We go to battle every day, spewing more carbon into the atmosphere, allowing more heat to be trapped. Unlike the Cold War, with its threat of instant annihilation from nuclear weapons, climate change is war on a much longer time scale, taking centuries (maybe only decades), to wreak similar amounts of havoc upon the world. Politically, few of the ruling elite want to make any concessions that they feel would place them in a short-term disadvantage. We have dug ourselves into trenches of apathy, not willing to take an offensive, unaware of the reeking stench of death from within.

Shortly before the U.S. Department of Energy reported the most recent carbon dioxide emissions figures, which “jumped by the biggest amount on record” to a level higher than the worst-case scenario anticipated by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That came as no surprise to many scientists, including the MIT program on climate change, which for years has warned that the IPCC predictions are too conservative.

Such critics of the IPCC predictions receive virtually no public attention, unlike the fringe of denialists who are supported by the corporate sector, along with huge propaganda campaigns that have driven Americans off the international spectrum in dismissal of the threats. Business support also translates directly to political power. Denialism is part of the catechism that must be intoned by Republican candidates in the farcical election campaign now in progress, and in Congress they are powerful enough to abort even efforts to inquire into the effects of global warming, let alone do anything serious about it. (Noam Chomsky)

An indirect result of a perceived external threat is that a crackdown happens internally before any action is taken against the real threat. Thus, the perception that climate change is an external threat becomes one of the primary reasons why action is lacking, even though no specific target exists. It’s difficult for the U.S. to acknowledge a threat if it can’t explicitly point to something such as communists or Islamic terrorists. And, like the war on terror, actions against climate change become mostly theater in order to make us feel as if we’re doing something to protect us against a ambiguous threat.

As witnessed during Hurricane Katrina, the poor caught the brunt of the effects of problems that were systemic, revealing larger symptoms of decline and neglect at home. While billions were quickly poured into the war against Iraq, such attention and expediency lacked in the response to Hurricane Katrina. The poor ultimately become part of the threat posed by climate change because they suffer the consequences, revealing our nation’s increasing inequality and our lack of willingness to address it.

High Noon (1952)

And, again much like the Cold War, attacks are leveled internally at the scientists who are doing the research and work on how and why our climate is changing so rapidly. Anti-intellectualism and attacks against science have been allowed to persist since the quick popular reversal against many atomic scientists after World War II, most notably the revoking of Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance after he questioned the tactics of McCarthyism. In today’s media, the attacks against climate scientists are presented as balanced reporting. At its core, it’s the same as the red baiting that took place after World War II.

In the early days of the Cold War, every demand for equal treatment became tainted with the prospect of Communism. Today, every demand for action against climate change is perceived as an equal threat against the nation’s economy. Addressing climate change is usually couched in terms that place boosting the economy first and foremost. To be for preserving the possibility of continued human existence is to be against the profits of corporations. And without corporations making profits, it seems, we would be doomed to an unthinkable existence. Or, as seen on the bumper of an SUV, “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

“Even if the worst auguries of the immediate postwar era were not realized, the domestic consequences of the Cold War were bad enough. It was a mitigated disaster….While democracy in the abstract was exalted and ‘the West’ was elaborately defended, particular rights were enfeebled or ignored, with the acquiescence of the Eisenhower administration.” (Whitfield, p. 233)

As a public body, Americans seem willing to give up personal freedom when faced with an enemy such as communism or Islamic terrorists. When confronted by a more existential threat such as climate change, however, giving up anything that constitutes our comfortable existence is a choice few are willing to make. What good is freedom, however limited, if you can’t see it displayed on a large, flat-screen TV? Freedom, then, is only the freedom to make purchases.

The same successful post-war U.S. society took on some of the traits of those whom it both fought against and feared the most. While valuing freedom in words, the U.S. restricted it for much of the population in the aftermath of the World War II. Loyalty oaths, purges, and other actions usually connected with totalitarian regimes became common in the post-war U.S. To get a feeling for the era, one only need to dig up a few Hollywood films from that era for a glimpse into the madness.

“According to the Cogley Report on Blacklisting, the number of movies concerning other social issues decreased drastically between 1947 and 1954, although more than fifty anti-Communist films were produced. Most were shot on low budgets with non-stars–indicating that the studios did not expect them to earn well. Apparently, the producers hoped to satisfy their right-wing critics without losing money; films that evoked any kind of ideology were usually unpopular…. Perhaps in no other period have such dismal creations been launched as a form of public relations.” (Sayre, p. 80)

Viewing it a half century after it was released, the film My Son John, written and directed by Leo McCarey, seems to convey the opposite message of its original intention. Rather than warning about the threat of an insidious ideology from the outside, the story of the film could be the difficulties faced by an adult whose elderly parents have bought into the Tea Party ideology. With a few minor edits, the film could easily be re-released as a current warning against letting religious and patriotic zealotry get in the way of social progress. Although I imagine its message would still be on target for the viewer groomed on Fox News.

My Son John (1952)

Even is its own day, My Son John was seen as too over the top by most critics. Audiences weren’t flocking to see films that so adamantly stuffed a message down their throats. But an established director such as McCarey felt it necessary, at least personally, to make such a film to prove himself a true American.

One also can’t help think of climate scientists such as Michael Mann when watching My Son John. The writings and antics of those described as global warming skeptics or deniers are like the parents of the supposed communist John. Just as the beliefs and actions of the parents (played by Helen Hays and Dean Jagger) seem outrageous in hindsight, the attacks against climate scientists will (one hopes) look as spectacularly crazy to the average person in a few years as most intelligent people view HUAC and McCarthyism today. In another half century, however, there may be few artifacts documenting that a sizable portion of the U.S. population let a handful of loudmouths backed by corporate interests prevent taking action that would have protected humanity.

While the campaign against climate change comes primarily from the same lineage as the attacks against Communists in the post-war era, what the denialists lack in House Committees, they make up with think tanks and paid influence. They use their money and media connections to harass climate scientists and cast doubt on their work. While the tactics are different, the intent is the same. Find people who are doing good work and tarnish their image while making their lives miserable through lawsuits or campaigns to get them fired.

The Red Scare looked to prove individuals guilty by association. Behind the assaults by climate change deniers on various climate scientists, there lies an underlying Red Scare mentality that these scientists are anti-American, that they are against companies making a profit. A common refrain from some of the deniers, including candidates for the Republican nomination, is that climate change is a tactic to control people’s lives.

“As the capacity for mutual destruction became more and more assured, the two superpowers were in danger of becoming a pair of Goliaths, hampered by the very formidability of their weaponry. Paradoxically helpless, they were as unable to use atomic warheads as to do without them.

Such a situation, transmuting unimaginable power into its opposite at the wave of a wand, was without historical precedent. Yet it occurred in a world where nuclear proliferation remained both a possibility and a reality.” (McNeil, p. 374)

Unlike My Son John, High Noon was a discreet attempt to fight back at the damage that the Red Scare, and HUAC in particular, was having on Hollywood. The director, Fred Zinnemann, wasn’t sure that he would be able to complete the film under the circumstances of rampant anti-communist sentiment in Hollywood.

Similar to My Son John, High Noon could easily be viewed as its opposite fifty years later. High Noon is yet another story where an individual has to fight against an enemy because others are too afraid or apathetic to help. It trumpets the lone fighter against the bad guys. Even the protagonist, Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper), is betrayed by his own wife, the marriage itself only hours old.

Watching High Noon and My Son John together, one feels their protagonists are suffering from the same thing, at least until the final few minutes of each film. While both films focus on an individual under attack, the resolution of each individual’s challenge eventually provides for the safety and security of the community. While John dies knowing he did the right thing by renouncing his past, Marshal Kane lives and renounces the future (the town he saved).

Unlike the films, as individuals we lack any power to provide for the safety and security of the larger community against the effects of climate change. We must renounce both the past and future if we are to survive. Just as the U.S. built the ultimate weapon to end war (all wars) but found they were so powerful that their use was prohibitive, it allowed war to continue unabated. Likewise, we have transmuted the unimaginable power of converting sequestered carbon into energy to improve our lives into its opposite. We now face a future undermined by our success. Some will renounce the past, while others renounce the future.

Much like the paths taken by two different German boys in Rotation and Germany Year Zero at a moment of intense abjection, one chose to renounce the past while the other renounced the future. Yet neither provided a solution to the problem facing post-war Germany. What is the collective next step and how do we break through the indecision about what we can and can’t do? Must the world suffer years of natural disaster, drought, and famine in order to chart a new course?

The solution to climate change won’t come from an individual fighting against the grain but from a collective response that turns the power of the forces driving climate change into its opposite. As a first step, just as the anti-communist hysteria abated and McCarthy himself flamed out, the climate change denial movement can and will be obliterated, its spokespeople and financial backers should held responsible for their crimes against humanity. From there, we can renounce both past and future, concentrating on a present where we honestly address solutions.

“…we have a status quo bias so intense that it simply filters out and marginalizes any news that would require fundamental change. It’s not just the fraudulent work of partisan think tanks, not just the right-wing media or a few unhinged Senators. It’s all of the above, creating a white-noise roar of such volume that it only allows messages that reinforce the status quo to rise above it.”
posted by gompa on Metafilter at 10:03 AM on February 15, 2012

References:

• The Culture of the Cold War, Stephen J. Whitfield, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991
• Running Time: Films of the Cold War, Nora Sayre, The Dial Press, 1982
• The Pursuit of Power, William H. McNeil, University of Chicago Press, 1984

Elsewhere, cities were rebuilt, trials were held, and monuments were erected to the fallen. Humanity not only survived, but by many accounts, truly began to prosper after the second world war. Technological innovation exploded. Space exploration, computing technology, and medical advances all boosted the health and economies of the nations of the industrialized capitalist world for the most part.

Firestorm (documentary)

Equality, however, would take a while longer to gain renewed attention in the post-war U.S. As a country, the U.S. did not live up to the ideals of what it had supposedly fought for in the war. The political focus was on external threats to freedom, even while internal checks against equality continued to hold strong. Like the Athenians who built a wall around their city to protect it from outside threats only to suffer an outbreak of plague from within, the U.S. would eventually realize its own internal outbreak of people demanding equal access to opportunity.

A half a century later, we are now facing a different power that is a by-product of our supposed success. Not only are we afraid to acknowledge its existence, for fear of staining our identity, but we are also unable to develop a strategy for dealing with it because tied to our notion of success is the fantasy of continual progress. For the United States, we can’t truly address climate change because the elements causing climate change are what keep our economic engine running.

Just as ordinary Germans could do nothing, even if they had desired, to deter the Nazi Party once they rose to power, we cannot do anything to drastically change the momentum of a highly carbon dependent society. Collectively, we have the ability to act, but we are hindered by, among other things, control of the media by a handful of companies and a lack of organization. But, most importantly, we lack the impetus that would necessitate our willingness to create and maintain fundamental changes to our everyday lives. These sorts of changes, in time, will be forced upon us instead. Is there anything that would force us to act?

But devastation of such proportions not only destroys the very mechanisms capable of measuring its scale, it annihilates the ability to imagine it. It must therefore be reduced to a more manageable size and more conventional nature, so that the mind can take it in rather than totally blot it out. Paradoxically, those who want to keep the memory of atrocity and those who wish to deny it are both engaged in a similar attempt to force the event into an acceptable imaginary mold. If their goals are radically opposed to each other, their means are much less so: for both denial and remembrance begin by diminishing the event. Denial starts off by casting doubt on the minutiae of destruction, undermining thereby our acceptance of the whole; reconstruction similarly begins from the details, because the scale of the enormity is so vast that it denies its own existence and vanishes from the mind. Having created a reality beyond its wildest fantasies, humanity cannot imagine what it created. In this context human agency remains tenuous, the disaster being ascribed either to insane genius or to anonymous forces. Language, too, disintegrates; hence the resort, either to medieval imagery of hell and metaphysical speculation or to radical skepticism about reality and a perception of the world as text—complex and elusive but purged of the inarticulate screams of the millions, inscribed into every word pronounced since the Holocaust.
(Bartov, p. 124)

To be clear, this is not a comparison between World War II (or war in general) and climate change. World War II was not a singular event with a set of repercussions that lasted until the next major event happened. It is part of a continuum of a human-caused destruction cycle. Since the Industrial Revolution (although the mythology extends much earlier), we’ve pushed forward along a path of continual progress, not stopping whenever an event casts doubt on our linear path of progress. How individual humans understand and react to challenges and crises falls short of our collective ability to engage the lessons of the past in ways that do not disintegrate into mere forms of entertainment. We like to look back and think we knew what we were doing in the mythology of stories and films.

Not only is there is a lag time between the human ability to understand when a situation becomes critical, but there is also a failure to comprehend what needs to happen next. The scale of the problem becomes so large that it is impossible for most individuals to react, so they continue to act as they have before, accumulating these acts in a large-scale process that perpetuates the problem. War provides an excellent look into human behavior during a crisis because it is a time-constrained event containing multitudes of human action and/or inaction. War, in this sense, is the same type of event as climate change, only on a different time scale. The reasons for war are the same as the reasons for climate change. The easiest way to keep producing is to destroy something else.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;

To put it another way, we cannot see the big picture (the play) because we are too busy acting in it. The stage and set are complex and striking. We catch flashes of it from time to time but are usually too focused on our bit part to take it all in. We feel that if we, as an individual, stop to take a look, the whole play will be ruined. We’ve been told that the show must go on regardless of what else happens. It’s all about maintaining the play.

The solution isn’t that we need to create a different play or rearrange the set design. It may then seem the only way to solve the problem is to become the audience. If we can sit down and try to imagine what we have created, maybe we can move beyond the crisis. Retreating to the seats and staring at a blank stage might allow us to realize that the stage is the source of our power. The play merely maintains the illusion of power.

The play demands continual repetition; the stage continual maintenance. If, as actors, however small time we may be, we retreat to the audience, it may be not as a passive act of resistance but as a restructuring of how we understand the problem. To relate it back to war, and as many anti-war writers have pointed out, war would simply not exist without soldiers willing to fight. But can we make the same grandiose claim for global warming, that it would not exist without people willing to contribute to it?

There are already a handful of critics in the audience who are pointing out the increasing dangers to life on the planet caused by a changing climate. For the most part, they are still a quiet voice, drowned out by the exciting news reports of the latest elements of the play: floods, wild fires, droughts, tornadoes, extreme storms, and scorching heat. Special effects trump information every time.

If war and climate change are along the same continuum of human-caused destruction tools, we should be able to unpack their components in a way that clarifies how they are similar or different as part of the human-caused destructive cycle. War is a battle between competing nations or groups involving soldiers from each side using weapons to defeat the other. A winner is usually the side that kills/destroys more than the other.

Like war, climate change will undoubtedly kill and destroy some more than others. Although there won’t always be clear divisions regarding nationality among the people most affected (with some notable exceptions such as island nations), the poorer nations will have the most difficult time. Just as the poor make up the vast numbers of soldiers who die in war, they will also be the ones who die due to climate change. And as we have seen with the various climate meetings and talks, most recently in Durban, nations are competing against one another to preserve their positions without conceding much of their national interest in economic advantage. The winner will be the ones who can physically survive by whatever means necessary, using their resources to stave off (adapt to) the effects of climate change.

Having moved from World War II to the war on the world, too, the enemy will be everywhere. The world will become a stage in which the unfolding play becomes so tragic, we will keep our acting our parts out of fear alone. Prior to climate change, this notion of keeping up appearances in the face of fear was a way of life in the Cold War. The fear of annihilation during the Cold War kept us adhering to the ideas behind its insanity. Unlike climate change, however, the ability to imagine the ultimate end of the destructive powers of nuclear war was just what Hollywood was capable of doing. The imagining of this most horrific creation became merely another form of entertainment, entertainment that kept us in our seats, even as we gasped in horror.

But, as audience members, how do we avoid remaining passive spectators of the ongoing destruction wrought by climate change? Is there any image that can shake us out of our seats? Unfortunately, no blockbuster film or no endlessly rerun video of a natural disaster will have any effect on our readiness to take action. Since the effects of climate change happen in slow-motion compared to the destruction of war, it’s much easier to remain comfortable. We can no longer even profess to the illusion that we would do what was necessary to ensure our survival.

Did the doom and gloom films during the Cold War provide any sort of stimulus for people to change their behavior, or did they provide an outlet for our fears? I tend to think the latter but will explore that idea more over the next few weeks. Compared to the number of films about nuclear annihilation, there have been very few about climate change destruction.

Joplin, MO (AP photo)

Having time to reflect on our situation, however, we can begin to understand our imprisonment. We are imprisoned not only by our choices but by the existing systems that we are brought up with. We can change personally but still can’t shake the feeling of being imprisoned, knowing that our own refusal to accept the system that runs the prison does not affect its continued operation. That often leaves us only one place to turn.

“…links between mythology and vision make for mechanisms of remembrance and prediction, fiction and representation, repression and categorization, which are at the core of humanity’s self-perception and sense of identity. Materially nowhere, utopia fills the mind; a site of infinite fantasy, it can also trigger limitless destruction.” (Bartov, p. 148)

As an example, consider the story of a man who survived all odds of being in a hideous war, captured by the enemy, packed into a freight car, and forced to do hard labor, only to have the city where he was held captive be bombed to complete destruction by those on his side. To be able to emerge from such a catastrophe with a sense of humor about the human race, even after digging out dead bodies from the air raid and piling them up to be burned, is a response that seems incredibly difficult to understand for someone removed from such experiences. To read about events none of us ever want to experience ourselves and to watch them portrayed on the screen without feeling their weight tends to become part of the fantasy of those who are imprisoned and need an identity.

Kurt Vonnegut experienced the devastation of Dresden, Germany, in real life, which influenced his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. A film version of the book was released in 1972 and was directed by George Roy Hill. It was the only film based on one of his books that Vonnegut thought captured the essence of the text. Slaughterhouse-Five (I’ll be specifically referring to the film) brings a different perspective to the destruction of Germany during World War II and the sense of being imprisoned.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)

The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, begins the film revealing his powerlessness. In a letter to a newspaper editor, he writes that he has become unstuck in time, which is something he has no control over. He then travels through time to when he was at the German front in World War II, where, without a gun (as a chaplain) and trudging through snow to avoid German soldiers, he is eventually “captured” by two American soldiers who doubt he is one of their own. They are all eventually captured by the Germans, but the rift between Billy and one of the other two soldiers, named Paul Lazzaro, does not end with their shared confinement.

The scenes of Billy and the other soldiers being transported to the prison camps in train cars creates an instant visual recognition of the Holocaust, even though it is not part of the story. As the soldiers file into camp, they are given coats from those who have already been executed. The film makes clear that being imprisoned (whether because of ideology, economic systems, ethnicity, etc.), necessitates the need to define an other who will suffer a worse fate than your own. As the American soldiers receive a warm welcome from their British counterparts, they file past Russian soldiers whose prison conditions are obviously much worse than the British soldiers conditions, which have been enhanced by a clerical error.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the soldier Paul Lazzaro, who constantly threatens Billy, engages in fantasies about revenge on all those who cause him trouble, real or imagined. He personally embodies a microcosm of the forces that are not only attempting to eradicate an entire ethnic group, but also the forces that deem it necessary to bomb a civilian population as a normal part of war. The need to destroy becomes an overriding urge to set things right again, but in reality only reinforces and perpetuates the ongoing destruction of life.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)

In the book Mirrors of Destruction, Omer Bartov explores the importance of the apocalyptic vision (chapter 4) in both the perpetrators of violence in Germany and among the victims of that violence. After suffering defeat in World War I, the Germans wanted to find the source of their weakness, rather than accept the consequences, and root it out completely. The Nazi party held a utopian vision, complete with apocalyptic cleansing, to restore order within their view of the world. While the Nazi’s complete dedication to this apocalyptic vision was supported by most Germans, even for those who were not Nazi supporters but who did not resist their policies, the outcome was the same. Their world was eventually destroyed, as they destroyed the world of others.

Whatever the specific path they have chosen, various religious and secular, ancient and modern, European and extra-European utopian notions have constructed a notion of inevitability. It is this idea that is the basis of both apocalyptic theology and planned society, geared as they are either to keep the anticipated catastrophe at bay or to exploit it for political purposes. It is thus also at the center of any discourse on the relationship between creativity and destruction, hope and despair, and is crucial to understanding how societies have come to terms with uncertainty and fear. At the same time, apocalypse is often seen as bearing utopian consequences; it is thus both an end and a beginning, feared and anticipated, accompanied by social violence and creative change. Precisely when secularized and incorporated into modern ideologies, apocalyptic reasoning and fantasies have fueled a paroxysm of unprecedented destruction.
(Bartov, p. 152)

Being in the condition of imprisonment, whether enemy soldier or ethnic minority, the apocalyptic vision filters down to those who play their part in the fantasy. In Night and Fog (1955) by Alain Resnais, he makes special mention of the filtering down of the individual roles people took within the the concentration camps. The Kapo, perhaps at one time the worst element of the imprisoned culture, is elevated to the highest level within the camp’s prisoners. Even in the face of absolute despair and hatred, they deny the humanity of their fellow prisoners. When the camps are liberated, however, they feel no responsibility for their role in the atrocities because there was always a higher authority that they answered to. They are able to eventually deny their own earlier denial. Their fantasy remains intact.

While Night and Fog provided a critical and harrowing look at one of humanity’s worst moments, Bartov rightfully questions the method of using the horrors of the Holocaust to teach people, especially the young, moral lessons about history. Many films have been made about different aspects of the Holocaust, but most of them, unlike Night and Fog, are meant primarily as entertainment, regardless of how much they attempt at historical authenticity.

More recent films such as Life is Beautiful, Schindler’s List, and The Boy with Striped Pajamas allow us to enjoy a few hours of portrayals of untold suffering, even while similar suffering continues to unfold in the present day. After the movie is over, we can comfortably fantasize about what we would have done had we been in such a situation. It allows us to minimize the reality of our own complicit involvement in ongoing destruction and inhumanity. It allows us to deny our own denial, to live in a site of infinite fantasy.

Indeed, one of the most frightening consequences of the Holocaust may well be that rather than serving as a warning to preserve humanity at all cost, it has provided a license to privilege physical survival over moral existence.
(Bartov, p. 176)

Like Billy Pilgrim, we have all become unstuck in time, which we have no control over. We are able to support war when it seems politically expedient, only to renounce it a few years later as it falls apart, taking time to duck into the cineplex to watch a film that supports our view and washes away any troubles of conscience. It is simple to forget what the point of a conflict was, but there is always a group who will create a mythology about it so you can feel confident your views are presently the correct ones.

There is a moment toward the end of Slaughterhouse-Five, when Billy, alone with a movie actress in his “zoo cage” on the planet Tralfamadore, asks the disembodied voices who keep him there why they don’t stop the end of the world since it is in their power to do so. Their reply is simple: “A Tralfamadorian test pilot panics, presses the wrong button and the whole universe disappears. He has always pressed it and he always will. We always let him, and we will always let him. The moment is structured that way.” This notion of eternal recurrence seems appropriate for our own recent history. At this point, the sense of inevitability is difficult to shake when looking at climate change and the nature of discourse about it in the U.S.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)

As with the millions of people who were displaced during World War II, climate change will be increasing the number of people who must flee natural disaster and drought-stricken areas. A similar solution will emerge from those who, for the most part, have been climate change deniers. An increase in attacks on immigrants as the problem will undoubtedly be part of our future. The state of Arizona already provides a perfect example in their attempts to remove ethnic studies and allow racial profiling.

This is all to say that the Holocaust is at the center of a crisis of identity, whose ramifications range far beyond its chronological boundaries and the life span of its survivors. This crisis has in many ways become the characteristic feature of the twentieth century, originating in World War I and felt with even greater urgency today. It is the crisis of encountering—-by way of perpetrating, observing, and being a target of-—the annihilatory force of modern violence: massive, all-encompassing, unrelenting, and faceless. It is a crisis that casts doubt on the very definition of identity, on what it means to know who you are, where you come from, what you are capable or incapable of doing, experiencing, imagining. It is a very personal crisis for those of us who would reflect on the implications of the century’s events for our own lives, and it is a collective crisis for those of us aware of our responsibility for humanity.
(Bartov p. 229)

As we’ve witnessed throughout most of the past century, answers to complex problems usually come packaged with war, or, at the very least, a war metaphor. We have already engaged in a war on the climate and have become imprisoned by the very conditions that caused the crisis. In Billy Pilgrim’s fantasy of living on the planet Tralfamadore, he is told, “On Tralfamadore you learn that the world is just a collection of moments all strung together in beautiful, random order. And if we’re going to survive, it’s up to us to concentrate on the good moments and ignore the bad.”

This rings similar to the supposed message from an Austrian military leader during World War I that the “situation was catastrophic but not serious.” Unlike the advice from the Tralfamadorians, we are going to have to concentrate on the bad if we expect to have a chance to salvage any good moments from a growing catastrophic situation. We know what led us to this imprisonment in a fantasy land. All we have to do is look at ourselves to discover both the problem and the solution. But we must first break out of the fantasy.

References:

• Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity, Omer Bartov, Oxford University Press, 2002

Germany Year Zero (1948)

We only have to go back as far as World War II for some answers. It marked a turning point in human history when our ability to destroy each other became absolute. In a matter of hours, we could undo billions of years of biological life striving to adapt to an ideal planetary environment. The stage was set; we were just waiting for the play to begin.

Our lack of action or acknowledgement during the beginning and continuation of any such devastation results in our inability to properly deal with the consequences. Inaction during a crisis leads to powerlessness. Germany during World War II provides a perfect example. Once the juggernaut of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party) took control, those who merely stayed out of the way in order to pursue their own livelihoods soon found themselves struggling to eek out a daily existence.

Two films released shortly after the war handle the struggles of German people from a pre- and post-war angle. Both films focus on a single family dealing with the crisis of being trapped by powers out of their control. In Rotation (1949), directed by Wolfgang Staudte, a young family strives to build a decent life for themselves before the war, while in Germany Year Zero (1948), directed by Roberto Rossellini, a family tries to stay together in the aftermath of the war’s devastation.

The German writer W.G Sebald, during a series of lectures that were published under the title On the Natural History of Destruction, explored why, in the aftermath of World War II, German writers failed to acknowledge the massive destruction of their cities and people during the war. Even many of the personal recollections that Sebald read did not adequately address the horrors of what happened or what the survivors endured.

People’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time [World War II]. The population decided–out of sheer panic at first–to carry on as if nothing had happened…”One day we came to a suburb that had not suffered at all. People were sitting out on their balconies drinking coffee. It was like watching a film; it was down-right impossible.” (Sebald, p. 41)

Sebald does not portray the Germans as victims but as a people unwilling to ultimately face the consequences of their actions (or inaction). Inaction is also the primary theme of the film Rotation . The film’s protagonist, Hans, and his young family struggle to make ends meet when Germany was still reeling from the aftermath of the first world war. As the Nazi Party rises to power, they disdain its politics and tactics but also do not actively do anything to prevent its ascent. Hans’s brother-in-law Kurt, however, does actively resist and has to go underground to avoid imprisonment.

In the following scene from Rotation, Hans cleverly avoids offending the visiting Nazi group leader in order to maintain his position within society.

Hans, in order to continue providing for his family, eventually gives in to pressure and joins the party to appease his boss. Although Hans has no admiration for or loyalty to the party, his son Helmut joins the Hitler Youth and becomes fully indoctrinated by Nazi ideology. Hans is troubled by his own son’s beliefs but does nothing to confront him.

The disturbances of the family idyll become a cataclysm in the third segment when the Nazi war regime uses its power overtly to subordinate the family to its political goal of domination. Whereas in the first two segments Kurt represented the antagonist–the nagging conscious of political responsibility to whom Hans turned a deaf ear–and his son Helmut justified the personal compromises necessary for a stable family life, the last segment reverses the equation’s terms. The reversal is underscored by the juxtaposition of a series of scenes alternating between Helmut’s Hitler Youth training and his growing susceptibility to Nazi ideology with Kurt’s resistance activities. Han’s descision to help him repair a printing press for anti-Nazi pamphlets is motivated less by political conviction than by emotional commitment. Helmut, however, turns in the illegal leaflets he finds at home out of political conviction (i.e., ideological indoctrination), which results in Kurt’s execution. That betrayal becomes the first step toward the complete disintegration of the family unit and Hans’s insight into his social responsibility. (Silberman, p. 108)

With the family broken apart, they become physically separated at the end of the war. Hans is imprisoned, his wife killed, and Helmut taken prisoner. Helmut eventually returns to his father, who forgives him.

At the end of Rotation, Helmut relives the past, meeting his girlfriend at the same spot where his father met Helmut’s mother before the war. Helmut tells his girlfriend about the meeting of his parents at the same spot. She says that history has a way of repeating itself. Helmut insists that they can make sure that it doesn’t, although they continue lounging around in the sun, just as Helmut’s parents had done years before. It doesn’t provide a reassuring message that, once the young are comfortable, they would do anything to prevent another catastrophe. Staudte himself became jaded as he witnessed Germany settle back into familiar patterns during the post-war years.

Similarly, Sebald, who admits that while he was only a year old when the war ended and that his family was not directly affected by any bombing raids, always felt that the devastation of Germany hung over him. As a child, he played in areas that were still in ruins, yet while growing up, he could not find any deep explanations for the destruction in the books he read. It was as if people were unable to speak about the experience. In Sebald’s words, “…they cast some light on the way in which memory (individual, collective, and cultural) deals with experiences exceeding what is tolerable.”

In Roberto Rosselini’s Germany, Year Zero, released a year earlier than Rotation, the theme is precisely how one family attempts to deal with an intolerable experience. The film takes place directly after the war and focuses on a family trying to survive amidst food shortages, power outages, distrust among neighbors, and lack of health care. The youngest, a boy named Edmund, does all he can to provide for his family, which consists of an ailing father and an older brother and sister. Unlike Helmut in Rotation, Edmund was not a member of the Hitler Youth, although his older brother, Karl-Heinz, “did his duty” and fought in the war. Karl-Heinz refuses to apply for a ration card, afraid that he will be imprisoned for having been a faithful Nazi soldier. He merely sulks around the apartment, contributing nothing but anger over his personal loss of purpose.

Edmund wanders the city alone

Edmund’s lack of ideological brainwashing doesn’t, however, keep him from getting bad advice from a former member of the Nazi party (and obvious pedophile). When Edmund decides to take matters into his own hands and do what he thinks will help his family based on that advice, it all backfires on him, leavng him isolated from his family. For Edmund, his world has been turned upside down and he doesn’t know how to set it right. He is constantly reacting to events around him, bouncing around in a game he fails to understand. Whereas Helmut understood his mistakes and vows to prevent them from happening again, Edmund decides there is no future worth striving for anymore.

“Is the destruction not, rather, irrefutable proof that the catastrophes which develop, so to speak, in our hands and seem to break out suddenly are a kind of experiment, anticipating the point at which we shall drop out of what we will have thought for so long to be our autonomous history and back into the history of nature?”
(Sebald, p. 66)

Unlike war, climate change is a much slower process and causes destruction that often slowly builds from year to year. Contrary to the route that Edmund took in Germany Year Zero, the other children adapted to life among the rubble and did whatever was necessary to get by. It is a well-worn cliche that children will adapt to anything.

In the United States, a significant percentage of the population either don’t believe climate change is happening or they choose to not let it bother them. For many people who are struggling to get by on a day-to-day basis, they, like Hans in Rotation, don’t have the time nor the energy to do anything about it. Even if they did recognize climate change as a threat to life on the planet, they may feel inadequate to effect any sort of change, but the poor will be those who will be most affected by rising food and energy prices, as well as those who might be directly affected by more extreme weather events.

The recent decline in the amount of media attention devoted to climate change and the continued denial of the science by a large percentage of the population in the U.S. indicates that we are treading the same path as the many Germans who put aside their worries about the threat of danger in order to maintain their way of life. Are we as powerless against the machinations of climate change as the individual Germans civilians were against the Allied air attacks? We have already let loose a force that is beyond our control. Now we must sit back and watch the skies, hoping that the next bomb misses us.

Maybe a hundred years down the line, nobody will look back at climate change as the most important issue of the early 21st century, because the damage will have been done, and the idea that it might have been prevented will seem absurd. Maybe the idea that Mali and Burkina Faso were once inhabited countries rather than empty deserts will seem queer, and the immiseration of huge numbers of stateless refugees thronging against the borders of the rich northern countries will be taken for granted. The absence of the polar ice cap and the submersion of Venice will have been normalised; nobody will think of these as live issues, no one will spend their time reproaching their forefathers, there’ll be no moral dimension at all. We will have wrecked the planet, but our great-grandchildren won’t care much, because they’ll have been born into a planet already wrecked.
The Economist (Dec. 12, 2011)

References:

• On the Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald, Modern Library, 2004
• German Cinema: Texts in Context, Marc Silberman, Wayne State University, 1995

The Motorcycle Boy Reigns

For the most part, critics panned Rumble Fish. The primary criticism of the film was that it focused too much on style, leaving the story obfuscated by liberal amounts of smoke and painted shadows. For example, Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times, said: “…the film is so furiously overloaded, so crammed with extravagant touches, that any hint of a central thread is obscured.”

The film later gained more admirers, not the least of which was the director himself, based on his commentary for the DVD release. Coppola envisioned Rumble Fish as an art film for teenagers to set it apart stylistically from The Outsiders, which he had completed filming just prior to Rumble Fish. Both were filmed on location in Tulsa, Oklahoma, featured many of the same actors, and were based on books by S.E. Hinton. At the time, Coppola was suffering from the failure of his own studio after the complete disaster of One from the Heart.

[Rumble Fish] is a deeply poetic and personal essay on adolescence and a sure sign that Coppola is seldom the man you want to hire for a mainstream, moneymaking project. (Thomson, p. 743)

Matt Dillon as Rusty James

Stephen Burum’s black-and-white cinematography is beautiful. Dean Tavoularis, his set design sprinkled with touches of expressionism that contrasted well with Coppola’s astute visual sense of realism, created a rich atmosphere that remains timeless. The moments when the design seems overbearing is where it too obviously reveals itself, such as a day scene when Rusty James visits his girlfriend Patty and the painted shadows on the front of the house from a prior night scene are still visible.

The story of Rumble Fish is simple. It’s about a man returning to his poverty-stricken neighborhood to rescue his younger brother from a life of gang fighting, but he gets killed in the process. It’s a story that resonates throughout history. The film evokes a reaction that might be less about the style than it is about the utter negation of meaning that the anti-hero portrays throughout the film, about which I’ll discuss more later.

The underlying theme, which is a bit overbearing, is the passing of time. While the time-lapse photography of clouds and night falling on the city make for excellent transition shots, the inclusion of clocks at every turn becomes almost ridiculous when Rusty James and the Motorcycle Boy walk over to a truck loaded with a huge clock face and stand against it. And, just so you don’t miss the point, Benny (Tom Waits) muses about time while wiping the counter at his cafe, which is the local hangout.

Tom Waits as Benny

Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item. When you’re young, you’re a kid, you got time. Throw away a couple of years here, a couple of years there. It doesn’t matter. You know? The older you get you say, “Jesus, how much I got?” I got thirty-five summers left. Think about it. Thirty-five summers.

But these minor annoyances do not detract from an exquisite black-and-white film with an original, driving soundtrack composed by Stewart Copeland. It’s a well-balanced blend of differing, and even risky, elements at a time when the teen film was about to become a formulaic rehash of suburban kids suffering through embarrassing moments in their lives. The urban, gritty nature of Rumble Fish stands out among the teen films of the time.

“Furthermore, film historians acknowledge in retrospect Coppola’s artistic courage in making an unrelentingly pessimistic picture about modern youth, which transcends the simplistic presentation of youngsters in more innocuous, safe teen flicks.” (Phillips, p. 225)

Although the story is told from the point of view of Rusty James, the beginning of the film makes clear that the main character is the Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke). Two images in the opening seconds of the film show graffiti which declares, “The Motorcycle Boys Reigns.” It’s important to note that the signs say “reigns” instead of a more colloquial “rules,” which would be the language that Rusty James would use. The Motorcycle Boy, as the anti-hero, is a Socratic figure who has returned to the place where he has been charged with corrupting the youth by the one figure of authority in the film, Officer Patterson (William Smith).

Rusty James, Steve, Officer Patterson, and the Motorcycle Boy

Although the Motorcycle Boy holds a near mythic status among his admirers in the lower-class neighborhood where he grew up, he tells Rusty James that he’d prefer to remain a neighborhood novelty. He makes it clear that he did not return to bring back gangs and rumbles. When Rusty James pushes his brother about how he could lead people anywhere, the Motorcycle Boy says, “If you’re going to lead people, you need to have somewhere to go.”

Why, then, did the Motorcycle Boy return? The Motorcycle Boy, as a Socratic character and a corrupter of youth, returns to face his destiny: death. Perhaps he knows he is dying and chooses his own way out. Regardless of how or why he dies, it allows his younger brother a chance to escape and to get a better shot at life. This is where the creeping sensation of nihilism enters the film. While there are plenty of suggestions that the Motorcycle Boy might be crazy, others who are closest to him suggest that he sees the world differently, both in a literal sense (being color blind) and figuratively (a prince in exile, being born in the wrong era). Even his former girlfriend (Dianna Scarwid) says about him, “I thought he was gone for good. I was wrong. But I was right.”

Nowhere to go

The Motorcycle Boy tells Rusty James that he stopped being a kid when he was five years old. He grew up in a broken world in which he had to fight for survival and meaning. Once he gets outside that world, he realizes all the meaning and esteem he held from his leadership in the gangs amounts to nothing. He couldn’t escape it, so he had to come back to make sure all traces of his former glory were erased.

While in California during his two month absence, the Motorcycle Boy experienced a profound change. Seeing the mother who had abandoned them fifteen years earlier may have been the moment he knew there was only one way to save his brother. When he finally tells Rusty James about seeing their mother, Rusty James is angry at him for waiting so long. The Motorcycle Boy finishes the story of how their mother left and took him with her, causing their father to get drunk and leave Rusty James alone for three days (which is the basis for his fear of being alone). When Rusty James asks why he didn’t tell him that before, the Motorcycle Boy says that he didn’t think it would do him any good. He knows Rusty James doesn’t learn through stories.

Rusty James steers the conversation back to California, asking his brother what it was like. He replies, “California’s like a beautiful, wild girl on heroin … who’s high as a kite, thinking she’s on top of the world, not knowing she’s dying even if you show her the marks.”

I didn't think it would do you any good.

The Motorcycle Boy knows that at the rate Rusty James is getting into fights, he will end up like the girl on heroin. He fears that Rusty James still identifies with his former self. While Rusty James wants them to get the gangs going again so they can rule their side of the river, the Motorcycle Boy has no such plans. Whatever is happening in the Motorcycle Boy’s head, his younger brother has no clue. As Steve says about the Motorcycle Boy, “I never know what he’s thinking, but you, Rusty James, I always know what you’re thinking.”

Near the end of the film, their father (Dennis Hopper) says of the Motorcycle Boy: “He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river, with the ability to be able to do anything he wants and finding nothing that he wants to do. I mean nothing.” Similarly, in a scene at a pool hall, Steve wonders aloud if there is anything the Motorcycle Boy can’t do. He seems to be gifted at everything he does but finds no pleasure in doing anything.

Waiting for the pet store to close

“One of the two core symptoms of human depression is anhedonia, the loss of interest or pleasure in daily activities. Daily stressful life events are recognized as predisposing factors in the etiology of depression.” [Source: http://biopsychiatry.com/anhedonia.html]

While explaining his past to a bruised and beaten Rusty James and a frustrated Steve, the Motorcycle Boy says that he eventually found rumbles to be a big bore. In addition to the Motorcycle Boy’s hardness of hearing and color blindness, he might equally suffer from anhedonia. This lack of ability to experience pleasure is referenced obliquely when Rusty James asks his brother how the ocean was. The Motorcycle Boy tells him that he never made it to the ocean because California got in the way. Likewise, he can’t find pleasure in life because it, too, gets in the way.

Later, right before the Motorcycle Boy and Rusty James take a ride on a motorcycle that the Motorcycle Boy steals (one of his bad habits), Rusty James says, “I feel like I’m wasting my life, waiting for something. I wish I had a reason to leave.” Throughout the film, his older brother has been subtly trying to give him reasons. For example, in a scene when the Motorcycle Boy, Rusty James, and Steve are walking across a bridge, they stop to look at the river. Rusty James comments on how his brother likes the river but then turns his back to it while drinking from a bottle. The Motorcycle Boys says the river goes all the way to the ocean. Rusty James then makes Steve take a drink from his bottle. Steve doesn’t like it but Rusty James tells him it will get you where you need to go.

"You should pray to God not."

Rusty James spends a good portion of the film talking about how he thinks he will be just like his older brother. Even their own father, upon hearing Rusty James declare that he thinks he will be just like the Motorcycle Boy, says, “You should pray to God not.” The Motorcycle Boy knows that the only way for him to break the spell he has over his younger brother is through death. Rusty James sees himself as a reflection of his brother. At the pet store, the Motorcycle Boy shows Rusty James how rumble fish will try to fight their own reflection. Later, when they return to the pet store to steal the fish, the Motorcycle Boy finally says to Rusty James, “I wish I were the big brother you always wanted. But I can’t be what I want any more than you can.” He finally breaks the reflection that Rusty James has been seeing.

The Motorcycle Boy is convinced that the fish wouldn’t fight if they were free to swim in the river. He feels the same about his brother, that he wouldn’t fight if he were free of his confining environment. At the same time, he also knows that Rusty James needs to be free from himself, the idolized Motorcycle Boy, the reflection that he fights to maintain.

In an excerpt from one of the deleted scenes on the DVD, Steve tells Rusty James that if he hangs out with the Motorcycle Boy for too long, he won’t believe in anything. The Motorcycle Boy spends the entirety of the film destroying all meaning he had previously created and his life ends up no more valued than the life of the fish he tried to take to the river. Mickey Rourke approached the character of the Motorcycle Boy as “an actor who no longer finds his work interesting.” (Goodwin, p. 347)

No longer finding his work interesting

At the end, when Rusty James sees his own reflection in the police car window, he smashes it, finally breaking himself free. It’s a painful and sad moment of release. Now that he no longer has his brother to look up to, he must find his own way. It ties back to the beginning of the film when Midget (Laurence Fishburne) tells Rusty James that Biff Wilcox is looking for him. Rusty James says he’s not hiding. He then tells him that Biff wants to kill him. Rusty James replies, “Saying ain’t doing.” Rusty James had been hiding behind his brother’s reputation the whole time, saying that it didn’t matter. Now he must face the reality of it.

The final song that plays over the end credits further reinforces the notion of breaking free from confinement. The song is titled “Don’t Box Me In.” In the case of the Motorcycle Boy, Rumble Fish explores what happens when we reject all the boxes we have previously been in. Will it free us from having to accept predicted ways of behavior or will it lead to our untimely demise? What happens when we feel we have nowhere to go? Even in the end of the film, everyone inadvertently follows the Motorcycle Boy down to the river, leaving them all with nowhere else to go.

Rumble Fish is the strongest evidence yet that Coppola is a challenge to the system. (…) The system produces films that do not require abstract or symbolic thinking. Rumble Fish is a demanding film for people with expectations conditioned by standard Hollywood product. (Chown, p. 168)

References:

• “Have You Seen . . . ?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films, David Thomson, Knopf, 2010
• Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola, Jeffrey Chown, Praeger Publishers, 1988
• On the Edge: The Life and Times of Francis Coppola, Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise, William Morrow & Co, 1989
• Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola, Gene D. Phillips, The University Press of Kentucky, 2004

Mickey Rourke as The Motorcycle Boy

Lidia outside the hospital

La Notte‘s story centers around Marcello Mastroianni’s character of Giovanni, a successful writer who has recently published a new book. His wife, Lidia (Jeanne Moreau), provides mere window dressing for Giovanni in the beginning of the film. When they visit a dying friend named Tommaso in the hospital, Lidia remains aloof in the hospital room, refusing to sit and join her husband and Tommaso in a celebratory drink of champagne. Lidia’s distance in the hospital room seems to indicate that Giovanni was the closer friend to Tommaso, but when Lidia leaves the room on short notice and is outside the hospital, her feelings overcome her. This shifts the film toward her as the main character.

Lidia breaking free becomes the central action of the film, just as Anna disappearing in L’Avventura became the turning point in that film. In the case of La Notte, Lidia struggles to find herself instead of someone else, which is made more difficult because she is defined by her husband and his success as a writer. Lidia has no identity of her own.

Lidia’s story … is the story of a woman’s realization of how totally irrelevant her role is in her man’s life and of her dilemma as to what to do.” Cottino-Jones, p. 122

Lidia trapped in the car

When Giovanni tries to leave the hospital, his salacious encounter with a female patient occupies him until their embrace is broken up by nurses. The young woman in the hospital is physically caged because of her overt sexual desire, which enticed Giovanni into following her. When caught, however, the nurses restrain and strike the woman while Giovanni rushes safely out of the room. Giovanni joins his wife outside the hospital but fails to attend to, or even acknowledge, her emotional needs. This contrast of Giovanni’s character serves to further highlight Lidia’s situation.

While in the car, Lidia remains silent, not addressing the looks Giovanni gives her. When they encounter a traffic jam, Giovanni finally addresses her but Lidia’s answers are terse. Giovanni confesses to his encounter with the woman in the hospital, but Lidia shows no surprise. That Lidia guessed he went into her room on his own volition suggests Lidia is no stranger to his behavior. She tells Giovanni, “Perhaps she’s the lucky one.” Giovanni, perplexed, asks why. Lidia replies, “She’s uncontrollable.” This is the first outright statement from Lidia about her predicament.

Lidia is the background for Giovanni

The car scene physically reinforces Lidia’s feeling of being trapped. Giovanni, in control of the car as it careens down the road, seems stunned by her reaction to his encounter with the woman, but Lidia is already plotting her escape from the cages that contain her. When they finally arrive at the book party for Giovanni, Lidia leaves her husband’s side and walks among the guests. She quickly ditches the party, however, and heads out into the open streets of Milan, on her own terms.

Lidia escaping from a cage

Once Lidia escapes into the city, her walk and mood seem lighter as she lets herself meander.  When she takes a cab to a different section of the city, however, her lightness begins to recede. She encounters some young men fighting. She intervenes, telling them to stop. They do and turn their attention to her. As she runs away, one runs after her but stops at a fence, a man trapped within his own cage of meaningless violence.

At this point in the film, while Lidia explores her independence, the male characters are displayed trapped in their own cages, such as the young man who pursued Lidia. This idea of the male cage is best summed up in the book Antonioni, the Poet of Images: “Present, too, in La Notte is the imagery of enclosure that is so prominent in Il Grido, but here already evolving into the imagery of imprisonment—caged feelings and suppressed realities—that will dominate Eclipse, hinting in that film of the violence lurking and looming under the deceptively placid surface of the world, with its solid appearances and stolid certainties.” (Arrowsmith, p. 52) [Emphasis mine]

Young man in his own cage

While Lidia roams, Giovanni is trapped in his domestic cage as he waits for her to return, first in his book-lined study and later on his balcony where bars separate his space from his neighbor’s. During his conversation with the woman next door, a bird tweets and flutters in a cage on the woman’s balcony, reinforcing the similar condition of the humans nearby. Giovanni holds onto the bars, as if a prisoner in his own home. The balcony’s darkness is split only by a thin sliver of the fading light of day, faint hope for a grim situation.

Giovanni in his own cage

Lidia finally calls Giovanni to pick her up in a section of town where they lived earlier in their relationship. Once he arrives, she tries to invoke some interest from him but he remains aloof. They discuss the possibility of going to a party in the evening. When Lidia says she wants to go, Giovanni seems surprised, but when push comes to shove, neither are excited by the prospect. Back in their apartment as they prepare for their night out, Lidia gets out of the tub to ask Giovanni for a towel. As she stands naked, Giovanni remains unmoved by her nakedness, handing her towel as if it were just another duty.

The couple decides to hit a nightclub first, in part to hedge against their decision to go to the party and to attempt to loosen up. At the nightclub, a black woman dances and performs acrobatic feats with a filled wine glass. This performance only seems to deepen Lidia’s understanding of her own situation, providing her with a breakthrough moment, causing her to smile. Giovanni asks what she is thinking, but Lidia refuses to tell him. It’s a lucid moment for Lidia that could be mistaken as her getting over the feelings she has been experiencing thus far.

Lidia and Valentina

After driving through open gates, they walk toward the house where the party is being held. Once at the open front door, no one is around. Giovanni wonders aloud if they are all dead, to which Lidia says, “Let’s hope so.” They find the party in the back of the house, gathered around a race horse and rider. Once the group breaks apart, Lidia and Giovanni begin mingling, each on their own terms. Lidia consciously avoids people who would cage her, settling for her own company if that of others tends toward entrapment. She briefly joins Giovanni with the rich couple who are hosting the party. Lidia boldly inserts several comments about Giovanni into the discussion that reveal her new outlook on life. Giovanni, however, does not welcome this change.

As Lidia wanders around, she spots Valentina (Monica Vitti) at the bottom of the stairs. The two exchange glances: Lidia from up high, Valentina from down low. This arrangement sets up their uneven interaction, which eventually finds middle ground even as it gets more complicated, thanks to Giovanni. When he first spots Valentina, she is behind glass and alone, what appears to be the ideal situation for Giovanni: a caged, single woman. But unlike his encounter in the hospital, Valentina does not throw herself at him.

Giovanni spots Valentina

Valentina’s father, the rich businessman hosting the party, does, however, throw himself at Giovanni, offering him a well-paid position at his company. Giovanni is reluctant to take the position because it represents a potential cage for Giovanni. The scene physically feels like a cage as the businessman’s office is covered in photos of his factories, lots of pipes that feel like bars in a cage. The businessman stresses how the position would provide stability, which is not what Giovanni is looking for. The only thing that prevents him from an outright refusal of the offer is the possibility of becoming closer to Valentina.

Another cage: Valentina is walking by it

While Giovanni plays cat and mouse with Valentina, Lidia calls the hospital and finds out that Tommaso has died. She retreats into herself for a while, deeply saddened. When she sees Giovanni kissing Valentina, she is reminded of her cage and looks for an escape. A sudden downpour provides a release for Lidia, and as she is about to dive into the swimming pool, a man who has been eyeing her the whole night whisks her away in his car. Compared to the earlier scene in which Lidia was trapped in the car with Giovanni, the silent scene of Lidia and her captor driving slowly in the rain reveals a different side of Lidia. The lack of audible dialogue reinforces the idea of Lidia’s freedom in the moment. When they finally stop and get out of the car, Lidia tells the man she is not interested. She knows it would only be swapping one cage for another. She remains true to her self, not to Giovanni.

This forces Lidia back into her cage

When the power goes out back at the party, Giovanni searches for Valentina, the darkness providing cover for a tryst. Just as they are about to kiss, the lights come back. Soon after, Lidia returns, soaked. Valentina, still with Giovanni, offers to help her dry off. Lidia is unsure of Valentina’s intentions and asks her directly. Valentina jokingly assures Lidia that she only wants to help Lidia get herself dry. With the air cleared, the women bond and Lidia opens up to Valentina, leading to the following dialogue right as Giovanni enters the room.

Lidia: “You don’t know what it is to feel the weight of years, in vain… I just feel like dying. An end to this agony, something new…”
Valentina: “It may be nothing.”
Lidia: “Yes, it may be nothing.”

Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni, and Monica Vitti

Upon hearing Lidia’s despair, Giovanni, knowing that his night is over, tells her that they are leaving. Each says their bit to Valentina, while she admits to not understanding them at all. Dawn breaks outside, seemingly providing a new day for everyone.

As Giovanni and Lidia walk along the golf course at dawn, Lidia decides to reveal her true feelings to Giovanni. She realizes that Tommaso loved her for who she was and wanted to help her grow, but she was attracted to Giovanni and followed her biological instincts instead of her reasoning.

Leaving Valentina

At this point, she knows she has nothing to lose. As they sit on the edge of a sand trap, she reads aloud a love letter Giovanni wrote to her many years ago, one that Giovanni doesn’t remember or recognize. His inability to recall these intimate feelings he wrote to Lidia sums up her case against him. But Giovanni doesn’t want to admit defeat. He needs to have someone inside his cage, and since he has failed with other women throughout the film, Lidia is the only one who remains. Giovanni envelopes Lidia, against her protestations. Lidia remains trapped in Giovanni’s cage.

In La Notte, Lidia represents the purposeless. When she breaks free in the film, she wanders without a goal or end in sight, letting life take her where it may. When it only takes her to her own past, it reinforces her present situation. What was it that led to this state for Lidia? She passed up Tommaso to be with Giovanni. Her choice, based on following her feelings, ended with her being all alone, just like Tommaso dying in his hospital bed. He is able to die, aided through his suffering with morphine. Lidia must bear her suffering. For Lidia, life has lost all meaning now that she clearly sees her relationship with Giovanni is merely a convenience.

La Notte gets at the heart of human purpose. Lidia has let someone else define her purpose and when that vanishes, she loses the will to continue living. In the first half, the film shows the cages people create for themselves, at times quite literally. When Lidia realizes that she doesn’t love Giovanni anymore, it destroys her reason for living, but she must remain in the cage created by and for her.

Caught in a sand trap, forever

Tarkovsky on the embrace between Lidia and Giovanni at the end of the film: “like the embrace of two people who are drowning.” Brunette, p. 72

La Notte, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

• Marcello Mastroianni as Giovanni
• Jeanne Moreau as Lidia
• Monica Vitti as Valentina
• Bernhard Wicki as Tommaso

References:
Women, Desire, and Power in Italian Cinema, Marga Cottino-Jones, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010
Antonioni: The Poet of Images, William Arrowsmith, Oxford University Press, 1995
The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Peter Brunette, Cambridge University Press, 1998

Nihilism in Film and Television: A Critical Overview from Citizen Kane to the Sopranos

Through the rise of Christianity, the European Enlightenment, and the nation-state, the modern age became more and more defined by a collectivist slave-morality. As Nietzsche points out, there are indeed only two escape routes for those individuals who will not conform blindly to some abstract “common good” that levels everything that was formerly unique and inspiring to mere averageness. These individuals can either rise above the crowd as creators of their own values (active nihilists) or else sink into the dark and life-negating abyss of passive nihilism.

David Thewlis as Johnny

In Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993), Johnny (David Thewlis) walks the line between the active and the passive nihilist. Johnny is a character so despicably likeable that it becomes too easy to dismiss him, and the rest of the film, with a simple, sweeping negation. Naked certainly unveils a misogyny that runs through modern urban life, but the film itself does not deserve the misogynistic label, which is more apt for those Hollywood rom-coms that portray a female character who must find a man to fulfill her needs or desires. Depiction and intent are not the same thing. The film makes this clear from the opening scene, leaving enough ambiguity about the action taking place without telling the viewer if it is right or wrong.

The two primary male characters, Johnny and Sebastian (also called Jeremy), do not treat women well. The brutality, however difficult it is to watch, is true to their opposing positions in the world. Sebastian occupies a position of power, depicted by wealth and status. Sebastian maintains his position through domination and humiliation. Johnny, on the other hand, is powerless, and while he shares in humiliation of his fellow human beings, it comes from a need to connect rather than dominate.

Johnny functions as a mirror, showing people how they are victims of a world that has no compassion for their plights. This plays out through Johnny physically and verbally. Even when Johnny himself becomes a victim, he knows it’s just part of the cycle. As Johnny himself says in the film, he fled Manchester to avoid a beating and got one in London instead. As much as he can’t avoid what’s coming to him, he gets it anyway. This, viewer, is what you have coming to you.

Don't let him in.

The film unfolds through Johnny’s encounters with other people. He arrives in London at the flat of an old girlfriend but meets her unemployed roommate Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge) instead. Sophie falls for the quick-witted Johnny instantly, and they engage in (consensual) sexual intercourse after Johnny lambasts his old flame Louise (Lesley Sharp) when she comes home from work. Johnny’s disdain for Louise’s new life hints at his own hurt over their former relationship. It’s a familiar tactic used by men to mask their feelings.

Sophie becomes a bit too attached to Johnny, forcing him to flee their flat for the cold world outside. Out on the street, he encounters a Scottish man looking for his girlfriend. The entire sequence between the three outsiders on the street is one of the best of the film. It not only reveals Johnny’s more compassionate and playful side but also his understanding of the meaninglessness of his act of helping the Scottish runaways find each other.

Johnny moves on again

After Johnny’s efforts to do good are ruined by the ignorance and selfishness of those he helped, he is left without any acknowledgement of his kindness. This scene exemplifies the underpinnings of Johnny’s caustic nature, which unfortunately plays itself out with those closest to him. How often are we kinder to strangers than to those closest to us? Johnny represents this notion in the extreme.

It is only when the tables get turned on Johnny that a sense of compassion toward his character is able to form. Yet just as that compassion gets warmed up, his brutality shines through again. After a long scene where he trades theories of life with a night watchman, Johnny visits the watchman’s object of interest: an older woman across the street who dances alone in front of her apartment window. Johnny pays her a visit while the night watchman looks on from his darkened office building. Johnny’s actions leave them both feeling violated.

Johnny meets his match.

The watchman, like the viewer, is not amused by Johnny’s behavior. When the watchman ends their brief relationship over breakfast, Johnny quickly finds someone else to engage in his game. The quiet and sultry waitress at the cafe is initially intrigued by Johnny, silently allowing him to follow her home. Johnny provides her with an invitation to let him come in, which she takes.

Once inside, however, Johnny tones down his attitude, almost reaching out to this quiet, dark woman. He uses his wit to get her to open up, but she only opens up a can of beans. For the first time in the film, Johnny meets someone who is able to disarm him through her own silence. Her face seems to hide something that Johnny can’t unearth. And just as he is settled and cozy, Johnny gets a taste of what it is like to be on the other side of falling for a person who can only push you away.

Are you with me, love?

Johnny’s London getaway continues its decline, but he doesn’t let that stop him from taking a piss with the recently returned third roommate back at the flat where his adventure started. There is even a brief moment that seems to break the fourth wall, almost a wink at the viewer who is watching closely enough. Johnny, perhaps, has been playing with all of us.

Mr. Thewlis read extensively in order to bring Johnny to life but, unfortunately, made him a bit too much of a religious kook rather than a philosophical kook. While I appreciate the excellent work that David Thewlis put in to improvising Johnny’s dialogue, I would have made some changes to his reading list. If he had read Nietzsche instead of Nostradamus, the result would have been more powerful and more in line with the character’s actions.

Johnny’s nihilism comes off as a cruel joke, but on nobody in particular. Johnny provoked the other characters by tearing apart their ideals, yet his prophetic rantings could also be easily torn apart. Unfortunately, Johnny did not sink to the depths of a nihilist who has devalued all values. Instead he chooses to hang on to a few cherished notions and myths, which is perhaps why he found himself in so much trouble.

The crash site

While the opening of Fearless hooks the viewer instantly, the rest of the film relies on the performances of its two main characters, played by Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez. The remainder of the supporting cast, which includes Isabella Rosselini, John Turterro, and Bennicio Del Toro, provide one-dimensional filler for the lead actors. Regardless of its shortcomings, Fearless leaves an impression that is difficult to shake off. Don’t see this film prior to flying.

Max, after being located by investigators and encouraged to return home to his wife and kid, finds that his normal life holds no interest for him. He also avoids the attention heaped upon him by the media for being a hero who saved many people during the crash. Carla (Rosie Perez), on the other hand, lost her baby boy during the crash and has not been able to move on since. A therapist, played too over-the-top by John Tuturro, brings Carla and Max together in an attempt to heal each other. Carla holds all her meaning in her dead child, while Max realizes there never was meaning to begin with.

Carla and Max

Max accompanies Carla to her church where she lights a candle and prays. Max, surveying the scenery, laughs out loud at the setting, which does not sit well with Carla. He then delivers the best line of the film: “People don’t believe in god so much as they choose not to believe in nothing.” Max’s nihilism-by-accident is further tested by a lawyer who is trying to win a huge settlement for Max and the family of Max’s dead architect partner. Max is unwilling to lie about what he saw during the crash. He finds their reasons for seeking financial gain trivial compared to the new view of life he is experiencing.

Max and Carla continue to grow closer to each other, much to the dismay of their respective spouses. But just as Max and Carla’s relationship seems to be bringing them both back to normal, Carla breaks down again, blaming herself for the loss of her baby. Max goes to an extreme to prove to Carla that the death of her child wasn’t her fault. The build-up to this climatic scene suffers from a bad choice of music, unfortunately, which weakens the scene’s impact.

After the dusts settles and the last twang of guitar fades, Carla is healed but Max remains scarred, emotionally speaking. By saving Carla, he loses her relationship, forcing him to go back to his normal life. He realizes he can no longer maintain his position outside his own life. Fortunately, the filmmakers set up a gimmick that will get Max where he wants to go. They beat it into the ground worse than the landing gear of the plane that crashed. And while anyone can see the gimmick coming from a mile away, the strength of the film’s ending comes from the flashbacks that Max experiences because of the gimmick.

The whisper of nihilism

Experiencing the actual crash provides the first-person perspective that allows the viewer a glimpse into Max’s loss of meaning. It’s a strong demonstration of how fragile our lives are. When Max realized the plane was going to crash, he whispered to himself: “This is it. This is the moment of your death.” That scene reminded me of a quote from a rabbi who discovered he had cancer: “What have I left undone? That marching song of purpose is quickly undermined by the whisper of nihilism: so what if you’ve left something undone?” Once Max realized his situation and accepted it, he was able to take action and help calm the other passengers, many of whom he saved.

Max’s nihilism may not represent a permanent fixture in his life but was something he had to experience in order to regain his perspective. When faced with death, the meaning he had assigned to life suddenly seemed trivial. The only way to move forward was to take active control of his nihilism. Once the meaning dissolved away, he decided what he wanted to do.

The primary theme of Universal Soldier – The Return (1999) is one that has been neglected for far too long in Hollywood: Can zombies reproduce and become productive members of society?

Based on flashbacks in the The Return and information gleaned elsewhere, the U.S. Army, in conjunction with a private company called Ryan-Lathrop, took some frozen dead soldiers from the Vietnam War and reconstituted them into Universal Soldiers (their slogan is UniSols 2500: Dying to Serve), who are stronger and whose only requirement for R&R is time in a walk-in freezer. For The Return, they improved somewhat on the (beta) zombie soldiers with new 2.0 releases, but still encountered a few bugs to work out.

Our hero Luc, played by Jean-Claude Van Damme, is himself one of the original beta versions of the UniSol. And he has an eleven-year-old daughter. So, yes, zombies, apparently, can reproduce with humans. Which is gross and should be outlawed. But, wait, there are more questions that need to be answered.

A great opening

The film opens with a fascinating look at a winged, horse-like creature. Oh, that’s the TriStar logo. When the film does begin, a pervasive sense of danger looms, thanks, in part, to the camera moving through a building that has more warning signs than the Surgeon General’s supply closet. After the opening titles, a montage of swamp shots is interrupted by a loud motorboat/jet ski chase, in which our hero and his sexy female Asian sidekick are pursued by muscular guys in black. Shots are fired. Fortunately, no one is hit.

Turns out this whole scene was a military exercise with the 2.0 version of the UniSols. But not for long. Due to budget constraints, the military is cutting the UniSol program, which they were never comfortable with in the first place, since it was run by a private company. Also, zombies creep them out. Luc reminds the Army general that zombies are better than real young American soldiers dying. I think that was a message.

Back at the company’s headquarters in Dallas (naturally), the human-voiced all-knowing computer named Seth, which resembles a Rubik’s cube in a large, round lava lamp, senses that something is not right in Texas and decides to take control of the situation, but not before helping Luc’s daughter with her homework. There are no other movies with which to compare this idea of a computer taking control. We’re in new territory here.

An angry Seth computer, not Hal

Once Seth seizes control of the UniSols and kills the smartest guy in the room, the Army is forced to move outside and set up a tent. The Army general is not happy. Five UniSols come out to play, and the general orders them shot. The UniSols fall down amid a blaze of gunfire. But not for long. Cue heavy metal music and lots of explosions. Many white soldiers are killed so the Army calls in a black guy. Yes, one black guy.

Amid all this chaos and death, a female reporter from a local news station has followed Luc demanding to know what is going on. Luc, however, is concerned for his daughter, who he entrusted in the care of his sexy Asian sidekick. She, however, allowed the daughter to suffer a head injury while fighting off the biggest UniSol of the bunch, who is so mean he always sneers and says things like, “I don’t like that guy.”

To top it all off, Luc and the previously mentioned smartest guy in the room (now deceased) are the only people in the world who have the secret code that Seth the computer needs in order to keep himself running. If Seth does not get the code, he’ll suffer the blue screen of death in a matter of hours. In order to improve his chances of getting the code from Luc, Seth has inserted a mobile version of himself into the brain of a large, muscular black zombie soldier. Since the previously mentioned good black soldier was killed, the story can now proceed with the traditional Western version of good versus bad.

The situation looks dire. Two truckloads of UniSols have escaped, headed toward Fort Worth perhaps. Luc and the female reporter need to check their email, but they don’t have an internet connection. Power is out all over Dallas. Who in the world would still have an internet connection?

Three boobies

Enter strip club. If the core audience has become uncomfortable with all the hunky half-clothed guys, they can now get some wood on thanks to multitudes of fake boobies at the strip club, before moving to the next heavy-metal laced scene of violence and destruction. Don’t think for a moment that all the fake boobies are gratuitous. They are a metaphor of society’s desire to make things bigger and better, much like the military did with the UniSols. But the pressure for bigger boobies (or zombie soldiers and smart-ass computers) will eventually work against us, threatening our existence. This film sends a strong message about using technology and reconstructive surgery to make everything, boobies or soldiers, bigger and better.

The embodied Seth chokes Luc

Our hero Luc says the only way to kill a UniSol is “to blow them up and hope the pieces don’t keep fighting us.” Again, I’ve searched far and wide to find any other films that may have delved into similar scenarios but have to conclude that USTR is entirely original is this respect. As it is, I’m having a difficult time completing my review because I want to smash my computer into little bits, for the sake of humanity.

And so the battle of centralized techno-plastic surgery versus former zombie turned caring father comes to a head. Luc has a choice, offered to him by the embodied Seth. Give him the code to save his life so he can take over the world and kill all humanity, and Luc’s daughter lives. Or don’t give Seth the code and Luc’s daughter dies from her head injury, which does seem to bother Seth a little since he has spent so much time helping her with her homework.

Actually, strike that choice. Seth has been multitasking and cracked the code himself. Game over.

Game over for Seth (don't ask)

Not yet. Luc didn’t die, come back as a zombie, and father a child for nothing. Plus the Army has wired the building with explosives, which should be going off any moment. Luc, after taking out Seth through a tedious battle with lots of broken glass, tries to make his escape but the big UniSol zombie who has been after him all movie prevents it. To make matters worse, sexy Asian sidekick, who was killed earlier by the UniSols, turned into a zombie soldier herself, and then shot again by Luc, has returned to finish Luc off.

Game over for sure. No! Sexy Asian former sidekick zombie sticks true to her man and shoots the big UniSol bully instead of Luc. Zombies can make right after all. I think this is good news for fake boobies, too. But what about the future of Luc and his daughter?

Thanks to my secret sources, there is another chapter of Universal Soldier in the works and the synopsis goes something like this: Luc takes his daughter (half zombie herself) to a small town where they start over. Luc marries a nice woman and opens a coffee shop on Main Street. Daughter gets bullied at school. Luc encounters bad men at coffee shop and kills them. Daughter goes off on bullies at school. Bad men come after Luc, revealing his secret zombie past to his family. Will they stick by him?

Again, sounds like Universal Soldier is charting new territory. If you want fresh ideas, Universal Soldier films should be in your future.

This review is part of the the Third Annual White Elephant Film Blogathon.

The script was well researched, providing a powerful punch in the opening half, culminating with the riots in Watts in 1965. But it is also here where the film spends too much time on a point that is made well but repeatedly. Police repression had reached a point where the residents of South Central had no option but to fight back with everything at their disposal.

The complexity of Crips and Bloods: Made in America is handled straightforwardly, and the film allows the gang members to speak for themselves. This was one part of the film I was left wanting more of, the human portraits of the people who must deal with this condition on an hour-by-hour basis.

Some of the interviews were too staged, even when using a room with walls covered in graffiti. The filmmaker tried to overcome this in post-production by layering on his trademark style. It resulted in a film where too many formalist methods competed for my attention when I was wanting to focus on the story at hand.

The extraneous camera movement was like having someone point to where they wanted me to focus at every turn, instead of me being able to let my gaze find its own way. I tend toward the realist camp but appreciate formalist styles that speak to the story. I felt there were too many different stylistic treatments competing for my interests. I’d prefer letting some of the raw images speak for themselves.

While I initially applauded the use of current mapping technology to help me wrap my head around the geographical elements of the story, it felt like a Dateline segment after repeated uses of flashpoints on the maps. The cliched use of white flashes along with gunfire to pump up still images of gangsters with guns also fell into that TV news-show style.

Toward the end of the film, the message came across too hard and heavy and went over the edge when crying mothers whose sons had been murdered were presented one after another, staged in the graffiti room and with subtitles telling the names and ages of those who had been killed. This whole bit came across like a UNICEF commercial, and it was at that point when I was wondering when the film was going to wrap up. There were several moments where the end seemed to be there, but wasn’t. The ending became a montage of all the good quotations and segments that either didn’t fit in elsewhere or were deemed too valuable to cut.

As much as I didn’t care for the film’s style, it presented a thoughtful attack on government policies and social prejudices that have created the worst imaginable scenario for people who are supposed to be living in an equal society but who experience anything but equality and freedom. In particular, it showed how and why the typical hard-handed response from authorities does not work.