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Dystopia, Bureaucracy and Identity in Crulic – The Path to BeyondDystopia, Bureaucracy and Identity in Crulic – The Path to Beyond
Anca Ursa
Iuliu Haţieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ancaursa@yahoo.com
Dystopia, Bureaucracy and Identity in Crulic – The Path to Beyond
Abstract: The allegorical film about a young Romanian victim of the Polish justice system is an upside-down dystopia, in the three-dimensional mirror of the real. A typical Kafkaesque character passes the path to death in a world that refuses to hear him. We see dystopia as a study method, not as a purpose for the analytical investigation. In addition, we do not start from the idea that this is the opposite of an ideal world, but it’s the utopia converted into a degraded version which unfolded badly. I applied two scales of understanding to a deep and challenging scenario: the sociological theories about the world as a dysfunctional mechanism and the archetypes of the contemporary imaginative.
Keywords: Death; Laughter; Dystopia; Identity; Bureaucracy; Katabasis.
A film hard to classify
About Crulic – The Path to Beyond, Anca Damian’s 2011 work, it is easier to talk in negative definitions than positive ones: it is neither documentary, nor fictional; neither biographical, nor Romanian; neither a feature film, nor a short one; neither fully animated, nor exclusively with crêpe paper characters or actors; neither drama, nor comedy; neither realistic, nor totally parabolic; neither just narration, nor poetic collage. But it has something from all, in varying proportions.
With a less numerous team, consisting of two Poles and a few Romanians, with a budget under € 300,000, the film won 25 international awards in the first year of the festival circuit and it was very well received by the public and the press. What part of the composition makes each spectator resonate? How come the typical Kafkaesque hero and the bureaucratic dystopia have not lost their fascination, although the last half century has created numerous and redundant avatars for them in the lineage of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s novels, following the theories of Max Weber and Adorno or cinematic achievements like Metropolis, A Clockwork Orange, Brazil etc.?
The script created by Anca Damian after a thorough documentation presents the story of Daniel Claudiu Crulic, a Romanian young man who went to work in Poland. In 2007, at 33 years old, already a suspect in a case of theft, he was falsely accused of sneaking the wallet of a High Court judge. He was arrested on September 9, 2007, in preventive detention, for 3 months initially, with a further extension of another two months. From the first week, he went on hunger strike to protest against his abusive arrest, which led to the young man’s death in January 2008. For four months he had sent letters to the Polish authorities and the Romanian consul in Warsaw, asking to consider the proofs of his innocence, but all the institutions involved continued to deny or abolish the emerged evidence as being irrelevant. Only in 2014 did the first convictions for Crulic case appear: two doctors from the prison hospital got eight months in prison for criminal negligence.
The idea of a documentary was rejected by the producer from the beginning.
Although she managed to obtain copies of the files from Warsaw and Bucharest, though she transcribed endless confessions and details from the relatives, Anca Damian considered that the mosaic had too many missing parts, on one hand, and that extrapolating the experience through parable and poetry would be more valuable, on the other hand.
I refused that proposal [to make a documentary] because I didn’t want to go with the microphone in front of people’s houses and harass them with unnecessary questions. What would I have won? I believe that a film is a piece of art which compensates some misconducts of the society and of the man. I am not Michael Moore and I don’t want to be him.[1]
Therefore, she chose the protagonist’s voice from beyond the grave to simply narrate a biography which was apparently boring. The actor Vlad Ivanov narrates everything in the first person, with a mild irony, with a genuine Moldavian accent and an equal voice. It is an inspired trick; dystopia is stealthily created in the middle of the dull everyday life so that its subversion can be more persuasive.
In the following pages, I use two scales to interpret the proposed film, one based on the psychological and sociological theories descended from the world-bureaucracy initiated a century ago, and the other derived from the analysis of symbols and archetypes of the current imaginary.
The typical Kafkaesque world of nonidentity: a quasi-Eastern-European bureaucratic dystopia
Crulic – The Path to Beyond is an allegory of a society which is still dysfunctional institutionally, now in the twenty-first century. We are not dealing with a classic dystopia, it is not a future projection fully imagined, and the reference to the present plays an essential part, as it creates the historical narrative core of the script. But as stated above, the film goes beyond the negative evolution of a destiny in order to draw a typical Kafkaesque world, with which the new millennium begins and which reinvents a couple of fears that we considered obsolete.
Before detailing the perspective of some dystopian anxiety, a few terminological explanations are needed. Firstly, we do not focus on dystopia itself, as an object of study, but as an analytical category useful for understanding how we relate to the future, in view of the past. Not as an object of research, but as a method. It is a necessary distinction, recently promoted by the coordinators of the investigation volume on utopias and modern dystopias at Princeton University.[2] Therefore fable is not important in itself, but when and where the artistic projection appeared. What these issues say about the creator and his receptors becomes more important than the coherence or spectacular circumstantial narrative. How do we relate to the future here, in the Eastern areas of the old continent, in the European Union democratic frameworks, based on respecting human rights? It is important, in the same respect, to see how the problem of immigrants is perceived and managed by the responsible administrative bodies. Four years after the movie, the dilemmas tackled in Crulic are up-to-date topics for not such a far future as we thought then.
In an analysis of the imaginary modern democracy, Lucian Boia believes that currently Europe has exhausted its aspirations, no longer has what to hope for, and no longer has ideologies that could divide it or give some consistency.[3] Therefore, a revitalization of solidarity and motivation can be achieved around an ancient, but eternally productive archetype, that of an immigrant or a foreigner. Crulic is a foreigner who went to Poland, a country from the former Soviet bloc, too. At the beginning of the film, in his genealogical tree, the protagonist mentions his grandparents, as immigrants from Poland and his surname (crulic means rabbit in Polish) retains traces of their native language. However, it is not enough for the young man to be assimilated by the adopted country. He is in preventive detention also because the judge frequently makes confusion between a Roma and a Romanian. Crulic is sure he will remain in custody for a while until they realize that “I’m not the Gypsy described by the saleswoman” (for sure, the stigmatic chain of the other one is endless). However, the archetype of otherness appears as a preface to the democratic labyrinth and as his legitimization. Solidarity through indifference to the stranger may be a confirmation of his own social or even national identity.[4]
Secondly, our analysis relies on the coherence of defining dystopia as not necessarily an opposite form to utopia. Despite the common element, we cannot speak of an antinomy. If that is the case, dystopian society would likely be anarchic or planned to evolve dramatically for its members. But anti-utopia or dystopia derives from a utopia that went in a wrong way or that works only for privileged groups.[5]
Claudiu Crulic is doing quite well in the new country, until he is arrested for stealing from the judge. He does not think he has much chance of employment when he gets there, with a little Polish caught during his previous trips for merchandise. And yet, he finds an “uncle,” Razdvanek, who lets him live in his house. He is hired temporarily at some garages and car-washes. He also has a girlfriend, Lica, whom he knows from back home. He pays annual visits to his family in Italy and Romania. The hopes are confirmed by the initial images of Krakow, performed in the style of the 1970s communist advertising, long blue and pink, with naive optimistic messages -English “Krakow rocks,” “PeaceLove,” “Krakow is so cool!” Nevertheless the utopian imaginary is already threatened by visual oxymoronic clues. The last message of the sequence above, “Sun Shine Krakow” is projected on a rainy landscape, on an increasingly gray background, with a paroxysmal acceleration of both background music and images. Since the cinematic process of accelerating images usually gives place to gags and comic effects, here there is only anguish and menacing.
The items that ruin Claudiu Crulic’s newly created idyllic world suddenly occur when returning from a vacation at home. The foreground image of the common file with Lica, the typewriter’s chatter, the judge’s hammer, the final group that summons him not to make an appeal, place the protagonist in another paradigm, that of the convict. The episode is frustrating for the innocent viewer as the cause and the sentence are missing altogether. Perhaps Anca Damian, attached to her character, intentionally omitted tougher strokes since it is important to see an innocent dying at the end, in the typical Kafkaesque world. The real process is yet to come.
But first of all, a brief statement about the theoretical bureaucracy is useful, as it was done by two of the theorists of anti-utopia, with reference to the mechanized world, in the last century. In 1922 in his complex essay “Economy and Society,” Max Weber outlined a portrait of the new species of inhuman beings, rational experts in administration and production, incapable of emotion.[6] In the lineage of Weber, Ralph P. Hummel emphasizes that the changes made by bureaucracy do not affect the human being only at a superficial psychological level, but they challenges and even changes it at an ontological level, through at least three strategies:
1. Bureaucracy replaces autonomous personality with organizational identity.
2. Bureaucracy takes the functions of conscience (superego) and mastery (ego) out of the individual’s psyche and distributes them across organizational structures: hierarchy and the division of labor.
3. Bureaucracy, the increasing dependency of the individual self on structures of the organization (in effect, mingling self and organization), controls its functionaries by manipulating the existential anxiety over the loss of self that a separation from the job threatens to produce.[7]
These theories will be taken and adapted gradually to the history of the twentieth century by groups of critics of modern civilization, members of Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin) or French postmodernists (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard).
Does Crulic’s world resemble the picture of the dystopias foreseen by the theorists? Not only has it common elements, but it seems to confirm the scenarios of the mechanized institutionalization in each detail. It is a dystopia à l’envers in a three-dimensional mirror of the real, an existential interpretation of speculative theories. Already suspected of theft in the first case, Claudiu and Lica are “recognized” in the police photos by the sacked judge. Here the voice changes, the producer has chosen to alternate confession in the first person with a neutral and serious narrative of the events in English, with Jamie Sives’ voice, as once inside the mechanical state institutions, destiny no longer belongs to Crulic, he can no longer control it.
This is how it eventually turns out that those responsible for the development of Crulic’s case collaborate with solidarity worthy of a better cause than to ruin the prisoner’s life. The initial investigators keep on talking at the interrogation, overwhelming him with questions. In the first instance, Crulic says he was in Krakow on the day of the theft, as he was preparing to go to Italy, but then remembers that he was already on the bus on July 11, when the theft occurred. Nobody wants to hear, no one records. The Romanian Consul tells him to trust the Polish justice system, even when the main character’s requests are accompanied by an official letter from one of the majors from the detention center, in the investigation. The testimony of the guide who was on the bus on the way to Italy on the date of the theft and Crulic’s appearance in the company records as the ticket’s owner are not valid. The doctors at the prison kept postponing feeding him artificially; they declared him healthy, although he got unconscious in the prison hospital, for three times. They also delayed the start of maneuvers for artificial feeding, a gesture that would have saved the prisoner’s life after 4 months of strike. The Court hadn’t given them the permission yet. The serious voice, which exclusively dominates the last 15 minutes of video, is presented neutrally but with pauses that cause the spectator’s revolt: “Everyone followed the law. And according to the law, any decision of the Court awaits validation.”
However Crulic has an admirable strength in refusing to get into the swirl of the declarations of guilt. He knows he is innocent, so he fights with every means to avoid being sentenced: hunger strike, letters to prosecutors, letters to the Romanian Embassy, a calendar made by him, allowing him to appear in court on the day of the trial, a journal in which he thoroughly documented the evolution of his case until the last moment and, not least, his efforts to remain aware and vigilant all the time, despite the weakness induced by the prolonged strike. In his chronicle, Angelo Mitchievici underlines the surprise that this Everyman from the East offers to the viewers:
What is surprising is not the dissolution of the lost ego, but its resistance to nothingness. The stubbornness with which Crulic wants to prove his innocence, to claim his rights has something stronger than any activism, it is an outrage that does not turn into a cry, but rather a kind of flatus vocis coming from nowhere. The committed injustice awakens in Crulic a reaction that is stronger than him, which he is unable to justify, a sense of dignity that redesigns him as a character in an intense and absurd drama.[8]
The symbolism of the body is well managed metaphorically by the drawers. If until then Crulic appears in vague strokes, with his body often transparent or outlined in watercolor, in order to suggest the common fate of an individual who remains faithful to his standards, now the touches of the outline are precise, their color inside is thicker, as if as the body melted into a hunger strike. His existential substance is much more consistent, more valuable. The relentless fight against a mechanized system increases its ontological value.
A Failed Katabasis
Erling B. Holstmark includes utopian and dystopian films in the series of those that take the mythological patterns as the journey to the underworld, along with westerns, detective thrillers, and war stories.[9] What else announces the title and leads the scenario for Crulic – The Path to Beyond? The Katabasis, the descending initiatory journey is associated with a profound knowledge of himself and his return to the surface as a superior being. All coordinates are found in Anca Damian’s movie, excepting the return from death, even if the final metaphor of the flying sheets can be interpreted as an escape, as a transition into a higher plan. But death is there, it is final and beyond doubt. It is present at the core of the film and the script seems not to negotiate anything with the receiver and not spare him in any way. Death is often treated with warm humor by the “dead” character, which makes it less frightening, but not less present. In addition, elements that connote it appear recurrent and consistent.
The first scene already transmits unequivocally that the character is speaking from beyond the grave. His uncle finds out that his nephew Claudiu Crulic has died in Poland. The scene is presented as a novel exhibition. A raven appears on the left of the screen and sits on a black branch in front of the house. Reading from left to right is a good anchor for the viewer’s gaze, as he/she enters the “story.” The transparent role of the raven is that of psycho-pomp who will lead the dead man’s soul to the underworld. It appears with variations, whenever it feels the breath of death. When he moves to Krakow, the screen is invaded by a whole bevy, as a sign for a series of initiative attempts that were awaiting him on the path towards death. It also occurs when Crulic has a serious car accident and his companion dies. It comes when his and Lica’s child dies at birth. A very emotional scene is the “Russian roulette.” During the hunger strike, there is a decisive moment: once it is overcome, the striker cannot stop, either the problem gets fixed or he finally dies. The raven enters the character’s head and the wings keep on moving smoothly. Finally, in the episode of death, it appears in the window and then leaps over the sill.
The descent into hell includes two major archetypes, outlined in the coherence of the pattern in Greek mythology, Hades and the road. The prison has the features of Hades: long and tangled roads / corridors, Cerberus guards without eyes, but whose menacing teeth can be seen, money confiscation, the tortures that he endures from the detainees and his imprisoned colleagues and, finally, the conviction that there is no way back.
The Christian imagery of death is part of the story, too. The rooms in the prison and in the hospital often have long, narrow walls, like a tomb. A wall is always absent initially but after a few frames it slams loudly, like a coffin lid. Orthodox icons appear both in the wallet that his mother gets back after of his death and on the wall next to the bed. They do not necessarily express faith or the presence of a transcendent entity. They are rather a character hint, a sign of traditional education. Sometimes religious courts are even involved in the extermination scenario, their protective role being out of question. The Romanian Consul who is asked to intervene appears in a silhouette shaped like an angel, who wants to be begged, but who urinates on the applicant. A similar moment is when the camera slowly approaches the icon of Jesus on the wall and the viewer is almost waiting for a miracle. But the only noise that is heard is that of a coin dropped on the table.
The last reiterated symbol is the road. As a matter of fact, at some point in his confession, Crulic creates a metaphor of his personal life as a trip by bus. In one of the first scenes, the Mercedes with the coffin comes on a road lined with leafless and black trees, which may be lost in a white nothingness, where the path ends. The image returns towards the end, to conclude the story as a circle. Symbols of death are so numerous and diverse; the whole movie could be considered a poem about death.
Crulic-The Path to Beyond is a very tender story about death, as tender as such a topic can bear. But there is also a breakdown of utopia for the immigrant in Europe, which is too overwhelmed to be functional and to have efficient mechanisms and institutions in order to give importance to isolated individuals. A failed utopia, converted into a criminal scenario, under the eyes of his victims, a dystopia which does not talk about an individual’s mistakes, not even about the system, but about a reorientation of the current imaginary toward social system that we considered it was linked and exhausted by the history of the last century.
Bibliography
Lucian Boia, Mitul democraţiei, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2003.
Lucian Boia, Pentru o istorie a imaginarului, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2000.
Anca Damian, “Despre cazul lui Claudiu Crulic: Nu m-a interesat cine e vinovat. Vinovaţi suntem toţi,” http://www.mediafax.ro/cultura-media/anca-damian-despre-cazul-lui-claudiu-crulic-nu-m-a-interesat-cine-e-vinovat-vinovati-suntem-toti-video-8525928.
Ralph P. Hummel, The Bureaucratic Experience: The Post-Modern Challenge, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1977.
Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tille and Gyan Prakash (eds.), Utopia / Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, Princeton – New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2010.
Gallya Lahav, Immigration and Politics in the New Europe: Reinventing Borders, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Serge Latouche, Décoloniser l’imaginaire: La pensée créative contre l’économie de l’absurde, Lyon, Parangon, 2005.
Per Persson, Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Max Weber, Oraşul, Bucureşti, Editura All, 2013.
Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth & Culture in the Cinema, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001.
Notes
[1] Anca Damian, “Despre cazul lui Claudiu Crulic: Nu m-a interesat cine e vinovat. Vinovaţi suntem toţi,” http://www.mediafax.ro/cultura-media/anca-damian-despre-cazul-lui-claudiu-crulic-nu-m-a-interesat-cine-e-vinovat-vinovati-suntem-toti-video-8525928, accessed on 03.10.2015.
[2] Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tille, Gyan Prakash (eds.), Utopia / Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, Princeton – New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2010, p. 3.
[3] Lucian Boia, Mitul democraţiei, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2003, p. 128: “Europe before nations was a strongly fragmented space, however unified around common political and spiritual principles: the Empire (half reality, half fiction), Christianity or Latin as instrument of communication elites. It was a space divided equally by thousands of borders and without borders. Then the nation came and simplified things, erasing interior borders and deepening the exterior ones. It seems that we are about to reinvent a complex system, heading towards a unified and equally fragmented world… ”
[4] Gallya Lahav, Immigration and Politics in the New Europe: Reinventing Borders, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 158: “One of the safest ways to confirm the identity for both communities and individuals is to find a way and measure what you are not.”
[7] Ralph P. Hummel, The Bureaucratic Experience: The Post-Modern Challenge, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, pp. 9-10.
Anca Ursa
Iuliu Haţieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ancaursa@yahoo.com
Dystopia, Bureaucracy and Identity in Crulic – The Path to Beyond
Abstract: The allegorical film about a young Romanian victim of the Polish justice system is an upside-down dystopia, in the three-dimensional mirror of the real. A typical Kafkaesque character passes the path to death in a world that refuses to hear him. We see dystopia as a study method, not as a purpose for the analytical investigation. In addition, we do not start from the idea that this is the opposite of an ideal world, but it’s the utopia converted into a degraded version which unfolded badly. I applied two scales of understanding to a deep and challenging scenario: the sociological theories about the world as a dysfunctional mechanism and the archetypes of the contemporary imaginative.
Keywords: Death; Laughter; Dystopia; Identity; Bureaucracy; Katabasis.
A film hard to classify
About Crulic – The Path to Beyond, Anca Damian’s 2011 work, it is easier to talk in negative definitions than positive ones: it is neither documentary, nor fictional; neither biographical, nor Romanian; neither a feature film, nor a short one; neither fully animated, nor exclusively with crêpe paper characters or actors; neither drama, nor comedy; neither realistic, nor totally parabolic; neither just narration, nor poetic collage. But it has something from all, in varying proportions.
With a less numerous team, consisting of two Poles and a few Romanians, with a budget under € 300,000, the film won 25 international awards in the first year of the festival circuit and it was very well received by the public and the press. What part of the composition makes each spectator resonate? How come the typical Kafkaesque hero and the bureaucratic dystopia have not lost their fascination, although the last half century has created numerous and redundant avatars for them in the lineage of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s novels, following the theories of Max Weber and Adorno or cinematic achievements like Metropolis, A Clockwork Orange, Brazil etc.?
The script created by Anca Damian after a thorough documentation presents the story of Daniel Claudiu Crulic, a Romanian young man who went to work in Poland. In 2007, at 33 years old, already a suspect in a case of theft, he was falsely accused of sneaking the wallet of a High Court judge. He was arrested on September 9, 2007, in preventive detention, for 3 months initially, with a further extension of another two months. From the first week, he went on hunger strike to protest against his abusive arrest, which led to the young man’s death in January 2008. For four months he had sent letters to the Polish authorities and the Romanian consul in Warsaw, asking to consider the proofs of his innocence, but all the institutions involved continued to deny or abolish the emerged evidence as being irrelevant. Only in 2014 did the first convictions for Crulic case appear: two doctors from the prison hospital got eight months in prison for criminal negligence.
The idea of a documentary was rejected by the producer from the beginning.
Although she managed to obtain copies of the files from Warsaw and Bucharest, though she transcribed endless confessions and details from the relatives, Anca Damian considered that the mosaic had too many missing parts, on one hand, and that extrapolating the experience through parable and poetry would be more valuable, on the other hand.
I refused that proposal [to make a documentary] because I didn’t want to go with the microphone in front of people’s houses and harass them with unnecessary questions. What would I have won? I believe that a film is a piece of art which compensates some misconducts of the society and of the man. I am not Michael Moore and I don’t want to be him.[1]
Therefore, she chose the protagonist’s voice from beyond the grave to simply narrate a biography which was apparently boring. The actor Vlad Ivanov narrates everything in the first person, with a mild irony, with a genuine Moldavian accent and an equal voice. It is an inspired trick; dystopia is stealthily created in the middle of the dull everyday life so that its subversion can be more persuasive.
In the following pages, I use two scales to interpret the proposed film, one based on the psychological and sociological theories descended from the world-bureaucracy initiated a century ago, and the other derived from the analysis of symbols and archetypes of the current imaginary.
The typical Kafkaesque world of nonidentity: a quasi-Eastern-European bureaucratic dystopia
Crulic – The Path to Beyond is an allegory of a society which is still dysfunctional institutionally, now in the twenty-first century. We are not dealing with a classic dystopia, it is not a future projection fully imagined, and the reference to the present plays an essential part, as it creates the historical narrative core of the script. But as stated above, the film goes beyond the negative evolution of a destiny in order to draw a typical Kafkaesque world, with which the new millennium begins and which reinvents a couple of fears that we considered obsolete.
Before detailing the perspective of some dystopian anxiety, a few terminological explanations are needed. Firstly, we do not focus on dystopia itself, as an object of study, but as an analytical category useful for understanding how we relate to the future, in view of the past. Not as an object of research, but as a method. It is a necessary distinction, recently promoted by the coordinators of the investigation volume on utopias and modern dystopias at Princeton University.[2] Therefore fable is not important in itself, but when and where the artistic projection appeared. What these issues say about the creator and his receptors becomes more important than the coherence or spectacular circumstantial narrative. How do we relate to the future here, in the Eastern areas of the old continent, in the European Union democratic frameworks, based on respecting human rights? It is important, in the same respect, to see how the problem of immigrants is perceived and managed by the responsible administrative bodies. Four years after the movie, the dilemmas tackled in Crulic are up-to-date topics for not such a far future as we thought then.
In an analysis of the imaginary modern democracy, Lucian Boia believes that currently Europe has exhausted its aspirations, no longer has what to hope for, and no longer has ideologies that could divide it or give some consistency.[3] Therefore, a revitalization of solidarity and motivation can be achieved around an ancient, but eternally productive archetype, that of an immigrant or a foreigner. Crulic is a foreigner who went to Poland, a country from the former Soviet bloc, too. At the beginning of the film, in his genealogical tree, the protagonist mentions his grandparents, as immigrants from Poland and his surname (crulic means rabbit in Polish) retains traces of their native language. However, it is not enough for the young man to be assimilated by the adopted country. He is in preventive detention also because the judge frequently makes confusion between a Roma and a Romanian. Crulic is sure he will remain in custody for a while until they realize that “I’m not the Gypsy described by the saleswoman” (for sure, the stigmatic chain of the other one is endless). However, the archetype of otherness appears as a preface to the democratic labyrinth and as his legitimization. Solidarity through indifference to the stranger may be a confirmation of his own social or even national identity.[4]
Secondly, our analysis relies on the coherence of defining dystopia as not necessarily an opposite form to utopia. Despite the common element, we cannot speak of an antinomy. If that is the case, dystopian society would likely be anarchic or planned to evolve dramatically for its members. But anti-utopia or dystopia derives from a utopia that went in a wrong way or that works only for privileged groups.[5]
Claudiu Crulic is doing quite well in the new country, until he is arrested for stealing from the judge. He does not think he has much chance of employment when he gets there, with a little Polish caught during his previous trips for merchandise. And yet, he finds an “uncle,” Razdvanek, who lets him live in his house. He is hired temporarily at some garages and car-washes. He also has a girlfriend, Lica, whom he knows from back home. He pays annual visits to his family in Italy and Romania. The hopes are confirmed by the initial images of Krakow, performed in the style of the 1970s communist advertising, long blue and pink, with naive optimistic messages -English “Krakow rocks,” “PeaceLove,” “Krakow is so cool!” Nevertheless the utopian imaginary is already threatened by visual oxymoronic clues. The last message of the sequence above, “Sun Shine Krakow” is projected on a rainy landscape, on an increasingly gray background, with a paroxysmal acceleration of both background music and images. Since the cinematic process of accelerating images usually gives place to gags and comic effects, here there is only anguish and menacing.
The items that ruin Claudiu Crulic’s newly created idyllic world suddenly occur when returning from a vacation at home. The foreground image of the common file with Lica, the typewriter’s chatter, the judge’s hammer, the final group that summons him not to make an appeal, place the protagonist in another paradigm, that of the convict. The episode is frustrating for the innocent viewer as the cause and the sentence are missing altogether. Perhaps Anca Damian, attached to her character, intentionally omitted tougher strokes since it is important to see an innocent dying at the end, in the typical Kafkaesque world. The real process is yet to come.
But first of all, a brief statement about the theoretical bureaucracy is useful, as it was done by two of the theorists of anti-utopia, with reference to the mechanized world, in the last century. In 1922 in his complex essay “Economy and Society,” Max Weber outlined a portrait of the new species of inhuman beings, rational experts in administration and production, incapable of emotion.[6] In the lineage of Weber, Ralph P. Hummel emphasizes that the changes made by bureaucracy do not affect the human being only at a superficial psychological level, but they challenges and even changes it at an ontological level, through at least three strategies:
1. Bureaucracy replaces autonomous personality with organizational identity.
2. Bureaucracy takes the functions of conscience (superego) and mastery (ego) out of the individual’s psyche and distributes them across organizational structures: hierarchy and the division of labor.
3. Bureaucracy, the increasing dependency of the individual self on structures of the organization (in effect, mingling self and organization), controls its functionaries by manipulating the existential anxiety over the loss of self that a separation from the job threatens to produce.[7]
These theories will be taken and adapted gradually to the history of the twentieth century by groups of critics of modern civilization, members of Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin) or French postmodernists (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard).
Does Crulic’s world resemble the picture of the dystopias foreseen by the theorists? Not only has it common elements, but it seems to confirm the scenarios of the mechanized institutionalization in each detail. It is a dystopia à l’envers in a three-dimensional mirror of the real, an existential interpretation of speculative theories. Already suspected of theft in the first case, Claudiu and Lica are “recognized” in the police photos by the sacked judge. Here the voice changes, the producer has chosen to alternate confession in the first person with a neutral and serious narrative of the events in English, with Jamie Sives’ voice, as once inside the mechanical state institutions, destiny no longer belongs to Crulic, he can no longer control it.
This is how it eventually turns out that those responsible for the development of Crulic’s case collaborate with solidarity worthy of a better cause than to ruin the prisoner’s life. The initial investigators keep on talking at the interrogation, overwhelming him with questions. In the first instance, Crulic says he was in Krakow on the day of the theft, as he was preparing to go to Italy, but then remembers that he was already on the bus on July 11, when the theft occurred. Nobody wants to hear, no one records. The Romanian Consul tells him to trust the Polish justice system, even when the main character’s requests are accompanied by an official letter from one of the majors from the detention center, in the investigation. The testimony of the guide who was on the bus on the way to Italy on the date of the theft and Crulic’s appearance in the company records as the ticket’s owner are not valid. The doctors at the prison kept postponing feeding him artificially; they declared him healthy, although he got unconscious in the prison hospital, for three times. They also delayed the start of maneuvers for artificial feeding, a gesture that would have saved the prisoner’s life after 4 months of strike. The Court hadn’t given them the permission yet. The serious voice, which exclusively dominates the last 15 minutes of video, is presented neutrally but with pauses that cause the spectator’s revolt: “Everyone followed the law. And according to the law, any decision of the Court awaits validation.”
However Crulic has an admirable strength in refusing to get into the swirl of the declarations of guilt. He knows he is innocent, so he fights with every means to avoid being sentenced: hunger strike, letters to prosecutors, letters to the Romanian Embassy, a calendar made by him, allowing him to appear in court on the day of the trial, a journal in which he thoroughly documented the evolution of his case until the last moment and, not least, his efforts to remain aware and vigilant all the time, despite the weakness induced by the prolonged strike. In his chronicle, Angelo Mitchievici underlines the surprise that this Everyman from the East offers to the viewers:
What is surprising is not the dissolution of the lost ego, but its resistance to nothingness. The stubbornness with which Crulic wants to prove his innocence, to claim his rights has something stronger than any activism, it is an outrage that does not turn into a cry, but rather a kind of flatus vocis coming from nowhere. The committed injustice awakens in Crulic a reaction that is stronger than him, which he is unable to justify, a sense of dignity that redesigns him as a character in an intense and absurd drama.[8]
The symbolism of the body is well managed metaphorically by the drawers. If until then Crulic appears in vague strokes, with his body often transparent or outlined in watercolor, in order to suggest the common fate of an individual who remains faithful to his standards, now the touches of the outline are precise, their color inside is thicker, as if as the body melted into a hunger strike. His existential substance is much more consistent, more valuable. The relentless fight against a mechanized system increases its ontological value.
A Failed Katabasis
Erling B. Holstmark includes utopian and dystopian films in the series of those that take the mythological patterns as the journey to the underworld, along with westerns, detective thrillers, and war stories.[9] What else announces the title and leads the scenario for Crulic – The Path to Beyond? The Katabasis, the descending initiatory journey is associated with a profound knowledge of himself and his return to the surface as a superior being. All coordinates are found in Anca Damian’s movie, excepting the return from death, even if the final metaphor of the flying sheets can be interpreted as an escape, as a transition into a higher plan. But death is there, it is final and beyond doubt. It is present at the core of the film and the script seems not to negotiate anything with the receiver and not spare him in any way. Death is often treated with warm humor by the “dead” character, which makes it less frightening, but not less present. In addition, elements that connote it appear recurrent and consistent.
The first scene already transmits unequivocally that the character is speaking from beyond the grave. His uncle finds out that his nephew Claudiu Crulic has died in Poland. The scene is presented as a novel exhibition. A raven appears on the left of the screen and sits on a black branch in front of the house. Reading from left to right is a good anchor for the viewer’s gaze, as he/she enters the “story.” The transparent role of the raven is that of psycho-pomp who will lead the dead man’s soul to the underworld. It appears with variations, whenever it feels the breath of death. When he moves to Krakow, the screen is invaded by a whole bevy, as a sign for a series of initiative attempts that were awaiting him on the path towards death. It also occurs when Crulic has a serious car accident and his companion dies. It comes when his and Lica’s child dies at birth. A very emotional scene is the “Russian roulette.” During the hunger strike, there is a decisive moment: once it is overcome, the striker cannot stop, either the problem gets fixed or he finally dies. The raven enters the character’s head and the wings keep on moving smoothly. Finally, in the episode of death, it appears in the window and then leaps over the sill.
The descent into hell includes two major archetypes, outlined in the coherence of the pattern in Greek mythology, Hades and the road. The prison has the features of Hades: long and tangled roads / corridors, Cerberus guards without eyes, but whose menacing teeth can be seen, money confiscation, the tortures that he endures from the detainees and his imprisoned colleagues and, finally, the conviction that there is no way back.
The Christian imagery of death is part of the story, too. The rooms in the prison and in the hospital often have long, narrow walls, like a tomb. A wall is always absent initially but after a few frames it slams loudly, like a coffin lid. Orthodox icons appear both in the wallet that his mother gets back after of his death and on the wall next to the bed. They do not necessarily express faith or the presence of a transcendent entity. They are rather a character hint, a sign of traditional education. Sometimes religious courts are even involved in the extermination scenario, their protective role being out of question. The Romanian Consul who is asked to intervene appears in a silhouette shaped like an angel, who wants to be begged, but who urinates on the applicant. A similar moment is when the camera slowly approaches the icon of Jesus on the wall and the viewer is almost waiting for a miracle. But the only noise that is heard is that of a coin dropped on the table.
The last reiterated symbol is the road. As a matter of fact, at some point in his confession, Crulic creates a metaphor of his personal life as a trip by bus. In one of the first scenes, the Mercedes with the coffin comes on a road lined with leafless and black trees, which may be lost in a white nothingness, where the path ends. The image returns towards the end, to conclude the story as a circle. Symbols of death are so numerous and diverse; the whole movie could be considered a poem about death.
Crulic-The Path to Beyond is a very tender story about death, as tender as such a topic can bear. But there is also a breakdown of utopia for the immigrant in Europe, which is too overwhelmed to be functional and to have efficient mechanisms and institutions in order to give importance to isolated individuals. A failed utopia, converted into a criminal scenario, under the eyes of his victims, a dystopia which does not talk about an individual’s mistakes, not even about the system, but about a reorientation of the current imaginary toward social system that we considered it was linked and exhausted by the history of the last century.
Bibliography
Lucian Boia, Mitul democraţiei, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2003.
Lucian Boia, Pentru o istorie a imaginarului, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2000.
Anca Damian, “Despre cazul lui Claudiu Crulic: Nu m-a interesat cine e vinovat. Vinovaţi suntem toţi,” http://www.mediafax.ro/cultura-media/anca-damian-despre-cazul-lui-claudiu-crulic-nu-m-a-interesat-cine-e-vinovat-vinovati-suntem-toti-video-8525928.
Ralph P. Hummel, The Bureaucratic Experience: The Post-Modern Challenge, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1977.
Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tille and Gyan Prakash (eds.), Utopia / Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, Princeton – New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2010.
Gallya Lahav, Immigration and Politics in the New Europe: Reinventing Borders, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Serge Latouche, Décoloniser l’imaginaire: La pensée créative contre l’économie de l’absurde, Lyon, Parangon, 2005.
Per Persson, Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Max Weber, Oraşul, Bucureşti, Editura All, 2013.
Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth & Culture in the Cinema, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001.
Notes
[1] Anca Damian, “Despre cazul lui Claudiu Crulic: Nu m-a interesat cine e vinovat. Vinovaţi suntem toţi,” http://www.mediafax.ro/cultura-media/anca-damian-despre-cazul-lui-claudiu-crulic-nu-m-a-interesat-cine-e-vinovat-vinovati-suntem-toti-video-8525928, accessed on 03.10.2015.
[2] Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tille, Gyan Prakash (eds.), Utopia / Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, Princeton – New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2010, p. 3.
[3] Lucian Boia, Mitul democraţiei, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas, 2003, p. 128: “Europe before nations was a strongly fragmented space, however unified around common political and spiritual principles: the Empire (half reality, half fiction), Christianity or Latin as instrument of communication elites. It was a space divided equally by thousands of borders and without borders. Then the nation came and simplified things, erasing interior borders and deepening the exterior ones. It seems that we are about to reinvent a complex system, heading towards a unified and equally fragmented world… ”
[4] Gallya Lahav, Immigration and Politics in the New Europe: Reinventing Borders, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 158: “One of the safest ways to confirm the identity for both communities and individuals is to find a way and measure what you are not.”
[7] Ralph P. Hummel, The Bureaucratic Experience: The Post-Modern Challenge, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, pp. 9-10.
The Blind Spot. Utopian and Dystopian Seeds in José Saramago’s Novel BlindnessThe Blind Spot. Utopian and Dystopian Seeds in José Saramago’s Novel Blindness
Cristina Vidruţiu
Fellow of the Associazione Internazionale Dino Buzzati, Feltre, Italy
vidrutiucristina@yahoo.com
The Blind Spot. Utopian and Dystopian Seeds in José Saramago’s Novel Blindness
Abstract: The paper first explores the peculiar symbiosis between utopia and dystopia in José Sarmago’s novel Blindness, by tracing a parallel between the group in the novel and the brigata in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron; and second, it analyzes the way this atypical world is translated on the big screen by Fernando Meirelles, using a number of different cinematography techniques.
Keywords: Plague; José Saramago; Giovanni Boccaccio; Blindness; Fernando Meirelles.
When Fernando Meirelles decided he wanted to shoot the cinematographic version of José Saramago’s novel Blindness, he knew it would not be an easy job, first of all, because he had to convince the Portuguese writer to give him this opportunity. Along the years, Saramago refused several offers to make a movie out of Blindness, because he said he was afraid that fallen in the wrong hands, the message of the novel would be distorted. Finally, he accepted Meirelles’s offer, and in 2008, when the movie premiered and Saramago saw it, he cried tears of happiness, saying that watching the adaptation made him as happy as when he finished writing the novel.
With that in mind, we can clearly say that, at least from Saramago’s point of view, Meirelles succeeded in making the camera see and show the unseen, and thus to assume the role of storyteller for the viewer. Not only that, but by using a set of well-timed techniques, Meirelles ended up making the viewer constantly “adapt to” and “adopt” the camera lenses’ view in understanding the movie.
When Saramago wrote Blindness, he did not make a choice between dystopia and utopia; instead, he acknowledged that the grains of paradise can be found in the midst of hell, confirming what Rebecca Totaro once wrote: “Utopianism took literary form, growing out of plague-time.”[1]
For the Portuguese writer, there is never a clear mark between these two areas, as these are always on the move, changing borders, reimagining the world. In Saramago’s novel, dystopia and utopia are permeable to each other and they seem to co-exist in a peculiar form of symbiosis.
From the moment the mysterious blindness epidemic hits the city and all falls apart, the world sets slowly its pace to a new rhythm: that of dystopia, promising a resurrection, in accordance with Elana Gomel’s distinction between apocalyptic-regenerative narratives and post-apocalyptic-death and suffering ridden narratives.[2]
As soon as the infected persons are put into the mental hospital, at gunpoint, under the strict surveillance of the military, on rationalized food, under scanty conditions of living and without any medical supplies, all hell breaks loose, making the fight for survival a day-to-day task for each and every one of those imprisoned. In this context, the dysfunctional “plague-stricken town” fails to become “the utopia of the perfectly governed city,”[3] as seen by Foucault. In fact, it turns out to be quite the opposite.
In the midst of violence, destruction and death, a new chance for life arises, as a small group of people understands the importance of cooperation, organization and leadership. The doctor’s wife, played by Julianne Moore, the only one who sees, coagulates a new form of brigata around her, whom she does not lead, as she says, but to whom rather she lends her sight.
In relation to the classical brigata from Boccaccio’s Decameron, the group from Saramago’s Blindness seems to be built on complementary principles. But beyond structural differences, it is important to remember the fact that both groups have a common origin, the outbreak of a disease, and that the main goal of both groups is to create a structure able to survive and function in the face of the plague.
While the brigata from the Decameron runs away from the bubonic plague, the new brigata from Blindness tries to escape the white blindness epidemic. In both cases, the disease is considered a violent event that changes the course of things. But the way each author envisions how people should react to the epidemic is totally different. Both Boccaccio and Saramago agree on the idea of a group, but where, when, how and with whom the group should be formed is seen very differently by the two authors.
Let’s take for example the classical brigata from the Decameron. This is a group made of young men and women (that have names), formed as soon as the plague sets in Florence, dwelling in the countryside and guided by a set of principles that represent the scientific preventive views of the time regarding the plague: in order to prevent or fight the plague, it is recommended to keep a good sense of humor, to engage in activities like storytelling, dancing, walking, singing, to eat nutritious and rich food, sleep well and retreat in the countryside for the fresh air.
On the other hand, the new brigata from Blindness is complementarily built. First of all, this other group is more heterogeneous. It consists of men and women, young and old, a child and eventually even a dog. Second, the characters do not have names. Third, the group is formed only as the epidemic invades the city and the characters escape the insane asylum, where they were kept. Fourth, the group dwells in the city. Fifth, the members of the group are not able to engage in relaxing activities, nor to have a healthy diet because of the chaotic state of the city, where provisions are scarce and the air is polluted.
Still, despite all the differences between the two brigata, there is a moment and, more specifically, a place when the groups resemble each other, when the two groups can be seen as the seeds of utopia. As soon as the group from Saramago’s novel escapes the insane asylum and enters the doctor’s home, things change.
This new space is defined in opposition to the space of the ward. In here, cleanliness, nice smells, order, food supplies, fresh water and a friendly atmosphere rule, leading to its being called a paradise by the members of the new brigata, while the place left behind is called hell. The access to this space of purity is guided by the doctor’s wife and her husband, who ask the members of the group to abandon their dirty clothes and wash themselves. Once settled, the new brigata can enjoy the provisions and engage in a pleasant way of spending time, much like the merry group from the Decameron.
The most striking difference, regarding the way the two groups try to articulate a functional, utopic structure in the midst of plague ridden cities, resides in the way these understand the notion of ruler.
In the Decameron, each day has a different patron, which establishes the theme for the stories to be told on that particular time frame. Each of the brigata’s members is to rule and each of them is bringing their contribution each day by telling a story. In other words, the power and the responsibilities that come along with it are distributed equally among all members, giving them the chance to assume different roles and to contribute in complementary ways to the good functioning of the group.
In Blindness, the one and only leader for the whole period of time is the doctor’s wife, mainly because she is the only one that does not lose her eyesight, and thus has the power to make decisions. Her relation to the others is one of great responsibility. Mainly, she assumes a role similar to that of a mother: she guides the members of the group, she feeds them, she takes care of them, she washes them, and she protects them.
Even though she is in a position whence she might take full advantage of her eyesight and become a tyrannical ruler, she does not do it. Nor does she consider herself a leader, but more of an organizer, a person like the others, who lends her sight to the others. When relating to others, she insists on the idea of community and the power of collaboration. In this case, the power irradiates from the doctor’s wife to the others and returns once again to the doctor’s wife, as the members of the group see in her a sort of savior.
If we consider the dynamic of the two brigata and the relation between these and the diseased environment, we can observe a certain similarity regarding the way these interact and the roles they assume. At first, the groups separate themselves from the chaotic mass of people. Second, they try to coagulate as a functional group. And third, they “contaminate” the world, serving as a functional model in the midst of chaos.
The group’s way of functioning as an independent and self-sufficient unit goes from chaotic, non-organized and destructive to defined, organized and regenerative. In biological terms, the functional transition the groups make is similar to that from cancer cells to stem cells. In this equation, the diseased city acts the same way as cancer cells, while the two brigata act the same way as stem cells. In both novels, the two groups irradiate life, they fight against disorder and give a solution: a way to organize themselves.
The nature of the diseases present in the two novels has a strong influence on the way the sense of community arises. If in the Decameron the bubonic plague allows everyday rules to be broken and the imagination to be set free, giving cathartic powers to the stories, in Saramago’s novel, the white blindness encourages touch as a way to bond with the others.
Meirelles clearly understands the transition from sight to touch, in Saramago’s novel, and while adapting the story for the big screen he lays a big emphasis on this aspect.
The camera focuses mainly on parts of the body. It assembles the whole image like a puzzle, trying to make sense of it. It usually starts with the extremities, the feet, or the hands, which usually make a strong sound while touching something else. In fact, the visual image of the movie is constructed by respecting the “contours” left by the sound.
The director superposes the movement of the camera to Saramago’s words from the novel: when the first man goes blind, his explanation about what he is experiencing synchronizes with the images the camera shots apparently in a random manner. While saying he is seeing white all around him, the windows of the car where the man is reflect the white light. As the explanation of the character continues, the car goes from light to dark, while crossing a tunnel.
This transgression between white and black or black and white will repeatedly appear in Meirelles’s movie, becoming a sort of visual rhythm, sewing together the pieces of the puzzle: from the street in the broad daylight to the tunnel, from the black wall of the kitchen to the light in the kitchen, from day to night, switching on and off lights or headlights, moving from the street to the dark van.
The visual rhythm of the movie is accompanied by a specific sound, which has the role of highlighting the proportions of the blindness epidemic. Each new case of blindness is signaled by a sound, similar to that of hitting a piece of crystal, while a white light invades the image.
The movie’s images suffer a reconversion once blindness is installed: the image is chopped, there is a lot of zooming, the eyes of the characters are outside of the frame, the extremities become the main focus and the sound guides the way to assembling the whole picture. As the epidemic progresses, the fight between the image and the white color is repeatedly staged in the movie: sometimes the image surfaces slowly from under a sea of white; at other times the image fades away, erasing itself in order to let the white invade it.
Meirelles’s movie is very resourceful when it comes to the seeing-not seeing dynamic. The director accurately and instinctively senses the variety of intermediate nuances raised by this battle. This is why the movie is a kaleidoscope of reflections and transparencies.
The car, the hotel and home windows and mirrors, the sun glasses, a glass elevator, an aluminum tea pot, a glass table – all mirror the characters, insisting on the importance of the point of view of the camera and, implicitly, of the audience.
The insane asylum, where Saramago’s characters are segregated, is made to look like a labyrinth of mirrors. When entering it, the doctor’s wife is reflected many times in the glass of the windows, thus insisting both on the fragmented image and the multiple images of self. The screen of one of the TVs in the asylum, showing an official talking about the benefits of isolation, reflects the ward, thus superposing the official version of the disease with the unofficial version of the disease.
The eye of the viewer is left to wander. Often, the characters are seen through a wall of glass: the doctor and his wife are watched through the glass walls of the living room, the health secretary through the glass walls of the hall, the girl with the sun glasses through the glass walls of the elevator, the first blind man through the windows of his car, the doctor’s secretary through the glass walls of the office, the doctor’s wife through the windows of the ambulance. This gives the viewer the impression of transparency, but at the same time it reminds him there is a boundary that he will not be able to cross.
Saramago’s interpretation of the novel, that “Blindness is a metaphor for the blindness of human reason,”[4] is reflected visually in the movie by focusing on the eye that no longer sees, and that is seen through a series of mediums built in order to exercise sight, like peepholes, lenses or glasses.
The novel highlights a disruptive logic: the characters “see, without seeing,” unlike Homer or Tiresias, who “don’t see, but see.” Following this logic of the dysfunctional eye, blurred images, close-ups and zooming become a way of moving through the movie, a red line that connects all the dots and forms the big picture. The repeated out-of-focus images force the audience to readjust sight many times during the movie, thus creating a strong interdependent connection between the eye of the viewer and the camera telling the story.
Following the same line, Saramago also questions the classic view on the relation between white and black. Atypical blindness is white, not black, as usual, giving, at least in the beginning, the impression that this disease is a noble one. Still, this presumption is rapidly dismantled when, for example, one of the characters “sailing” on a sea of white is appalled by the awful smells around him, rising from the dirty and chaotic city.
By becoming physically blind, Saramago’s characters are forced to become aware of and to overcome their rational blind spot, which prevents them from truly understanding the essence of the world and of the self. One blindness enlightens the other. One blindness serves the other. Only when they cannot see the physical world do they turn their eyes onto themselves, to the meaning of things. As soon as they learn how to live peacefully with the others in this new position, their sight comes back, in order to let them fully see the better place they have created, by connecting harmoniously the two gazes, targeted at the world and at themselves.
Bibliography
Barroso, Donzelina, “Jose Saramago: The art of fiction CLV”, The Paris Review, No. 149, Winter 1998, p. 55-73.
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, London, Vintage Books, 1995.
Gomel, Elana, “The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body”, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 46, No. 4, “Literature and Apocalypse,” Winter 2000, p. 405-433.
Totaro, Rebecca, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 2005.
Saramago, José, Blindness, translated by Giovanni Pontiero, London, Vintage Books, 2005.
Blindness, directed by Fernando Meirelles, writers José Saramago and Don McKellar, Miramax, 2008, DVD, 121 minutes.
Notes
[1] Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 2005, p. 15.
[2] Elana Gomel, “The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body”, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 46, No. 4, “Literature and Apocalypse,” Winter 2000, p. 405-433.
Cristina Vidruţiu
Fellow of the Associazione Internazionale Dino Buzzati, Feltre, Italy
vidrutiucristina@yahoo.com
The Blind Spot. Utopian and Dystopian Seeds in José Saramago’s Novel Blindness
Abstract: The paper first explores the peculiar symbiosis between utopia and dystopia in José Sarmago’s novel Blindness, by tracing a parallel between the group in the novel and the brigata in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron; and second, it analyzes the way this atypical world is translated on the big screen by Fernando Meirelles, using a number of different cinematography techniques.
Keywords: Plague; José Saramago; Giovanni Boccaccio; Blindness; Fernando Meirelles.
When Fernando Meirelles decided he wanted to shoot the cinematographic version of José Saramago’s novel Blindness, he knew it would not be an easy job, first of all, because he had to convince the Portuguese writer to give him this opportunity. Along the years, Saramago refused several offers to make a movie out of Blindness, because he said he was afraid that fallen in the wrong hands, the message of the novel would be distorted. Finally, he accepted Meirelles’s offer, and in 2008, when the movie premiered and Saramago saw it, he cried tears of happiness, saying that watching the adaptation made him as happy as when he finished writing the novel.
With that in mind, we can clearly say that, at least from Saramago’s point of view, Meirelles succeeded in making the camera see and show the unseen, and thus to assume the role of storyteller for the viewer. Not only that, but by using a set of well-timed techniques, Meirelles ended up making the viewer constantly “adapt to” and “adopt” the camera lenses’ view in understanding the movie.
When Saramago wrote Blindness, he did not make a choice between dystopia and utopia; instead, he acknowledged that the grains of paradise can be found in the midst of hell, confirming what Rebecca Totaro once wrote: “Utopianism took literary form, growing out of plague-time.”[1]
For the Portuguese writer, there is never a clear mark between these two areas, as these are always on the move, changing borders, reimagining the world. In Saramago’s novel, dystopia and utopia are permeable to each other and they seem to co-exist in a peculiar form of symbiosis.
From the moment the mysterious blindness epidemic hits the city and all falls apart, the world sets slowly its pace to a new rhythm: that of dystopia, promising a resurrection, in accordance with Elana Gomel’s distinction between apocalyptic-regenerative narratives and post-apocalyptic-death and suffering ridden narratives.[2]
As soon as the infected persons are put into the mental hospital, at gunpoint, under the strict surveillance of the military, on rationalized food, under scanty conditions of living and without any medical supplies, all hell breaks loose, making the fight for survival a day-to-day task for each and every one of those imprisoned. In this context, the dysfunctional “plague-stricken town” fails to become “the utopia of the perfectly governed city,”[3] as seen by Foucault. In fact, it turns out to be quite the opposite.
In the midst of violence, destruction and death, a new chance for life arises, as a small group of people understands the importance of cooperation, organization and leadership. The doctor’s wife, played by Julianne Moore, the only one who sees, coagulates a new form of brigata around her, whom she does not lead, as she says, but to whom rather she lends her sight.
In relation to the classical brigata from Boccaccio’s Decameron, the group from Saramago’s Blindness seems to be built on complementary principles. But beyond structural differences, it is important to remember the fact that both groups have a common origin, the outbreak of a disease, and that the main goal of both groups is to create a structure able to survive and function in the face of the plague.
While the brigata from the Decameron runs away from the bubonic plague, the new brigata from Blindness tries to escape the white blindness epidemic. In both cases, the disease is considered a violent event that changes the course of things. But the way each author envisions how people should react to the epidemic is totally different. Both Boccaccio and Saramago agree on the idea of a group, but where, when, how and with whom the group should be formed is seen very differently by the two authors.
Let’s take for example the classical brigata from the Decameron. This is a group made of young men and women (that have names), formed as soon as the plague sets in Florence, dwelling in the countryside and guided by a set of principles that represent the scientific preventive views of the time regarding the plague: in order to prevent or fight the plague, it is recommended to keep a good sense of humor, to engage in activities like storytelling, dancing, walking, singing, to eat nutritious and rich food, sleep well and retreat in the countryside for the fresh air.
On the other hand, the new brigata from Blindness is complementarily built. First of all, this other group is more heterogeneous. It consists of men and women, young and old, a child and eventually even a dog. Second, the characters do not have names. Third, the group is formed only as the epidemic invades the city and the characters escape the insane asylum, where they were kept. Fourth, the group dwells in the city. Fifth, the members of the group are not able to engage in relaxing activities, nor to have a healthy diet because of the chaotic state of the city, where provisions are scarce and the air is polluted.
Still, despite all the differences between the two brigata, there is a moment and, more specifically, a place when the groups resemble each other, when the two groups can be seen as the seeds of utopia. As soon as the group from Saramago’s novel escapes the insane asylum and enters the doctor’s home, things change.
This new space is defined in opposition to the space of the ward. In here, cleanliness, nice smells, order, food supplies, fresh water and a friendly atmosphere rule, leading to its being called a paradise by the members of the new brigata, while the place left behind is called hell. The access to this space of purity is guided by the doctor’s wife and her husband, who ask the members of the group to abandon their dirty clothes and wash themselves. Once settled, the new brigata can enjoy the provisions and engage in a pleasant way of spending time, much like the merry group from the Decameron.
The most striking difference, regarding the way the two groups try to articulate a functional, utopic structure in the midst of plague ridden cities, resides in the way these understand the notion of ruler.
In the Decameron, each day has a different patron, which establishes the theme for the stories to be told on that particular time frame. Each of the brigata’s members is to rule and each of them is bringing their contribution each day by telling a story. In other words, the power and the responsibilities that come along with it are distributed equally among all members, giving them the chance to assume different roles and to contribute in complementary ways to the good functioning of the group.
In Blindness, the one and only leader for the whole period of time is the doctor’s wife, mainly because she is the only one that does not lose her eyesight, and thus has the power to make decisions. Her relation to the others is one of great responsibility. Mainly, she assumes a role similar to that of a mother: she guides the members of the group, she feeds them, she takes care of them, she washes them, and she protects them.
Even though she is in a position whence she might take full advantage of her eyesight and become a tyrannical ruler, she does not do it. Nor does she consider herself a leader, but more of an organizer, a person like the others, who lends her sight to the others. When relating to others, she insists on the idea of community and the power of collaboration. In this case, the power irradiates from the doctor’s wife to the others and returns once again to the doctor’s wife, as the members of the group see in her a sort of savior.
If we consider the dynamic of the two brigata and the relation between these and the diseased environment, we can observe a certain similarity regarding the way these interact and the roles they assume. At first, the groups separate themselves from the chaotic mass of people. Second, they try to coagulate as a functional group. And third, they “contaminate” the world, serving as a functional model in the midst of chaos.
The group’s way of functioning as an independent and self-sufficient unit goes from chaotic, non-organized and destructive to defined, organized and regenerative. In biological terms, the functional transition the groups make is similar to that from cancer cells to stem cells. In this equation, the diseased city acts the same way as cancer cells, while the two brigata act the same way as stem cells. In both novels, the two groups irradiate life, they fight against disorder and give a solution: a way to organize themselves.
The nature of the diseases present in the two novels has a strong influence on the way the sense of community arises. If in the Decameron the bubonic plague allows everyday rules to be broken and the imagination to be set free, giving cathartic powers to the stories, in Saramago’s novel, the white blindness encourages touch as a way to bond with the others.
Meirelles clearly understands the transition from sight to touch, in Saramago’s novel, and while adapting the story for the big screen he lays a big emphasis on this aspect.
The camera focuses mainly on parts of the body. It assembles the whole image like a puzzle, trying to make sense of it. It usually starts with the extremities, the feet, or the hands, which usually make a strong sound while touching something else. In fact, the visual image of the movie is constructed by respecting the “contours” left by the sound.
The director superposes the movement of the camera to Saramago’s words from the novel: when the first man goes blind, his explanation about what he is experiencing synchronizes with the images the camera shots apparently in a random manner. While saying he is seeing white all around him, the windows of the car where the man is reflect the white light. As the explanation of the character continues, the car goes from light to dark, while crossing a tunnel.
This transgression between white and black or black and white will repeatedly appear in Meirelles’s movie, becoming a sort of visual rhythm, sewing together the pieces of the puzzle: from the street in the broad daylight to the tunnel, from the black wall of the kitchen to the light in the kitchen, from day to night, switching on and off lights or headlights, moving from the street to the dark van.
The visual rhythm of the movie is accompanied by a specific sound, which has the role of highlighting the proportions of the blindness epidemic. Each new case of blindness is signaled by a sound, similar to that of hitting a piece of crystal, while a white light invades the image.
The movie’s images suffer a reconversion once blindness is installed: the image is chopped, there is a lot of zooming, the eyes of the characters are outside of the frame, the extremities become the main focus and the sound guides the way to assembling the whole picture. As the epidemic progresses, the fight between the image and the white color is repeatedly staged in the movie: sometimes the image surfaces slowly from under a sea of white; at other times the image fades away, erasing itself in order to let the white invade it.
Meirelles’s movie is very resourceful when it comes to the seeing-not seeing dynamic. The director accurately and instinctively senses the variety of intermediate nuances raised by this battle. This is why the movie is a kaleidoscope of reflections and transparencies.
The car, the hotel and home windows and mirrors, the sun glasses, a glass elevator, an aluminum tea pot, a glass table – all mirror the characters, insisting on the importance of the point of view of the camera and, implicitly, of the audience.
The insane asylum, where Saramago’s characters are segregated, is made to look like a labyrinth of mirrors. When entering it, the doctor’s wife is reflected many times in the glass of the windows, thus insisting both on the fragmented image and the multiple images of self. The screen of one of the TVs in the asylum, showing an official talking about the benefits of isolation, reflects the ward, thus superposing the official version of the disease with the unofficial version of the disease.
The eye of the viewer is left to wander. Often, the characters are seen through a wall of glass: the doctor and his wife are watched through the glass walls of the living room, the health secretary through the glass walls of the hall, the girl with the sun glasses through the glass walls of the elevator, the first blind man through the windows of his car, the doctor’s secretary through the glass walls of the office, the doctor’s wife through the windows of the ambulance. This gives the viewer the impression of transparency, but at the same time it reminds him there is a boundary that he will not be able to cross.
Saramago’s interpretation of the novel, that “Blindness is a metaphor for the blindness of human reason,”[4] is reflected visually in the movie by focusing on the eye that no longer sees, and that is seen through a series of mediums built in order to exercise sight, like peepholes, lenses or glasses.
The novel highlights a disruptive logic: the characters “see, without seeing,” unlike Homer or Tiresias, who “don’t see, but see.” Following this logic of the dysfunctional eye, blurred images, close-ups and zooming become a way of moving through the movie, a red line that connects all the dots and forms the big picture. The repeated out-of-focus images force the audience to readjust sight many times during the movie, thus creating a strong interdependent connection between the eye of the viewer and the camera telling the story.
Following the same line, Saramago also questions the classic view on the relation between white and black. Atypical blindness is white, not black, as usual, giving, at least in the beginning, the impression that this disease is a noble one. Still, this presumption is rapidly dismantled when, for example, one of the characters “sailing” on a sea of white is appalled by the awful smells around him, rising from the dirty and chaotic city.
By becoming physically blind, Saramago’s characters are forced to become aware of and to overcome their rational blind spot, which prevents them from truly understanding the essence of the world and of the self. One blindness enlightens the other. One blindness serves the other. Only when they cannot see the physical world do they turn their eyes onto themselves, to the meaning of things. As soon as they learn how to live peacefully with the others in this new position, their sight comes back, in order to let them fully see the better place they have created, by connecting harmoniously the two gazes, targeted at the world and at themselves.
Bibliography
Barroso, Donzelina, “Jose Saramago: The art of fiction CLV”, The Paris Review, No. 149, Winter 1998, p. 55-73.
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, London, Vintage Books, 1995.
Gomel, Elana, “The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body”, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 46, No. 4, “Literature and Apocalypse,” Winter 2000, p. 405-433.
Totaro, Rebecca, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 2005.
Saramago, José, Blindness, translated by Giovanni Pontiero, London, Vintage Books, 2005.
Blindness, directed by Fernando Meirelles, writers José Saramago and Don McKellar, Miramax, 2008, DVD, 121 minutes.
Notes
[1] Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 2005, p. 15.
[2] Elana Gomel, “The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body”, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 46, No. 4, “Literature and Apocalypse,” Winter 2000, p. 405-433.
[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995, p. 197-198.
[4] Donzelina Barroso, “Jose Saramago: The art of fiction CLV”, The Paris Review, No. 149, Winter 1998, p. 70.
Soumission ou capitulation? Une France antiutopique dans le roman Soumission et dans le film L’enlèvement de Michel HouellebecqSubmission or Surrender? A Dystopian France in the Novel Submission and in the film The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
Laura T. Ilea
Université de Montréal, Canada
airarle@yahoo.com
Soumission ou capitulation? Une France antiutopique dans le roman Soumission
et dans le film L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq/
Submission or Surrender? A Dystopian France in the Novel Submission and in the film The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
Abstract: This article analyses the novel Submission by Michel Houellebecq (2015) and the movie The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq by Guillaume Nicloux (2014). It highlights the idea of an anti-utopian France and the auto-immune crisis that characterizes the Western civilization at the beginning of the 21st century. The fragility of a democratic system that, according to Houellebecq, will end up in “insurrection” and “civil war” leads to the nostalgic temptation of the happiness of surrender.
Keywords: Anti-utopia; Surrender; Western Decadence; Michel Houellebecq.
1. Décadence de la civilisation européenne
Quoique controversé et problématique puisse paraître à la première vue le dernier roman de Michel Houellebecq, Soumission (2015), il incite à une réaction imminente. Houellebecq décrit et déconstruit un monde où il se sent étranger, où il n’est plus capable de déceler des chances de survie; un monde en pleine déchéance, dans lequel un homme en train de vieillir reconnait les traces des civilisations disparues. À plusieurs reprises, le livre est traversé par des images du Moyen Âge, revu par ses adulateurs, Péguy, Claudel et Huysmans, imbus de mysticisme et désavouant le rationalisme d’un Pascal, d’un Newton ou d’un Kant. Le livre est également traversé par des images de la Rome antique : une des scènes qui précèdent « la soumission » finale a lieu dans un appartement parisien luxueux, aux alentours des Arènes de Lutèce, le lieu où l’esprit de Rome est le plus présent à Paris.
À ce moment, la vision du personnage principal du roman – un des multiples visages de l’auteur – met en parallèle la décadence des deux civilisations, la prémonition de leur fin, au moment précis où elles se sentent au comble de leur développement historique. Un désir secret de disparition, caché sous l’apparence d’une force vitale en pleine ascension. Cette vision concerne les Romains, qui « avaient eu la sensation d’être une civilisation éternelle, immédiatement avant la chute de leur empire; s’étaient-ils, eux aussi, suicidés? Rome avait été une civilisation brutale, extrêmement compétente sur le plan militaire – une civilisation cruelle aussi, où les distractions proposées à la foule étaient des combats à mort entre hommes, ou entre hommes et entre fauves. Y avait-il eu chez les Romains un désir de disparaître, une faille secrète? » (p. 258).
Le livre d’Houellebecq est au premier abord un cruel réquisitoire de la civilisation occidentale, qui s’est suicidée au bout de quelques décennies. Si c’était son seul enjeu, il ne susciterait aucune controverse. Son auteur n’est pas le premier à l’avoir fait. Après Nietzsche, la perspective nihiliste concernant le sort de l’homme occidental, affaibli par le christianisme, la tolérance et l’effémination, est monnaie courante dans tout discours intellectuel. Mais la façon dont Houellebecq dépasse le lieu commun est spécifique à cet auteur dont la force de la vision est secondée par un érotisme dont la cruauté se nourrit de la franchise qui dévoile un homme à qui le manque de plaisir physique semble plus difficile à supporter que la mort.
En d’autres mots, Houellebecq ne se limite cette fois-ci à regarder le déclin de la civilisation occidentale ; il imagine également un avenir très proche, dans lequel la Fraternité musulmane, un mouvement islamique modéré dirigé par Mohammed Ben Abbes, remporterait de manière démocratique les élections en France. Ce n’est pas la première fois qu’Houellebecq s’attaque au problème islamique. Il l’avait déjà fait dans son livre Plateforme, où un terroriste tue l’amante du personnage principal. Dans le roman Soumission, l’élément le plus difficile à traiter est la limite extrêmement fine entre ironie et capitulation. Parce que, pour un personnage d’une intelligence décapante comme c’est le spécialiste du XIXe siècle à travers lequel l’histoire est racontée, la soumission ne signifie pas la joie de l’union de l’homme à Dieu et l’acceptation du monde, tel qu’il a été créé, mais plutôt capitulation. Capitulation devant le manque de solutions vitales, devant l’impossibilité de régénération qui caractérise un homme qui se réclame de la civilisation occidentale du début du XXIe siècle.
Quelles sont donc ses impossibilités? Qu’est-ce qui l’empêche de vivre et pourquoi la capitulation (soumission) totale peut lui sembler une solution? À chaque fois que je parlerai de la solution (finale) de la soumission, je n’oublierai pas de mentionner l’ironie avec laquelle elle est présentée, de sorte que le lecteur atteigne une zone d’indiscernable, là où ses valeurs morales sont bouleversées et son jugement annulé. S’installe la paralysie de la volonté et de la raison, où la rhétorique et la fascination de l’orthodoxie s’insinuent. C’est la même sensation que celle créée par Ben Abbes, le dirigeant de la Fraternité musulmane, au sein de la nation française, au bout de quelques apparitions télévisées: « En y réfléchissant je me rendais compte que je n’en savais rien, et au moment où s’achevait la conférence de presse je compris que j’en étais arrivé exactement là où le candidat musulman voulait me mener: une sorte de doute généralisé, la sensation qu’il n’y avait rien là de quoi s’alarmer, ni de véritablement nouveau. » (p. 109). Les journalistes les plus agressifs, les plus acharnés, sont hypnotisés en présence de Mohammed Ben Abbes, et toutes les questions légitimes qu’ils pourraient lui adresser sont réduites au silence: la suppression du régime mixte par exemple, ou le fait que les professeurs doivent passer à la croyance musulmane, afin de pouvoir continuer leur carrière.
Je pense d’ailleurs que c’est précisément ceci l’élément-clé du livre d’Houellebecq: la façon dont il est capable de raconter l’histoire de la décadence de la civilisation occidentale à travers des observations incisives qui concernent autant ses contemporains que le personnage principal.
2. Le nouveau désordre amoureux
La diagnose du début du XXIe siècle passe en premier par Huysmans, puisque le narrateur est un spécialiste en Huysmans – un écrivain passionné par le problème religieux, par la beauté de l’amour conjugal, vivant dans un monde où la grande boucherie du XXe siècle, qui avait conduit au nihilisme occidental, n’était qu’un pressentiment. On nous rappelle la tendre passion nourricière de la femme, qui épluchait et cuisinait les légumes, un plaisir désirable, même s’il n’était en fin de compte qu’une faible compensation du plaisir charnel. Comme Houellebecq nous a déjà habitués dans ses autres romans, les névroses d’inadaptation dans les sociétés contemporaines sont expliquées par le déséquilibre érotique des mâles en souffrance, auxquels le nouveau désordre amoureux soustrait le fruit de leur désir.
Les relations érotiques dans les romans d’Houellebecq sont en perpétuel déséquilibre. L’homme est pris dans une course suicidaire contre le temps, en se choisissant des amantes de plus en plus jeunes et de plus en plus indisponibles, jusqu’à ce qu’il finisse dans l’écroulement total du sentiment amoureux. Dépourvue de désirs et de la capacité de se les satisfaire, la pensée du suicide le hante. Ce qui est le plus intéressant c’est le fait qu’aucune des idiosyncrasies de la compétitivité occidentale (y compris l’échec implicite) ne peut mener Houellebecq à l’idée du suicide. Son équation est bien plus simple: la mort de la libido et de la capacité de la satisfaire signifie privation de vie, d’où le suicide. De manière cynique et élégiaque, il insinue que toutes les valeurs occidentales, telles l’autonomie, la liberté, la reconnaissance, pourraient être sacrifiées en échange de l’équilibre hormonal: le mariage d’amour a échoué lamentablement (comme l’affirme Pascal Bruckner), ce qui reste est le mariage arrangé, qui met ensemble les qualités physiques de la femme et le statut social de l’homme. Pour que les deux fonctionnent ensemble, les marieuses regagnent leur importance dans la société.
Le choix est une illusion: « On observe que tous les hommes, mis en situation de choisir, font exactement les mêmes choix. C’est ce qui a conduit la plupart des civilisations, en particulier la civilisation musulmane, à la création des marieuses. C’est une profession très importante, réservée aux femmes d’une grande expérience et d’une grande sagesse. Elles ont bien évidemment le droit, en tant que femmes, de voir les jeunes filles dénudées, de procéder à ce qu’il faut bien appeler une espèce d’évaluation, et de mettre en relation leur physique avec le statut social des futurs époux. » (p. 293). Vu que les hommes sont strictement déterminés du point de vue biologique, choisissant imperturbablement en fonction de critères physiques, il s’ensuit que l’évolution de l’espèce est en grande partie due à la plasticité intellectuelle des femmes, qui peuvent adapter leurs critères reproductifs, par une éducation soutenue, aux critères de la richesse ou de l’intellect. « On peut même, dans une certaine mesure, les persuader de la haute valeur érotique des professeurs d’université » (p. 294), écrit, cyniquement, l’auteur.
Par une telle équation simplifiée, la souffrance de l’homme occidental serait réduite au minimum. La situation désespérée dans laquelle « les possibilités vitales coulaient entre mes doigts avec une rapidité croissante, me laissant, comme l’aurait dit Huysmans, inému et sec » (p. 205), ou la tentation du suicide, sans désespoir, sans tristesse, « simplement par dégradation lente de la somme totale des fonctions qui résistent à la mort dont parle Bichat » (p. 207) est annulée. L’équilibre du désir masculin est assuré par la possibilité d’avoir quatre femmes. Quelle perspective rassurante, mise en parallèle avec celle de son propre père, qui « lui, avait eu… ma mère, cette putain névrosée. » (p. 227).
En échange de l’ordre amoureux réinstallé, la femme n’a qu’à renoncer à l’autonomie. Mais à quoi ça sert, la fameuse autonomie, si elle ne peut assurer le bonheur? Fuck autonomy, déclame l’intellectuel spécialiste en Huysmans; lui-même y avait renoncé avec beaucoup de facilité, avec soulagement même. Responsabilités intellectuelles et professionnelles – ne sont que des sources de malheur – se dit-il pendant un voyage dans le train, en regardant devant lui l’homme arabe qui noircit d’angoisse à chaque fois que son téléphone sonne. La seule façon de se soustraire à cette existence néfaste est la compensation créée par les deux femmes gracieuses qui l’accompagnent pendant son voyage.
Quant à elles, les femmes peuvent rester toute leur vie des enfants. En sortant de cette période idyllique, elles deviendraient tout de suite mères, bref elles replongeraient dans l’univers de l’immaturité. À quelques années près, où elles troqueraient les jeux enfantins contre les jeux sexuels, ce qui revient en gros à la même chose.
Houellebecq s’attaque aussi au sensible problème du vêtement féminin, renversant le point de vue habituel selon lequel la femme arabe est prisonnière de son vêtement, entièrement soumise à l’homme. Il nous présente la relation de la femme avec ses vêtements comme un problème de séduction qui pourrait à la rigueur jouer en faveur de la femme arabe. La femme occidentale, selon lui, regarde ses vêtements comme une empreinte sociale. Quand elle sort, elle met en jeu l’infrastructure de la séduction. Sa séduction se dirige vers le monde extérieur. L’effort social l’épuise, de sorte que, alors qu’elle se retire dans son espace privé, un t-shirt avachi soit plus que suffisant pour mettre fin à son épuisante prestation sociale. C’est exactement le contraire de ce qui se passe avec la femme arabe. Comme son rôle social est extrêmement limité, son entière capacité de séduction se dirige vers l’espace intime. Ainsi, elle s’y concentre sur la satisfaction de l’homme, telle une déesse qui pulvérise le quotidien.
Ces considérations souffrent bien évidemment de l’égocentrisme masculin occidental, dont Houellebecq se rend coupable dans la plupart de ses livres. Tout féminisme, aussi superficiel soit-il, pourrait démonter ce genre d’arguments. J’insiste là-dessus parce que, par leur caractère absurde, ils nous donnent la mesure d’une certaine tentation que l’homme occidental pourrait ressentir devant le nouveau modèle de société, d’ordre économique, amoureux et politique proposé par la Fraternité musulmane de Ben Abbes. Il ne faut pas oublier, suggère Houellebecq, qu’au comble de la civilisation romane, qui précédait de près son effacement définitif, elle donnait beaucoup de pouvoir aux femmes, tout comme la civilisation européenne actuelle. Malheureusement, semble-t-il insinuer de manière élégiaque et ironique, la sophistication de la civilisation va de pair avec les symptômes de sa décadence. Je ne vais pas trop insister sur ce genre de détails, parce que j’aimerais également présenter dans le chapitre suivant les autres avantages qui se présentent à celui qui croit au Nouveau Monde.
3. Le Nouveau Monde
Tout d’abord, du point de vue religieux, aucun bouleversement majeur n’apparaitrait puisque, en plein milieu des ardents débats présidentiels, Ben Abbes propose le dialogue autour de la laïcité, ce qui lui confère l’image de la modération. Qui plus est, pour un islamiste modéré, tel qu’il se présente, la France fait potentiellement partie de la dar al islam, la loi de l’Islam; sa doctrine s’oppose aux djihadistes, pour lesquels la France représente une terre d’impiété, dar al koufr. Les élections et la prise du pouvoir par la Fraternité musulmane ne miseraient donc pas sur des questions économiques, mais surtout sur des questions de valeurs. Là où Tariq Ramadan présentait charia comme une option novatrice, révolutionnaire, qui effrayait la population française, Ben Abbes lui restituait la valeur traditionnelle, en y ajoutant un parfum d’exotisme qui la rendait désirable, par la restauration de la famille, de la morale traditionnelle et du patriarcat. La Fraternité musulmane serait en faveur de la religion chrétienne, puisque son grand ennemi n’est pas le christianisme, mais l’athéisme matérialiste et la laïcité. Les subventions allouées aux associations catholiques et à l’entretien des bâtiments religieux, en pleine déchéance, augmenteraient.
Du point de vue politique, le plan de Ben Abbes est simple, suivant d’ailleurs l’aspiration millénariste de l’Empire romain. Le point principal de sa politique externe serait le déplacement du centre de gravité de l’Europe vers le sud, ce qui ne serait pas trop compliqué, puisque ce genre d’organisations existait déjà, par exemple l’Union pour la Méditerranée. Englobant en premier la Turquie et le Maroc, et par la suite la Tunisie et l’Algérie, l’ambition du leader arabe est celle de devenir le premier président choisi de l’Europe élargie. Il ne serait d’ailleurs le seul à avoir développé une telle ambition, De Gaulle l’avait précédé, lui qui avait initié la grande politique arabe de la France.
Tétanisé par cette liste d’avantages évidents, le lecteur se retrouve devant la vision du personnage principal du roman, qui comprend que le bonheur humain réside dans la soumission absolue. La soumission de la femme à l’homme, de l’homme à Dieu. Alors que pour le bouddhisme le monde est souffrance, et pour le christianisme Satan est prince de ce monde, dans l’Islam la création divine est parfaite, un chef-d’œuvre absolu. Voici le secret du bonheur, et la conversion finale du professeur universitaire, décrite au mode conditionnel – « La cérémonie de la conversion, en elle-même, serait très simple … le hammam me serait spécialement ouvert, il était d’ordinaire fermé aux hommes; vêtu d’un peignoir, je traverserais de longs couloirs aux colonnades surmontées d’arches … Le silence se ferait autour de moi. Des images de constellations, de supernovas, de nébuleuses spirales me traverseraient l’esprit ; … de grandes forêts presque vierges… Et puis ce serait fini ; je serais, dorénavant, un musulman ; … et ce serait la chance d’une deuxième vie, sans grand rapport avec la précédente. » (p. 297-299) – porte témoignage du fait que le livre d’Houellebecq, dont la sortie était prévue le 7 janvier 2015, quand les journalistes de Charlie Hebdo furent tués par deux extrémistes arabes, n’est pas un réquisitoire islamophobe. Houellebecq parle plutôt d’une crise auto-immune. La tentation de la soumission s’insinue dans l’esprit de la civilisation occidentale parce que sa sophistication la prédispose à la névrose et au nihilisme. Le secret de la prose d’Houellebecq dans ce livre se trouve surtout dans le fait que les deux dimensions – le comique et la métaphysique, la crise auto-immune et la farce politico-religieuse – coexistent jusqu’à l’indiscernable.
4. L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq, un film de Guillaume Nicloux (2014)
Même si apparemment le film L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq se penche sur des enjeux différents, quelques scènes retracent les idées présentées dans les trois chapitres précédents. De quoi s’agit-il au juste ? Le sujet du film est l’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq, qui vit dans un appartement style Le Corbusier, où il s’ennuie, écrit des poèmes et fume sans arrêt. Trois hommes, Luc, Max et Mathieu l’immobilisent dans l’ascenseur, puis l’amènent par force à la campagne, à la maison de Ginette et d’André (Dédé, d’origine polonaise) Suchotzky, les parents de Mathieu. L’opération se passe dans le calme ; les « agresseurs » s’entretiennent avec l’écrivain sur un ton de respect. Le seul qui a des poussées d’orgueil est Luc, un Gitan, qui ne veut pas se « faire passer pour une fausse couche » et qui ne veut pas concéder à l’écrivain sa supériorité intellectuelle. Il avait d’ailleurs écrit un poème en secondaire, qu’il se rappelle même à ses quarante-trois ans : « Des années et des années passent/Et je ne t’aime toujours pas, la chasse/J’aime les animaux en liberté/Quand on n’a pas besoin de les tuer/Existe-t-il sur terre quelque chose de plus extraordinaire/Que ces choses en plein air ? ». Surpris par l’hilarité générale suscitée par son poème, Luc jette son profond mépris au monde : « Je vous emmerde profondément ».
Enfermé à la campagne et menotté, Houellebecq attend sa libération. Mais il n’arrête pas à demander à ses « bourreaux » qui est celui qui pourrait payer la rançon, du moment où ni son agent ni sa famille ne se permettraient les 20.000 euros que les trois gars demandent pour sa libération. Le soupçon ironique de l’écrivain va en direction de François Hollande, surtout que ses agresseurs le prennent en photo avec, sur la poitrine, une image de la Libération qui montre le président français secondé par Désir de l’avenir.
L’intrigue du film est ponctuée par une série d’images antiutopiques : l’habitation dans laquelle vit l’écrivain, au tout début du film – le village vertical, le simulacre grotesque imaginé par Le Corbusier. Dans la deuxième partie du film, il est amené à la campagne, dans un décor délabré, où les voitures abandonnées s’entassent dans un paysage surréaliste. C’est précisément dans ce paysage qu’Houellebecq profère ses théories sur la nécessité de se vider, de s’ennuyer, de sortir du quotidien. C’est là que « les choses » arrivent. S’extraire du monde antiutopique de Le Corbusier et plonger dans « le monde du réveil » et du paradoxe : « La Pologne est un rêve », profère l’écrivain, affirmation qui choque les trois braves gars, dont le métier est celui de bodybuilder (Max) et de boxeur (Mathieu). L’occupation de Luc n’est pas précise, chose qui convient parfaitement à sa « race ». C’est lui qui fait les décomptes des victimes d’Auschwitz – 6 millions juifs, 2 millions gitans, 1 million de la « race de Charles Aznavour ». « Arméniens ? », demandent les autres. « Oui, Arméniens », répond Luc, comme s’il disait « Peu importe ».
Les discussions se continuent sur le même ton de farce et de grotesque. De temps en temps, Houellebecq revient à ses thèmes favoris, cette fois-ci traités du point de vue des potentiels « terroristes » : la lutte (n’oublions pas qu’Houellebecq a écrit un livre qui s’appelle L’extension du domaine de la lutte) – il est confronté à ses propres thèmes, décodés dans le langage commun, qui appartient à ceux qui ne se nourrissent pas d’utopies, mais de la réalité. Houellebecq regarde ensemble avec Mathieu l’un des combats de ce dernier. L’homme lui explique les techniques d’attaque et de défense. L’écrivain ne peut pas s’y concentrer. Il répète incessamment : « Il saigne. On peut y trouver un intérêt ? Il saigne ». Il s’intéresse à la lutte abstraite, mais le combat en tant que tel est trop saignant pour lui. Quant à l’autre, le boxeur, il lui demande s’il pouvait écrire un livre sur lui. « Pourquoi pas ? », lui répond Houellebecq.
La fragilité d’Houellebecq, sa position inhabituelle sont évidentes. N’empêche qu’il continue à proférer ses professions de foi : l’intolérance (« Il faut dire les choses », affirme-t-il), le bonheur qui se trouve dans le présent (« si la vie s’arrêtait maintenant, je ne regretterais rien. J’ai assez vécu »), l’incontournable féminin (« Voulez-vous un film porno ? », lui demande Ginette, la mère de Mathieu. « Non, plutôt une fille ». Et Ginette lui amène une jeune fille arabe, Fatima, qui se trouve dans une situation familiale précaire et qui possède un charme physique évident). Les théories présentées dans Soumission sont illustrées donc à merveille. La fin du film revient au problème de la démocratie participative – l’idéal d’Houellebecq. Il critique encore une fois la régression de l’Europe : « Ça va finir dans l’insurrection. Bruxelles – ça sera la guerre civile. Suède – c’est la dictature. C’est pire qu’en France. L’anti démocratie. »
Le film finit dans l’accélération : Michel Houellebecq, après sa libération, au volant d’une voiture (sa part de la rançon) qui roule à 250 km/heure, sur une autoroute qui efface dans l’ivresse de la vitesse le cauchemar antiutopique : les habitations style Le Corbusier et les paysages délabrés de la campagne. Michel Houellebecq rendu au vide de ses pensées, à l’écoute de la fragilité des choses.
Bibliography
Michel Houellebecq, L’extension du domaine de la lutte, Éditions Maurice Nadeau, Paris, 1994.
— Plateforme, Flammarion, Paris, 2001.
— Soumission, Flammarion, Paris, 2015.
Guillaume Nicloux, L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq, film (2013).
Laura T. Ilea
Université de Montréal, Canada
airarle@yahoo.com
Soumission ou capitulation? Une France antiutopique dans le roman Soumission
et dans le film L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq/
Submission or Surrender? A Dystopian France in the Novel Submission and in the film The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
Abstract: This article analyses the novel Submission by Michel Houellebecq (2015) and the movie The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq by Guillaume Nicloux (2014). It highlights the idea of an anti-utopian France and the auto-immune crisis that characterizes the Western civilization at the beginning of the 21st century. The fragility of a democratic system that, according to Houellebecq, will end up in “insurrection” and “civil war” leads to the nostalgic temptation of the happiness of surrender.
Keywords: Anti-utopia; Surrender; Western Decadence; Michel Houellebecq.
1. Décadence de la civilisation européenne
Quoique controversé et problématique puisse paraître à la première vue le dernier roman de Michel Houellebecq, Soumission (2015), il incite à une réaction imminente. Houellebecq décrit et déconstruit un monde où il se sent étranger, où il n’est plus capable de déceler des chances de survie; un monde en pleine déchéance, dans lequel un homme en train de vieillir reconnait les traces des civilisations disparues. À plusieurs reprises, le livre est traversé par des images du Moyen Âge, revu par ses adulateurs, Péguy, Claudel et Huysmans, imbus de mysticisme et désavouant le rationalisme d’un Pascal, d’un Newton ou d’un Kant. Le livre est également traversé par des images de la Rome antique : une des scènes qui précèdent « la soumission » finale a lieu dans un appartement parisien luxueux, aux alentours des Arènes de Lutèce, le lieu où l’esprit de Rome est le plus présent à Paris.
À ce moment, la vision du personnage principal du roman – un des multiples visages de l’auteur – met en parallèle la décadence des deux civilisations, la prémonition de leur fin, au moment précis où elles se sentent au comble de leur développement historique. Un désir secret de disparition, caché sous l’apparence d’une force vitale en pleine ascension. Cette vision concerne les Romains, qui « avaient eu la sensation d’être une civilisation éternelle, immédiatement avant la chute de leur empire; s’étaient-ils, eux aussi, suicidés? Rome avait été une civilisation brutale, extrêmement compétente sur le plan militaire – une civilisation cruelle aussi, où les distractions proposées à la foule étaient des combats à mort entre hommes, ou entre hommes et entre fauves. Y avait-il eu chez les Romains un désir de disparaître, une faille secrète? » (p. 258).
Le livre d’Houellebecq est au premier abord un cruel réquisitoire de la civilisation occidentale, qui s’est suicidée au bout de quelques décennies. Si c’était son seul enjeu, il ne susciterait aucune controverse. Son auteur n’est pas le premier à l’avoir fait. Après Nietzsche, la perspective nihiliste concernant le sort de l’homme occidental, affaibli par le christianisme, la tolérance et l’effémination, est monnaie courante dans tout discours intellectuel. Mais la façon dont Houellebecq dépasse le lieu commun est spécifique à cet auteur dont la force de la vision est secondée par un érotisme dont la cruauté se nourrit de la franchise qui dévoile un homme à qui le manque de plaisir physique semble plus difficile à supporter que la mort.
En d’autres mots, Houellebecq ne se limite cette fois-ci à regarder le déclin de la civilisation occidentale ; il imagine également un avenir très proche, dans lequel la Fraternité musulmane, un mouvement islamique modéré dirigé par Mohammed Ben Abbes, remporterait de manière démocratique les élections en France. Ce n’est pas la première fois qu’Houellebecq s’attaque au problème islamique. Il l’avait déjà fait dans son livre Plateforme, où un terroriste tue l’amante du personnage principal. Dans le roman Soumission, l’élément le plus difficile à traiter est la limite extrêmement fine entre ironie et capitulation. Parce que, pour un personnage d’une intelligence décapante comme c’est le spécialiste du XIXe siècle à travers lequel l’histoire est racontée, la soumission ne signifie pas la joie de l’union de l’homme à Dieu et l’acceptation du monde, tel qu’il a été créé, mais plutôt capitulation. Capitulation devant le manque de solutions vitales, devant l’impossibilité de régénération qui caractérise un homme qui se réclame de la civilisation occidentale du début du XXIe siècle.
Quelles sont donc ses impossibilités? Qu’est-ce qui l’empêche de vivre et pourquoi la capitulation (soumission) totale peut lui sembler une solution? À chaque fois que je parlerai de la solution (finale) de la soumission, je n’oublierai pas de mentionner l’ironie avec laquelle elle est présentée, de sorte que le lecteur atteigne une zone d’indiscernable, là où ses valeurs morales sont bouleversées et son jugement annulé. S’installe la paralysie de la volonté et de la raison, où la rhétorique et la fascination de l’orthodoxie s’insinuent. C’est la même sensation que celle créée par Ben Abbes, le dirigeant de la Fraternité musulmane, au sein de la nation française, au bout de quelques apparitions télévisées: « En y réfléchissant je me rendais compte que je n’en savais rien, et au moment où s’achevait la conférence de presse je compris que j’en étais arrivé exactement là où le candidat musulman voulait me mener: une sorte de doute généralisé, la sensation qu’il n’y avait rien là de quoi s’alarmer, ni de véritablement nouveau. » (p. 109). Les journalistes les plus agressifs, les plus acharnés, sont hypnotisés en présence de Mohammed Ben Abbes, et toutes les questions légitimes qu’ils pourraient lui adresser sont réduites au silence: la suppression du régime mixte par exemple, ou le fait que les professeurs doivent passer à la croyance musulmane, afin de pouvoir continuer leur carrière.
Je pense d’ailleurs que c’est précisément ceci l’élément-clé du livre d’Houellebecq: la façon dont il est capable de raconter l’histoire de la décadence de la civilisation occidentale à travers des observations incisives qui concernent autant ses contemporains que le personnage principal.
2. Le nouveau désordre amoureux
La diagnose du début du XXIe siècle passe en premier par Huysmans, puisque le narrateur est un spécialiste en Huysmans – un écrivain passionné par le problème religieux, par la beauté de l’amour conjugal, vivant dans un monde où la grande boucherie du XXe siècle, qui avait conduit au nihilisme occidental, n’était qu’un pressentiment. On nous rappelle la tendre passion nourricière de la femme, qui épluchait et cuisinait les légumes, un plaisir désirable, même s’il n’était en fin de compte qu’une faible compensation du plaisir charnel. Comme Houellebecq nous a déjà habitués dans ses autres romans, les névroses d’inadaptation dans les sociétés contemporaines sont expliquées par le déséquilibre érotique des mâles en souffrance, auxquels le nouveau désordre amoureux soustrait le fruit de leur désir.
Les relations érotiques dans les romans d’Houellebecq sont en perpétuel déséquilibre. L’homme est pris dans une course suicidaire contre le temps, en se choisissant des amantes de plus en plus jeunes et de plus en plus indisponibles, jusqu’à ce qu’il finisse dans l’écroulement total du sentiment amoureux. Dépourvue de désirs et de la capacité de se les satisfaire, la pensée du suicide le hante. Ce qui est le plus intéressant c’est le fait qu’aucune des idiosyncrasies de la compétitivité occidentale (y compris l’échec implicite) ne peut mener Houellebecq à l’idée du suicide. Son équation est bien plus simple: la mort de la libido et de la capacité de la satisfaire signifie privation de vie, d’où le suicide. De manière cynique et élégiaque, il insinue que toutes les valeurs occidentales, telles l’autonomie, la liberté, la reconnaissance, pourraient être sacrifiées en échange de l’équilibre hormonal: le mariage d’amour a échoué lamentablement (comme l’affirme Pascal Bruckner), ce qui reste est le mariage arrangé, qui met ensemble les qualités physiques de la femme et le statut social de l’homme. Pour que les deux fonctionnent ensemble, les marieuses regagnent leur importance dans la société.
Le choix est une illusion: « On observe que tous les hommes, mis en situation de choisir, font exactement les mêmes choix. C’est ce qui a conduit la plupart des civilisations, en particulier la civilisation musulmane, à la création des marieuses. C’est une profession très importante, réservée aux femmes d’une grande expérience et d’une grande sagesse. Elles ont bien évidemment le droit, en tant que femmes, de voir les jeunes filles dénudées, de procéder à ce qu’il faut bien appeler une espèce d’évaluation, et de mettre en relation leur physique avec le statut social des futurs époux. » (p. 293). Vu que les hommes sont strictement déterminés du point de vue biologique, choisissant imperturbablement en fonction de critères physiques, il s’ensuit que l’évolution de l’espèce est en grande partie due à la plasticité intellectuelle des femmes, qui peuvent adapter leurs critères reproductifs, par une éducation soutenue, aux critères de la richesse ou de l’intellect. « On peut même, dans une certaine mesure, les persuader de la haute valeur érotique des professeurs d’université » (p. 294), écrit, cyniquement, l’auteur.
Par une telle équation simplifiée, la souffrance de l’homme occidental serait réduite au minimum. La situation désespérée dans laquelle « les possibilités vitales coulaient entre mes doigts avec une rapidité croissante, me laissant, comme l’aurait dit Huysmans, inému et sec » (p. 205), ou la tentation du suicide, sans désespoir, sans tristesse, « simplement par dégradation lente de la somme totale des fonctions qui résistent à la mort dont parle Bichat » (p. 207) est annulée. L’équilibre du désir masculin est assuré par la possibilité d’avoir quatre femmes. Quelle perspective rassurante, mise en parallèle avec celle de son propre père, qui « lui, avait eu… ma mère, cette putain névrosée. » (p. 227).
En échange de l’ordre amoureux réinstallé, la femme n’a qu’à renoncer à l’autonomie. Mais à quoi ça sert, la fameuse autonomie, si elle ne peut assurer le bonheur? Fuck autonomy, déclame l’intellectuel spécialiste en Huysmans; lui-même y avait renoncé avec beaucoup de facilité, avec soulagement même. Responsabilités intellectuelles et professionnelles – ne sont que des sources de malheur – se dit-il pendant un voyage dans le train, en regardant devant lui l’homme arabe qui noircit d’angoisse à chaque fois que son téléphone sonne. La seule façon de se soustraire à cette existence néfaste est la compensation créée par les deux femmes gracieuses qui l’accompagnent pendant son voyage.
Quant à elles, les femmes peuvent rester toute leur vie des enfants. En sortant de cette période idyllique, elles deviendraient tout de suite mères, bref elles replongeraient dans l’univers de l’immaturité. À quelques années près, où elles troqueraient les jeux enfantins contre les jeux sexuels, ce qui revient en gros à la même chose.
Houellebecq s’attaque aussi au sensible problème du vêtement féminin, renversant le point de vue habituel selon lequel la femme arabe est prisonnière de son vêtement, entièrement soumise à l’homme. Il nous présente la relation de la femme avec ses vêtements comme un problème de séduction qui pourrait à la rigueur jouer en faveur de la femme arabe. La femme occidentale, selon lui, regarde ses vêtements comme une empreinte sociale. Quand elle sort, elle met en jeu l’infrastructure de la séduction. Sa séduction se dirige vers le monde extérieur. L’effort social l’épuise, de sorte que, alors qu’elle se retire dans son espace privé, un t-shirt avachi soit plus que suffisant pour mettre fin à son épuisante prestation sociale. C’est exactement le contraire de ce qui se passe avec la femme arabe. Comme son rôle social est extrêmement limité, son entière capacité de séduction se dirige vers l’espace intime. Ainsi, elle s’y concentre sur la satisfaction de l’homme, telle une déesse qui pulvérise le quotidien.
Ces considérations souffrent bien évidemment de l’égocentrisme masculin occidental, dont Houellebecq se rend coupable dans la plupart de ses livres. Tout féminisme, aussi superficiel soit-il, pourrait démonter ce genre d’arguments. J’insiste là-dessus parce que, par leur caractère absurde, ils nous donnent la mesure d’une certaine tentation que l’homme occidental pourrait ressentir devant le nouveau modèle de société, d’ordre économique, amoureux et politique proposé par la Fraternité musulmane de Ben Abbes. Il ne faut pas oublier, suggère Houellebecq, qu’au comble de la civilisation romane, qui précédait de près son effacement définitif, elle donnait beaucoup de pouvoir aux femmes, tout comme la civilisation européenne actuelle. Malheureusement, semble-t-il insinuer de manière élégiaque et ironique, la sophistication de la civilisation va de pair avec les symptômes de sa décadence. Je ne vais pas trop insister sur ce genre de détails, parce que j’aimerais également présenter dans le chapitre suivant les autres avantages qui se présentent à celui qui croit au Nouveau Monde.
3. Le Nouveau Monde
Tout d’abord, du point de vue religieux, aucun bouleversement majeur n’apparaitrait puisque, en plein milieu des ardents débats présidentiels, Ben Abbes propose le dialogue autour de la laïcité, ce qui lui confère l’image de la modération. Qui plus est, pour un islamiste modéré, tel qu’il se présente, la France fait potentiellement partie de la dar al islam, la loi de l’Islam; sa doctrine s’oppose aux djihadistes, pour lesquels la France représente une terre d’impiété, dar al koufr. Les élections et la prise du pouvoir par la Fraternité musulmane ne miseraient donc pas sur des questions économiques, mais surtout sur des questions de valeurs. Là où Tariq Ramadan présentait charia comme une option novatrice, révolutionnaire, qui effrayait la population française, Ben Abbes lui restituait la valeur traditionnelle, en y ajoutant un parfum d’exotisme qui la rendait désirable, par la restauration de la famille, de la morale traditionnelle et du patriarcat. La Fraternité musulmane serait en faveur de la religion chrétienne, puisque son grand ennemi n’est pas le christianisme, mais l’athéisme matérialiste et la laïcité. Les subventions allouées aux associations catholiques et à l’entretien des bâtiments religieux, en pleine déchéance, augmenteraient.
Du point de vue politique, le plan de Ben Abbes est simple, suivant d’ailleurs l’aspiration millénariste de l’Empire romain. Le point principal de sa politique externe serait le déplacement du centre de gravité de l’Europe vers le sud, ce qui ne serait pas trop compliqué, puisque ce genre d’organisations existait déjà, par exemple l’Union pour la Méditerranée. Englobant en premier la Turquie et le Maroc, et par la suite la Tunisie et l’Algérie, l’ambition du leader arabe est celle de devenir le premier président choisi de l’Europe élargie. Il ne serait d’ailleurs le seul à avoir développé une telle ambition, De Gaulle l’avait précédé, lui qui avait initié la grande politique arabe de la France.
Tétanisé par cette liste d’avantages évidents, le lecteur se retrouve devant la vision du personnage principal du roman, qui comprend que le bonheur humain réside dans la soumission absolue. La soumission de la femme à l’homme, de l’homme à Dieu. Alors que pour le bouddhisme le monde est souffrance, et pour le christianisme Satan est prince de ce monde, dans l’Islam la création divine est parfaite, un chef-d’œuvre absolu. Voici le secret du bonheur, et la conversion finale du professeur universitaire, décrite au mode conditionnel – « La cérémonie de la conversion, en elle-même, serait très simple … le hammam me serait spécialement ouvert, il était d’ordinaire fermé aux hommes; vêtu d’un peignoir, je traverserais de longs couloirs aux colonnades surmontées d’arches … Le silence se ferait autour de moi. Des images de constellations, de supernovas, de nébuleuses spirales me traverseraient l’esprit ; … de grandes forêts presque vierges… Et puis ce serait fini ; je serais, dorénavant, un musulman ; … et ce serait la chance d’une deuxième vie, sans grand rapport avec la précédente. » (p. 297-299) – porte témoignage du fait que le livre d’Houellebecq, dont la sortie était prévue le 7 janvier 2015, quand les journalistes de Charlie Hebdo furent tués par deux extrémistes arabes, n’est pas un réquisitoire islamophobe. Houellebecq parle plutôt d’une crise auto-immune. La tentation de la soumission s’insinue dans l’esprit de la civilisation occidentale parce que sa sophistication la prédispose à la névrose et au nihilisme. Le secret de la prose d’Houellebecq dans ce livre se trouve surtout dans le fait que les deux dimensions – le comique et la métaphysique, la crise auto-immune et la farce politico-religieuse – coexistent jusqu’à l’indiscernable.
4. L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq, un film de Guillaume Nicloux (2014)
Même si apparemment le film L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq se penche sur des enjeux différents, quelques scènes retracent les idées présentées dans les trois chapitres précédents. De quoi s’agit-il au juste ? Le sujet du film est l’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq, qui vit dans un appartement style Le Corbusier, où il s’ennuie, écrit des poèmes et fume sans arrêt. Trois hommes, Luc, Max et Mathieu l’immobilisent dans l’ascenseur, puis l’amènent par force à la campagne, à la maison de Ginette et d’André (Dédé, d’origine polonaise) Suchotzky, les parents de Mathieu. L’opération se passe dans le calme ; les « agresseurs » s’entretiennent avec l’écrivain sur un ton de respect. Le seul qui a des poussées d’orgueil est Luc, un Gitan, qui ne veut pas se « faire passer pour une fausse couche » et qui ne veut pas concéder à l’écrivain sa supériorité intellectuelle. Il avait d’ailleurs écrit un poème en secondaire, qu’il se rappelle même à ses quarante-trois ans : « Des années et des années passent/Et je ne t’aime toujours pas, la chasse/J’aime les animaux en liberté/Quand on n’a pas besoin de les tuer/Existe-t-il sur terre quelque chose de plus extraordinaire/Que ces choses en plein air ? ». Surpris par l’hilarité générale suscitée par son poème, Luc jette son profond mépris au monde : « Je vous emmerde profondément ».
Enfermé à la campagne et menotté, Houellebecq attend sa libération. Mais il n’arrête pas à demander à ses « bourreaux » qui est celui qui pourrait payer la rançon, du moment où ni son agent ni sa famille ne se permettraient les 20.000 euros que les trois gars demandent pour sa libération. Le soupçon ironique de l’écrivain va en direction de François Hollande, surtout que ses agresseurs le prennent en photo avec, sur la poitrine, une image de la Libération qui montre le président français secondé par Désir de l’avenir.
L’intrigue du film est ponctuée par une série d’images antiutopiques : l’habitation dans laquelle vit l’écrivain, au tout début du film – le village vertical, le simulacre grotesque imaginé par Le Corbusier. Dans la deuxième partie du film, il est amené à la campagne, dans un décor délabré, où les voitures abandonnées s’entassent dans un paysage surréaliste. C’est précisément dans ce paysage qu’Houellebecq profère ses théories sur la nécessité de se vider, de s’ennuyer, de sortir du quotidien. C’est là que « les choses » arrivent. S’extraire du monde antiutopique de Le Corbusier et plonger dans « le monde du réveil » et du paradoxe : « La Pologne est un rêve », profère l’écrivain, affirmation qui choque les trois braves gars, dont le métier est celui de bodybuilder (Max) et de boxeur (Mathieu). L’occupation de Luc n’est pas précise, chose qui convient parfaitement à sa « race ». C’est lui qui fait les décomptes des victimes d’Auschwitz – 6 millions juifs, 2 millions gitans, 1 million de la « race de Charles Aznavour ». « Arméniens ? », demandent les autres. « Oui, Arméniens », répond Luc, comme s’il disait « Peu importe ».
Les discussions se continuent sur le même ton de farce et de grotesque. De temps en temps, Houellebecq revient à ses thèmes favoris, cette fois-ci traités du point de vue des potentiels « terroristes » : la lutte (n’oublions pas qu’Houellebecq a écrit un livre qui s’appelle L’extension du domaine de la lutte) – il est confronté à ses propres thèmes, décodés dans le langage commun, qui appartient à ceux qui ne se nourrissent pas d’utopies, mais de la réalité. Houellebecq regarde ensemble avec Mathieu l’un des combats de ce dernier. L’homme lui explique les techniques d’attaque et de défense. L’écrivain ne peut pas s’y concentrer. Il répète incessamment : « Il saigne. On peut y trouver un intérêt ? Il saigne ». Il s’intéresse à la lutte abstraite, mais le combat en tant que tel est trop saignant pour lui. Quant à l’autre, le boxeur, il lui demande s’il pouvait écrire un livre sur lui. « Pourquoi pas ? », lui répond Houellebecq.
La fragilité d’Houellebecq, sa position inhabituelle sont évidentes. N’empêche qu’il continue à proférer ses professions de foi : l’intolérance (« Il faut dire les choses », affirme-t-il), le bonheur qui se trouve dans le présent (« si la vie s’arrêtait maintenant, je ne regretterais rien. J’ai assez vécu »), l’incontournable féminin (« Voulez-vous un film porno ? », lui demande Ginette, la mère de Mathieu. « Non, plutôt une fille ». Et Ginette lui amène une jeune fille arabe, Fatima, qui se trouve dans une situation familiale précaire et qui possède un charme physique évident). Les théories présentées dans Soumission sont illustrées donc à merveille. La fin du film revient au problème de la démocratie participative – l’idéal d’Houellebecq. Il critique encore une fois la régression de l’Europe : « Ça va finir dans l’insurrection. Bruxelles – ça sera la guerre civile. Suède – c’est la dictature. C’est pire qu’en France. L’anti démocratie. »
Le film finit dans l’accélération : Michel Houellebecq, après sa libération, au volant d’une voiture (sa part de la rançon) qui roule à 250 km/heure, sur une autoroute qui efface dans l’ivresse de la vitesse le cauchemar antiutopique : les habitations style Le Corbusier et les paysages délabrés de la campagne. Michel Houellebecq rendu au vide de ses pensées, à l’écoute de la fragilité des choses.
Bibliography
Michel Houellebecq, L’extension du domaine de la lutte, Éditions Maurice Nadeau, Paris, 1994.
— Plateforme, Flammarion, Paris, 2001.
— Soumission, Flammarion, Paris, 2015.
Guillaume Nicloux, L’enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq, film (2013).
Dystopian Reminiscences in the Romanian Contemporary FilmDystopian Reminiscences in the Romanian Contemporary Film
Ruxandra Cesereanu
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
RuxCes@yahoo.com
Dystopian Reminiscences in the Romanian Contemporary Film
(Miserabilist Stances in the Films of Mircea Daneliuc, Lucian Pintilie and Cristi Puiu)
Abstract: This study analyzes the dystopian reminiscences outlined in the Romanian contemporary film, by exploring the cinematic work of three directors belonging to different generations (Mircea Daneliuc, Lucian Pintilie and Cristi Puiu), who assumed, to a greater or a lesser extent, the tenets of miserabilist neorealism – an “ism” that gained currency in Romania after the collapse of the communist regime.
Keywords: Romanian Contemporary Film; Neorealism; Naturalism; Miserabilism; Mircea Daneliuc; Lucian Pintilie; Cristi Puiu; Topos.
There is an undeniable dystopian component in the Romanian cinema produced after the collapse of the communist regime, even though it does not necessarily represent the option of the majority film producers and even though there is a visible difference from the responses that dystopian art generated in communism: allegory, parable, symbols and metaphors have well-nigh disappeared or, in any case, they have surely diminished and become less frequent, being replaced by a direct, blunt, neorealist discourse. At certain levels of the perspectives on marginality, the discourse is dystopian and miserabilist (highly naturalistic, but also prone to caricature). It is a discourse that marked, within less than a decade after the overthrow of the Ceaușescu regime, both Romanian literature (fiction, in particular, but also poetry) and the autochthonous cinema. These two forms of art have mutually influenced one another, albeit partially: while contemporary film has not infrequently assumed a narrative stance on all manner of acute and squalid poverty (human, economic, social or political), contemporary fiction has often assumed a cinematic style of narration.
The critics who have voiced, in more or less ample studies, their opinions on the miserabilist strand in Romanian literature include Ion Simuț, Mihai Zamfir, Dan C. Mihăilescu, Daniel Cristea-Enache and others. They have highlighted several key elements in the new realist post-communist literature: sordid pessimism, furious cynicism, the vulgar grotesque, existential nausea, the cruelty of perception, a penchant for everyday minimalism, a style steeped in slang or in defiant jargon, post-communist neorealism being grafted, in any case, on a neoexpresionist undercurrent. It is as if Louis-Ferdinand Céline had been reclaimed and reassumed as a model in the neorealist Romanian literature, but in a post-communist context (as Mihai Zamfir has insightfully pointed this out!). The human, social, economic and moral morass and the sheer amount of poverty under communism contaminated the perspective and vision of Romanian post-communist films, bringing to the fore lumpen characters, who are portrayed through magnifying lenses. This is the truly unique and innovative feature of films produced in the post-communist period, which dismantle the fabricated, artificial depiction of heroism in communist films. Something has radically changed: reality or neoreality has been zoomed in with a detailed, unhurried gaze, in slow motion, marked by a proneness for orality.
Contemporary Romanian film (the new cinema or the new wave) has already been the subject of extensive analysis, in synthesis books of considerable impact, authored by Mihail Fulger, Alex Leo Șerban, Andrei Gorzo, Mircea Deaca and Doru Pop (in chronological order). In addition to these, there have been published several collective volumes, with essays on the films produced by the most outstanding Romanian directors of the third millennium.
Alex Leo Șerban, for instance, describes the directors of the new wave as “angry neorealists”[1] who cultivate an “unembellished, shocking, effective minimalism.”[2] Șerban points out the affinities between the minimalism displayed by the Romanian cinema and the Italian neorealism from the aftermath of World War II, but he uses minimalism in a technical sense, considering that the most appropriate term would be Romanian neorealism.[3] Alex Leo Șerban actually legitimizes the syntagm New Romanian Cinema (NRC).
When undertaking a panoramic or focal overview of the films produced by the new directors, Andrei Gorzo refuses such terms as minimalism, realism or miserabilism, for he regards these concepts as being “too general.” He also rejects the possibility (even if only symbolic) that the directorial brand sanctioned by Cristi Puiu (who is considered the reinventor of the Romanian cinema and the most poignant adherent of neorealism, and whose approach to this aesthetic trend has become a brand) might be derived from Lucian Pintilie, Mircea Daneliuc or Alexandru Tatos.[4] The definition that Gorzo gives of the New Romanian Cinema is dyadic. From a stylistic perspective, the NRC is about “an aesthetic formula predicated on the elevation of certain features of dramatic and directorial style to the rank of norms.”[5] From a biological (and chronological) viewpoint, the NRC stands for a new generation of filmmakers[6] (born between 1967 and 1975). Andrei Gorzo makes a nuanced and precise distinction between the NRC and the Romanian New Wave, as follows: the NRC is umbilically linked to several “stylistic premises shared by a number of films that have enjoyed international success. As a result of this success, these premises have come to represent the mainstream style in contemporary Romanian cinema,” while the Romanian New Wave is simply “a generation of successful filmmakers.”[7]
Doru Pop, the author of a synthetic and, at the same time, analytical foray into the new Romanian film directors, written directly in English, considers that their major influences go beyond Italian neorealism, including the New British Cinema, the French New Wave and the new generations of filmmakers in Central and Eastern Europe.[8] Unlike Șerban and Gorzo, Pop prefers the Romanian New Wave formula (even though he states that these filmmakers disavow this syntagm), because he perceives and legitimizes it from a philosophical-cinematic perspective.[9] Still, like Andrei Gorzo, Doru Pop emphasizes the divide between the Romanian New Wave directors and their predecessors, who have produced realistic films in the miserabilist vein (Mircea Daneliuc, Dan Pița, Nae Caranfil). The explanation he provides is different from that suggested by Gorzo. Thus, the Romanian New Wave does not depict “subhumans” (even though they are antiheroes) and does not exaggerate the miserabilist, neonaturalist effect, but presents ordinary, marginal people (antiheroes), who are held captive in a brutalizing quotidian routine.[10] The Romanian New Wave directors resort to a painterly naturalism, but reject dark naturalism, that is, miserabilism, resisting the hyperbolic caricature and grotesqueness of Daneliuc’s or Caranfil’s films, for instance.[11] An entire chapter in Doru Pop’s book tackles antiheroes and the notion of marginality, but I have limited myself here to some general considerations, relevant for the case study I am investigating. For Doru Pop too (as well as for Gorzo), Cristi Puiu is the symptomatic director of the new autochthonous cinema.
For Florin Poenaru, one of the theorists who espouses an activist, ideological stance on the Romanian contemporary film, the neorealism of the new Romanian cinema is not perceived in thematic or stylistic terms, but from a technical, strategic viewpoint, as a cognitive artifact: what matters is not necessarily the narrative the film conveys, but its imagery and “its possibilities not just to reflect reality, but also to conceive and problematize it.”[12]
*
In the sphere of literature, the critic who defines miserabilism most accurately is a miserabilist writer himself. In 2010, Dan Lungu published a text entitled “Carnet de scriitor” [“A Writer’s Scrapbook”] in the review Bucureștiul Cultural. One of the subsections of this text, which outlines a most welcome synthesis of the phenomenon under analysis, is entitled “‘Miserabilism’ or Post-traumatic Pessimism.” In Dan Lung’s view, post-communist Realism is explained and described as “post-socialist, post-traumatic, de-ideologized.”[13] Although Dan Lungu’s text was published after the release of the three films I will deal with in this concise study, pointing out the presence of miserabilist dystopian reminiscences in the works of three directors belonging to different generations (the films The Conjugal Bed, directed by Mircea Daneliuc, Terminus Paradis, directed by Lucian Pintilie, and The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, directed by Cristi Puiu), Lungu’s argument is acutely and directly related to the impact that the new Romanian film has had both abroad and, via a boomerang effect, inside Romanian culture and on the contemporary mentality.
What are the features of miserabilist reality, in the opinion (not just artistic-literary, but also sociological) of Dan Lungu? The list of these features is condensed: “caricature, mockery, sarcasm, caustic humor, the absurd or the bizarre.” From a social point of view, the focus is on marginal humans and “larval existence,” some of the characters being “mutants.” The style is rudimentary, wallowing in slang, but it suits the world of these antiheroes (as Dan Lungu dubs these marginal, peripheral characters). Perceived from outside, this world is accused and criticized, but viewed from within, it is pervaded by the natural atmosphere of post-communism. What strikes the spectator (reader) is the directness of the style and essence of this world, its antielitism and minimalism, as Dan Lungu insists. These antiheroes are outcasts in society, depicted face-forward, without labyrinthine stylistic derailments or baroque entanglements. They are part of a post-communist realism which mocks communist realism through its very peripheral character, through its overall response of – literal, not philosophical or aesthetic – existential nausea. The abolition of censorship after the collapse of the communist regime has allowed this, but has also engendered a tendency to recuperate the mundane quotidianness of existence (at the level of vision, language, action and style). Dan Lungu believes that the miserabilist realism of Romanian post-communist literature is part of a natural process of “lexical democratization.”
In the previous paragraph, I synthesized and used the entire theory about miserabilism assumed by Dan Lungu, as I fully agree with his approach and demonstration. I do have, however, some polemical takes on certain ideas he advocates. Thus, social miserabilism (materialized through poverty, disgust, despair) also existed during communism and was actually extended into Romanian post-communism, even though communism prohibited explorations of this neorealism. The ghettoization of the population in communism also contaminated post-communism, as a direct legacy of the previous regime. Excessive references to the peripheral and to the marginal also existed under communism, but they did not become key issues in art, being allowed extremely rarely to become part of the accepted social landscape and only in order to suffer amendments and penalties (in films like The Reconstruction, for instance). De facto, the state of peripherality, marginalization and ghettoization was perpetuated from the previous regime straight into post-communism, which has been marked by a collapse of prudish or protective screens. The intimate (domestic), sordid space that is constantly present in the Romanian post-communist film is, with or without quotation marks, a remnant of the Gulag, a degrading, suffocating, punitive communist coop. In other words, the new wave does not invent ghettoization, the lumpen state and abjection, but extracts them from behind a screen.
*
The Conjugal Bed (1993) is one of the first films produced after the collapse of the communist regime that is permeated by a miserabilist outlook and style. The emphasis is laid on a space that is almost abject, a space that morally encapsulates the spirit of the transition period, at the outset of post-communism (and does not necessarily reveal the poor souls of those inhabiting that space). The cramped, Babelian apartment in The Conjugal Bed is an alienated and alienating, pathologized microcosm: there is no difference between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen, as the entire place is infected by an immediately apparent promiscuity. There is no longer any distinction between the closet and the kitchen or the bed. Everything is exposed in plain sight, poured out, vitiated; doors do not close, squalor and promiscuity moving from one room to another. Daneliuc insists on filming the pathetic and damaged furniture for a globalizing effect: the theater where Vasile, the protagonist (excellently played by Gheorghe Dinică), is the director proves to be yet another squalid, dilapidated space, just like the apartment back home. The damaged toilet at the cinema is the very image of post-communistRomania, which was through and through dependent on the vicissitudes of communism: overflowing toilets, spilling filthy, liquefied excremental matter. The furniture (the table, the chairs, the wardrobe) is also used to provoke the abortion ofCarolina, Vasile’s pregnant wife (he is a man who pathologically invents this type of aggression). Thus, the furniture becomes a forceps, a polymorphous instrument of abortion (even though it is botched attempt at that). The same apartment is adapted to become a shabby film studio for a porn film, the conjugal bed serving as the focal point of this plateau of concentrated kitsch. Contaminated by the grimy space that is instrumented in a pornographic sense, Vasile tries to hang himself, filming everything on the apartment-set; everything takes the form of hemorrhaging psycho-human effluvia: Carolina’s macabre hanging attempt, the nails driven into the head of his pregnant wife (who failed to abort her child with the help of the furniture) and, finally, Vasile’s concrete and definitive suicide by hanging, behind the stage in the cinema. Fifteen years later, the same apartment will host the grotesque intercourse of Decebal (the half-wit child of Vasile andCarolina, who could not be aborted) and the prostitute Stela (the woman for whom Vasile had been willing to give everything up).
Space is essential in Daneliuc’s films, because it stands for the psyché: not only at the individual, but also at the collective level. Romania, freshly plunged into post-communism, is like Vasile’s grotesque apartment: dependent on or downright addicted to pestilence, a topos that is irretrievably contaminated by the sordidness of communism. It is not by chance that the motto of the film The Conjugal Bed is taken from Petre Ţuţea, a skeptical or even cynical mind of the transition, as well as a former political prisoner during the first stage of Romanian communism: “we are not lost as a people. Perhaps God will have mercy on us and kick us in the ass.” The squalid nature of space is not necessarily restricted to The Conjugal Bed, because Daneliuc also used memorable sequences of this type in a few films he made under communism: the autistic, cramped dorm rooms or the restrictive cabins in The Cruise (1981), or the dilapidated, damp hospital wards reeking of liquefied burial chambers in the cinematic parable Glissando.
With Terminus Paradis (1998), Lucian Pintilie also adopts a miserabilist perspective (even though he is the senior of the Romanian directors, with a different background and tastes than his younger fellow directors or even than the eternal rebel Daneliuc). True, the grotesque slum in Why Are the Bells Ringing, Mitică? (1981) did not necessarily portray the slums of Caragiale, but Romania itself as a communist slum, and the sordid and pathetic rooms in The Oak (1992) – be they hospitals, apartments or houses – bluntly charted the restrictive and punitive space of the infested Gulag during the communist period. In Terminus Paradis, however, Pintilie places a hyperbolic bet on miserabilism, having been catalyzed by the script compiled by three prose writers, two of whom were already major authors adhering to the miserabilist strand: Răzvan Popescu and Radu Aldulescu. To these was added Răzvan Rădulescu, who, while being a diversified and nuanced writer, is also known as a neorealist screenwriter (an adjunct of the directors belonging to the New Romanian Cinema).
In my opinion, Terminus Paradis is the glue and the link between The Conjugal Bed directed by Daneliuc, and the end of miserabilism, represented by The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, Cristi Puiu’s famous film. The life of Mitu Cafanu (the main character, played remarkably by Cornel Cașcaval) is umbilically connected to his dilapidated, bidonville-type apartment. The deterioration is extreme and it is filmed thoroughly as such. Everything is peripheral, the apartment is barren, there are the remains of a dismantled kitchen and the block itself is located in a Bucharest slum. And yet, up to a point, this gregarious and damaged space is also a space of shared love between Mitu and Norica, however squalid it may appear. In fact, all the other topoi in the film (Gili’s pub, the rooms in the barracks, Gili’s home, the escape wagon) are just as abandoned (orphaned), filthy and destitute. Mitu is a swineherd, but he is not contaminated by his job; instead, the all-encompassing, generalized contagion comes from the restrictive, punitive, stifling and rotten space. Contagion comes from the decomposed marginality that has invaded everything. Through this film, Lucian Pintilie manages to adapt perfectly, in thematic and stylistic terms, to post-communism and even to miserabilism, regardless of whether he does so out of a desire for competition against his younger confreres, or simply from an expert directorial instinct (professionally trained and armored).
With a script written by Cristi Puiu and Răzvan Rădulescu and directed by the former, The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005) represented the end to miserabilism along the lines initiated by The Conjugal Bed, on the theme I examine in this text (the film is, however, multifaceted and much more complicated, including in meta-cinematic terms, than the theme I approach here). First, the kitchen is cosmic (or ironically and grotesquely raised to cosmic dimensions). It belongs to Dante Remus Lăzărescu (played with exceptional talent by Ioan Fiscuteanu) and encapsulates the banal life of a man who is suffocated by objects and things, because he is alone, isolated, an “orphan,” without umbilical cords to connect him to the world in which he lives and which has forgotten, or even abandoned him. He is an aborted character, in the sense that he is expelled from the world, before actually dying. The telephone itself is found in this microcosm of the kitchen, which has been turned into a boudoir, a bathroom, and a dining room (up to a point – as all the other spaces are secondary). Cristi Puiu’s directorial gaze is obsessed intentionally (tendentiously) with things and leftovers, as if they were the main characters – which they actually are, because they anticipate the cadaverous state of the protagonist and because they condense an agonizing death and presage disintegration. The furniture is indigent and anguishing, deliberately cramped and punitive; in the kitchen, man has become an object alongside all the other objects. Then the bedroom takes over the topographical role and becomes the world itself, more specifically, an adaptedBabel tower: sheets, chaotic rags and linen layers, debris and some cats (instead of people). The state of the human being (the title character) as an inanimate object is preserved in the psychopomp ambulance and in the dehumanizing hospitals. The bureaucracy is the new Gulag, the carceral universe resting on the grotesque mechanisms of the administration and in the absurdity of the medical institution. With Cristi Puiu, a detail can become the focus of a moral accusation, with multiple ramifications; the repetitiveness of details (the kitchen and the bedroom are filmed using leitmotif and counterpoint techniques) and the repetitiveness of mundane objects (man himself having been reified) outline a decomposed space, in which even the psyche (or the soul) is decomposing, trapped in a pre-corpse state. Cristi Puiu demonstratively portrays this process of decay, teaching a lesson on the anatomy of decomposition.
The domestic space, the room, the apartment are also obsessive in Aurora (where the script was written just by Cristi Puiu, and where he is not only the director but also the leading actor); here, Viorel’s unfinished house is the most direct way to indicate autism, the character’s mental disintegration. Viorel’s wandering through apartments and houses (some unfinished, others crammed with objects or people, overcrowded, as their owners are upstarts) or his roaming in the streets, through warehouses and basements chart a map of his spiritual hell, deliberately explored, especially since the protagonist is also a living corpse from an emotional point of view: his breakdown has already taken place, and he is an “ghoul” who wanders through the world to punish the living who have hurt him or downright “killed” him within.
Andrei Gorzo defines Cristi Puiu as a follower of Bazianism and of the reality principle,[14] but disavows the qualifiers minimalist and minimalism (considered inappropriate and fallacious) for a film like The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, a complex production that problematizes and subtly reinvents the cinema.[15]
Doru Pop refuses the concrete (and applied) idea of miserabilism as a label for the films of the new Romanian directors; instead, he detects in their works a major dose of deliberate black humor. For Pop, miserabilism was a dominant feature of the autochthonous cinema only during the period immediately following the collapse of the communist regime (in Mircea Daneliuc’s films, for instance), when vulgarity and extreme violence were central means and themes.[16] In his analysis of the iconography of the kitchen space and of the eating process (filmed in ultra-slow motion, sometimes) in relatively recent Romanian films, Doru Pop believes that they outline a poetics of the New Wave predicated on the retrieval of ordinary and small human gestures (considered ignoble or petty in the previous period).[17]
I am not the only analyst who has drawn attention to Cristi Puiu’s insistence, in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, on a space diagnosed as squalid hell. Petre Rado has noted the excessively filthy setting in Lăzărescu’s apartment, who, before dying, travels through the infernal circles of everyday post-communist reality, overtly marked by dilapidation, grime, concupiscence, even abjection.[18] Andrei Gorzo contends that the objects and the rooms in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu amount to an individual and collective history that can only be comprehended from the inside, remaining completely indecipherable or enigmatic to an external gaze. Cristi Puiu “masterfully creates spaces that are utterly impregnated by the partially accessible histories of the men who live in them – a kind of technique of field depth, applied not only to space and time – and succeeds in plunging ultra-rapidly into the intimate substance of these lives, which is both inviting and repulsive, threadbare and promiscuous, dull and suspicious.”[19] Laura Dumitrescu also highlights the “urban prehistory” in Lăzărescu’s apartment, which prefigures “a sensorial hell through baroque combinations of vegetable grime and feline scents.”[20] Similarly, in Aurora, Viorel’s apartment deconstructs itself, decays, emptying itself and voiding the character of his own self. This time, the apartment is not filthy (like that of Lăzărescu), but a dead, cadaverous home, in a psychological, non-sensorial sense.
This study has approached the miserabilist stances evinced by three well-known films with quasi-dystopian overtones, produced by Romanian directors from different generations, who have all exerted a major impact on the autochthonous cinema and achieved tremendous success, including at the level of the public reception. As stated in the premise of this text, these films are not dystopian in the consecrated sense of the term, but revolve around dystopian reminiscences whose purpose was to extend the fatal communist substrate (at the level of the collective and individual destiny) in post-communism, through the lenses of an –ism that was theorized and applied in art after the collapse of the communist regime: miserabilism (either overtly or covertly assumed, but never unconsciously adhered to!). Andrei Gorzo considers that there are radical (technical and stylistic) differences between Cristi Puiu and Lucian Pintilie or Mircea Daneliuc; Doru Pop believes the same thing, denying the presence of any miserabilist stance in the New Wave films; however, I have connected these three filmmakers in this analysis and highlighted their similarities in their approach to the dystopian worlds they depict. My own argument has been influenced, of course, by aesthetic (and affective) criteria, the three films existing in a triad and outlining a consistent mind-set among individuals and communities alike. These are not the only such sequences, for dystopian-miserabilist stances are also adopted in other films produced after the fall of communism), but to my mind, these films present emblematic case studies for the mentality of the people. The furniture (either abundant and degraded or, on the contrary, minimalist) aggressively colonizes the human, suffocating or emaciating the individual, and human spaces become eschatological spaces in the afterworld (filmed here, in this world), full of vicissitudes. It is a method that E. Ionesco (in the play The Chairs) or J. P. Sartre (in No Exit) employed through a reduction to absurdity, each in their own (ethical) manner, anticipating the dystopian way in which furniture and the domestic space were to be used against humans in Romanian post-communism.
Translated into English by Carmen-Veronica Borbely
Bibliography
Corciovescu, Cristina and Mihăileanu, Magda (eds.). Cele mai bune 10 filme ale tuturor timpurilor. Stabilite prin votul a 40 de spectatori. Iași: Editura Polirom, 2010.
Deaca, Mircea. Cinematograful postfilmic. Note și lecturi despre filmul contemporan. Timișoara: Editura Brumar, 2013.
Fulger, Mihai. “Noul val” în cinematografia românească. București: Editura Art, 2006.
Gorzo, Andrei. Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel. Un mod de a gândi cinemaul, de la André Bazin la Cristi Puiu. București: Editura Humanitas, 2012.
Gorzo, Andrei and State Andrei (eds.). Politicile filmului. Contribuții la interpretarea cinemaului românesc contemporan. Cluj: Editura Tact, 2014.
Pop, Doru. Romanian New Wave Cinema. An Introduction. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014.
Șerban, Alex Leo. 4 decenii, 3 ani și 2 luni cu filmul românesc. Iași: Editura Polirom, 2009.
Notes
[1] Alex Leo Șerban, 4 decenii, 3 ani și 2 luni cu filmul românesc, Iași: Editura Polirom, 2009, p. 111.
[4] Andrei Gorzo, Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel. Un mod de a gândi cinemaul, de la André Bazin la Cristi Puiu, București: Humanitas, 2012, p. 13.
[8] Doru Pop, Romanian New Wave Cinema. An Introduction,Jefferson,North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014, p. 3.
[12] Florin Poenaru, “Noul Val din perspectivă colonial,” in Andrei Gorzo, Andrei State (eds.), Politicile filmului. Contribuții la interpretarea cinemaului românesc contemporan, Cluj: Tact, 2014, p. 157.
[13] Dan Lungu, “Carnet de scriitor,” Bucureștiul Cultural, no. 98, 21.09. 2010 (http://www.revista22.ro/bucurestiul-cultural-nr-98—-carnet-de-scriitor-8922.html). All the quotations in my study that refer to Dan Lungu are taken from this text.
Ruxandra Cesereanu
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
RuxCes@yahoo.com
Dystopian Reminiscences in the Romanian Contemporary Film
(Miserabilist Stances in the Films of Mircea Daneliuc, Lucian Pintilie and Cristi Puiu)
Abstract: This study analyzes the dystopian reminiscences outlined in the Romanian contemporary film, by exploring the cinematic work of three directors belonging to different generations (Mircea Daneliuc, Lucian Pintilie and Cristi Puiu), who assumed, to a greater or a lesser extent, the tenets of miserabilist neorealism – an “ism” that gained currency in Romania after the collapse of the communist regime.
Keywords: Romanian Contemporary Film; Neorealism; Naturalism; Miserabilism; Mircea Daneliuc; Lucian Pintilie; Cristi Puiu; Topos.
There is an undeniable dystopian component in the Romanian cinema produced after the collapse of the communist regime, even though it does not necessarily represent the option of the majority film producers and even though there is a visible difference from the responses that dystopian art generated in communism: allegory, parable, symbols and metaphors have well-nigh disappeared or, in any case, they have surely diminished and become less frequent, being replaced by a direct, blunt, neorealist discourse. At certain levels of the perspectives on marginality, the discourse is dystopian and miserabilist (highly naturalistic, but also prone to caricature). It is a discourse that marked, within less than a decade after the overthrow of the Ceaușescu regime, both Romanian literature (fiction, in particular, but also poetry) and the autochthonous cinema. These two forms of art have mutually influenced one another, albeit partially: while contemporary film has not infrequently assumed a narrative stance on all manner of acute and squalid poverty (human, economic, social or political), contemporary fiction has often assumed a cinematic style of narration.
The critics who have voiced, in more or less ample studies, their opinions on the miserabilist strand in Romanian literature include Ion Simuț, Mihai Zamfir, Dan C. Mihăilescu, Daniel Cristea-Enache and others. They have highlighted several key elements in the new realist post-communist literature: sordid pessimism, furious cynicism, the vulgar grotesque, existential nausea, the cruelty of perception, a penchant for everyday minimalism, a style steeped in slang or in defiant jargon, post-communist neorealism being grafted, in any case, on a neoexpresionist undercurrent. It is as if Louis-Ferdinand Céline had been reclaimed and reassumed as a model in the neorealist Romanian literature, but in a post-communist context (as Mihai Zamfir has insightfully pointed this out!). The human, social, economic and moral morass and the sheer amount of poverty under communism contaminated the perspective and vision of Romanian post-communist films, bringing to the fore lumpen characters, who are portrayed through magnifying lenses. This is the truly unique and innovative feature of films produced in the post-communist period, which dismantle the fabricated, artificial depiction of heroism in communist films. Something has radically changed: reality or neoreality has been zoomed in with a detailed, unhurried gaze, in slow motion, marked by a proneness for orality.
Contemporary Romanian film (the new cinema or the new wave) has already been the subject of extensive analysis, in synthesis books of considerable impact, authored by Mihail Fulger, Alex Leo Șerban, Andrei Gorzo, Mircea Deaca and Doru Pop (in chronological order). In addition to these, there have been published several collective volumes, with essays on the films produced by the most outstanding Romanian directors of the third millennium.
Alex Leo Șerban, for instance, describes the directors of the new wave as “angry neorealists”[1] who cultivate an “unembellished, shocking, effective minimalism.”[2] Șerban points out the affinities between the minimalism displayed by the Romanian cinema and the Italian neorealism from the aftermath of World War II, but he uses minimalism in a technical sense, considering that the most appropriate term would be Romanian neorealism.[3] Alex Leo Șerban actually legitimizes the syntagm New Romanian Cinema (NRC).
When undertaking a panoramic or focal overview of the films produced by the new directors, Andrei Gorzo refuses such terms as minimalism, realism or miserabilism, for he regards these concepts as being “too general.” He also rejects the possibility (even if only symbolic) that the directorial brand sanctioned by Cristi Puiu (who is considered the reinventor of the Romanian cinema and the most poignant adherent of neorealism, and whose approach to this aesthetic trend has become a brand) might be derived from Lucian Pintilie, Mircea Daneliuc or Alexandru Tatos.[4] The definition that Gorzo gives of the New Romanian Cinema is dyadic. From a stylistic perspective, the NRC is about “an aesthetic formula predicated on the elevation of certain features of dramatic and directorial style to the rank of norms.”[5] From a biological (and chronological) viewpoint, the NRC stands for a new generation of filmmakers[6] (born between 1967 and 1975). Andrei Gorzo makes a nuanced and precise distinction between the NRC and the Romanian New Wave, as follows: the NRC is umbilically linked to several “stylistic premises shared by a number of films that have enjoyed international success. As a result of this success, these premises have come to represent the mainstream style in contemporary Romanian cinema,” while the Romanian New Wave is simply “a generation of successful filmmakers.”[7]
Doru Pop, the author of a synthetic and, at the same time, analytical foray into the new Romanian film directors, written directly in English, considers that their major influences go beyond Italian neorealism, including the New British Cinema, the French New Wave and the new generations of filmmakers in Central and Eastern Europe.[8] Unlike Șerban and Gorzo, Pop prefers the Romanian New Wave formula (even though he states that these filmmakers disavow this syntagm), because he perceives and legitimizes it from a philosophical-cinematic perspective.[9] Still, like Andrei Gorzo, Doru Pop emphasizes the divide between the Romanian New Wave directors and their predecessors, who have produced realistic films in the miserabilist vein (Mircea Daneliuc, Dan Pița, Nae Caranfil). The explanation he provides is different from that suggested by Gorzo. Thus, the Romanian New Wave does not depict “subhumans” (even though they are antiheroes) and does not exaggerate the miserabilist, neonaturalist effect, but presents ordinary, marginal people (antiheroes), who are held captive in a brutalizing quotidian routine.[10] The Romanian New Wave directors resort to a painterly naturalism, but reject dark naturalism, that is, miserabilism, resisting the hyperbolic caricature and grotesqueness of Daneliuc’s or Caranfil’s films, for instance.[11] An entire chapter in Doru Pop’s book tackles antiheroes and the notion of marginality, but I have limited myself here to some general considerations, relevant for the case study I am investigating. For Doru Pop too (as well as for Gorzo), Cristi Puiu is the symptomatic director of the new autochthonous cinema.
For Florin Poenaru, one of the theorists who espouses an activist, ideological stance on the Romanian contemporary film, the neorealism of the new Romanian cinema is not perceived in thematic or stylistic terms, but from a technical, strategic viewpoint, as a cognitive artifact: what matters is not necessarily the narrative the film conveys, but its imagery and “its possibilities not just to reflect reality, but also to conceive and problematize it.”[12]
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In the sphere of literature, the critic who defines miserabilism most accurately is a miserabilist writer himself. In 2010, Dan Lungu published a text entitled “Carnet de scriitor” [“A Writer’s Scrapbook”] in the review Bucureștiul Cultural. One of the subsections of this text, which outlines a most welcome synthesis of the phenomenon under analysis, is entitled “‘Miserabilism’ or Post-traumatic Pessimism.” In Dan Lung’s view, post-communist Realism is explained and described as “post-socialist, post-traumatic, de-ideologized.”[13] Although Dan Lungu’s text was published after the release of the three films I will deal with in this concise study, pointing out the presence of miserabilist dystopian reminiscences in the works of three directors belonging to different generations (the films The Conjugal Bed, directed by Mircea Daneliuc, Terminus Paradis, directed by Lucian Pintilie, and The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, directed by Cristi Puiu), Lungu’s argument is acutely and directly related to the impact that the new Romanian film has had both abroad and, via a boomerang effect, inside Romanian culture and on the contemporary mentality.
What are the features of miserabilist reality, in the opinion (not just artistic-literary, but also sociological) of Dan Lungu? The list of these features is condensed: “caricature, mockery, sarcasm, caustic humor, the absurd or the bizarre.” From a social point of view, the focus is on marginal humans and “larval existence,” some of the characters being “mutants.” The style is rudimentary, wallowing in slang, but it suits the world of these antiheroes (as Dan Lungu dubs these marginal, peripheral characters). Perceived from outside, this world is accused and criticized, but viewed from within, it is pervaded by the natural atmosphere of post-communism. What strikes the spectator (reader) is the directness of the style and essence of this world, its antielitism and minimalism, as Dan Lungu insists. These antiheroes are outcasts in society, depicted face-forward, without labyrinthine stylistic derailments or baroque entanglements. They are part of a post-communist realism which mocks communist realism through its very peripheral character, through its overall response of – literal, not philosophical or aesthetic – existential nausea. The abolition of censorship after the collapse of the communist regime has allowed this, but has also engendered a tendency to recuperate the mundane quotidianness of existence (at the level of vision, language, action and style). Dan Lungu believes that the miserabilist realism of Romanian post-communist literature is part of a natural process of “lexical democratization.”
In the previous paragraph, I synthesized and used the entire theory about miserabilism assumed by Dan Lungu, as I fully agree with his approach and demonstration. I do have, however, some polemical takes on certain ideas he advocates. Thus, social miserabilism (materialized through poverty, disgust, despair) also existed during communism and was actually extended into Romanian post-communism, even though communism prohibited explorations of this neorealism. The ghettoization of the population in communism also contaminated post-communism, as a direct legacy of the previous regime. Excessive references to the peripheral and to the marginal also existed under communism, but they did not become key issues in art, being allowed extremely rarely to become part of the accepted social landscape and only in order to suffer amendments and penalties (in films like The Reconstruction, for instance). De facto, the state of peripherality, marginalization and ghettoization was perpetuated from the previous regime straight into post-communism, which has been marked by a collapse of prudish or protective screens. The intimate (domestic), sordid space that is constantly present in the Romanian post-communist film is, with or without quotation marks, a remnant of the Gulag, a degrading, suffocating, punitive communist coop. In other words, the new wave does not invent ghettoization, the lumpen state and abjection, but extracts them from behind a screen.
*
The Conjugal Bed (1993) is one of the first films produced after the collapse of the communist regime that is permeated by a miserabilist outlook and style. The emphasis is laid on a space that is almost abject, a space that morally encapsulates the spirit of the transition period, at the outset of post-communism (and does not necessarily reveal the poor souls of those inhabiting that space). The cramped, Babelian apartment in The Conjugal Bed is an alienated and alienating, pathologized microcosm: there is no difference between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen, as the entire place is infected by an immediately apparent promiscuity. There is no longer any distinction between the closet and the kitchen or the bed. Everything is exposed in plain sight, poured out, vitiated; doors do not close, squalor and promiscuity moving from one room to another. Daneliuc insists on filming the pathetic and damaged furniture for a globalizing effect: the theater where Vasile, the protagonist (excellently played by Gheorghe Dinică), is the director proves to be yet another squalid, dilapidated space, just like the apartment back home. The damaged toilet at the cinema is the very image of post-communistRomania, which was through and through dependent on the vicissitudes of communism: overflowing toilets, spilling filthy, liquefied excremental matter. The furniture (the table, the chairs, the wardrobe) is also used to provoke the abortion ofCarolina, Vasile’s pregnant wife (he is a man who pathologically invents this type of aggression). Thus, the furniture becomes a forceps, a polymorphous instrument of abortion (even though it is botched attempt at that). The same apartment is adapted to become a shabby film studio for a porn film, the conjugal bed serving as the focal point of this plateau of concentrated kitsch. Contaminated by the grimy space that is instrumented in a pornographic sense, Vasile tries to hang himself, filming everything on the apartment-set; everything takes the form of hemorrhaging psycho-human effluvia: Carolina’s macabre hanging attempt, the nails driven into the head of his pregnant wife (who failed to abort her child with the help of the furniture) and, finally, Vasile’s concrete and definitive suicide by hanging, behind the stage in the cinema. Fifteen years later, the same apartment will host the grotesque intercourse of Decebal (the half-wit child of Vasile andCarolina, who could not be aborted) and the prostitute Stela (the woman for whom Vasile had been willing to give everything up).
Space is essential in Daneliuc’s films, because it stands for the psyché: not only at the individual, but also at the collective level. Romania, freshly plunged into post-communism, is like Vasile’s grotesque apartment: dependent on or downright addicted to pestilence, a topos that is irretrievably contaminated by the sordidness of communism. It is not by chance that the motto of the film The Conjugal Bed is taken from Petre Ţuţea, a skeptical or even cynical mind of the transition, as well as a former political prisoner during the first stage of Romanian communism: “we are not lost as a people. Perhaps God will have mercy on us and kick us in the ass.” The squalid nature of space is not necessarily restricted to The Conjugal Bed, because Daneliuc also used memorable sequences of this type in a few films he made under communism: the autistic, cramped dorm rooms or the restrictive cabins in The Cruise (1981), or the dilapidated, damp hospital wards reeking of liquefied burial chambers in the cinematic parable Glissando.
With Terminus Paradis (1998), Lucian Pintilie also adopts a miserabilist perspective (even though he is the senior of the Romanian directors, with a different background and tastes than his younger fellow directors or even than the eternal rebel Daneliuc). True, the grotesque slum in Why Are the Bells Ringing, Mitică? (1981) did not necessarily portray the slums of Caragiale, but Romania itself as a communist slum, and the sordid and pathetic rooms in The Oak (1992) – be they hospitals, apartments or houses – bluntly charted the restrictive and punitive space of the infested Gulag during the communist period. In Terminus Paradis, however, Pintilie places a hyperbolic bet on miserabilism, having been catalyzed by the script compiled by three prose writers, two of whom were already major authors adhering to the miserabilist strand: Răzvan Popescu and Radu Aldulescu. To these was added Răzvan Rădulescu, who, while being a diversified and nuanced writer, is also known as a neorealist screenwriter (an adjunct of the directors belonging to the New Romanian Cinema).
In my opinion, Terminus Paradis is the glue and the link between The Conjugal Bed directed by Daneliuc, and the end of miserabilism, represented by The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, Cristi Puiu’s famous film. The life of Mitu Cafanu (the main character, played remarkably by Cornel Cașcaval) is umbilically connected to his dilapidated, bidonville-type apartment. The deterioration is extreme and it is filmed thoroughly as such. Everything is peripheral, the apartment is barren, there are the remains of a dismantled kitchen and the block itself is located in a Bucharest slum. And yet, up to a point, this gregarious and damaged space is also a space of shared love between Mitu and Norica, however squalid it may appear. In fact, all the other topoi in the film (Gili’s pub, the rooms in the barracks, Gili’s home, the escape wagon) are just as abandoned (orphaned), filthy and destitute. Mitu is a swineherd, but he is not contaminated by his job; instead, the all-encompassing, generalized contagion comes from the restrictive, punitive, stifling and rotten space. Contagion comes from the decomposed marginality that has invaded everything. Through this film, Lucian Pintilie manages to adapt perfectly, in thematic and stylistic terms, to post-communism and even to miserabilism, regardless of whether he does so out of a desire for competition against his younger confreres, or simply from an expert directorial instinct (professionally trained and armored).
With a script written by Cristi Puiu and Răzvan Rădulescu and directed by the former, The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (2005) represented the end to miserabilism along the lines initiated by The Conjugal Bed, on the theme I examine in this text (the film is, however, multifaceted and much more complicated, including in meta-cinematic terms, than the theme I approach here). First, the kitchen is cosmic (or ironically and grotesquely raised to cosmic dimensions). It belongs to Dante Remus Lăzărescu (played with exceptional talent by Ioan Fiscuteanu) and encapsulates the banal life of a man who is suffocated by objects and things, because he is alone, isolated, an “orphan,” without umbilical cords to connect him to the world in which he lives and which has forgotten, or even abandoned him. He is an aborted character, in the sense that he is expelled from the world, before actually dying. The telephone itself is found in this microcosm of the kitchen, which has been turned into a boudoir, a bathroom, and a dining room (up to a point – as all the other spaces are secondary). Cristi Puiu’s directorial gaze is obsessed intentionally (tendentiously) with things and leftovers, as if they were the main characters – which they actually are, because they anticipate the cadaverous state of the protagonist and because they condense an agonizing death and presage disintegration. The furniture is indigent and anguishing, deliberately cramped and punitive; in the kitchen, man has become an object alongside all the other objects. Then the bedroom takes over the topographical role and becomes the world itself, more specifically, an adaptedBabel tower: sheets, chaotic rags and linen layers, debris and some cats (instead of people). The state of the human being (the title character) as an inanimate object is preserved in the psychopomp ambulance and in the dehumanizing hospitals. The bureaucracy is the new Gulag, the carceral universe resting on the grotesque mechanisms of the administration and in the absurdity of the medical institution. With Cristi Puiu, a detail can become the focus of a moral accusation, with multiple ramifications; the repetitiveness of details (the kitchen and the bedroom are filmed using leitmotif and counterpoint techniques) and the repetitiveness of mundane objects (man himself having been reified) outline a decomposed space, in which even the psyche (or the soul) is decomposing, trapped in a pre-corpse state. Cristi Puiu demonstratively portrays this process of decay, teaching a lesson on the anatomy of decomposition.
The domestic space, the room, the apartment are also obsessive in Aurora (where the script was written just by Cristi Puiu, and where he is not only the director but also the leading actor); here, Viorel’s unfinished house is the most direct way to indicate autism, the character’s mental disintegration. Viorel’s wandering through apartments and houses (some unfinished, others crammed with objects or people, overcrowded, as their owners are upstarts) or his roaming in the streets, through warehouses and basements chart a map of his spiritual hell, deliberately explored, especially since the protagonist is also a living corpse from an emotional point of view: his breakdown has already taken place, and he is an “ghoul” who wanders through the world to punish the living who have hurt him or downright “killed” him within.
Andrei Gorzo defines Cristi Puiu as a follower of Bazianism and of the reality principle,[14] but disavows the qualifiers minimalist and minimalism (considered inappropriate and fallacious) for a film like The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, a complex production that problematizes and subtly reinvents the cinema.[15]
Doru Pop refuses the concrete (and applied) idea of miserabilism as a label for the films of the new Romanian directors; instead, he detects in their works a major dose of deliberate black humor. For Pop, miserabilism was a dominant feature of the autochthonous cinema only during the period immediately following the collapse of the communist regime (in Mircea Daneliuc’s films, for instance), when vulgarity and extreme violence were central means and themes.[16] In his analysis of the iconography of the kitchen space and of the eating process (filmed in ultra-slow motion, sometimes) in relatively recent Romanian films, Doru Pop believes that they outline a poetics of the New Wave predicated on the retrieval of ordinary and small human gestures (considered ignoble or petty in the previous period).[17]
I am not the only analyst who has drawn attention to Cristi Puiu’s insistence, in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, on a space diagnosed as squalid hell. Petre Rado has noted the excessively filthy setting in Lăzărescu’s apartment, who, before dying, travels through the infernal circles of everyday post-communist reality, overtly marked by dilapidation, grime, concupiscence, even abjection.[18] Andrei Gorzo contends that the objects and the rooms in The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu amount to an individual and collective history that can only be comprehended from the inside, remaining completely indecipherable or enigmatic to an external gaze. Cristi Puiu “masterfully creates spaces that are utterly impregnated by the partially accessible histories of the men who live in them – a kind of technique of field depth, applied not only to space and time – and succeeds in plunging ultra-rapidly into the intimate substance of these lives, which is both inviting and repulsive, threadbare and promiscuous, dull and suspicious.”[19] Laura Dumitrescu also highlights the “urban prehistory” in Lăzărescu’s apartment, which prefigures “a sensorial hell through baroque combinations of vegetable grime and feline scents.”[20] Similarly, in Aurora, Viorel’s apartment deconstructs itself, decays, emptying itself and voiding the character of his own self. This time, the apartment is not filthy (like that of Lăzărescu), but a dead, cadaverous home, in a psychological, non-sensorial sense.
This study has approached the miserabilist stances evinced by three well-known films with quasi-dystopian overtones, produced by Romanian directors from different generations, who have all exerted a major impact on the autochthonous cinema and achieved tremendous success, including at the level of the public reception. As stated in the premise of this text, these films are not dystopian in the consecrated sense of the term, but revolve around dystopian reminiscences whose purpose was to extend the fatal communist substrate (at the level of the collective and individual destiny) in post-communism, through the lenses of an –ism that was theorized and applied in art after the collapse of the communist regime: miserabilism (either overtly or covertly assumed, but never unconsciously adhered to!). Andrei Gorzo considers that there are radical (technical and stylistic) differences between Cristi Puiu and Lucian Pintilie or Mircea Daneliuc; Doru Pop believes the same thing, denying the presence of any miserabilist stance in the New Wave films; however, I have connected these three filmmakers in this analysis and highlighted their similarities in their approach to the dystopian worlds they depict. My own argument has been influenced, of course, by aesthetic (and affective) criteria, the three films existing in a triad and outlining a consistent mind-set among individuals and communities alike. These are not the only such sequences, for dystopian-miserabilist stances are also adopted in other films produced after the fall of communism), but to my mind, these films present emblematic case studies for the mentality of the people. The furniture (either abundant and degraded or, on the contrary, minimalist) aggressively colonizes the human, suffocating or emaciating the individual, and human spaces become eschatological spaces in the afterworld (filmed here, in this world), full of vicissitudes. It is a method that E. Ionesco (in the play The Chairs) or J. P. Sartre (in No Exit) employed through a reduction to absurdity, each in their own (ethical) manner, anticipating the dystopian way in which furniture and the domestic space were to be used against humans in Romanian post-communism.
Translated into English by Carmen-Veronica Borbely
Bibliography
Corciovescu, Cristina and Mihăileanu, Magda (eds.). Cele mai bune 10 filme ale tuturor timpurilor. Stabilite prin votul a 40 de spectatori. Iași: Editura Polirom, 2010.
Deaca, Mircea. Cinematograful postfilmic. Note și lecturi despre filmul contemporan. Timișoara: Editura Brumar, 2013.
Fulger, Mihai. “Noul val” în cinematografia românească. București: Editura Art, 2006.
Gorzo, Andrei. Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel. Un mod de a gândi cinemaul, de la André Bazin la Cristi Puiu. București: Editura Humanitas, 2012.
Gorzo, Andrei and State Andrei (eds.). Politicile filmului. Contribuții la interpretarea cinemaului românesc contemporan. Cluj: Editura Tact, 2014.
Pop, Doru. Romanian New Wave Cinema. An Introduction. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014.
Șerban, Alex Leo. 4 decenii, 3 ani și 2 luni cu filmul românesc. Iași: Editura Polirom, 2009.
Notes
[1] Alex Leo Șerban, 4 decenii, 3 ani și 2 luni cu filmul românesc, Iași: Editura Polirom, 2009, p. 111.
[4] Andrei Gorzo, Lucruri care nu pot fi spuse altfel. Un mod de a gândi cinemaul, de la André Bazin la Cristi Puiu, București: Humanitas, 2012, p. 13.
[8] Doru Pop, Romanian New Wave Cinema. An Introduction,Jefferson,North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014, p. 3.
[12] Florin Poenaru, “Noul Val din perspectivă colonial,” in Andrei Gorzo, Andrei State (eds.), Politicile filmului. Contribuții la interpretarea cinemaului românesc contemporan, Cluj: Tact, 2014, p. 157.
[13] Dan Lungu, “Carnet de scriitor,” Bucureștiul Cultural, no. 98, 21.09. 2010 (http://www.revista22.ro/bucurestiul-cultural-nr-98—-carnet-de-scriitor-8922.html). All the quotations in my study that refer to Dan Lungu are taken from this text.
Ruy Guerra et Dionysos ou la contre-utopie de l’imaginaire de l’auteur au cinéma: les racines de l’éthéréRuy Guerra and Dionysos or the Counter-Utopia of the Imaginary in the Authorial Film: Ethereal Roots
Eduardo Portanova Barros
Unisinos-RS, Brésil
PNPD/CAPES
eduardoportanova@hotmail.com
Ruy Guerra et Dionysos
ou la contre-utopie de l’imaginaire de l’auteur au cinéma: les racines de l’éthéré
Ruy Guerra and Dionysos
or the Counter-Utopia of the Imaginary in the Authorial Film: Ethereal Roots
Abstract: Post-modernity could be an alternative sensibility to the values sustained by the logic of rationalistic type. That means to say that, at the present time, it is already possible, with more clarity, to observe aspects such as the emotions, the feelings and the intuitions of an artist- in the case Ruy Guerra and of his imaginary. This is the aim of this article: to investigate Ruy Guerra’s path from the point of view of the imaginary, as theorized by Gaston Bachelard and Gilbert Durand. We focused on a film director who was a very active presence in the Cinema Novo (Brazil) of the 1960, a phase marked by political ideology, but also in the context of hedonist post-modernity. What interests us is to show the balance between subjective and objective coercions in Ruy Guerra (Gilbert Durand). We are not looking for a rigid answer, but for a constellation of factors in post-modern (counter) utopia.
Keywords: Ruy Guerra; Cinema; Imaginary; Post-modernity; Utopia.
Depuis les années 1960 et 1970, lorsque le Brésil était une dictature, le cinéaste mozambicain Ruy Guerra (né en 1931) qui vit à Rio de Janeiro depuis la fin des années 1950, produit (ou, comme il préfère, « fait ») du cinéma. Pourquoi ? Difficile à dire. Néanmoins, il est possible de tenter des approximations (et non des réponses) méthodologiques en affirmant, tout d’abord, que nous sommes, il faut bien l’admettre, dans une toute autre époque que celle du communisme (ou de sa fin) : dans la contre-utopie de la post-modernité. Qu’est-ce que c’est, alors, la contre-utopie post-moderne ? Si le terme post-moderne est une abstraction ou une métaphore de la réalité humaine, parce que le présent est plus vécu que rationalisé, cela signifie qu’une chose quelconque ne représente pas la Vérité. Et c’est bien ça la contre-utopie. Penser à une chose quelconque et savoir en même temps que cette chose à laquelle on pense n’est jamais là. Penser à Dionysos, par exemple, qui, avec les Bacchantes, dilacérèrent tout ce qui, au nom de la rationalité, récuse une effervescence fécondatrice. Penser à Guerra, un cinéaste qui, en utilisant une pensée bachelardienne, laisse à l’imagination le temps de travailler la matière cinématographique. Penser le contraire. Penser l’inverse ou l’éthéré.
C’est bien cela l’objectif de ce travail: observer les idées obsédantes, du point de vue de l’imaginaire contre-utopique localisé, parmi d’autres auteurs, dans la lignée de Gaston Bachelard (« imagination matérielle ») et Gilbert Durand (« cercle anthropologique »), d’un directeur cinématographique qui a travaillé aussi bien dans le Cinéma Nouveau (Cinema Novo) brésilien des années 1960 – une phase marquée par l’idéologie politique – que dans le contexte de la post-modernité hédoniste. Selon Maffesoli[1], c’est une sensibilité alternative aux valeurs soutenues par la logique d’empreinte rationaliste. Cela signifie que, à présent, il est déjà possible, avec plus de clarté, d’observer des aspects comme les émotions, les sensations et les intuitions d’un artiste – dans le cas Ruy Guerra – et de son imaginaire (rêves, contre-utopies, mythes et désirs). L’intérêt, dans ce cas, est de montrer l’équilibre, chez Ruy Guerra, entre la subjectivité et les contraintes d’ordre objectif (Gilbert Durand). Nous ne voulons pas chercher une réponse rigide, mais une constellation de facteurs. Constellation propre aussi bien à l’état de matérialité-règle qu’à la nature éthérée d’un vol cinématographique (la subjectivité).
Pour Bachelard, l’imaginaire n’appartient pas au royaume des nombres et des mesures. Par conséquent, selon Maffesoli[2], chaque objet ou phénomène est lié avec les autres : pour cette raison, il est soumis au changement et au hasard. Ce qui nous intéresse, alors, est la révision de la notion d’auteur cinématographique dans la post-modernité dans le sens d’une contre-utopie (ou anti-utopie) et du « trajet anthropologique », selon Gilbert Durand[3], d’un cinéaste, Ruy Guerra, qui travaille, aujourd’hui, d’une façon moins égocentrique (hypothèse) que dans les années d’avant-garde lorsque il représentait un rôle politique dans le Cinema Novo. Une analyse peut prendre en considération l’auteur comme un exemple abstrait, oui, mais aussi comme une personnalité qui s’exprime à travers la caméra. Il n’est pas question, ici, de découvrir ce qu’un directeur cinématographique comme Guerra pense derrière la caméra, mais bien d’admettre qu’un film, dans certaines circonstances, puisse être la représentation d’une individualité sensible et, seulement pour ça, il serait déjà justifié si nous considérons, comme dit Maffesoli[4], que le thème du sensible – on ajoute dyonisiaque et contre-utopique – pourrait être la marque de la post-modernité.
Si l’esthétique, matière première du cinéma, est la connaissance par le sensible, nous appellerons contre-utopie cinématographique chez Ruy Guerra le contradictoire de l’utopie de type réaliste. Mais notre intention n’est pas de traiter à fond – en soulignant ce qui est ou ce qui n’est pas contre-utopie chez Ruy Guerra – l’analyse d’une œuvre particulière. En effet, cette analyse ne se limite pas, puisque, selon Teixeira Coelho (1973), le fait esthétique permet des appréhensions variées aussi bien de l’individu même que de récepteurs multiples. Par conséquent, celle-ci est également ouverte, ce qui signifie, selon Eco: « […] que chaque spectateur apporte une situation existentielle concrète, une sensibilité personnelle conditionnée, une certaine culture, des goûts, des tendances, des préjugés personnels ». Si nous analysons un cinéaste pour rechercher chez lui une contre-utopie nous dénaturerions la notion avec laquelle nous travaillons dans cet article. Dans l’idée de contre-utopie l’impression sensible de l’interprétation compte plus que le rationalisme déconstructiviste, parce que, comme dit Merleau-Ponty, « […] la signification du perçu est seulement une constellation d’images qui commencent à réapparaître sans raison ». La créativité approximative ne peut pas créer, de manière forcée, une contre-utopie d’une œuvre cinématographique en essayant de la surpasser analytiquement.
Nous ne voulons même pas promouvoir une analyse descriptive et reconstructrice d’une œuvre, encore moins d’un seul film ou cinéaste pour justifier l’idée de contre-utopie, mais bien la considérer, dans la théorie du cinéma, comme une sorte de nihilisme. La contre-utopie cinématographique, qui est le sujet de cet article, découle donc de son contraire, l’utopie du réalisme. Pour l’interpréter comme « anti » ou « contre », au sens voulu, nous ne faisons aucune distinction entre ces deux termes, il faut comprendre la nécessité de ce qui est alogique. La logique disjonctive est représentée par le cinéma traditionnel (quelle que soit la tradition) et donc par l’esprit captif, parce qu’attaché à cette même tradition. La contre-utopie est déjà alogique et a également besoin d’un esprit, mais pas prisonnier de cette même tradition : libre. C’est un exercice de capacité, pas de savoir. Capacité de réaliser quelque chose d’une manière pertinente, pour paraphraser Nietzsche dans son aphorisme 256 sur la science. Et pas un savoir logique. La contre-utopie de Ruy Guerra est constituée, à l’instar de la foi, par une « adhésion que l’on sait au-delà des preuves, non nécessaire, tissée d’incrédulité et menacée à chaque instant par la non-foi », comme dit Merleau-Ponty. Elle est le visible et l’invisible.
Nous pouvons aussi considérer la contre-utopie, de façon analogue à la physique, comme une mesure de « l’inexploitabilité » (comme une quantité de chaleur non utilisable complètement pour sa transformation en travail). L’opposé de l’entropie, qui représente l’originalité, est, dans la Théorie de l’Information, la redondance (répétition). La répétition est une ressource (elle ne cesse pas d’être, pour le meilleur ou pour le pire) de l’intelligibilité du contenu, y compris filmique. Nous avons vu, par conséquent, que l’entropie est le désordre et que la redondance est la prévisibilité. En effet, pas toute la chaleur prévue n’est exploitée dans l’entropie. Quand se déroule une consommation d’énergie qui, en chemin, empêche toute cette possibilité d’exploitation, on considère cela comme étant un phénomène entropique. Cette indétermination (on ne sait pas combien le système sera plus ou moins affecté par la consommation) est ce qui caractérise l’entropie et ce qui justifie également sa relation avec la contre-utopie. Le cinéaste Ruy Guerra la pratique ainsi. Et Bergman également : la scène finale « […] où la Mort s’éloigne en dansant avec les marcheurs », dans le film Le septième sceau a été improvisée en quelques minutes, avec la figuration de techniciens et de touristes.
En d’autres termes, la contre-utopie est un archétype numineux, parce qu’il s’agit, selon Jung, « […] d’un fondement émotionnel qui semble inaccessible à la raison critique ». Il n’y a pas une seule histoire, mais bien des points de vue mythiques. Et de quels points de vue parlons-nous ? Certainement de beaucoup, la polyphonie discursive étant une ressource qui s’actualise avec force à chaque nouveau cycle de l’éternel retour mythique qui marque la contre-utopie dans l’œuvre de Ruy Guerra. Ainsi, la contre-utopie tend plus à l’implosion des directions de narration qui structurent les scénarios traditionnels et moins à l’explosion de pratiques redondantes. Godard suggère que sa posture créative est parfois stimulée par des circonstances qui peuvent définir des stratégies et des solutions uniques. À propos de À bout de souffle (1960), le cinéaste dit qu’il aurait aimé tourner en studio, mais ce ne fut pas possible en raison de divers problèmes. Dans ses limites pratiques et techniques, tout en reconnaissant qu’à l’époque il ne savait rien techniquement, le réalisateur est resté en dehors du formalisme qui subsiste dans l’art cinématographique, arrivant à sacrifier quelques images premières au nom de la nécessité que le moment de faire du cinéma a imposée.
Conscient de sa capacité à effectuer des contre-utopies, Godard montre que renoncer à un idéal filmique peut améliorer le sentiment de liberté dans le tournage – la liberté de réaliser le rêve possible, au moins. Ainsi, l’improvisation devient l’un des nombreux outils de création valorisés par le cinéaste anti- ou contre-utopique. Dans cette longue période s’étendant au moins de la période d’or de Hollywood à nos jours, où les scripts traditionnels ont assumé un rôle central dans le processus de réalisation, le script (ou scénario) est passé par un processus intense de structuration, se plaçant comme un outil essentiel et potentiellement inflexible pour la production de films. Des scénaristes comme l’américain Syd Field, créateur de Paradigme qui définit les 120 pages d’un script supposé idéal et dans lequel figurent les trois actes de base d’un long métrage (La Présentation, la Confrontation et la Résolution), sont devenus les gourous de l’industrie du divertissement. Le paradigme, ainsi qu’un guide Vogler, est à l’opposé de la contre-utopie. Vogler s’est basé sur le livre Le Héros aux mille et un visages, du mythologue américain Joseph Campbell, qui a inventé le terme Voyage du Héros pour caractériser les stades archétypaux chez l’homme et les a reliés à la narration du film.
Cela a abouti à l’utopie d’un Guide Pratique du Scénario caractérisant les étapes suivantes: monde ordinaire; appel à l’aventure; refus de l’appel; rencontre avec le mentor; franchissement du premier seuil; test; allié; ennemis; approche de la grotte cachée; épreuve suprême; récompense; chemin du retour; résurrection, et enfin retour avec de l’élixir. « J’ai travaillé avec l’idée de Campbell du Voyage du Héros pour comprendre l’incroyable phénomène qui a eu lieu avec des films comme Star Wars et Rencontre du Troisième Type […] ils reflètent les schémas que Campbell a vus dans les mythes », a déclaré Vogler. Contrairement à ce modèle, le Septième Sceau, comme on l’a déjà dit, contenait une grande improvisation, comme dans la scène mentionnée auparavant, filmée à cause de quelques nuages soudainement apparus qui formaient, pour Bergman, un visuel parfait pour l’image qu’il avait à l’esprit. D’ailleurs, selon Bergman, ce film n’a pas pris plus de 35 jours pour être terminé. Il faut rappeler que des accidents de parcours arrivent même dans ce trajet supposé régulier du Héros structuré par Campbell et répandu dans le cinéma. Et c’est probablement sur ce point que deviennent claires les divergences sur les perceptions du Héros entre le penseur nord-américain et la théorie du mythe de Durand. Pour Durand, le héros n’est ni un personnage unidimensionnel qui répond à une narration préalablement structurée, ni l’expression principale d’un monomythe, mais bien une image symbolique dont la multipolarité sémantique fait référence à l’archétype du héros, ce contenu psychique présent dans l’inconscient collectif qui est la racine d’images et de symbolismes universels et complémentaires. La contre-utopie serait probablement plus proche de la vision durandienne de la pluralité des sens propre à la récurrence mythique que du cadre organisationnel proposé par Campbell.
Les cinéastes ne seraient-ils pas en train d’éviter l’utilisation de leur imagination créatrice, génératrice d’images, en dépendant de scripts très fermés qui contrôlent l’inattendu, pour empêcher des processus d’essais et d’erreurs? En programmant et en scénarisant chaque seconde de toutes les scènes de l’ensemble du film et en standardisant à l’extrême tout le processus de tournage, les réalisateurs – mais ce n’est pas le cas de Guerra – ne bloqueraient-ils pas le pouls de la création artistique? La contre-utopie n’a pas pour objectif d’ignorer la planification minimum nécessaire à la réalisation d’un film mais laisse observer que la possibilité de l’existence de lacunes et de doutes peut mener vers des chemins créateurs qui emplissent l’œuvre en délivrant la réalisation cinématographique. Les hiatus dans la texture d’un script ne sont pas, pour la contre-utopie, des défaillances structurelles, mais bien des crevasses dimensionnelles qui peuvent fournir des sauts quantiques au réalisateur dans son propre travail. L’inattendu, pour la contre-utopie, serait une façon pour celui-ci de ne plus faire circuler exclusivement la tension linéaire des trames filmiques traditionnelles, de sorte qu’il puisse être présent d’une façon créative dans les récurrences circulaires d’un éternel retour que le scénario mythique pourra assumer.
La contre-utopie permettrait ainsi la « libre » création du réalisateur à partir de la célébration de l’incertain et de la scénarisation de l’imprévu, ces outils revitalisant la forme et la direction du film. Naturellement, les conduites créatives proposées par la contre-utopie cinématographique se heurtent aux exigences de la technique et de la pratique, des demandes du marché et du schéma artistique exigé par celui-ci. Il revient aux cinéastes de choisir entre la rigueur imposée par les règles de la production de masse et la liberté offerte par l’anarchie de la création – qui peut dé-former (Bachelard) le langage et encourager un « cinéma de libération », comme Inácio Araújo définit le travail d’Orson Welles, de Jean-Luc Godard et, pourrions-nous ajouter, de Ruy Guerra.
Cette notion peut également être observée dans des documentaires, qui, aujourd’hui, assument un caractère fictionnel toujours plus grand (par exemple Un passeport hongrois, 2003, de Sandra Kogut) pour faire comprendre que toute représentation humaine est une « construction », un choix. Et, en étant choix, elle est, évidemment, aussi refus (anti-contre). Dans ce cas, le documentaire se développe, a priori, sans unité et sans définition. Il signale une rupture plus nette avec le mythe de la naturalité et de l’académisme documentaires. Aujourd’hui, la tendance est de penser dans une réalité plurielle. Godard, dans ses scènes, mélange le « réel » avec la fiction. Godard est une fiction de lui-même. Dans « JLG par JLG », il déclare: « La culture est la règle; l’art est l’exception ». Ces distinctions demeurent encore dans la culture. Cependant, la postmodernité a conduit à une liquéfaction progressive de la référence exprimée par Godard. Ceci parce que Godard regrette la défaite de la pensée. Autrement dit, la référence serait dans cette analogie que nous faisons avec la culture, l’exception, tandis que la postmodernité, selon le point de vue présenté, promouvrait la culture volatile et facile au niveau de la spectacularisation. La Science, qui contrarie le mythe, cherche une cause linéaire aux choses.
Mais le mythe, au contraire, qui transcende toute forme de rationalité continue, se déplace dans toutes les directions: passé, présent et futur. Et un film, qui n’est rien de plus qu’une dé-formation par la sensibilité, se déroule comme un événement mythique. Il est un éternel instant. Il est l’éternité de l’instant. Cet instant et cette éternité sont le fondement, selon la vision nietzschéenne de l’éternel retour du même, de la circularité. Pas le temps fait d’une succession d’étapes ultérieures, mais bien la centralité de toutes parts. La mémoire même dans le présent mythique, cyclique, qui ne se divise pas en catégories et qui est prisonnière de l’entropie. Le non-début entropique est alors le fondement quantique de la contre-utopie. Quantique parce que, dans cette physique, il y a un principe d’indétermination des pôles. La contre-utopie est donc encore un exercice de philosophie polaire. Quand on parle d’entropie, nous devons considérer ce qui suit. L’entropie est un système, mais, comme tout système, même s’il paraît fermé, il est néanmoins proche, conceptuellement parlant, d’un changement, parce que nous ne réussissons pas à établir le début d’un système entropique.
Par conséquent, ce qui importe dans la contre-utopie entropique n’est pas le fait selon lequel, conceptuellement, elle nous emmène au « triadique », avec un début, un développement et une dégradation, mais bien qu’elle représente un processus indéterminé des pôles qui finissent par s’attirer et se repousser constamment. L’entropie se trouve dans cette constante variation entre ce que nous appellerions début – qui existe seulement conceptuellement – développement – qui n’existe lui non plus que conceptuellement – et fin (irréaliste). En somme, le concept d’entropie nous aide à réfléchir sur la contre-utopie. En termes de Théorie de l’Information, selon Teixeira Coelho, l’entropie est « la mesure du désordre introduit dans une structure d’information ». Cela signifie que l’entropie est similaire à l’état de l’art des films de réalisateurs comme Ruy Guerra, Bergman et Godard, entre autres, mais pas de beaucoup d’autres, en raison de leur haut degré d’originalité par rapport aux films redondants du point de vue de l’information. Teixeira Coelho (1973) précise que le mot entropie en physique est la fonction d’un état thermodynamique des systèmes utilisés pour déterminer « l’inexploitabilité » de l’énergie de ce même système.
La question de la polarité qui, au fond, se reflète ici en termes d’utopie et de contre-utopie, se réfère aussi, dans notre cas, à la philosophie présocratique décrite par Nietzsche. Parménide, dit Nietzsche, réfléchissait, dans le sillage d’Anaximandre de Milet, à l’existant et à l’inexistant. Lui, Parménide, s’interrogeait: l’inexistant existe-t-il? Parménide se basait sur la validité universelle des concepts (c’est comme si nous pensions à la validité universelle de l’utopie, ou plutôt au concept d’utopie). Ainsi, Parménide se distanciait intentionnellement du monde intuitif. Autrement dit, il s’éloignait, dans notre cas, de la contre-utopie qui est une pratique plus intuitive que conceptuelle. Nous dirions donc que la contre-utopie représente une idée parménidienne de la subjectivation de l’alogique. En ce sens, nous supposons, ici, que la contre-utopie est l’un des pôles d’un devenir de la guerre des opposés (scénario/anti-scénario, film/anti-film, utopie/contre-utopie), comme Héraclite – un autre philosophe grec – le pensait en allant à l’encontre de Parménide. Oui, mais si l’anti-utopie est déjà en nous, comment pourrait-elle être en devenir? C’est parce qu’il y est déjà au sens d’antériorité à la formulation de lui-même.
Nous connaissons seulement quelque chose parce que nous formulons un concept qui préexiste dans notre esprit, selon Merleau-Ponty (1999). Par conséquent, nous pouvons considérer la contre-utopie comme étant un antiréalisme parce qu’il est impossible de séparer la réalité de nos opinions. Autrement dit, si nous avons une opinion sur quelque chose, comme au sujet de la contre-utopie, c’est déjà une réalité pour nous, mais cela peut ne pas l’être pour les autres. Il faut assumer d’avoir un discours « idéologique » par rapport à la contre-utopie parce qu’il s’agit d’une construction abstraite et un choix de réflexion individuel. Il n’existe aucune prétention, ici, d’encadrer la contre-utopie dans telle ou telle école de cinéma (si, le cas échéant, cette école ait jamais existé). Pour continuer sur ce sujet, nous devons nous diriger vers l’imagination symbolique. Une définition en premier lieu: « Elle est la transfiguration d’une représentation concrète à travers un sens toujours abstrait », dit Durand. En considérant la contre-utopie comme étant l’opposé du signe, car elle n’est pas une représentation concrète, mais une transfiguration de l’utopie et de la représentation, il est possible de transiter sur le terrain mouvant qu’est l’imaginaire.
Nous savons qu’on utilise le terme d’imaginaire de diverses manières, comme nous éclaire Durand: « Image, signe, allégorie, symbole, emblème, mythe parabole, figure, icône et idole sont utilisés indifféremment par la plupart des auteurs ». Pour ne pas tomber dans ce flou, nous avons choisi ce terme au sens d’une qualité à peine présentable concrètement ainsi que le cas de la contre-utopie au cinéma nous semble être. Alors, si l’imagination est alogique et ne fait pas référence à une représentation, à une, comme ci-dessus, « qualité guère présentable concrètement » comment pouvons-nous la considérer théoriquement? Il n’y a qu’une seule issue: la considérer comme une expression de la subjectivité. Dans ce cas, le choix de la Guerra se justifierait donc plus par la raison sensible que par un supposé concept de l’utopie dans son cinéma. La contre-utopie se présente plus, par ailleurs, comme une notion que comme un concept – celui-ci étant plus fermé et rigide. Dans l’art tragique de Nietzsche, traduit par le dionysiaque, le Je se désintègre. Pour l’instant, rappelons-nous que l’idée du dionysiaque (ou « instinct esthétique ») chez Nietzsche sous-tend la thèse selon laquelle l’expérience artistique est plus importante que la rationalité scientifique apollinienne (« esthétique rationaliste »). Ces deux instincts esthétiques coexistent. L’un s’ajoute à l’autre. Pour lui, la genèse du mythe tragique partage avec la sphère artistique apollinienne la joie à parts entières de l’apparence et de la contemplation. Mais, dans un même temps, elle nie cette joie et va trouver une satisfaction plus élevée en s’annihilant du monde perceptible de l’apparence (Nietzsche).
Nous voulons ainsi montrer qu’à cause du lien ombilical entre le réalisateur, la forme et le contenu de son film, un thème commun à eux tous peut revêtir différentes approches. Nous avons choisi la contre-utopie parce qu’elle est, ainsi que la mort dont elle ne se sépare pas selon l’imaginaire occidental, une vision récurrente dans les films d’auteur de réalisateurs comme Guerra. Cependant, cette violence prend un contour symbolique. Elle fonctionne comme une sorte de catharsis afin d’éloigner la pensée de finitude que la mort véhicule. La distance à laquelle nous voulons nous maintenir de la mort n’est cependant jamais suffisante pour l’oublier. Pourtant, la vie et la mort sont inséparables dans notre existence, chose que la pensée rationaliste du progrès a toujours voulu nier. Aujourd’hui, on travaille avec l’hypothèse selon laquelle nous incorporons dans le quotidien une sensibilité tragique (Maffesoli). Si nous acceptons cette observation et pensons que les auteurs cinématographiques comme Guerra réélaborent la quotidienneté dans leurs films, car c’est bien dans cette espèce de chaudron qu’ils vivent, nous verrons alors que vivre, pour eux, se relie intensément au quotidien et que leurs films sont imprégnés par cette atmosphère. L’art est plutôt séducteur, une caractéristique qui ne rentre pas dans la lecture hygiéniste de la modernité.
Son dernier film – jusqu’au mois de janvier 2009 – se base sur le roman La mala hora écrit en 1962 par Gabriel García Márquez et traduit au Brésil par O veneno da madrugada. En français: Le poison de l’aube. C’est l’histoire d’un hameau dont les familles sont perturbées par des ragots (d)écrits sur des morceaux de papier. Le nom de cette pratique est marforio, comme l’explique Gabriel García Márquez[5] dans son roman: « […] une injure anonyme clouée sur la porte d’une maison ». Par exemple: « Il y a deux jours, ils ont mis mon nom dans ces messages mensongers. Les bobards habituels. L’histoire des ânes. Chaque âne que je vendais était retrouvé mort deux jours après, sans aucun signe de violence ». L’ex-propriétaire des animaux, qui raconte l’histoire au médecin du village, aurait été présent, de nuit, aux différents endroits, pour tirer dans l’anus des ânes. Le film commence avec une voix-off dans un écran noir qui, peu à peu, cède sa place à une pluie présente durant toute l’œuvre. L’ambiance est inhospitalière. Quelques rares personnes circulent dans le bourg. Tous les autres habitants semblent exister hors du cadre, selon la thèse cinématographique de Ruy Guerra. Ce sont des personnages retranchés qui finissent par ne penser, à cause des billets anonymes, qu’à leurs malheurs et craignent de nouvelles accusations. Il n’existe aucun climat favorable à l’optimisme. Tous, comme le dit un des personnages, « sont fatigués de tout », principalement parce qu’ils sont esclaves de l’alcaide, une sorte de maire et de commissaire de police. La narration n’a rien de linéaire, car, comme dit la cartomancienne du cirque, « la flèche du temps vole dans plus d’un sens ». Cette idée est transposée dans le film. L’ambiance, en plus d’être claustrophobe et intense, prend rapidement un ton absurde. Tous voient des fantômes.
Il y a également, dans l’imaginaire de Ruy Guerra, un espace pour la manifestation poétique de la contre-utopie. Dans Estorvo (Embrouille, 2000), par exemple, Guerra fait une adaptation du livre homonyme de Chico Buarque en cherchant à imprimer une marque personnelle dans l’histoire. Guerra fait ressortir l’existence marginale du protagoniste qui n’a pas de nom. Il est simplement le “Je”. Estorvo commence par une interrogation: ouvrir ou non la porte quand la sonnette de son appartement retentit. Le judas optique lui restitue un œil distordu et menaçant. Commence alors la crainte de la persécution, et c’est ceci, dans Estorvo (Embrouille), que le film montre. Le “Je” n’a pas de maison, il déambule sans direction et se réfugie dans sa propre imagination. L’image de Guerra est plus que la visualité. Elle est également le non-dit. On finit avec la question de Wunenburger[6]: « Comment enfin articuler la régularité des imaginaires individuels et culturels-collectifs, c’est à dire, pour adopter la nomenclature disciplinaire, la psychologie avec la sociologie des imaginaires ? ».
(Avec la collaboration d’Olivier Chatriant pour la traduction)
Bibliographie
Bachelard, Gaston. (1988) A poética do devaneio. Martins Fontes, São Paulo.
Bachelard, Gaston. (1993) A poética do espaço. Martins Fontes, São Paulo.
Barros, Eduardo Portanova. Truffaut, o homem que amava o cinema. Canoas: Ed. da Ulbra, 2013.
Barros, Eduardo Portanova. Autoria cinematográfica: a impressão digital de François Truffaut. São Paulo (SP). Dissertação de Mestrado. Universidade de São Paulo (USP), 2003.
Barros, Eduardo Portanova. O cinema de Ruy Guerra: um imaginário autoral na pós-modernidade. Porto Alegre (RS). Tese de Doutorado. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), 2009.
Bergman, I. Imagens. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1996.
Coelho, T. Introdução à teoria da informação estética. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1973.
Durand, Gilbert. (1997) As estruturas antropológicas do imaginário. Martins Fontes, São Paulo.
Durand, Gilbert. A imaginação simbólica. Lisboa, Edições 70, 2000.
Durand, Gilbert. (1998) O imaginário – ensaio acerca das ciências e da filosofia da imagem. Difel: Rio de Janeiro.
Eco, Umberto. Obra aberta. Forma e indeterminação nas poéticas contemporâneas. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1976.
Godard, Jean-Luc. Introdução a uma verdadeira história do cinema. Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 1989.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Resposta a Jó. Petrópolis (RJ), Vozes, 1979.
Maffesoli, Michel. (1998) Elogio da razão sensível. Vozes, Petrópolis (RJ).
Maffesoli, Michel. (2004) Notas sobre a pós-modernidade: o lugar faz o elo. Atlântica, Rio de Janeiro.
Merleau-Ponty, M. Fenomenologia da percepção. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1999.
Merleau-Ponty, M. O visível e o invisível. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 2014.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Humano, demasiado humano. Um livro para espíritos livros. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2005.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. A filosofia na era trágica dos gregos. São Paulo, Hedra, 2008.
Vogler, C. A jornada do escritor: estruturas míticas para contadores de histórias e roteiristas. Rio de Janeiro, Ampersand, 1997.
Wunenburger, J.J. L’imagination mode d’emploi ? Une science de l’imaginaire au service de la créativité. Paris, Manucius, 2011.
NOTES
[2] Michel Maffesoli, Notas sobre a pós-modernidade: o lugar faz o elo, Atlântica, Rio de Janeiro, 2004, p. 10.
Eduardo Portanova Barros
Unisinos-RS, Brésil
PNPD/CAPES
eduardoportanova@hotmail.com
Ruy Guerra et Dionysos
ou la contre-utopie de l’imaginaire de l’auteur au cinéma: les racines de l’éthéré
Ruy Guerra and Dionysos
or the Counter-Utopia of the Imaginary in the Authorial Film: Ethereal Roots
Abstract: Post-modernity could be an alternative sensibility to the values sustained by the logic of rationalistic type. That means to say that, at the present time, it is already possible, with more clarity, to observe aspects such as the emotions, the feelings and the intuitions of an artist- in the case Ruy Guerra and of his imaginary. This is the aim of this article: to investigate Ruy Guerra’s path from the point of view of the imaginary, as theorized by Gaston Bachelard and Gilbert Durand. We focused on a film director who was a very active presence in the Cinema Novo (Brazil) of the 1960, a phase marked by political ideology, but also in the context of hedonist post-modernity. What interests us is to show the balance between subjective and objective coercions in Ruy Guerra (Gilbert Durand). We are not looking for a rigid answer, but for a constellation of factors in post-modern (counter) utopia.
Keywords: Ruy Guerra; Cinema; Imaginary; Post-modernity; Utopia.
Depuis les années 1960 et 1970, lorsque le Brésil était une dictature, le cinéaste mozambicain Ruy Guerra (né en 1931) qui vit à Rio de Janeiro depuis la fin des années 1950, produit (ou, comme il préfère, « fait ») du cinéma. Pourquoi ? Difficile à dire. Néanmoins, il est possible de tenter des approximations (et non des réponses) méthodologiques en affirmant, tout d’abord, que nous sommes, il faut bien l’admettre, dans une toute autre époque que celle du communisme (ou de sa fin) : dans la contre-utopie de la post-modernité. Qu’est-ce que c’est, alors, la contre-utopie post-moderne ? Si le terme post-moderne est une abstraction ou une métaphore de la réalité humaine, parce que le présent est plus vécu que rationalisé, cela signifie qu’une chose quelconque ne représente pas la Vérité. Et c’est bien ça la contre-utopie. Penser à une chose quelconque et savoir en même temps que cette chose à laquelle on pense n’est jamais là. Penser à Dionysos, par exemple, qui, avec les Bacchantes, dilacérèrent tout ce qui, au nom de la rationalité, récuse une effervescence fécondatrice. Penser à Guerra, un cinéaste qui, en utilisant une pensée bachelardienne, laisse à l’imagination le temps de travailler la matière cinématographique. Penser le contraire. Penser l’inverse ou l’éthéré.
C’est bien cela l’objectif de ce travail: observer les idées obsédantes, du point de vue de l’imaginaire contre-utopique localisé, parmi d’autres auteurs, dans la lignée de Gaston Bachelard (« imagination matérielle ») et Gilbert Durand (« cercle anthropologique »), d’un directeur cinématographique qui a travaillé aussi bien dans le Cinéma Nouveau (Cinema Novo) brésilien des années 1960 – une phase marquée par l’idéologie politique – que dans le contexte de la post-modernité hédoniste. Selon Maffesoli[1], c’est une sensibilité alternative aux valeurs soutenues par la logique d’empreinte rationaliste. Cela signifie que, à présent, il est déjà possible, avec plus de clarté, d’observer des aspects comme les émotions, les sensations et les intuitions d’un artiste – dans le cas Ruy Guerra – et de son imaginaire (rêves, contre-utopies, mythes et désirs). L’intérêt, dans ce cas, est de montrer l’équilibre, chez Ruy Guerra, entre la subjectivité et les contraintes d’ordre objectif (Gilbert Durand). Nous ne voulons pas chercher une réponse rigide, mais une constellation de facteurs. Constellation propre aussi bien à l’état de matérialité-règle qu’à la nature éthérée d’un vol cinématographique (la subjectivité).
Pour Bachelard, l’imaginaire n’appartient pas au royaume des nombres et des mesures. Par conséquent, selon Maffesoli[2], chaque objet ou phénomène est lié avec les autres : pour cette raison, il est soumis au changement et au hasard. Ce qui nous intéresse, alors, est la révision de la notion d’auteur cinématographique dans la post-modernité dans le sens d’une contre-utopie (ou anti-utopie) et du « trajet anthropologique », selon Gilbert Durand[3], d’un cinéaste, Ruy Guerra, qui travaille, aujourd’hui, d’une façon moins égocentrique (hypothèse) que dans les années d’avant-garde lorsque il représentait un rôle politique dans le Cinema Novo. Une analyse peut prendre en considération l’auteur comme un exemple abstrait, oui, mais aussi comme une personnalité qui s’exprime à travers la caméra. Il n’est pas question, ici, de découvrir ce qu’un directeur cinématographique comme Guerra pense derrière la caméra, mais bien d’admettre qu’un film, dans certaines circonstances, puisse être la représentation d’une individualité sensible et, seulement pour ça, il serait déjà justifié si nous considérons, comme dit Maffesoli[4], que le thème du sensible – on ajoute dyonisiaque et contre-utopique – pourrait être la marque de la post-modernité.
Si l’esthétique, matière première du cinéma, est la connaissance par le sensible, nous appellerons contre-utopie cinématographique chez Ruy Guerra le contradictoire de l’utopie de type réaliste. Mais notre intention n’est pas de traiter à fond – en soulignant ce qui est ou ce qui n’est pas contre-utopie chez Ruy Guerra – l’analyse d’une œuvre particulière. En effet, cette analyse ne se limite pas, puisque, selon Teixeira Coelho (1973), le fait esthétique permet des appréhensions variées aussi bien de l’individu même que de récepteurs multiples. Par conséquent, celle-ci est également ouverte, ce qui signifie, selon Eco: « […] que chaque spectateur apporte une situation existentielle concrète, une sensibilité personnelle conditionnée, une certaine culture, des goûts, des tendances, des préjugés personnels ». Si nous analysons un cinéaste pour rechercher chez lui une contre-utopie nous dénaturerions la notion avec laquelle nous travaillons dans cet article. Dans l’idée de contre-utopie l’impression sensible de l’interprétation compte plus que le rationalisme déconstructiviste, parce que, comme dit Merleau-Ponty, « […] la signification du perçu est seulement une constellation d’images qui commencent à réapparaître sans raison ». La créativité approximative ne peut pas créer, de manière forcée, une contre-utopie d’une œuvre cinématographique en essayant de la surpasser analytiquement.
Nous ne voulons même pas promouvoir une analyse descriptive et reconstructrice d’une œuvre, encore moins d’un seul film ou cinéaste pour justifier l’idée de contre-utopie, mais bien la considérer, dans la théorie du cinéma, comme une sorte de nihilisme. La contre-utopie cinématographique, qui est le sujet de cet article, découle donc de son contraire, l’utopie du réalisme. Pour l’interpréter comme « anti » ou « contre », au sens voulu, nous ne faisons aucune distinction entre ces deux termes, il faut comprendre la nécessité de ce qui est alogique. La logique disjonctive est représentée par le cinéma traditionnel (quelle que soit la tradition) et donc par l’esprit captif, parce qu’attaché à cette même tradition. La contre-utopie est déjà alogique et a également besoin d’un esprit, mais pas prisonnier de cette même tradition : libre. C’est un exercice de capacité, pas de savoir. Capacité de réaliser quelque chose d’une manière pertinente, pour paraphraser Nietzsche dans son aphorisme 256 sur la science. Et pas un savoir logique. La contre-utopie de Ruy Guerra est constituée, à l’instar de la foi, par une « adhésion que l’on sait au-delà des preuves, non nécessaire, tissée d’incrédulité et menacée à chaque instant par la non-foi », comme dit Merleau-Ponty. Elle est le visible et l’invisible.
Nous pouvons aussi considérer la contre-utopie, de façon analogue à la physique, comme une mesure de « l’inexploitabilité » (comme une quantité de chaleur non utilisable complètement pour sa transformation en travail). L’opposé de l’entropie, qui représente l’originalité, est, dans la Théorie de l’Information, la redondance (répétition). La répétition est une ressource (elle ne cesse pas d’être, pour le meilleur ou pour le pire) de l’intelligibilité du contenu, y compris filmique. Nous avons vu, par conséquent, que l’entropie est le désordre et que la redondance est la prévisibilité. En effet, pas toute la chaleur prévue n’est exploitée dans l’entropie. Quand se déroule une consommation d’énergie qui, en chemin, empêche toute cette possibilité d’exploitation, on considère cela comme étant un phénomène entropique. Cette indétermination (on ne sait pas combien le système sera plus ou moins affecté par la consommation) est ce qui caractérise l’entropie et ce qui justifie également sa relation avec la contre-utopie. Le cinéaste Ruy Guerra la pratique ainsi. Et Bergman également : la scène finale « […] où la Mort s’éloigne en dansant avec les marcheurs », dans le film Le septième sceau a été improvisée en quelques minutes, avec la figuration de techniciens et de touristes.
En d’autres termes, la contre-utopie est un archétype numineux, parce qu’il s’agit, selon Jung, « […] d’un fondement émotionnel qui semble inaccessible à la raison critique ». Il n’y a pas une seule histoire, mais bien des points de vue mythiques. Et de quels points de vue parlons-nous ? Certainement de beaucoup, la polyphonie discursive étant une ressource qui s’actualise avec force à chaque nouveau cycle de l’éternel retour mythique qui marque la contre-utopie dans l’œuvre de Ruy Guerra. Ainsi, la contre-utopie tend plus à l’implosion des directions de narration qui structurent les scénarios traditionnels et moins à l’explosion de pratiques redondantes. Godard suggère que sa posture créative est parfois stimulée par des circonstances qui peuvent définir des stratégies et des solutions uniques. À propos de À bout de souffle (1960), le cinéaste dit qu’il aurait aimé tourner en studio, mais ce ne fut pas possible en raison de divers problèmes. Dans ses limites pratiques et techniques, tout en reconnaissant qu’à l’époque il ne savait rien techniquement, le réalisateur est resté en dehors du formalisme qui subsiste dans l’art cinématographique, arrivant à sacrifier quelques images premières au nom de la nécessité que le moment de faire du cinéma a imposée.
Conscient de sa capacité à effectuer des contre-utopies, Godard montre que renoncer à un idéal filmique peut améliorer le sentiment de liberté dans le tournage – la liberté de réaliser le rêve possible, au moins. Ainsi, l’improvisation devient l’un des nombreux outils de création valorisés par le cinéaste anti- ou contre-utopique. Dans cette longue période s’étendant au moins de la période d’or de Hollywood à nos jours, où les scripts traditionnels ont assumé un rôle central dans le processus de réalisation, le script (ou scénario) est passé par un processus intense de structuration, se plaçant comme un outil essentiel et potentiellement inflexible pour la production de films. Des scénaristes comme l’américain Syd Field, créateur de Paradigme qui définit les 120 pages d’un script supposé idéal et dans lequel figurent les trois actes de base d’un long métrage (La Présentation, la Confrontation et la Résolution), sont devenus les gourous de l’industrie du divertissement. Le paradigme, ainsi qu’un guide Vogler, est à l’opposé de la contre-utopie. Vogler s’est basé sur le livre Le Héros aux mille et un visages, du mythologue américain Joseph Campbell, qui a inventé le terme Voyage du Héros pour caractériser les stades archétypaux chez l’homme et les a reliés à la narration du film.
Cela a abouti à l’utopie d’un Guide Pratique du Scénario caractérisant les étapes suivantes: monde ordinaire; appel à l’aventure; refus de l’appel; rencontre avec le mentor; franchissement du premier seuil; test; allié; ennemis; approche de la grotte cachée; épreuve suprême; récompense; chemin du retour; résurrection, et enfin retour avec de l’élixir. « J’ai travaillé avec l’idée de Campbell du Voyage du Héros pour comprendre l’incroyable phénomène qui a eu lieu avec des films comme Star Wars et Rencontre du Troisième Type […] ils reflètent les schémas que Campbell a vus dans les mythes », a déclaré Vogler. Contrairement à ce modèle, le Septième Sceau, comme on l’a déjà dit, contenait une grande improvisation, comme dans la scène mentionnée auparavant, filmée à cause de quelques nuages soudainement apparus qui formaient, pour Bergman, un visuel parfait pour l’image qu’il avait à l’esprit. D’ailleurs, selon Bergman, ce film n’a pas pris plus de 35 jours pour être terminé. Il faut rappeler que des accidents de parcours arrivent même dans ce trajet supposé régulier du Héros structuré par Campbell et répandu dans le cinéma. Et c’est probablement sur ce point que deviennent claires les divergences sur les perceptions du Héros entre le penseur nord-américain et la théorie du mythe de Durand. Pour Durand, le héros n’est ni un personnage unidimensionnel qui répond à une narration préalablement structurée, ni l’expression principale d’un monomythe, mais bien une image symbolique dont la multipolarité sémantique fait référence à l’archétype du héros, ce contenu psychique présent dans l’inconscient collectif qui est la racine d’images et de symbolismes universels et complémentaires. La contre-utopie serait probablement plus proche de la vision durandienne de la pluralité des sens propre à la récurrence mythique que du cadre organisationnel proposé par Campbell.
Les cinéastes ne seraient-ils pas en train d’éviter l’utilisation de leur imagination créatrice, génératrice d’images, en dépendant de scripts très fermés qui contrôlent l’inattendu, pour empêcher des processus d’essais et d’erreurs? En programmant et en scénarisant chaque seconde de toutes les scènes de l’ensemble du film et en standardisant à l’extrême tout le processus de tournage, les réalisateurs – mais ce n’est pas le cas de Guerra – ne bloqueraient-ils pas le pouls de la création artistique? La contre-utopie n’a pas pour objectif d’ignorer la planification minimum nécessaire à la réalisation d’un film mais laisse observer que la possibilité de l’existence de lacunes et de doutes peut mener vers des chemins créateurs qui emplissent l’œuvre en délivrant la réalisation cinématographique. Les hiatus dans la texture d’un script ne sont pas, pour la contre-utopie, des défaillances structurelles, mais bien des crevasses dimensionnelles qui peuvent fournir des sauts quantiques au réalisateur dans son propre travail. L’inattendu, pour la contre-utopie, serait une façon pour celui-ci de ne plus faire circuler exclusivement la tension linéaire des trames filmiques traditionnelles, de sorte qu’il puisse être présent d’une façon créative dans les récurrences circulaires d’un éternel retour que le scénario mythique pourra assumer.
La contre-utopie permettrait ainsi la « libre » création du réalisateur à partir de la célébration de l’incertain et de la scénarisation de l’imprévu, ces outils revitalisant la forme et la direction du film. Naturellement, les conduites créatives proposées par la contre-utopie cinématographique se heurtent aux exigences de la technique et de la pratique, des demandes du marché et du schéma artistique exigé par celui-ci. Il revient aux cinéastes de choisir entre la rigueur imposée par les règles de la production de masse et la liberté offerte par l’anarchie de la création – qui peut dé-former (Bachelard) le langage et encourager un « cinéma de libération », comme Inácio Araújo définit le travail d’Orson Welles, de Jean-Luc Godard et, pourrions-nous ajouter, de Ruy Guerra.
Cette notion peut également être observée dans des documentaires, qui, aujourd’hui, assument un caractère fictionnel toujours plus grand (par exemple Un passeport hongrois, 2003, de Sandra Kogut) pour faire comprendre que toute représentation humaine est une « construction », un choix. Et, en étant choix, elle est, évidemment, aussi refus (anti-contre). Dans ce cas, le documentaire se développe, a priori, sans unité et sans définition. Il signale une rupture plus nette avec le mythe de la naturalité et de l’académisme documentaires. Aujourd’hui, la tendance est de penser dans une réalité plurielle. Godard, dans ses scènes, mélange le « réel » avec la fiction. Godard est une fiction de lui-même. Dans « JLG par JLG », il déclare: « La culture est la règle; l’art est l’exception ». Ces distinctions demeurent encore dans la culture. Cependant, la postmodernité a conduit à une liquéfaction progressive de la référence exprimée par Godard. Ceci parce que Godard regrette la défaite de la pensée. Autrement dit, la référence serait dans cette analogie que nous faisons avec la culture, l’exception, tandis que la postmodernité, selon le point de vue présenté, promouvrait la culture volatile et facile au niveau de la spectacularisation. La Science, qui contrarie le mythe, cherche une cause linéaire aux choses.
Mais le mythe, au contraire, qui transcende toute forme de rationalité continue, se déplace dans toutes les directions: passé, présent et futur. Et un film, qui n’est rien de plus qu’une dé-formation par la sensibilité, se déroule comme un événement mythique. Il est un éternel instant. Il est l’éternité de l’instant. Cet instant et cette éternité sont le fondement, selon la vision nietzschéenne de l’éternel retour du même, de la circularité. Pas le temps fait d’une succession d’étapes ultérieures, mais bien la centralité de toutes parts. La mémoire même dans le présent mythique, cyclique, qui ne se divise pas en catégories et qui est prisonnière de l’entropie. Le non-début entropique est alors le fondement quantique de la contre-utopie. Quantique parce que, dans cette physique, il y a un principe d’indétermination des pôles. La contre-utopie est donc encore un exercice de philosophie polaire. Quand on parle d’entropie, nous devons considérer ce qui suit. L’entropie est un système, mais, comme tout système, même s’il paraît fermé, il est néanmoins proche, conceptuellement parlant, d’un changement, parce que nous ne réussissons pas à établir le début d’un système entropique.
Par conséquent, ce qui importe dans la contre-utopie entropique n’est pas le fait selon lequel, conceptuellement, elle nous emmène au « triadique », avec un début, un développement et une dégradation, mais bien qu’elle représente un processus indéterminé des pôles qui finissent par s’attirer et se repousser constamment. L’entropie se trouve dans cette constante variation entre ce que nous appellerions début – qui existe seulement conceptuellement – développement – qui n’existe lui non plus que conceptuellement – et fin (irréaliste). En somme, le concept d’entropie nous aide à réfléchir sur la contre-utopie. En termes de Théorie de l’Information, selon Teixeira Coelho, l’entropie est « la mesure du désordre introduit dans une structure d’information ». Cela signifie que l’entropie est similaire à l’état de l’art des films de réalisateurs comme Ruy Guerra, Bergman et Godard, entre autres, mais pas de beaucoup d’autres, en raison de leur haut degré d’originalité par rapport aux films redondants du point de vue de l’information. Teixeira Coelho (1973) précise que le mot entropie en physique est la fonction d’un état thermodynamique des systèmes utilisés pour déterminer « l’inexploitabilité » de l’énergie de ce même système.
La question de la polarité qui, au fond, se reflète ici en termes d’utopie et de contre-utopie, se réfère aussi, dans notre cas, à la philosophie présocratique décrite par Nietzsche. Parménide, dit Nietzsche, réfléchissait, dans le sillage d’Anaximandre de Milet, à l’existant et à l’inexistant. Lui, Parménide, s’interrogeait: l’inexistant existe-t-il? Parménide se basait sur la validité universelle des concepts (c’est comme si nous pensions à la validité universelle de l’utopie, ou plutôt au concept d’utopie). Ainsi, Parménide se distanciait intentionnellement du monde intuitif. Autrement dit, il s’éloignait, dans notre cas, de la contre-utopie qui est une pratique plus intuitive que conceptuelle. Nous dirions donc que la contre-utopie représente une idée parménidienne de la subjectivation de l’alogique. En ce sens, nous supposons, ici, que la contre-utopie est l’un des pôles d’un devenir de la guerre des opposés (scénario/anti-scénario, film/anti-film, utopie/contre-utopie), comme Héraclite – un autre philosophe grec – le pensait en allant à l’encontre de Parménide. Oui, mais si l’anti-utopie est déjà en nous, comment pourrait-elle être en devenir? C’est parce qu’il y est déjà au sens d’antériorité à la formulation de lui-même.
Nous connaissons seulement quelque chose parce que nous formulons un concept qui préexiste dans notre esprit, selon Merleau-Ponty (1999). Par conséquent, nous pouvons considérer la contre-utopie comme étant un antiréalisme parce qu’il est impossible de séparer la réalité de nos opinions. Autrement dit, si nous avons une opinion sur quelque chose, comme au sujet de la contre-utopie, c’est déjà une réalité pour nous, mais cela peut ne pas l’être pour les autres. Il faut assumer d’avoir un discours « idéologique » par rapport à la contre-utopie parce qu’il s’agit d’une construction abstraite et un choix de réflexion individuel. Il n’existe aucune prétention, ici, d’encadrer la contre-utopie dans telle ou telle école de cinéma (si, le cas échéant, cette école ait jamais existé). Pour continuer sur ce sujet, nous devons nous diriger vers l’imagination symbolique. Une définition en premier lieu: « Elle est la transfiguration d’une représentation concrète à travers un sens toujours abstrait », dit Durand. En considérant la contre-utopie comme étant l’opposé du signe, car elle n’est pas une représentation concrète, mais une transfiguration de l’utopie et de la représentation, il est possible de transiter sur le terrain mouvant qu’est l’imaginaire.
Nous savons qu’on utilise le terme d’imaginaire de diverses manières, comme nous éclaire Durand: « Image, signe, allégorie, symbole, emblème, mythe parabole, figure, icône et idole sont utilisés indifféremment par la plupart des auteurs ». Pour ne pas tomber dans ce flou, nous avons choisi ce terme au sens d’une qualité à peine présentable concrètement ainsi que le cas de la contre-utopie au cinéma nous semble être. Alors, si l’imagination est alogique et ne fait pas référence à une représentation, à une, comme ci-dessus, « qualité guère présentable concrètement » comment pouvons-nous la considérer théoriquement? Il n’y a qu’une seule issue: la considérer comme une expression de la subjectivité. Dans ce cas, le choix de la Guerra se justifierait donc plus par la raison sensible que par un supposé concept de l’utopie dans son cinéma. La contre-utopie se présente plus, par ailleurs, comme une notion que comme un concept – celui-ci étant plus fermé et rigide. Dans l’art tragique de Nietzsche, traduit par le dionysiaque, le Je se désintègre. Pour l’instant, rappelons-nous que l’idée du dionysiaque (ou « instinct esthétique ») chez Nietzsche sous-tend la thèse selon laquelle l’expérience artistique est plus importante que la rationalité scientifique apollinienne (« esthétique rationaliste »). Ces deux instincts esthétiques coexistent. L’un s’ajoute à l’autre. Pour lui, la genèse du mythe tragique partage avec la sphère artistique apollinienne la joie à parts entières de l’apparence et de la contemplation. Mais, dans un même temps, elle nie cette joie et va trouver une satisfaction plus élevée en s’annihilant du monde perceptible de l’apparence (Nietzsche).
Nous voulons ainsi montrer qu’à cause du lien ombilical entre le réalisateur, la forme et le contenu de son film, un thème commun à eux tous peut revêtir différentes approches. Nous avons choisi la contre-utopie parce qu’elle est, ainsi que la mort dont elle ne se sépare pas selon l’imaginaire occidental, une vision récurrente dans les films d’auteur de réalisateurs comme Guerra. Cependant, cette violence prend un contour symbolique. Elle fonctionne comme une sorte de catharsis afin d’éloigner la pensée de finitude que la mort véhicule. La distance à laquelle nous voulons nous maintenir de la mort n’est cependant jamais suffisante pour l’oublier. Pourtant, la vie et la mort sont inséparables dans notre existence, chose que la pensée rationaliste du progrès a toujours voulu nier. Aujourd’hui, on travaille avec l’hypothèse selon laquelle nous incorporons dans le quotidien une sensibilité tragique (Maffesoli). Si nous acceptons cette observation et pensons que les auteurs cinématographiques comme Guerra réélaborent la quotidienneté dans leurs films, car c’est bien dans cette espèce de chaudron qu’ils vivent, nous verrons alors que vivre, pour eux, se relie intensément au quotidien et que leurs films sont imprégnés par cette atmosphère. L’art est plutôt séducteur, une caractéristique qui ne rentre pas dans la lecture hygiéniste de la modernité.
Son dernier film – jusqu’au mois de janvier 2009 – se base sur le roman La mala hora écrit en 1962 par Gabriel García Márquez et traduit au Brésil par O veneno da madrugada. En français: Le poison de l’aube. C’est l’histoire d’un hameau dont les familles sont perturbées par des ragots (d)écrits sur des morceaux de papier. Le nom de cette pratique est marforio, comme l’explique Gabriel García Márquez[5] dans son roman: « […] une injure anonyme clouée sur la porte d’une maison ». Par exemple: « Il y a deux jours, ils ont mis mon nom dans ces messages mensongers. Les bobards habituels. L’histoire des ânes. Chaque âne que je vendais était retrouvé mort deux jours après, sans aucun signe de violence ». L’ex-propriétaire des animaux, qui raconte l’histoire au médecin du village, aurait été présent, de nuit, aux différents endroits, pour tirer dans l’anus des ânes. Le film commence avec une voix-off dans un écran noir qui, peu à peu, cède sa place à une pluie présente durant toute l’œuvre. L’ambiance est inhospitalière. Quelques rares personnes circulent dans le bourg. Tous les autres habitants semblent exister hors du cadre, selon la thèse cinématographique de Ruy Guerra. Ce sont des personnages retranchés qui finissent par ne penser, à cause des billets anonymes, qu’à leurs malheurs et craignent de nouvelles accusations. Il n’existe aucun climat favorable à l’optimisme. Tous, comme le dit un des personnages, « sont fatigués de tout », principalement parce qu’ils sont esclaves de l’alcaide, une sorte de maire et de commissaire de police. La narration n’a rien de linéaire, car, comme dit la cartomancienne du cirque, « la flèche du temps vole dans plus d’un sens ». Cette idée est transposée dans le film. L’ambiance, en plus d’être claustrophobe et intense, prend rapidement un ton absurde. Tous voient des fantômes.
Il y a également, dans l’imaginaire de Ruy Guerra, un espace pour la manifestation poétique de la contre-utopie. Dans Estorvo (Embrouille, 2000), par exemple, Guerra fait une adaptation du livre homonyme de Chico Buarque en cherchant à imprimer une marque personnelle dans l’histoire. Guerra fait ressortir l’existence marginale du protagoniste qui n’a pas de nom. Il est simplement le “Je”. Estorvo commence par une interrogation: ouvrir ou non la porte quand la sonnette de son appartement retentit. Le judas optique lui restitue un œil distordu et menaçant. Commence alors la crainte de la persécution, et c’est ceci, dans Estorvo (Embrouille), que le film montre. Le “Je” n’a pas de maison, il déambule sans direction et se réfugie dans sa propre imagination. L’image de Guerra est plus que la visualité. Elle est également le non-dit. On finit avec la question de Wunenburger[6]: « Comment enfin articuler la régularité des imaginaires individuels et culturels-collectifs, c’est à dire, pour adopter la nomenclature disciplinaire, la psychologie avec la sociologie des imaginaires ? ».
(Avec la collaboration d’Olivier Chatriant pour la traduction)
Bibliographie
Bachelard, Gaston. (1988) A poética do devaneio. Martins Fontes, São Paulo.
Bachelard, Gaston. (1993) A poética do espaço. Martins Fontes, São Paulo.
Barros, Eduardo Portanova. Truffaut, o homem que amava o cinema. Canoas: Ed. da Ulbra, 2013.
Barros, Eduardo Portanova. Autoria cinematográfica: a impressão digital de François Truffaut. São Paulo (SP). Dissertação de Mestrado. Universidade de São Paulo (USP), 2003.
Barros, Eduardo Portanova. O cinema de Ruy Guerra: um imaginário autoral na pós-modernidade. Porto Alegre (RS). Tese de Doutorado. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), 2009.
Bergman, I. Imagens. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1996.
Coelho, T. Introdução à teoria da informação estética. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1973.
Durand, Gilbert. (1997) As estruturas antropológicas do imaginário. Martins Fontes, São Paulo.
Durand, Gilbert. A imaginação simbólica. Lisboa, Edições 70, 2000.
Durand, Gilbert. (1998) O imaginário – ensaio acerca das ciências e da filosofia da imagem. Difel: Rio de Janeiro.
Eco, Umberto. Obra aberta. Forma e indeterminação nas poéticas contemporâneas. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1976.
Godard, Jean-Luc. Introdução a uma verdadeira história do cinema. Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 1989.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Resposta a Jó. Petrópolis (RJ), Vozes, 1979.
Maffesoli, Michel. (1998) Elogio da razão sensível. Vozes, Petrópolis (RJ).
Maffesoli, Michel. (2004) Notas sobre a pós-modernidade: o lugar faz o elo. Atlântica, Rio de Janeiro.
Merleau-Ponty, M. Fenomenologia da percepção. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1999.
Merleau-Ponty, M. O visível e o invisível. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 2014.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Humano, demasiado humano. Um livro para espíritos livros. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2005.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. A filosofia na era trágica dos gregos. São Paulo, Hedra, 2008.
Vogler, C. A jornada do escritor: estruturas míticas para contadores de histórias e roteiristas. Rio de Janeiro, Ampersand, 1997.
Wunenburger, J.J. L’imagination mode d’emploi ? Une science de l’imaginaire au service de la créativité. Paris, Manucius, 2011.
NOTES
[2] Michel Maffesoli, Notas sobre a pós-modernidade: o lugar faz o elo, Atlântica, Rio de Janeiro, 2004, p. 10.
Digging out the Heideggerian Linguistic Utopia from Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s HannibalDigging out the Heideggerian Linguistic Utopia from Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal
Francisc Ormeny
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ormenyfrancisc@yahoo.com
Digging out the Heideggerian Linguistic Utopia from Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal (Seasons 1 & 2)
(The Insinuation of the Vortex in the Human Act of Blinking)
Abstract: In this study we analyze the vortical insinuation and inscription of the transcendental fierceness (its rapacious avidity for a reincarnation-through-fiber-corruption in the flooded human “cloud”) in the human experience, through the supra-linguistic gesture of blinking. We apply Heidegger’s anti-humanist utopian vision on the primacy of language over the human subject (ego) to Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal series (Season 1 & 2 only). According to Heidegger and to his recent exegetes, modern man’s model of perfectibility should take into account a divorce from the vulgar individualistic concerns and replace them with a greater attentiveness to Being, through a language that can disclose the Being and further brings it into the open. This displacement is enacted by making use and abuse of the most emotionally intense (verbal and non-verbal) meta-erotic expressions. We analyze how Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) uses the act of blinking (always coupled with a large spectrum of facial tensions and chiasms), – one by means of which intersubjectivity is at once disbanded and affirmed, and one which allows man to use the energy of the nonpresence and nonevidence while retreating into his coziest and most demonically-fertile inner abysses and secretly recharging himself therein – to control his subjects, to destroy their Eros and to make them brutishly and desperately cling to reason.
Keywords: Linguistic Utopia; Linguistic Anti-humanism; Saying (Sage); Blinking; Fierce Transcendental Insinuation; Savagely-Poetic Expressions of Being.
Although the show seems to be a stand-alone (intransigently independent) reflexive line about the body and its culinary pollinations and polymorphizations, Hannibal, as far as the essence of the theological, epistemological and axiological privileges[1] from behind which it was conceived (and according to which it was assumed by its captious audience) goes, is a savage meditation about the preeminence of linguistic acts over any other type of human acts … genetic or generic.
This work of cinematic Schellingian shadowy theology[2] is constructed around the premise that neither divine imagination nor human phantasy can exist, as long as they are not translated into language and thus turned into an incarnated echo – i.e. into a life-tree that imitates the structure of a derivation tree (used by linguists working in generative grammar and considered by them a primary object of human study) bent over the grave of the former Cartesian human ego (fiendishly deepening his roots in the sustaining and bulging darkness of the human body and using its branches in order to bring upon ourselves storms that normally should not belong to us). It is here that Bryan Fuller’s utopian linguistic vision (“What do you see, doctor? Sum up the Ripper in so many words? Choose them wisely. / Oh, I always do. Words are living things. They have personality, point of view, agenda. They’re pack hunters”[3]) meets what was generally condemned as late Heidegger’s anti-humanism:
The Cartesian ego or consciousness is no longer conceived as the privileged subject of knowledge. (…) A more radical decentering of the subject occurs with Heidegger’s famous “turn” or “Kehre” and the associated attack on Sartre’s humanism. In Heidegger’s later writings his earlier, apparently existentialist account of individual existence – as “anxious” or “caring”, “authentic” or “fallen” – gives way to a more impersonal preoccupation with Being. Heidegger wishes to divert our ‘thinking’ from its individualistic concerns towards a greater “attentiveness to Being”. Only by transcending the limited perspective of the Cartesian subject, “who may deign to release the beingness of beings into an all too loudly bruited ‘objectivity’”, can “thinking” “realize the proper dignity of man” as “the shepherd of Being”. Accompanying this change of emphasis, there is in Heidegger’s later writings an overriding concern with language as “the House of Being” (…) Language discloses Being or “brings it into the open”: “language alone brings beings into the open for the first time. Where there is not language, as in the Being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of beings, and consequently no openness either of nonbeing and of the empty.”[4] (…) Heidegger is particularly hostile to Sartre’s Cartesian claim that “one must take the subjectivity as his point of departure”[5]. Heidegger’s anti-humanism leads instead to “thinking” as the “letting-be” of transcendent Being [author’s note: through language].[6]
In more direct words, when the characters from the series begin referring to their lives and to their deaths in terms of punctuation marks, as Jack Crawford’s dying wife Bella does when Hannibal tricks her and maliciously refuses to euthanize her (“Hannibal: The punctuation at the end of a sentence gives meaning to every word, every space that proceeded it. Bella: They moved my punctuation mark, Dr. Lecter. You moved my meaning. I’m not here because I want to be here. You saw to that.”[7] ), what they do is resurrect in the most eloquent manner the cleanest possible abruptness of the colors of the deific frenzied feeding, and provide a model for the reincorporation of the “God” into the human “cloud”[8] (host), via language – i.e. monstrously attribute a human system to the (infernal) divine self-understanding, in the exact manner in which John Fowles’s character Clegg from The Collector does to his rare and dangerous butterflies, using only the most ontologically “developed” (up to the limit of lunacy) words: “Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity, heart-in-mouth, as they say. A Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance. I always thought of her like that, I mean words like elusive and sporadic, and very refined – not like the other ones, even the pretty ones. More for the real connoisseur.”[9]
Clegg’s description of Miranda in terms of insects by means of the most exquisite possible choice of words, Heidegger’s stress on language to the detriment of the human subject, and Bryan Fuller’s decomposition and punctuation of the human matter in terms of derivation trees represent an anti-humanist utopia but not necessarily a dystopia – because the real aim behind all these three examples is not at all a deculturation or a critique of any kind of the human subject; on the contrary, all of them are attempts at making use through abuse of the phenomenal empty (available, unoccupied) spaces (Wolfgang Iser’s vision of some areas of human thinking and of human intuiting for which there are no specific or code-governed signifieds, so that the signifier can point to an empty position, and can also allow for a nonbeing to be posited as a signified), in order to project (and inject) in there a demented fleshy consistency for the otherwise unrealistic human speculations, longings, infinite wishes and cravings – all disconnected from ideologies and skillfully connected to the passionately-obsessive idea of evolution (change) into better / superior grasping forces:
The derivation of “utopia” is Greek words meaning “not-place”, and utopianism is generally identified with unrealistic speculation, providing the adjective “utopian” with its everyday pejorative meaning. (…) Utopian though is seen as springing from the unconscious, whose imaginative capacity confronts, challenges, surpasses, and overrides conscious reality by means of projected counter-pictures containing hopes, desires, and wishful thinking. This utopian faculty, however, is only critical if disconnected from existing ideologies, and based on an understanding of social totality and the means of realizing better conditions of existence. (…) utopianism is limited neither to a literary genre nor to specific conceptions of the good life. It rather plays a genuine role in relation to possible or intended change in existing social conditions.[10]
*
Yet, talking about linguistically-secured derivation trees and Heidegger’s linguistic anti-humanism in the same logic, and applying these conjoined thought-tapestries to the Hannibal series is an extremely dicey claim, and this happens precisely because Heidegger was against all sequences of “orthodox” grammar and phonetics, and equally obsessed with letting the in-between-the-lines speak for itself, through our (in) voices. Heidegger abjured all “affability and condescension”[11] in his relation with the category that we like to call today “Grammar Nazis” and, in his bond with the Being through language, adopted the position that, once again, we like to identify today as that of an emotionally-engaged “situated observer” or “positioned subject”[12] (always with an implied critique of the so-called “detached” phenomenological and linguistic observer, a raw scientist relying solely on his disengaged reason and impersonal observation):
More vigorously than ever, the later Heidegger fights against the entire phonocentric and logical-grammatical representation of language that has dominated from antiquity up until Husserl in order to summon us to the place where language itself speaks and where humans learn with humility that they are not the masters of language, but that it is rather they who are under the command of language (…) we learn that speaking is not just using words in a banal fashion to name things and beings; naming cannot be reduced to providing an already known object with a name, to affecting things with a label that fits them like a glove (…) Naming is not the arbitrary act of denomination that some believe it to be. Contrary to a tenacious image inherited from metaphysics, words are not barrels and buckets from which we draw the content of a pregiven meaning. To speak is to receive into oneself the saying [author’s note: our italics] of the words of our language. To name is “to call the thing to the world”, to summon it in its very absence into our presence, to invite it to do something in a world of things.[13]
In the Hannibal series, this artifice within the linguistic utopia promoted by Bryan Fuller (and having its roots, consciously or not, deeply implanted in a Heideggerian soil) appears when the discourse on language passes from the radically-visceral psychiatrist Hannibal to his milder and softer colleague – Doctor Alana Bloom:
Alana Bloom: Sharing will help normalize.
Abigail Hobbs: I’m not normal… not anymore.
Alana Bloom: What happened to you was a… Some of these women aren’t even sharing. They speak in “little girl voices”, telling everyone what was done to them without saying a word about it. Certain traumas can arrest vocal development. And victims can sometimes broadcast victimhood involuntarily.[14]
In the lines above we have an example of what Michel Foucault called the “strong power,” which is the power to attract (and to seduce), and which stands opposed to Hannibal’s “weak power” (at least at this level of expression), a power irremediably bound to all the types of coercive influences and supremacies, a power which governs our lives in the shape of a scale, starting from the most elusive informative methods and ending up in full-fledged actual physical force.
What Dr. Bloom implies by “speaking about something ‘in little girl voices’ and without actually saying a word about that something” resembles Heidegger’s vision of man being “trapped” in the inseparable and indissoluble interminglings and interlinkings of language by the grace of the fabulous magnetism of the language’s saying (Sage) – an almost transcendental manifestation of the springs of creation as they enter, each time as if (als ob) for the very first time, into the complexly-enfleshed human poetry, made of intuition, gestures, unique facial expressions and depths of eye-effulgences and splendors:
Words are like gestures that engender a world by making things come to the world and the world come to things. This is the “poietic” power of speaking attested to by the poet, who, better than anyone, knows that we do not cease to speak after our language, which always walks in front of us in each of our steps. Language is like the “house of being” that humankind inhabits, the unique dimension in which we can establish residence, and where the paths of thinking always already pre-traced in our bosom are discovered, Provided we listen to our language, we become aware that we are always already caught up in its saying (Sage), in the inextricable interweavings of the relations that it spins and to which we belong due to our own speaking. With the omnipresence and omnipotence of language that is expressed in the unusual tautological formula “Die Sprache spricht” (language speaks), humans do not speak except by providing a reply to it and by entering into correspondence with its saying [author’s note: our italics]. If speech relieves humans of all initiative, what they say, each of their words, is carried by the speaking of their language. Language is like the “Geläut der Stille” (the sounding of stillness) that nevertheless does require the speaking of mortals in order to be understood, provided that they are disposed to the quiet hearing of this eloquent silence.[15]
*
I
n trying to treat Abigail Hobbs’s posttraumatic stress disorder, Doctor Alana Bloom perfectly intuits Heidegger’s thesis on die Sage, but she fails to implement it. On the other hand, if Hannibal misses his therapy at the level of the discourse per se (where he behaves like an orthodox priest of doom or like an inquisitor the boiling “high definition” plasma), he perfectly applies it at the level of gestures, of a supreme use of silence, and of the act of blinking – displays which Heidegger interprets as being of paramount importance in the “capturing” of the Being inside a human vocalized value; as being capable of inducing a decisive positioning of the subject in his relationship with a Beyond, actively involved and trans-organically immersed in His human design:
(…) the wink, ostensibly a bonding gesture, also manifests a moment of dysfunction: I wink at the other in my very incapacity to reach that other in a more articulate way. As in the case of the blink, intersubjectivity is at once disbanded and affirmed: for in winking at or to another I also collaborate with that other in some significant way. I assert the link that my lack of express verbal representations has otherwise placed in question.[16][17]
To speak in real terms, what Caroline Dhavernas (Alana) beautifully formulates but fails to bring into the act, Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) elevates to the highest possible allure and appeal – the virtuoso of the Danish actor transforming the very mystery of language into a an all-pervading differential and into the ultimate trigger for the aborted consciousness. This is also where he shifts his discursive weak power into a strongly-seductive (as if shifting into the highest possible gear) gestural influence and art of rooting a person to the ground (as it combines in a fatal / deadly way the power of the most intense non-spoken with the avidity of a Being that greedily awaits its incarnation into the human host), a power capable to arrest the human subject in an truly anti-humanistic manner, while taking away all his speaking vigor. (This is also how Hannibal manages to para- and supra-linguistically get into the mind of Will Graham and seize both his will and his power of self-understanding and of crime-reconstruction[18] [his clarity], creating an inescapable blind-spot on the mind of his patient: “Dr. Lecter: Lost in thought? Will: Not lost. Not anymore. I used to hear my thoughts inside my skull with the same, (…) tone, timbre, accent, as if the words were coming out of my mouth. Dr. Lecter: And now? Will: Now my inner voice sounds like you. I can’t get you out of my head.”[19])
In his will to penetrate the mystery of language, Heidegger discovers another name that is more appropriate because it gathers together in a single word logos and Being, the Saying and the Said, and that which induces us to speak. He calls it “die Sage” (Saying), from an ancient word that has the same origin as deixis, the source of signs that are not made from the gestures of humans, but rather from the “gesture of word”. This is a remarkable hypostasis of language that seems to take away every power of the speaking subject in order to give this power to the Saying and the Said of language. For the thinker, all original language is “the coming of Being into the Said” that it assumes as its destiny, and it is foundational for the history of the community of humans. At this point we are (…) carried away into the mysterious land in which lies the being of language as Sage (legend) and out of which all that “there is” in world originates.[20]
And Bryan Fuller knows how to make the best of Mads Mikkelsen’s capacity to embody and synthesize in real time and in real facial laws the clash of phenomenal powers as well as the serene acceptance of the developing disaster, by using feverish and intimately-porous close-up shots combined with long takes and long shots, where “long takes give the impression of real time; long shots allow us to see complete figures in the context of their milieu; the moving-camera knits time and space together in a contiguous whole so that events can appear to be actual.”[21]
Every time Mads Mikkelsen blinks, he uses this clever ruse in order to retreat into the most sacred depths of his inner voids (or, as he says, of his “vast mental palace”), and to recharge himself with the gestating powers of the vortexes that await ravenously and devastatingly therein, puddling threateningly at the edge of his being, in the reverberatory furnace of pre-language. That is why Mason Verger (portrayed by Michael Carmen Pitt) ends up being disfigured and dementedly dehumanized by Hannibal – as he cannot understand the supra-linguistic and utterly-disarming use of the power of the non-presence, in the act of blinking (“Don’t get me wrong. I play chicken with Margot all the time. I just don’t tell her I’m playing. I’m good at chicken, Dr. Lecter. I never blink.”[22]):
“Nonpresence and nonevidence are admitted into the blink of the instant. There is a duration to the blink, and it closes the eye. This alterity is in fact the condition for presence, presentation, and thus for Vorstellung in general.”[23] The blink of the eye, the obverse of the glance, undermines the open-eyed attestation of the kind of sheer presence that is available in essential insight, whether this is said to occur in Platonic or Aristotelian noesis, Cartesian intellectual intuition, or Husserlian Wesensanchauung. But something not taken into account by Derrida is that if the same blink detonates the now as point in time (i.e., as “source-point” in Husserl’s term), by the same token it affirms the subjectivity of the subject: an abyssal subjectivity but a subjectivity nonetheless. For when I blink, for a fleeing instant I retreat into a bottomless refuge that lies, somewhere and somehow, within myself.[24]
All the murders and all the horrors can be erased by the blink of the eye, because when one blinks he re-opens his accusing wounds and his sloppy cuts, and the horrors and the maggots of denunciation disappear back into those wounds. For this reason the blinking signals exactly what Edmond Jabès called the “wounded words.” Through blinking credibility and naturalness is restored (“You get all starey and non-blinky like that, it’ll undermine you and me, but mainly him. (…) You are smitten with the accused, Miss Bloom. And it is adorable, but not our brand of defense.”[25]). In the blink of the clever eye, the identification between the indexical and the projective is greater than anywhere else – the two melt into each-other and fuse with one-another, turning into an undetectable superior predator (haunting its prey neither inside, nor outside the human spectrum) – namely, into a predator capable of escaping representation (the ultimate human system of detection) and of resting on a new (unknown and unapproachable) ontological foundation, a “groundwork” reaching not the linguistic constructs but the very springs and reservoirs of the need-for-language. Here is where the anti-humanist utopia begins (in the not-yet translated vortex which imperatively demands its first translation, in the noxious ravenous nothingness of the middle position [no-longer uncreated, but not-yet creation[26]]):
“I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can be given to me only through the failure of my language. Only when the construct falters do I reach what I cannot accomplish.”[27] Faltering constructions – linguistic and otherwise – expose the fault of foundations and the error of every foundationalism. This crack, this fault, lies “beyond” the end of theology. (…) The wound of words is a tear that cannot be mended – a tear that can never be wiped away. This tear or tear, which interrupts the system of exchange, is neither exactly inside nor outside the text. As such, it eludes the economy of representation. That which is neither outside nor inside cannot be represented either referentially or self-reflexively.[28]
Will Graham, a man trapped in Hannibal blink – in this supra-linguistic anti-humanist “teleportation-contraption,” loses control over both time and space (Hannibal being able to literally maneuver him like he would a hologram – “Well, I was on a beach in Grafton, West Virginia. I blinked, and then I was waking up in your waiting room, except I wasn’t asleep! Grafton, West Virginia, is three-and-a-half hours from here”[29]). He loses his dreams and his sleeping hours (as a consequence of having had his blink stolen by Hannibal and replaced with his psychiatrist’s “clandestine” blink – unlike Hannibal who sleeps and dreams perfectly: “Hannibal: What is there to think about? You listen to your breathing in the dark and the tiny clicks of your blinking eyes. I dream more now than I used to”[30]). Moreover, while immersed in the compact plasma of the pre-linguistic streams of Being and surrounded by the walls of Hannibal’s linguistic utopia, he also has his meta-erotic creative knowledge worryingly suspended.
He now strives desperately to cling to his fading reason in order to remain, at least a common man, at least a primal organically oriented Hominidae in front of the colossal vortical assault of the Being through the linguistic living marks of direct passage of the transcendental fury into the human experience – such as the blinking. In the doing of it he goes against his nature, his design – because he is not and he has never been a “normal man.” And this is how Hannibal uses the linguistic utopia to break him own – by forcing him to urgently forget about his meta-erotic creativity and to desperately seek a degraded refuge in reason:
(…) meta-erotica. It must be said that this mystical or creative knowledge is not what it is known as rational knowledge. And then, only the Devil will always know what the rationalists name reason! Rattio is a thing, and Vernuft is another. I am reading, for example, from a rationalist (Lev Sestov), the following lines about Pascal: “The fundamental condition of the possibility of human knowledge consists, I repeat, in that that the truth can be noticed by any normal man.” What is a normal man? Maybe it is the same thing as the “middle man” (the average man, Durch-schnittsmensch). Meaning a fantastic entity: Phantasia non homo, as Petronius used to say (Satirycon, XXXVIII, 16). And exactly about these poor normal men, who notice the rational truth and nothing more, the count Joseph de Maistre, another agonic, wrote, not without arrogance: “They are only right!: (“Ils n’ont que raison!”). The poor human reason and not the divine, creative truth.[31]
This work was possible due to the financial support of the Sectorial Operational Program for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project number POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863 with the title “Competitive European researchers in the fields of socio-economics and humanities. Multiregional research net (CCPE).”
Bibliography
Arion L. Kelkel, “Language after Husserl,” in Lester Embree, Elisabeth A. Behnke, David Carr, J. Claude Evans, José Huertas-Jourda, Joseph J. Kockelmans, William R. Mckenna, Algis Mickunas, Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Thomas M. Seebohm, Richard M. Zaner (eds.), Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, pp. 394-401.
Bernard, Freydberg,Schelling’s Dialogical Freedom Essay (Provocative Philosophy Then and Now), New York: State University of New York Press, 2008.
David West, “The Contribution of Continental Philosophy,” in Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (eds.), in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Oxford and Cambridge (Massachusetts): Blackwell Publishers, 1995, p. 39-71.
Edward S. Casey, “The Time of the Glance: Toward Becoming Otherwise,” in Elizabeth Grosz (ed.), Becomings. Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, Ithaca (New York) and London: Cornell University Press, 1999, pp. 79-97.
Hans-Herbert Kögler, “Utopianism,” in Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 892-893.
Henry Heath Bawden, The principles of pragmatism: a philosophical interpretation of experience, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1910.
John Fowles, The Collector, London: Vintage, 1998.
Mădălina Diaconu, Pe Marginea Abisului, Søren Kierkegaard şi nihilismul secolului al XIX (On the Edge of the Precipice, Søren Kierkegaard and the Nihilism of the 19th Century), Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1996.
Mark C. Taylor, “The End(s) of Theology,” in Sheila Greeve Davaney (ed.), Theology at the End of Modernity (Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Kaufman), Philadelphia (PA): Trinity Press International, 1991, p. 233-248.
Miguel de Unamuno, Agonia Creştinismului (The Agony of Christianity), translated from Spanish by Radu I. Petrescu, Iaşi: The European Institute Publishing House, 1993.
Tim Bywater, Thomas Sobchack, Introduction to Film Criticism, New York: Longman, 1989.
Internet Sources
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hannibal_%28TV_series%29
http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/
Notes
[1] “[author’s note: Theological loci]: Reality is Immediacy. The real is the fullness of the present experience, and this is best expressed by that sense of the binding of the finite to the cosmic personality (…). Feeling rather than though is the key to the ultimate nature of things. The truth concerning reality is felt rather than known. It is appreciated by direct intuition, not by scientific reflection; by faith, not by sight. (…); [author’s note: Epistemological loci]: Reality is Validity. The real is the assured, the genuine, the true. It lies in the meaning, the relations, of things, in the thought by which things are apprehended. Concepts, laws, types, are the most real things in the universe. The real is the universal. (…); [author’s note: Axiological loci]: Reality is value. Reality is relevancy, congruity, adequacy, satisfaction. The real is the expression of concrete individual purpose: it is the needful, the important, the useful, the necessary. The real is the individual, and individuality is determined by interests, motives, desires, utilities. (…)Reality is (…) appreciation of value. (…)” (Bawden, 1910, pp. 237-238-239) In Hannibal Lecter’s own words, we recognize these patterns in the following relevant “thought-arrangements”: Theological aspects: “It’s not Hobbs’ ghost that’s haunting you, is it? It’s the inevitability of there being a man so bad that killing him felt good.”; Epistemological aspects: “Abigail Hobbs: Why did you really call? Hannibal Lecter: I wanted to warn your father that Will Graham was coming for him. Abigail Hobbs: Why? Hannibal Lecter: I was curious what would happen. I was curious what would happen when I killed Marissa. I was curious what you would do. Abigail Hobbs: You wanted me to kill Nick Boyle. Hannibal Lecter: I was hoping. I wanted to see how much like your father you were. Abigail Hobbs: [horrified] Oh my God… Hannibal Lecter: Nicholas Boyle is more important for you gutting him. He changed you, Abigail. That’s more important than the life he clamored after.” Axiological aspects: “Hannibal Lecter: First and worst sign of sociopathic behavior, cruelty to animals. Jack Crawford: That doesn’t apply in the kitchen. Hannibal Lecter: I have no taste for animal cruelty. That’s why I employ an ethical butcher. (…) I’m afraid I insist on it, no need for unnecessary suffering. Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself. Jack Crawford: A gift that keeps on giving.” Taken from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hannibal_%28TV_series%29, consulted of July 1, 2015.
[2] “The unity of the god within and he god outside is manifest in the philosophical act of freedom (…) The God outside unfolds from the God within, and vice versa. (…) Schelling had claimed (…) that in the circle from which all things come into being, it is no contradiction to say that that which gives birth to the one is, in its turn, produced by it” ( Freydberg, 2008, p. 77). Or, in Hannibal Lecter’s own words: “Killing must feel good to God, too. He does it all the time, and are we not created in God’s image? (…) God’s terrific. He dropped a church roof on 34 of his worshipers last Wednesday night in Texas, while they sang a hymn.(…) He felt powerful.” Taken from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hannibal_%28TV_series%29, consulted on July 1, 2015.
[3] Taken from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s01e07, consulted on June 19, 2015.
[4] David West’s citation: Heidegger, Martin: “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936), in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrel Krell. New York: Harper Collins, 1977, p. 183.
[7] Taken from: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s02e13, consulted on June 19, 2015.
[8] We are referring here to the concept of “Cloud computing” – a term borrowed from computer sciences, in order to highlight the availability of the human “offside locations” in relation to their God-(Main-/Source-)Computer.
[10] Hans-Herbert Kögler, “Utopianism,” in Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p. 893.
[12] The phrase belongs to Renato Rosaldo, and it appears in his Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. London: Routledge, 1993.
[14] Taken from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s01e04, consulted on June 19, 2015.
[16] Casey’s endnote: “Heidegger discusses the ‘hint’ or ‘sign’ (der Wink, not the equivalent of the English ‘wink’ despite the homography) in a comparable way: ‘A hint can give its hint so simply…that we release ourselves in its direction without equivocation. But it can also give its hint in such a manner that it refers us… back to the dubiousness against which it warns us’ (‘The Nature of Language’, in On the Way to Language. Trans. P.D. Herz. New York: Harper, 1971, p. 96),” Edward S. Casey, “The Time of the Glance: Toward Becoming Otherwise,” p. 225.
[18] Thus, the blink in which Will gets lost is not his own. It is Hannibal’s mischievous blink that swallows him, like an undetected carnivorous plant: “Jack: What you do is you take all of the evidence available at a crime scene. You extrapolate. You reconstruct the thinking of a killer. You don’t think of yourself as the killer. Will: I got lost in the reconstruction. Just for a second. Just a blink.” (Taken from: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s01e10, consulted on June 19, 2015.
[19] Taken from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s02e01, consulted on June 19, 2015.
[22] Taken from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s02e12, consulted on June 19, 2015.
[23]Casey’s citation and endnote: Jacque Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, transl. David Allison (Evanston, I11: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 65). Derrida italicizes “the blink of the instant”, whose bodily analogue is the blink of the eye, Edward S. Casey, “The Time of the Glance: Toward Becoming Otherwise,” p. 225.
[25] Taken from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s02e03, consulted on June 20, 2015.
[26] A Kierkegaardian paradox perfectly stressed by Mădălina Diaconu, which “places the individual ‘in the nothingness of the middle position’ (im Nichts der Mitte), therefore in a suspended existence (…),” Mădălina Diaconu, Pe Marginea Abisului, Søren Kierkegaard şi nihilismul secolului al XIX, p. 123, our translation.
[27]Taylor’s reference: Clarice Lispector, The Passion according to G.H., trans. R.W. Sousa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 90.
[29]Taken from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s01e09, consulted on June 20, 2015.
Francisc Ormeny
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ormenyfrancisc@yahoo.com
Digging out the Heideggerian Linguistic Utopia from Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal (Seasons 1 & 2)
(The Insinuation of the Vortex in the Human Act of Blinking)
Abstract: In this study we analyze the vortical insinuation and inscription of the transcendental fierceness (its rapacious avidity for a reincarnation-through-fiber-corruption in the flooded human “cloud”) in the human experience, through the supra-linguistic gesture of blinking. We apply Heidegger’s anti-humanist utopian vision on the primacy of language over the human subject (ego) to Bryan Fuller’s and Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal series (Season 1 & 2 only). According to Heidegger and to his recent exegetes, modern man’s model of perfectibility should take into account a divorce from the vulgar individualistic concerns and replace them with a greater attentiveness to Being, through a language that can disclose the Being and further brings it into the open. This displacement is enacted by making use and abuse of the most emotionally intense (verbal and non-verbal) meta-erotic expressions. We analyze how Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) uses the act of blinking (always coupled with a large spectrum of facial tensions and chiasms), – one by means of which intersubjectivity is at once disbanded and affirmed, and one which allows man to use the energy of the nonpresence and nonevidence while retreating into his coziest and most demonically-fertile inner abysses and secretly recharging himself therein – to control his subjects, to destroy their Eros and to make them brutishly and desperately cling to reason.
Keywords: Linguistic Utopia; Linguistic Anti-humanism; Saying (Sage); Blinking; Fierce Transcendental Insinuation; Savagely-Poetic Expressions of Being.
Although the show seems to be a stand-alone (intransigently independent) reflexive line about the body and its culinary pollinations and polymorphizations, Hannibal, as far as the essence of the theological, epistemological and axiological privileges[1] from behind which it was conceived (and according to which it was assumed by its captious audience) goes, is a savage meditation about the preeminence of linguistic acts over any other type of human acts … genetic or generic.
This work of cinematic Schellingian shadowy theology[2] is constructed around the premise that neither divine imagination nor human phantasy can exist, as long as they are not translated into language and thus turned into an incarnated echo – i.e. into a life-tree that imitates the structure of a derivation tree (used by linguists working in generative grammar and considered by them a primary object of human study) bent over the grave of the former Cartesian human ego (fiendishly deepening his roots in the sustaining and bulging darkness of the human body and using its branches in order to bring upon ourselves storms that normally should not belong to us). It is here that Bryan Fuller’s utopian linguistic vision (“What do you see, doctor? Sum up the Ripper in so many words? Choose them wisely. / Oh, I always do. Words are living things. They have personality, point of view, agenda. They’re pack hunters”[3]) meets what was generally condemned as late Heidegger’s anti-humanism:
The Cartesian ego or consciousness is no longer conceived as the privileged subject of knowledge. (…) A more radical decentering of the subject occurs with Heidegger’s famous “turn” or “Kehre” and the associated attack on Sartre’s humanism. In Heidegger’s later writings his earlier, apparently existentialist account of individual existence – as “anxious” or “caring”, “authentic” or “fallen” – gives way to a more impersonal preoccupation with Being. Heidegger wishes to divert our ‘thinking’ from its individualistic concerns towards a greater “attentiveness to Being”. Only by transcending the limited perspective of the Cartesian subject, “who may deign to release the beingness of beings into an all too loudly bruited ‘objectivity’”, can “thinking” “realize the proper dignity of man” as “the shepherd of Being”. Accompanying this change of emphasis, there is in Heidegger’s later writings an overriding concern with language as “the House of Being” (…) Language discloses Being or “brings it into the open”: “language alone brings beings into the open for the first time. Where there is not language, as in the Being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of beings, and consequently no openness either of nonbeing and of the empty.”[4] (…) Heidegger is particularly hostile to Sartre’s Cartesian claim that “one must take the subjectivity as his point of departure”[5]. Heidegger’s anti-humanism leads instead to “thinking” as the “letting-be” of transcendent Being [author’s note: through language].[6]
In more direct words, when the characters from the series begin referring to their lives and to their deaths in terms of punctuation marks, as Jack Crawford’s dying wife Bella does when Hannibal tricks her and maliciously refuses to euthanize her (“Hannibal: The punctuation at the end of a sentence gives meaning to every word, every space that proceeded it. Bella: They moved my punctuation mark, Dr. Lecter. You moved my meaning. I’m not here because I want to be here. You saw to that.”[7] ), what they do is resurrect in the most eloquent manner the cleanest possible abruptness of the colors of the deific frenzied feeding, and provide a model for the reincorporation of the “God” into the human “cloud”[8] (host), via language – i.e. monstrously attribute a human system to the (infernal) divine self-understanding, in the exact manner in which John Fowles’s character Clegg from The Collector does to his rare and dangerous butterflies, using only the most ontologically “developed” (up to the limit of lunacy) words: “Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity, heart-in-mouth, as they say. A Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance. I always thought of her like that, I mean words like elusive and sporadic, and very refined – not like the other ones, even the pretty ones. More for the real connoisseur.”[9]
Clegg’s description of Miranda in terms of insects by means of the most exquisite possible choice of words, Heidegger’s stress on language to the detriment of the human subject, and Bryan Fuller’s decomposition and punctuation of the human matter in terms of derivation trees represent an anti-humanist utopia but not necessarily a dystopia – because the real aim behind all these three examples is not at all a deculturation or a critique of any kind of the human subject; on the contrary, all of them are attempts at making use through abuse of the phenomenal empty (available, unoccupied) spaces (Wolfgang Iser’s vision of some areas of human thinking and of human intuiting for which there are no specific or code-governed signifieds, so that the signifier can point to an empty position, and can also allow for a nonbeing to be posited as a signified), in order to project (and inject) in there a demented fleshy consistency for the otherwise unrealistic human speculations, longings, infinite wishes and cravings – all disconnected from ideologies and skillfully connected to the passionately-obsessive idea of evolution (change) into better / superior grasping forces:
The derivation of “utopia” is Greek words meaning “not-place”, and utopianism is generally identified with unrealistic speculation, providing the adjective “utopian” with its everyday pejorative meaning. (…) Utopian though is seen as springing from the unconscious, whose imaginative capacity confronts, challenges, surpasses, and overrides conscious reality by means of projected counter-pictures containing hopes, desires, and wishful thinking. This utopian faculty, however, is only critical if disconnected from existing ideologies, and based on an understanding of social totality and the means of realizing better conditions of existence. (…) utopianism is limited neither to a literary genre nor to specific conceptions of the good life. It rather plays a genuine role in relation to possible or intended change in existing social conditions.[10]
*
Yet, talking about linguistically-secured derivation trees and Heidegger’s linguistic anti-humanism in the same logic, and applying these conjoined thought-tapestries to the Hannibal series is an extremely dicey claim, and this happens precisely because Heidegger was against all sequences of “orthodox” grammar and phonetics, and equally obsessed with letting the in-between-the-lines speak for itself, through our (in) voices. Heidegger abjured all “affability and condescension”[11] in his relation with the category that we like to call today “Grammar Nazis” and, in his bond with the Being through language, adopted the position that, once again, we like to identify today as that of an emotionally-engaged “situated observer” or “positioned subject”[12] (always with an implied critique of the so-called “detached” phenomenological and linguistic observer, a raw scientist relying solely on his disengaged reason and impersonal observation):
More vigorously than ever, the later Heidegger fights against the entire phonocentric and logical-grammatical representation of language that has dominated from antiquity up until Husserl in order to summon us to the place where language itself speaks and where humans learn with humility that they are not the masters of language, but that it is rather they who are under the command of language (…) we learn that speaking is not just using words in a banal fashion to name things and beings; naming cannot be reduced to providing an already known object with a name, to affecting things with a label that fits them like a glove (…) Naming is not the arbitrary act of denomination that some believe it to be. Contrary to a tenacious image inherited from metaphysics, words are not barrels and buckets from which we draw the content of a pregiven meaning. To speak is to receive into oneself the saying [author’s note: our italics] of the words of our language. To name is “to call the thing to the world”, to summon it in its very absence into our presence, to invite it to do something in a world of things.[13]
In the Hannibal series, this artifice within the linguistic utopia promoted by Bryan Fuller (and having its roots, consciously or not, deeply implanted in a Heideggerian soil) appears when the discourse on language passes from the radically-visceral psychiatrist Hannibal to his milder and softer colleague – Doctor Alana Bloom:
Alana Bloom: Sharing will help normalize.
Abigail Hobbs: I’m not normal… not anymore.
Alana Bloom: What happened to you was a… Some of these women aren’t even sharing. They speak in “little girl voices”, telling everyone what was done to them without saying a word about it. Certain traumas can arrest vocal development. And victims can sometimes broadcast victimhood involuntarily.[14]
In the lines above we have an example of what Michel Foucault called the “strong power,” which is the power to attract (and to seduce), and which stands opposed to Hannibal’s “weak power” (at least at this level of expression), a power irremediably bound to all the types of coercive influences and supremacies, a power which governs our lives in the shape of a scale, starting from the most elusive informative methods and ending up in full-fledged actual physical force.
What Dr. Bloom implies by “speaking about something ‘in little girl voices’ and without actually saying a word about that something” resembles Heidegger’s vision of man being “trapped” in the inseparable and indissoluble interminglings and interlinkings of language by the grace of the fabulous magnetism of the language’s saying (Sage) – an almost transcendental manifestation of the springs of creation as they enter, each time as if (als ob) for the very first time, into the complexly-enfleshed human poetry, made of intuition, gestures, unique facial expressions and depths of eye-effulgences and splendors:
Words are like gestures that engender a world by making things come to the world and the world come to things. This is the “poietic” power of speaking attested to by the poet, who, better than anyone, knows that we do not cease to speak after our language, which always walks in front of us in each of our steps. Language is like the “house of being” that humankind inhabits, the unique dimension in which we can establish residence, and where the paths of thinking always already pre-traced in our bosom are discovered, Provided we listen to our language, we become aware that we are always already caught up in its saying (Sage), in the inextricable interweavings of the relations that it spins and to which we belong due to our own speaking. With the omnipresence and omnipotence of language that is expressed in the unusual tautological formula “Die Sprache spricht” (language speaks), humans do not speak except by providing a reply to it and by entering into correspondence with its saying [author’s note: our italics]. If speech relieves humans of all initiative, what they say, each of their words, is carried by the speaking of their language. Language is like the “Geläut der Stille” (the sounding of stillness) that nevertheless does require the speaking of mortals in order to be understood, provided that they are disposed to the quiet hearing of this eloquent silence.[15]
*
I
n trying to treat Abigail Hobbs’s posttraumatic stress disorder, Doctor Alana Bloom perfectly intuits Heidegger’s thesis on die Sage, but she fails to implement it. On the other hand, if Hannibal misses his therapy at the level of the discourse per se (where he behaves like an orthodox priest of doom or like an inquisitor the boiling “high definition” plasma), he perfectly applies it at the level of gestures, of a supreme use of silence, and of the act of blinking – displays which Heidegger interprets as being of paramount importance in the “capturing” of the Being inside a human vocalized value; as being capable of inducing a decisive positioning of the subject in his relationship with a Beyond, actively involved and trans-organically immersed in His human design:
(…) the wink, ostensibly a bonding gesture, also manifests a moment of dysfunction: I wink at the other in my very incapacity to reach that other in a more articulate way. As in the case of the blink, intersubjectivity is at once disbanded and affirmed: for in winking at or to another I also collaborate with that other in some significant way. I assert the link that my lack of express verbal representations has otherwise placed in question.[16][17]
To speak in real terms, what Caroline Dhavernas (Alana) beautifully formulates but fails to bring into the act, Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) elevates to the highest possible allure and appeal – the virtuoso of the Danish actor transforming the very mystery of language into a an all-pervading differential and into the ultimate trigger for the aborted consciousness. This is also where he shifts his discursive weak power into a strongly-seductive (as if shifting into the highest possible gear) gestural influence and art of rooting a person to the ground (as it combines in a fatal / deadly way the power of the most intense non-spoken with the avidity of a Being that greedily awaits its incarnation into the human host), a power capable to arrest the human subject in an truly anti-humanistic manner, while taking away all his speaking vigor. (This is also how Hannibal manages to para- and supra-linguistically get into the mind of Will Graham and seize both his will and his power of self-understanding and of crime-reconstruction[18] [his clarity], creating an inescapable blind-spot on the mind of his patient: “Dr. Lecter: Lost in thought? Will: Not lost. Not anymore. I used to hear my thoughts inside my skull with the same, (…) tone, timbre, accent, as if the words were coming out of my mouth. Dr. Lecter: And now? Will: Now my inner voice sounds like you. I can’t get you out of my head.”[19])
In his will to penetrate the mystery of language, Heidegger discovers another name that is more appropriate because it gathers together in a single word logos and Being, the Saying and the Said, and that which induces us to speak. He calls it “die Sage” (Saying), from an ancient word that has the same origin as deixis, the source of signs that are not made from the gestures of humans, but rather from the “gesture of word”. This is a remarkable hypostasis of language that seems to take away every power of the speaking subject in order to give this power to the Saying and the Said of language. For the thinker, all original language is “the coming of Being into the Said” that it assumes as its destiny, and it is foundational for the history of the community of humans. At this point we are (…) carried away into the mysterious land in which lies the being of language as Sage (legend) and out of which all that “there is” in world originates.[20]
And Bryan Fuller knows how to make the best of Mads Mikkelsen’s capacity to embody and synthesize in real time and in real facial laws the clash of phenomenal powers as well as the serene acceptance of the developing disaster, by using feverish and intimately-porous close-up shots combined with long takes and long shots, where “long takes give the impression of real time; long shots allow us to see complete figures in the context of their milieu; the moving-camera knits time and space together in a contiguous whole so that events can appear to be actual.”[21]
Every time Mads Mikkelsen blinks, he uses this clever ruse in order to retreat into the most sacred depths of his inner voids (or, as he says, of his “vast mental palace”), and to recharge himself with the gestating powers of the vortexes that await ravenously and devastatingly therein, puddling threateningly at the edge of his being, in the reverberatory furnace of pre-language. That is why Mason Verger (portrayed by Michael Carmen Pitt) ends up being disfigured and dementedly dehumanized by Hannibal – as he cannot understand the supra-linguistic and utterly-disarming use of the power of the non-presence, in the act of blinking (“Don’t get me wrong. I play chicken with Margot all the time. I just don’t tell her I’m playing. I’m good at chicken, Dr. Lecter. I never blink.”[22]):
“Nonpresence and nonevidence are admitted into the blink of the instant. There is a duration to the blink, and it closes the eye. This alterity is in fact the condition for presence, presentation, and thus for Vorstellung in general.”[23] The blink of the eye, the obverse of the glance, undermines the open-eyed attestation of the kind of sheer presence that is available in essential insight, whether this is said to occur in Platonic or Aristotelian noesis, Cartesian intellectual intuition, or Husserlian Wesensanchauung. But something not taken into account by Derrida is that if the same blink detonates the now as point in time (i.e., as “source-point” in Husserl’s term), by the same token it affirms the subjectivity of the subject: an abyssal subjectivity but a subjectivity nonetheless. For when I blink, for a fleeing instant I retreat into a bottomless refuge that lies, somewhere and somehow, within myself.[24]
All the murders and all the horrors can be erased by the blink of the eye, because when one blinks he re-opens his accusing wounds and his sloppy cuts, and the horrors and the maggots of denunciation disappear back into those wounds. For this reason the blinking signals exactly what Edmond Jabès called the “wounded words.” Through blinking credibility and naturalness is restored (“You get all starey and non-blinky like that, it’ll undermine you and me, but mainly him. (…) You are smitten with the accused, Miss Bloom. And it is adorable, but not our brand of defense.”[25]). In the blink of the clever eye, the identification between the indexical and the projective is greater than anywhere else – the two melt into each-other and fuse with one-another, turning into an undetectable superior predator (haunting its prey neither inside, nor outside the human spectrum) – namely, into a predator capable of escaping representation (the ultimate human system of detection) and of resting on a new (unknown and unapproachable) ontological foundation, a “groundwork” reaching not the linguistic constructs but the very springs and reservoirs of the need-for-language. Here is where the anti-humanist utopia begins (in the not-yet translated vortex which imperatively demands its first translation, in the noxious ravenous nothingness of the middle position [no-longer uncreated, but not-yet creation[26]]):
“I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can be given to me only through the failure of my language. Only when the construct falters do I reach what I cannot accomplish.”[27] Faltering constructions – linguistic and otherwise – expose the fault of foundations and the error of every foundationalism. This crack, this fault, lies “beyond” the end of theology. (…) The wound of words is a tear that cannot be mended – a tear that can never be wiped away. This tear or tear, which interrupts the system of exchange, is neither exactly inside nor outside the text. As such, it eludes the economy of representation. That which is neither outside nor inside cannot be represented either referentially or self-reflexively.[28]
Will Graham, a man trapped in Hannibal blink – in this supra-linguistic anti-humanist “teleportation-contraption,” loses control over both time and space (Hannibal being able to literally maneuver him like he would a hologram – “Well, I was on a beach in Grafton, West Virginia. I blinked, and then I was waking up in your waiting room, except I wasn’t asleep! Grafton, West Virginia, is three-and-a-half hours from here”[29]). He loses his dreams and his sleeping hours (as a consequence of having had his blink stolen by Hannibal and replaced with his psychiatrist’s “clandestine” blink – unlike Hannibal who sleeps and dreams perfectly: “Hannibal: What is there to think about? You listen to your breathing in the dark and the tiny clicks of your blinking eyes. I dream more now than I used to”[30]). Moreover, while immersed in the compact plasma of the pre-linguistic streams of Being and surrounded by the walls of Hannibal’s linguistic utopia, he also has his meta-erotic creative knowledge worryingly suspended.
He now strives desperately to cling to his fading reason in order to remain, at least a common man, at least a primal organically oriented Hominidae in front of the colossal vortical assault of the Being through the linguistic living marks of direct passage of the transcendental fury into the human experience – such as the blinking. In the doing of it he goes against his nature, his design – because he is not and he has never been a “normal man.” And this is how Hannibal uses the linguistic utopia to break him own – by forcing him to urgently forget about his meta-erotic creativity and to desperately seek a degraded refuge in reason:
(…) meta-erotica. It must be said that this mystical or creative knowledge is not what it is known as rational knowledge. And then, only the Devil will always know what the rationalists name reason! Rattio is a thing, and Vernuft is another. I am reading, for example, from a rationalist (Lev Sestov), the following lines about Pascal: “The fundamental condition of the possibility of human knowledge consists, I repeat, in that that the truth can be noticed by any normal man.” What is a normal man? Maybe it is the same thing as the “middle man” (the average man, Durch-schnittsmensch). Meaning a fantastic entity: Phantasia non homo, as Petronius used to say (Satirycon, XXXVIII, 16). And exactly about these poor normal men, who notice the rational truth and nothing more, the count Joseph de Maistre, another agonic, wrote, not without arrogance: “They are only right!: (“Ils n’ont que raison!”). The poor human reason and not the divine, creative truth.[31]
This work was possible due to the financial support of the Sectorial Operational Program for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project number POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863 with the title “Competitive European researchers in the fields of socio-economics and humanities. Multiregional research net (CCPE).”
Bibliography
Arion L. Kelkel, “Language after Husserl,” in Lester Embree, Elisabeth A. Behnke, David Carr, J. Claude Evans, José Huertas-Jourda, Joseph J. Kockelmans, William R. Mckenna, Algis Mickunas, Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Thomas M. Seebohm, Richard M. Zaner (eds.), Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, pp. 394-401.
Bernard, Freydberg,Schelling’s Dialogical Freedom Essay (Provocative Philosophy Then and Now), New York: State University of New York Press, 2008.
David West, “The Contribution of Continental Philosophy,” in Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (eds.), in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Oxford and Cambridge (Massachusetts): Blackwell Publishers, 1995, p. 39-71.
Edward S. Casey, “The Time of the Glance: Toward Becoming Otherwise,” in Elizabeth Grosz (ed.), Becomings. Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, Ithaca (New York) and London: Cornell University Press, 1999, pp. 79-97.
Hans-Herbert Kögler, “Utopianism,” in Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 892-893.
Henry Heath Bawden, The principles of pragmatism: a philosophical interpretation of experience, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1910.
John Fowles, The Collector, London: Vintage, 1998.
Mădălina Diaconu, Pe Marginea Abisului, Søren Kierkegaard şi nihilismul secolului al XIX (On the Edge of the Precipice, Søren Kierkegaard and the Nihilism of the 19th Century), Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică, 1996.
Mark C. Taylor, “The End(s) of Theology,” in Sheila Greeve Davaney (ed.), Theology at the End of Modernity (Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Kaufman), Philadelphia (PA): Trinity Press International, 1991, p. 233-248.
Miguel de Unamuno, Agonia Creştinismului (The Agony of Christianity), translated from Spanish by Radu I. Petrescu, Iaşi: The European Institute Publishing House, 1993.
Tim Bywater, Thomas Sobchack, Introduction to Film Criticism, New York: Longman, 1989.
Internet Sources
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hannibal_%28TV_series%29
http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/
Notes
[1] “[author’s note: Theological loci]: Reality is Immediacy. The real is the fullness of the present experience, and this is best expressed by that sense of the binding of the finite to the cosmic personality (…). Feeling rather than though is the key to the ultimate nature of things. The truth concerning reality is felt rather than known. It is appreciated by direct intuition, not by scientific reflection; by faith, not by sight. (…); [author’s note: Epistemological loci]: Reality is Validity. The real is the assured, the genuine, the true. It lies in the meaning, the relations, of things, in the thought by which things are apprehended. Concepts, laws, types, are the most real things in the universe. The real is the universal. (…); [author’s note: Axiological loci]: Reality is value. Reality is relevancy, congruity, adequacy, satisfaction. The real is the expression of concrete individual purpose: it is the needful, the important, the useful, the necessary. The real is the individual, and individuality is determined by interests, motives, desires, utilities. (…)Reality is (…) appreciation of value. (…)” (Bawden, 1910, pp. 237-238-239) In Hannibal Lecter’s own words, we recognize these patterns in the following relevant “thought-arrangements”: Theological aspects: “It’s not Hobbs’ ghost that’s haunting you, is it? It’s the inevitability of there being a man so bad that killing him felt good.”; Epistemological aspects: “Abigail Hobbs: Why did you really call? Hannibal Lecter: I wanted to warn your father that Will Graham was coming for him. Abigail Hobbs: Why? Hannibal Lecter: I was curious what would happen. I was curious what would happen when I killed Marissa. I was curious what you would do. Abigail Hobbs: You wanted me to kill Nick Boyle. Hannibal Lecter: I was hoping. I wanted to see how much like your father you were. Abigail Hobbs: [horrified] Oh my God… Hannibal Lecter: Nicholas Boyle is more important for you gutting him. He changed you, Abigail. That’s more important than the life he clamored after.” Axiological aspects: “Hannibal Lecter: First and worst sign of sociopathic behavior, cruelty to animals. Jack Crawford: That doesn’t apply in the kitchen. Hannibal Lecter: I have no taste for animal cruelty. That’s why I employ an ethical butcher. (…) I’m afraid I insist on it, no need for unnecessary suffering. Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself. Jack Crawford: A gift that keeps on giving.” Taken from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hannibal_%28TV_series%29, consulted of July 1, 2015.
[2] “The unity of the god within and he god outside is manifest in the philosophical act of freedom (…) The God outside unfolds from the God within, and vice versa. (…) Schelling had claimed (…) that in the circle from which all things come into being, it is no contradiction to say that that which gives birth to the one is, in its turn, produced by it” ( Freydberg, 2008, p. 77). Or, in Hannibal Lecter’s own words: “Killing must feel good to God, too. He does it all the time, and are we not created in God’s image? (…) God’s terrific. He dropped a church roof on 34 of his worshipers last Wednesday night in Texas, while they sang a hymn.(…) He felt powerful.” Taken from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hannibal_%28TV_series%29, consulted on July 1, 2015.
[3] Taken from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s01e07, consulted on June 19, 2015.
[4] David West’s citation: Heidegger, Martin: “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936), in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrel Krell. New York: Harper Collins, 1977, p. 183.
[7] Taken from: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s02e13, consulted on June 19, 2015.
[8] We are referring here to the concept of “Cloud computing” – a term borrowed from computer sciences, in order to highlight the availability of the human “offside locations” in relation to their God-(Main-/Source-)Computer.
[10] Hans-Herbert Kögler, “Utopianism,” in Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p. 893.
[12] The phrase belongs to Renato Rosaldo, and it appears in his Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. London: Routledge, 1993.
[14] Taken from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s01e04, consulted on June 19, 2015.
[16] Casey’s endnote: “Heidegger discusses the ‘hint’ or ‘sign’ (der Wink, not the equivalent of the English ‘wink’ despite the homography) in a comparable way: ‘A hint can give its hint so simply…that we release ourselves in its direction without equivocation. But it can also give its hint in such a manner that it refers us… back to the dubiousness against which it warns us’ (‘The Nature of Language’, in On the Way to Language. Trans. P.D. Herz. New York: Harper, 1971, p. 96),” Edward S. Casey, “The Time of the Glance: Toward Becoming Otherwise,” p. 225.
[18] Thus, the blink in which Will gets lost is not his own. It is Hannibal’s mischievous blink that swallows him, like an undetected carnivorous plant: “Jack: What you do is you take all of the evidence available at a crime scene. You extrapolate. You reconstruct the thinking of a killer. You don’t think of yourself as the killer. Will: I got lost in the reconstruction. Just for a second. Just a blink.” (Taken from: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s01e10, consulted on June 19, 2015.
[19] Taken from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s02e01, consulted on June 19, 2015.
[22] Taken from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s02e12, consulted on June 19, 2015.
[23]Casey’s citation and endnote: Jacque Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, transl. David Allison (Evanston, I11: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 65). Derrida italicizes “the blink of the instant”, whose bodily analogue is the blink of the eye, Edward S. Casey, “The Time of the Glance: Toward Becoming Otherwise,” p. 225.
[25] Taken from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s02e03, consulted on June 20, 2015.
[26] A Kierkegaardian paradox perfectly stressed by Mădălina Diaconu, which “places the individual ‘in the nothingness of the middle position’ (im Nichts der Mitte), therefore in a suspended existence (…),” Mădălina Diaconu, Pe Marginea Abisului, Søren Kierkegaard şi nihilismul secolului al XIX, p. 123, our translation.
[27]Taylor’s reference: Clarice Lispector, The Passion according to G.H., trans. R.W. Sousa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 90.
[29]Taken from http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=hannibal&episode=s01e09, consulted on June 20, 2015.
The Phantasm of Revolution from Fight Club to Mr. RobotThe Phantasm of Revolution from Fight Club to Mr. Robot
Ştefan Bolea
Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania
stefan.bolea@gmail.com
The Phantasm of Revolution from Fight Club to Mr. Robot
Abstract: In the following paper we explore the utopian theme of revolution in two filmic works of art: the movie Fight Club (1999), directed by David Fincher, and the very recent TV series Mr. Robot (2015), created by Sam Esmail. We will argue that Fight Club is an existential meditation on simulation, dehumanization and the capitalistic tyranny of the objects combined with a nihilistic pursuit of authenticity through violence. Closely following Fight Club’s rumination on madness as “revolution of the self,” Mr. Robot allows us to take a peek into the mystery of revolutionary freedom: will it change everything or will we come to regret our former tyrants?
Keywords: Authenticity; Nihilism; Existentialism; Film Studies; Revolution; Freedom; Destruction; Anarchy; Psychosis.
Fight Club: From Simulation to Project Mayhem
The cult movie Fight Club (1999) combines central themes from the existentialist tradition with a postmodern critique of consumerism and a nihilistic perspective (from Schopenhauer to Cioran). Based on the novel written by Chuck Palahniuk (1996), David Fincher’s movie tells the story of an insomniac office worker (Jack, played by Edward Norton) who crosses paths with a nihilistic soap maker (Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden). They both form an underground fight club that becomes the first step in a revolutionary project targeted at the destruction of society.
Fight Club movie poster (1999).
The postmodern motif of the copy (“Narrator: With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy”[1]) is essential. In a society ruled by the Heideggerian “They Self” (das Man), we are, as psychosociological subjects, one another’s copies. In Heidegger’s version, “the Others… are … those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself.”[2] Such being the case, we are identical not only in our pursuit of similar objects, we are also alike in the inherent structures of subjectivity. Society seems to provide the common measure for each individual and the result is a dehumanization of the Dasein. This is why Robert Bennett remarks that Fight Club calls for a rehumanization of the subject through the existential exploitation of death, suffering and violence.[3] Are we still human? We certainly keep the appearance of the human structures but we might be only a reflection of the things we own (“Tyler Durden: The things you own end up owning you.”[4]) or an echo of the repetitive cycle work-media-sleep.
In Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, the critique of consumerism is made from an anarcho-nihilistic perspective:
And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.
We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern…
We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper…
You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.
Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.[5]
The “obscure object of desire” (to paraphrase Buñuel) has moved from the erotic sphere to the economic one, following the phases of a libidinal economy. Just as lust can become gluttony, it can also turn into avarice. The possessive and individually dispossessive objects are not perceived by the majority of the consumers as an alienating factor: on the contrary, the objects are seen as the means of displaying personal success. We should remember Tyler Durden’s words: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need”[6] (double dissatisfaction: destructive work + contingent possessions).
The society of simulation, one in which we have become the copies of the others, in which we imitate and mimic existence, is balanced in Fight Club by the pursuit of authenticity. The quest for authenticity is coupled with a project of cultural destruction (just like in Nietzsche’s oscillation between nihilism and anti-nihilism, the eventual intentionality of destruction is recreation and rehumanization), which stems from the postulates of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Bakunin. This declaration of active nihilism is called Project Mayhem: “It’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.”[7] As Barry Vacker argues: “To blow up the world requires an older form of consciousness, a consciousness destined to be emptied of scientific and technological knowledge, the intellectual devolution from modern to premodern.”[8]
The utopic project of assassinating modernity in order to create a premodern age fit for hunters and gatherers is highlighted in the novel in poetic post-apocalyptic fragments:
You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a fortyfivedegree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.[9]
The civilizing symbols (Rockefeller Center, a complex of 19 commercial buildings from New York covering 22 acres and the Space Needle Tower from Seattle, 184 m high), touristic attractions and emblems of the capital, become, in a premodern projection, hunting terrains. The urban guerilla becomes fighting for survival, where we must prove once again our spiritual and especially our physical superiority over animals, while zoos become cages of protection for the human beings.
Fight Club’s emphasis on the body (our consciousness is embodied) and on fight (the body is not only a temple; it is also a tank) is a plea for immediacy, which proves that the exploitation of pain and death brings us in our true center, defending the idea that we can overcome alienation through authenticity. If simulation brings along with it conformism, authenticity is synonymous with originality: we have the exact ratio between depersonalization and individualism. Palahniuk (and maybe also Fincher) believes that after postmodernity a sort of premodernity will be resurrected. Is it a sort of postexistential utopia to believe that after late modernity a sort of alternative modernity may be possible, a modernity which goes beyond capital and is in need of an authentic individual, who awakens from the “dogmatic sleep” of alienating work (who works for his own development and not for money) and overcomes the Pascalian diversion of the media through existential focus and recreation of the self? There is an inherent need of the Dasein to turn himself or herself into a work of art, to resist the vile dictatorship of the objects.
Mr. Robot: Revolution at the Gates
Mr. Robot (2015), the psychological thriller TV series created by Sam Esmail, combining somehow The Matrix with Fight Club, tells the story of a computer programmer who is also a vigilante hacker. Elliot Anderson (played by the inspired Rami Malek) is a security engineer for the cybersecurity firm Allsafe. Plagued by clinical depression and anxiety disorder, dealing also with a morphine addiction, Elliot is recruited by the charismatic anarchist Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) to take down the great corporation E(vil) Corp (Allsafe’s greatest client) and to totally cancel all debts.
Mr. Robot TV series poster (2015).
In a plot that is often reminiscent of Fight Club, Elliot’s purpose is to reset the economic clock to the anarchistic zero hour, to recreate the postulate of equal chances which is the cornerstone of any democracy. “Our democracy has been hacked” (a quote from Al Gore) is one of the key lines of the TV series. Moreover, “equality,” one of the principles of the French Revolution, is today – simply put – a lie. “There’s no middle anymore. Just rich and poor,”[10] claims Darlene, one of the hackers of society (the group that recruits Elliot). The mediatic sleep intends to make us forget that we live in a modern plutocracy, where to exist is synonymous with to pay, where money has a high ontological status.
As I have mentioned, what is impressive in Mr. Robot is its capacity to provide a serious reply to the nihilistic and existential Fight Club. What happens to Tyler Durden, Project Mayhem, revolution in the age of Facebook, terrorism, migrationism and “total” camera surveillance? Tyler, like Neo from Matrix, must become a hacker. It is interesting that both the movie Fight Club and Mr. Robot’s episode 9 touch climax with the accomplishment of revolution. The bank buildings explode in the famous final Fight Club scene, accompanied by the indie rock track Where Is My Mind by the Pixies, and as Elliot explains to Tyrell (one of his archenemies) how he destroyed E Corp, we hear Maxen Cyrin’s brilliant piano cover to Where Is My Mind:
Tyrell Wellick: How long has this been going on?
Elliot Alderson: I don’t know.
Tyrell Wellick: And what is it that you’re doing exactly?
Elliot Alderson: Encrypting all the files, all the Evil Corp’s financial records will be impossible to access. The encryption key will self-delete after the process completes.
Tyrell Wellick: What about the backups?
Elliot Alderson: I took care of that too. China…
Tyrell Wellick: Steel Mountain? Of course, even when we went redundant.
Elliot Alderson: I hacked the AirDream network. I was in all of them.
Tyrell Wellick: You really thought of everything.
[pauses]
Tyrell Wellick: Who else was involved?
Elliot Alderson: Just me.[11]
Like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot allows us to take a peek into the end of everything, answering the primary question: what happens after the victory of revolution? Is absolute freedom possible or – to paraphrase Emil Cioran – will we miss our tyrants? There are three answers to this crucial question and the first one belongs to one of E Corp’s executive vice presidents, James Plouffe, who speaks the truth for the first time in his life and kills himself live (in a scene reminiscent of The Network), after his persona was shattered:
James Plouffe: You want me to be honest?
Reporter: Of course.
James: You’re right, absolutely right. The public should be worried. I mean, personally, my life is over. My pension, savings, everything has been in this company since I started here and that’s all gone now. Truth is, I’ve been with the engineering team all week and no one knows how to fix it. In fact, about the only thing they do know for certain is that this will be impossible to fix.[12]
Some of the tyrants (or plutocrats) will be destroyed by the advent of revolution and this is the first answer. They who believe that the poor are “nobodies,” that the life of the ordinary citizens amounts to zero will be reduced to zero as well, to the economic and ontological class of non-existence. The formula of this class is the following one: if you were penniless or broke, you might as well be dead (or, to put it more simply: if you have nothing, you are nothing.) This is why Mr. Plouffe killed himself – because he had lived inside this closed circuit of ontological capitalism which claims that existence and wealth are equivalent. We should quote Tyrell Wellick to understand this equality between being and financial success and the patronizing contempt of the master regarding his slaves.
Tyrell Wellick: I’ve seen our waiter here for the last seven years. Must be in his 50s. Maybe has kids … I wonder, what must he think of himself. His life’s potential reached a 30 grand a year salary, an economy car he still owes money on, two bedroom apartment, child support, coupons. I couldn’t bear it. A life like that. A life of an ordinary cockroach whose biggest value is to serve me salad.[13]
For the plutocrats, we – as ordinary citizens – are mere “cockroaches.” Seen from their perspective, “equality,” “justice,” “freedom” and “God” are nothing but hollow words deprived of essence. The only truth is the 100$ bill, the rest is just, for instance, the delusion of equality – ridiculous for the master, necessary for the slave. It is almost Kafkian that we, as ordinary “poor” struggling people, seem to be identified with cockroaches. But this personification is fitting for a society that has no middle ground, as the anarchist Darlene infers. Let us move to a second answer to the problem of revolution. We have seen that some of the oligarchs have been squashed just like the bugs they look down upon in a world built upon on an economic ontology.
Angela: Everyone else is worried, but you? You’re sure that you’re gonna get through this. Why?
Philip Price: People did this. Right? I mean, aliens didn’t invade our planet. Zeus didn’t come out of the heavens to destroy us. Zombies haven’t risen from the dead. No. Whoever’s behind this, they’re just people… like you and me. Except, of course, I have the full weight of the biggest conglomerate in the world behind me. You’ll come to realize that when you have that, matters like this, they tend to crack… under that weight.[14]
From the speech of E Corp’s CEO Philip Price, one can see that revolution may be able to wipe out some of the tyrants, but in the long run the power structures will remain unaltered. It is a kind of stoical wisdom that advises against rebellion, that the hegemonic system will integrate its systemic anomaly, to remind one of the theses from Matrix Reloaded. Therefore, in the CEO’s conclusion we have the same reference to an economic ontology: the biggest amount of money is equal to (quasi)absolute power and to (real) existence.
The third answer to the revolutionary issue brings along a new take on reality. Closely following Fight Club, where Jack turns into Tyler Durden in order to initiate the revolution, Elliot has to identify with Mr. Robot to achieve his ambitious plan. One can say that both revolutionaries are psychotic and perhaps madness is a revolution of the self, a way of meeting the Jungian shadow, of becoming aware of our unconsciousness. Without the revolution of the self, no “real” objective revolution is possible: “How can I change the world if I even can’t change myself?”[15] We might say that changing ourselves and changing the world are comparable because my universe will change if I change my perspective (with the postscript that some philosophers like Seneca or Schopenhauer wonder whether it is really possible to change ourselves). So what is reality?
Eliot: You’re not real. You’re not real.
Mr. Robot: What? You are? Is any of it real? I mean, look at this. Look at it! A world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertising. Mind-altering chemicals in the form of… food! Brainwashing seminars in the form of media. Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven’t lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century. We turned it off, took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs while we tossed the remnants in the ever-expanding Dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit. A kingdom you’ve lived in for far too long. So don’t tell me about not being real. I’m no less real than the fucking beef patty in your Big Mac.
Mr. Robot’s brilliant speech, taking place in New York’s Times Square, perhaps the most “hyperreal” (Baudrillard) place on the planet, among noisy protesters and extremely invasive commercials (the revolution has taken place but advertising ironically lives on: someone also has to advertise the revolution), with sounds of helicopters surveying the scene, is centered on this idea: “We haven’t lived in anything remotely close to [reality] since the turn of the century.” There is a misunderstanding between the two meanings of the word reality: Eliot, battling with his demons (anxiety, depression, psychosis), refers to a sort of psychological reality; Mr. Robot, clearly a sensation type in the Jungian sense (a sort of extreme realist), describes a sociological reality. But what is real from a philosophical perspective?
Even if one calls it “hyperreal,” “post-real” or “para-real,” reality seems to have absorbed its antithesis, unreality. We live in a “world built on fantasy,” a world where life has become a dream. A sure sign of madness is that one cannot discern between fantasy and reality. In a world that cannot discern between those two, in a psychotic universe, isn’t it a sign of normalcy to become mad? Perhaps we can say that in both Mr. Robot and Fight Club becoming insane is a symptom of wisdom, a sign of (total) understanding, a way of accessing hyperlucidity: the ones who are considered normal must willingly join the cage of repression, forgetfulness, the most common lies and mostly sleep (“the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen”). We sleep while working, shopping, watching TV: the ones who wake up must be executed or incarcerated in asylums. So, let us ask once again: what is reality?
Logically speaking, reality = reality + unreality: a hegemonic metastatic disease that has the structure of a dream. Moreover, what is the final answer of revolution? Let us review the former three versions: (1) some of the tyrants are wiped out like cockroaches (the metaphor for the ordinary citizens); (2) other plutocrats believe that revolution changes nothing, the power structures remain the same; (3a) the revolution of the self is the real revolution; (3b) if life is a dream, then revolution is also a dream. Perhaps revolution is just a phantasm but in a world built on the logic of phantasy, it might be the only dream worth pursuing. To quote Albert Camus, “I rebel – therefore we exist.”[16]
This paper is the result of the doctoral research made possible by the financial support of the Sectoral Operational Programme for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863, with the title “Competitive Researchers in Europe in the Field of Humanities and Socio –Economic Sciences. A Multi-regional Research Network”.
Works Cited
Robert Bennett, “The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural Logic of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club,” Stirrings Still. The International Journal of Existential Literature, Fall/Winter 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2.
Albert Camus, The Rebel. An Essay on Man in Revolt, translated by Anthony Bower, New York: Vintage, 1991.
Faithless, “Salva Mea,” Reverence (Audio CD), Swanyard Studios, London, 1996.
Fight Club (1999), directed by David Fincher, written by Jim Uhls, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, London: Vintage Books, 2006.
Barry Vacker, Slugging Nothing. Fighting the Future in Fight Club [Kindle version], Theory Vortex Experiments, 2008.
Notes
[1] Fight Club (1999), directed by David Fincher, written by Jim Uhls, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel.
[2] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson,Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, p. 154.
[3] Robert Bennett, “The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural Logic of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club,” Stirrings Still. The International Journal of Existential Literature, Fall/Winter 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 74.
Ştefan Bolea
Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania
stefan.bolea@gmail.com
The Phantasm of Revolution from Fight Club to Mr. Robot
Abstract: In the following paper we explore the utopian theme of revolution in two filmic works of art: the movie Fight Club (1999), directed by David Fincher, and the very recent TV series Mr. Robot (2015), created by Sam Esmail. We will argue that Fight Club is an existential meditation on simulation, dehumanization and the capitalistic tyranny of the objects combined with a nihilistic pursuit of authenticity through violence. Closely following Fight Club’s rumination on madness as “revolution of the self,” Mr. Robot allows us to take a peek into the mystery of revolutionary freedom: will it change everything or will we come to regret our former tyrants?
Keywords: Authenticity; Nihilism; Existentialism; Film Studies; Revolution; Freedom; Destruction; Anarchy; Psychosis.
Fight Club: From Simulation to Project Mayhem
The cult movie Fight Club (1999) combines central themes from the existentialist tradition with a postmodern critique of consumerism and a nihilistic perspective (from Schopenhauer to Cioran). Based on the novel written by Chuck Palahniuk (1996), David Fincher’s movie tells the story of an insomniac office worker (Jack, played by Edward Norton) who crosses paths with a nihilistic soap maker (Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden). They both form an underground fight club that becomes the first step in a revolutionary project targeted at the destruction of society.
Fight Club movie poster (1999).
The postmodern motif of the copy (“Narrator: With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy”[1]) is essential. In a society ruled by the Heideggerian “They Self” (das Man), we are, as psychosociological subjects, one another’s copies. In Heidegger’s version, “the Others… are … those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself.”[2] Such being the case, we are identical not only in our pursuit of similar objects, we are also alike in the inherent structures of subjectivity. Society seems to provide the common measure for each individual and the result is a dehumanization of the Dasein. This is why Robert Bennett remarks that Fight Club calls for a rehumanization of the subject through the existential exploitation of death, suffering and violence.[3] Are we still human? We certainly keep the appearance of the human structures but we might be only a reflection of the things we own (“Tyler Durden: The things you own end up owning you.”[4]) or an echo of the repetitive cycle work-media-sleep.
In Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, the critique of consumerism is made from an anarcho-nihilistic perspective:
And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.
We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern…
We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper…
You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.
Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.[5]
The “obscure object of desire” (to paraphrase Buñuel) has moved from the erotic sphere to the economic one, following the phases of a libidinal economy. Just as lust can become gluttony, it can also turn into avarice. The possessive and individually dispossessive objects are not perceived by the majority of the consumers as an alienating factor: on the contrary, the objects are seen as the means of displaying personal success. We should remember Tyler Durden’s words: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need”[6] (double dissatisfaction: destructive work + contingent possessions).
The society of simulation, one in which we have become the copies of the others, in which we imitate and mimic existence, is balanced in Fight Club by the pursuit of authenticity. The quest for authenticity is coupled with a project of cultural destruction (just like in Nietzsche’s oscillation between nihilism and anti-nihilism, the eventual intentionality of destruction is recreation and rehumanization), which stems from the postulates of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Bakunin. This declaration of active nihilism is called Project Mayhem: “It’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover.”[7] As Barry Vacker argues: “To blow up the world requires an older form of consciousness, a consciousness destined to be emptied of scientific and technological knowledge, the intellectual devolution from modern to premodern.”[8]
The utopic project of assassinating modernity in order to create a premodern age fit for hunters and gatherers is highlighted in the novel in poetic post-apocalyptic fragments:
You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a fortyfivedegree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.[9]
The civilizing symbols (Rockefeller Center, a complex of 19 commercial buildings from New York covering 22 acres and the Space Needle Tower from Seattle, 184 m high), touristic attractions and emblems of the capital, become, in a premodern projection, hunting terrains. The urban guerilla becomes fighting for survival, where we must prove once again our spiritual and especially our physical superiority over animals, while zoos become cages of protection for the human beings.
Fight Club’s emphasis on the body (our consciousness is embodied) and on fight (the body is not only a temple; it is also a tank) is a plea for immediacy, which proves that the exploitation of pain and death brings us in our true center, defending the idea that we can overcome alienation through authenticity. If simulation brings along with it conformism, authenticity is synonymous with originality: we have the exact ratio between depersonalization and individualism. Palahniuk (and maybe also Fincher) believes that after postmodernity a sort of premodernity will be resurrected. Is it a sort of postexistential utopia to believe that after late modernity a sort of alternative modernity may be possible, a modernity which goes beyond capital and is in need of an authentic individual, who awakens from the “dogmatic sleep” of alienating work (who works for his own development and not for money) and overcomes the Pascalian diversion of the media through existential focus and recreation of the self? There is an inherent need of the Dasein to turn himself or herself into a work of art, to resist the vile dictatorship of the objects.
Mr. Robot: Revolution at the Gates
Mr. Robot (2015), the psychological thriller TV series created by Sam Esmail, combining somehow The Matrix with Fight Club, tells the story of a computer programmer who is also a vigilante hacker. Elliot Anderson (played by the inspired Rami Malek) is a security engineer for the cybersecurity firm Allsafe. Plagued by clinical depression and anxiety disorder, dealing also with a morphine addiction, Elliot is recruited by the charismatic anarchist Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) to take down the great corporation E(vil) Corp (Allsafe’s greatest client) and to totally cancel all debts.
Mr. Robot TV series poster (2015).
In a plot that is often reminiscent of Fight Club, Elliot’s purpose is to reset the economic clock to the anarchistic zero hour, to recreate the postulate of equal chances which is the cornerstone of any democracy. “Our democracy has been hacked” (a quote from Al Gore) is one of the key lines of the TV series. Moreover, “equality,” one of the principles of the French Revolution, is today – simply put – a lie. “There’s no middle anymore. Just rich and poor,”[10] claims Darlene, one of the hackers of society (the group that recruits Elliot). The mediatic sleep intends to make us forget that we live in a modern plutocracy, where to exist is synonymous with to pay, where money has a high ontological status.
As I have mentioned, what is impressive in Mr. Robot is its capacity to provide a serious reply to the nihilistic and existential Fight Club. What happens to Tyler Durden, Project Mayhem, revolution in the age of Facebook, terrorism, migrationism and “total” camera surveillance? Tyler, like Neo from Matrix, must become a hacker. It is interesting that both the movie Fight Club and Mr. Robot’s episode 9 touch climax with the accomplishment of revolution. The bank buildings explode in the famous final Fight Club scene, accompanied by the indie rock track Where Is My Mind by the Pixies, and as Elliot explains to Tyrell (one of his archenemies) how he destroyed E Corp, we hear Maxen Cyrin’s brilliant piano cover to Where Is My Mind:
Tyrell Wellick: How long has this been going on?
Elliot Alderson: I don’t know.
Tyrell Wellick: And what is it that you’re doing exactly?
Elliot Alderson: Encrypting all the files, all the Evil Corp’s financial records will be impossible to access. The encryption key will self-delete after the process completes.
Tyrell Wellick: What about the backups?
Elliot Alderson: I took care of that too. China…
Tyrell Wellick: Steel Mountain? Of course, even when we went redundant.
Elliot Alderson: I hacked the AirDream network. I was in all of them.
Tyrell Wellick: You really thought of everything.
[pauses]
Tyrell Wellick: Who else was involved?
Elliot Alderson: Just me.[11]
Like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot allows us to take a peek into the end of everything, answering the primary question: what happens after the victory of revolution? Is absolute freedom possible or – to paraphrase Emil Cioran – will we miss our tyrants? There are three answers to this crucial question and the first one belongs to one of E Corp’s executive vice presidents, James Plouffe, who speaks the truth for the first time in his life and kills himself live (in a scene reminiscent of The Network), after his persona was shattered:
James Plouffe: You want me to be honest?
Reporter: Of course.
James: You’re right, absolutely right. The public should be worried. I mean, personally, my life is over. My pension, savings, everything has been in this company since I started here and that’s all gone now. Truth is, I’ve been with the engineering team all week and no one knows how to fix it. In fact, about the only thing they do know for certain is that this will be impossible to fix.[12]
Some of the tyrants (or plutocrats) will be destroyed by the advent of revolution and this is the first answer. They who believe that the poor are “nobodies,” that the life of the ordinary citizens amounts to zero will be reduced to zero as well, to the economic and ontological class of non-existence. The formula of this class is the following one: if you were penniless or broke, you might as well be dead (or, to put it more simply: if you have nothing, you are nothing.) This is why Mr. Plouffe killed himself – because he had lived inside this closed circuit of ontological capitalism which claims that existence and wealth are equivalent. We should quote Tyrell Wellick to understand this equality between being and financial success and the patronizing contempt of the master regarding his slaves.
Tyrell Wellick: I’ve seen our waiter here for the last seven years. Must be in his 50s. Maybe has kids … I wonder, what must he think of himself. His life’s potential reached a 30 grand a year salary, an economy car he still owes money on, two bedroom apartment, child support, coupons. I couldn’t bear it. A life like that. A life of an ordinary cockroach whose biggest value is to serve me salad.[13]
For the plutocrats, we – as ordinary citizens – are mere “cockroaches.” Seen from their perspective, “equality,” “justice,” “freedom” and “God” are nothing but hollow words deprived of essence. The only truth is the 100$ bill, the rest is just, for instance, the delusion of equality – ridiculous for the master, necessary for the slave. It is almost Kafkian that we, as ordinary “poor” struggling people, seem to be identified with cockroaches. But this personification is fitting for a society that has no middle ground, as the anarchist Darlene infers. Let us move to a second answer to the problem of revolution. We have seen that some of the oligarchs have been squashed just like the bugs they look down upon in a world built upon on an economic ontology.
Angela: Everyone else is worried, but you? You’re sure that you’re gonna get through this. Why?
Philip Price: People did this. Right? I mean, aliens didn’t invade our planet. Zeus didn’t come out of the heavens to destroy us. Zombies haven’t risen from the dead. No. Whoever’s behind this, they’re just people… like you and me. Except, of course, I have the full weight of the biggest conglomerate in the world behind me. You’ll come to realize that when you have that, matters like this, they tend to crack… under that weight.[14]
From the speech of E Corp’s CEO Philip Price, one can see that revolution may be able to wipe out some of the tyrants, but in the long run the power structures will remain unaltered. It is a kind of stoical wisdom that advises against rebellion, that the hegemonic system will integrate its systemic anomaly, to remind one of the theses from Matrix Reloaded. Therefore, in the CEO’s conclusion we have the same reference to an economic ontology: the biggest amount of money is equal to (quasi)absolute power and to (real) existence.
The third answer to the revolutionary issue brings along a new take on reality. Closely following Fight Club, where Jack turns into Tyler Durden in order to initiate the revolution, Elliot has to identify with Mr. Robot to achieve his ambitious plan. One can say that both revolutionaries are psychotic and perhaps madness is a revolution of the self, a way of meeting the Jungian shadow, of becoming aware of our unconsciousness. Without the revolution of the self, no “real” objective revolution is possible: “How can I change the world if I even can’t change myself?”[15] We might say that changing ourselves and changing the world are comparable because my universe will change if I change my perspective (with the postscript that some philosophers like Seneca or Schopenhauer wonder whether it is really possible to change ourselves). So what is reality?
Eliot: You’re not real. You’re not real.
Mr. Robot: What? You are? Is any of it real? I mean, look at this. Look at it! A world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertising. Mind-altering chemicals in the form of… food! Brainwashing seminars in the form of media. Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven’t lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century. We turned it off, took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs while we tossed the remnants in the ever-expanding Dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit. A kingdom you’ve lived in for far too long. So don’t tell me about not being real. I’m no less real than the fucking beef patty in your Big Mac.
Mr. Robot’s brilliant speech, taking place in New York’s Times Square, perhaps the most “hyperreal” (Baudrillard) place on the planet, among noisy protesters and extremely invasive commercials (the revolution has taken place but advertising ironically lives on: someone also has to advertise the revolution), with sounds of helicopters surveying the scene, is centered on this idea: “We haven’t lived in anything remotely close to [reality] since the turn of the century.” There is a misunderstanding between the two meanings of the word reality: Eliot, battling with his demons (anxiety, depression, psychosis), refers to a sort of psychological reality; Mr. Robot, clearly a sensation type in the Jungian sense (a sort of extreme realist), describes a sociological reality. But what is real from a philosophical perspective?
Even if one calls it “hyperreal,” “post-real” or “para-real,” reality seems to have absorbed its antithesis, unreality. We live in a “world built on fantasy,” a world where life has become a dream. A sure sign of madness is that one cannot discern between fantasy and reality. In a world that cannot discern between those two, in a psychotic universe, isn’t it a sign of normalcy to become mad? Perhaps we can say that in both Mr. Robot and Fight Club becoming insane is a symptom of wisdom, a sign of (total) understanding, a way of accessing hyperlucidity: the ones who are considered normal must willingly join the cage of repression, forgetfulness, the most common lies and mostly sleep (“the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen”). We sleep while working, shopping, watching TV: the ones who wake up must be executed or incarcerated in asylums. So, let us ask once again: what is reality?
Logically speaking, reality = reality + unreality: a hegemonic metastatic disease that has the structure of a dream. Moreover, what is the final answer of revolution? Let us review the former three versions: (1) some of the tyrants are wiped out like cockroaches (the metaphor for the ordinary citizens); (2) other plutocrats believe that revolution changes nothing, the power structures remain the same; (3a) the revolution of the self is the real revolution; (3b) if life is a dream, then revolution is also a dream. Perhaps revolution is just a phantasm but in a world built on the logic of phantasy, it might be the only dream worth pursuing. To quote Albert Camus, “I rebel – therefore we exist.”[16]
This paper is the result of the doctoral research made possible by the financial support of the Sectoral Operational Programme for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863, with the title “Competitive Researchers in Europe in the Field of Humanities and Socio –Economic Sciences. A Multi-regional Research Network”.
Works Cited
Robert Bennett, “The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural Logic of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club,” Stirrings Still. The International Journal of Existential Literature, Fall/Winter 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2.
Albert Camus, The Rebel. An Essay on Man in Revolt, translated by Anthony Bower, New York: Vintage, 1991.
Faithless, “Salva Mea,” Reverence (Audio CD), Swanyard Studios, London, 1996.
Fight Club (1999), directed by David Fincher, written by Jim Uhls, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, London: Vintage Books, 2006.
Barry Vacker, Slugging Nothing. Fighting the Future in Fight Club [Kindle version], Theory Vortex Experiments, 2008.
Notes
[1] Fight Club (1999), directed by David Fincher, written by Jim Uhls, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel.
[2] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson,Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, p. 154.
[3] Robert Bennett, “The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural Logic of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club,” Stirrings Still. The International Journal of Existential Literature, Fall/Winter 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 74.