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), the hero of the special-effects laden Kung Fu films of that area and wins this apparently 'friendly contest'. But Tarantino's most touching declaration of love for the classical cinema is the scene in which Sharon Tate enters a Westwood Theatre where she noticed a poster of the movie THE WRECKING CREW (Phil Karlson, USA, 1968), in which - the real - Sharon Tate was featured, along with Dean Martin and Elke Sommer. She mimicks the martial art movements that she has learned from Bruce Lee and the real Sharon Tate makes in that movie, but first and foremost she is delighted by the response of the audience to the jokes and acts on screen: it is a celebration of the classical, social and collective film experience that was already vanishing at the end of the sixties when classical genres became the food of TV series and these were watched in the privacy of the home (the Westwood theatre is far from sold out, and most films or series are watched on television in this movie). This Sharon Tate, later in the movie pregnant of a child she has with Polanski - a hopeful joinder of classical and art cinema as the new future for Hollywood? - is obviously the center of the film, as well because of this open declaration of love as because of the looming tragedy that her and Polanski's presence and that of the Manson gang evoke.
 However, in a typical Tarantinesk style, the story of the film hardly builds up to this expected climax. The film meanders along many digressions that  seem to be motivated mostly by the opportunities they offer to showcase a meticulously (re-)constructed LA with all its billboards, signposts, restaurants, bars, film sets, dwellings, cinemas, streets, cars, clothes, shoes, jeans, sunglasses, that together build up an admittedly very romanticized and idealized image of that city in that period as Tarantino wants his audience to experience it (as he has maybe himself always wanted to experience it). As exciting as the sometimes hilarious or violent scenes of the movie are the almost endless drives of Cliff (sometimes with Rick) through the city, which makes the movie akin to some of the road movies that inaugurated the end of the classical film (most spectacularly Dennis Hopper's EASY RIDER (USA, 1968) a film that is curiously absent in this film, although one long-haired cab driver is scolded as 'Dennis Hopper' by Rick). In this respect,  ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD is what Frederic Jameson would call a 'nostalgia film' par excellence: a film that is true to imagination and longing rather than to historical factuality.
 That goes for the ending of the film as well. Rather than having his darling - Sharon Tate - killed, Tarantino has the Manson gang assault the house of Rick where they meet Cliff - who has just smoked one of Pussycat's LSD cigarettes and can't believe the hippies with their knives are real - and through Cliff their - cruel - end, and of course Rick who kills one of the female hippies with the flame thrower he used in one of his films to kill a couple of German Nazi officers - and maybe thus rekindles in 'real life' the faked heroism of his acting life. But his real redemption comes after this violent reckoning with the Manson gang, when through the intercom of her mansion Sharon Tate tells Rick - who in the beginning of the film had said that he  wanted to have a role in one of Polanski's films - that she has always admired him and invites him into her house. Here - as he had done before in his other films - Tarantino uses the fictional dimension of film making to rewrite history and to create a what the historian Nigel Ferguson once called a 'counterfactual' history in which Rick, as well as Sharon Tate are redeemed: history is moulded into the format of the classical Hollywood film that requires, as Rick experienced in his guest appearances as the bad guy in the TV shows, a happy end. 
 Of course, as many critics have remarked, this fictional redemption of the past comes with a price: this idealized and romanticized LA is not disturbed by the civil rights movement, or the protests again the war in Vietnam, that also heavily marked the sixties, historically as well as in the collective memory and imagination. In this respect ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD also voluntarily conforms to the norms of the classical Hollywood movie, where social conflicts and political struggle were always carefully avoided and elided from the screen. The famous left-wing critic Jonathan Rosenbaum therefore has compared Tarantino's films with the back-to-the-fifties mentality as it propagated by Trump and other populists. Whether he has a point remains to be seen, and maybe the answer is in the present in which the film culture that Tarantino celebrates and bemoans at the same time no longer exists: the greatest paradox of ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD is, perhaps, that is a very powerful and a very powerless movie at the same time. But isn't that the case with all mythologies?

 

The Dead Don't Die - or Do They? Postmodern film philosophy in the flesh

"The world is perfect. Appreciate the details." This piece of wisdom is given by "WUPC" delivery man Dean (RZA) to Bobby Wiggins (Caleb Landry Jones), the young and geeky owner of a gas station  and a shop of memorabilia and gadgets of mainly antiquated super-hero and horror movies and cartoons. The advice to mainly pay attention to the details seems to be directed to the spectator of the film as well, because although Jarmusch's movie seems to follow the rules and conventions of the horror movie in general and the zombie movie in particular, the devil is - so to speak - in the details. The setting of this scene already provides some clues to the multiple layers that are conjoined in the movie: the gas station and the shop itself offer typical timeless images of a rural America as one has already seen in countless movies. The shop itself sells toys, cartoon strips, videos and cd's that refer to a bygone past, but the WUPC delivery truck and its driver are clearly contemporary figures.

Similar seeming anachronisms reoccur when, for instance, officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) and officer Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny) arrive at the equally timeless diner where both female staff have been slashed by zombies in their Toyota Prius and Smart car respectively. Not only  past and present are merged in this way, as is only appropriate in a zombie movie in which the (un)dead rise from their graves to come and haunt the present, but the future is also present since the strange events that happen - cattle and pets disappear, the cycle of day and night turns out of order, wifi and mobile phone networks stop working, TV broadcastings are disturbed, etc. - are alledgedly caused by a shift of the axis of planet earth, which in turn is caused by fracking in the Artic area.  The present, then, is in this movie under attack from both the past that returns to cannibalize it, and the future that threatens to destroy it with a man-made ecological disaster. Indeed, as officer Peterson repeatedly remarks, "This is definitely going to end badly."

This imminent crushing of the present by the past and the future surely gives the film some political undertones. It can be read as a critique of (Trumpian) denial of man-made climate change and of Trump's promises to restore America's past greatness, whereas Peterson's statement that Mexicans are his favorite people can be taken as a rebuttal of Trump's debunking of Mexicans as criminals and rapists. When it comes to politics and critique, however, the film more generally just seems to follow a trope that is familiar from the zombie genre from its very start with George Romero's THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (USA, 1968): the zombies in Jarmusch's movie "gravitate to what they liked best in their lives", as, again, Peterson observes and what they liked best are consumer goods, game consoles, fashion, sports like tennis, or pop cultural activities such as playing the guitar. As 'undead' the zombies prefer to continue to do what they did when they were still alive because they could do those things as 'brainlessly'  as zombies. As all zombie movies, THE DEAD DON'T DIE seems to want to bring across the message of philosopher Daniel C. Dennett's dictum that "We are all zombies", as the voice over of Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) rather explictly explains at the end of the movie. The zombie-like nature of the living in our contemporary societies is in Jarmusch's movie accentuated by the rather bland acting style of its protagonists chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Muray) and more specifically Adam Driver's character Ronnie Peterson, who is explicitly scolded by the former for his 'cool' since the zombie disaster broke out.

However, in this film this "we are all zombies" theme - again, a familiar recurring trope in the genre - seems to be no more than a sort of obligatory afterthought, a coda that is quite literally added to the movie through the concluding voice-over of Hermit Bob. Rather than being a comment on the contemporary state of Western society in general and American culture and politics in particular, THE DEAD DON'T DIE seems to offer an ironic reflection on the current state of cinema as an 'undead' medium. That the film is first of all a self-reflective movie is already made clear in one of the first scenes when Robertson and Peterson drive back to the police station after a confrontation with Hermit Bob who is being accused of stealing a chicken from farmer Frank Miller (Steve Buscemi): when the radio plays the song The Dead Don't Die by Sturgill Simpson and Robertson says it sounds very familiar to him, Peterson explains this by pointing out that it is the theme song of this movie. Later officer Peterson who seems to be the real protagonist of the movie, tells Robertson that he was already sure from the beginning that things would definitely end badly because he had been given the whole script of the movie to read (whereas Robertson says that he only got his own parts to read). These are ironic instances of the typically modernist strategy of "laying bare the device" through which the spectator was supposed to be made aware of the artificial  and make-believe nature of the cinematic illusion. Other examples of such self-reflexive moments are when the camera tilts down over a tomb stone in which the name of one of the main actors, "Bill Murray" is engraved. 

The days of modernist cinema are, however, already over for a long time, and these instances of "laying bare the device" nowadays sollicit a smile rather than a shock, they amuse rather than estrange, they have become part and parcel of today's knowledgeable film spectator's competence who no longer needs to be educated in a Brechtian or Godardian way about the technological, artificial and illusionary nature of the cinematic image. Jarmusch's movie positions itself rather squarely - and not surprisingly - in a postmodern tradition by abundantly and extensively referring to and quoting from, or, to put it more poshly, "paying tribute to" numerous horror, zombie, and science-fiction movies from Murnau's NOSFERATU (Germany, 1922) the iconic poster of which is printed on Bobby Wiggin's T-shirt, through Hitchcock's PSYCHO (USA, 1960), mentioned in a conversation between the juvenile delinquents in the local detention center, to Tarantino's KILL BILL (USA, 2003) to which the samurai sword swinging undertaker Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton) is an obvious "tribute", and Steven Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (USA, 1977) and E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTIAL (USA, 1982) is paid hommage to with the space ship that in the midst of the zombie carnage comes to collect Zelda. Romero's THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD has already been mentioned, and one might also think of classics as John Landis' video-clip for Michael Jackson's Thriller, or pick your own favorite zombie or horror classic. To a large extent, then, THE DEAD DON'T DIE consists of images, figures, tropes and themes that had already been invented and developed by other, earlier filmmakers from the classic and modern periods of the history of film. 

 In this sense, one could certainly see THE DEAD DON'T DIE as an example of the postmodernist  ennui - and resignation - with the contemporary filmmaker's (and artists in general) feeling that everything has already been invented and tried in the past and that the only thing left for the contemporary filmmaker to do is to ransack the past and to recombine it's ideas, images and artifacts into maybe eclictic but hopefully refreshing, amusing, or entertaining ways (as Jarmusch does with fragments and figures from the films mentioned above). However, postmodernism's past is not just a reproduction of images (or texts or other artifacts) from a bygone period, but rather a reconstitution of that past as how this past is being imagined by a present generation who projects their own (collective) memories that are fed by movies, pictures, novels, as well as by contemporary phantasies and desires, onto that past. In postmodernist art and cinema, the past not only cannibalizes on the present, but the present also invades, colonizes and cannibalizes the past. It is certainly no coincidence that Fern (Eszter Balint) and Lily (Rosal Colon), the staff of the local diner, discuss Jack Clayton's THE GREAT GATSBY (USA, 1974) before they get assaulted by zombies, conflating actors (Robert Redford) with characters, fictional with historical figures (Gatsby), and authors with fictional characters (Fitzgerald). The (last) Marxist philosopher and culture critique Frederic Jameson had pointed out THE GREAT GATSBY as a paradigm example of what he called the postmodernist "nostalgia film", that is, a film that sollicits a longing to experience a long gone and disappeared past but not as a historically accurate reconstruction of that past, but as a past as the contemporary audience imagines it. A nostalgia film like THE GREAT GATSBY, instead of offering a realistic account of the twenties "as they really were"  rather makes those twenties "as they really were" disappear from the collective memory and consciousness: it acts like a zombie that cannabilizes the present collective memory by eating away the substantial part of the past, thus creating a sense of time in which past and present collapse and the future is nothing but the eternal return of the same. Indeed, a time in which "the dead don't die".

 THE DEAD DON'T DIE, however, is not just a nostalgic pastiche of a by now almost lost movie genre. As the French philosopher and anthropologist Edgar Morin had argued in his book Le Cinéma ou l'Homme Imaginaire: Essai d'Antropologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982), there is an intimate relationship between the cinema and the "undead". Movie characters are, after all, not living creatures of flesh and blood, but lead a shadowy existence in which they are condemned to repeat the same actions, expressions and utterances over and over again (at least when the film in which they appear is screened). As the rather bland performances of Peterson and Robertson there is therefore not a radical, categorical difference between a human and a zombie-like character in a movie, and the transformation from human to zombie is - although not painless - quick and easy. Zombies, then, are the perfect allegorical representations for movie characters, as is shown when Peterson and Robertson watch them from their seats in their patrol car enchroach upon their windshield. Just as Jean Baudrillard once observed that the American landscape is transformed into a movie image when seen through the windshield of a moving automobile, the windshield of the patrol car functions as a film screen on which the shadowy figures of movie characters appear. Once they step out of the car and enter the world of the zombies, these film characters - already zombies for the spectator of this movie - will fataly join the mass of zombies as well. And they will be doomed to eternally return to and rampage and cannibalize the present.

This allegorical interpretation of the story and imagery of THE DEAD DON'T DIE leaves one with a very bleak vision on the current and future state of the cinema, indeed. There are, however, a few suggestions that there might be some hope for a renewed future. First, there is the Hermit Bob. He is no part of the small town community, lives in the woods, and feeds himself with what he catches and gathers. He seems to be untainted by the rampant consumerism that turns citizens into brainless zombies in the contemporary world, but, more importantly, he is also an outside - "distant" as the film theoretician Noel Burch would say - observer of the events in the civilized world. He watches what's going on in town through his binoculars and provides these with a running voice-over comment. He is in the position of a filmmaker/camera man, and - as the French film semiotician Christian Metz once argued - through that position also the imaginary embodiment of the film spectator who eventually sees what the camera man saw and recorded when the spectator was not (yet) present, and sees it when the camera man is not present (during the projection of the screen). 

Hermit Ben is the incarnation of the classical film spectator who takes what he sees through the optical stand-in of his or her eyes as a direct and correct depiction of what is and happens in front of it (the "profilmic event", as film semioticians used to call it) and who focuses on the content of his or her vision, oblivious to the technologies that mediate between the "profilmic" and the spectator's view. But, as already mentioned before, Hermit Ben's comments on the carnage he wittnesses from his safe distant observer position are no more than a marginal afterthought that have no impact on the course of events whatsoever. They are simply and quite literally, beside the point. Moreover, in THE DEAD DON'T DIE this classical film spectator is allegorically represented by an old, anti-social, isolated  - and, not unimportantly, white, male - tramp,who looks like a rather repugnant remnant of the 1960s "back to nature" hippie culture - this belated "film buff" character could hardly be a promising beaken for the future of cinema.

But then there are the three juvenile delinquents, Stella (Maya Delmont), Olivia (Taliyah Whitaker) and Geronimo (Jahi Di'Allo Winston). These - Hispano and African-American - youngsters are, contrary than Hermit Bob - involuntarily isolated from the small town community, kept away from the consumer goods and leisure time activities that turn the "free citizens" into zombies, and also watch the events in town from behind their (rather constrained) "window on the world". In the midst of the mayhem caused by the zombies they manage to escape, and although this might seem to be one of the loose ends of the film - they don't reappear in the movie after running away behind the bushes - the very name of Geronimo suggests that there attempt to escape might be succesful: Geronimo was, after all, an Apache chief of the late 19th century, who became famous for his capacity to escape and make himself undetectable for the American army (until he surrendered in 1886). This escape might be either the launch of a brandnew start (of a more diverse and non-conventional filmmaking, for instance) or provide the producers of the film with a reason to come up with a sequel, which is, as is well known, only the start of an "eternal return of the same", or a revamping of zombielike moviemaking. And, after all, Geronimo was an extremely ambiguous figure: he was not only a celebrated escape hero, but also - and maybe foremost - a much feared warrior who, out of revenge for the killing of his family by Mexican soldiers, killed scores of Mexican and American army men. A return of Geronimo as a zombie, "gravitating towards what he liked best in his life time" would certainly reinforce the meaning of Robertson's hunch that "this is definitely going to end badly". 

And isn't the future not already - in the film quite literally - 'tilted' towards disaster caused by human-made technologies? Needless to say that in the case of cinema these are the digital technologies that according to many 'old-school' critics have deprived cinema (and photography) from it's realist destiny and turned the imaginary immersion into fictional worlds into brainless playing of First Person Shooter games (of which Peterson's and Robertson's chasing of the zombies seems to be parody and it will be no coincidence that they must aim at the heads of these creatures). However, and this probably why in this allegory the success or failure of the kids' escape remains undecided, the "death of cinema" has been proclaimed at the arrival of almost all earlier new audio-visual technologies, such as television, video and DVD, and the cinema has (still) survived them all, be it in more adapted forms and a changed position in the field of audiovisual entertainment that it now must share with the YouTubes, Netflixes, VRs, and laptop-, mobile phone- and other, almost ubiquitous screens. And maybe the samourai warrier Zelda will return on earth from the high-tech world the spaceship has (probably) brought her to, to deliver planet earth from the zombies that meanwhile have populated it.

If one follows the advice of the WUPC delivery man Dean and pays attention to the details of this film, the film opens layer after layer, and every reference and quotation opens up new readings and interpretations, to the extent that the - rather simple and, to be honest, rather clichéd story and its characters disappear from sight. But isn't that exactly the utimate achievement of a zombie-movie: that it cannibalizes on and sucks out its own subject? In this sense, one might consider THE DEAD DON'T DIE as the ultimate, not postmodernist but hypermodernist or post-postmodernist movie.

August 7, 2019