Vol.29 – Page 3 – Echinox Journal

Melting Reality, Rising Utopia, or Why You Should Never Come Back to Reality Melting Reality, Rising Utopia, or Why You Should Never Come Back to Reality

Posted on 20/12/2015 by Dan Chira

Posted in Vol.29

Cosmin Perta
Hyperion University, Bucharest, Romania
zorovavel@yahoo.com

Melting Reality, Rising Utopia, or Why You Should Never Come Back to Reality

Abstract: Starting with late modern literature, utopia and dystopia have rarely been found in a pure state. We usually encounter a mixture of utopia and dystopia in the content of one and the same story. Instead of canceling each other, they complement each other because they alternate on the simple principle of action and reaction inside a frame we refer to as fictional reality. This technique has surpassed the borders of literature, going into cinematography, and two of the most intense films that have used it are Zabriskie Point and Easy Rider. We shall take the track of utopia in post-modern times and we will learn its ways based on these two movies. We will see that utopia is nowadays mostly a state of mind and that after finding it, it would be better not to leave it, because reality kills.

Keywords: Utopia; Dystopia; Reality; Society; Oppressive System; 1960s America; Zabriskie Point; Easy Rider; Michelangelo Antonioni; Denis Hopper

In literature and in cinematography, Utopia and Dystopia are concepts that respect a rule of time and space, meaning that those worlds are set in no identifiable time and space, against static backgrounds. But that is a strict and limited point of view over Utopia and Dystopia, because those are broader concepts and they rarely fit that narrow conception in modern or even post-modern times. The most important thing that has happened throughout the evolution of those concepts is that they have attempted to escape the imagined/fictional world, coming closer to factual reality or even melting into reality and acting as a litmus test, determining which parts of the reality can be seen as Utopian or Dystopian. The problem in this case is that transferring those concepts to reality means that the settings and the rules have changed. The settings are no longer static, but dynamic, and everything is easily recognizable. In this case, even if they are opposite concepts, the border between Utopia and Dystopia is often very fragile. In order to respect the dynamics, the changes, the fluctuations of the real world, Utopia and Dystopia have to adapt and to alternate (we should remember that as literary concepts, they were created for the use of static worlds, meaning that they cannot function at full parameters outside this rule. Ou topos, in Latin, means no place).

The first works that contain elements of Utopia and Dystopia simultaneously are The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1564), by Francois Rabelais, and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), by Jonathan Swift, because both Rabelais and Swift intended their works to be a direct critique of the regime in their time and, as such, they had to approach reality somehow, even through allegory.

In literature we have many other examples, most of them from the beginning of twentieth century, especially in Russia, where we had this paradox: the reality was itself pure Dystopia and the only accepted literature was Utopia. There were a few authors that fed on the sickness of that time and created dystopian worlds, direct or allegoric copies of the reality, with Utopian flavor given by hope. Yevgeny Zamyatin, Andrei Chayanov, Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov are the most important names (as a short digression, while Aldous Huxley was one of the best-sellers in Europe, in Russia Chayanov was executed, Zamyatin was expelled and Bulgakov and Platonov were socially tortured, their main works being published only after their and Stalin’s deaths). A perfect example of Dystopia based on Utopian settings and rules is Cevengur, by Andrei Platonov.

In the field of cinematography, there have been several attempts at mixing Dystopia and Utopia in the reality blender, and I mainly think of Charlie Chaplin’s work (City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, A King in New York, etc.), but the obvious alternation of Utopia and Dystopia inside a reality look-a-like world was first explored in the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. I have to mention the beautiful dystopian comedy Catch 22 (1970), made after Joseph Heller’s novel, but in this paper I will only refer to Antonioni’s first American movie, Zabriskie Point (1970) and Denis Hopper’s directing debut, Easy Rider (1969).

Before starting to analyze those two movies, we have to take a look at the society they refer to. It is common knowledge that the 1960s and the 1970s were some of the most tormented decades in the modern history of the USA. The Vietnam war, started soon after the Korean war, the emergence of new forms of industry, brands and trade, the structural changes that took place in politics, the racial hatred problem, the students’ and the trade unions’ riots, the lack of trust and the lack of a fresh horizon, the lack of harmony, the danger of social uniformity, the need for individual freedom – all these worked together towards creating a soft ideological, capitalist Dystopia (very different from the Soviet one, which was more concrete), and this Dystopia called for countermeasures that came from hope and manifested themselves through a rejection of reality, encouraging individual freedom and non-conformism and creating alternative realities (the hippie movement, in our case, Utopia).

In literature, Richard Brautigan’s Watermelon Sugar (1968) was one of the most impressive mixtures of Utopia and Dystopia that arose from this “historical playground” and, when carefully read, it is obvious that it has a few solid connections with the two movies we will refer to.

Zabriskie Point, also known as Death Valley, starts with a college students’ debate over the society and the students’ riots (a real debate filmed by Antonioni, no acting involved). The society/the system is seen as corrupted and truly representative of Orwell’s projections. The meeting slogan is the famous “Power to the people!” and the models meant to counterattack the corrupt system come from the socialist ideological Utopias represented by Lenin or Castro.

While Mark Frechette is leaving the meeting, Antonioni presents to us an obsessive showdown of American brands, almost suggesting that brands are taking over people. “Joining is not a matter of choice, but a matter of survival,” says Morty, referring to the fact that if you do not adapt to society, society will kill you (we will see later, in terms of society/reality, that this is a turning point, the reality that kills its misfits). “People act when they need to, but I need to sooner than that. (…) Cops talking about stopping violence when the cops are doing it,” replies Mark, suggesting that the hypocrisy of the system is so advanced that it will never bring you to an extreme point and that you have to escape sooner than that.

We have here the first signs of a struggle to create a mental Utopia by opposing human identity to the social Dystopia, creating this way an unstable balance. Neither Utopia, nor Dystopia can exist in a pure state inside reality, but always in a mixture. Ideological or mental Utopia is most commonly created as a response to violence and chaos. However, the system or the society has tools to prevent such actions, so it presents a ready-made Utopia on the social networks. We have the example of Sunnydunes land development in Antonioni’s film, the ideal, worriless, perfect city presented day by day on TV using dummies instead of people, selling a desert as an oasis. Eventually, this is the perfect mirage, an exquisite Morgana that serves the system and keeps the folks dreaming about something imagined by others, not by themselves. Even the radio is equally split between news about the Dystopia of the Vietnam War and the Utopia of Sunnydunes opportunities.

Real Utopia, not the one offered by the system, serves as a hiding place for Mark and Daria as they are escaping reality. The perception of this place as a secret den that protects from reality is a characteristic that makes Utopia unreal, separated from reality, but not completely: it is separate but incorporated within reality (a complete separation would mean the death of Utopia because it could not exist by itself).

Daria is following a personal dream, while Mark is running away from a mistake and they will meet and share a Utopia of their own. Still, what we have to point out here is the fact that Utopia is generally inhabited by misfits, by all those who cannot connect to the system. It is poetic, but malfunctioning, as seen in Watermelon Sugar.

The first man that welcomes Daria in her Utopia is the World Middleweight Boxing Champion of the 1920s. An old alcoholic, skeletal and forgotten by everybody, he asks her if she remembers him. This is a nice metaphor of Utopia turned into Dystopia over time (both Zabriskie Point and Easy Rider are road movies, resembling life, always in motion, not static as Utopia and Dystopia usually are, so the passing of time has an important role to play). But this is not the only metaphor about time that interests us. The name that gives the title of the film, Zabriskie Point, refers to an area created over millions of years, primarily a lake (so, once a living place) transformed, in time, into a desert (a dead place). This contrast resembles the contrast between Utopia and Dystopia and the movement from one to the other is influenced by the same elements: changes implemented by reactions to external forces (in nature’s case) or by external systems/ideologies (in people’s case).

The next metaphor that caught our attention was that of Daria finding weeds in the desert, “plants that make it in the sand,” people that can survive dystopian societies. “I wonder what else is going on in the real world,” said Mark, making it obvious that they have abandoned “the real world” in favor of an illusion. Utopia is defined as escaping reality (including all oppressive social systems), while the others, the ones remaining in the real world are seen as being on “a reality trip,” which is defined by Daria as “the impossibility of imagining things.” Their personal Utopia becomes a work of the imagination, referred to as “peaceful” or “at home.” Daria’s idea of planting memories about great things into people’s heads to forget the unfair reality asks for a total transfer to Utopia, which can go badly, as we will see.

In the well-known and much discussed love-making scene (an expression of freedom and insubordination) that Mark and Daria fantasize about (in order to create a mental community), they all look alike, but they are not copies, indicating that Utopia can be inhabited only by those who are similar, who share the same principles. The whole scene is playful and joyful, suggesting the idea of Utopia’s pure happiness. Antonioni highlights that Utopia’s secret is not in the place, but in the state of mind, showing us the classic American family getting to the same place and not noticing anything else but the urge of having a burger drive-in there.

Mark escapes the system (police), Daria escapes the system (bureaucracy), she even leaves all her documents, everything that connects her to the system behind, but in the end they both escape not only the system, but reality. You cannot escape only the system because the system is the active part of reality. In order to escape that, you have to leave it all behind.

This is the tricky part of discovering Utopia. Once found, it should never be abandoned. Mark’s mistake was his good faith and the correct belief that one cannot enter Utopia with a bad karma (we will also come across this idea in Easy Rider). He chooses Utopia, but he does not realize he is already in and wants to make things right in reality before entering Utopia for good. However, things cannot be done right in reality and leaving Utopia and returning to reality means dying. Once you have escaped reality, you cannot return to it. Reality will not have you back, it will kill you instead. Exactly the same thing happens in Easy Rider or in the novel Watermelon Sugar.

After Mark’s death, the last clash between Utopia and Dystopia, the last collision between reality and imagination consists in Daria meeting the businessmen and their wives in the villa, in her last attempt to return to reality. Daria’s dress is half wet, half dry, a symbol of the duality, of the struggle inside her. The first thing that implodes is her mind. There is a moment that suggests an implosion that blows away the reality the same way the villa she leaves is blown away by the explosion. She decides not to return to reality and to escape and by doing that she saves her life. She survives in her singular Utopia, while all the others die in reality. Mark was right after all, reality pays tribute to faith and karma, while Utopia is still, far away, out of faith.

Easy Rider was released in 1969, one year before Zabriskie Point, but there is little chance that Antonioni was influenced by the debutant Denis Hopper, so I think all the common ideas should be put on the account of the society they were inspired by.

The film starts directly with a bad karma scene representing Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Denis Hopper) buying drugs from Mexico and selling them further in New York for a lot of cash, which they hide inside Harley Wyatt’s tank, as they set off on the road to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, to lose their track and retire with the pot money on the coast of sunny Florida.

Wyatt and Billy are, like Daria and Mark, runaways. They try to hide and to escape society (police, corruption, etc.), but they also try to escape reality because Mardi Gras, the event they are heading to is seen as “out of this world,” with the magic attributes of New Orleans, as a place of total forgetfulness and enhanced mystical experiences. However, generally Utopia cannot be found at the end of a quest as the Grail should be, but at the end of an escape, of a flight, because Utopia is not a reward, but a refuge. They say the quest is the Grail, but in our case the escape is the Utopia.

There is a subtle scheme Hopper is following in his debut movie: he quickly passes with the camera through different hypostases of American men, the traditional family (still working the field), the urban family (already subjugated by brands), the American rebel or runaway (without a clear purpose) and the hippie village (the free zone), and at the middle of the film, he turns this scheme upside down, going back and destroying, imploding everything and allowing tradition to kill and suppress the rebel and his freedom.

Things start to change as soon as the Stranger (Luke Askew) makes his appearance on the highway and Wyatt picks him up on his bike. The Stranger acts as a guide that will lead the two lost rebels to Utopia, giving them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stay there forever. The Stranger would not say his name or where he is from. He would just say that he is from a city (a general symbol of the system) and that he is running away from it: “I’m a long way from the city, and that’s where I wanna be right now.” He shows Wyatt and Billy the way to a hippie village. When asked if he is sure about the route, the Stranger refers to the hippie village as “the place we’re coming to,” not going, but coming, as if the place were waiting for them in a non-geographical place (a common topic for Utopias).

The village is a hippie heaven, free of inhibitions, full of joy and happiness and totally cut off from the system, a true Utopian space. But this space is continuously menaced by intruders. The ruler of the village is a woman (matriarchate is seen as a simpler, healthier alternative to the modern ruling system), the Stranger’s girlfriend, and she makes it clear that strangers may come and see them, but not all are welcome because they would destroy the balance. The inhabitants of this space are superior people from a cultural and mystical point of view: they play instruments, they know literature, they act on a stage of their own, they pray a lot, they believe in transcendence, unlike the corrupted city man they oppose, and they need “simple food for our simple taste,” conducting their lives after simple principles and working the land in order to feed themselves.

Like in Zabriskie Point, it seems that all the inhabitants of this rural Utopia are misfits and they all look alike. Even if they have a hard time because their crops are not growing properly and they have to work hard, they are happy and they get along as a perfect community.

Wyatt finds in his Utopia calm, joy, happiness, even love, but he still decides to quit it, as Mark does in Zabriskie Point, as he wants to put the things in order (to help Billy get to Florida, because Billy is more of a city man and he cannot be enchanted by Utopia) and return after that, but that will never happen. “When you get to the right place with the right people… Yeah, this could be the right place, but I just gotta go,” says Wyatt.

Before their departure, even if the Stranger insists that they stay, one of the hippie girls reads a fortune cookie that somehow resumes the whole movie plot: “Starting brings misfortune. Perseverance brings danger. Not even demand for change in the existing order should be heeded. On the other hand, repeated and well-founded complaints should not fail to a hearing.”

The next target city is New Orleans and Mardi Gras. As we had the fake Utopia symbolized by Sunnydunes in Zabriskie Point, so is Mardi Gras for Easy Rider, a fake Utopia created by the system to misguide, a Utopia that brings no peace or equilibrium, but chaos and pain, as we will see.

One of the most profound characters of this movie is George Hanson (brilliantly acted by Jack Nicholson), an alcoholic lawyer that Wyatt and Billy met on a state prison not long after they left the hippie village. “You know, I must have started off to Mardi Gras six or seven times. Never got further than the state line,” says Hanson. As a lawyer, he stands for an agent of the system, destroyed on the inside by it. He tries to escape, but fails, because he is too deep inside the system and cannot pass the imposed borders. Hanson sees a chance in those two rebels and rides with them, but the Utopia is already behind.

Learning how to smoke marijuana, Hanson tells them a conspiracy story about aliens living on Earth, and talking about those alien worlds, he describes a perfectly utopian space, a standard model for the utopian society they all dream of: no monetary system, no wars, no leaders (every man is a leader for himself), plenty of food, clothes, houses and free transportation equally for all and with no effort. “Godlike control over his own destiny. A chance to transcend and to evolve with some equality for all.” This is the model, the aspiration, the pursued Utopia.

George Hanson will be the first to die. Why? Maybe because, for the system, the others were misfits, but Hanson was a traitor. He had to be punished first in a symbolical and exemplary way. He never got to reach his Utopia, the secret brothel, the best brothel in New Orleans, but he passed the knowledge.

“People are not scared of you, they are scared of what you represent to them. You represent to them freedom. Talkin’ about it and bein’ it it’s two different things. It’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. ‘Course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free ‘cause the gonna get real busy killin’ to prove to you that they are. They’re gonna talk and talk and talk to you about individual freedom, but if they see a free individual it’s gonna scare’em. That makes’em dangerous.” Those were the last words of George Hanson before he was hammered to death.

Taking over Hanson’s legacy, Wyatt and Billy found and entered the secret brothel in New Orleans. This brothel was built inside an old monastery (again, the contrast of the coexistence of Utopia and Dystopia) and most of its walls were still covered in Biblical or religious quotes in general (the prison cells where they meet Hanson were also covered in quotes from Jesus).

“If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.” This is written on one of the brothel walls. Still, this does not refer only to God as perceived by Christianity, but can also refer to a general saving point or place. We can link this to our idea of Utopia as a saving place that has to be invented by means of the imagination (the same as in Zabrinskie Point). Another quote sends directly to the revenge of reality: “Death only closes a man’s reputation and determines it as good or bad.” In other words, it is a matter of choice. It depends on which road you die, as well as on the direction you are heading for.

In Zabriskie Point, Mark’s key line before deciding to get back to reality was “I wonder what else is going on in the real world.” In this case, the key line is said by Wyatt, who asks “What’s happening outside? Let’s go outside. We’ll all go outside.” That is the signal for the return to reality and, as we already know, this return kills. Wyatt is attracted by the deceptive mirage of Mardi Gras, the fake Utopia, and they all dive into reality using the same filter they used to run away from it, drugs.

Utopia becomes Hell, the drug induced delirium is extremely painful, like a rebirth to reality. But it is a rebirth only so that you can die. A man in Utopia is out of this world. A man out of this world cannot die because he is also out of time. In order to die you have to be reborn, to come back to reality (as in the Romanian fairytale Youth without Age and Life without Death).

The next day, Billy, who cannot sense the subtle meanings, says happily: “We made it. We’re rich,” but Wyatt, who knows that they have just missed Utopia, replies: “We blew it.” In a few hours, they will be both dead.

As a short and hasty conclusion, I think we can say that in these cases, Utopia and Dystopia coexist with reality in the same space and time because they do not have a space and time of their own. Dystopia is society/system based, while Utopia is mainly a state of mind or a mind projected territory that can be shared by several individuals or by small communities that have the same affinities or are running away from the same things. We have seen that Utopia is generally a hiding place, a shelter, and we have seen that once reached, it should never be left, because every return to reality means death.

Besides all this, we can now add that every Utopia, even if intimate, extremely personal, has to be an ideological one. It is based on an idea and on a concept. The examples we have given are no exceptions to this rule. The problem with ideological Utopia is that it cannot really exist independently from society and from society-based dystopia. As I have already said, they have to take turns into reality, to alternate, to adapt. The moment Utopia separates totally from reality and becomes a parallel ideological reality, we know it from history, not just literature; it has no other chance but self-destruction. Even without self-awareness, as in the cases already presented (Mark and Wyatt persevere towards death without knowing, as the fortune cookie suggests) or in the case of BoilIn and his crew from the already mentioned novel, Richard Brautigan’s Watermelon Sugar, when BoilIn and his gang choose to publicly and symbolically commit suicide in front of the others, just to draw their attention about the fake Utopia they are in, just to wake them up, to make them self-aware. However, we know that this sacrifice is in vain, for no one really understands anything and they keep moving on with their fake lives after cleaning buckets of blood like any other filth.

Thus, after all, if reality does not kill you, Utopia will.

The Death of Individual Freedom and its Mass Effects over the Young Generation in Roberto Faenza’s H2SThe Death of Individual Freedom and its Mass Effects over the Young Generation in Roberto Faenza’s H2S

Posted on 20/12/2015 by Dan Chira

Posted in Vol.29

Cristian Paşcalău
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
babelrealm@yahoo.com

The Death of Individual Freedom and its Mass Effects over the Young Generation in Roberto Faenza’s H2S

Abstract: This article studies some aspects of fiction making in the Roberto Faenza’s futuristic dystopia H2S. We tackle mainly the concept of individual freedom and its dissolution as it appears represented in the movie, along with the severe consequences this process bears. The satire against Italian bourgeoisie becomes a manifesto against any kind of repression, mainly the repression that hits young generations. In fact, Faenza warns about the dangers hidden beneath the surface of a vitiated educational system. Posing social problems such as order, legality, identity, freedom, happiness, collective welfare and so on, he tries to capture a panoramic view on the critical points that drive civilization to a future break-down. Anthropologically speaking, the movie explores the idea of a global recontextualization in the field of collective consciousness and asks serious questions about the endless desire to cope with an improved technological frame and about the disclosure of unity or split this process brings along. We undertake an inquiry into these prospects within a philosophical and anthropological framework.

Keywords: Roberto Faenza; Dystopia; Utopia; Drama; Surrealism; Science; Science-Fiction; Technocracy; Education; Young Generations; Absurd; Identity; Individual Freedom; Collective Freedom; Repression.

Un esperimento condotto da alcuni scienziati su di totti cavia ha messo in evidenza que in una civilità soprapopulata la repressione e la supremazia portano a una spietata lotta per la sopravvivenza, lotta che conduce ad aberazzioni sociali di natura patologica e monstruosa: pansessualità, violenza, follia, cannibalismo. Dopo pochi mesi di osservazione, si comincia a determinare in anzi tutto che lo trituramento sociale investiva tanto i maschi che le femmine. Nei maschi se stabiliva una guerra sanguinaria per la presa del potere che durava ininterrotammente, e con singolare ferocia, fino al prevalere del più forte. Divenuto capo, il più forte se isolava con le femmine e le costringeva d’attendere lui in una specie di harem, mentre la sua vigilanza dominava dall’altro la vita de le su di te. Privati de le femmine, i maschi se accoppiavano tra loro senza alternativa di sesso. Uscivano solo per mangiare. In una pena encontravano il capo, cercavano di contarlo lui consenziente, secondo cui proceso che vene chiamato omosessualità de identificazione. Più grave il aberazzione di comportamento materno: le femmine rimaste gravide, forze advertendo l’atmosfera di tensione e di pericolo, rifiutavano di partorire e la maternità. Preferivano un dolore fino a scoppiare una lenta, esasperata agonia. Pochisime accettavano di sgravarsi, ma subito dopo si disinteressavano de la plove. Così, incapace di allevare loro nati, si vedevano costretti ad abandonarli, assistendo impotente a loro richiami di aiutto. Quando non venivano devorati dagli adulti, i sopravvissuti, isolati e privati de le cure materne, no riuscivano a svelire uno sviluppo regolare, e crescevano anormali e diformi. Dopo qualche tempo, la nevrosi generale esso seguirsi de tali fenomeni aumentavano con improvviso e violenza l’indice de la patologia sociale, portando a un unico resultato: l’estinzione della popolazione. Grazie!

The fragment quoted in Italian reproduces the monologue opening Roberto Faenza 1969’s H2S, a little-known Italian futuristic dystopian masterpiece, according to one of its viewers.[1] Roberto Faenza is well known for his crusades against social inequity, dictatorship, and corruption. This movie particularly raises a full frontal attack against the repression persistently pursued by inefficient educational systems in order to render students docile. It is however imperative to notice that a utopian ideal of equity is clearly discarded. Faenza resorts to satire, allegorical structures and philosophical insights to focus the absurdity of such an enterprise and, at the same time, the moral issues that students have to deal with in the process of their emancipation. The monologue is more than eloquent for the issue raised: it mirrors the social distress and ultimate dissolution among the guinea pigs, only to anticipate the complete disaster in a distorted human society ruled by a pack of technocrats, mad scientists, and amoral corrupt barons.

Before we analyze the movie more closely, let us take a short inquiry into the concepts of utopia and dystopia. Utopia is perceived as a cultural construct almost entirely generated out of mixture. Its conventional form makes the reader delve into a non-space and a non-time. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism,[2] lists some features that any utopian work encompasses:

■ ritualized description of a human community or society;

■ the ritual is meaningful;

■ the social behavior is artificial;

■ any utopian society can be understood in terms of logic, numbers, transparency, technology;

■ the individual behaves like a robot, hence the impression of a cosmic mechanism that any utopia shows;

■ each utopian society runs a program, a typical way of life at the surface of society.

On the other hand, dystopia explores all the negative consequences of such a rational ideal. For instance, religion is replaced by a higher authority / rationality seen as a supreme religious standard. Utopias are projections with an extreme rational structure and purpose. The social structure is generally a two-leveled one. Society, with all its biosocial functions, is perceived as a pack of life functions taking place in a completely inorganic reality. Utopian communities eliminate the unpredictability of nature. A society of this kind is submitted to control, either consensually accepted or driven by means of force. Individuals are well encouraged to eliminate the range of unpredictability in their lives, to such an extent that births are controlled, sexual instincts are suppressed etc. Dystopias cannot control the free, unpredictable, transformative growth in nature. That is the main reason for a self-induced isolation from the canvas of natural spaces, into a highly technical environment.

In fact, Faenza’s movie is an anti-utopian one, as it embraces the absurd declining of the individual in a totalitarian society, and a dystopian one, as it depicts the danger of misused technology. The director superposes in hallucinatory cuts the brute reality of a society ruled by corrupt elite (a dystopian dimension) and the dreamy escape of the two lovers that run from an alienating world (the utopian dimension). Throughout the movie, the aggressive nature of the wealthy rulers comes across to the basic need of freedom that the young students experience. The horrors and the standardized way of life make the two lovers want to escape in a natural landscape of freshness, freedom, playfulness, poetry, and to attain a primordial state of mind that leads even to language being replaced by prelinguistic attempts.

The polemic dimension of the movie rises above any shadow of a doubt. Its reflexive criticism against modern society brings along a space filled with interrogations and inner tensions. The perfection claimed so loudly by the institute members is a totally abusive concept, designed to preserve the elite’s status and its perverted ideologies. As a dystopian space, this society is transfixed in the package of moral and cultural values of the young generation, like an apparently indestructible self-sustaining matrix. It is however a society that works as an irreducible fraction between the pragmatic control with the finite use of standardization and the ideal of equity nicely packed in newspeak. It is a society that annihilates the initiative, smashes consciousnesses, claims the unconditional submissiveness of its citizens and directs their entire energies towards the needs and desires of the ruling class. The algorithm of such a society presupposes a strict rationalization of the material assets and human resources. Under no circumstances is the individual able to surpass this social frame. All the individuals are totally caught into this mass process that eventually ends with their total reification.

On the other hand, dystopia involves a paradoxical return to the Center and, at the same time, a collapse of the social self-consciousness. The dystopian space is a place which does not guides the individual towards a higher purpose, but instead absorbs him within the matrix with the finality to perpetuate itself like an agonic organism. It is a space of almost impossible searches or liberation. Power in this kind of society reaches its outmost limits, becomes absolute guideline for the individuality lost into oblivion. At the extent that not only society acts like a global prison, but the individual mind faces on its turn the same quality of censorship. Thus the movie depicts the perfect representation of a dystopian society, reached at the inner point of its decadence. The human condition is literally smashed within the wheels of sacrifice. This society imposes an absolute concentration of power by making use of scientific propaganda, mass control, and elite supremacy over the lower classes. The horror is exposed almost everywhere in this no man’s land.

Faenza explores the collective subconscious by using hypnotic sets and landscapes, hallucinatory trajectories, and rough symbolic choreography in which the characters evolve. Even the soundtrack, scored by Ennio Morricone, expands this dynamics of slowness and rapidness, static frames and rapidly changing inserts. In this exploration, there are two states of mind that influence the main characters’ behavior: the first one is the exhilarating awareness of presence, and the second one is evanescence, the desire of escape the prison of society, to free oneself from the anguish of living in a standardized social environment.

The sets also show three realities in which the characters revolve: a futuristic one (consisting of labs, scientific experiments, specialists engaged in research projects), a classic baroque one (the castle in which Capo and the founder of the institute live), and a natural one, which is in fact the reality into which Tommasso and Alice escape. The latter one is a reality full of light, poetry, happiness. In respect to the states of mind, the sets open an aesthetic point of transgression, as the adults (the rulers) and the young generations of students interact. The institute resembles to a factory in which pupils are taught to be obedient, to worship the new religion of social equity and to let themselves ruled by the machines. The concept of collective freedom is opposed, in Capo’s teachings, to that of individual freedom, because, as Capo himself states, individual freedom is not, in fact, freedom at all. In his opinion, social order would be attained by restraining individual liberties and by shaping individuals in the form of robotized entities integrated in a mass device. Among the first scenes of the movie is one that particularly draws attention to the impact of brainwashing technologies upon individual consciousness. The Professor brings newly arrived Tommasso into the basement of the lab, only to acquaint him with the experiments he is conducting in this respect. A little girl, sitting in a glass cage, is literally controlled by a sort of device that inputs her commands prompts and induces her all the reactions the Professor desires. The girl, or better said, the marionette is well trained for the new society planned by scientists. Once started, the device controls the girl and, whenever the Professor claps his hands or clicks his fingers, she dances or lies on her back, spreading her legs while the Professor laughs hysterically. Afterwards, the girl comes in front of the glass cage, takes a small fish from a vat and simply watches it struggling, agonizing, and ultimately dying. Another clap, and the girl starts laughing like a robot. No wonder Tommasso, arrived to study at this prestigious institution, after having seen this horrible spectacle of human degrading, says to the Professor: “Sono tutti matti!”

Technocracy is therefore the new religion for this society, being sustained through key words such as order, legality, welfare, and happiness. Anyone who disobeys Capo’s guidelines and preaching is silenced. Bea, the female student who set up a fight against the oppressive education offered by Capo and his scientists, is invited to Capo’s castle, drugged, strangled with a spindle, boiled, and finally eaten. The Professor informs the young rebels about this atrocity, and proposes to help them get rid of Capo. In doing so, he makes Tommasso commit a crime (he shoots a black man who played the role of Capo, in a staged rehearsal for the real attack to come). As Tommasso could not bear the consequence of his action, a female student comes and tries to comfort him. She convinces him to escape the madness they were facing, so they flee into the mountains.

As the perspective changes, the natural sets bring poetry and constitute a luminous alternative to the black and white atmosphere encountered so far in the institute and implicitly in the movie. The young couple and a dog climb the snowy mountain, and set their camp in the middle of a natural heaven. They try to live in a primordial fashion, but eventually the girl gets bored and makes Tommasso accept all sorts of weird role plays. At some point, exhausted by her demanding attitude, Tommasso leaves the natural paradise and returns to the institute, only to find out that Capo has been murdered and replaced by the Professor. Ambitious, the Professor used the students to dispose of Capo and take his place. Afterwards, he had no remorse to restore the traditional discipline and the educational values of the institute. Considered a fugitive, Tommasso is punished in front of the other students, so they could understand that only by means of repression will be able to develop a good citizenship, and that only obedience can lead them to perfectly fit in the system.

After this degrading moment, Tommasso tries to commit suicide, but his attempt fails. The Professor, now settled in the Castle, argues with the founder of the institute, a pansexual who resembles to a satyr. They decide that Tommasso needs to be reeducated, but first of all they want to offer him the privilege of mating. Thus they organize a simulacrum of wedding, a grotesque wedding, in which Tommasso is the groom and the founder of the institute is the bride. They climb on a circular stage, being attended by two singers, while the rest of the participants, including the Professor, stand in front of the scene. All begin to sing “a, e, i, o, u / a, e, i, o, u / a, e, i, o, u”, while the bomb Tommasso previously made is ticking and the circular stage rounds and rounds with the bridegrooms. The entire movie can be interpreted, in this key, as a theater of the absurd, and all the characters are playing a choreographic role. For instance, the participants in this grotesque wedding become a choir repeating vowels, the bridegrooms become archetypes of innocence and perversion, as a reverse to the famous the Beauty and the Beast story.

The entire world becomes a metaphor, a stage in which the characters evolve like puppets, led by an absurd sense of apathy. All the plagues stated in the prologue of the movie (pan-sexuality, violence, madness, cannibalism) become symptoms for a profoundly diseased society, turned into a symbol of a decadent age. In this manner, an allegory for any totalitarian entity that oppresses the individual is set into motion. This world makes sense, but it is a sense of the absurd, a sense of being out of joint, a sense of aberration that sustains it from behind. Faenza manages to confuse the spectators’ expectations by refusing to delineate an immediate logic sense, i.e. an elaborate meaning and a purposeful progression. His movie resembles a surreal theater of shocking techniques, instinctive reactions, outlining a sense of catastrophe that tears apart the illusory veil of a daily, stupid, mechanical reality. Their stereotypical identities and their idiosyncrasies make the characters look like interchanging masks within a Panopticon of brute energies according to which the inland absurdity of the textual world is driven. All the characters act like familiar shadows in a deranged super dense cosmos and deploy obsession, insanity, and tendencies for the sake of entropy.

There is at work a spark of tensional relationships throughout the entire movie. If we follow the pattern of textual sense construction elaborated by Mircea Borcilă,[3] we will manage to identify some critical moments in the development of the semantic content. When Tommasso arrives in London, he is at first astonished by the indifference of the passengers. He feels like a stranger who fell down into a strange world, ruled by technology, indifference, and decadence. Even the journey with the high-speed train is a descending into the abyss of technology. The travelers on the train are connected to a televised network, and their brain is stimulated to react in a reaction-controlled manner.[4] So from the very beginning the movie shows the tension between sanity (symbolized by young Tommasso) and the insanity of a misused technological environment. The tension is further increased, to the extent that the main character delves into the spider web of the institute. Furthermore, the moments of tension raise between irreconcilable poles, such as individual creativity, freedom, and natural responses opposed to an abstract collective freedom and controlled reactions driven by mechanically induced stimuli. Individual creativity ought to be eliminated from this controlled environment. Only Capo and the scientists are allowed to be creators, whereas all the students need to obey, to worship the system, to let themselves being ruled by computers. In this way, the road for individual freedom is closed. Students are trained for a mass destruction of individualism. The tension increases when Bea starts a revolt against Capo and his pack of scientists. The conflict escalates to the extent that Capo retreats into his Castle, not yet aware of how to proceed next. But the conflict is postponed, as he invites Bea, the leader of the group, to the Castle. Here, he fakes compassion and reasoning for the rebels’ claims, misleading Bea and making her believe all their problems would be solved. Instead, Capo, along with the founder of the institute, drug Bea, kill her and eat the corpse.

The next moment of tension appears when Tommasso is misled to kill the nigger. In order to solve this tension, Tommasso escapes with Alice, one of the female students. In time, another tension appears between the two lovers. Tommasso, trying to solve this problem, returns, but then he is taken as a rebel and treated according to his acts. Therefore, we can see that the movie expands moments of pressure (psychological distress, anxieties, revolt against oppression, sexual tension, anger), moments that are interwoven with attempts at coping with or resolving the tension. The former are diaphoric moments, whereas the latter are endophoric moments. These moments work as nuclear metaphoric devices and their extension creates the entire world of the movie. We never get to the final epiphoric moment, when all the conflicts would be actually solved. The reason is a very simple one: the world of the movie is set to preserve tension, along with an illusory hope for salvation. The young Tommasso cannot attain redemption, but only perdition. He makes a clock bomb in order to kill all the scientists, including the Professor and the founder of the institute, but in the end we can only hear an indefinite clock ticking sound effect. The tension is preserved, the bomb does not explode and the insane world will continue to exist even after the movie ends.

The gestures, the stereotypes of language, newspeak, hysterical laughter and the controlled reactions of the individuals mingle together in order to designate an absurd world, inhabited by puppet-like-characters. The architecture and the costumes are futuristic, but they also restore some classic prototypical elements (the pieces of furniture inside the Castle, for instance).[5] Apart from the scenes in the mountain, where the immensity of space gives a sense of freedom, put somehow in the brackets of oppression, the whole movie evolves in closed areas. All the fluid contents of consciousness are trapped within the frames of a closed spatiality. It is the perfect means of representation in respect to the feeling of repression exhibited all over the movie. The amphitheater is designed in such a way that the students can see neither each other, nor the teacher. They are isolated in wooden walls that surround each of them; thus, they can only listen to the voice of the speaker, but are far from being able to see him. They live in parallel worlds with predetermined lives, as they cannot manifest their individual thoughts, feelings, or expressions. Their entire personality is fragmented so they could fit in the system, into an absolute geometric division of the collective self. The students need to reject a historical dimension of the individual self. They crave for an identity that is lost, drowned in the new era of technocracy, but their attempt to regain the paradise lost of their individual freedom ultimately fails. They are naïve to think that the Professor, an artisan of the system, would consider helping them to surpass their guinea-pig condition.

Tommasso becomes more and more attached to the system, to the new order that rules the text, i.e. the absurd. He stares helplessly at the new reality, unable to free himself from the technocratic madness that took over the youngest generations. At this point, we can state that Roberto Faenza deconstructs all the system, revealing its appalling roots. Faenza warns his spectators about the dangers that lurk in corrupt ideologies and modern dictatorships. His satire is directly focused on the rich class, made of individuals who have the authority to manipulate and rule over others’ destinies. Capo and the scientists stand for a dictatorship of technocracy, in which machines control individual life, and in the end it depends on who and how uses the machines. The scientists and the technicians live in an artificial paradise of a new social order. Interpersonal relationships are damaged to such an extent that the sense of individual liberty is completely lost. That is the reason why the key concepts used in Capo’s preaching (freedom, collective welfare, order, stability, happiness) are labels put on empty bottles. Their original meaning is completely gone and the concepts are integrated via recontextualization into an absurd discourse that is made to elude students.

The movie can be seen as a satire of a corrupt and perverted high-class society. The elite is the eternal bourgeoisie, so even if the events are placed in a distant future, under a scientific and technological controlled environment, the rulers of this world are shown in their basic instinctual behavior.[6] They seem to be satyrs of eternal Middle-Ages, driven to extinction by their morbid pleasures. They are instinctual, grotesque, insane beings, who show no difference from the animals they despise. At the same time, Faenza knows exactly how to distillate the clashes of generations and how to recreate them by means of artistic substance. At the same time, the director is a fine observer of human flaws; therefore, he takes great care for emphasizing the dramatic effects of his film. The result is a social and anthropological drama, comparable to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a movie standing as a warning device in the flow of history, a work that echoes, among others, ancient Greek mythologies, Kafka, Nietzsche, Musil, Camus, Sartre, Orwell. Strategies such as the configuration of an altered otherness (that restates from a critical perspective the relationship between subject and object); the insertion of some events which are more or less plausible and fit into a geometry that preserves little to zero footprints of Cartesian logic; paradoxes; double meaning; allusions; satire; sarcasm; ontological oppositions etc. prove Faenza’s radical creativity.

The human condition as depicted in his movie suffers a great deterioration. A standardized postindustrial society that follows the roadmap to entropy and dissolution is shaken by an Avant-garde revolt that tries to deconstruct and to reconstruct a kind of anarchic split from the absurd and the collective madness that the government perpetuates. The entire movie is consists of surreal episodes, powerful symbols, and tantalizing disorder. The director makes use of antirational patterns of creation, being interested in setting free the subconscious energies that make the social surface shake. Faenza’s film is a shock to any dictatorial system, be it a political one or an educational one. The young generations are invited to transcend their mechanical condition, to wake up from the impoverishing sleep of their consciousness, and to find the inner equilibrium. It is an awakening to awareness that Faenza attempts in his film, a strong desire to free the mind from all the poisonous subliminal labels, from all the contingencies that surrounds individuals, from all the restrictions that social institutions are continually throwing over the life of the individuals. The impact on the audience is meant to be a harsh one, given that every viewer is invited to make sense in a personal manner of many surreal elements inserted throughout the entire movie and to cope with the anti-establishment.

The monstrosity of the Bourgeoisie becomes a distinct image of the absolute annihilation suffered by the individuals within the frames of a post-human social environment. In fact, Roberto Faenza depicts post-humanity in all its massiveness and rough coherence. Therefore, the movie shows the peel of a reality that needs to be explored from all the possible angles and given back to fiction as to the sole existence that would ever virtually cover in its entirety.

Bibliographical references

Borcilă, Mircea, Lingvistică şi poetică antropologică – lectures attended at the PhD School of Linguistic Studies, Cluj-Napoca, University of Babeş-Bolyai, Faculty of Letters, 2008.

Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton University Press, 1957.

Molitero, Gino, Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema, The Scarecrow Press Inc., Lanham, Maryland, Toronto, Plymouth, 2008.

*** http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0178544/

*** http://irenebrination.typepad.com/irenebrination_notes_on_a/2011/05/h2s-roberto-faenza.html

Notes

[1] “H2S was never released outside Italy. Rarely seen since its original Cinema release in 1968 this surreal futuristic comedy drama is directed by Roberto Faenza whose inspirations from his art college days are clearly displayed here. Student revolts in a futuristic scientific university see an unusual role for the American actor Lionel Stander, who had previously been cast as the barman in Sergio Leone’s “Cera una volta il West” (1968) The story is a puzzling one – it begins in London, England where students are controlled by a dictatorship Government where sex is outlawed. The film was supposed to have been banned in Italy and destroyed, but do they really do that to films these days? Nonetheless, the set designs are truly stunning, especially the second half of the film where the runaway lovers end up living in the Italian mountains in a colorful ‘funked-up’ igloo! But the film is so slow and bemusing blending political statements with sci-fi which was to emerge as a popular genre in the US. (…) But, for lovers of Italian 60s Cinema and particularly the Director who stunned us with great images in “Escalation” (1967) where an Italian Student comes to London England and enjoys hippy life, the film “H2S” Can still be classed as a hidden Italian masterpiece. Please note this film has never been shown on TV anywhere, the film was seen in an Italian Film Archive.” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0178544/). In the meantime, the movie was rescued and it can be watched now on Youtube.

[2] Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton University Press, 1957.

[3] Mircea Borcilă, Lingvistică şi poetică antropologică – lectures attended at the PhD School of Linguistic Studies, Cluj-Napoca, University of Babeş-Bolyai, Faculty of Letters, 2008. Borcilă has elaborated a metaphoric model that presupposes three distinct moments that expand a textual world: the diaphoric moment (in which different referential quanta collide, generating a tension that apparently cannot be solved); the endophoric moment (in which the subjects involved in the textual frame try to escape from the tension and to find a solution); and the epiphoric moment (in which a solution is found by transgressing the initial state and attaining a higher level in the cosmic hierarchy of sense.

[4] A recent short movie called Pathos, another Italian futuristic dystopia, directed by Dennis Cabella, Marcelo Ercole, and Fabio Prati (2010), explores the way in which individuals are literally locked in cells and sustained via the drug of virtual reality. Their brain is attached to a chain that provides them with simulacra of life, like in Philip K. Dick’s novels, as long as they pay for it. The system works to perfection: whoever does not pay the fee, is disconnected from the network, the chain is removed and he dies. A short presentation of the movie: “In an indeterminate future, huge plains of waste cover every corner of the Planet. Global warming makes the surface uninhabitable and hostile. The Earth is dead. But Mankind gave life to its greatest invention, Pathos, a mechanical system that protects human beings, controls their 5 senses and gives them a perfect life with fee. Liberal thought is not allowed. Only pay-dreams provided by the system can be done. But one day, something would change.” (http://imaginesciencefilms.org/pathos/)

[5] For further inquiries, follow the link:

http://irenebrination.typepad.com/irenebrination_notes_on_a/2011/05/h2s-roberto-faenza.html

[6] According to Gino Molitero, “a ferocious attack on bourgeois conformism, H2S, a futuristic dystopian fantasy whose name appropriately alludes to the chemical formula for sulfuric acid. The film’s caustic nature provoked the ire of the censors, who delayed its release by almost two years.” (Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema, The Scarecrow Press Inc., Lanham, Maryland, Toronto, Plymouth, 2008, p. 126).

Cristian Paşcalău
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
babelrealm@yahoo.com

The Death of Individual Freedom and its Mass Effects over the Young Generation in Roberto Faenza’s H2S

■ ritualized description of a human community or society;

■ the ritual is meaningful;

■ the social behavior is artificial;

■ any utopian society can be understood in terms of logic, numbers, transparency, technology;

■ the individual behaves like a robot, hence the impression of a cosmic mechanism that any utopia shows;

■ each utopian society runs a program, a typical way of life at the surface of society.

Bibliographical references

Borcilă, Mircea, Lingvistică şi poetică antropologică – lectures attended at the PhD School of Linguistic Studies, Cluj-Napoca, University of Babeş-Bolyai, Faculty of Letters, 2008.

Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton University Press, 1957.

Molitero, Gino, Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema, The Scarecrow Press Inc., Lanham, Maryland, Toronto, Plymouth, 2008.

*** http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0178544/

*** http://irenebrination.typepad.com/irenebrination_notes_on_a/2011/05/h2s-roberto-faenza.html

Notes

[2] Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton University Press, 1957.

[5] For further inquiries, follow the link:

http://irenebrination.typepad.com/irenebrination_notes_on_a/2011/05/h2s-roberto-faenza.html

Far and Away: Utopian Projections, Mythological Quest and The American Dream in Kazan’s America AmericaFar and Away: Utopian Projections, Mythological Quest and The American Dream in Kazan’s America America

Posted on 20/12/2015 by Dan Chira

Posted in Vol.29

Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu
“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
andrada.fatu.tutoveanu@gmail.com

Far and Away: Utopian Projections, Mythological Quest and The American Dream in Kazan’s America America

Abstract: A major contemporary storyteller, the American cinema, has constantly recycled and explicitly or implicitly reactivated classical mythological and religious patterns. The hero’s journey and the initiation rituals associated with it have definitely been some of the most frequently employed such patterns. The initiation journey was a highly important topos of classical mythologies and rites of passage and has penetrated fiction in both oral and written traditions. Elia Kazan’s epic intentionally draws on these traditional narrative frameworks, also employing – by way of the myth of the American dream, with reference to the utopian destination – the myth of the earthly paradise as the object of the quest. Concerning the hero’s initiation, we might say that the traditional patterns of initiation are closely followed in Kazan’s narrative: the protagonist leaves the familiar space, faces dangerous situations and characters, meets a mentor, escapes the temptations of wealth and love and, eventually, is symbolically reborn when reaching the magical destination: he is baptized with a new name, washing away his sins and recovering his lost innocence, while literally receiving a new identity and a new destiny.

Keywords: Utopia; Cinema; American Dream; Mythology; Hero’s Journey; Elia Kazan.

The American Utopia

A privileged cinematic theme, the American Dream has taken numerous shapes in 20^thcentury both mainstream and auteur cinema. One of its avatars – both within popular culture and as a representational stereotype – can be that of a utopian destination, a land where hopes and dreams can materialize. Therefore, the cinematic myth of the American Dream can be related with the cultural archetype of utopia: “sometimes called the American dream, that idea remains one of our most persistent and fraught utopian visions. In American culture, we now see utopianism and utopian literature intersecting with new formulations of multicultural identity.”[1] Since Thomas More’s classical work, the concept has undergone a lexical evolution and several meaning shifts, being encountered in different contexts:

Utopia, as a neologism, is an interesting case: it began its life as a lexical neologism, but over the centuries, after the process of deneologization, its meaning changed many times, and it has been adopted by authors and researchers from different fields of study, with divergent interests and conflicting aims.[2]

As scholars have noticed, the concept of utopia itself has undergone certain metamorphoses in time, from designating an imagined perfect society to a generic term suggesting the genre, respectively the literary or cinematic “form into which the utopian imagination has been crystallized”[3]. It also embodies, eventually, a generic “desire for a better life, caused by a feeling of discontentment towards the society one lives in.”[4] It is this latter meaning that the current article will be concerned with, as the American Dream encapsulates precisely this mirage of an ideal place, a sort of Promised Land of self-accomplishment and fulfilment: “from its origins, America has been conceived as the New World, a land of liberty, equality and opportunity, where both individuals and society as a whole would prosper.”[5] This type of spatial projection or representation contains recognizable features of the utopia archetype, intertwined – as anticipated – with the biblical topos of the Promised Land: “The place that later became the United States has been called ‘the Promised Land’ by innumerable people in the past four hundred years.”[6]

It can also be associated with the myth of the earthly paradise[7] recurrent in different mythologies and imaginaries (a pattern materialized, in Greek mythology, in the Fortunate Isles or the Isles of the Blessed). This can be related to the belief in the existence of a so-called Terrestrial Paradise,[8] which became – as will later happen to the American utopia – not only the embodiment of an aspiration, a desire and a most sought after Destination, but also the object of actual mapping and attempts of locating:

The medieval Christianity displaced Eden from its central location to a peripheral site of the mappaemundi. The geographical information given by Genesis 2 on the location of the Terrestrial Paradise was very poor: all we find out about Eden is that it situated mikedem, “towards the East.”[9]

The modern imaginary functions similarly in the case of the American utopia, with the inevitable mapping shift towards the West but otherwise preserving the religious load and the features of the myth pattern: “one of America’s most fundamental myths is expressed in what often has been termed America’s civil religion, the myth of the American Dream, which is related to the myth of rebirth”^[10] or “the prospect of symbolic immortality.”[11] Configured within this mythological matrix of the earthly paradise, the American Dream destination is also shaped by its own specific historical context and causalities. Thus, Eliade argues that the Puritan perspective led to this specific shaping of the American myth: “It is very probable that the behavior of the average American today, as well as the political and cultural ideology of the United States, still reflects the consciousness of the Puritan certitude of having been called to restore the earthly paradise.”[12] This prolongation of a biblical aspiration for the lost paradise or the terrestrial paradise was identified by Mircea Eliade in the Puritan quest for a new order within the New World:

Taking his interpretation further in The Quest: Paradise and Utopia, Eliade “reads” in modern America the first settlers’ “nostalgia for the earthly paradise,” the determination to build it there anew, the cult of work and of novelty, the rapid turning of landscape into a garden, the “American paradise” which “gave rise to the myth of indefinite progress and American optimism,” a lasting “religious enthusiasm” despite secularization. He detects an “Adamic nostalgia” in camouflaged forms in the works of American writers especially in the nineteenth century, and sees everywhere “the result of these messianic hopes.” Eliade also argues that the power of the nostalgia for paradise myth and consequently the settlers’ “certainty of the eschatological mission” of bringing paradise on the new land could not be easily forgotten, and more so, can be traced even today.[13]

Another myth dimension associated to this paradisal nostalgia is related, also in Eliade’s terms, with the very idea of “New World” and therefore with the cosmogony structure implicit in the founding of a new society or community. Not accidentally, as we are speaking about the religious-laden Puritan perspective, this reiteration of Creation made use of a religious imagery and paraphernalia

Like any space that started being organized, America was then, to borrow Eliade’s terms, “susceptible to become sacred,” as he says: “settling in a territory is equivalent to founding a world.” Assuming the responsibility of “creating” the world in which to live, the Puritans repeated the experience of the religious man in traditional societies who sanctified the small universe making it similar to the divine world. “Religious nostalgia makes man want to live in a pure and sacred Cosmos as it was when it first came out of the Creator’s hands.”[14]

This reiteration of the primordial Creation and therefore a transfer of cosmogonic actions probably led to the emphasis on the individual in the future American Dream stereotype of the self-made man: “the American Dream has at its core an emphasis on the individual. According to the ideology of the American Dream, we are ‘master of our own fate’. We go ‘our own way’ and do ‘our own thing’.”[15] We can therefore deduce an intrinsic connection between the religious-laden imaginary connected to the American Dream and its specific features as a myth, favoring the fulfilment of the individual, and not just an evolution or shift of emphasis.

So it was that some people with a strong sense of religious mission founded a new world they hoped would become a model for the old one. Their confidence – in themselves, in their sense of mission for their children and in a God they believed was on their side – impelled them with ruthless zeal to gamble everything for the sake of a mission. In the process, they accomplished the core task in the achievement of any American Dream: they became masters of their own destiny.[16]

Concerning the history of the concept, while it is believed that the genesis of the myth can be traced back to the discovery of the New World,[17] the notion appeared for the first time at a critical moment, during the Great Depression, in James Truslow Adams’s 1931 The Epic of America.[18] The coherency of this myth, which had existed prior to this process of naming, is constructed on the image of this earthly paradise of human justice and equal opportunities, in contrast with the many traditional stratified societies in which the individual’s future was conditioned by social origin as well as other external circumstances: “In the image of the American Dream, America is the land of opportunity. If you work hard enough, you can overcome any obstacle and achieve success. No matter where you start out in life, the sky is the limit. You can go as far as your talents and abilities can take you.”[19] The status of immigrants shared by the creators of this new world eliminates, at least within the myth, any potential social bias in the individual’s fulfilment and this equality and meritocracy added a component of dignity to the strife.

In a general way, people understand the idea of the American Dream as the fulfilment of the promise of meritocracy. The American Dream is fundamentally rooted in the historical experience of the United States as a new nation of immigrants[…] The ideal in America was that its citizens were “free” to achieve on their own merits. The American Dream was the hope of fulfilment of individual freedom and the chance to succeed in the “New World” … To be consistent to the American Dream, our society would need to become one that truly creates equal opportunities to develop merit, recognize genuine merit and equitability reward it. [20]

This dignity is precisely the essence of the urge so poetically depicted by Kazan’s film in his “American Odyssey,” as the hero is offered wealth and social status before actually reaching the U.S. Following a period of hesitation which, in any case, made apparent that he had reached neither happiness nor fulfilment, the protagonist decides to leave these behind and follow his (American) dream. By this rejection, the audiences are communicated the message that his quest was in search of this dignity and meritocracy rather than of material wealth, as at the end, although in a far less fortunate situation, the protagonist shows genuine joy and hope.

The Hero’s Mythological Journey[21]

The notion of quest was not accidentally mentioned in this context: one of the central cinematic myths, inherited from traditional storytelling pattern is the hero’s journey, “occurring in every culture, in every time. It is as infinitely varied as the human race itself and yet its basic form remains constant.”[22] Therefore, this pattern can be considered universal, as it can be identified across mythologies, religions and cultures, not to mention in literary and cinematic narratives.

Despite its infinite variety, the hero’s story is always a journey. A hero leaves his comfortable, ordinary surroundings to venture into a challenging, unfamiliar world. It may be an outward journey to an actual place: a labyrinth, forest or cave, a strange city or country, a new locale that becomes the arena for her conflict with antagonistic, challenging forces.[23]

As a contemporary audio-visual storyteller, the cinema and, most recognizably, American mainstream productions have recycled these successful and universal myth patterns and have centred their narratives on the hero’s quest, which eventually leads him to attain maturity. In the classical hero’s journey pattern (as Campbell, in his classical The Hero with a Thousand Faces emphasized), this process materializes in the protagonist’s abandonment of the familiar space (implying the key moment of the departure) in order to start a travel filled with obstacles, ordeals and a descent into a sort of dark world (or the underworld). The hero thus undergoes initiation and on his successful return, he has not only reached the explicit purpose of the journey but also gained knowledge and maturity.

The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. … Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again – if the powers have remained unfriendly to him – his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).[24]

Generally, the initial moment of the hero’s journey is, as anticipated, that of the hero abandoning his familiar space as a condition for achieving his goal (including that of self-knowledge), conquering the unknown world and defeating external and internal demons. “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”[25]

The ordeal(s) he has to face are part of the traditional initiation processes (common to many cultures, as it is found in shamanic ancient rituals as well as in Western folk tales and traditions) and while this is an “indispensable step in his initiation and identity quest”[26] it is also highly significant in cinema narratives as it aims to stir empathy and emotional reactions: “the Ordeal is a ‘black moment’” for the audience, as we are held in suspense and tension, not knowing if he will live or die. The hero, like Jonah, is ‘in the belly of the beast’.”[27] The overcoming of the ordeal has a deeper aim: “profound self-realization”[28] and knowledge. The dark forces fought against can also be read as a confrontation with one’s inner demons and weaknesses.

The hero’s initiation through a journey or a quest involves, therefore, an exploration of the world and of the self, symbolized in the quest and in the classical prototype of Odysseus, but proving itself enduring in the sense that it takes the form of multiple avatars. Although the “call to adventure” can take the shape of different challenges and problems to solve, the common pattern mentioned above (“separation, liminality, and reintegration into society,”[29] resulting in transformation through a fundamental experience) remains remarkably stable and enduring.

The Transatlantic Journey to Utopia. Case Study: Elia Kazan’s America America

As a major contemporary storyteller, the cinema has always employed at a large scale this mythological pattern of the hero’s (initiation) journey. Moreover, the American cinema has sometimes intertwined it with the utopian myth of the American dream, being itself, as already discussed, an individual-focused aspiration and quest.

He [Kazan] made explicit reference to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and to “a Candide with Hope.” In Bunyan’s seventeenth-century allegory (its full title was Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which is to Come) the protagonist makes a journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, while Voltaire’s picaresque novel recounts its hero’s adventures, including in the mythical city of El Dorado. Something of this is suggested by the episodic form of Kazan’s work, in which Stavros encounters a series of characters who aid, try or tempt him along the way.[30]

However, in many cases we can speak of the hero’s metaphorical journey in “pursuit of happiness” rather than of an actual voyage. It is not the case with Elia Kazan’s classic epic America America, in which the painful pursuit of the American dream takes the form of a traditional journey across land and sea, with all the recognizable trials and temptations of a classical Odyssey. Besides the recognizable pattern, there are also specific references to the ancient Greek narratives (the protagonist, as well as the filmmaker being Greeks themselves):

A number of scenes, including the first meeting between Stravos and Hohannes and the protagonist’s flight from the scene of his murder of Abdul, a speck in a vast expanse of mountainside, suggest the timelessness of Greek mythology. … The scene also suggests something of the Aegean legends of Jason and the Golden Fleece. The visual and verbal references to memories and dreams, together with Kazan’s introductory and concluding narration, and the role of Stavros’s parents as a typical Kazan chorus, all enhance the status of the film story as myth and fable as much as period documentary.[31]

The voyage is placed, from the very beginning (from the director’s opening comment), in the center of the story: “My name is Elia Kazan. I am a Greek by blood, a Turk by birth, and an American because my uncle made a journey.”[32] Moreover, this describes a multiple journey: that of the uncle, the protagonist named Stavros Topouzoglou in the film, that of his family (Kazan among them) and, most significantly, the journey in time, with the aim of retracing this family history and providing it with meaning. The main journey, that of Stavros, is obviously one of initiation and maturation: a young boy at the beginning of the film, the protagonist is fascinated with his older Armenian friend Vartan’s dream of emigrating to the United States. Both belong to communities that are, at the beginning of the 20^th century, minorities within the Turkish province of Anatolia: the Greeks and the Armenians. While the former assume, in Stavros’s rebellious eyes, a humiliating attitude of accepting the Turkish dominance (the “Anatolian smile” referred to by one version of the film title), the latter become the target of persecution, soon turned into extermination. Thus, Vartan becomes a victim and is no longer able to escape and fulfill his dream, desperately assumed by young Stavros. Fortunately, his aspirations to leave the village and start a new life coincide with those of his family: his father decides that Stavros should go to Constantinople with all the family goods and start a business there in order to later bring the whole family there. His own dreams go beyond, captured in his obsessive line “America America” (subtly but powerfully reiterated by the musical themes signed by Manos Hadjidakis).[33] As in any initiation, he is at first unprepared to face the trials and becomes soon a victim of swindle and theft. Reduced to poverty after being robbed of all the money and goods given by his family (all their possessions, in fact), the young man tries to gather the necessary amount for the trip to America, while not confessing the defeat to his family. Eventually, after numerous ordeals and setbacks, he seems willing to accept his uncle’s suggestion to marry a rich merchant’s daughter and start a comfortable life in Constantinople. Still, what seems to be the end of his journey, materialized in the domestic paradise described by his future father-in-law, in Stavros’s eyes looks like the abandonment of his dream and a new compromise and subordination like those he had tried to escape. Kazan himself spoke of the “people who swarmed to America at the end of the last century, leaving oppression behind, looking for freedom and the hope of dignity.”[34] Therefore, Stavros’s quest, as it becomes apparent, is not that of wealth and stability but of dignity, and this bears the name of America.

America America simultaneously works as the archetypal immigrant story and a specific coming-of-age saga. We see Stavros undergo the struggles and setbacks present in almost every immigration narrative – poverty, oppression, danger, plain bad luck – the kind of trials which take on a mythical quality. … And yet, there is something in Stavros’ journey which is unique. … Stavros’ desire to immigrate is not simply a reaction to poverty and persecution; it is a burning need at the core of his being. … Stavros remains impressively insensible to any other worldly desires, rejecting the temptation of women, wealth and domesticity.[35]

He would eventually abandon all these temptations and continue his voyage to the United States, although in order to do this, he still has to violate a series of principles of honor[36]: “central to Kazan’s thematic plan was the hunger for dignity and the terrible things people will do to get it.”[37] However, when, as typical of initiation patterns, the hero is born again (“the same initiatory schema – comprising suffering, death, and resurrection (= rebirth) – is found in all mysteries”[38]) when he reaches the Promised land and is baptized under a new name: “Kazan emphasizes what his hero had lost in reaching America, and the scene of his re-baptism by the immigration officer also suggests a merging, at the end, of the qualities of Stavros and those of the much more accepting, more Christian, figure of Hohannes.”[39] This baptism is anticipated by Stavros when he says to Thomna, his fiancée, that “he believes that in America he will be ‘washed clean’.”[40] Before his arrival in the United States, in a context of despair, as Stavros risked being sent back, he reiterates the dance he shared with Vartan before the latter’s death and Stavros’s travel:

Desperate but determined, the two men enact a strange dance, separately and yet in synchronization. To Kazan the two men were like crusaders taking an oath, while the incantation of the phrase ‘America America’ suggests the mystical nature of their defiance, and their projection of their hopes for a different life.[41]

Reminding the audiences of Alexis Zorba’s dance of both happiness and despair, as well as of a “whirling dervish,”[42] Stavros externalizes all his despair and noble aspirations, “the intensity and the ‘madness’ of the quest.”[43]

Conclusions

A major contemporary storyteller, the American cinema has constantly recycled and explicitly or implicitly reactivated classical mythological and religious patterns. The hero’s journey and the initiation rituals associated with it have definitely been some of the most frequently employed such patterns. This quest, with its initiation undertones, was equally important for classical mythologies and rites of passage and has penetrated fiction in both its oral and written forms.

Elia Kazan’s epic intentionally draws on these traditional narrative frameworks, also employing – by way of the myth of the American dream, with reference to the utopian destination – the myth of the earthly paradise as the object of the quest. This magical destination, laden with all the characteristics of utopia, never loses its power of fascination, manifested in the bitter-sweet incantation “America, America” repeated by the protagonist. Following the dramatic journey, the audiences become increasingly aware that this destination is deeply associated with a quest for dignity and self-accomplishment, essentially present in the myth of the American Dream, which focuses on individual fulfilment and the opportunities provided by a meritocratic society. Despite temptations and trials, despite the testimony of a fellow worker on the deceitfulness of this dream for some, Stavros desperately clings to his quest. The classical and mythical patterns are intertwined, in a rich structure, with the modern myth of the American dream, a narrative structure in which music plays a significant merging and enchanting role.

Concerning the hero’s initiation, we might say that the traditional patterns of ritualistic initiation are closely followed: the protagonist leaves the familiar space, faces peril and dangerous characters (some disguised as friends), encounters a mentor, escapes temptations of wealth and love and, eventually, is symbolically reborn when reaching the magical land and kissing the ground beneath his feet: he is baptized with a new name, washing away his sins and loss of innocence, literally receiving a new identity and a new destiny. Moreover, Stavros’s struggle – eventually successful – to bring his entire family to the United States establishes a balance between the ending and the opening lines narrated by Kazan, which speak of the determining role of his uncle’s journey for the destiny and identity of his family. This was a journey that changed more than one destiny, providing the hero with the magical aura of traditional mythological quests and of heroic community saviours.

Works Cited

Braga, Corin, “Paradis terrestre, Millénium et Utopie (II) Trois variantes du ‘lieu parfait’ à la Renaissance,” Transylvanian Review, no. 3, 2008.

Braga, Corin, „Psychoanalytical Geography,” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, no. 7, 2010, pp. 134-149.

Braga, Corin, Du paradis perdu à l’antiutopie aux XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, Ed. Classiques Garnier, 2010.

Campbell, J., The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004 [1949].

Cullen, Jim, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. by Willard Trask, New York: Harcourt Press, 1959.

Fătu-Tutoveanu, Andrada, “The Reversed Odyssey: Identity Construction, Cultural Archetypes and Stereotypes in Contemporary American Cinema. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008),” in Adrian Radu (ed.), Proceedings of the International Conference CONSTRUCTIONS OF IDENTITY (VII), Cluj-Napoca, 24-26 October 2013, Cluj-Napoca, Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, 2014.

Fatu-Tutoveanu, Andrada; Corneliu Pintilescu, “Religious ‘avatars’ and implicit religion: recycling myths and religious patterns within contemporary US popular culture,” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 11.33 (2012), p. 182-205.

Gupte, Samir S., “The Reciprocal Reshaping of the American Dream and American Religion,” Masters of Liberal Studies Thesis, 2011, http://scholarship.rollins.edu/mls/15, accessed on September 28, 2015.

Keller, Florian, Andy Kaufman: Wrestling with the American Dream, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

McNamee, Stephen J., Robert K. Miller, The Meritocracy Myth, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.

Morreale, Joanne, A New Beginning: A Textual Frame Analysis of the Political Campaign Film, Suny Press, 1991.

Neve, Brian, Elia Kazan: The Cinema of an American Outsider, I.B. Tauris, 2009.

Paraschivescu, Mihaela, “‘We the People’ and God. Religion and the Political Discourse in the United States of America,” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 33 (Winter 2012), p. 21-38.

“Revisiting Origins of The American Dream: Elia Kazan’s America, America,” 2012, http://kubrickontheguillotine.com, accessed on September 3, 2015.

Stone, Jon R., “Ritual,” in Eric Michael Mazur (ed.), Encyclopedia of religion and film, Santa Barbara, Calif., ABC-Clio, 2011.

Tedder, Charles, Utopian Discourse: Identity, Ethnicity, and Community in Post-Cold War American Narrative, Ph.D. Thesis, https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/Tedder_uncg_0154D_10384.pdf, accessed on September 29, 2015.

Vieira, Fatima, “The concept of utopia,” in Gregory Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Vogler, Christopher, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, Michael Wiese Productions, 2007 [1998].

Notes

[1] Charles Tedder, Utopian Discourse: Identity, Ethnicity, and Community in Post-Cold War American Narrative, Ph.D. Thesis, https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/Tedder_uncg_0154D_10384.pdf, accessed on September 29, 2015, p. 1.

[2] Fatima Vieira, “The concept of utopia”, in Gregory Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, edited by Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 3.

[3] Ibidem, p. 6.

[4] Ibidem, p. 6.

[5] Joanne Morreale, A New Beginning: A Textual Frame Analysis of the Political Campaign Film, Suny Press, 1991, p. 58.

[6] Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 16.

[7] See Corin Braga, Du paradis perdu à l’antiutopie aux XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, Ed. Classiques Garnier, 2010; Corin Braga, “Psychoanalytical Geography,” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 7(2010), pp. 134-149; Corin Braga, “Paradis terrestre, Millénium et Utopie (II) Trois variantes du ‘lieu parfait’ à la Renaissance,” Transylvanian Review 3 (2008).

[8] Idem, “Psychoanalytical Geography”, pp. 134-149.

[9] Ibidem, p. 141.

[10] Joanne Morreale, op. cit., p. 58.

[11] Florian Keller, Andy Kaufman: Wrestling with the American Dream, Minneapolis & London, University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. xii.

[12] Qtd in Mihaela Paraschivescu, “‘We the People’ and God. Religion and the Political Discourse in the United States of America,” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 33 (Winter 2012), p. 24.

[13] Ibidem, p. 24.

[14] Ibidem, p. 24.

[15] Stephen J. McNamee, Robert K. Miller, The Meritocracy Myth, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, p. 4.

[16] Jim Cullen, op. cit., p. 18.

[17] See Samir S. Gupte, “The Reciprocal Reshaping of the American Dream and American Religion”, Masters of Liberal Studies Thesis, 2011, http://scholarship.rollins.edu/mls/15, accessed on September 28, 2015.

[18] Ibidem.

[19] Stephen J. McNamee, Robert K. Miller, op. cit., p. 1.

[20] Ibidem, pp. 2, 18.

[21] Fragments in this section are based on an article previously published as “The Reversed Odyssey: Identity Construction, Cultural Archetypes and Stereotypes in Contemporary American Cinema. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)”, in Adrian Radu (ed.), Proceedings of the International Conference CONSTRUCTIONS OF IDENTITY (VII), Cluj-Napoca, 24-26 October 2013, Cluj-Napoca, Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, 2014.

[22] Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, Michael Wiese Productions, 2007 [1998], p. 4.

[23] Ibidem, p. 7.

[24] Ibidem, p. 7.

[25] J. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004 [1949], p. 31.

[26] Christopher Vogler, op. cit., p. 14.

[27] Ibidem, p. 15.

[28] Ibidem, p.181.

[29] Jon R. Stone, “Ritual” in Eric Michael Mazur (ed.), Encyclopedia of religion and film, Santa Barbara, ABC-Clio, 2011, p. 369.

[30] Brian Neve, Elia Kazan: the cinema of an American outsider, I.B. Tauris, 2009, p. 150.

[31] Ibidem, p. 153.

[32] Elia Kazan (dir.), America America, Warner Bros., 1963, 174 min.

[33] “Kazan wanted the song to capture the feelings of ‘people who have to leave some place, a place they love and regret leaving, but one which they must now leave behind them forever’”, Neve, 155.

[34] Elia Kazan qtd. in Brian Neve, op. cit., p. 155.

[35] “Revisiting Origins of The American Dream: Elia Kazan’s America, America,” 2012, http://kubrickontheguillotine.com, accessed on September 3, 2015.

[36] Maurice Elia, “America, America d’Elia Kazan : racines”, Séquences: la revue de cinéma, 229 (2004), p. 41.

[37] Brian Neve, op. cit., p. 150.

[38] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. by Willard Trask, New York, Harcourt Press, 1959, p. 196.

[39] Brian Neve, op. cit., p. 151.

[40] Ibidem, p. 158.

[41] Ibidem, p. 152.

[42] Ibidem, p. 152.

[43] Ibidem.