The Times Quotidian

The Red Desert and The Question Concerning Technology
By Rita  Valencia

Even though we don’t realize it, our lives are dominated by industry. And by “industry”, I don’t just mean the factories themselves, but also their products*

The new release by Criterion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert comes at a moment when the ecological crisis that was in its infancy in 1964 has matured into a full blown demon with multiple emanations. All cries to end the blind and ludicrous march toward oblivion that “progress” has become are drowned out by the roar of exploding oil gushers. Optimists may claim that the disasters we are seeing are the result of greed and incompetence. Technology and the science which supports it, they would argue, can also be used to solve our ecological problems and create comfort and edification.

They are all over our houses, made of plastic or materials that, up to a few years ago, were totally unknown. They are brightly colored and they chase after us everywhere. They haunt us from advertisements, which appeal ever more subtly to our psychology, to our subconscious.*

Today I read a fascinating piece in the New York Times about the beneficent use of artificial intelligence in making little critters to keep the company of patients with dementia, A Soft Spot for Circuitry. The discussion of brain science often has the feel of an excited girl telling her friend about a first date. “He showed me how a meditating brain has a different color on a CT scan or pattern of brain waves that looks different from that of a “normal” person!” This brightly colored new technology may some day–well, maybe not prove, but posit–that mind exists as an extra-organic noumenon which is at once nonexistent but detectable and measurable and, most importantly, manipulable. The kind of shallow investigation of the measurable raved about on TED, should never excuse us from questioning the phenomenological issues associated with new science in its marriage with technology. Required viewing certainly includes Antonioni’s Red Desert.

Heidegger, in his essay The Question Concerning Technology (1954), examines the troubling ontology of the industrial and post-industrial age. The essence of technology, as Heidegger explains, is exploitive and utilitarian. Instead of the field being a place where the farmer brings forth the fruit of his labors through tools and toil, the field becomes a natural resource that must be regulated and secured for the production of crops. Heidegger calls this transformed entity “standing reserve”, which assumes a position in a process of ordering and managing, cause and effect, in service of a particular set of human demands. The human becomes a subordinate to the process, and though she never entirely succumbs she also is bound into a play of illusory mastery of, or domination by the system. It is a role Heidegger defines as “enframing”. Heidegger sees dangers in this system of enframing. “The unconcealment in accordance with which nature presents itself as a calculable complex of the effects of forces can indeed permit correct determinations; but precisely through these successes the danger may remain that in the midst of all that is correct the true will withdraw.”

I would go as far as to say that by setting the story for Red Desert in the world of factories, I have got to the source of that crisis that like a river, collects together a thousand tributaries and then bursts out into a delta, overflowing its banks and drowning everything.*

The cries within Red Desert are both eery and plangent, but none articulate so well the danger within technology’s reign as the poetic juxtaposition of the sound (electronically manipulated from site sources) and image of blighted transmogrified environment with the beautiful but hysterical victim of her time, Guiliana, played by Monica Vitti. Vitti, in a performance that is at once mannered and uncannily intense, never stops moving, her nervous fingers scraping at an unseen botherer, her eyes strange and shifty. She wears inappropriately elegant shoes for the grim muddy landscape. She is unable to connect, especially with her would-be lover Corrado, played by the very sultry Richard Harris, in the most indefatigable pursuit of an object of desire ever filmed. Giuliana’s bourgeois life affords little in the way of comforts: her mental condition has deprived her of the pleasures of her rank in society and thrown her into a spiraling downward of misery. She is the sort of character contemporary marketers (or audiences in a marketing-savvy time) would reject as “not relatable”, for she remains aloof and self-involved, brittle and skittish.

The “character” with which she is set in conflict is not any of the humans, but the extraordinary environment which Antonioni has so carefully painted her into: shades of ash torn by shocking hues of red, green and yellow, massive pipes and towers, smokestacks spewing. In a tale reminiscent of one of my favorite scenes from Alice in Wonderland, Antonioni describes a night of painting a hapless stand of pines. or rather ordering a team of workers to do so. He had decided they must be white for just the right effect in the dank fog. It was a bitter cold night, with a stiff wind, and the workers were high up in the trees, clouds of white paint billowing around them, all working to exhaustion, some of the men quitting outright. But Antonioni was indefatigable, and scrupulous in describing a world which is not real, but hyper real. Alas, after the rigors of all night painting, (and his best effort at transforming the stand of pines into “standing reserve” in service of Art), his shot was ultimately ruined. The next morning the sun came out, so that the white-painted trees became black silhouettes against the sky.

The dramatic heart of the film is a strange extended scene where Giuliana and a group of her husband Ugo’s associates and friends, including Corrado, gather in a river-side hut for dinner and a swinger party. Starting with an inane conversation about the aphrodisiac effect of quail eggs, Giuliana takes over, in a forced and awkward display of uncool, a cringe-worthy Italian film version of dancing with a lampshade on her head–sexy but underlaced with anxiety. Just in time to forestall even deeper embarrassment, one of the workers walks in on them, accompanied by a sensual low-caste woman. The two are welcomed with an exchange of bawdy, coarse language, but clearly the mood is ruined.

In the party’s denouement, it comes out that the owner of the hut has sold it to the intruding worker, a fact passed over very lightly. A woman complains of the cold. There is no fuel for the woodburning stove. Someone has the idea of pulling slats from an interior wall and breaking down some furniture. Madness ensues: the cruel gaiety of a mob taking delight in the destruction–of property the bourgeois has already sold to the worker–which therefore, is now worthless. Giuliana has taken part…one of the first and only times we see her happy, or at least, savagely gleeful. This orgy takes the place of the sex that never got off the ground–all of the sexual tension is released as destructive and sadistic violence.

In a pause, the party sees a great ship come to a halt right in front of the hut. It hoists a flag to signal the fact that there is an infectious disease on board. On seeing this, Giuliana becomes hysterical and forces the group to leave. Giuliana exists in a toxic world, but the toxic is far preferable to the septic. Although the others are indifferent to any danger, they follow her out–it is cold and the party a failure anyway–Giuliana drops her purse as she leaves but doesn’t realize it before the group has gotten back to the cars. Her emotional state further devolves as Corrado steps up before her husband to fetch it back, and her emotional outburst in pleading with him not to go becomes an unbearable humiliation. Shown POV of Giuliana: the party guests stand in a fog suspension, their bodies fading and blurring before her. They are at once a mob on the verge of stoning the village outcast or a coven of indifferent gaping strangers, but the unsettling shimmer between these two inflections of their gaze is a moment of pure hell and as perfect a filmed poem of alienation as you’ll ever see. Spiralling down, Giulianna gets in her car, drives off into the fog and stops just short of plunging it into the port. Giuliana has taken the scene as far as she could. She has led the action, from eating the libidinous quail’s eggs to rousting the group from its apathy over the boat’s septic threat, and now an attempted suicide shaking them from emotional torpor.

I think that in the next few years we will see some major violent transformations, both in the physical world and in man’s psyche. The current crises derive from this spiritual confusion, which is also moral, religious and political.*

1964 was the year R.D. Laing published Sanity, Madness, and the Family. In eleven case studies, Laing demonstrates the way in which families will take their most non-adaptive member and create a sort of emotional scapegoat of them, depositing in the “neurotic” (or “psychotic”) all the emotional dysfunction of the family, identifying the member as the sole one with the problems, and thus absolve themselves of any responsibility or need to examine their own behavior. This is a microcosm of the larger process of scapegoatism which Girard examines in Violence and the Sacred. Giulianna the “non-adaptive”, will continue to be in a metaphysical sense the dousing rod for the ecological-industrial travesty around her, resisting the process of enframing by failing to comply with a new normalcy, and yet, remaining capable of carrying the load of poisons that lace her environment, inasmuch as she is incapable of figuring out how to put it down.

Antonioni is not consistent in his remarks about Guiliana: sometimes he says the environment is only a trigger to her emotional breakdown–a suicide attempt that has preceded the timeframe of the film–asserting that the ground had to be fertile for her problems to mushroom as they have. In other statements he claims her neurosis is a product of her failure to adapt to her environment; a failure which he sometimes sees as social dysfunction, other times as ecological malaise, and as well in psychological terms. But the poetic truth of this first-ever film in which ecology and psychology are juxtaposed in a meaningful way is undeniably mysterious and anxious. Yes, Guiliana is non-adaptive, but it seems that if she were to “adapt”, the result would necessarily be cynicism and despair…or self-deluded complacency. In his interviews, Antonioni tries to maintain that he is not against progress, and this film is not by any stretch a moralistic diatribe against industrialization. But one needs to imagine a Giuliana who could accept the brutal beauties that meet her gaze: the fruit (painted) gray on the stand outside the empty shop she hopes in vain to open some day, the dinghy smokestacks spewing poison smoke, the brackish polluted water, the heaps of steaming refuse in vacant lots that resemble a sort of charnel ground. Only a yogi–or an artist–would see such a world as “alive and serviceable”–Antonioni’s adjectives. The question also arises, are the objects of the camera’s gaze a symbolic projection of Giuliana’s psychic malaise? Significantly, not. Antonioni is not interested in symbols, but he is keenly observing a remarkable phase of human endeavor, where the forest is just something that gets in the way of industry, and has no business being there–any more than the difficult and maladaptive Guiliana. This problem of functioning/adapting within a context of the Heideggerian “enframing” becomes even more metaphysical than psychological.

The scene of the giant oil tanker sliding anomalously, monstrously, behind the pathetic stand of pines demonstrates the visceral and unnerving process that enframing engenders; the sea transforming from living waterway (see the new dvd’s extraordinary doc fragment, Gente del Po) to standing reserve–a channel for commercial shipping that is open for exploitation. It follows thematically that Corrado, the reluctant entrepreneur with a surfeit of capital to float, finds a new business potential in the tankers for hauling his freight at low low rates–an inspiration he draws from the anchored ship of contagion outside the orgy hut.

The men who comprise the inner circle of Giuliana’s life are her husband Ugo, her 7-year old son Valerio, and Corrado, her lover. She is as it were, their “standing reserve”; for husband, a duty-bound desirable wife; for son, a serviceable mother even in her madness; and for Corrado, a mysterious challenge and conquest. In woman’s traditional role as caregiver and object of desire, happiness has never been a requirement, any more than a donkey is required to enjoy pulling its cart. It is impossible in the red desert world for love to exist, it can only or cohabit with indifference, demand or exploit. In the interpersonal, there is only the decency of exchange, and human decency is thin when it is unsupported by real compassion or ethics. The story which Giuliana tells her son, or rather which her son wrests from her, is a lyrical respite from the desaturated and raw hues of the red desert world, into a world of pink sands, fleshy rocks, and a sea of clear aquamarine…a wistful, narcissistic idyll, gathered into the bosom of a nurturing Nature. This is a world as limpid and light as the voice singing that emanates from “everything”.

I have to say that the the neurosis I sought to describe is above all a matter of adjusting.*

Corrado, after a decent amount of time stalking Giuliana in his polite and patient way, ultimately rapes her. Yes, she shows up at his hotel room, but Giuliana is incapable of wholeheartedly giving herself over to anything as simple as going to bed with a man–and indeed going to bed with a man is anything but simple given the state of things, the hidden dangers, the unspoken cries, the surrender of ego to strange and possibly alien forces. She says she wishes for a circle of people who love her to form a protective wall around her…and then…her limbs twist and fold away from Corrado at odd angles…she jumps out of the bed and must be brought back, again and again. He is never really cruel, but relentless and insentient, as he goes about stripping her and folding her into compliance. Would he be any less so if she were more complicit in his goal?

“The essential unfolding of technology threatens…that all revealing with be consumed in ordering, and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealment of standing reserve.” —Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” Heidegger is speaking of technology not as the “machines” that ease, and increasingly define, our lives but the Machine that is in manifold ways pressing us into its service as it refuses to show its aims, its ends or its face–a fact Heidegger sees as the “machines” with a lower case m but the Machine that is in manifold ways pressing us into its service as it refuses to be show its aims, its ends or its face—which Heidegger sees as a great danger and one which is only to be defused by art and the questions it poses. The Red Desert is truly an answer to this call, with its sad forest of skinny pines, beings of a ghostly realm; where sailing ships linger and the yellow clouds no longer kill the little birds who now know to avoid them.

But before getting carried too away with the poetry of it all, follow this link…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/7862914/Shakespeare-plays-help-boost-cows-milk-production.html

*Michaelangelo Antonioni’s quotes from the interview with Jean-Luc Godard published in Cahiers du Cinema 160, Nov 1964

A Prophet (Un prophète), 2009, a film by Jacques Audiard
By Guy Zimmerman

…in time it would come: the killer instinct
unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.

Beowulf —  Trans: Seamus Heaney

A culture like ours, rooted in the worship of a man whose hands and feet have been nailed to beams of wood, should be open to possible links between violence and the sacred. And yet in recommending A Prophet (Un prophète), the prison noir by Jacques Audiard that won the Palme D’Or at Cannes last year, I feel compelled to warn you about scenes of violence in the film. A Prophet is not a movie for the faint of heart. But part of what’s refreshing about the film is how it treats human violence with depth and integrity, rewarding our attention with some valuable insights.

There’s a premeditated murder early in A Prophet that is particularly harrowing. The protagonist, Malik, a prisoner of French-Arab descent, visits the cell of another Arab prisoner, an informant named Reyeb, for a sexual exchange. Malik arrives with a disposable razor blade concealed in his mouth and we have seen him coached by members of the Corsican mob on how to transfer this razor to his teeth, where it can be used to sever Reyeb’s jugular vein. Malik himself will surely be killed if he fails in his mission, and his visceral fear of the Corsicans overrides any compassion for his victim, whom he scarcely knows. The murder when it comes is brutal and messy, but Audiard has also given it the disturbing intimacy of a sacrificial rite.  As James Joyce famously wrote about the tragic effect, pity and terror here combine to “arrest” our minds, uniting them with the sufferer, but also with the secret cause of the suffering.

In many ways the subject of the film is the odd intimacy that now develops between Malik and his victim. As the story unfurls, Reyeb returns in ghostly form, seeming to confer almost magical powers on the forlorn Malik. Malik begins to display remarkable talents as he navigates the power structure of the prison. Tutored by the Corsican gangster in charge of things, Malik forges alliances with Arab gangs on the outside. After a second spasm of violence, he takes control of the entire enterprise.

Violence on screen, or in any other art form, is upsetting. Adrenalin flows, our breathing turns shallow. It’s impossible to argue with people who don’t embrace to such material…unless it’s a pretext for a more general philistinism. From Homer to Sarah Kane, great art tends to wound us in one way or another. Moreover, our staggering gift for violence is perhaps our defining feature as a species, so it’s hard to know what is being served by avoiding its representation in art. If executed effectively and with integrity, depictions of violence offer glimpses of mysteries that return us to our lives in a more vital and urgent way. In scenes throughout A Prophet, the camera hovers close to Malik as he ponders such mysteries, as do we, rooted to our seats in the movie theater.

This unnerving dimension of human violence, has been explored in depth by the French cultural anthropologist Rene Girard. The author of the seminal Violence and the Sacred, Girard does not flinch from large ideas. His central thesis is that at a certain stage in their development all human communities faced an impending apocalypse of inter-clan violence, and that this blood feud is the terrifying monster vanquished symbolically in every myth (see the Beowulf quote above). Salvation arrived in the scapegoat mechanism, the sacrifice of the Pharmakos in Athens, for example, who would then be worshiped for his very real contribution to the survival of the community. So violent are we as a species, Girard believes, that those cultures which failed to stumble upon the scapegoat mechanism were wiped out in a storm of contagious tit-for-tat killings – the depravity of Rwanda or Bosnia played out to the bitter end.

It would take a very long post to unpack all the evidence Girard marshals and all the implications of his thesis. To Girard our violence is “mimetic,” by which he means it springs from competition for social roles, which are inherently plastic and adoptable. For me, given my engagement with Buddhist thinking, what’s interesting is how mimetic violence relates to the concept of “emptiness.” It is precisely because we lack any intrinsic, enduring form that, in the grip of dualism, we resort to imitation – mimesis. In contrast to our nagging sense of groundlessness, the Other appears fixed and solid. Secretly craving these qualities we seek to become “original” copies of the Other…which can only happen if the Other is eliminated in the process. We find the Oedipal relationship, in which the son seeks to copy and replace the father, so revealing, not because it is special, but because the tangled dynamic of mimesis becomes clearer when lit up by the primal energies of close family bonds.

Paradoxically, aggressive acts temporarily seem to deliver the solidity longed for by the egoic self, and this makes violence as contagious as small pox. Imagine me striking someone you love and feel how definite you become, how liberated from free-floating anxiety. The anger that runs through you is an entirely negative experience perhaps, but you are certainly free from feelings of “lack” or self-doubt. In the grip of anger we truly do become mirror images, replicas, of each other, and our public world becomes a nightmarish echo chamber of reciprocal violence. The mechanism of sacrifice ends the Hobbesian “war of all against all” as the violence is directed at the scapegoat. By common agreement the blood feud is buried with the victim, who is then worshiped as a god, becoming the lynch pin of all culture and myth. But the peace that descends is only temporary, and the seeds of mimetic violence will sprout again.

Certainly, anyone who has spent time working in the dramatic arts recognizes the significance of mimesis and the plasticity of the self, and all tragic dramas are rooted in sacrificial rites. But in Girard’s view social hierarchy in general arises out of the initial, hidden sacrifice. Even the competitive mimesis of the market economy – in which every new product is instantly cloned – is a distant, sublimated echo of the mimetic violence percolating underneath. And whenever we come to resemble each other too closely – when income inequality levels out, for example – the old atavistic anxieties begin to stir. Opponents of the death penalty, for example, miss how the leveling of incomes during the 1970s caused alarm among the defenders of social hierarchy. As recent governors of Texas seem to understand, erroneous executions are to be secretly celebrated; the more innocent the victim the more the execution will function like an actual sacrifice, buttressing the forces of social hierarchy.

There’s much more. The essential narrative of the Old Testament, according to Girard, is the story of the scapegoat mechanism held in abeyance. Abraham comes close to sacrificing Isaac…but then holds back. Joseph’s brothers’ turn him into a scapegoat…but he survives. With Jesus, however, we arrive at the return of the scapegoat mechanism in classic form. In Girard’s view the final lament of Jesus was that with his own sacrifice our bond with violence would only be buried, not broken. The aggression remained, sublimated in the various forms of culture, ready to continue its destructive magic out of view. Seen in this way, the idea that a second reckoning would surely arrive was more the product of clear thinking than prophecy. To survive, Girard suggests, the species must finally and completely shed its bond with violence – both greed and aggression – in its direct and in its sublimated forms.

While Girard may be extravagant in the claims he makes for his ideas, it’s hard to see where he really goes wrong. One reason the issue of mimetic violence is so hard to illuminate is that those who come to understand it directly, like Malik in A Prophet, are rendered mute by what they have experienced. The murderer exists apart, on the other side of language. Whether you define their difference as a form of spiritual insight or as a moral disfigurement, they speak in riddles or remain silent. From Macbeth on the battlements to Raskolnikov on the crowded streets of St. Petersburg, the killer is drawn into the heart of things to his ultimate peril. The genius of A Prophet is how it shows this dynamic operating in a vehicle as unlikely as Malik, an everyman who seems empowered solely by his bond with the would-be lover he murders.

Depictions of violence in art beg the question: what cherished self images are we willing to forgo in order to lessen the actual suffering we are causing? No doubt we would prefer to forget our own shadow material, which today gets played out, not in primal blood feuds, but in gushers of black oil flooding the waters of the Gulf. From a Buddhist perspective, our ultimate opponent is not aggression or greed but ignorance. Artists examine human violence in order to illuminate the Darwinian habits that also explain our current success as a species. But the violence cultivated by the imperatives of natural selection is now a limiting factor when it comes to our continued survival. Evolution itself now calls on us to break our hidden bonds with violence. A first step, perhaps, is to draw them into the light and look at them with an unflinching eye.

Bigger Than Life (1956), directed by Nicholas Ray
Re-released by The Criterion Collection on DVD and Blu-ray disc
by Rita Valencia

“When a friendly, successful suburban teacher and father (James Mason) is prescribed cortisone for a painful, possibly fatal affliction, he grows dangerously addicted to the experimental drug, resulting in his transformation into a psychotic and ultimately violent household despot.” (IMDb.com)

The word normal is of relatively recent origin, coming into usage in 1828 to mean “conforming to common standards.” The notion of a such a thing as a common standard to which behavior conforms is so deeply ingrained in us that it resists analysis, and yet, it is a uniquely contingent idea, falling apart with the least pressure. In the course of a day, one can move from home to school or work, to recreation, to cultural or religious activities and cross through different zones of “normalcy” where entirely different sets of behavior are expected. The fact that it was 1828 before this word became part of the vernacular hints at its scientistic origins, in new sociologies and psychologies that measured, tested and categorized human behavior. The concept of normal appears to be deeply connected to systems of social control and to rationalism, although the latter connection is ironic, for normative behavior is culturally determined and based on a subtle web of largely irrational behavioral cues which go mostly unstated (and thus elude people with maladies such as autism or schizophrenia). People are said to be behaving “rationally” when they are acting in a normal way, and so the “rational” conflates with the conventional, and meaning quickly evaporates as the actual agenda for normality emerges: social control. Intrinsic to the concept of normality is the silence of fear, anxiety and dread–hidden, but badly.

Nicholas Ray, in his 1956 melodrama “Bigger Than Life“, creates a mythical normality, infused with reason and rationality, as a frame for a tale about the descent into madness and disorder. If his characters were any more “normal” they would become self-parodies; as it is, my fascination with this artifact of the 50’s lies with its creepy flatness and lack of any UNexplainable behaviors or feelings. Once his illness is diagnosed and his pharmaceuticals dispensed by the gravely rational doctors–the heirophants of this terrifying order–the madness that overtakes James Mason is an entirely sensible plot development. Although Mason’s behavior is aberrational, there is no mystery as to its origins in the demands of a normal life, where he has to work two jobs to make ends meet, and breaks down physically under the pressure. It seems that the appearance of normalcy entails social and economic dysfunction, although the larger implications of this dimension of the story go unexplored in favor of lingering in a domestic terrain of almost bloodless virtue. (An interesting quote of Ray from another project, “It’s not blood, it’s red”.)

Ray’s zone of normality in Bigger Than Life is a protean handiwork of veneers and signs, a clinically perfect film vocabulary, much admired by Godard and other New Wave directors. The coming darkness of Mason’s breakdown is presaged by a scene in which Mason follows his wife through the rooms of their home turning out lights on her. She is angry and suspicious of him because of his unexplained absences (which of course have an innocent explanation), but he is oblivious to her feelings in his desire to seduce her–a scene which Mason masterfully infuses with subtle menace. Sometimes Ray’s use of symbolism is clumsily overt, as the bathroom mirror which Barbara Rush breaks in a fit of pique over her husband’s irascibility, followed by a camera angle of his face in the cracked shards. More successful are the architectural details. The house is small, and movement is tight, especially around the water heater, standing in the passage from kitchen to dining room; an anomalous, intentional, eyesore, streaming drips of rust from its cap. The ugliness of this object is a silent marker of a family in economic stress. Color is a character: red in Bigger Than Life is a sumptuous visual sign pointing the way to the madness that unfolds. In the opening scene, a cascade of children coming out of the school where Mason teaches are spattered with red articles of clothing. Mason develops a taste for red during his spree of psychosis, insisting that Barbara Rush pour herself into in a stunning Dior party dress, hardly the thing to wear to church, though it makes for a brilliant image.

The neat equivalencies between symbol and symbolized is steadfast, and although sometimes dull (a word which emerges from the generally aseptic dialogue along with the famous, all-time-great line “God was wrong”) it creates a compelling unity of style and content. There are moments in this film which quickly graduate to a sort of postmodern fever dream. The most notable is when James Mason, emerging from a psychotic crisis where he has fancied himself the Biblical Abraham about to slay his son, wakes from his delirium and he claims to have seen Abraham Lincoln. Then, with his family close, he recalls which Abraham he is actually talking about, and remembers the horror he came so close to perpetrating. Conflating of a Biblical figure of such intense gravity as Abraham with the patriotic icon of Lincoln, our own American saint, could only have occurred to the minds of successful Hollywood screenwriters engaged in a rare moment of free association. (Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum wrote story and screenplay, with several others “uncredited” including Clifford Odets and James Mason himself). The staunch rationalism of this mythic story serves to define the ethos of its era and simultaneously, with its curiously disturbing message about how easily the nuclear family can devolve to mayhem and madness, belies the dull verities of “normal” society’s values. The great irony here is how normality, which is the moral determinant of all action in this film, is subverted by delusional promises of science (pharmacology in this case) and by a madness so clearly driven by socioeconomic distress. Given the inevitable ramifications of the psychosis portrayed here, the neat conclusion of this film is uniquely unbelievable. The nuclear family of the post-war decade, along with its the normality myths, would ultimately prove fragile, delicate and filmy as the celluloid on which Bigger Than Life was exposed.

Hidden in Plain Sight
by Guy Zimmerman

Revolutionary Road is a film centered around the emotional state referred to in Buddhist literature as “lack.” Leonardo DiCaprio, working with Kate Winslet and director Sam Mendes, made Revolutionary Road as an homage to the novel of the same name by Richard Yates. Showing the same restraint the Coen brothers brought to the filming of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, the makers of Revolutionary Road get out of the way and let Yates’ text have it’s say. And, again like No Country, Revolutionary Road concludes in an enigmatic way that indicates the presence of a rich vein of meaning.

Set in the stratified social hierarchy of 1950s America, the story begins as Frank and April Wheeler move into a new home on Revolutionary Road in suburban Connecticut. Already the Wheelers are afflicted by a nameless malaise; behind the breezy, self-confidant banter, lack casts its corrosive shadow. Ready to seize the day, April pleads with her husband to move to Paris and pursue his literary calling. Frank agrees initially, then balks at the last minute, choosing instead to climb the corporate ladder at his firm, which is devoted to the selling of business machines. Cycling through episodes of rebellion and self denial, April spirals down until one day Frank arrives home to find medics out front and a pool of blood in the middle of his living room. On foot he races for the hospital, the camera tracking with him as he runs through the placid streets, arriving just in time to hear news of April’s death. We are given a glimpse of Frank  some months later sitting in mute incomprehension on a park bench in Manhattan where he has moved with his children. The film then veers off, returning to Revolutionary Road where the Wheeler’s realtor, Helen Giving (played by Kathy Bates), is showing their former home to a new pair of up-and-comers. Later that night, Helen gossips unmercifully about Frank and April to her husband Howard. The camera moves in slowly as Howard, a peripheral character up to now, reaches down and slowly turns the volume on his hearing aid down to zero. Through his eyes we watch as Helen’s lack-infused slander is slowly engulfed by the deep silence that underlies the false solidity of this world.

I happened to be reading David Loy’s A Buddhist History of the West when I saw Revolutionary Road and I realized that the novel’s central focus is the feeling of lack that Loy views as a defining feature of our collective life, the Rosetta Stone of Western history. You can think of lack as original sin if you want to be pre-modern about it; or you can adopt Marxist terminology and call it alienation; or free-floating anxiety if you’re a psycho-analytically inclined. In Loy’s view, this sense of lack is linked to our fundamental groundlessness in the world, and our inability to make peace with that groundlessness. Contact with other people only fuels the emotion. From the outside others seem so effortlessly rooted in the specific, so solid and grounded, that we fear we alone are deficient. For some the resultant feeling of lack is a nagging doubt, for others a consuming fire, but we all suffer from it to one degree or another, and our history of domination and social inequity can be viewed as an expression of lack.

Richard Yates, the author of Revolutionary Road, was no stranger to suffering. The product of a broken home, Yates struggled all his life with alcoholism, isolation and marital difficulties. His burnished, understated realism delivers knowledge earned the hard way, breath by breath, face pressed hard into the rough surfaces of experience. A Yates sentence feels as though it has been dragged shining out of a crucible where each moment has been reduced to molten silver searing to the touch. If you want to understand lack and what to do with it, read Trungpa, Pima Chodron or Stephen Batchelor. If you want to experience it directly, read Revolutionary Road, or, if time is short, rent the movie.

The image of poor Frank Wheeler on his blind run toward the hospital came to my mind a month ago. Driving home from delivering my daughter to school I got a call from my wife. The results of the fine needle aspirant, she told me, indicated that the lump beneath her ear was malignant rather than benign. Blood pounding in my ears I drove fast along side routes through the burnished, sunlit world to get home faster. I felt as if a large hand had taken hold of a branch of my nervous system and given it a good strong yank. Neurons entangled during the twenty years we have shared experience with each other were being pulled apart emitting bursts and tiny screams of light. All my self-centered ambitions, my trespasses and infidelities large and small, my many imagined glories, shames and failings seemed to trail behind my speeding mini-van – the meaningless streamers and confetti of the ego. There is no safety for us in this world.

In such times I give thanks for the various awareness and asana practices that help me stay open and present in the face of fear and despair. I’m fortunate to live in a time and place where the fruit of the great Asian wisdom traditions are readily available, often in a pragmatic, practice-based form that has been distilled by capable Western-born teachers. In January, for example, I was listening to a series of pod casts the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod gave recently as he worked out a new translation of the Ganges Mahamudra. This is the song the great 11th century renunciate Tilopa delivered to the scholar Naropa after suitable period of instructional abuse. One section of McLeod’s presentation in particular had a powerful impact on me, and the sense of stability and peace has continued to unfold through the stressful weeks since Jenny’s cancer was diagnosed.

But I also give thanks for a tradition that is equally transformational in its dogged way, an awareness lineage so secret it remains unrecognized even by itself. I’m talking about the tradition of modern art and literature as it has unfolded in protest against our prevailing materialism since the end of the 18th century. While the Ganges Mahamudra has been a source of strength in crisis, for example, the story Errand by Raymond Carver has also been coming to mind. The most beautiful description of dying I can think of, Errand recounts the final moments of Anton Chekhov’s death at the age of forty-two of tuberculosis. Carver wrote the story while he himself was dying of lung cancer. Like nothing else I know Errand captures the sense presence and ease in the face of whatever is arising that is the aim of mahamudra practice. To stay open and entirely present, at ease, even as death approaches is to give life its proper due.

It would not be so difficult for me to compose a list of eighty-four literary and artistic masters to hang alongside the traditional depictions of the eighty-four Mahasiddahs of the tantric traditions. Kafka and Beckett would be on that list, no doubt. Proust and Joyce would be included. Duchamp and Van Gogh. Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Milosz and Celan. Rilke, certainly. Juan Rulfo, Harold Pinter, Isaac Babel, Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Bernhard. Raymond Carver, Richard Yates…I could go on (and on) and so, probably, could you. It’s easy to forget how radical the Romantics were, Byron and Keats in England, Holderlin and Novalis in Germany – these artists were filling a gap that had opened in the West when the Industrial Age began. Bereft of a viable means of engaging with Being via religion we developed a new mode of making art, a mode oriented toward forging new paths to the open ground of experience. Confronting an essential vulnerability, these pioneers opened new doorways into Being. There we can find timelessness and joy, which are the experiences lack can open into if worked with correctly.

There are times when I believe this movement reached its conclusion in the 1970s with Burroughs, Warhol and Ashberry. Now, as this new mode of Being percolates out into the population (we’re all artists today), the role of art itself moves around again in the Classical direction. In a world full of YouTube-auteurs simple skill – craft – becomes again a relief. Be that as it may, I want to close with the image of Frank Wheeler on his park bench in Manhattan. Devastated by the sudden loss of the familiar emotional coordinates of his life, he is unable to recognize himself in the luminosity that surrounds him. What he needs at that moment is an eloquent and convincing bodhisatva …or at least a good novel to point out where to look, how to stay open.

The White Ribbon (DAS WEISSE BAND ), 2009, a film by Michael Haneke
By Rita Valencia

The White Ribbon, the award-winning new film from Michael Haneke, is sub-titled A Children’s Story. The children of a small village in Northern Germany are at the heart of this film. Haneke contemplates the process of evil’s origination in the raising of these children, a process that requires the repression of all joy and openness and the nurturance of fear and loathing. The titular white ribbon is tied onto Klara and Martin, two young teens, by their father, the town Pastor, who explains that the ribbon serves to bind them to innocence and purity. Of course that is a lie, just as the quiescence and purity of the village is an illusion that conceals horrors. The cruelty shown the children is normative behavior in the village’s rigidly patriarchal, feudal environment. The placid town slumbers, its resentment and fear festering, as we know full well that its reawakening will be in the Third Reich: the village children are the generation that will form the backbone of Nazi Germany. From one languorous and bleak scene to the next, the psychopathology of fascism unfolds, with methodical precision. The breaks of sweetness, a romance between the town schoolteacher and the nanny of the town’s manor house, only serve to heighten the contrasting gloom and cruelty. Haneke drops into this setting several unsolved and seemingly random crimes and fatal accidents, from which a mysterious horror hangs in the air like a tasteless and odorless poison.

A group of village children march in step on what they claim is a kind-hearted mission to see Anna, a girl whose father (the town doctor) has been injured in a riding accident. On its face the spectacle of the girls walking in unison is a bit somber, but innocent enough–still there is an unsettlingly sadistic shading to their mission. Anna’s father had fallen victim to a deliberately strung wire that tripped his horse. Are the children really on a visit of good will, or are they returning to the scene of a crime? Later, the same children are seen being severely reprimanded at dinner for being out too late. Their father, the town’s pastor, announces he will beat them all on the very next day, a form of sadism which I only hope is rare these days (my Italian mother used to tell me with great disdain that only cold-blooded Germans allotted time between the sentencing and the execution of punishment, and boasted that Italians believed in beating their children only in the heat of anger!!) The horrific anticipation drives one of the young victims to a suicide attempt. Some time after the pastor canes his children, the child of the town patriarch is found half dead and half naked, having been served up an uncannily similar beating. More incidents follow, all of them seeming to make a certain sense, but blame is never fixed, and despite the lumpen attempts of an outside police force to solve the crimes, no single culprit ever emerges. The townspeople are frozen in silence.

In an extraordinary scene, the town’s schoolteacher, an innocent man who is an “outsider” from a neighboring village, and therefore out of reach of the psychic oppression that rules these folks, confides certain suspicions to the Pastor, bits of evidence that imply the Pastor’s own children may have something to do with the crimes. Of course, the Pastor becomes enraged and threatens the schoolteacher with ruin. But nothing ever happens. The final sealing over of the mystery occurs when the housekeeper of the doctor claims that she knows who is responsible for the crimes. She rides off on a bicycle to tell the police, and we never hear from her again.

This unwillingness to investigate, to purge, to accuse, to “bring to justice” represents a collusion of the oppressor and the oppressed–and here is the real mystery that Haneke presents to us: why this silence? The core thesis of The White Ribbon, and the reason for Haneke leaving unsolved the crimes of his allegorical village, is all about the human desire to remain sleeping, to resist the psychic rupture that truth threatens, to resist change even when the habits and practices that bind us produce illness and misery for ourselves, our loved ones and our children. The people of Haneke’s village will slumber on, through dreams, through nightmares, through self delusion (the Pastor really believes he loves his children). The political, economic and social repression so imbue the personal realm that individuals are immobilized in a sleep-like passivity, that is, until “the reawakening”, that age-old tragedy of Oedipus, finding the remains of crimes scattered about in so many open graves. The themes that Haneke opens up in The White Ribbon may apply pointedly to the process of fascism, but are deeply resonant wherever a culture of concealment and repression buries the hope of significant social or personal change in falsehoods, trivialities and distractions.

[Academy Award nominations for Best Foreign Language Film & Cinematography--Christian Berger]

Rape and Murder
by Nancy Cantwell

Last Year at Marienbad is first and foremost about persuasion. Can X (Giorgio Albertazzi) convince A (Delphine Seyrig) that indeed they had an affair last year, persuade her to abandon her husband and depart, forever his? Does he make his argument by supplanting her memory or by coercion? Is this love or conquest? The audience must decide if the premise of a brief encounter followed by a promise to return is real or imagined. The characters have no inner voice, no motivation and no history beyond the walls of the decadent facades of the hotel or the confines of the all too formal gardens upon which to base conclusions. Screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet states, “…it deals with a reality which the hero creates out of his own vision his own words. And if his persistence, his secret conviction, finally prevail, they do so among a perfect labyrinth of false trains, variants, failures and repetitions!”

Dark forces are at work and because of the deliberate non-linear dramatic structure one is drawn to make conclusions about the sub or unconscious at play. In Marienbad, false and true, past and present all conspire to conceal the present tense from X, A and M (Sasha Pitöeff). Where there are gaps, obscured regions of memory, does the mind fill in the void with fodder of its own, does the seducer implant a convenient past or as Robbe-Grillet suggests, “They are imaginings: an imagining, if it is vivid enough, is always in the present.”?

Imaginings of rape and murder drive Marienbad to its crescendo. Chanel dresses Delphine Seyrig, in a most spectacular feathered robe, for both ill fated scenarios. It is here that X is at the height of his construct. Murdered first, shot by her husband, A lies in a variety of melodramatic repose. Then, in an abrupt reversal of theory she is resurrected. X:  “…No, this isn’t the right ending…I must have you alive…”. The motif of violation persists and next turns to ravishment. In the original script Robbe-Grillet calls for a “Rather swift and brutal rape scene.”, but Resnais was more inclined to shoot an implied altercation. A simply recoils in horror at the encroaching X, and, as imaginings are wont to do, our protagonist again retracts his savage conjecture . X: “No, no, no! (violently:) That’s wrong… (calmer:) It wasn’t by force…Remember…”.

Because the characters have no internal psychology there is a frustration as the viewer tries to determine whether the violence is a repressed memory or delusion. And our customary desire to cast moral judgment upon rape and murder is stunted by a constant shift in frame of reference. We are destabilized in the normal perception of violence, left with mere possibilities to comprehend. Neutralized, murder and rape become devices that reflect more upon themselves than act as offerings to help us decipher character motivation or plot outcome.

So intended Robbe-Grillet. His vision was based on the ability of a cinematic media whose “essential characteristic of the image is its present-ness.” Mareinbad gives us an opportunity to experience a cinema that  “by its very nature, what we see on the screen is in the act of happening, we are given the gesture itself, not the account of it.” Our instinctual efforts to “try to reconstitute some Cartesian scheme” run into roadblocks and prevent us from coming to terms with a cinema of pure subjectivities. For Robbe-Grillet, ready made psychologies made for clumsy systems of interpretation which “machine made fiction or films grind out ad nauseam, and are the worst kind of abstractions.”

Little Black Dresses
by Nancy Cantwell

The Little Black Dress is a Coco Chanel invention. First produced in 1926 Vogue claimed it to be the ” Ford” of fashion, “The frock that all the world will wear.” The long-sleeved black dress, which was initially made for day in wool, and for evening in crepe, satin or velvet, shook up the world of fashion. It became instantly synonymous as an essential chic component of any stylish woman’s wardrobe. One of the early adapters of the LBD was Betty Boop who, in the classic 1932 Minnie the Moocher, sexed it up with sashay and a little black garter. And that is the beauty of the LBD, it’s simplicity and elegance make it the perfect backdrop for accessory, whether it be copious strands of pearls, daring diamond drops or a cultivated Hoochie coochie stroll.

Last Year at Marienbad is filled with LBD’s. In fact the LBD seems to have a character of its own. Alain Resnais styled much of A’s look (played by Delphine Seyrig) after the Louise Brooks’s character Lulu in the 1929 Georg Wilhelm Pabst film Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora). Lulu was lurid and sensationally modern. Seyrig’s look mirrors that sensibility, but Resnais adds a formal, deliberate and poised styling to meet his ends. The hair and maquillage are Gothic, enigmatic and decadent. But behind or below it all is the Chanel Little Black Dress.

There are four distinct LBD’s that A wears and if you follow them closely you can also unwind some of the time shifts that take place throughout Marienbad. Because there is no continuity in time or place, the script girl, Sylvette Baudrot, with whom Resnais continues to work with to this day, had a graph made that resembled an algorithm to track present, past and imaginary time. Costume continuity, while not driven by plot narrative needed to be meticulously recorded as ensemble changes in many scenes were shot months apart. One must remember that Alain Robbe-Grillet has obfuscation built into the screenplay of Marienbad. It is disorienting by design.

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY and THE INFORMANT!
By Rita Valencia

And again I say to you: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 19:24
________

When assuring your friend you aren’t lying say:
“Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye”

One of the common strategies of the contemporary “issue film” is to lull the audience into the comfortable state where it is assured it will not be hearing anything it does not already know. I tried to figure out why Mr. Moore sub-titled his movie “a love story” and my best guess is that he’s referring to this pleasure zone of agreement. His movie is ideological porn, where your righteously progressive opinions are massaged and amplified, and all you need to do is sit there and nod vigorously. In Moore’s Manichean universe there exist the evil rich perpetrators and the innocent poor victims, helpless and wronged–and Moore’s narration in case we don’t get it. He even enlists the aid of Catholic clerics he’s recruited to weigh in on the right side of good and evil (he finds two who condemn capitalism)…a welcome relief from the lurid tales of sex abuse with which OTHER documentaries have regaled us.

There are a number of interesting threads that start, then unravel. Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech a few brief months before his death on the need for a new Bill of Rights which would assure all citizens the right to health care, a decent home, and a good education. There is no follow through to this story. According to Moore’s fast, loose history, the Roosevelt era progressivism of America starts to decline with the advent of Reagan. The efforts to destroy Roosevelt policies started well before Reagan, but Moore evidently had a happy childhood and wasn’t aware of any problems in the late 50’s/early 60’s. His parents could afford vacations, as, he thinks, all working class people did. Yup.

Moore does a sort of historical hopscotch, a chart here, a graph there, Katrina, the foreclosure epidemic, the growing gap between rich and poor, the Great Bailout of 2008, where Moore shows just how there is indeed a sort of Illuminati that control this nation’s economy. (Ohio 9th District Rep. Marcy Kaptur does a star turn as one who balked at the strong arm tactics, heroine of an opposition that was pre-destined to be plowed under.)

It turns out many publicly traded companies buy life insurance policies on their employees, with themselves as beneficiaries. Check www.deadpeasants.biz. “Dead peasants”, a Gogolian concept which has been reinvented by corporate America, is perfectly legal, but ethically appaling. Moore tells the horror story of an ex-Wal-Mart employee who dies of an asthma attack, leaving her family destitute, while Wal-Mart collects a hefty sum in life insurance. This case was particularly shocking because the woman had not worked for a couple of years, and her family was dead broke, but this policy still paid out a hefty sum to Wal-Mart.

A critical mass of this sort of vignette would really make for a fascinating film, but there isn’t. Instead we get the familiar Michael Moore set pieces where he confronts security guards and is escorted from the premises. He rolls out a spool of crime scene tape around a bank building–embarrassing to us but not to him. This not an essay film, it is a screed: too much of the burbling Moore and too little about deregulation, deteriorating public education, lobbyists–and nothing about media consolidation–all essential plot points in any story about Late Capitalism.

Yet another essential plot point in any story of Late Capitalism is the endemic criminality and everyday deceit of our corporate institutions. Millions of people are employed by these megaliths like ADM, Citibank, Dupont, Proctor and Gamble, Xerox–companies that have their moral compass set the polar opposite of the ethics we learn in kindergarten or Sunday School. Compliantly their minions labor along, ignorant for the most part of what the masters of their little universe may be plotting… that is until reality snaps shut and the job disappears, the pension is stolen, the health insurance is withdrawn, fields can only grow corn if anything at all, and the mortgage is in foreclosure.

Steven Soderbergh’s skillful allegory, The Informant!, takes us inside the world of corporate masters, conducting an incisive exploration of the mind of one of non-fiction’s strangest characters, Mark Whitacre, the whistle blower of the 90’s who managed to put execs from Archer Daniels Midland behind bars for price fixing, but himself got busted for massive embezzlement. The man was a pathological liar, to use a psychiatric term completely alien to the spirit of the film. In the world Soderbergh weaves for us, Whitacre is uncannily like us, with his unceasing monkey mind and his facade of normality which lures everyone into the illusion that their lives are real.

The title role is played by Matt Damon, wearing a prosthetic nose and gut, melting entirely into the Whitacre character, a man who himself melted into corporate culture like margarine on Wonder Bread. The Informant is a story told in sideways fashion, incidentally, as an afterthought interspersed between hilarious and random internal monologue. Damon deadpans his absurdist voiceover patter: lines like “I read this thing about mustaches on the flight back from Zurich…What facial hair says about a man’s level of honesty. Some psychological theory ” or, “It’s not really lying when you’re doing it to serve some greater purpose…I think that’s what God would say “… “Porscha or Porsch–I’ve heard it both ways. Three years in Germany–I should know that”.

Before long you realize you have watched the incredible disintegration of a man’s life and, by the way, a corporate cover blown wide open, then sealing itself right back over. Whitacre’s disintegration reveals much about why our culture is degenerating, without ever saying anything. It lays cards on the table and then matter-of-factly wipes them back up again. Bloodlessly, it describes a most horrific horror, one that is easy and pleasant to watch and one that shows why everything happens as it does in the Moore film, but without need for explanation, only the post-Faulknerian patter of a moral imbecile, signifying literally nothing. Marvin Hamlisch’s score is brilliant, and Soderbergh positions the camera as beautifully as he conceals his rage.

Chanel Redressed
Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais France 1961 94 minutes Black and White 2.35:1
by Nancy Cantwell

Much has been said about Last Year at Marienbad and so little of it has to do with the sensational costume designs of Coco Chanel. Has no one noticed just how well paired Chanel and Resnais, were or more to the point, what a dramatic backdrop Marienbad provides for Chanel couture? Chanel was no stranger to the film industry, but it had 22 years since her last employ at costume design and Marienbad. In 1931, as the behest of Samuel Goldwyn, Chanel came to Hollywood twice a year to design for the actresses Goldwyn had on contract with his studio, he would pay her one million dollars per year. She created the costumes for a forgettable Jean Harlow film called Palmy Days and for a Gloria Swanson box office disaster called Tonight or Never. The third film which featured her costumes was called The Greeks Had a Word for It, directed by Lowell Sherman, 1932, which was a huge success starring Ina Claire, Joan Blondell, and Madge Evans.* While these last two films were still in post-production Chanel, disillusioned with Hollywood, returns to Paris to tend her couture business flailing in the midst of The Depression. In 1937 she collaborates with long time friend Jean Cocteau for his plays Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde and Oedipus Rex and continues with theatrical costume designs in early French cinema classics including Port of Shadows, directed by Marcel Carne, 1938, and Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La Règle du jeu, 1939.

With the onset of World War II Coco Chanel closed her shop and had taken up with Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a German officer 13 years her junior to ride out the war. There are several accounts of her complicity with the Third Reich, but the one I found the best researched is by weekly columnist for the Times (London) Kate Muir and can be found here. Needless to say she was persona non grata in Paris. But time permitted her return and in 1954 she reopened business as usual. Although not a success in France, sales of what became the quintessential Chanel suit sold extremely well in the US and England.

All this being said, it does seem a bit odd that Resnais, one of the first directors to capture the horrors of the holocaust in his 1955 powerful documentary short Night and Fog, would employ a blatant sympathizer. My speculation runs that, regardless of political affiliation, no one could define the culture of the characters of Last Year at Marienbad with as much exactitude as Coco Chanel. Her sensibilities for perfection in workmanship and design were akin to Resnais’s passion and rigor for the art of film making.

But lets get more to the point of this pairing or trining as it were. For the complicity between Resnais and Robbe-Grillet cannot be undone, theirs is an extraordinary partnership. Here is what Robbe Grillet’s script calls for as to people and place in Marienbad. “This takes place in an enormous hotel, a kind of international palace, huge, baroque, opulent but icy: a univere of statues, motionless servants. Here the anonymous, polite, certainly rich and idle guests observe—seriously though without passion—the strict rules of their games (cards, dominoes…), Their ballroom dances, their empty chatter, or their marksmanship contests. In this sealed, stifling world, men and things alike seem victims of some spell, as in the kind of dreams where one feels guided by some fatal inevitability, where it would be futile to try to change the slightest detail as to run away.” Resnais delivers the mise en scène explicitly, and Chanel conjures through her sartorial discernment just the precise expression of the bored upper class which this film so well portrays.

Note: *Madsen, Axel. Chanel: A Woman of Her Own (Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1990)