'Montage interdit' is the title of two essays from the French film critic André Bazin (1918-1958), first published in the Cahiers du Cinéma in 1953 and 1957 and merged and reprinted as a single essay in the 1975 collection of his essays Qu'est-ce-que le Cinéma?. Bazin, a great admiror of the Italian neo-realism, argued that since it was cinema's vocation to produce a faithful reproduction of reality, the unity of space and time should be preserved as much as possible: editing was to be avoided whenever and wherever possible. His favorite stylistic devices were therefore the deep-focus shot (that allows a clear vision of the scene from the front plane all the way to the background) and the so-called plan-sequence that continuously - that is, without interruptions - follows the movements of the characters. However, Bazin was enough of a realist to realize that following the logic of this argument the ideal film would be a complete reproduction of the existing world and that this ideal of a 'total cinema' is nothing but an illusion. He therefore concluded another of his essays, Ontologie de l'Image Photographique' with the resignation: "D'autre part le cinéma est un langage," acknowledging that film, in order to be able to tell something about the world, needs to abstract from it to a certain extent.
Film as an integral reproduction of reality, and film as a medium that selects and re-arranges parts of that reality (whether as it is or artificially created) to create a virtual world, tell a story, or even build an argument, those are the two main conceptions of film that have dominated allmost all of its history, from its early beginnings with the completely opposite approaches of the medium by the Lumière brothers on the one hand and Méliès on the other. In these digital time and days Bazin's 'Mythe du Cinéma Total' (the title of another one of his essays) has migrated to immersive 3D Virtual Reality (where, for the time being, it still remains a myth), and the plan-sequence has become an obligatory staple of FPS and other kinds of computer games. At the same time digital technologies have made film loose it's innocence of objectivity and have at least made film's 'ontological vocation' to faithfully reproduce reality highly problematic. Digital technologies have severed the 'ontological' bond (Bazin) between photographic and filmic images and the reality in front of the camera lens, making any digitally produced photograph or film image suspect of manipulation and outright forgery. In these circumstances, the deep-focus shot and the plan-sequence have lost much of their attractiveness even for 'realist' filmmakers.
Given this contemporary context, Sam Mendes' 1917 (UK/USA, 2019) is a remarkable attempt to re-animate the realistic aspirations of a 'total cinema' by reconquering the plan-sequence from VR and videogames and using it to allow cinema-goers to immersive themselves in the realities of the First World War (WWI) front by following two British soldiers, Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay) who have to cross a no-man's land between the allied and German troops in order to deliver an urgent message to Colonel MacKenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch) in (what seems to be) a single, uninterrupted shot. Mendes is certainly not the first director who attempted to create the illusion that a full-length feature film was recorded in just one shot. Already in 1948, Alfred Hitchcock undertook such an endeavour in his film THE ROPE (USA, 1948). In order to circumvent the technical limitations of that time, that allowed only for takes of ten minutes at the max, he had his camera land on a dark surface - such as the back of a black jacket - every ten minutes in order to conceal the necessary cut. Digital technologies have, of course, delivered cinema from such constraints and make it theoretically, if not in practice, possible to continuously film characters or real people for in principle infinite stretches of time.
However, as perhaps Bazin already surmised, and as Mendes' film probably unwillingly demonstrates, the film aesthetic issue of an integral, continuous and realistic 'total' rendering of a narrative world is not a technological, but a conceptual and experimential one. A comparison with Hitchcock's THE ROPE makes this clear already. In THE ROPE the suggested duration of the single shot (or presented as such) matched the about eighty minutes of the presented story: the length of screen time, the time the presented story took, and the time of recording/showing the story (or, in more technical narratological terms, the times of story, plot and discourse) were identical. In 1917, however, the length of the seemingly single shot and the length of screen time are - or at least meant to seem - identical and take about two hours time but the story time is about twenty-four hours and thus largely exceeds both shot and screen time. The challenge Mendes and his camera man Roger Deakins set themselves is not primarily a technological one - although, of course, the project raised many technological challenges as well - but a dramaturgical and narrative one: how to compress a story that unfolds in about twenty-four hours into a two-hour movie and at the same time creating the illusion of an uninterrupted continuity?
Mendes solves this conumdrum, maybe quite predictably, by stretching and compressing time in ways that seem quite natural and therefore are almost unnoticeable. A good example of this strategy can be found already at the beginning of the film. The film opens with a low shot of flowers in a meadow in which, as the camera reveals when it pulls back, Blake and Schofield are taking a rest. They are disturbed by an officer who summons them to General Erinmore's (Colin Firth) headquarters and the camera then follows them on their way over the meadow and into the trenches to the place where Erinmore resides. During the first part of this walk, Blake and Schofield exchange stories and jokes, and together with the continuity of the shot this suggests that story, plot and discourse time are identical, and this impression is only corroborated by the walk through the narrow trenches where they constantly stumble on and exchange scoldings and greetings with other soldiers. What could be a more natural continuity than that of an uninterrupted conversation between two soldiers? But the distance between their initial position and the entrance of the trenches would presumably longer in the story world and take more time to cover than the distance covered by the two soldiers during their conversation. Story time, that is, is longer than the plot and discourse time, or the story time is longer than the shot and screening time.
The same trick is used later in the film when Schofield gets a lift in the back of a military lorrie in which his fellow soldiers kill the time by impersonating a not very beloved officer. Again, the continuity of the conversational exchanges together with the continuity of the shot suggests a convergence of shot and story time, but in the story world the ride is likely to have lasted hours rather than minutes: the continuity of human interaction, that is, is used to conceal a divergence of story time and shot/screening time. Another, quite obvious example occurs when Schofield is temporarily unconscious after having been hit by a German sniper. When the camera slowly approaches Schofield he (also slowly) regains consciousness, but again, his state of unconsciousness has in all likelihood taken much longer than the few minutes the camera uses to approach and find him. It is probably no coincidence that Schofield then tries to consult his wrist watch only to find out that it doesn't work anymore: time keeping is paradoxically almost impossible in this supposedly single-shot movie.
There are other means by which the film attempts to make the spectator feel that she is permanently in the position of a direct wittness of the events that unfold in front of the camera. The film, for instance, seems to start in media res: the main characters Blake and Schofield are from the first minute summoned into action without there being any introduction of the characters or the circumstances in which they find themselves, of the place where the action develops, of the state in which the war is: the spectator is thrown into the characters' world as if she had dropped from the sky and simply has to go along with the characters and events without asking too many questions. But this is not too hard a condition because the movie itself doesn't raise too many questions itself either. The film tells a very classical and straightforward story along the well known pattern of a journey with a well defined goal (a message has to be delivered at the other side of the no-man's territory) and on the way the hero(s) has/have (they don't make it both of them) overcome obstacles and difficulties, none of them beingvery surprising for spectators who are a bit familiar with the genre (the Brits are the good guys, the Germans are the bad guys, the hero is resilient, persistent and determined, human and compassionate as demonstrated when he gives away his food to a French woman and a baby, and will prevail in the end). It is probably no coincidence that most reviews are rather brief in the narrative department of this movie.
The critical question, then, is whether or not the attempt to immerse the spectator into the reality of this WWI movie and make her share the experiences of the main characters has succeeded? Maybe because of the witholding of background information on the characters - in order to create that in medias res feeling - and the lack of any psychological deepening of their personalities on the one hand, and the meticulous but also rather sanitized recreation of the war zone and its props, it is hard not to constantly have the impression of being a tourist in an open space museum where WWI is being re-enacted. It is maybe also because of the familiarity of the narrative pattern itself - probably deliberately chosen so the spectator will have no problem identifying herself with the hero - that most of the attention is drawn to the backdrops and, not in the least, the technical audacity of the movie. The movie gives the feeling of being taken on a tour of which the main character is - indeed - the main character and the camera is the guide ('come, now I'll show you this, and now look there, and please, see how astonished our main character is', etc.). Instead of becoming immersed, a spectator will probably rather have the feeling of being an outsider or a guest in a world that remains alien to him or her. When it comes to immersion in the realities of WWI, Peter Jackson's THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD (UK/New Zealand, 2018) did a much better job with it's colorized film footage and added sound track.
By attempting to overcome the paradox of filming a twenty-four hour adventure in a two-hour single shot and thus creating a greater sense of immersion into the story world and proximity to the characters of this world, Mendes actually has achieved the inverse. Instead of immersing the spectators into the story world, the film constantly invites them to scrutinize the movie for cuts or traces of editing, and instead of focusing on the endeavours of the hero, the film draws attention to the technical virtuosity and brilliance of the camera work. Maybe the story has been kept deliberately as shallow as it is: instead of making the spectators forget that they are watching a movie - the holy grale of transparency of all media - the film prowdly displays the craftsmanship of it's makers, from director to camera man, sound engineers and set designers. And it is probably a characteristic of this digital age that even or may especially films made with a realistic intention are being scrutinized for traces of technological manipulation. In that sense, 1917 is a kiss of death.
Friday, January 10, 2020
Monday, January 06, 2020
JOJO RABBIT (Taika Waititi, Czech Republic/New Zealand/USA, 2019)
Although JOJO RABBIT (Taika Waititi, Czech Republic/New Zealand/USA, 2019) is, at first sight, a coming-of age-movie set in the final days of the Third Reich, the opening of the film already makes it clear that the story is not limited to that particular historical moment or place. The opening sequence mixes historical footage of nazi rallies with the Beatles song "I wanna hold your hand", thus overlaying the images of the images extatic young girls in nazi attire with reminiscences of images of hysterically screaming Beatles fans. Moreover, although English is the language spoken in this film, the written and printed texts are all in German, as if the movie wants to make clear that the props and settings are situated in a historical place and time, but that the movie addresses itself to a much wider and not place and time bound audience. And if this is not enough, the attitudes, behaviors and wise cracks of Nazi officers at the Hitler Jugend camp would not be misplaced in an American youth camp but probably very much out of order in a real Hitler Jugend camp. Nazi Germany, that's what apparently these stylistic elements are to convey, is nothing but a more or less accidental set piece for a more general, if not universal truth this film attempts to convey. JOJO RABBIT chooses Hitler's Germany because its extreme conditions provide a suitable background for the parable the movie wants to tell.JOJO RABBIT may look like a film about Nazi Germany, but it really isn't.
That things may be different from how they appear to you is basically the lesson that the film's main character Johannes AKA Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), a ten year old Hitler Jugend enthusiast, learns during the dying days of the Third Reich. In the first scene one sees Jojo preparing for his inauguration as a member of the Hitler Jugend (HJ) by rehearsing the answers to the questions of his entree exam and the obligatory 'Heil Hitler' salute. The adult man in Nazi uniform of whom only the torso fits is captured by the frame who puts the questions, compliments Jojo for his right answers and corrects his 'Heil Hitler' salutes, turns out to be no one less than Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi) himself, although it becomes immediately clear that - again - this is not a Hitler who actually exists in the film's story world but just an imaginary friend of the little boy who is invisible for the other characters in the film.
And here again the film hints towards realities that extend beyond the historical place and time of the movie's story and draws a parellel with the contemporary world. Indeed, Jojo's imaginary friend Adolf Hitler who gives him advice, praise, encouragements and guidance functions as a substitute for his absent father whom Jojo believes to be fighting for Germany in Italy against the allied forces. Social scientists have argued that in contemporary post-patriarchal societies the authority of the father has diminished (they have become 'papa's', as Milan Kundera once wrote) and that in the absence of a strong father figure with whom they can not only identify but against whom they can also oppose themselves in order to develop their own identities young men (and women) become susceptible for authoritarian leaders of the populist type, even - or maybe precisely because - they tell lies and actually incite them to act against their own interests.
That is exactly what Hitler does to Jojo. When Jojo gets scolded as a coward on the HJ camp because he is not capable of killing a rabbit and flees into the woods, Hitler stops him and tells him that 'rabbit' is a name of honour because instead of being cowardly, bunnies have to be smart, fast and skillful in order to survive in a world full of large and strong predators. Encouraged by Hitler Jojo then runs back to the camp where there is a lesson in grenade throwing going on, picks the grenade out of the hands of captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), and throws it away. Unfortunately, the grenade hits a tree, bounces back and explodes at Jojo's feet, which leaves his face marked by scars ("My face looks like a street map," as he says to his mother Rose (Scarlett Johanson)) and forces him to quit the camp and convalesce at home. And even more seriously, it is his imaginary friend who fills his head with not only an exaggerated patriotism, but also with the outrageous Nazi ideas about Jews.
And here is where another character comes into Jojo's life. Once forced to stay 'home alone' during his recovery from the grenade accident, he discovers that his mother has a shelter to the Jewish girl Elsa (Thomasin MacKenzie), who like Anne Frank hides in a room behind a wall from her German persecutors. Clever as Jojo Rabbit is, he immediately understands the predicament they both find themselves in: if he turns Elsa over to the Gestapo, she will denounce his mother as her protector and if Elsa would tell Jojo's mother that he has discovered her, Rose will see herself forced to send Elsa away. In this stalemate it is best for both parties to leave things as they are. Soon, however, Jojo sees this situation as an opportunity to use Elsa as a first-hand source of information for the book he intends to write on all things Jewish. Elsa complies, regurgitates the whole repertoire of anti-semitic myths and imagery from the Nazi-propaganda, and offers Jojo to draw a picture of the dwellings of Jews in his sketch book. When Jojo sees that she has drawn his portrait with the caption "Stummkopf", she simply remarks that that's where those Jews from the anti-semitic propaganda live: in his head that is - as she doesn't know - controlled by his imaginary friend, the xenofobic populist leader avant la lettre.
Gradually, Jojo then starts to learn that the world might be a bit different from how his imaginary friend wants him to see it. He finds out that his mother is working with his father for the resistence, and discovers her dead body hanging on the gallows on the market square of their village. When the Gestapo knock on the door to search their house and Elsa has to reveal herself, she pretends that she's Jojo's sister (in fact, Rose has taken her into her house because she was a friend of and ressembled her deceased daughter) and shows the latter's ID to prove that. As she later, as the Gestapo's and captain Klenzendorf who joined the company later, have left that she has given up a wrong date of birth to Klenzendorf's question, she and Jojo realize that Klenzendorf was not that hard boiled Nazi but instead actually saved Elsa and Jojo. And when the village is finally liberated by American and Russian troops, Jojo initially refuses to bring this news to Elsa because it would mean that she was free to go outside, realising that he cares more for her than his Nazi convictions would allow him. With respect to Jojo, then, Elsa moves from the position of foe to friend to sister to wanna-be lover to perhaps a substitute mother When they are at the verge of leaving the house into the now again free world, Jojo ties the laces of his mother's shoes that he has given to Elsa - itself a reversal of the service Rose offered to Jojo at several occasions in the film - and once outside, Elsa does what Rose had said she would do first thing when they would be free: dance. The engine of this move are not the erronous thoughts about Jews or the superiority of the Arien race, but - as his mother had predicted him - physical feelings of love ("butterflies in your belly"). Love, that is, is eventually the force that overcomes all ideological oppositons and differences
It looks as if Waititi was not content with telling this story in a straightforward way - although the film has a pretty linear and far from convoluted storyline - but also wanted to weave the movie's theme into the style and form of the film itself. The opening sequence - already confusing because of its mixture of historical footage of Nazi rallies with a Beatles song - may suggest that the film will be a sort of historical costume drama, but the very first scene that already introduces a weard kind of Hitler warns the spectator that this is not your customary WWII drama. However, once tuned for a comedy - with perhaps not the most tastful choice of subject matter - shots of corpses hanging from a gallow on the town's market square, and later the image that shows how Jojo recognizes the shoes of Rose next to his head, as she hangs dead from the gallows, delicately not shown in a full body shot) the spectator is again to be made aware that this is not your average comedy either. The film swtiches from hillarious scenes as those in the HJ camp in the beginning of the film or the endless exchanges of 'Heil Hitler' salutes in the scene where the Gestapo's and captain Klenzendorf meet in Jojo's house which reminds one of the British TV series ALLO ALLO (UK, 1982-1991), to dramatic scenes as just described, to melodrama and musical in the final scenes with Jojo and Elsa. Even dramatic scenes as the conquering of the village by American troops that have a flavor of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (Spielberg, USA, 1998) are interspersed with comical moments as when Klenzendorf and his deputy Finkel (Alfie Allen) storm the invading allied forces in the super-hero-avant-la-lettre outfits designed by Klenzenberg, perhaps thus demonstrating the rags from which fantasy figures as those that populate the Nazi ideologie are really made of.
The film thus provides a rollercoaster experience in which the spectator is swung back and forth between Charlie Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR (USA, 1940), Ernst Lubitsch's TO BE OR NOT TO BE (USA, 1942), Volker Schlöndorff's DIE BLECHTROMMEL (BRD/France/Poland/Yugoslavia, 1979), ALLO ALLO, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, Tarantino's INGLORIOUS BASTARDS (Germany/USA, 2009) and pick your own favorite war drama or comedy. Although these unexpected shifts and turns in mood and style may be intended to produce a sort of a Brechtian Verfremdungs-Effekt, one may wonder if Waititi has not overreached himself because instead of provoking a critical stance on the part of the spectator the film runs the risk of leaving the latter in a state of disarray, wondering not onl what this film is all about, but also what sort of film this actually is. And it does not really help that Waititi chose Nazi Germany as the backdrop for his supposedly time- and placeless - but therefore also rather shallow - universal message, because in spite of all the efforts to lift the theme above the specific historcal context of the final days of the Third Reich, that subject matter is simply too much charged with unique drama and oppressive memories from which it is impossible to abstract away. Although physical feelings like 'butterflies-in-your-belly' may eventually overcome ideological and political oppositions and differences, laughter is probably not the best means to get rid of false imaginary friends.
That things may be different from how they appear to you is basically the lesson that the film's main character Johannes AKA Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), a ten year old Hitler Jugend enthusiast, learns during the dying days of the Third Reich. In the first scene one sees Jojo preparing for his inauguration as a member of the Hitler Jugend (HJ) by rehearsing the answers to the questions of his entree exam and the obligatory 'Heil Hitler' salute. The adult man in Nazi uniform of whom only the torso fits is captured by the frame who puts the questions, compliments Jojo for his right answers and corrects his 'Heil Hitler' salutes, turns out to be no one less than Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi) himself, although it becomes immediately clear that - again - this is not a Hitler who actually exists in the film's story world but just an imaginary friend of the little boy who is invisible for the other characters in the film.
And here again the film hints towards realities that extend beyond the historical place and time of the movie's story and draws a parellel with the contemporary world. Indeed, Jojo's imaginary friend Adolf Hitler who gives him advice, praise, encouragements and guidance functions as a substitute for his absent father whom Jojo believes to be fighting for Germany in Italy against the allied forces. Social scientists have argued that in contemporary post-patriarchal societies the authority of the father has diminished (they have become 'papa's', as Milan Kundera once wrote) and that in the absence of a strong father figure with whom they can not only identify but against whom they can also oppose themselves in order to develop their own identities young men (and women) become susceptible for authoritarian leaders of the populist type, even - or maybe precisely because - they tell lies and actually incite them to act against their own interests.
That is exactly what Hitler does to Jojo. When Jojo gets scolded as a coward on the HJ camp because he is not capable of killing a rabbit and flees into the woods, Hitler stops him and tells him that 'rabbit' is a name of honour because instead of being cowardly, bunnies have to be smart, fast and skillful in order to survive in a world full of large and strong predators. Encouraged by Hitler Jojo then runs back to the camp where there is a lesson in grenade throwing going on, picks the grenade out of the hands of captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), and throws it away. Unfortunately, the grenade hits a tree, bounces back and explodes at Jojo's feet, which leaves his face marked by scars ("My face looks like a street map," as he says to his mother Rose (Scarlett Johanson)) and forces him to quit the camp and convalesce at home. And even more seriously, it is his imaginary friend who fills his head with not only an exaggerated patriotism, but also with the outrageous Nazi ideas about Jews.
And here is where another character comes into Jojo's life. Once forced to stay 'home alone' during his recovery from the grenade accident, he discovers that his mother has a shelter to the Jewish girl Elsa (Thomasin MacKenzie), who like Anne Frank hides in a room behind a wall from her German persecutors. Clever as Jojo Rabbit is, he immediately understands the predicament they both find themselves in: if he turns Elsa over to the Gestapo, she will denounce his mother as her protector and if Elsa would tell Jojo's mother that he has discovered her, Rose will see herself forced to send Elsa away. In this stalemate it is best for both parties to leave things as they are. Soon, however, Jojo sees this situation as an opportunity to use Elsa as a first-hand source of information for the book he intends to write on all things Jewish. Elsa complies, regurgitates the whole repertoire of anti-semitic myths and imagery from the Nazi-propaganda, and offers Jojo to draw a picture of the dwellings of Jews in his sketch book. When Jojo sees that she has drawn his portrait with the caption "Stummkopf", she simply remarks that that's where those Jews from the anti-semitic propaganda live: in his head that is - as she doesn't know - controlled by his imaginary friend, the xenofobic populist leader avant la lettre.
Gradually, Jojo then starts to learn that the world might be a bit different from how his imaginary friend wants him to see it. He finds out that his mother is working with his father for the resistence, and discovers her dead body hanging on the gallows on the market square of their village. When the Gestapo knock on the door to search their house and Elsa has to reveal herself, she pretends that she's Jojo's sister (in fact, Rose has taken her into her house because she was a friend of and ressembled her deceased daughter) and shows the latter's ID to prove that. As she later, as the Gestapo's and captain Klenzendorf who joined the company later, have left that she has given up a wrong date of birth to Klenzendorf's question, she and Jojo realize that Klenzendorf was not that hard boiled Nazi but instead actually saved Elsa and Jojo. And when the village is finally liberated by American and Russian troops, Jojo initially refuses to bring this news to Elsa because it would mean that she was free to go outside, realising that he cares more for her than his Nazi convictions would allow him. With respect to Jojo, then, Elsa moves from the position of foe to friend to sister to wanna-be lover to perhaps a substitute mother When they are at the verge of leaving the house into the now again free world, Jojo ties the laces of his mother's shoes that he has given to Elsa - itself a reversal of the service Rose offered to Jojo at several occasions in the film - and once outside, Elsa does what Rose had said she would do first thing when they would be free: dance. The engine of this move are not the erronous thoughts about Jews or the superiority of the Arien race, but - as his mother had predicted him - physical feelings of love ("butterflies in your belly"). Love, that is, is eventually the force that overcomes all ideological oppositons and differences
It looks as if Waititi was not content with telling this story in a straightforward way - although the film has a pretty linear and far from convoluted storyline - but also wanted to weave the movie's theme into the style and form of the film itself. The opening sequence - already confusing because of its mixture of historical footage of Nazi rallies with a Beatles song - may suggest that the film will be a sort of historical costume drama, but the very first scene that already introduces a weard kind of Hitler warns the spectator that this is not your customary WWII drama. However, once tuned for a comedy - with perhaps not the most tastful choice of subject matter - shots of corpses hanging from a gallow on the town's market square, and later the image that shows how Jojo recognizes the shoes of Rose next to his head, as she hangs dead from the gallows, delicately not shown in a full body shot) the spectator is again to be made aware that this is not your average comedy either. The film swtiches from hillarious scenes as those in the HJ camp in the beginning of the film or the endless exchanges of 'Heil Hitler' salutes in the scene where the Gestapo's and captain Klenzendorf meet in Jojo's house which reminds one of the British TV series ALLO ALLO (UK, 1982-1991), to dramatic scenes as just described, to melodrama and musical in the final scenes with Jojo and Elsa. Even dramatic scenes as the conquering of the village by American troops that have a flavor of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (Spielberg, USA, 1998) are interspersed with comical moments as when Klenzendorf and his deputy Finkel (Alfie Allen) storm the invading allied forces in the super-hero-avant-la-lettre outfits designed by Klenzenberg, perhaps thus demonstrating the rags from which fantasy figures as those that populate the Nazi ideologie are really made of.
The film thus provides a rollercoaster experience in which the spectator is swung back and forth between Charlie Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR (USA, 1940), Ernst Lubitsch's TO BE OR NOT TO BE (USA, 1942), Volker Schlöndorff's DIE BLECHTROMMEL (BRD/France/Poland/Yugoslavia, 1979), ALLO ALLO, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, Tarantino's INGLORIOUS BASTARDS (Germany/USA, 2009) and pick your own favorite war drama or comedy. Although these unexpected shifts and turns in mood and style may be intended to produce a sort of a Brechtian Verfremdungs-Effekt, one may wonder if Waititi has not overreached himself because instead of provoking a critical stance on the part of the spectator the film runs the risk of leaving the latter in a state of disarray, wondering not onl what this film is all about, but also what sort of film this actually is. And it does not really help that Waititi chose Nazi Germany as the backdrop for his supposedly time- and placeless - but therefore also rather shallow - universal message, because in spite of all the efforts to lift the theme above the specific historcal context of the final days of the Third Reich, that subject matter is simply too much charged with unique drama and oppressive memories from which it is impossible to abstract away. Although physical feelings like 'butterflies-in-your-belly' may eventually overcome ideological and political oppositions and differences, laughter is probably not the best means to get rid of false imaginary friends.
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
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?
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?
Friday, November 15, 2019
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?
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?
Friday, August 16, 2019
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?
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?
Wednesday, August 07, 2019
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
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
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Dogged Democracy: Manderlay and The Redeemer’s Dilemma
As usual, Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (DK/SE/NL/FR/DE/UK, 2005), the second film of his American trilogy which opened with Dogville (DK/SE/NO/FI/UK/FR/DE/NL, 2003) and is announced to close with Wasington[i], has given cause to much anger, disappointment, confusion and controversy. Von Trier’s presumed anti-Americanism plays a great part in the annoyance about these films. According to one critic, Manderlay is “simply another subversive spectacle” made with no other intention than “to siphon off the glamour and excitement of American culture,” while another called the film “a crude Soviet view of American history.”[ii] The New York Times did not appreciate the ‘derision and moral arrogance of a snide European intellectual thumbing his nose at American barbarism” with a “deeply misanthropic, anti-American film [that] insists that the United States is ruled by crooks and gangsters and cursed by the legacy of slavery whose poison has seeped to its very core.”[iii] Grace’s attempts to open up the hearts and minds of the slaves in Manderlay for freedom and democracy have been interpreted as an allegory of the US invasion of Iraq, whereas her incapacity to deal efficiently with a natural disaster like a dust storm has been seen as an allusion to the US government’s handling of hurricane Katrina. For those offended by Von Trier’s alleged anti-Americanism, it may come as a small comfort that he didn’t picture a very uplifting image of the Old Continent either in the three films that became known as his Europe trilogy consisting of Forbrydelsenselement/The Element of Crime (DK, 1984), Epidemic (DK, 1987), and Europa (DK/SE/FR/DE/CH, 1991)..
Probably because Von Trier’s predilection for organizing his films into trilogies made him set Dogville, Manderlay, and the projected Wasington apart as an “American trilogy,” and also because both Dogville and Manderlay evolve around the do-good gangster daughter Grace and both films are shot on similar stages with the plans of the sites and the names of streets and buildings chalked on the floor, this combination of Brechtian distanciation techniques and the choice of American places as settings for these film’s stories has blinded critics for the similarities and continuities with Von Trier’s earlier films.
His film Dancer in the Dark (DK/DE/NL/IT/US/UK/FR/SE/FI/IS/NO, 2000), together with Breaking the Waves (DK/SE/NO/IS/FR/NL, 1996) and Idioterne/The Idiots (DK/SE/FR/NL/IT, 1998) part of the “Golden Heart” trilogy, is also set in the United States and has as its protagonist a rather naive do-good immigrant woman, Selma (played by Björk). As a musical it is no less unrealistic as the staged dramas of Dogville and Manderlay, and in spite of being adorned with song and dance, its story is no less grim than the narratives of the latter films. It could just as well have beeen part of the America series. The other two films of the Golden Heart trilogy, though both set in Europe, deal with female protagonists who face a fate that is very similar to that of Grace in Dogvile and those of the male protagonists of the Europe trilogy. Von Trier’s eight feature films can easily be grouped along other lines.[iv]
This is not to deny that there Dogville and Manderlay are closely connected. The narrator’s voice-over introduces the latter explicitly as a sequel of the former, both films share the same protagonist, both films are staged in a similar theatrical fashion, and, of course, both films are set in the United States in the era of the Great Depression. But instead of following Von Trier’s own rather arbitrary grouping of his films it might be prove worthwhile to discuss Dogville and Manderlay in the context of Von Trier’s other films. After all, the America of Dogville and Manderlay is no less fictional and no more ‘historical’ than postwar Europe in The Element of Crime and Europa. More generally, Von Trier’s films need to be discussed in the framework of his approach to film laid down in the Dogma 95 Manifesto. In this manifesto, Von Trier (his co-writers all confirm that the Manifesto was Von Trier’s idea) defines film making as a rule bound practice, that is, for Von Trier the practice of film making is like a game. His films are best understood accordingly. Game theory - of the mathematical and economic sort, that is - might have more to say about his films than classical film theory and naratology.[v]
Von Trier’s Game Cinema
The Dogme 95 Manifesto, which Von Trier launched in 1995 in Paris at the conference “Cinema in its Second Century,” came with a “Vow of Chastity” which contained ten rules for the aspiring Dogma filmmaker that circumscribe practices the filmmaker is allowed or forbidden to employ during shooting and post-production. Among other things, they forbid the filmmaker to bring props or costumes to the set, to use special lighting, or to record sound separately from the images, to add special effects during post-production, and prescribe the use of a handheld camera.[vi]
These rules are not motivated by content or subject matter, as, for instance, André Bazin’s recommendation of the use of in-depth photography was motivated by the desire to preserve the spatiotemporal continuity of a filmed event.[vii] The rules are impediments because they prohibit the filmmaker to use the most habitual and efficient skills and techniques of the profession. Rather, they force the filmmaker to develop new skills and techniques to work around the prohibitions imposed by the rules, just like a soccer player must develop special skills to cope with the rule that forbids to touch a ball with the hands. And just as the special skills of a soccer player are rather useless outside the pitch, the rules laid down in the Dogma 95 Manifesto are only meaningful in the game of Dogma 95 filmmaking. Von Trier and the other founders of Dogma 95 each made only one film according to the rules of the Manifesto only to change them for other rules for their next films. As game rules, the rules themselves are arbitrary and interchangeable: if one gets tired or bored of the game, one can simply start to play another game, as Von Trier himself did after (and before) The Idiots.
However, the rules of the Dogma 95 Manifesto are arbitrary but not meaningless, although their meaning is quite different from their usual interpretation as an injunction to documentary realism and the treatment of contemporary subjects. But as the Dogma films of the founders of the movement convincingly demonstrate, it is very well possible to enact historical dramas and fictional characters with objects found at the location of shooting. In Dogme#3 - Mifunes Sidste Sang/Mifunes Last Song (Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, DK/SE, 1999) Kersten enacts for his younger brother Rud the Japanese warrior Mifune with an armor improvised out of pans and utensils he had found in a kitchen, and in Dogme#4-The King Is Alive (Kristian Levring, Se/DK/US, 2000) a group of tourists stranded in the desert decide to stage Shakespeare’s King Lear with props they find at the site and in the light of the blazing sun.
The purpose of the ban on props, sets, and costumes is not some notion of intensified realism, but to replace the prevailing notion of representation with ideas that are more current in games and new media: simulation and model building. In film, a scene is usually conceived of as a verisimilar re-enactment of a unique event as it supposedly occurred in a historical or fictional reality. A scene must “look” like the event it represents, and must be “directed”, that is, planned and choreographed, in such a way that the position of the camera offers the dramaturgically most effective view on it. A simulation, on the other hand, is not aimed at a meticulous reconstruction of already past events, but at soliciting the behaviors of a system under various actual, possible, and even impossible conditions. For a simulation a visual resemblance with the system it models is not necessary and often even disturbing because it distracts from its relevant properties.[viii] The behaviors of the simulation model are not known in advance and cannot be “directed”: the experimenter just “feeds” the model with variable parameters and then sees what happens. The purpose of a simulation is, moreover, not the reconstruction of a singular event, but rather the charting of a system’s “state space,” i.e. the space of all possible configurations it can attain.[ix]
The rules of the Dogma 95 Manifesto envision this sort of simulation. The ban on props, sets and costumes is aimed at “shearing away detail”, “the very essence of model building.”[x] The rejection of “predictable dramaturgy” and the renouncement of “taste” and the status of “artist” point in the same direction: the filmmaker is not an “author” but an experimenter who observes the behaviors of models. The camera must “follow” the action, instead of the action being organized and directed towards the camera. In the editing shots from various takes of various executions of an action under varied parameters (e.g., mood), are “sampled” to the effect that instead of creating a seeming continuity, the flagrant discontinuity of the shots reveals that each execution is only one possible “state” out of the infinitely many “states” the same event could have attained. The “whole” that emerges from this editing is not a singular actualized state, but rather the infinite virtual state space of the possible configurations open the event could have settled into.[xi] Dogma’s “realism” aims at opening up a virtual and mental space rather than a physical and palpable reality.
Von Trier deploys other strategies to open up virtual worlds in his films as well. It is not difficult to recognize a strategy of “shearing away detail” in the scarce settings of Dogville and Manderlay. Although the theatrical staging in both these films has often been associated with Brechtian alienation techniques, they do not serve the pedagogical purpose of making the spectator aware of the artificiality of cinema. A good indication for that is that critics often mention these techniques in passing but do not seem to experience them as intrusive upon their engagement with the worlds and characters of these films. The sparse sets rather solicit the spectators to fill in the gaps with projections of images from their memories of the vast number of films, photographs, records, stories, news paper reports, advertisements, tv programs, magazines that constitute a collective cultural image of America. The photographic sequences that conclude these films are there to confirm the virtual worlds the spectator conjured up in the preceding projection time.
Von Trier deployed this strategy less conspicuously in Dancer in the Dark, which is set in a bland and almost nondescript town which could be situated anywhere in the Midwest and anytime in the fifties or sixties. The spectator is invited to follow the example of the nearly blind Selma who imagines the dance scenes from the musicals she goes to see in the local cinema on the basis of the verbal and tactile descriptions by her friend Kathy (Katherine Deneuve) together with her memories of movies she saw in her youth in Czechoslovakia. In these “American” films Von Trier makes his spectators perform the work he executed himself in his European trilogy where he constructed an entirely virtual Europe literally “written with light” and built out of physically impossible spatiotemporal relationships that could only be brought into existence with cinematographic means. Especially in Europa, “Europe” was rendered with images taken from a comprehensive catalogue of European films, styles, genres, movements, themes and motives. Von Trier called this method the “Kafka method”, since Kafka wrote his novels about America on the basis of information from his uncle. Von Trier too constructed the worlds of both his European and American films by using the “indirect evidence” stored in the audience’s collective cultural memories.[xii] These virtual and literally “imaginary” worlds are as loosely related to the real historical continents as the worlds of games like Close Combat (Atomic Games, 1996-2005) are to the actual battles of World War II.
If these virtual worlds are only remotely related to their historical referents, it might make more sense to see if they can be treated in the same way as game worlds. For a game designer, the particular visual appearances of characters, objects, and environments of a game are just a matter of dressing up or “coloring” of the rules and algorithms that specify the game.[xiii] What if one were to perform a sort of reverse engineering on the Von Trier’s films to see what models might underly their “colorings?”
Dad’s Law: TIT-FOR-TAT
If one looks beyond the great diversity of settings, perods, styles, and characters one discovers that Von Trier tells the same story over and over again: a stranger enters an unknown territory where he (the protagonists of the Europe trilogy) or she (all others) has to find out the rules and intentions that govern the behavior of its inhabitants. They all put trust and faith in their new companions, but all wind up abandoned, abused, maltreated, exploited, and even dead. The only exception is Grace, who takes a terrible revenge on the “good and honest” people of Dogville and manages to escape from Manderlay.[xiv] Von Trier’s heroes and heroines seem to have only one choice: perish or punish.
The problem Von Trier’s protagonists face is what has become the staple of game theory, “The Prisoner’s Dilemma”: is cooperation possible in an environment where everybody else pursues their own interests?[xv] In the Prisoner’s Dilemma - itself a story invented to “color” an abstract logical problem[xvi] - two men arrested by the police on suspicion of a serious crime, e.g. a bank robbery, are interrogated separately without means to communicate with one another. They are offered the following choices: if both confess, they will be sentenced to five years in prison; if neither confesses, they will both be sent to jail for one year for a lesser offense, e.g. illegal possession of arms; if one of them confesses while the other does not, the former will be granted immunity and the latter will be sentenced to ten years in prison. The best choice each player can make individually is to confess (defection), because this guarantees that the player will not end up with the severest penalty while it keeps open the possibility of the highest reward, immunity. Cooperation (not confessing), on the other hand, makes it tempting for the other player to defect and to leave the loyal player with the “sucker’s payoff.” Although mutual cooperation yields a higher payoff than mutual defection, defection is each player’s best response to whatever choice the other player makes.[xvii]
The predicament of Von Trier’s protagonists is sad proofs this game theoretical insight: by choosing a strategy of cooperation they expose themselves to ruthless exploitation by the other players in their new surroundings and - again except for Grace - wind up with the “suckers payoff” and perish.[xviii] But if cooperation is not very wise, then why do Von Trier’s protagonists persist in choosing a nice strategy? In order to answer this question, one should look at Von Trier’s as iterations in an infinitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In such a game, the payoff for mutual cooperation is in the long run much higher than the reward for mutual defection. But in the short run the temptation of defection remains, and since one never knows whether one is dealing with a “nice” or a “mean” player, the problem for a cooperative player is how to avoid exploitation by the other player. In a computer tournament organized by Robert Axelrod economists, social scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists were invited to submit strategies for an infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma in which each strategy played each other strategy. The winner turned out to be a remarkably simple strategy that started with offering cooperation and in every next turn did what the other player did when it was his turn to move. The success of this strategy, known as TIT-FOR-TAT, shows that in a population of unknown players it is wise to start with offering cooperation, since there is always a possibility that the other player is a nice player (or follows a TIT-FOR-TAT strategy, too) and nice players thrive much better in the long run.
This is what Von Trier’s protagonists do but unfortunately they only encounter grim players. Bess in Breaking The Waves introduces another nice player, Jan, in the community of grim players on her isle, but an accident makes him involuntarily defect and leave her unprotected in the community of mean players. Grace in Dogville accepts the “quid-pro-quo” deal with the people of Dogville proposed to her by wanna-be writer Tom, offering to do chores in exchange for a safe heaven, only to find herself exploited and abused. Eventually her father comes to her rescue and instructs her about the necessity of a TIT-FOR-TAT rule of behavior in a world of selfish players. Only then she retaliates defection with defection thus conforming to what may be called “Dad’s Law.”
Von Trier’s films arrive at the same conclusion as Axelrod’s computer tournament. From a game theoretical perspective, the different settings and episodes of Von Trier’s films are just as many different “colorings” of the same “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game. In this series of iterations, Grace is the first of Von Trier’s protagonists to learn that TIT-FOR-TAT is the only viable strategy in a world populated with mean players. Selma in Dancer in the Dark is the only other character to come close to that realization. After her neighbor, landlord, and local sheriff Bill has robbed her of the money she had saved for the eye operation of her sun, Bill makes her kill him and thus forces her to retaliate his defection. Selma is then sentenced to death and executed, as prescribed by Dad’s Law, but since she managed to hand her savings to the doctor who will operate her sun’s eyes, she doesn’t end up with the “sucker’s payoff” but gets “the reward for mutual defection.” From Bess in Breaking the Waves via Selma to Grace in Dogville Von Trier’s protagonists go through a learning process in which they gradually learn to come to terms with the harsh but only viable rule of TIT-FOR-TAT.
How does Manderlay fit in this game? At first sight Manderlay is a repetition of the previous iterations of the game: as in Dogville, Grace leaves her father and enters against his advise the unknown world of Manderlay, where she starts a search for other nice players to help her overthrow the regime of Mam’s Law. She fails and eventually flees from Manderlay, abandoned by her father and chased by the inhabitants of Manderlay. Hasn’t Grace learned anything after all?
Mam’s Law: A Dogged Social Contract
There are striking differences between Manderlay and Dogville (and Von Trier’s other films) as well. To begin with, contrary to Von Trier’s other protagonists, including Grace in Dogville, Grace is invited, if not urged, to enter Manderlay by one of its inhabitants. Moreover, Grace is not forced into a humble and humiliating position of dependency on the inhabitants of her new environment, but she puts herself in charge of the plantation after Mam’s death. From this position, she tries to redeem the inhabitants of Manderlay from slavery by introducing freedom and democracy. Her attempts fail because the former slaves stubbornly stick to Mam’s Law and even vote for Grace’s installment as Mam’s successor. Grace nearly falls victim to the democratic rules she tried to introduce when she almost sees herself forced to occupy the very position she tried to abolish. In the end she meets out the whipping to Timothy she intervened to prevent in the beginning of the film. In the final shot she is seen in a bird’s eye view fleeing over the map of the USA away from Manderlay, chased by the inhabitants of the plantation and abandoned by her father. It looks as if she winds up like Karen in The Idiots, betrayed by the members of the community she had become part of and abandoned by her family.
Grace’s self-imposed mission to redeem the slaves of Manderlay seems to have failed because she didn’t find another player who shared her ideals: her campaign for free and democratic cooperation falters on a similar sort of narrow-minded defection she had encountered among the “good and honest people” of Dogville.[xix] But maybe the specific “coloring” of this iteration of the game, cast in an opposition of slavery and freedom, distracts from what actually is at stake. It might be wise to follow the rules of Dogma 95 and “shear away details.” Let’s take the purpose of the Brechtian alienation techniques seriously and take our distances from the the represented world in order to uncover the model underlying it.
To start with, the film presents a clear spatial division: there is the vast space of America, represented from a bird’s eye view by a white map with only the borders and the names of the States printed on it, and a drawing of the Statue of Liberty at New York’s place on the map (and the meaning of liberty is the central theme of the movie). The only moving objects visible in this space are four dots that appear to be the motorcade of Grace’s father, his gangsters and Grace herself who travel from the Rocky Mountains to Alabama where they will happen on Manderlay. Grace’s father and his gang are the only persons in this film to occupy this vast and undifferentiated space, which makes it safe to say that in this film this space is dominated by Grace’s father, who represents Dad’s Law, i.e., TIT-FOR-TAT as the only viable strategy in a world populated with “mean players.” (Grace’s father is not exempt from this law, since his business has been taken over by his competitors while he was in Dogville). That this “America” is the space of Dad’s law is confirmed by the few other representatives of this space like the entertainer Doctor Hector whose profession as a card cheater makes him literally a “mean player.” It is also the space where Timothy, in Manderlay known as a “proud” African from Munsi descent who doesn’t drink or gamble, turns out not to be the “proud” African from Munsi descent who refrains from drinking and gambling as he is known in Manderlay, but an “eye pleasing” Mansi who (ab)uses alcohol and gambles with money stolen from the Manderlay community.
Opposite the space of Dad’s law is the space of Manderlay ruled by Mam’s Law. As the owner of the Manderlay plantation Mam has kept her workers in slavery for seventy years after its abolishment. She apparently rules by fencing off her workers from the outside world and by arbitrarily meeting out corporeal punishment, as Grace learns when she is asked to intervene in the whipping of Timothy. His wife Victoria tells Grace that Timothy is unjustly accused of possessing a bottle of whine which was “just put in his cabin to have something to punish him for” (exactly what Grace will arrange at the end of the film). But Mam’s law turns out to be a bit more complicated. Mam herself is an old, sick and dying woman, whose power does not reside in her whip and weapons (“a shotgun and an old pistol”) or the fences and gates around Manderlay (“we could easily climb over them with a ladder”, as Wilhelm will explain), but in a book in which “Mam’s Law” is laid down. Apart from some “bizarre and vicious regulations” this book contains a “psychological” classification of the workers of Manderlay into categories like “a clowning nigger,” “a hitting nigger,” “losing niggers,” “a talking nigger,” “a weeping nigger,” “pleasing niggers,” “crazy niggers,” “proudy niggers,” that is, a system of “bondage, even through psychology” as the voice-over narrator puts it.
As Wilhelm will later explain to Grace,these categories are based on the observation of these individuals’ “patterns of behavior”: the inhabitants of Manderlay are subjected to a system that is designed to fit them. And Mam’s Law is also protective and beneficiary: it makes sure that each worker does the work that suits his or her skills, talents, and character and that each worker gets rewarded accordingly. Mam’s Law, as Wilhelm explains to Grace, “is for the good of everyone.” Mam’s law does not need to be enforced with violence nor does its existence need to “brought into the open” as Grace initially intends to, since the inhabitants of Manderlay all know about the existence the book and have voluntarily accepted the rule of Mam’s law.
To Grace’s great surprise Mam’s law was not written by Mam but by Wilhelm, the community’s elder. Mam’s power is like that of a constitutional monarch: it is entirely symbolic and rests literally on the book she keeps under her mattress and that was written by a representative of the community she presides over. Even if Grace would have burned this book, as Mam requests on her death bed, the system would have remained in place since it is no less than a social contract, eventually even democratically voted for by the community which thinks it is, as Wilhelm says, “as relevant as it ever was.” Instead of enforcing her law on the inhabitants of Manderlay, Mam’s authority itself was derived from the social contract codified by Wilhelm’s book.[xx]
Freedom or Fairness?
A social contract is “the set of common understandings that allow the citizens of a society to coordinate their efforts” and in this it can only succeed if behavior is coordinated on an equilibrium that should meet the requirements of stability, efficiency, and fairness.[xxi] TIT-FOR-TAT, Dad’s law, assures a stable social contract, because if all other members of society stick to this rule, nobody can do better by deviating from it. It is, however, not necessarily efficient because it favors mutual defection although mutual cooperation is a more rewarding strategy. Since nice players only stay nice as long as they know that defection will immediately be retaliated, mutual cooperation is not a stable equilibrium. As all protagonists of Von Trier’s movies, including Grace in Dogville, learned, in a population of mean players a single nice player is doomed to perish. Dad’s law, then, is a social contract which creates stability, but it is not efficient (most of the time, players only receive the award for mutual defection) and not fair either (nice players get ruthlessly exploited and end up with the “sucker’s payoff”). It is, however, as the prominent presence of the Statue of Liberty on the map of the USA already suggested, libertarian, because it leaves the players free in their strategic choices assuming that the players’ interactions will eventually settle on an equilibrium state. In more contemporary political terms, this social contract represents the unfettered reign of “free” market forces neo-conservatives dreams of. In game theoretical terms, this is called an egalitarian social contract.[xxii]
Mam’s law, on the other hand, exemplifies a so-called utilitarian social contract. It is based on “psychological” classification system - an almost Foucaultian formalization of knowledge embodied by and extracted from this social body - which serves to divide labor and food, duties and rewards to each member of the community according to his or her abilities. The system ascribes “utilities” to each member of the community, and divides responsibilities and rewards, rights and obligations accordingly. This system is efficient and fair, because it makes sure everybody contributes to the “common good” according to his or her abilities and everybody gets their proportional share of the common good. It is, however, not stable because the members of the community will always be tempted to put their own self-interests above those of the community and cheat on the fairness norms laid down in the social contract. In Manderlay this weakness is demonstrated by Wilma, who steals the mule meat the community had put aside for sick little Claire, or when most of Manderlay’s workers start spending more time at mending of their own dwellings and neglect their work on the “common” land.
This utilitarian social contract therefore needs an external power to enforce and police it, which is why the community of Manderlay needs the authority of Mam and later votes for Grace as her successor. The utilitarian social contract is “not free” - as Grace rebukes Wilhelm’s explanation of Mam’s law - because it requires the power of a “nurturing” authority who knows what is best for its subjects. [xxiii] Mam’s law, for instance, prohibits alcohol and forbids the possession of cash money to keep Manderlay’s workers away from the vices of drinking and gambling. The utilitarian social contract, then, is not free, but it is protective and “caring.” This “matronizing” social contract underlies regimes from corporatism and fascist dictatorships to the communist ideal state, and is nowadays probably best exemplified by the European welfare state. Is not the latter not often criticized for “enslaving” its citizens by making them dependent on social security, national health care systems, minimum wages, and other forms of state supplied support or legally enforced social provisions?[xxiv]
Dad’s law and Mam’s law, then, are two models of social contracts similar to ones one finds in textbooks on game theory or in the thought experiments of moral philosophers like John Rawls and John Harsanyi.[xxv] Like these models, both models Manderlay are idealized and abstract sich all detail has been “sheared away.” Neither of these models is to be found in the pure and brutal, and hence caricatural form as they are presented in Manderlay (or in scientific and philosophical textbooks) in the real world, not in the United States nor in the former Soviet Union or anywhere in Europe. To visualize these models, Von Trier “colors” them with tropes, taken from the stock of contemporary cultural memory and imagination, “gangsterdom” as the incarnation of the free market economy and “slavery” as the icon for dependency on a nurturing state. Manderlay is not about America, nor is it about America’s legacy of slavery: Manderlay is a model simulation of two opposite forms of a social contract, for which images of gangsters and slaves serve as vivid personifications. The models themselves are not tied to any country or continent in particular. The opposition between the American Democrats and Republicans has, for instance, been described as an opposition between the model of the “nurturing parent” and that of the “strict father,” after the collapse of communism the economy of the former Soviet Union was ruled by the Russian mafia, whereas the nurturing state is most typically exemplified by the European welfare state, often criticized for “enslaving” its citizens by addicting them to, and in some Eastern European former communist parties were democratically re-elected in government by a population who feared the effects of globalization, deregulation, privatization and in general the free market forces.
Ironically, once one understands that Manderlay presents a model simulation, it immediately becomes clear that the film, though not referring to real, historical phenomena, is nevertheless not that far removed from real world developments either (as is usually case the with simulations). The only thing that is really amazing is that after half a century of Cold War and its aftermath, these models were not recognized in Von Trier’s film.
Daughter’s Law?
How do the politics of Grace fit into all this? Initially Grace seems to take distance from her father. According to the narrator Grace and her father had taken up “their legendary discord” and Grace had become “somewhat weary of her unbearably overweening daddy.” Grace tells her father twice that “he wouldn’t have dared to speak like that if mother still would have been alive,” suggesting that she leans more towards “mam’s site” than to “dad’s.” However, in Dogville she accepted Dad’s instruction about the necessity of TIT-FOR-TAT, she enters Manderlay determined to overthrow Mam’s law, and she takes five of her father’s gangsters with her to assist her with her operation. For Grace there is apparently no contradiction between her father’s methods and the freedom and democracy she wants to introduce into Manderlay.
Rather, the freedom and democracy Grace promotes are the political and institutional side of Dad’s law. Not coincidentally, the topic of the first session of the democracy course Grace obliges the workers of Manderlay to attend is how to settle a dispute over private property. After the death of little Claire the community members unanimously vote for the execution of Wilma who they hold responsible: apparently, democracy fosters the application of the logic of TIT-FOR-TAT and Grace obliges by killing Wilma personally. Grace’s attempts to introduce freedom and democracy destabilize the community rather than liberate it. Her decision to let the workers take down the trees of the Old Lady’s Garden to use the wood for the mending of their houses deprives the plantation of its protection against the annual dust storms. The Old Lady’s Garden wasn’t there for the private pleasures of Mam after all, and Grace’s choice to let the private interests of the inhabitants prevail over Mam’s rules and prohibitions turns out to be detrimental for the common good. For lack of food, everybody is forced to eat “dirt” which was strictly forbidden under Mam’s law.[xxvi] This episode shows in a nutshell how Grace’s overruling of Mam’s law leaves Manderlay’s inhabitants unprotected against the unleashed forces in the outside world. Grace thus destabilizes the social contract of Mam’s law, and introduces the inefficiency (loss of the harvest, the eating of “dirt,”) and unfairness (Wilma’s capital punishment) of Dad’s law into Manderlay.
Grace, then, acts like the “liberating forces of capitalism” as described by Marx and Engels in “The Communist Manifesto” that “burst asunder” the “feudal relations of property” that became “fetters” to “the already developed productive forces.”[xxvii] Capital, after all, needs “free labor”, that is, a labor force that is not tied to land, property, ownership or other obligations but is “freely” disposable and dispensable. This explains the reluctance of the inhabitants of Manderlay to give up Mam’s law for Dad’s law. Confronted with the choice between an egalitarian social contract and a utilitarian one, they prefer the latter, because under Dad’s law they will have nothing to offer but cooperation: under Dad’s law they will be “free” from possessions, obligations, and rights, as assured under Mam’s law, and they will be forced to accept any “quid-pro-quo” deal offered to them, just as Grace herself was forced to in Dogville. Under Dad’s law this means that they too, like Grace and all other protagonists of Von Trier’s previous films, will be exposed to the most despicable and ruthless forms of abuse, maltreatment and murder, as demonstrated by the fate of Burt who left his wife on the plantation for a white girl and is at the end of the film seen hanging from a tree, killed by the company of the woman he put his trust in, and the sequence of photographs with which Manderlay ends. Under Dad’s law, freedom as symbolized by the Statue of Liberty means “freely disposable” for exploitation and abuse.
There seems to be as little room between the evil of Dad’s law and the lesser evil of Mam’s law for a Daughter’s Law as in Von Trier’s imaginary “Europe” and “America.”
Conclusions
To discuss Manderlay in terms of democracy versus slavery or to interpret it as a belated Danish “J’accuse,” an indictment of the maltreatment of the Afro-Americans in the nine-teen-thirties or to see it as proof of Von Trier’s incorrigible anti-Americanism is to miss the point of this film (and the other films by Von Trier). The film itself already contains a number of indications that it should not be taken literally: it’s style is another example of the model-building Von Trier has practiced since the launch of the Dogma 95 Manifesto; the Brechtian alienation techniques invite the spectator to take a critical distance from the film’s referential illusion; and Wilhelm suggests that Grace, who can only read “the prolongation of slavery” and “a recipe for oppression and humiliation” in Mam’s law that she has “been reading it with the wrong spectacles.”
For those familiar with Von Trier’s earlier films about the immediate post-war Europe it must be clear that “reading” Manderlay as a film about slavery or even about America is indeed “reading it with the wrong spectacles.” His films do not refer to historical periods and geographically identifiable countries, but rather to the images, myths, and narratives “Europe” and “America” have come to stand for in contemporary - mainly cinematographic - culture. Von Trier uses these cultural icons and symbols to “color” the models he builds with his films. As I have argued elsewhere, these films up to Manderlay are all iterations of a single game: together they form an infinitely repeated game of “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.”[xxviii] Apparently it takes Von Trier’s protagonists eight iterations to find out that a consistently and ruthlessly followed strategy of TIT-FOR-TAT is the only viable strategy in a world populated by mean players.
In Manderlay Von Trier raises the stakes: this film does not pit one nice player against a population of mean players, but two social contracts, one based on a strategy of voluntary defection, and the other based on forced cooperation. The egalitarian social contract - Dad’s law - is the model of the free market and free enterprise, for which the United States of America have become the paramount symbol, whereas the utilitarian social contract - Mam’s law - underpins the “mothering” state nowadays (still) best exemplified by the European welfare state .
But this drives home the point that a historical or referential reading of Manderlay is besides the point. Manderlay obviously does not stage a conflict between “America” and “Europe”, but rather between two models of social contracts colored by mythical, or if you prefer, caricatural images that circulate in contemporary, predominantly cinematographic visual culture: gangsterdom for a (neo - conservative) free market economy and slavery for a (liberal) welfare state. The models that are pitted against each other, however, are as abstract and idealized as you will find them in a text book on game theory or in the thought experiments of moral philosophers like John Rawls and John Harsanyi. And who would take them to task for historical accuracy?
[i] According to the Internet Movie Data Base, Wasington is “still on the back burner of Lars von Trier,” and not scheduled for release before 2009. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0461425/, accessed on Oct. 15, 2007.
[ii] Peter Bradshaw, “Manderlay,” in The Guardian, March 3, 2006, http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,,1721653,00.html, accessed on Oct. 15, 2007; Philip French, “Manderlay,” in The Observer, March 5, 2006, http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_review/0,,1723665,00.html, accessed on Oct. 15, 2007.
[iii] Stephen Holden, “Manderlay: An America Where Gangsters Free Slaves Not Keen for Liberation,” in The New York Times, January 27, 2006, http://movies.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/movies/27mand.html, accessed ok Oct. 15, 2007.
[iv] His latest feature film, Direktøren for det hele/The Boss Of It All (DK/SE/IS/IT/NO/FI/DE, 2006) is not included in this number, because Von Trier himself did not take this project all too seriously.
[v] Jan Simons, Playing The Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007).
[vi] The “Dogma 95 Manifesto” is published on the official Dogma 95 website, http://www.dogme95.dk (accessed on Oct. 17, 2007).
[vii] André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2004).
[viii] See Gonzalo Frasca, “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology,” in Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (eds.), The Video Game Theory Reader, New York and London: Routledge, 2003, 223.
[ix] See John Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Cambridge, Ma: Perseus Books, 1998), 34.
[x] Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order, 24.
[xi] For a more elaborate discussion of the aesthetics of virtual realism, see Simons, Playing The Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema; Jan Simons, “Von Trier’s Cinematic Games,” Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Spring 2008). See also Jack Stevenson, Lars von Trier (London: BFI Publishing, 2002).
[xii] This “Kafka”-method is explicitly demonstrated in Epidemic, in which filmmaker Lars (Lars von Trier) and scriptwriter Niels (Niels Vørsel) write a story about a plague epidemic on the basis of archival material, but Niels also confesses that he maintains a correspondence with a girl in Atlantic City because seeing Bob Rafelson’s King of Marvin Gardens (US, 1972) made him want to know more about that town but he is too lazy to travel there by himself. As is well known, Von Trier doesn’t like to travel himself, and he has never been in the USA. See Simons, 115.
[xiii] Greg Costikyan, “I Have No Words & I Must Design,” in Interactive Fantasy#2, 1994, http://www.costik.com/nowords.html, accessed on Oct. 18, 2007.
[xiv] The only other exception is Doctor Mesmer in the embedded story in Epidemic. In almost all respects this story mirrors symmetrically all other stories: instead of entering a strange environment Mesmers leaves his familiar city, and instead of being abused by the inhabitants of his new environment he goes out to cure the plague-infested population of the country side. Mesmer’s salvation is consistent with these structural mutations. The other exceptional figure is Bess in Manderlay, since she is an inhabitant of the isle as well. She has, however, a history of mental illness and is regarded by the other inhabitants as the village’s fool. She is thus a stranger in her own community.
[xv] Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984, 9.
[xvi] Only after this story’s invention by Albert W. Tucker the problem underlying it rose to fame. See Brian Skyrms, Evolution of the Social Contract (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 48-49.
[xvii] Mutual defection corresponds to what is called a Nash equilibrium. This equilibrium is reached when each player’s move is the best response to the other player’s move and no player can improve his or her payoff by choosing an alternative strategy.
[xviii] For a more elaborate analysis see Simons, 188-196.
[xix] See Wim Staat, “Dogville Characterized by The Grapes of Wrath: European Identity Construction Through American Genre Convention,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 48.1 (Spring 2007): 79-96.
[xx] As mathematician and economist Ken Binmore writes, “Nor are popes, presidents, kings, judges, or the police exempt from the social contract of the society in which they officiate Far from enforcing the social contract, they derive what they have from a social convention which says that ordinary citizens should accept their direction.” Binmore, Natural Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.
[xxi] Binmore, Natural Justice, 3-5. An equilibrium that is not stable would not hold for long; an equilibrium that is not sufficiently efficient cannot compete with more efficient equilibria, and an equilibrium that would be experienced as unfair encourages defection and cheating.
[xxii] Binmore, 188.
[xxiii] See George Lakoff, Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 108.
[xxiv] See for instance Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2001).
[xxv] John Harsanyi, Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univerity Press, 1977); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1972).
[xxvi] This is a variation of “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the overgrazing of common land because each farmer individually tries to get a maximal benefit by grazing as many animals as possible. This is a classical example of an inefficient equilibrium (under an egalitarian social contract). See Binmore, 7.
[xxvii] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto” (Paris, 1848), http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html, accessed on Oct. 25, 2007.
[xxviii] Simons, Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Cinematic Games, 188-196.
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