bearing the cross

One of my friends heard that how you interpret the last scene of Children of Men determines whether you’re an optimist or pessimist – do you think the boat’s coming to get Kee and the baby, or no?  My friend said no.  I wasn’t sure.  I thought in all likelihood yes, but I had also become convinced at that point that the Human Project might be the Human Slaughterhouse Project, and didn’t think there was much use in hoping they would save the world – after all, everybody who tried to do that either died or was evil.

One of the first things I responded to in Children of Men was this idea the film promotes (indirectly or directly) that all the heroes must die – yes, all of them.  Not including Kee and the baby, because, obviously, they were the ones to die for.  I’m not exactly averse to this in particular – I liked 28 Weeks Later, and that has the same premise, that all the main/real/adult characters were trying to save the weak/helpless children (who, incidentally, were also the miracle babies, being possibly immune to the Rage virus, just like Kee’s baby is the miracle baby), even if they had to die doing it, because “their lives are more important than yours, or mine”.  Except, see, in 28 Weeks Later, this altruistic self-sacrifice is mocked because the Rage-immune children are out to spread Rage, as we see in the end.  I appreciated that turn.  Children of Men is still trapped in the aesthetic of self-sacrifice (is that an aesthetic?), which I have a real problem with because I think it trivializes death – both people’s fear of death, and people’s reaction to death – both are supposed to disappear in the self-sacrifice aesthetic.

Obviously, Children of Men is colored with biblical references, and none of them subversive.  There’s a firm maintenance of the hegemonic canon here – the miracle baby, the holy mother, the Jesus figures, the Simon Zealotes figures (Luke) who are too radical and foolish for Jesus (Theo/the baby), the turn-the-other-cheek, even the holy smiting of London, the sinful, glorious city-state.  And yes, Jesus is embodied in both baby Dylan and Theo, as well as in all the others whose blood waters the plants of hope – everyone in the refugee camp, Miriam, Julian, Jasper.  Everyone who uses militant action and violence – and shows little impulse to peacefully let themselves be killed – to get their way in this movie is bad, from the military to the revolutionaries.  Everyone who is not militant, but prefers more peaceful resolution (or, is apolitical) is good.  And dies a horrible, horrible death.  It’s not the kind of movie that promotes hope for the future, because the thing is, nobody is really that willing to sacrifice themselves for anything or anyone.  The bottom line is that people want to survive.  Being told that death is necessary to change the world’s course from dystopia to utopia is bound to promote apathy and hopelessness.  Just look at how many Germans decided to help Jews after Kristellnacht.  Not very many.  Of course, both the revolution and the system try to encourage us to see things differently, to see a glory in death for a greater cause, because ideologues need nameless, faceless bodies to shift power from one pair of hands to another.  But autocracies are on the descent, and as democracy spreads, so does individualism, so does economic development, so does education, and so does apathy.

I also see two other ways by which Children of Men promotes political apathy.

1.  By stressing that what’s most important is compassion, not politics – politics just ruins everything.  Irony of ironies, this anti-ideology stance seems to contradict with what I said previously about dying for the cause – don’t Julian and Miriam and Jasper die for a cause, the cause of freeing Kee?  Well, yes, and that’s the problem with Children of Men – it may not have an expressed political ideology, but it sure has another kind of biological, biblical, “oldest-story-in-the-world” ideology.

2.  Director Alfonso Cuaron’s emphasis on technology over storytelling.  It diminishes the power of the narrative, obviously, when the director is more proud of his camera tricks and his amazing, spectacular six-minute no-cut shots (ego, much?).  But I guess this depends on what one thinks the “point” of movies is.  I personally think the point is the story, not the CG or lack-of-CG or any aspect of the production.  But I’ve always been more of a plot aficionado than a craft aficionado.  I’m the same way with writing – I feel what I lack in artistry, I make up for in story.  Cuaron has the opposite approach, which is his right, although I admit that it does remind me of Japan’s apolitical society that has basically traded political agency for economic wealth (isn’t it interesting that technocrat and technology have the same prefix?).  Then there’s, of course, Virilio’s idea that advances in technology coincide with advances in the military, because each one serves the other, both of them dehumanizing humans, distancing them from the real thing – and if this is the case, then Cuaron has completely failed to criticize the military-state at all.

Apparently people think Children of Men is a great example of storytelling through images, particularly with Baby Diego.  Well, not really.  Cuaron just uses the media as a narrative device, and people don’t talk about it because they, and the movie’s audience, are all huddled around a screen uncritically watching a television station’s pre-packaged Baby Diego Montage.   And this is of course part of Virilio’s point – the more “real” and “transparent” war seems to become, the more immediately immediate to everyone, the more unreal it actually becomes: “Transparency, ubiquitousness, instant information – it was the time of the great ‘command operas’ where, in London as in Berlin, stage-directors moved the naval and air fleets around”.  Cuaron’s doing the same thing in Children of Men.  He is “an icy scientist, and for [him] their war is a laboratory experiment” – in his own technical abilities.  And yes, it is possible for a military-industrial movie to frown on militancy in its characters.  Let me give an allegorical, political example.

Indonesia’s Suharto had/has a disease: a fear of the people.  Call it anthropophobia.  Oh, what do you know, that’s a real phobia.   He’s afraid of what the masses are capable of.  But before he was president, he had to get the presidency by throwing a coup.  During the coup, he propagated images of revolutionary struggle, through bloodshed, and angry young men wielding spears, avening the blood of their brethren.  All very militant stuff.  After the coup succeeded and he got his power, he propagated images of economic development, a peaceful happy populace working together as a happy Indonesian family with defined roles for father/mother/child, promoting traditional ideals and growth – some of the militants he used to get this power in the first place were shot down in subsequent skirmishes because, guess what, the time for the people to be militant is over – it’s quiet time now, and it was quiet time for the next thirty-two years.  And that is how dictators, and Children of Men, can encourage passive self-sacrifice while at the same time promoting the military-industrial complex.

When you consider how politically-driven/radical this movie is (i.e., not at all), it’s not surprising that all this is so.  Cuaron firmly upholds the military-industrial complex by making this a vehicle for his technical abilities, so he has to demean his characters by turning them into hackneyed martyrs, a la Jesus and Patrick Henry and Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, because the only good character in a military-industrial movie is one who will die for “motherhood and apple pie” – nameless, faceless, selfless, passive.  Characters who do not fight their deaths.  Characters who don’t even become angry (did you notice?  Theo’s cynicism and anger [against all rational odds!] completely dissipate after he inherits the burden of mankind) and instead say, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”.

 

your dream is your demise

One of the themes brought up in tutorial in relation to the amazing film 4 by Ilya Khrjanovsky was the “life-changing event” – what happens to a person after going through an event that changes their life? What is an event at all? And this is actually one of those questions for me, one of those things that I think about too much. As a political science major I relate it to social norms, and what leads those norms to change – usually some schema-shaking event. In the case of Thailand and Indonesia, it is often the deaths of student protesters. It’s the reason I watch apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies, because how people react to traumatic events is really fascinating to me.

The reason for this, I just realized, is because my life can be divided very easily (and very evenly, at this age, although this will soon change), into the ante and the post. I lived in status quo, the normal and stable world, until I was ten, with a given set of rules and expectations and norms to live by. I was also living in a military dictatorship, although being that age, I didn’t realize this. When I was ten, in quick succession, my father died, the dictatorship collapsed, and my mother and I moved to the United States, where I had never been. My life before the “event(s)” was dead, and so were the rules that I thought governed the universe. A part of me thought that by all rights I, or at least the “I” that I knew, was dead – yet I was clearly still in existence, undead, as in, I was not dead. Zombie movies, and post-apocalyptic movies in general, focus on the undead: the survivors, who belong to a world that is now dead, and of course the corpses that have risen from the dead. I think that I watch post-apocalyptic movies – which is a very wide term I use to denote movies that focus on people and worlds that survive after the destruction of the prior schema, the prior logic of things – like 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, The Signal, Apocalypse Now, Sunshine, Alien(s), Akira, Kairo (as well as the more blockbuster types: Independence Day, Mars Attacks – and the B-movie types: Tank Girl, Resident Evil) – to see how others do it. How do they survive? How do they go on? How do they make sense of what remains?

In short, to steal my favorite question from the magazine Adbusters, “what today remains of our capacity to reinvent the world?”

4, in many senses, is a post-apocalyptic movie, although what “the event” or “the apocalypse” is, we’re not quite sure of. Russia’s fall? World War II? The individual traumas that individual people have suffered? Whatever it is, 4 definitely gives off the post-apocalyptic vibe. I constantly was reminded of the Paul Virilio reading, “Strategies of Deception” – humanity as quarry; biocracy; anthropophagy, devoid of ritual; the extinction of humanity. I think I understood that reading better with 4 than with No Man’s Land. My favorite sequence of the movie is Marina’s walk through urban wasteland – eerily similar to Jim’s walk through an abandoned, wasted London in 28 Days Later, which similarly uses no music to enhance the emptiness. As in the classic, much ridiculed post-apocalypse B-movie, people in her home village descend into animalistic, cannibalistic behavior.

But what 4 tells me is that an attempt to make sense of this world is useless. It defies logic, it defies sense. 4 is nonsense in many ways. It defies plot and narrative conventions. It is surreal and real at once. What is it about? The importance of the number 4 – a non-answer. I cannot rationalize this world, because the end of the world cannot be rationalized. Those who try to promote grandiose ambitions of rebuilding and opportunity – i.e., Volodya – are shot down with astonishing efficiency and reminded that this is a senseless world, almost absurdly senseless (Catch-22 comes to mind). Their ideologies mean nothing now. Similarly, Oleg, who takes one moral stance by admonishing his co-worker’s kicking of a dog – ironically, at a meatpacking plant – is forced to pay for that moral stance with his life. Oleg’s example also brings up an important note on Volodya’s unhappy twist: not only did Volodya claim free will existed, but he pretended to be an organic chemist working on a secret clone project, telling the others that there are hundreds of thousands of clones in Russia alone, living among us, dying a little earlier than normal due to malfunctions. When he is arrested by the police it seems that he does have a clone – responsible for a murder – or rather, he is a clone. So his fairytale, his “exercise” in free agency, has come true in nightmarish form.

Marina also has a rough time at the village, but she doesn’t die or get shipped off to war, and presumably she escapes, but only after burning the dolls her sister has shaped on top of her sister’s grave – all traces of the past, that is, are demolished. Marina’s “dream” at the bar was also the least grand, claiming only that she was in advertising (hardly the same as working for the president or in a clone factory), selling a product that simply made people feel good – which is true, since she is a prostitute. Marina’s moment of truth, then, is less severe because her dream was not as ambitious. The rest of the movie she simply spends feeling bad, instead of good. She also revisits the past – if only to destroy it – which the men do not do. In this sense she is the least “modernist” of the three – the men want, very vaguely, to fix things that they never fix, to be people they aren’t, to move forward and to believe they can move forward (as in the Radiohead song, “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box”, “after years of waiting/nothing came”). Marina does not. Marina lives day to day, occasionally wallowing in the past, unable to forgive her sister, not believing in anything, not trying to make sense, or a stance, out of anything. And it’s non-ideologue Marina that makes it.

This theme of the victory of chaos and nonsense over logic and ideology is expanded even further into the victory of nature, of Earth, over humanity. I think it’s extremely important that the last shot is of the dog that Oleg has died to avoid running over. The dogs survive. They’re not even killed by those nasty road drills. They survive in the wasteland, in the metropolis. Something does survive. It’s not humans, with our insistence on reason and sensibility and thought. The world, the dogs. They survive. Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us cites the animals that flourish in the Chernobyl “Zone of Alienation” as evidence that animals are simply stronger than we are. – and for them, “apocalypse has turned out to be not so bad after all”. The trees are a bright green in 4’s closing shot.

 

i can be cruel/ I don’t know why

What I found most unexpected about Dogville was the notorious end credits: “Young Americans”, to familiar Depression-era photographs. I did not remember, until then, that this was a film about America. Much of the (American) backlash against Dogville has been this supposed anti-American message – running along the lines of, presumably, this is what America is like, both inside (with immigrants) and outside (with foreign policy) – this evil hegemon that takes all it can from everyone else. To make Dogville so brashly political somewhat repulsed me, and although I can understand where Lars von Trier is coming from (even as an American), I can’t help feeling like he missed the point of his own movie.

Chapter 1. Dogville’s Trajectory.

I thought about Dogville on the walk home to my apartment, and kept getting reminded of different stories, one after the other, like Dogville had set off some kind of fuse in my history of literature and cinema, on the path to some great explosive realization about, at least, a common universal theme. Some kind of unattainable “whole”, which of course I did not attain. But here’s how the thought process went:

Henrik Ibsen’s plays, in particular Enemy of the People, for Dogville’s minimalist set and idea-driven production, where most of the conflict takes place in dialogue, and also the little town that, faced with a moral choice between protecting itself and protecting the visiting world/Other (being a good host), chooses itself; Sanctuary, William Faulkner’s scandalous novella about a high-society girl who is kidnapped and raped by a peg-legged yokel, for ugliness and the rich-poor dynamics of the first rape – Chuck plays with Grace’s expensive monogrammed scarf, etc.; Asian revenge movies, at first Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, until I realized that given Grace’s womanhood and the sexual aspect of her degradation, revenge B-movies, like Last House on the Left and I Spit On Your Grave, because Dogville is really just a high-art version of them that plays much less to the sensationalism of sexploitation; and as I was listening to Aimee Mann’s “Save Me”: “you look like a perfect fit/for a girl in need of a tourniquet”, A Streetcar Named Desire – if only, I thought, Blanche had had mafia connections – because, like similarly named Grace, Blanche has “always relied on the kindness of strangers”, kindness that is not found.

Chapter 2.  Guilt in Dogville.

The idea of intervention in relation to Dogville is very interesting to me.  The nation-state is arguably losing ground against the forces of globalization at the moment, and in a sense Dogville can be considered a micro-nation-state.  The fact that the citizens of Dogville, then, seem quite against intervention – if by intervention we mean saving Grace – makes them quite anti-modern.  As the Nuremberg trials determined, already outlining the death of the nation-state that did not live up to the standards of the international community, when state laws run contrary to international humanitarian laws, the state law must be rejected by the citizen if there is a chance for a moral choice.  As legal globalization increases, that will be ever more so the standard.  Even on local levels, intervention is not a dirty word – in the age of total information access, it is said, there are no innocent bystanders, and in some places being a good Samaritan is no longer an option for extra brownie points, it’s a requirement.  Dogville runs contrary to this, too.

Adam Atkinson writes in “On the Nature of Dogs, the Right of Grace, Forgiveness and Hospitality” that there are many rules governing and constraining the supposedly all-welcoming nature of hospitality.  No one accepts the Other with no strings attached (except for Grace).  Yet the trend of globalization suggests that – from the perspective, of course, of Dogville, not of the UN – soon a great number of Others, in a great Other Community, will be judging insular hosts around the world on the way they receive refugees, treat minority groups or the poor or political dissidents.  This is in fact what happens in the movie – the gangsters (who are the anti-Dogville, the epitome of Dogville’s Other, even Dogville’s Shadow in Jungian terms) appear, seemingly lawless and yet actually more lawful, in this circumstance, then Dogville, and enact their moral indignation on the town.

Strangely enough, although the movie leads us to feel that we should intervene (or someone should intervene), it doesn’t allow us to, thereby forcing us to play the liable innocent bystander, complicit in all crime that happens in Dogville.  It forces us to be cruel by default.  Yet is that why Dogvillians are cruel?  No, they are more active – but why?  Are they just evil?  No.  Are we all just evil, and some of us more indoctrinated by the law than others?  Another thing Dogville made me think of was the famous Milgram Experiment, where the authority-pleasing, dutiful rationale was used – distinct from Dogville’s more economic quid pro quo justification, but with the same result.  In these experiments there were conscientious objectors.  Yet there are none in Dogville.  Maybe a better example is the Stanford Prison Experiment – that one was more contained, more insular, more subject to community pressures.

Why all this talk about experiments?  Well, Dogville reads like an experiment.  As was said in class, the township of Dogville is completely mapped out, planned out, narrated – like we’re scientists observing the behavior of little white mice in a simulated environment.  And this brings me to the hubris of Dogville, or rather of Lars von Trier – Tom Edison is the reviled moral high horse of the town, who talks about using “illustrations” to demonstrate his point, who objectifies Grace, making her a thing, a gift, so the town can learn to accept.  Tom Edison’s arrogance, unlike the kinds Grace and her father argue over, is the simplest kind – the belief that you are smarter than those around you – and he is shot for his actions and manipulations without any pity.  Yet what do we do if not objectify everyone in Dogville, make them stand for something else – why is Grace’s name, for God’s sake, Grace?  Dogville is von Trier’s illustration.

Chapter 3. Dogville’s Tragedy.

That said – I loved Dogville, basically because I love Henrik Ibsen. I love systemic breakdown, especially of presumed utiopias. And in an Aristotlian sense, Dogville is a classic tragedy: Grace has a tragic flaw (her forgiving, doormat nature) that escalates to the point of her own destruction – and arguably, the destruction of the town, too, since if she had not allowed herself to be taken advantage of, I doubt that meek, inward-looking Dogville would have forced it upon her – and finally, she comes to realize this in anagnorisis (when the moonlight comes up and grotesquely illuminates the town), and cleanses herself, and more importantly the audience, which crows in joy, of this flaw of forgiveness by having the town massacred. Dogville is at the same time a classic comedy, because the townspeople’s flaws (of brutality, of cruelty, of selfishness, of many things that come out of the woodwork) don’t ever seem to be self-realized, although they’re punished for them anyway. Because of this ignorance, it is not their purging that is satisfying to us – it’s Grace’s cathartic purge of her tragic flaw that we’re drawn to. If Grace had simply left and the town been struck down by a Rocky Mountain avalanche afterwards, the ensuing euphoria would not have been the same.

Chapter 4. Fear and Loathing in Dogville.

One aspect of Americanism that did come to mind in relation to Dogville wasn’t so much a willingness to exploit the weak – it’s the culture of fear so aptly explored in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. Canadians own as many guns as Americans do, yet they have fewer gun deaths, and they don’t lock their doors at night. Bowling for Columbine’s thesis was that in order to assuage our fear – which could be blamed on the politicians who want to keep us fearful and obedient, but nobody knows its origin for sure – we ramp up our security, arm ourselves to the teeth, and attack the Other mercilessly if the Other encroaches on personal territory. That, and we consume – just like it is argued in the above essay on hospitality that Dogville consumes Grace. Dogville is afraid of her, after all – they have to make sure she is disarmed and dehumanized. And maybe this is an astute commentary on American culture, one that I don’t think many Americans would disagree with.

 

carbon to feed the engine

Of all the ideas brought up in relation to Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land, I find the most interesting to be the reduction of people to material.  It’s a “progression” from the previous wartime logic of people as bodies – body count, body bag, human shields – to people as combustible carbon.  The first correlation that comes to mind is the entire concept of putting a bomb underneath a dead soldier so that when the body is picked up to be buried elsewhere, it and everything around it will explode.  Not only does this reduce the human body to nothing different from a log or a jeep – as something that can be exploded – but it also mocks the odd “ritualistic” compassion that the dead man’s comrades bear by taking the time to move the soldier to a more suitable, honorable place, obviously still thinking there is significance in the soul or at least the human body and it needs to be respected even in death.

Even though this is a localized event, it can be considered part of an overall trend of de-individualization.  It strips people of all that makes them human, and all that makes them distinct.  I think various groups of people have certainly been dehumanized and de-individualized in the past, in particular during colonization or slavery, but the current trend does not hold anyone above this dehumanization.  If anything, those that dehumanize others dehumanize themselves, but in addition, there seem to be no rules as to who can be eaten and who can eat – especially given the advent of terrorism.  It’s a feeding frenzy, a free for all.  To have rules, after all, would be to have rituals.

So in a way it does put us all on equal footing, and somewhat reduces inherent power imbalances, simply pitting savage man against savage man – as the two soldiers in the trench are.  It makes sense, then, that the journalism involved is so neutral and objective and ultimately uninspiring.  With no one to “root” for, what choice do reporters have?  It may be argued that the emphasis on years of ethnic conflict adds historical texture and maintains some aspect of identity and distinction, at least between the two sides.  However, this method of relaying information is just another way to pass on historical determinism – nothing can change, this is the way things are, always have been, and always will be – which breeds apathy, and encourages us to think of the opposing sides as just part of the world’s muddled mess.  If history is so lifeless and meaningless, so “useless”, then it may as well not exist at all.

This kind of aesthetic helps explain why it is so easy for the UN and the media to abandon the soldier on the bomb at the end of No Man’s Land.  The two soldiers who indirectly or directly kill each other even when freed from the trench don’t kill each other for nationalism or any particular cause – it’s because one kept the other from leaving, or tried to kill him with his own knife.  They’re personal vendettas that are aggravated by the conflict.  Yet they will be forever portrayed, and remembered, as just two more waste products of the war.  It’s possible that some of this is an inevitable part of movies that consciously make political “points”, or use stock characters to represent larger, faceless forces.  Allegories do cheapen the characters they use, more so than any other storytelling method.  The allegory in No Man’s Land concurs with the idea of the human as, essentially, a blob of carbon, formless and indistinct, because although its characters represent different political actors, they all end up reaching the same conclusion – abandoning the man on the bomb.

It’s not only victims that become demoted to mere material.  So are the apathetic bystanders – and they demote themselves by giving no reaction, showing themselves to be, so to speak, dead to the world, and just as useless as the man on the bomb.  And so everyone is fair game.

 

The Death of a Narrative

When I was a kid living in Jakarta enduring many hours of deadlocked traffic, I would sometimes imagine, to make the car ride more interesting, that none of the landscape outside my window was real.  It was all just a movie that had been inserted into the mysterious transportation device, this “car”, to make the journey more vibrant.  I eventually managed to convince myself that the car itself was not real, but was only one of those teleport chambers or wormholes you see in bad science fiction, and that the space between point of departure and destination wasn’t real either.  It might look like a few miles, but who knew, maybe it was a few thousand miles, or light years.

And when I drive around Lincoln, listening to the radio and waiting for the light to turn, I watch pedestrians and cars and imagine that this, my point of view, is the opening to some artsy, grungy movie about life in suburban America.   The movie never resolved itself, but I never felt it had to.  It was just a movie about a segment of people in a given place, their reality, a movie about truth.

Given this habit of mine, I do find it interesting that Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten is considered so “ultra-real”.  It does look like a documentary, and the actors and actresses do not look like actors and actresses, and sometimes they seem to not remember that they’re trying to act in a movie – and then they remember again, and the transition is a little awkward.  So I suppose it is ultra-realistic in its style, but I feel like many in my generation are somewhat accustomed to our “entertainment” being equal to “reality”, even a self-indulgent reality.  There’s reality television.  There’s the ever-popular catchphrase of any teenager’s music playlist, “soundtrack to my life”.  There’s accusations that certain criminals couldn’t separate their real life from their shoot-em-up videogame.  Maybe it’s media saturation, maybe it’s part of the whole “reality through technology” issue, but whatever it is, simply turning off the television and walking outside is not enough to separate virtual life from reality.  I think a lifetime of watching television and movies has taught us to see everything around us as a grand performance.

In that sense, Ten really can be seen as a reality television show shot in Iran, with obvious political overtones.  Like Kiarostami, many reality television producers tell their “cast” to talk about certain things when they’re in the “confession” room, but does not give them an exact script.  The difference is that reality TV comes from the assumption that this is real – Kiarostami comes from the assumption that this is fake.  But they arrive at a shockingly similar result, the anti-narrative.

The narrative is on its way out, it seems, destined to live only in vaults and archives and the occasional short story anthology.

It’s true that many Hollywood movies, especially chick flicks, are still grounded in narrative structure (which is part of the reason Ten holds interest, because it’s come up with the way to discuss women’s issues without becoming bogged down in traditional feminist structure – the main character does not, by the end of the movie, tame her unruly son into respecting her and understanding her need to get a divorce, as she would if this was made by a Western pseudo-feminist picturehouse.  Instead she decides to cater to his wishes and lets his father have him, because “a boy needs to be with his father”).  But many indie movies, comedies, and horror movies are not.

For that matter, respectable books have been losing their narrative structures for a while now.  Postmodernism killed the narrative star.  And it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it, for Ten to be postmodern, given its political background?  The open image rebels, like postmodernism, against political (and artistic) absolutism – against a straight line of history, from start to finish – against a pre-determined path, ordained by whoever is in power.  Ten’s open image says, “well, I don’t know what happened in the end, what do you think happened in the end?”, inviting both a democratic viewing experience (but not one that is overtly political, there are no agendas here) and hints of what theologians call free will.  The world has not been set in stone – it is yours to make what you want of it.  I think the world in general has been going in this direction, the direction of postmodernism, of the open image, of the anti-narrative, whatever you want to call it (it’s up to you) for a long time now.

 

Extreme Experiences

It is interesting that at a time when mainstream culture is so sensitive to violence in movies, a movie like Pan’s Labyrinth, rife with violence, is excused. I believe this is because the violence here is not seen as gratuitous, but as historically accurate. Just like the automatic “R” rating for smoking is excused in the cases of historical dramas, there is lenience for history. History cannot be changed, and as we saw with The Passion of the Christ, audiences embrace movies that show historical villains – from Pontius Pilate to Hitler – as maximally evil, often through maximum violence. It is important, after all, for the winners of history to continue creating their own version of history – often through demonizing the losers of history to the point of caricature.

This is not to say, of course, that there were no Captain Vidals, or that Franco’s Spain was not an extremely violent and cruel place to live, particularly for his enemies. All I mean is that many movies about salient historical events reinforce the norm we as a culture hold regarding that historical event, usually by showing only one very simplistic perspective.

This is one of the only ways conservatives (at least in America) allow violence to be viewed – in historical settings. In fact, violence is encouraged as long as it’s kept in the past and as long as it shows the “correct” angle. It’s good for civic and cultural nationalism.

Pan’s Labyrinth fits this model of “acceptable violence”.  Franco’s dictatorship was on the losing, evil side of history, having sided with the Axis armies in World War II.  The revolutionaries, which the movie takes care to point out are on the side of the Allied troops, are on the winning side, even though they lose their immediate battle against Franco (which this movie curiously avoids putting on screen, choosing to end on a more optimistic note).  Here, Franco is represented by the tortuous, sadistic Captain Vidal – the revolutionaries, the force of the good, represented by the courageous, virginal Ofelia.

No matter how acceptable it is, however, the extreme violence in this movie needs to be examined in and of its own extremity, because there are some interesting deviations from the usual patterns in its aesthetics.

First is the violent female body.  Not only does Pan’s Labyrinth repeat the motif of the female body as a vessel (particularly as a womb), but it gives its female bodies fairly violent roles as well.  The physical body itself is violent, sometimes against itself in the case of Ofelia’s mother when her pregnancy is in distress and she walks around the bedroom gushing blood, and sometimes against others, as when Mercedes rips apart Captain Vidal’s mouth, saying “won’t be the first pig I gutted”.  The places that signify the womb (the labyrinth, the tree, the pale man’s hall) are all far more sinister than comforting.  Movies do not often allow their female bodies this level of violence.  While Ofelia chooses not to use the knife on her baby brother, she is also more of a child than a woman, and does not fully own her sexuality.  The two adult women have much more blood in their lives.  This could be read in multiple ways.  Violence in women could mark their contamination – the taint of war, and maybe of mortality – if we choose to exalt Ofelia’s innocence.  On the other hand, Ofelia could be a simple, naive sacrificial lamb to the monstrous Captain Vidal, and Mercedes’ violence represents a repressed people rising up and turning the tide against their oppressors.

Second, Pan’s Labyrinth depicts war as sensory, as extreme, rather than as logical and rational.  War is often thought of as the final act of politics – cerebral, philosophical, the realm of the masculine thinker.  But this movie shows the senses and feelings of political conflict with the help of vivid imagery, climactic music, and melodramatic action, moving war into the realm of the aesthetics, the feminine feeler, complete with tears and blood.  What I think this shows is that everything that is considered reasonable and rational and thought-oriented has its aesthetics.  Everything Enlightened philosophers debated comes to dramatic life somehow, and for those in the throes of a real war, it is useless to separate thinking from feeling – they are one and the same (the filmind of Frampton?).

Third, while Eagleton suggests that aesthetics (at least in the middle class) are formed in conjunction with custom and morality, Pan’s Labyrinth would suggest otherwise – at least that aesthetics have nothing to do with custom, since disobedience of societal norms is usually celebrated.  Pan’s Labyrinth seems to agree that aesthetics and morality coincide, however, since aesthetics here are shaped by Ofelia’s (and the revolutionaries’) morality.

One might wonder, however, what this movie would have looked like if, say, Franco’s government had come to power after World War II, when Communism was seen as the world’s chief evil, and those that opposed it considered heroes.

 

In the Land of Women

I found it very strange that channel 9 decided to play The Stepford Wives (2004) directly followed by Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Or maybe it isn’t so strange. I suppose the two are supposed to create an automatic dichotomy of extremes, with Nicole Kidman’s “normal” character of Joanna in the middle as the real modern woman – she’s not Barbie, and nor is she G.I. Jane. She’s stylish in her own way, without pandering to male fantasies of either the wife or the whore.

Joanna, indeed, is the real epitome of “girl power”. She’s a photographer from New York City who’s married the husband of another “girl power” figure of mainstream culture, Carrie Bradshaw (I mean, her character’s husband is played by impossibly untalented Matthew Broderick). They have two children, a boy and a girl, and she is better than her husband at everything. When he rants to her about how he is left with nothing to excel at, saying, “and what does that make us?”, she condescendingly replies, “Lucky. Worthy.” Even her club of friends is the picture of the “modern woman” – there’s the ugly hippie-artist and the flamboyant gay guy.

So what’s the alternative to the Joanna? Well, there are the Stepford wives. Here the programming monster is not the lead husband but the lead wife, who has a robot lead husband. She comes from a life of brain surgery and finds herself “overworked and underloved” – after killing her real husband for sleeping with a 21-year-old research assistant, she builds herself another, perfect husband, then lures other couples to Stepford, Connecticut, where “no one will notice a community of robots”. This facet corrected the odd idea that in a world of men and robot-women, men would choose to be dancing in a ’50s midsummer night’s waltz in tuxes instead of watching the game. The Stepford Wife, of course, is the romantic – she says so herself. She wants men to be men and women to be ladies. She wants chivalry. She wants happy endings.

There is not much difference between Joanna and the Stepford wives, in my opinion. Joanna is simply an immature Stepford wife. After her husband starts cheating on her and her work hours become too much, she too will decapitate him, and reminisce. Or maybe not – the women’s punishment for the men after they regain consciousness is to have them shop for groceries. Assign them women’s work, in other words – o, the humiliation of household chores. All this, of course, is firmly “within” the system of sexual politics in the U.S. To be a feminist nowadays means insisting your husband do the chores, means refusing to be a Barbie doll, means having a career (but a stylish one – either an artiste or a gluttonous capitalist), means suing your boss if you don’t get maternity leave, means being against sexual harassment. All within the realm of the personal, because that is, and always will be (apparently) the realm of women.

Feminist studies in colonialism remind the men to look at the women and their issues, so woefully neglected – look at the home, the household duties, how the children are raised – enough with this focus on power politics and civil unrest! How manly those topics are.

The Stepford Wives tries to be some kind of nouveau feminism movie, and maybe it is nouveau feminism – maybe nouveau feminism nowadays restricts itself to the household, as if to say, women don’t care about any issue larger than themselves and their immediate family. Women are without politics or causes. They are self-obsessed, and not only that, but they are obsessed with the traditional, womanly parts of the self – the wife part, the mother part. Nothing else. Nothing has changed, except they want more “equality”, whatever that is, in their assigned roles. Hollywood is comfortable with this. It makes for good sitcoms and random moments of feel-good empowerment when spunky heroines verbally or physically bitchslap a chauvinist who demands they stay in the kitchen, before being swept off their feet by the dashing hero who’s wealthy enough to hire them a maid, so there’s no need to fight over chores. Either way, women and their issues are still tightly boxed in the house.

It’s a great shame that female figures who defy this obsessive association of “women” with “the personal” or “the home” are so blown out of proportion that they cannot be taken seriously. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider provides an alternative of sorts to the established role of women (wandering somewhere between Nicole Kidman and Glenn Close), but it’s just for laughs. If the movie were a bit more serious and a bit less over the top, maybe Lara Croft would be a viable feminist figure. If she weren’t so perfect at everything, if she weren’t so wealthy or if she weren’t so beautiful. Because she is never in the house (except when using it as a battlefield) and is not married. She doesn’t even have a pet (except, perhaps, her butler and geek). She’s an arrogant, confident bitch who cares nothing for interpersonal relationships except with her father (and not with her mother, which deviates greatly from the chick flick “modern woman”). But to be any of those things, the laughable special effects and proposterous plot subtly tells us, is not possible in the real world. Until monkey-guards come to life and arctic snowgear consists of a cape and sweats, women must stay in the private sphere, and argue about who’s doing the dishes.

 

do you have the crazy?

I watched The Signal at the Melbourne International Film Festival with a crowd of the offbeat loner types, not sure what to expect – a slasher like Hatchet, or a spooker like Kairo?

Something else, apparently. It’s a mix of absurdist and violent comedy (Shaun of the Dead) and genuine creeping horror (Kairo). The minimalist plot synopsis: a signal is being transmitted via televisions, radios, and cell phones. It is both a mechanical screaming sound and a psychedelic, kaleidoscope-like image, and it hypnotizes people – according to the “philosopher”, Clark, it disturbs the synapses in the brain and leads to irrational thought and behavior. The tag line is that it makes people start killing each other, but actually this is just one response. It enhances paranoia and suggestability – people may be less averse to killing, but some are definitely more equipped to start a massacre than others, who may be more inclined to talk to decapitated heads and dance with the dead.

Although the dead don’t come back to life – we don’t think – it is firmly a zombie movie. It just extends the trend that 28 Days Later began – how do we know that that person coming toward us “has the crazy”? Cases of mistaken insanity in these movies start from George Romero’s trilogy and become more and more blurred as the genre continues. In 28 Days Later, only spots of blood in the eyes and a general lack of human rationale makes the distinction. The climax of the movie takes place when Selena is about to club Jim to death because she thinks he’s Infected, but really he’s just furious – he’s enraged, but he doesn’t have Rage. In The Signal, there are no physical signs of “crazy”, and what’s more, those who are “crazy” can still engage in conversation, think, pretend to be not crazy, because as we see, they don’t even know they’re crazy.

It’s also a critique of the zombie genre, as characters kill in self-defense and then begin to suspect everyone around them is a homicidal maniac – so they start to kill everyone. “These people are going to kill the world,” says one supposedly sane character who has created a bashing ball of knives, “and we have to kill them all.” I suppose this is the same question that 28 Weeks Later sought to probe – isn’t it ironic that to protect the world from killers, you have to “terminate with extreme prejudice” (and yes, this is a term used in the movie)? And from that perspective it’s a lot like the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street”.

The traditional interpretation of this movie seems to be that it’s a commentary on how the media can numb our brains into scrambled eggs and make us do whatever “it” wants (the whole subliminal messages idea), although who “it” is, no reviewer knows. I think that’s a rather shallow review of the movie, because it’s much more about the physical, sensory experience that the viewer goes through.

The signal itself is played on the big screen, without the surrounding edges of a television screen or a character in the foreground, several times, and it is the kind of sound-image combination that can “trip people out”. At the beginning it’s easy to tell what’s real and what’s someone’s hallucination – the real is stable, the unreal is haphazard, sudden. But by the end everything looks unreal, and at one point, the hallucination appears more real than the reality – or at least, what we want to believe is reality. And to tell the truth, there’s really no way to know by the end if what you’re watching is what has really happened, or what you want to have happened. But I suppose that’s the conundrum of movies. It is fiction. None of the stories can be true. The Signal repeatedly talks about “the signal” being a trick, and it should know – any movie is in and of itself a signal that is a trick, but that’s why it’s called “a willing suspension of disbelief”.

But maybe we’re tricked because it feels so real. It’s not an overtly gory movie, because most points of contact are not shown by the camera, and it thus deviates from a lot of movies like it by focusing on other things – you may not see the shears plunge into the woman’s throat, but you’ll see her body spasm out like a flopping puppet in response. You may not see the man swing his bat at another man’s head, but you will hear the blood drumming in his victim’s ears, and you’ll fall with him and hear the attacker’s voice tinny and distant as voices become when you fall unconscious. It thus transports you more truly into the actual experience of violence than splatterpunk movies do. When you stand up you feel dizzy, as if you’ve been tumbled in a washing machine for a few rounds. How real the fictional can feel – shocking because it’s more “real”, it seems, than our everyday mundane “reality”. And then you’re down the rabbit hole, so to speak.

This also reminds me of Daniel Frampton’s discussion of Heidegger’s philosophy:

Technology is closer than reality, than beauty or nature or life, and we now often experience technology before reality (or reality via technology)…  Films can often be overrun by special effects, leaving  no room for thinking – they can be an easy and quick route to satisfaction…  So meditative thinking is needed to contemplate that which is close to us, that which is becoming bonded to us – this technology.  Thus Heidegger’s solution to the impact of technology is a mode of thinking that uses technology then lets it go.  Meditative thinking lets in technology as much as it leaves it outside; Heidegger calls this a ‘releasement towards things‘, a calmness in the face of charging technology.  And because technology hides its meaning from us, man also needs an ‘openness to the mystery‘.

The audience experience is so strange here partly because of the laughter between the deaths – there are moments of surprisingly funny juxtaposition, like the New Year’s Eve party guest that arrives amid the carnage, prompting a pretend New Year’s Eve party complete with weapons and cocktails, and the audience laughs uproariously – almost to relieve the tension we’ve been holding in – and then when the killing begins, the laughter comes to a sudden, silent stop. It’s an interesting measurement of our sensibilities and “morals”, those things that a lot of grindhouse aficionados claim do not exist, especially not in their kind of amoral, violent movie. Oh, but norms do exist – we aren’t homicidal maniacs, and we do live within the confines of lawful society, even if we do dress in black.

Some interesting tidbits: the idea that there is a sound “past the noise” – the pure, unadulterated sound of the earth itself, that was here long before we were and will continue long after we’re gone, and the idea that that sound is what the characters must listen for to keep sane. Along with that is breathing as an antidote to insanity. That’s a noble solution, but the “heroine” of sorts has a different solution – tuning in to her headphones and dropping out of the world that has gone mad, listening to the exact opposite of the earth’s holistic rhythm – something similar to the evil signal, just ordered into something beautiful (but not authentic). Her solution is to alienate herself rather than to attune herself to the world’s natural rhythm. And I suppose that’s the choice all of us have in response to stress.

And all this about the power of sound, both the kind transmitted by some kind of infernal radio tower and the kind transmitted by the tectonic plates, reminds me of the Taos Hum – an unexplained phenomenon of low-pitched humming heard by some in the northern hemisphere. Is that what we’re supposed to listen for in case the machines go crazy, I wonder. It is true that as I sit here, I am plugged into my laptop, headphones blaring right in my ear, half-watching YouTube. My senses are constantly occupied, and yet sometimes I forget I’m listening to anything, or watching anything – my senses are also numb. It takes the visceral rollercoaster effect of a movie like The Signal to bring this to light.

 

ridin’ on a sin-wagon

From the New York Times review of Grindhouse:

“It’s a great car chase, but it’s also a metaphor. “Grindhouse,” soaked in bloody nostalgia for the cheesy, disreputable pleasures of an older form of movie entertainment, can also be seen as a passionate protest against the present state of the entertainment industry. Those Detroit relics, modified with loving care in someone’s garage or backyard, may waste gas and burn oil, but they seem to have an individuality — a soul — that the homogeneous new vehicles, with their G.P.S. and their cruise control, their computer chips and their air bags, can never hope to match.

And “Grindhouse” argues, with more enthusiasm than coherence, for the integrity of a certain kind of old movie. Not the stuff that finds its way into the Classics section of the video store, but the kind that the guys behind the counter are always talking about: cheap, nasty slasher films, sleazy sexploitation pictures, gimcrack sci-fi epics starring people you never heard of. Just about anything, in short, with the right combination of topless women, gory, pointless violence and inspired amateurism. Also car chases.”

It may make little sense that I like Sin City and not A Clockwork Orange.  But to me, it does make sense.  Sin City does not once claim that something like rape, say, is okay.  When the “heroes” (and the villains are really so awful in Sin City that people who sympathize with them have problems of their own) commit their spectacular violence, it’s always in response to an immediate threat to themselves or their friends and lovers, or as retribution for some sadistic murder that really was committed in cold blood.  I feel that the hipster type of ultra-violence, to borrow the Clockwork phrase, is too stylish and too sympathetic to the bad guys, who are too hip, the movie itself too indulgent in victimization.  Grindhouse cinema is almost always focused on basically sympathetic, good people who have to pick up a machine gun or a machete in order to get payback for something they should definitely get payback for, or to fend off flesh-eating zombies.  There’s no plot to these movies, and little character development.  Good is borderline good, and bad is horrid, not the cuter, more tender “bad boy”.  There’s no aestheticized pretension of looking into the villain’s heads.

I’ll tell you this – I may be a good girl, but I will survive a zombie attack.

 

ok, Jim, I’ve got some bad news.

28 Days Later is a very, very interesting take on the zombie-apocalypse scenario.  There are actually not that many zombies here – and they’re not the “living dead”, either, they’re “infected” with a virus called Rage, and they don’t want to eat people as much as they want to kill them or spread the virus, and once you kill them, they stay dead – there’s more emptiness.  As Selena says, they will never read a book that hasn’t already been written, they will never see a movie that hasn’t already been shot.  Their families are dead, and if they’re lucky, they died peacefully and not as a mutated Infected, shot in the head like a dog.  Shot entirely on digital video, the movie is full of shadows, muted colors, and is not crisp but is “ultra-real”.

While this is usually referred to as a zombie movie, I find that it’s more of a post-apocalypse movie.  More important than the zombies and the gore and violence (which is not in excess here), are the reactions of the survivors in evacuated and decimated Britain, quarantined by the rest of the world.  There is no paranormality here either – Rage is a lab-created disease produced by exposing lab monkeys to endless videos of violence captured on the news, and it is set free when well-meaning animal activists decide to free one of the monkeys, which immediately attacks them.  Which means, in effect, we create our own doom, and the real difference between the Infected and a furious non-Infected (like Jim) is some hold on what we call “humanity” – a sense of humor, a sense of restraint, the ability to love, the ability to do anything that is not for your own gain but someone else’s, motor skills, recognition, memory.  While language is, to some extent, also a facet of humanity, a little Infected boy that attacks Jim says, “I hate you.”  I wasn’t sure if I heard it when I watched it, but it’s confirmed by IMDb.  Which is to say, this disease is basically rage and hatred without anything else.

Equally or maybe more alarming than the Infected themselves are the reactions of the survivors.  Jim is compassionate, reluctant to kill or leave anyone behind.  Selena believes survival is “as good as it gets”.  Frank and Hannah always try to make believe that it’s not really that bad (probably because Hannah’s a child) and they live for each other, having a dynamic very similar to the Man and the Boy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (interestingly, they have parallel fates as well).  The soldiers are a strange mix of excited to be in a warzone where they get to exercise their shooting and bashing skills and experience dangerous adrenaline highs, and depressed because “there is no future”.  Despite issuing a broadcast all over England inviting survivors to come to Manchester, they only protect those who can serve a purpose to them – the men they find are executed, and the women are kept to breed the next generation.  Selena bashes in her teammate when he becomes Infected without hesitation, while Jim ends up killing two soldiers – one who tried to kill him, and one who tried to rape Selena – in cold blood.  Interestingly, Jim also sets the soldiers’ “pet” Infected loose, allowing him to wreak havoc on the base and spread the disease further.  And by that time, I have to admit, I was rooting for the Infected Mailer over the soldiers.

Basically, there’s not that much difference between the Infected and the non-Infected.  The enemy is us.  As U2 says, “and you become a monster so the monster will not break you.”