Movies and Meaning
Symptomisation in 21st Century Film
From a Western perspective, and probably the world’s, the most important events of the 21st century have been the atrocities of 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, and Covid, which started in late 2019. There have been important wars, disasters, movements and political surprises, including the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza, the 2004 Tsunami in South East Asia, and also the 2011 tsunami that was made all the more disastrous by sweeping up against the Fukushima plant and creating the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl. There has been the rise of the far-right in Europe, and MAGA in the US, MeToo and Black Lives Matter, too, and the British public’s decision to leave the European Union, as well as the American electorate’s to make Donald Trump president twice, and the attacks in Paris on 13/11, 2015. All the while, there has been the constant presence of climate disasters and technological development that could upend lives.
If we can agree that these are amongst the most significant events, and the most important issues, there may be less agreement over the best films of the 21st century. Here is a list based on various polls: Mulholland Dr., Hidden, There Will Be Blood, Toni Erdmann, Tar, The Tree of Life, Margaret, Aftersun, Hunger, Wolf of Wall Street, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, The Turin Horse, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Norte, The End of History, Dogville, Elephant, The Headless Woman, The Child, Holy Motors, Burning, The Assistant, Margin Call, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Parasite. The Act of Killing, and Her. One may offer a different top twenty, but what we would probably find is that whatever the greatest films of the last twenty-five years have been, there will be little correlation between the world’s most important events and the best films made over this period. Even when a film looks like it is dealing with a recent crisis, like The Wolf of Wall Street and the financial world, we find it is set in the 1980s and 1990s. Hidden’s main historical detail focuses on a moment in the early 1960s when supporters of Algerian independence were drowned in the Seine. There Will Be Blood may be brilliant in its depiction of the sort of violence committed by a man who believes in manifest destiny, but the film is set in the early years of the 20th century, not the 21st. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days addresses abortion issues, but not when it was made, but during the Ceaușescu dictatorship in the 1980s. It is true that other films have dealt with the immediacy of events: Toni Erdmann explores an international consultancy entering Romania and proposing economic terms sympathetic to global capital, to the detriment of local involvement. Burning is a contemporary account of the haves and have-nots in Korea, and Parasite could be seen likewise. Tar might go down as the great film on cancel culture, and Elephant is a brilliant examination of school shootings, a phenomenon that just wouldn’t go away, as Sandy Hook became the new byword for school spree killings, replacing Columbine. While Elephant was inspired by the school killings at Columbine in the late 1990s, its pertinence didn’t remotely go away in the 21st century, as school shootings became ever more prevalent, and Sandy Hook was the one that personified the phenomenon. Yet few would say Toni Erdmann, Parasite, Tar and Elephant are better films than There Will be Blood, Hidden, Mulholland Dr. The Social Network, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Or if they did, it wouldn’t rest on their need to reflect the immediacy of a given event. Lots of films have been pertinent to the present but have been less important as works of art, including World Trade Centre (9/11), Bombshell (MeToo), Revoir Paris (13/11), Fruitvale Station (Black Lives Matter) and The Impossible (the 2004 Tsunami).
When looking at viewing films through the notion of a zeitgeist, David Bordwell notes that zeitgeists are hard to define, that films seem to be coming from such different positions and perspectives that, if there is one reflecting a collective mind, it must be a very fragmented one, and that even if a film is ‘‘popular that doesn’t mean that people have found the same meaning out of what a movie puts before us.’’ (Minding Movie). J Hoberman would seem to disagree when saying in a collection of reviews, covering mainly American films of the early 21st century, the best were ‘‘ones that seemed more directly responsive to or reflective of the post 9/11 climate.’’ (Film After Film) Perhaps one way of squaring contrary positions, acknowledging that films can reflect a mood, but that moods are contrary, and a film’s success or even apparent pertinence will not necessarily capture it, is to see that cinema is often vaguely symptomatic rather than concretely representational. If we see that film is made up of a representation, a story and a problematic, just because the first is very evident, and the second capable of offering that representation in narrative form, this doesn’t mean that the problematic has been elucidated. If this were so, Bombshell would be a better film than The Assistant, Revoir Paris better than Hidden, and World Trade Centre better than Dogville. Some might insist that with the exception of Bombshell and The Assistant (both MeToo stories), we are comparing apples with oranges, but this will be deemed so if one can only see the representational dissimilarities over the problematic similarities. Rather than seeking the most obvious representation in one’s story and problematic, better perhaps to find a problematic that can then be explored by a given representation and story.
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If all this sounds complicated, let us look briefly at our initial three comparisons. It is true that Bombshell and The Assistant can seem similar: exploitative and misogynistic practises in the workplace. In Bombshell, the film is based on Megyn Kelly’s experiences at Fox News, and how she discovered other women were hit on and insulted by Fox Exec Roger Ailes. The film is full of well-known figures, mainly played by well-known actors. Bill O’Reilly, Rupert Murdoch and Rudy Giuliani are amongst the characters, and Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, Malcolm McDowell and John Lithgow are in the cast. Yet the film lacks the force of The Assistant, even though none of the actors was anywhere near as famous and the characters they were playing were based on fictional personages. While clearly based on aspects of the Harvey Weinstein case, The Assistant remains an oblique account, focusing on the secretary who has a vague idea of what is going on, but remains excluded from this world partly because of her lowly status and also because she wouldn’t be deemed attractive enough to be pestered by the studio boss. While Bombshell is a straightforward study of a case the various Fox women won against the company, it has none of the ricocheting nuances of Kitty Green’s film. The Assistant, by relying on offscreen space and what central character Jane (Julia Garner) can glean from what she half-witnesses and overhears, suggests less the simple presence of an ogre than the complex presence of enablement. It also registers the importance of invisibility and the ambivalence that such a position entails. Jane may be deemed too plain to be lusted over, and while this protects her from the worst, it also reminds her of her non-status. It is as though women can only be objects of desire or indifference, and while the latter is surely better in a world of Weinstein-like predators, it is hardly great for one’s sense of self. With a dull grey palette and framing that suggests a solitude too close to loneliness, Green manages to see a toxic environment that is simultaneously enabling and undermining, aggrandising for some, and belittling for others. But even if you happen to be a woman who receives a little attention from the boss, that is only part of a broader denigratory state, as the only winners will be the men who can hire, fire, make, break, and take sexual advantage of those who pass through their doors. The Boss is a minotaur in his labyrinth, and Green indicates that Jane is one of the doorkeepers, who at the same time doesn’t quite know what is going on behind those doors, and when she takes it to her superior to try to find out, and to reveal more, she is stalled and pressurised. She might initially prefer not to know because a job in the film industry is a coveted thing, and yet nothing indicates she would have been guilty, even if she didn’t try to report what she believed was happening. One reason she can be stalled is that her position is so subordinate that the inner workings of the exploitation remain, for the most part, removed from her purview. It is this that makes Green’s film so interesting: unlike Bombshell, it isn’t a ‘privileged’ account of exploitation, but one that leaves Jane devastated in her impotence, in her lack of power as a woman and as an employee in a coveted industry where men who have power can be covetous. She is yet another victim, someone who finds herself undermined when she does try to express reservations. Green has said, ‘‘I wanted the audience to sense how much power he [the Weinstein figure] has over that workplace, and how corrosive that power was. So it was important to me that there were little bits and pieces of him, like the phone conversations, but I specifically didn’t want anything too graphic.’’ Interviewer Nikki Baughan says ‘‘I’ve seen a lot of people calling this ‘the Weinstein film’ but to me it feels much bigger.’’ Green replies, ‘‘That’s my worry with the Weinstein label, the idea of ‘Oh, it only happens at the Weinstein company, it doesn’t happen anywhere else’.’’ (Sight and Sound) Bombshell falls into representational expectation and can be described as that case against Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. It has brand recognition but loses problematic specificity. In other words, it becomes so much about the personalities involved, as it tells the stories of the women taking the men on, that it lacks the focus on the problematic of power that The Assistant makes central. It becomes no more than a secondary aspect of the story, partly because it has to be faithful to the events it depicts rather than the problematic it explores.
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In Hidden, there is an exchange between the white and wealthy central character, Georges (Daniel Auteuil), and a black young man on a bike. They argue, as Georges insists the cyclist is hurtling down a one-way street in the wrong direction, and director Michael Haneke presents it as a minor incident but a major flashpoint. It symptomises racial tensions in Paris, but is of no great narrative import. The violence lies elsewhere, in the past, and in the heads of those who suffered the consequences after those bodies were thrown in the Seine. Haneke doesn’t seek cause and effectual violence, but its symptomatic form. Films on major events like World Trade Centre and 9/11, The Impossible and the tsunami, and Revoir Paris and November 13th, all show the characters reacting to the situation, even if Revoir Paris also focuses on events some time after the attacks too. They capture the immediacy, but part of that focus perhaps means the societal retreats as the action inevitably becomes foregrounded. However, if we claim not only that Hidden is a much better film than Revoir Paris, but more provocatively a better film about the Paris attacks, this might initially seem absurd yet be symptomatically accurate. It would be absurd because Hidden came out in 2005, a decade before November 13th, and yet Haneke pinpoints well the societally fragile, which could indicate that the later attacks, while atrocious, needn’t be inexplicable. In Hidden, here we have Majid, whose parents worked for Georges’ parents, disappearing in the Algerian war protests, and they intended to adopt Majid. But Georges managed to convince his parents not to do so by lying about and manipulating Majid’s behaviour. Georges has gone on to be a successful TV journalist, while Majid lives in a small, suburban council flat.
Georges reckons the tapes he gets sent reflect Majid’s resentment, and while for various reasons this is never proven, what it does suggest is Georges’ guilty conscience. While he sees Majid seeking revenge, all we know is that it shows that Georges understands Majid would have reasons to seek it. Haneke undermines cause and effect, all the better to bring out the symptomatic element of a divided Paris, with Majid on one side of that divide and Georges on the other. The divisions might be different from those in the early 1960s, when Majid’s parents died, and Majid was sent away, but the power dynamic and the privilege Georges enjoys that Majid does not are still there. Haneke extends into the theme of the film, a scene in the middle of his earlier work, set in Paris, Code Unknown. In both works, he even uses the same actors (Juliet Binoche, who plays Georges’ wife Anne in Hidden), and the actors who play Majid (Maurice Benichou) and his son (Walid Afkir). In Code Unknown, Afkir starts harassing customers on the train, spits on Binoche’s face, and a stranger (Benichou) intervenes. It is a scene that, on the one hand, shows Afkir as a youthful troublemaker and Benichou as a kindly man intervening, but it also illustrates the sort of tensions that would play out one way in Hidden, and in another terrible way in 2015. We have no idea why Afkir acts so obnoxiously as he does in Code Unknown (it his only scene in the film), just as we don’t know in Hidden whether he has been involved in sending the tapes to Georges. That would be to reduce the film to causes and effects, when Haneke wants to symptomise resentments, all the better to understand the tensions in a given city, over motivations in specific individuals. While we needn’t pretend the events of November are easy to comprehend, whatever inkling of apprehension we might glean can better be found in Hidden and Code Unknown, as they try to take the temperature of a Paris that shows a divided nation, than in Revoir Paris. This can be read in Haneke’s films as an argument for the stupidity of large-scale immigration, or the idiocy of social inequality, but whatever Haneke’s personal views (as he no doubt leans towards the latter), the films’ purpose is to pinpoint the specifics of the problem. Few watching either Code Unknown or Hidden would be likely to insist Haneke isn’t addressing a problem.
Yet this seems a little different from addressing a subject, and perhaps the danger arises when someone addresses a subject with an issue, as though both the subject is too direct, and the issue too pronounced, for the nuance of the aesthetic to become evident. It isn’t that ‘big’ subjects can’t be confronted, but the angle upon them needs to be oblique enough for the very purpose of the aesthetic in its original meaning to become evident: to perceive or to feel. If it becomes too representatively obvious, and the issue too morally pronounced, that angle will struggle to produce a work of art. This is why films on large subjects, works like Hiroshima, mon amour, Shoah and Come and See, needn’t fall into an immediate representational pertinence, nor into issue-driven proclamations. They bide their time before attending to the event, and refuse the homilies that Hiroshima was an atrocity, the Holocaust a terrible thing that ought never to happen again, and that the brave and heroic Soviet people suffered terribly during WWII. All claims might be valid, but they wouldn’t quite be aesthetic: they would risk foreshortening the act of perception and feeling. A filmmaker’s obligation isn’t to represent the event (this is one reason we have journalism), nor to proclaim right and wrong – we have politicians, teachers and preachers, in various forms of good and bad faith, to do that.
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Speaking of Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, both films made in the early 2000s, von Trier said that he was interested in sacrifice in the former and revenge in the latter. ‘‘What can we say about sacrifice? […] Someone who sacrifices himself or herself is at least giving their existence some sort of meaning – if you can see a meaning in doing something for others, for an idea, a belief.’’ (Trier on von Trier). ‘‘I could see myself making a film about revenge. I thought the most interesting thing would be to come up with a story where you build up everything leading to the act of vengeance.’’ (Trier on Von Trier) Are these two sides of the same coin, or completely different modes of exchange? In the late 90s, Hollywood offered a handful of martyr narratives: Saving Private Ryan, Titanic, Braveheart and Armageddon, all showing characters sacrificing themselves to the greater good. But they also contain the sacrificial within the pragmatic: the love of another, the needs of a nation, the wish to save the planet. Any martyrdom is secondary to the heroic, as their sacrifices allow them to be remembered, venerated, or even worshipped. (The model is usually, at source, Jesus Christ) Von Trier has often wondered what if this search for meaning he discusses becomes evident as the meaninglessness that sits behind the deed, with the viewer unable to distinguish between the necessity of sacrificing oneself and the desire to do so. In Armageddon, etc., this isn’t a desire the characters possess; simply a situational reality they find themselves in. Dancer in the Dark (like von Trier’s Breaking the Waves before it), wonders if there is an aspect of one’s being that wills sacrifice, and finds an opportunity to bring it to fruition. To say Bess and Selma (Bjork) are virtuous characters wouldn’t be wrong, but it might be to miss the point, or to insist on a profound one. What makes the self capable of such a sacrifice, and does the person possess something close to an innate need, rather than merely a set of circumstances that means they will die for that greater good? This isn’t to undermine the worthiness of such a demise, and many have died in war or for a burgeoning nation. Yet such films wouldn’t be about sacrifice; they would be about the struggles the characters find themselves in, and which they accept may be well be the death of them.
None of these characters need concern themselves with what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas sees as fundamental. He reckons there is in being ‘‘the dis-interestedness for-the- other of holiness [and] is recognised by every human being as a value and that this recognition defines the human.’’ (Is it Righteous to Be?) Levinas reckons that neither social organisations nor institutions can produce or assure holiness, but there holiness is. Characters like Bess and Selma possess this characteristic, one that no amount of pragmatism can explain away. Yet for Levinas and von Trier, this might be at the root of the ethical questions most films contain within narratives of societal and historical necessity. There is nothing inexplicable about William Wallace dying for his country, nor the captain in Saving Private Ryan taking on a dangerous mission to rescue the titular character. They sacrifice their lives to a principle that not everyone may agree on (the dastardly English or the Nazi Germans in these instances), but that will nevertheless be far from an absurd sacrifice that many will see in the deaths in these von Trier films. Bess chooses to believe she can return her husband to health by dying herself, and Selma refuses to provide the information which will help her avoid the death penalty after she murders a man who tried to rob her, and refuses, too, the help of the lawyer because she wants the money to go on her son’s eye operation. The film presents Selma as bloody-minded, while at the same time showing she has something to die for as she has remained true to herself, even if that bodily self will go to the gallows. Von Trier films the execution in harrowing detail as he moves between the narratively melodramatic, the musically exuberant (the film makes much of Bjork and her music), and the brutally realistic when it comes to the hanging.
In Breaking the Waves, made in 1996, the film emphasises sacrifice without revenge. In Dancer in the Dark, it combines both because though Selma is willing to die for unpragmatic reasons, the State is willing to execute her for pragmatic ones. She killed a man, the State believes in capital punishment, and so she will be hanged. In Dogville, the emphasis is on revenge over sacrifice. Grace goes to a small town and hides out from gangsters. Initially, she helps out and is treated well; then becomes exploited and is treated so badly that, by the end of the film, she will gun them all down with the aid of her gangster father’s henchmen. If we might find aspects of Levinas in Dancer in the Dark, we can see elements of Rene Girard in Dogville. Girard insists that Christ on the cross, saying, ‘Father, forgive them, they do not know what they do’, should be interpreted literally. “For if myths recognized the facts, the innocence of the scapegoat would become visible, and violence would lose its cathartic efficacy.’’ (All Desire is a Desire for Being) In Dogville (like Dancer in the Dark, filmed on a Scandinavian sound stage but set in the US), Grace becomes a scapegoat as she is used and abused, and central to scapegoating is that it becomes collective outrage that draws justification less from a given ethos than from communal agreement. It is partly why, at the end of Dogville, Grace kills everyone. This isn’t only because everybody has treated her badly, but also because it proves she can be as indiscriminate as the treatment she has received. She doesn’t treat each wrongdoing singularly, but sees each act by the locals, however negligible or atrocious, as all part of a collective communal will.
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If Girard is right that the community does not know consciously what it is doing, then von Trier might reply that Grace knows exactly what she is doing. She takes revenge lucidly; they exploited her thoughtlessly. But, unlike in most revenge dramas, the director isn’t justifying revenge; he is asking for its lucid realisation. After all, one might say that what Girard says about the scapegoat is pertinent also to revenge narratives, a 21st-century genre if ever there was one. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Kill Bill, Oldboy, Taken, John Wick, Django Unchained just a few examples. But how many of them explore the question of revenge as von Trier’s film surely does? Just as we have talked about the pragmatics of sacrifice to be found in late ‘90s films, so we can see the pragmatics of revenge in many a 21st-century work. The films usually create a narrative excuse, rather than probing the question. Graham Fuller proposed that a work like The History of Violence can be seen as a 9/11 revenge allegory, in which the central character, Tom Stall, is a military that heads east (Iiaq) and makes a pre-emptive strike against insurgent forces. Fuller admits, Cronenberg’s ‘‘allegories have never been so crude as the one I’ve just proposed.’’ (Sight and Sound) But what matters is that it provokes the allegorical, not that it can be defined by it. Like Dogville, Cronenberg’s film offers a symptomatic account that can help us understand 9/11 without either representing it or symbolising it. This is why we talk of symptomisation over the literal or the symbolic. Such an approach problemitises the question without turning it into an issue, nor without reducing it to comprehension on the direct or abstract level. When at the end of The History of Violence, Tom Stall returns home, once again the violent man that he once was in the past and where he had another name, he enters the house a different figure, not just because they all know he is not Stall but Joey. It is also and more especially because they have seen he is capable of a violence that turns a happy family into a wary one. The situation Tom finds himself in isn’t so very different from the heroes in The Hurt Locker and American Sniper – men who have fought for their country and struggled to contend with home life. The Hurt Locker is a very good film, and American Sniper is a good one, but the directness of their approach can eschew the residual aspect that leaves us asking questions about the nature of violence, questions that Dogville and The History of Violence incorporate.
The Hurt Locker and American Sniper might not insist on the cathartic release typical of revenge thrillers, but this is partly due to their acceptance that reality most play a role in the drama the films play out. Their representational directness doesn’t quite allow for the purging a genre piece often offers, but neither does it allow for the question over what violence is and what revenge happens to be. Dogville and The History of Violence are very different works, with von Trier leaning towards a combination of Brechtian distanciation and melodramatic narrative, and Cronenberg adopting numerous genre tropes about a man hiding his true self from his family as he then goes on to show that when a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, he is about the best there is at administering violence. In very different ways, they reject the representational realism of actual events and their depiction, and yet arrive at a deeper understanding of certain incidents as a paradoxical consequence.
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In a different way, Margaret is another good example. It was filmed several years after 9/11, but for various reasons wasn’t released until a decade after the New York events. Set in the city, there are several direct and indirect allusions to the Twin Towers. But the catastrophe it depicts has nothing to do with the World Trade Centre, and instead focuses on a bus accident that kills a pedestrian after the central character distracts the driver. While there are discussions in the classroom about the attacks, and where we might feel that the shots of the New York skyline that director Kenneth Lonergan lingers over might now seem depleted, the film chiefly captures an atmosphere in the city that feels tense, caustic and harsh. Some may say this is just New York, and plenty of films before 9/11 captured a place that appeared to be living on the edge of its nerves, from Taxi Driver to Dog Day Afternoon, The French Connection to Do the Right Thing. But Margaret is like a Woody Allen film (it is set in the Upper West Side) that has sitting behind it a tension it doesn’t quite understand, and while Lisa (Anna Paquin) wants everybody to comprehend the magnitude of this accident, and puts her feelings at the centre of every scene, it is as though everyone else, with rare exceptions, is no less anxious and self-absorbed. Lonergan has made a film that doesn’t show the collapse of the Twin Towers, but instead a terrible but relatively minor incident, while also alluding to the much greater one. This isn’t to suggest that the bus accident isn’t horrific – of course it is. Yet it is to insist that it would impact a small number nervously. This would include the central character, Lisa, the bus driver, and perhaps the best friend of the pedestrian that Lisa gets to know. But it wouldn’t be a permeatingly traumatic one, and here we have a film set in a city not long after the Twin Towers came down, and Lisa cannot quite seem to countenance why what is happening to her isn’t seen as more consequential than it is. While the film makes much of her feelings as a late teenager who feels so strongly because of her age, we might add that others are unable to entertain the seriousness of the event partly because of one of much greater magnitude several years before, one that has left a hole in people’s lives just as it has left a hole in the skyline. Sachin Dharwadker was not alone in believing the film ‘‘the finest portrait of post-9/11 New York.’’ (Substack) Would it have been so fine had it focused more directly on 9/11 and where the event hadn’t been the bus accident but the toppling of the towers? By our reckoning, probably not.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t fine films made directly about a given moment, but if we take All the President’s Men and The Deer Hunter as examples, both are great less because the former addresses Watergate head-on, or that the latter insists on confronting the Vietnam War so soon after the US troops pulled out. It is that the director Alan J. Pakula allows All the President’s Men to be permeated by the paranoiac atmosphere he also accessed in his earlier works, Klute and The Parallax View. Equally, The Deer Hunter focuses less on the collapse of the US troops in the war than on the collapse of the community and the psychology of one of its members. It uses the war as a pretext for comprehending friendship, and for musing over how certain events devastate a small steel town, no matter if the war took place thousands of miles from home. Director Michael Cimino registers its impact on the quiet misery of those who can’t quite understand the war, and those who return, who wouldn’t know how to explain it. If it is a great film, it isn’t because it is about the Vietnam War, but about War and Community, friendship and its limits. It may use Vietnam as a pretext, which might have enraged various commentators who wished for a film on the conflict, but it allows us to understand why it can hold up as a work of art. Sylvia Shin Huey Chong noted that ‘‘opinions fell precisely along this fault line, with those who admired the film emphasizing its artistic value and those who disliked it focusing on its politics.’’ (Cinema Journal) There is the risk that a film so flagrantly (mis)using artistic license in its depiction of events can become a work of ‘‘reactionary jingoism’’, a phrase Marsha Kinder used towards The Deer Hunter in Film Comment. But this might seem more a term of abuse than a piece of close analysis, the sort of phrase that would describe The Green Berets rather than Cimino’s film. There is the fear that a work that uses historical reality for fictional fabrication flirts with simplification and distortion (and certainly The Deer Hunter could be accused of the latter with its depiction of Russian Roulette). But it also symptomatically captures an aspect of the US fighting distant wars and leaving communities in their own country, both oblivious and devastated simultaneously. No film quite captures that contradiction, and one still evident as the US continues on its numerous foreign adventures.
Artistic licence is a term that can cover innumerable sins, but it really depends on what that licence is serving. If it functions as little more than an excuse to avoid nuance, under the claim that it seeks dramatic narrativization, we might see a filmmaker’s bad faith, an insistence that events are too complex to be offered with subtlety, and they must inevitably adopt cruder methods to convey aesthetic purpose. Yet if there are other works that manage nuance, this seems a poor excuse. The sort of artistic licence a von Trier insists upon isn’t to claim that he must rotoscope his work into fictional finesse, but that artistic licence is close to Nietzsche’s sovereign right of the ego, as he will take responsibility for whatever the result happens to be, by making it so obviously on his own terms. This isn’t because he wants to ignore reality, but wishes to find in it its deepest implications, and would perhaps echo Girard on this point. Girard reckons ‘’the notion that the beliefs of all mankind are a grand mystification that we alone have succeeded in penetrating is a hardy perennial – as well as being, to say the least, somewhat arrogant.’’ (Violence and the Sacred) As Girard questions the complacency of science in knowing it all, he sees that it isn’t always understanding we need, but comprehension. The aesthetic work doesn’t allow us to understand a problem, but to see the complexity of its implications. An artistic licence that simplifies this relationship, feeling it has to remove ambiguities, all the better to arrive at dramatic assertiveness, is just the flipside of the one that feels it has to be an accurate depiction of the moment it addresses. Both are abdications of aesthetic responsibility, even if only one of them claims artistic licence.
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Our proposal is that many of the best films of the 21st century neither fall too easily into representing real events, nor insist on escaping from them into generic predictability. There may be moments in several of the great films of the 21st century where we believe this might look to be the case, and A History of Violence’s flirtation with genre occasionally results in clumsy consummation, evident perhaps in the scene where Tom/Joey takes out his brother in the latter’s body-guarded home. Equally, one might note that a few of the great works have been based on real events, including Hunger, The Wolf of Wall Street, Zodiac, Elephant, and Margin Call. But of these four, only Margin Call was immediately representational. The others were set in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. This doesn’t mean that this greater distance will inevitably result in better work, and one might even argue that on occasion it can show timidity on the director’s part as they find an historical moment that needn’t cause too much controversy, as everyone can agree that the Nazis are bad, Stalinism was horrific, and the Allies winning World War II was a good thing. But focusing on the past can also give a film an analogous distance by finding in the past an aspect of a country’s preoccupations that we might see hasn’t gone away.
If There Will Be Blood has made so many top tens of the 21st century, including in The New York Times, Rolling Stone and IndieWire, it rests not only on the notion that, according to Adam Nayman, “it might be the most visually striking American feature of the last decade.” (Reverse Shot) But also because, as Jeff Reichert says in the same magazine: ‘’The film casts a sidelong glance at the uncomfortable bind that would be the New Deal; introducing the hand of government as a corrective to the laws of supply and demand was a necessary fix at the time (and remains so), but only induced that ever-shifting djinn that is commerce to find new ways to master government, thus leaving us with the entirely sickened democratic process we endure currently. Today Daniel Plainview might head mercenary group Blackwater.” The film is about a US that hasn’t gone away, focusing on a workaholic who always wants more, and doesn’t know what to do with himself if he isn’t pursuing his personal manifest destiny. When Nayman says that “The deeper that Daniel Plainview digs into the Earth’s core, the larger his dominion grows on its surface; as his ambition (and profit margins) spiral ever higher, his soul sinks further into the muck”, we might think of the present administration, which has in it: “The world’s richest man. The owner of the Houston Rockets. The former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. These are just some of the 12 billionaires — not including President Donald Trump — who have held roles in the administration this year. In total, they’re worth $390.6 billion as of March.” This comes from the Washington Post, whose owner (Mark Zuckerberg) may not be in the cabinet, but did get a front row seat at the inauguration, and who, after it, insisted that the paper's op-eds “would be changing. From now on, their purpose would be solely to champion personal liberties and free markets.’’ (Guardian)
Plainview is, of course, in the cinematic tradition of Charles Foster Kane (Citizen Kane), Michael Corleone (The Godfather) and Noah Cross (Chinatown), a person who doesn’t so much want it all as a figure who doesn’t quite know what he wants but arrives at a degraded human state. Obviously, the biblical imperative comes to mind, “for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’’ But perhaps it needs reformulated for our times, and with far deeper pessimism, when we know that “twelve of the world’s wealthiest billionaires produce more greenhouse gas emissions from their yachts, private jets, mansions and financial investments than the annual energy emissions of 2m homes.” (Guardian) What is it to have no soul and be determined to lose the whole world might be more appropriate, as the billionaires will either deny climate change, believe it isn’t man-made, will prep for their own survival, or believe it doesn’t really matter if they can disappear to Mars. Their claims seem a mixture of denial, delusion, disavowal, and dislocation. Invoking Plainview in a piece chiefly on Bezos, the writer Noah Hawley says, “the world has always been run by rich men. The robber barons of the Gilded Age were known for their ruthlessness in the accumulation.” But while “today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is happening – a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history.’’ (Atlantic) Things are no longer in plain view, so to speak, but the same principle behind There Will Be Blood remains intact, and the need to consume the planet’s resources for personal profit is no less manifest. Perhaps a lot more so. When Plainview explains how he has stolen the resources from neighbouring land, he describes it as drainage, and draws an analogy with a milkshake, saying that he uses his straw to drink the other man’s beverage. The drink is still in front of the other person, but he isn’t the one benefiting from it, as Plainview has put pipes under the other’s land and drained it dry.
What matters isn’t land rights but force and cunning, and we might see it all over again in an American administration that insists, if it has the cash and the brawn, it can take resources from any part of the world it likes. Some might question whether it has the brains, but maybe this is where Hawley’s comment is useful: the Plainviews were in touch with reality; they weren’t relying on mediated feedback from channels that were in agreement with them on principle, or on the lack of them. At the beginning of There Will Be Blood, Plainview is a man of the earth, as we see him trying to extract gold, and we view this as someone who, while he might have no interest in environmental issues, nevertheless works clearly with the immediacy of an environment. From one perspective, we could say that director Paul Thomas Anderson has made things easy on himself. Those first few minutes digging underground are both wordless and tense, the grunts and groans of a man with astonishing will, while the grunts and groans of Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg might have little dramatic purpose, even if another important contemporary American director, David Fincher, offered a version of the Zuckerberg story in The Social Network. But, as Elle Palmer says, “The Social Network wasn’t really the story of Facebook. Instead, it was a story of narcissism, friendship and betrayal.” (Far Out Magazine) The risk of being too close to the times is avoided by making sure it elaborates on its theme.
One of the risks involved in the contemporary, rather like in ‘true life’ stories, is the need to tell it as it is. But what is it, and does the filmmaker, attending to their moment, flirt with the problem of being so close to it that fidelity to the subject matter leaves them unable to extract from the moment the theme that makes it more than a newspaper headline? Some might insist that certain events are naturally dramatic, yet from a certain perspective, that drama will never be as powerfully conveyed as its unfolding in real time. Whether it is the planes going into the Twin Towers or the enormous waves rolling onto the beach and destroying buildings as they moved inexorably through the land in the 2004 tsunami, nothing is more dramatic than unfolding, catastrophic reality. It is true that fiction films can give such events angles that were missing because the footage shot capturing them were primitive; at best shot from a news crew camera; at worst somebody’s mobile phone or video device. It is the difference between fictional access over documentary reserve: the fiction film will usually have a large budget and also another version of artistic license. If it wants to show people in the building under duress, or crosscut between the towers collapsing and a loved one nearby, knowing that their partner is in one of them, this is all part of fiction’s possibilities. But it might also seem to be doing nothing more than fleshing out the bare bones of an event that cut to the very bone in its unfolding. Films like World Trade Centre and The Impossible offer us inside stories, but that is to give human purpose to events that can seem so alienating, when what is more useful aesthetically is to understand the tenor of the time the event encapsulates, over the stories it can tell because of the drama in the event itself.
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If Romanian film in the 21st century has been so important, it rests not on natural drama but on the typically mundane, even if, from a certain perspective, the stories it tells contain the dramatic. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Graduation, 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective are all (de)pressing stories, but the emphasis rests on the depressing rather than the pressing, with the directors seeking to find in their subjects a symptom of their society more than the force of their given narratives. This doesn’t mean that the films aren’t tense on the narrational level. In 4 Months…the central character helps her friend secure an illegal abortion; in Lazarescu, medics try to secure a hospital place for the very ill eponymous character; in Graduation, a father determines to get his daughter to pass an exam, and tries to find someone who will allow her to get the results she needs. In 12:08 East of Bucharest, a panel is pressed on whether they were protesting before Ceausescu’s fall or celebrating just after it. A key difference between heroism and cowardice. In Police, Adjective, a young cop, Cristi, trails a teen hash-head, and the authorities want him arrested, no matter if this most minor of offences will ruin the teen’s life.
It would be a stretch to claim any of the films are exciting, even if 4 Months… potentially accesses the most conventional suspense in any of them, and offers the most risk. But if this drama is generally absent, this is because the directors want symptomisation over dramatization. They want to understand the society rather than an individual psychology, and while central to drama is surely the motivations of a character and the pursuit of their goal, New Romanian Cinema often wonders what societal erosions are taking place around the deed. Whether the action is seen as a positive one (doing everything to help your friend secure the abortion she insists upon), an ambivalent one (helping your daughter pass an exam through accepting bribes after an assault leaves her traumatised and perhaps unable to concentrate), or a negative one (locking up a teen for smoking a bit of weed), the films ask not only what is the character doing, but what is society doing? A viewer might insist that they think in the context of the good, ambivalent and negative actions we proposed, that they don’t see it that way. They reckon abortion is wrong, getting someone to pass an exam anyway they can isn’t so bad when the real crime is her abuse, and that, of course, people should be arrested, no matter how minor the drug offence. Yet that would be to impose one’s own values onto the films, and also to pay too much attention to the given acts themselves. The abortion, the bribes and the possible arrest are all contained in questions that indicate the given deeds are premises. That is, less situations the characters must overcome, but circumstances which the filmmaker hopes to understand.
What is it saying about Romanian society that a physician has to cajole others into helping his daughter get into Cambridge after the attack on her? Why in the 1980s set 4 Months…does everybody have an agenda and a focused self-interest instead of questioning the policies of Ceausescu that made abortion illegal? In Police, Adjective, why can’t the authorities see that the young central character has a point when he says smoking a joint is a negligible offence in other European countries? Now this doesn’t mean that the films are insular accounts of one nation; more that by focusing on one country they can symptomise its problems, but also allude to both the specific and the universal. The specific resides in trying to understand a nation that for many years was under a dictatorship, and what that might do to people: how it can bring out their conformist instincts and, at the same time, their need for surreptitious advantage. This is clearly the case in 4 Months… and Police, Adjective. The characters might seem antithetical (an abortionist working against the law; a police chief insistently practising it). But it isn’t only that the roles share the same actor (Vlad Ivanov); the characters share the same characteristics. Both are sticklers demanding obedience, taking advantage of a state (whether a dictatorial one, as in 4 Months…or an antediluvian one in Police, Adjective) to get what they want, without this at all indicating what might be usually deemed as ambition. They both accept their lot and insist on remaining top dog, but the latter feels like a resentful revelation of the former: a one-upmanship that isn’t likely to take them very far, but will always reveal there are those beneath them. Is this what the physician in Graduation wishes his daughter to escape, with a place in an august Western university awaiting her? Or at least it would have been if the daughter hadn’t been attacked, hurt her wrist and now needs all the back-scratching bribery that Romanian society is deemed to do so well.
Obviously, if the films were no more than comments on Romania, they wouldn’t have become as internationally important as they have. As Carmen Gray noted, “When Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007, it crystallised a sense that something remarkable was happening in Romania.” (BFI) Yet nothing that has happened in Romania would be consistent with those events with which we opened the article. How can such an apparently small country, where none of the major events of the first part of the 21st century took place, prove so important cinematically? One answer would reside in the form, with new Romanian cinema often adopting a long-take, indolent style that can give the impression that the filmmaker is too idle to develop an approach that will involve a viewer in the events. It is a correlative form of the inertia the characters frequently exhibit, or the societal torpor they feel caught within. As the camera often bobs around at a decent distance from the action, it seems an onlooker caught between indifference and curiosity, but not quite capable of showing concern. It possesses a gawping quality, an ambulance-chasing aspect that doesn’t have the energy for the chase. The style allows us to understand in the very form the difficulties involved in intervention, as it also gives immense weight to shots that finally indicate that it isn’t a slothful style, but a penetrating one. It insists the shot possesses a certain gravity that many shots in film do not.
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To explain in detail what we mean by this would be a digression too lengthy, but when a work chiefly tells its story, it needn’t concern itself with the weight of the shot but chiefly its propulsion. An establishing shot of a building doesn’t expect us to concern ourselves with its architectural specificity; when a person is shot by the hero, the film isn’t inclined to linger on the victim’s suffering, and, in a car chase, the pedestrians in the way are only offered the briefest of concerns. But potentially all these moments could have weight as the shot becomes about the architecture, about the pain, and about the bystander. But to give them too much weight would risk hampering the propulsion. Romanian films of the 21st century are happy to undermine the propulsive, all the better to reveal aspects of the symptomatic. When 4 Months… lengthily shows the central character trying to arrange things at a hotel, the shots accept the petty bureaucratic slowness of the process as the receptionist is yet another figure capable of practising one-upmanship in the most mundane of circumstances. In The Death of Mr Lazarescu, the gap between the urgency of the viewer’s wish to see the titular character getting the help he needs, and the system’s slowness in helping him, becomes not only or even especially a source of tension, but frustration, as the film emphasises, like many of the works, not dramatic suspense but symptomatic exasperation – the difficulty of getting things done while trying to navigate procedures impeding that ability. While many a cop film will have procedural pedants who won’t let the Dirty Harrys of the world take the law into their own hands, the point is usually that they do: the bureaucracy is just there as a minor impediment to the slaying of the guilty. In Romanian cinema, bureaucracy is a major obstacle, as it slows everything down and shows the workings (or failed workings) of the state over the propulsive acts of the individual. While the cop film shows hindrances, the Romanian film illustrates impediments so significant that they represent state inertia.
One reason why this is important to 21st century film is that it offers a particular type of what has commonly and too hastily been referred to as slow cinema. This could include anybody from Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) to Bela Tarr (The Turin Horse), and any film with events deemed elongated beyond their immediate narrative purpose. In the Romanian films, it isn’t because the image is slow, though it often is, but more especially that societal action is slow, and hence the specific type of frustration the films elicit. This might not always be the type of frustration people feel in their 21st-century lives, but the issue is exasperation, not the form it takes, which is central to our understanding of symptomisation. “Technology frustration refers to the negative emotions stemming from difficulties in using various tech solutions or digital tools”, David Wilson says. “These feelings may arise from repeated software failures, slow performance, or complex updates. Understanding this frustration is essential for implementing effective tech strategies that improve your business operations, from cloud computing to mobile apps.” (Small Business Trends) Or it might be waiting for an appointment with a specialist, in a waiting room with a dozen people ahead of you in the queue. One confronts what feels like impassive forces, and if people often find the Romanian films funny, no matter how dark the subject matter, it rests partly on the analogous sense of frustration they invoke. In systems that are increasingly two-tier, whether from private jets to public transport, from private health to public care, it can seem like money buys frustration alleviation, as if Kaka’s metaphysical propositions can be channelled into everyday vexation. When Lazarescu is passed from hospital to hospital, when the friend tries to deal with a receptionist in 4 Months… the issues the films explore may possess an urgency, but their approach to them reveals the sort of everyday feelings of annoyance that can make getting through our day exhausting.
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Yet this isn’t at all the same as saying the films are symbolic. The symbol is an abstraction, while symptomisation is, if you like, an extraction. Film may often use symbolism, but it usually does so by absorbing it into the concrete: oranges in The Godfather, the water tank in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the sled in Citizen Kane can all be read symbolically. The oranges are a symbol of death (as they foreshadow various characters’ demises), the tank in Cuckoo’s Nest, the demand for freedom, and the sled in Citizen Kane, a lost childhood. When it doesn’t become absorbed, like the little girl in red in Schindler’s List, or the dinosaur in The Tree of Life, some might find it gratuitous. At best, it augments the visual texture of a film and manages to encapsulate in images the film’s theme; at worst, it imposes upon the diegesis a meaning that can seem external to it. Symptomisation instead permeates the material, finding in an event a primary feeling or first principle that can allude to various situations far beyond its immediate representation. Haneke’s Hidden manages to symptomize the tensions in France before November 13th, just as Margaret symptomizes tensions in New York after 9/11.
These are moods and feelings that precede and follow major events but that indicates a situation is manifest in a given deed but cannot be contained by it. By this reckoning, the importance of the Romanian films doesn’t rest on their ability to pinpoint failures in the country’s systems, but to arrive at first principles over human dignity, and also primary affects when it comes to feeling thwarted in one’s attempt to get things done. If one wishes to understand inertial states that the state will be happy to exacerbate, one can do worse than look at Romanian cinema. But this doesn’t at all mean such states are not to be found in other nations; in other systems, just that the Romanian filmmakers were particularly brilliant in exploring them. They took a general filmic notion (decelerated, or slow cinema), found situations in Romanian society where the form could be utilised, and arrived at a profound understanding of a certain type of mood and feeling. There may be symbols to be extracted in these films, just as one can find them no doubt in Hidden and Margaret, but the works aren’t important because of any symbolic detail (the dead cock a symbol of French failure; the sleeping pills the central character takes a symbol of his denial to face reality as examples in Hidden), but they aren’t important because of any symbolism one can find as abstraction, but because of the extractive symptomisation.
Let us take as our two final examples The Headless Woman and Burning. Some reviews of the former film insisted on a variation of symbolism, seeing an allegory. Becky Kuckla believed, “keeping with Martel’s preference for heavy-handed yet incredibly effective symbolism, Veronica’s accident can be read as an allegory for the rich-poor gap in Argentina, at its height in the 1970s when The Headless Woman is set.” (Vague Visages) It seems the film is set much closer to the present (a mobile phone proves important to a key event) and, if anything, Martel would seem less interested in an allegory on a terrible moment in contemporary Argentinean history that incorporated the Dirty War and the Disappeared, than in suggesting that Argentine culture more generally works off a continuing project of cowardice and lies, one that will protect a bourgeois standard of living. If this was a political problem in the 1970s, as people accepted that neighbours might suddenly disappear, while the military junta took those they deemed radical out of their homes and dropped them from planes, then Martel wonders what type of self-protection and complacency sits behind Argentinean society more generally. Focusing on the extreme example (the junta), or allegorising that extremity, doesn’t quite capture the symptomatic. Martel addresses the sort of everyday complicity that can lead people to accept the dictatorial, just as in a different way, Romania did. While Puiu, Mungiu and others’ films often took the stubborn form of self-interest, in Martel’s The Headless Woman, it manifests itself as class protection. In the film, the central character Vero (María Onetto) may have run over a young boy, but others insist this is all in her head and, at the same time, remove any traces that might look as if she is culpable.
Martel’s film keeps things vague and nuanced on the narrative level, but what the director wants to make clear is that whether Vero is or isn’t responsible, she is someone who is a citizen above suspicion because she belongs to a class that oughtn’t to go to jail for such things, especially when a person found dead is indigenous. Martel says, “You can have doubts about whether she kills someone or not. But the film is very clear with how she decides to deal with this possibility, and how the family and social class decide to react to the situation. There is a beautiful and at the same time horrifying mechanism in society: if you want to protect someone, you can disown his or her responsibility across his or her class.” (Reverse Shot) This might look like pusillanimous class protection, and perhaps something similar took place during the military junta. But that wouldn’t make it an allegory of such an event; it would indicate the potential continuation of societal aspects that allow for the military to hold power over the people because of such characteristics. This doesn’t mean it is unique to Argentine society, especially when Chile and Brazil during a similar period had military dictatorships, but Martel’s purpose is to see it as a characteristic of the Argentine bourgeoisie, and finds in Vero’s situation a way of exploring this state. To reduce it to the allegorical would risk undermining both its singularity and its symptomatic comprehension of behaviour, a moment that can seem negligible next to the years of the Disappeared (just as the bus accident in Margaret can seem so next to 9/11), yet where it can be no less effective in comprehending certain characteristics. The risk of taking an extreme moment is that it suggests the out-of-character, while a relatively minor one in the broader scheme of things, like the bus accident in Margaret, the accident with the car here, can open up into a broader understanding of character. If New Yorkers are irritated people at the same time traumatised in the aftermath of 9/11, we might see those around Vero as determined to protect their own when it looks like something might undermine their community. An extreme event can suggest fear, while a less substantial one might register a broader cowardice.
This isn’t a negligible distinction, because the latter risks leading to the former, where a country, for example, cowardly accepts its nation being democratically undermined until it reaches the point where speaking out becomes a very understandable fear. It is one thing to refuse to sign a petition when a politician wishes to bring in a policy that undermines certain human rights; it becomes another when signing a petition can lead to serious consequences, such as losing one’s job or even losing one’s life. It wouldn’t be quite fair to say the person who doesn’t stand up in a dictatorship is a coward, though the person who does can be deemed a hero; the former are understandably frightened. Better instead to try to minimise the cowardice early on when relatively little is as stake, rather than rely on the odd hero to fight the authorities after they feel forced to act on the cowardice of the many. In the context of The Headless Woman, Martel doesn’t allegorise the dirty war years, but she does suggest there are characteristics which haven’t gone away.
One feels that a dictatorship could come around again, and partly because those with money and status in the community will not use these for any public good beyond their own immediate profession (Vero is a dentist in Salta. It is as if their job isn’t so much a given task, and that each person contributes their skills communally, but that it is a profession where one needs to retain one’s status as a bourgeois. If the community was the thing, then whatever might undermine it would be worth fighting for, but if status is the thing, then what matters is protecting that status. Using a visual approach that relies strongly on offscreen sound, Martel stays close to her central character, with the director giving the impression that filmic offscreen space reflects a world where there is the onscreen (the upper middle-classes) and the off-screen (the poor). Vero’s family are all professionals (her brother is a doctor), and we sense that Vero and others allow those not in their class to work around them, with the upper-middle classes usually unaware of these poorer people’s presence. That presence becomes manifest in Vero’s concern over one of the poor’s absence, and that she might be responsible. They become visible.
But Martel’s purpose isn’t to show Vero’s individual guilt, but to reflect a broader indifference that can become culpability when it looks like one of their own might have been responsible for a boy’s death. Martel reckons, “In Argentina, my country, I see people that still carry the weight of the really bad stuff that they did not denounce back when it happened under the dictatorship. A lot of people decided they didn’t want to see, they didn’t want to know what was happening.” (Film Comment) She reckons too, that now “the same process is occurring, but it’s in relation to poverty. A lot of people pretend they do not see that a huge part of the country is becoming poorer and poorer and is undergoing great suffering. The same mechanism that we used in the past to ignore the suffering of others is still very present today. That’s why in the film, I use music from the Seventies at the same time that people use mobile phones and drive contemporary cars. What I wanted to stress with these elements is that the same mechanism that started back then is continuing.” (Film Comment) By seeing it less as an allegory, or for that matter a subjective account of guilt, Martel conveys very well a country that may or may not any longer be in denial about the political past, but still practises a certain conformity that means the country’s well-off protect their own, even if the crisis might seem relatively specific next to the events of the 1970s, and may not even be an issue at all. The point isn’t that Vero has done something terrible and won’t face it. She could well have done, but others will not allow her to take responsibility even if she wished.
James Quandt, also invoking allegory, says it is a “trance film, ghost story, and political allegory, the impossibly dense and allusive Headless inlays every image with enigma so that its simple tale of a woman seized by the belief that she has committed a crime takes on an air of epistemological riddles.” Quandt adds, “the film attenuates duration and temporal markers—the music and men’s hairstyles are strictly ’70s—its sense of elapsed time drifting into dreamy incoherence.” (Art Forum) Martel might make the period vague, just as she ambiguously shows the nature of Vero’s responsibilities, but makes unequivocal the broader need to deny responsibility when it looks like it will impact not society, but their society. This needn’t be allegorical – but it is surely symptomatic. Does this mean Martel is attacking the Argentinean bourgeoisie, generally, Salta specifically, or those with money, universally? It can be a little of all three, without indicating that anybody with money is automatically pusillanimous and self-serving. What we do infer is that this is hardly exclusive to Vero and her family, nor an extended metaphor for a moment in Argentine history.
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Any narrative art form looks for the general out of the specific, but if it moves towards the too general, or attends to the overly specific, it may lose the tension point that constitutes the value of a story. That is one of the ironies of Police, Adjective: the story is in the story that it isn’t. In other words, Cristi doesn’t think a character taking hash is worthy of incarceration, but the authorities do, and the story rests on the dull, cumbersome assertions of the old guard, looking for an easy arrest, and Cristi the young cop seeing the pointlessness. The film captures much of that pointlessness in specific detail, but we are aware that it reflects a broader malaise that encapsulates a given society. Like The Headless Woman, we may have central characters, but it is the broader milieu with which we are concerned.
Burning more readily absorbs the socio-political into its narrative than either Police, Adjective or The Headless Woman, but it again wants to register a symptomatic aspect of the nation, while also incorporating into it aspects that show South Korea as a product of broader questions that needn’t leave us only concerned with the Korean situation. Casual worker and farmer’s son Jong-su becomes besotted by Hae-mi, who tells him they knew each other when they were younger. It takes Jong-su a moment to remember, but once he has, he finds her impossible to forget. When she goes off to Africa, he looks after her place, and also a cat he feeds but never sees. On her return, he picks Hae-mi up from the airport, and she now has a new man, Ben, a wealthy Korean who has a luxury apartment, a sports car, and a job that is as ill-defined as it is well-paid. Director Lee Chang-dong shows a South Korea of haves and have-nots, but the impression is that a generation earlier, Jong-su might have been a relative ‘have’ and that Ben would have been no richer than his love rival. After all, Jong-su’s father owns a farm, but it seems now to make little money as Jong-su looks after it, while his father is in prison concerning a dispute where he won’t back down, and Jong-su has to take odd jobs to support himself. Serious money isn’t made with one’s hands and on the land, but in the virtual economy, one so virtualised that we never find out what Ben does; only what his earnings buy.
Lee says that “the movie is about Korean rage, but I also thought that this could be a commentary on people from all regions worldwide and their rage. Everyone has their own reasons for being enraged whether they are rich or poor. Even people who seem to have everything can become enraged. I thought a lot about this question of why people are so enraged when I was trying to figure out what to work on next, and I even called it ‘Project Rage.’” (MovieMaker) If Lee is right, we can see the film as about potent and impotent anger, with Ben potently able to take it out on whoever and whatever he wishes, and will retain his calm exterior, and the father, a person who finds himself in a legal dispute partly predicated on his own rage. In turn, Jong-su will avenge himself on Ben, even if he doesn’t quite know why he is doing so, and can only surmise that Ben is behind the disappearance of Hae-mi when she becomes mysteriously absent. Lee says that he wanted the audience to respond to “the structure of the ordinary thriller that is embedded in the movie. I want the audience to question or try to figure out where Hae-mi went and who Ben is—all of those questions—but I also want them to make the connection between these questions and bigger ones about the mysteries of the world.” (MovieMaker) It is as though by the end of the film, when Jong-su takes revenge on Ben, this isn’t because he is now potent, as he would be in a typical revenge thriller like the ones already discussed. It is that he feels so impotent that he must do something with all this useless anger. Jong-su is no spree killer, but he could share with the boys in Elephant a feeling that seeing fear in the eyes of others is at least better than seeing what he might believe is Ben’s contempt.
This isn’t to draw false equivalence: the schoolkid victims in Elephant are properly innocent, and the two killers undeniably sadistic, while Ben may well be responsible for Hae-mi’s disappearance, and Jong-su kills him based on this assumption. But what the killers in Elephant and Jong-su have in common is impotent rage, quite distinct from the rage of a political movement or an individual unequivocally aware of why they are taking revenge. When in The History of Violence, Joey goes to Philadelphia to take out his gangster brother, there is nothing impotent in it at all, and we might not even need to call it rage. It is measured violence, however appalling. Equally, when a political organisation like The IRA, ETA, FLN or any other political organisation commit atrocities, one may not care for the methods, might not even care for the cause, but describing them as examples of impotent rage would be to misconstrue the point and purpose. They are seeking national self-determination and believe the ends justify the means. But the end is important; the means pragmatic. But in impotent rage, the means hardly need an end, because what counts is the purging of feeling, an attempt to quell the rage. In Hunger, Bobby Sands will die for a cause, starving himself to death in an act that dissolves impotent rage into purposeful self-destruction. It is a terrible thing to do, but it is dying for something bigger than oneself, rather than seeing oneself undermined and trying to do whatever it takes to alleviate the feelings of anger. If many 21st-century films have revenge narratives, then we shouldn’t only have a problem with so many works insisting people take the law into their own hands, but that they risk a combination of the literal and the symbolic, one that undermines their capacity to comment on the times. Narratively, they offer a literal exploration of a feeling, all the better to arrive at a concrete conclusion, while symbolically suggesting that such a story can offer the purging of impotent rage in narrative form, by making it appear potent. But if Elephant is a far more important work than many a revenge thriller that creates identificatory vengeance, as opposed to Elephant’s dismayed incomprehension, it rests on its capacity to muse over the symptoms it addresses rather than the plot it wants to propel. It is often out of this search for the symptomatic that the image and sound become themselves complex, with Elephant constantly alluding to offscreen sound, Margaret frequently cutting away to the New York skyline, Burning to ellipses in the story as Ben and Hae-mi remain enigmas, and Dogville proposes a sound-stage setting all the better to indicate that the film is a conceit and not simply a story. Then we have Hidden, which leaves us unsure of the image’s status, and There Will Be Blood, framing Plainview in widescreen images as if the world could never be vast enough to contain his greed.
Of course, this doesn’t mean filmmakers have to make films about their moment in clear terms, but allusive ones. We started by suggesting that there have been a series of major events in the 21st century, but a film’s pertinence will not simply reside in making a film about them. They are more likely to find a greater meaning in discovering a first principle or primary affect that coincides with these events, and bring them to light in aesthetic form. How this is done, we hope, has been explored in this essay.
© Tony McKibbin