skating and nothingness: paranoid park

Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park is, it seems to me, a movie that is easy to misunderstand. A death serves as the ostensible center and motivator of the film's events. This death cannot exactly be called accidental, nor can it accurately be described as intentional, though it is investigated by the Portland Police as a murder.

The circumstances of this death are as follows: one Saturday night, teenage Alex goes to the titular skate park which was constructed extra-legally by local, disaffected skate punks on the banks of Portland's Willamette River. As he sits on his skateboard observing the other skaters he is approached by one of the park’s older denizens who asks if he would like to ride a freight train and then get some beer. A security guard observes the two 'men' as they climb aboard the freight car, approaches them and begins repeatedly striking them with his oversized mag-lite. Alex swings his skateboard at the guard, smashing his head and sending him reeling onto the neighboring tracks at the moment another freight approaches and the guard is gruesomely killed.

A Google search for references to Paranoid Park reveals some interesting interpretations of this event. The plot synopsis on IMDB reads, “A teenage skateboarder's life begins to fray after he is involved in the accidental death of a security guard.” The page devoted to the film on wikipedia.org describes Alex’s actions as being “[in] self-defense and confusion.” A review of the film found on HollywoodReporter.com describes the event in this way: “Alex accidentally caused the death of an older security guard down by the railroad tracks.” And in what is probably the least prescient response to the film, James Rocchi, in his review on cinematical.com, admits in one breath that he “wasn't expecting Paranoid Park to be a suspense film or a procedural,” then complains of Van Sant’s “staging of the murder.”

The variety of interpretations of this event is at least partially understandable. The narrative, as it were, takes the form of a long, rambling, non-linear confessional letter written by Alex at the suggestion of his friend Macy. This is a letter written by the sixteen year-old son of divorcing parents and not a Hollywood screenwriter. As such, events which, in the context of a movie, would be viewed as important, such as the circumstances of his parents’ divorce, are often treated perfunctorily, while events that might seem trivial in comparison, like the sandwich he ordered at subway on the night of the killing, are relayed with novelistic detail.

The particular effectiveness of this narrative style is just one of the remarkable things about Paranoid Park. Contemplating the film’s unorthodox narrative arc, one is reminded of the park’s skaters as they ride up and down the ramp, cutting back over the same territory, but this time from a different angle, with a different perspective, but always with athleticism and grace. It is a testament to the success of Van Sant’s adaptation of Blake Nelson’s novel that the film would not be near as effective if the events were presented in a more straightforward manner.

But the question remains: what is this film all about? Like several of Van Sant’s movies, Paranoid Park is partly about disaffected youth—and more particularly the relation between youth who are merely disaffected and those who have literally been thrown away. Alex lives with his mother in the suburbs and though his parents’ ongoing break-up has left him effectively unsupervised, he still has parents who at least play at being nurturing. The kids who built Paranoid Park, on the other hand, have no families and many of them live at the park that they constructed. There is a sense of menace in Alex’s interactions with these kids; when the man with whom Alex will eventually take his fateful train ride asks to use Alex’s board, he balks at first. When police detective Liu inquires if Alex went to Paranoid Park alone after his friend Jared decided to visit Oregon State on the night of the guard's killing, Alex replies that you don’t go to Paranoid Park alone. This snapshot of contemporary youth is important, but it merely scratches the surface of the film's themes.

That the circumstances of the security guard’s death pay more than a passing resemblance to the famous unmotivated crime in Andre Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures may provide a clue to a deeper interpretation of Paranoid Park’s significance. Gide used the notion of the unmotivated crime—in this case Lafcadio’s throwing Amedee out of a moving train for no apparent reason—as the extreme example of his libertarian views on freedom. Similar though they are, however, the deaths described in these two works are not exactly the same. Alex’s attack on the security guard may ultimately have been unwarranted, but it could not be described as gratuitous.

There are other aspects of the film, however, that point to a struggle within the character of Alex over his notion of freedom and its attendant responsibilities. Near the beginning of the film, as Alex and Jared decide to visit Paranoid Park for the first time, Alex explains that as bad as his life might seem, the kids at Paranoid Park had it worse. Abandoned by their families and alienated from the mainstream social structure, these discarded punks created meaning in their lives on their own terms. Skateboarding and the park they constructed both as locus of their activities and as their homes represented their own expression of their existential freedom.

What, then, is the significance of the security guard’s death and Alex’s retelling thereof? I sort of touched upon this earlier when I described Alex’s train ride as “fateful.” Alex’s telling of the events leading to and surrounding the security guard’s death lend to the events themselves a sense of the inevitable. This is a boy who is confronting his adulthood and its associated freedoms and responsibilities. What is worse, his tattooed father and negligent mother are remiss in their responsibility to help him deal with the changes he is facing. Alex’s lack of perspective on the nature of adult responsibility coupled with the utter failure of his parents to help him through this critical transition lead him to this sense of the inevitability, not only of the guard's killing, but also more quotidian events such as the loss of his virginity with his cheerleader girlfriend.

Another clue to this internal dilemma comes via two conversations Alex has with Macy. At one point in the film, Alex expresses the view that his own problems seem so insignificant in light of the continuing war in Iraq and the frightful circumstances under which people live in Africa. Somewhat later in the film (though the chronological sequence is somewhat difficult to divine), Macy asks him if he has been reading about the war in the papers. Alex’s response is abrupt and dismissive as he suggests that people who complain about the war don’t know what they are talking about. The paradox of Alex’s response to events in the larger world would seem to speak volumes about his ambivalence about the responsibility that comes with the freedom to act.

A friend who had seen the film earlier pointed out that the Van Sant’s decision to eschew establishing shots takes a cue from Godard’s Hail Mary (1985). The effect of this is not only jarringly beautiful, but it also supports the impression that the events are told through the perspective of an adolescent. The cinematography by Christopher Doyle (In The Mood For Love) is also stunning. There is a shot in which we view from above Alex laying on the ground with his skateboard, his arms splayed to his sides as Macy approaches. This shot recalls Caravaggio’s The Conversion of St. Paul in the foreshortening of the subject’s body and his Christ-like aspect. Even more remarkably Caravaggio-esque is the shot near the end of the film as Alex finishes writing his letter. The room in which he writes is extremely dark, giving the fire-lit close-up of Alex’s face an almost angelic cast, recalling the painter's representations of St. John the Baptist.

Paranoid Park rivals the films of Robert Bresson for its beauty, complexity and for the sheer power concentrated in its 85 minute running time. It seems unfortunate that the film has seen scant attention in the major publications and those reviews that have appeared do not seem to have given it the careful, attentive viewing it warrants. Some reviewers have even remarked that Van Sant appears to be in a rut, going over much of the same territory he explored in his earlier films. This complaint echoes many of those made about the recent films of Wes Anderson. What these reviewers seem to ignore is that this is precisely what artists do: find a subject and repeatedly explore it in order to reveal new perspectives and deeper meanings.

hump the honky or where have all the heroes gone?

We are now officially five years into our conflict in Iraq and six-and-a-half since the destruction of September 2001. In the intervening years, a whole new set of political orthodoxies has developed in our country—orthodoxies marked by that peculiar naïve infantilism for which our nation’s politics are best known. Generally behind the times, the motion picture industry in the last couple of years has really ratcheted up its response to the changing political environment. Whether we are talking about feature films or documentaries, the political cinema of the present age seems to be particularly humorless and irrelevant—affected without being effective. Two recent films, Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight—a documentary—and Brian de Palma’s Redacted—a fictionalized representation of factual events—typify this trend.

No End in Sight comes highly recommended from critics, film festivals and awards juries. It won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Documentary Feature) and was granted four-star status by Roger Ebert. One would imagine that such lofty accolades would be suggestive of a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking. One would be decidedly disappointed.

Charles Ferguson is not a documentary filmmaker—or at least he wasn’t before making No End in Sight. He is a former academic and fellow with the Brookings Institution with a PhD in political science from MIT. These credentials allowed him to gain access to many of the former government and military officials who were responsible for planning and executing America’s war and subsequent occupation of Iraq (I’ll come back to this). The film’s structure is basically that of your typical History Channel production: lots of talking heads cut with shocking scenes of brutal violence and anti-American sentiment in Iraq.

The first problem with No End in Sight is its focus on the poor and insufficient planning for the occupation of Iraq as the central problem with which we are now faced. Nobody is going to argue over whether that the Bush administration’s planning for the war’s aftermath was woefully inadequate. This is established in even the more hawkish circles. One must ask, however, wouldn’t the question of planning been rendered moot if sensible heads were able to put a stop to the march to war in the first place? The film touches on the shoddiness of the argument for the war, but this is treated as a mere preface to the real issue. Ferguson himself was initially a supporter of the war, so taking this line was probably not an option.

Be this as it may, the issue of the administration’s planning of the war is a legitimate topic of inquiry. The problem here, however, is that the ground covered by the film has been exhaustively trod by many of the top newspapers and public affairs periodicals in recent years—you know, journalists. Any halfway informed citizen with access to the New York Times and a subscription to the New Yorker is likely to come away from No End in Sight with a distinct sense of deja-vu (deja-read?). That documentary films have become something of a substitute for legitimate journalism is problematic and does not bode well for this country’s political future.
This brings us to the film’s fatal flaw: the culpability of its participants. Ferguson’s use of former administration officials who were directly involved in the war’s planning and execution was obviously intended to give viewers the sense that what they are seeing is an unvarnished version of the sequence of events leading us to the current quagmire. That said, a reading of the c.v.’s of the film’s participants can also lead to another interpretation. Let’s take a look at some of these talking heads:

Robert Hutchings – Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (2003 – 2005)

Colonel Paul Hughes – Director of Strategic Policy for the U. S. Occupation

Jay Garner – Administrator, ORHA – February – May 2003

Ambassador Barbara Bodine – In Charge of Baghdad for the U. S. Occupation

The job titles of those contributing to Ferguson’s film offer a couple of possible interpretations. In one sense, who better to explain the problematic execution of this war than those directly involved? On the other hand, one could also argue that these were important people in the administration who not only allowed this war to happen, but also participated directly in its slipshod execution. One gets the sense in listening to these individuals that their hand wringing belies an absent mea culpa. Moreover, if anybody has an axe to grind with the administration, it is this group of disgruntled exes. I do not doubt the truth of the stories relayed by these officials, but I also cannot help thinking to myself that these are the assholes that made it happen.

If No End in Sight is an ultimately superfluous example of the sort of liberal orthodox documentary that has flourished under the Bush administration, Redacted is something else altogether. In it, director de Palma uses mixed media—marine private Angel Salazar’s video diary, a French news crew’s documentary, phony news reports, videos posted on the web sites of jihadist groups and soldiers’ spouses—to tell the story of the American occupation of Iraq in general, and the brutal rape and murder of a fifteen year-old Iraqi girl and her family by a pair of marines stationed in Samarra.

Redacted is one of the most clumsily put together movies I have ever seen. The characters are not really characters so much as they are comments on the sort of characters used in war (or anti-war) movies. Gabe Blix, in his O’Hara reading intellectualism and keffiyeh wearing irony, is something of an analogue for Full Metal Jacket’s Private Joker. Even worse are the two marines ultimately responsible for the movie’s central crime. These two are not so much soldiers as they are Appalachian gorillas who somehow got separated from their Klan rally. The following comments are typical of their presentation:

“The only language these sand niggers understand is force.”

“Waxing Hajjis is like stomping cockroaches.”

You get the point. The problem with this approach, however, is that when finally faced with their abhorrent crime, the audience can only conclude that they never should have been allowed into the marine corps in the first place—rather than that somehow the “horrors of war” have turned otherwise good boys into monsters. What might have been the film’s saving grace is its unorthodox structure, which recalls de Palma’s earlier (and much better) films such as Hi, Mom! (1970). This pastiche of media is used in the first place to give a rounder perspective on the events and circumstances portrayed, but it also serves as something of a critique of the media’s presence and possible complicity in modern war. The problem again is in the execution. What could have been an effective technique for really digging into the complexity of the conflict as it now stands in Iraq, instead becomes a crutch in which the same, oversimplified arguments are used to criticize the American occupation.

In one scene, presented as a documentary by a French television crew, we are presented with a view of one of countless roadblocks set up by the occupation forces to curtail the spread of violence. The following title appears on the screen:

Over a 24-month period, U. S. troops killed 2,000 Iraqis at checkpoints. 60 were confirmed insurgents. No U. S. soldiers were charged in any of these incidents.

Then you see a car speeding into the checkpoint. As soldier after soldier signals the car to stop, it only speeds up and swerves to dodge the marines in its way. Once it reaches a certain point without showing any sign of slowing, the marines open fire on the vehicle. As it turns out, the vehicle was carrying an exaggeratedly pregnant woman being driven to the hospital by her brother. She and her unborn fetus are tragically killed. What is sort of left hanging there, however, is the fact that you have this group of American soldiers who know that there are people out there trying to kill them by any means possible. When they see a car speeding toward them, ignoring all entreaties to stop, their rules of engagement tell them to open fire on the vehicle. These kids are scared like the Iraqis are scared and it is difficult to blame them for playing by the rules in such a circumstance. This is war we are talking about, not a drunk-driving checkpoint. War is ugly, people die, lives are destroyed. What is the point?

Hi, Mom!, on the other hand, uses similar techniques to create a film that is highly entertaining, extremely funny and truly prescient in terms of its satirical take on the racial politics of its era. Take, for example, the National Intellectual Television presentation of The Black Revolution Part 2: Artificial Dissemination. Participants in a radical theatre production Be Black Baby walk around Greenwich Village exhorting the non-Black residents to learn what it means to be black in America. The responses of the people they encounter are double-edged in the sense that they both typify the white response to sixties era black radicalism as well as patronizing benevolence of white liberals. An older white woman informs her black interlocutors, “You know, we have been on many marches in Harlem. We’ve done lots of things. We haven’t been born today, you know. How do you expect to be where you are now if we don’t help you?” At the group’s continuing insistence, the woman’s husband inquires, “Just what do you want from us?” As though to say, we marched with our white friends in your honor, we read the appropriate liberal publications, our obligation is met—stop being so fucking demanding.

The satire—and satire is key here, why is nobody doing satire anymore?—gets even richer with the “production” of Be Black Now at the film’s end. This scene is so masterful in its economy and the complexity of its subtexts as to be archetypical of what satire can and should do. The group starts by explaining to their liberal white audience that being black means being loose and gives them the opportunity (the secret desire of many whites) to fondle the assembled afros. The responses—“it’s kind of springy,” “it’s like a sponge,” “like angel food cake (ha!),” “I had expected steel wool”—are perfect in their absolute truth and embarrassing irony. Or when one of the performers explains that in order to be black and to feel black, you’ve got to eat black and serves the disgusted white audience a meal of black-eyed peas, collard greens and pigs feet. When the audience members politely refuse to eat the food they are literally force fed by the performers. This is as hilarious as it is confrontational.

The performance’s finale is one of the high-water marks of satirical cinema. The black performers, their faces whitened with pancake makeup, blacken the faces of their white audience. The satire is turned on its head when the performers begin to slyly steal the purses and empty the wallets of the white audience members—at once exposing ingrained prejudices and preying on the audience’s deepest fears. Then, in the production’s climax, one of the white women is grabbed by the white-faced black men, her clothes are torn from her and it is apparent that she is about to be raped. When a police officer arrives in response to the noise, the white audience is relieved, until, responding to their blackened faces and absence of money or identification, he scoffs at their stated names (“Martin Zinn? More like Martin Freeman. Prime Minister of the Black Panthers”) and places of residence (“Scarsdale? Come on, Martin, where do you live?”) and wantonly beats them.

Mick LaSalle’s review for Redacted from the San Francisco Chronicle is quoted on the DVD case:

“ . . . Made with a clear intention—to stop the Iraq war.”

The problem is it is too late for that, and this is sort of the point. Where was this flood of public attention to the developing situation with Iraq in 2002? Perhaps if people and filmmakers were more engaged at that point, this war may not have happened. Now that most of the American public is fully in tune to the ridiculousness of this enterprise, it is too easy and ultimately irrelevant to adopt this stance of protest. In any event, if filmmakers are not going to have the courage to ask difficult questions and take unpopular stances, the outlook for the future of political cinema is poor indeed.

to twist or not to twist

Probably the most irritating unintended consequence of the terrorist attacks of Terrible Tuesday in New York City and Washington has been the increase in expressions of righteous indignation from Americans of all political persuasions. Relativism (cultural, moral) is out and a new era of Moral Clarity is in the ascendant. The irony is that this notion of moral clarity is used by each side to denounce the position of the other, so who has it right?

When the world is talking about issues as heady as extra-judicial rendition, warrantless wire-tapping and tor . . . er, I mean ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ you can bet that filmmakers will not be far behind in sharing with us their own elevated views on matters. Topical cinema is generally problematic for a whole host of reasons, but what passes for political filmmaking in these post-9/11-Iraq-War-On-Violent-Extremist-Islamo-Fascism times has reached a new nadir.

Gavin Hood's Rendition (2007) uses the practice of extraordinary rendition—a policy drafted during the Clinton administration—as its starting point to ostensibly ask questions about the efficacy and morality of the practice of harsh interrogations (torture) to identify members of terrorist organizations and learn the details of coming attacks with the ultimate aim of preventing them. The film bears comparison to another topical film dealing with issues stemming from an earlier historical example of what one might call the Clash of Civilizations between the liberal democratic West and Arab/Muslim Near East--Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1967). The two films differ not so much on the answers they develop to the question of the legitimacy of torture as a tactical response to terrorism—though their conclusions are indeed different—but in the ways in which the essential questions are asked.

The story told in Rendition is that of Anwar el-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian chemical engineer who has been living in the United States as a resident alien for fourteen years with his mother, his very beautiful, very pregnant and very white wife (Reese Witherspoon) and their young son. As the film opens, el-Ibrahimi is preparing to return home from a chemical engineering conference in South Africa. At the same time, in an unnamed North African country, a suicide bomber detonates his weapon outside a sidewalk café frequented by Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor), an apparatchik in the country's internal security apparatus and a notorious torturer. Though the bomb fails to kill Fawal, it just so happens that a vehicle carrying local CIA station chief William Dixon (David Fabrizio) and his lead analyst Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhall) is passing just at this moment and Dixon is killed by shrapnel from the blast. Combing through the call logs of the telephone number of Rashid Salimi, the notorious terrorist who claimed responsibility for the attack, American agents discover that several calls were made and received by el-Ibrahimi's mobile telephone. As he disembarks from an airliner at Reagan National Airport, el-Ibrahimi is detained by CIA personnel and put on a plane headed to the (still) unnamed North African country—it is at this point that everything turns to shit.

One of the paradoxes inherent in contemporary political cinema is that, on the one hand, a filmmaker should present the superiority of her moral position as forcefully as possible, but she must also, in accordance with the dictates of political correctness, do so without giving offense to special populations or interest groups. In effect, a political film—particularly a liberal political film—must be made without controversy and a non-controversial political statement is basically meaningless or at best irrelevant.

Rendition is no exception to this in that the film is neatly stripped of controversy by insisting on the innocence of el-Ibrahimi. The audience is forced to endure scenes of successive sessions of various tortures, including electrocution and the obligatory water-boarding (wink!) and el-Ibrahimi is powerless to stop it as he does not have the information his interrogators are seeking. We are thus justifiably sickened by his extra-judicial interception and his treatment at the hands of Fawal and his associates. The problem with this is that the film doesn't really ask whether such harsh tactics might indeed be effective and justified. The idea that torture simply doesn't work is presented as something of a Received Truth that needs no scrutiny. An attentive viewer must ask herself how the movie might play if el-Ibrahimi had indeed sold technological information to the bombers as he falsely claims in order to put an end to his mistreatment.

The Battle of Algiers, on the other hand, comes to the viewer unencumbered by such received moral truths. Though Pontecorvo's sympathy with the native Algerians' struggle for self-determination is never left in doubt, the conflict between them and their French colonial masters is presented as a case of two roughly equally legitimate groups who happen to have competing agendas. When the Algiers cell of the FLN begins its campaign of bombings in the European quarter of the city, the audience is not spared the sight of the terror and violence that results. Though based on an antiquated system of racial and cultural superiority, part of the legacy of French colonialism in Algeria was a population of several million European residents who had lived in the country, often for generations, expending their labors to make the desert fruitful and build fulfilling lives for themselves and their families. Viewing the film through 21st Century eyes, we understand the inherent injustice of the unequal treatment of Arab and European residents in Algeria—but this does not mean we cannot sympathize with the pieds-noirs who suddenly find themselves faced with the destruction of their lives and livelihoods.

The Battle of Algiers is something of a textbook for modern day insurgency and counter-insurgency tactics. The Algiers cell of the FLN structured itself such that each member knew only the identities of two other members. Moreover, members were instructed to change their hiding places within the casbah every 24 hours, rendering any information gleaned by the authorities obsolete after only a day. As a result of the acutely time-sensitive nature of the search for intelligence, the French authorities found it necessary to resort to torture in order to glean information that was still relevant. This is the key: the French had a compelling reason to resort to inhumane interrogation tactics (the old ticking time bomb, if you will) and as the historically accurate events portrayed in the film show, these techniques worked. The Algiers uprising was quashed, all members of the leadership of the cell either killed or arrested, in a span of three months.


Pontecorvo did not shy away from pointing out the many ironies of the French government's tactics in dealing with the uprising and the press's response to them. In one of the film’s most bitterly rendered scenes, the architect of the French response to the uprising, Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin), faces tough questions from reporters about the methods used by his paratroopers. Mathieu responds:

“Their success is the result of these methods. One depends on the other. The word ‘torture’ isn’t used in our orders. We use interrogation as the only valid police method against clandestine activity. The FLN asks all its members, in case of capture to remain silent for 24 hours. Then they may talk. This gives the FLN time to render any information useless. And us? What form of questioning must we adopt? Civil law procedures, which take months for a mere misdemeanor? The problem is this: The FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria, and we want to stay. Even with slight shades of opinion, you all agree that we must stay. When the FLN rebellion began, there were no shades at all. Every paper, the communist press included, wanted it crushed. We’re here for that reason alone. We’re neither madmen nor sadists. We are soldiers. Our duty is to win. Therefore, to be precise, it’s my turn to ask a question. Should France stay in Algeria? If you answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences.”

As Mathieu’s speech ends, the film presents a chilling montage of the various torture techniques used by the French to bring down the Algiers uprising. Following this, scenes of FLN cadres driving down busy Algiers streets, gunning down dozens of innocent European civilians.

By refusing to either idealize or excuse the actions of either side in this struggle, The Battle of Algiers establishes an enlightened position that is far ahead of its time. This contrasts strongly with the undoubtedly unintentional, but nevertheless unmistakable air of cultural bigotry presented by Rendition. There is a remarkably telling scene in which Gyllenhall’s gutless “jackal” reveals to the North African country’s interior minister that the names provided by el-Ibrahimi are the same as the starting line-up of the 1990 Egyptian soccer team. Gyllenhall insists that this means that el-Ibrahimi is innocent and he just provided the names to stop the torture. The interior minister responds:

“We have a saying: ‘Beat your woman every morning. If you don’t know why, she does.’”

Gyllenhall responds:

“We have a saying, too. Do you know Shakespeare? ‘I fear you speak upon the rack where men enforced do speak anything.’”

This exchange provides a startling contrast to the exchange between Colonel Mathieu and Djafar (Saadi Yacef), the captured leader of the Algiers cell:

Mathieu: I’d have hated to blow you all up.

Djafar: Why?

Mathieu: Your picture and your file have been on my desk for months. I have the feeling I know you a bit. You don’t strike me as the kind for empty gestures.

Djafar: You seem satisfied to have me alive.

Mathieu: Yes, I am.

Djafar: I thought you’d regret it. I gave you an unexpected advantage.

Mathieu: No, only the satisfaction of having had the right hunch.

These are the words of men, admittedly of competing goals and worldviews, who recognize the legitimacy of one another’s positions. Though one position may be more tenable in moral terms, the world of the film—like the world of, well, the world—is not divided between good guys and villains. The worldview of Rendition, on the other hand, is more neatly divided between the heroes and villains and therefore so much less like life.

I do not fault Rendition for asking the question of whether extra-judicial rendition and torture are legitimate means for prosecuting a war against armed terrorist. Rather, my problem with the film is that it asked the questions in such a way that the answers were presented as foregone conclusions. Debate of this sort insults the intelligence of attentive filmgoers and adds little to the many critical debates going on within our society.

3 Movies; 13 Moons

A friend with broad experience in these matters gave me some advice in terms of attracting a broader readership to my little operation here. One of the things he suggested was to at least periodically write about movies that people (regular people, not “Film” people) are watching and thinking about right now. With this advice in mind, I traveled to my local video rental outfit and rented three movies: Michael Clayton, La Vie en Rose and Collateral, with the intention of devoting my next post to at least one of these movies.

I first watched Michael Clayton, reasoning that as a Best Picture nominee, it must at least be passably good and therefore of sufficient interest to generate maybe a half-dozen paragraphs of quasi-informed commentary. I suppose the experience of viewing Atonement should have demonstrated the flaw in this reasoning. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about Michael Clayton, but rather that very little of it would be complimentary and it could reasonably summed up in a handful of sentences. There is something about this new(ish) strain of Hollywood milquetoast liberalism that just seems to rub me wrong. I mean, do we really need to see a film like Michael Clayton in order to know that corporations bury evidence of the dangers of their products and pay high-powered law firms millions to convince the world of their ignorance? The cleverly non-linear narrative structure was also particularly irksome. I don’t necessarily have a problem with a movie that begins at the end (see: Citizen Kane et al), unless it is done with the express intention of misleading viewers and artificially creating suspense, as was the case with Michael Clayton.

Collateral was similarly disappointing, though for entirely different reasons. I have been recently shown the light as regards to the brilliance of Michael Mann, so I have been slowly working to familiarize myself with the examples of his oeuvre with which I had previously been unfamiliar. Like many of Mann’s movies, Collateral works very well in some ways and falls flat in others. Technically speaking, it is nearly as impressive a movie as Miami Vice. Mann’s shot constructions and compositions are undoubtedly amongst the most exacting and impressive of any contemporary Hollywood director. I challenge anyone to name me another filmmaker who could give Los Angeles the impression of being a unitary metropolis as opposed to the amorphous sprawling mess that it is, as Mann has done with Collateral. Stylistic achievements aside, however, the film is ultimately done in by its thin, contrived plot and its shameless sentimentality.

Albert Einstein defined insanity roughly as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Though clinically dubious, Einstein’s wisdom in this case convinced me to hold off on watching La Vie en Rose, at least for the moment, and instead turn to an unqualified masterpiece for cinematic succor—in this case, Fassbinder’s In a Year With 13 Moons (1978).

In his short but extraordinarily prolific career, Rainer Werner Fassbinder subverted the conventions of Hollywood genres—most particularly the family melodrama—in his effort to explore the ways in which people laid the architecture of their own suffering through their denial of love and the abortive nature of their relationships. Fassbinder was an unconventional filmmaker and In a Year With 13 Moons is an unconventional film. What makes the movie extraordinary is that it is through this unconventionality that the film succeeds precisely where many more conventional movies fail.

The narrative of In a Year With 13 Moons concerns the final days of the transsexual Erwin/Elvira Weisshaupt. The opening sequence shows Erwin/Elvira, dressed in men’s attire, soliciting the sexual attentions of a man in an open park setting and being set upon and beaten when her castrated nature is discovered. The low early morning lighting and the presentation of the film’s opening credits lend to what by most rights would be considered a scene of high drama a perfunctory nature that will become emblematic of the film in general.

In his monograph on the life and works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christian Braad Thomsen writes, on the subject of In a Year With 13 Moons, “The narrative is ruptured in practically every scene, and is not taken seriously at the very point when the film tradition in which Fassbinder had previously worked would have pushed things to a melodramatic climax. I know only one other film made on the same principle: Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963) also deflects away from its tragedies, instead of wallowing in them” (256). Thomsen seems to get it half right here, at least in his identification of Godard as Fassbinder’s principle forebear in adopting the Brechtian technique of interrupting the viewer’s response to the action for the cinema. There is more of Godard in In a Year With 13 Moons than Thomsen suggests here, however. Moreover, I would argue that it is precisely because he treats the events portrayed in this film with great seriousness that he intentionally pulls the viewer out of any emotional connection therewith.

Subsequent to her ordeal in the park, Erwin/Elvira returns to her apartment where she unexpectedly meets her lover, the failed actor Christoph and a bitter argument ensues. The content and shot constructions of this scene call to mind the masterful central scene in Godard’s Contempt, which depicts the argument between Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot in their Rome apartment. While the similarities between these two scenes are remarkable, it is their differences which are truly instructive. The characters in Godard’s film are highly idealized and the troubles with which they are dealing seem comparatively trite. The analogous scene in In a Year With 13 Moons is conversely remarkable for the unstinting ugliness of the characters and barbs with which they stick each other. Erwin/Elvira is fat and manly and scarred and frighteningly vulnerable. Christoph, for his part, is vulgar and merciless in pointing out these shortcomings. One gets the sense in watching this scene in Contempt that the relationship may be doomed, but both parties will undoubtedly survive the rift (though of course one of them doesn’t)—the same cannot be said for Erwin/Elvira.

The scene which follows this argument is undoubtedly one of the most disturbing, affecting, memorable and baffling in all of cinema. Erwin/Elvira meets with her friend the prostitute Red Zora and relates to her how she once, when still a complete man, worked in an abattoir. The two then walk to a slaughterhouse and watch as the throats of a half dozen steer are slit and their blood pours forth torrentially. As they and the viewer regard this nearly unbearably grisly scene, Erwin/Elvira proceeds to recount her sad history—her years in the slaughterhouse, her marriage to the slaughterhouse owner’s daughter, her wife’s giving birth to their own daughter and her subsequent journey to Casablanca for her sex-change/castration—to Red Zora. The effect of this is singular as at one moment the non-German speaking viewer finds it difficult to read the subtitles as she is transfixed by the nauseous violence of the images. When this violence becomes overpowering, she seeks solace in the words, but the emotional violence recounted is equally merciless. The viewer ultimately finds a kind of balance by alternating between these two elements, at once getting the emotional force of the violence of each, while being spared the brutal totality of either.

The music over the introduction to this scene is the main theme from Nino Rota’s score for Fellini’s Amarcord (1973). At first glance, this seems to be a jarring mismatch of music to thematic and visual elements, but it actually underscores the primary aspect of the film’s narrative. Amarcord—which translates as ‘I remember’ in the dialect of Fellini’s native Rimini—is essentially a long reminiscence on Fellini’s youth. In a Year With 13 Moons is also a meditation on the past and in particular it is Erwin/Elvira’s search for her own forgotten past in the hopes that she will find clues to suggest the source of her ultimate brokenness.

Fassbinder’s oeuvre is one of the most personal bodies of work in the history of cinema. That In a Year With 13 Moons is one of the more personal of his films is therefore significant. Fassbinder himself wrote, directed, photographed, edited and decorated the film himself. The film is notable for many of its unique and truly masterful compositions. There is a scene in which Erwin/Elvira and Zora listen as their friend Seelenfrieda recounts a dream, primarily during one roughly two-minute shot. The low candle lighting and red/orange/golden color scheme portends the visual scheme of Berlin Alexanderplatz. The shot is static with the camera roughly at eye level. To the left there is a cross hanging on the wall behind and above a small television set, which is turned on. Seelenfrieda is in the right foreground, directly behind and empty set of shelves, which serves to chop up the frame into geometrical segments. Behind him, a well built man slowly and rhythmically performs biceps curls with a pair of dumbbells. In the far background, Erwin/Elvira stands and Zora lays on the floor against the wall. The effect is striking and calls to mind the modernist compositions of Michelangelo Antonioni.

If Erwin/Elvira’s quest to uncover her past provides the thrust of the narrative, the film’s defining moment (every movie has one) comes when she and Red Zora visit the orphanage at which s/he was raised. Zora approaches one of the nuns and inquires if she is Sister Gudrun—the nun Erwin/Elvira remembers as the one who primarily raised her. Confirmed of her identity, Zora brings her to Elvira who introduces herself as Erwin Weisshaupt. Sister Gudrun indeed remembers Erwin and proceeds to tell the gothically tragic story of Erwin’s childhood. Erwin’s mother brought young Erwin to the orphanage explaining that his father was lost in the war and that she could not raise him alone. The young boy was doted upon by the nuns in the convent and at a certain point a young couple came and hoped to adopt Erwin as their own. In order to confirm her wish to give Erwin away for adoption, Sister Gudrun paid a visit to Erwin’s mother and finds that his father has returned, more children have been born and the mother seems to have forgotten completely about her son Erwin. Since Erwin’s father is still alive, his permission must also be given for the boy to be adopted and as the mother does not wish her husband to know of the child’s existence, she refuses this permission.

The way in which this scene is presented is even more important than the story related. Each of the three characters present remains in her own space, not acknowledging the presence of the other two. It is almost as though the story is too devastating to be shared collectively and that it must indeed be absorbed alone. It is in this way that Fassbinder’s film reveals a realism that is wholly absent from conventional melodrama. Movies portrayed in a typical melodramatic mode will always present the tragedy or sadness of it characters in such a way as to invite the audience to sympathize and feel affronted by the circumstances in which the characters find themselves. Real world tragedy is never so neatly parsed and if it were it would fail to be tragic. Humans find themselves in tragic situations precisely because they fail to invoke sympathy, causing others to look away or otherwise view their problems as unfixable.

Another important aspect of this scene is Fassbinder’s casting of his own mother, Lieselotte Pempeit, in the role of Sister Gudrun. One can sense the subtext of Fassbinder’s feelings regarding his own fatherless upbringing bubbling up through Gudrun’s narration. Moreover, the revelation that Gudrun was reading a volume of Schopenhauer when she was interrupted by Erwin/Elvira and Zora is significant in terms of the themes of death explored in the film (more on this later).

I would also point out that it is at this point, roughly halfway through the film, that the quixotic nature of the Erwin/Elvira and Red Zora’s quest becomes apparent. This quest is indeed quixotic in the sense that despite discovering the ostensible source of Erwin/Elvira’s loss of identity, this discovery does nothing to heal the wounds. Further, there is a genuine comedy in the pairing of Erwin/Elvira and Red Zora and the futility of their ‘adventures’ in righting past wrongs.

The irony of Erwin/Elvira’s transgendered status is that Erwin was not a homosexual. Indeed, the film reveals that the decision to travel to Casablanca for the sex change/castration was a rash one made as a result of an infatuation Erwin had for his one-time business partner, the brothel owner-cum-real estate speculator Anton Saitz. In what was undoubtedly a manifestation of Erwin’s desire for a father figure, he admitted to Saitz one day that he was in love with him. Saitz explained that this wouldn’t be a problem if only Erwin were a woman, leading to his fateful trip to Casablanca. Saitz’s own story is a further illustration of Einstein’s definition of insanity. Imprisoned in a concentration camp as a child, Saitz was freed with the liberation at the end of the war. Rather than learn from his experience of the Nazis’ brutality, in adulthood, Saitz modeled his own brothel on the concentration camp model.

Erwin/Elvira opts to visit Saitz at his office on her own, presumably to continue her quest to exorcise her demons. Learning of the location of his office by listening to the ramblings of a disgruntled former employee, Erwin/Elvira climbs the stairs toward the 16th floor and narrowly avoids running into Saitz and his entourage on their way down the stairs. The inexplicable gunfight she witnesses in the parking lot below calls to mind the parking lot altercation, which occurs at the beginning of the road trip in Godard’s Weekend (1967).

The remainder of the film becomes fully imbued with the theme of suicide and death. As she waits in an abandoned office for Saitz’s return, Erwin/Elvira watches as a man prepares a noose from which to hang himself at which point she asks him for a light. She asks if he intends to kill himself, which he readily admits—even asking if she minds. Before he does, however, she offers him some red wine, French bread and cheese. She then reveals this to be something of an homage to her former life with Saitz:

“It’s an old story with the red wine and the French bread and cheese; almost a bit sentimental, when I think about it. But what would life be without sentiment? Pretty sad, I’d say. It all started with cheese.”

The discussion which takes place between this man and Erwin/Elvira becomes almost absurdly philosophical. When she asks him why he wishes to end his life, he explains that it is because he does not wish to allow things to go on being real simply because he perceives them. Essentially he is choosing to end his life to make a philosophical point. But there is an important philosophical point to the man’s view of suicide and one which will bear further in Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979). This is the idea as proposed by Schopenhauer that suicide is not a negation of existence, but an attempt on the part of the suicide to enter into a different form of existence altogether.

As if such evidence were needed, Erwin/Elvira’s eventual reunion with Saitz confirms the futility of her journey through her past to find and ostensibly heal the sources of her suffering. Saitz is revealed to be an archetypal example of arrested development. He no longer performs any work in his office and instead spends his time viewing and reenacting Martin and Lewis movies with his cronies. It takes some time and an old photograph to remind Saitz of who Elvira/Erwin is/was and when he does remember, instead of commenting one way or another, he insists upon a song and dance first. Erwin/Elvira somehow joins in with this prearranged song and dance and the viewer is again struck by the film’s moments of seemingly inappropriate comedy. The dance ends and Saitz tells Erwin/Elvira that she’s grown fat, but its okay because everyone is getting fat these days and in an aside informs his retinue that this lady used to be a boy named Erwin.

The film’s downward spiral has reached a sort of critical mass at this point and the viewer senses that Erwin/Elvira’s end is near. The remainder of the film is surprisingly affecting—one might almost say sentimental, but throughout, Erwin/Elvira’s predicament and her suffering are kept one step removed from the viewer’s ability to relate. Erwin/Elvira brings Saitz to her apartment and while she goes to the kitchen, Saitz encounters Red Zora who has been sleeping on Erwin/Elvira’s bed. Zora learns of Saitz’s identity and immediately recognizes his signficance to Erwin/Elvira’s story. This does not prevent her, however, from welcoming his sexual advances. Erwin/Elvira witnesses this and, defeated, goes into the bathroom and cuts off her hair while staring into the mirror. She then outfits herself in men’s clothing and pays a visit to his former wife and daughter. She seems to make an abortive attempt at reconciliation with his wife, but both realize it is too late. Erwin/Elvira returns to her apartment and seeks out a neighbor to talk to. The neighbor, friendly as can be and completely ignoring the obvious existential crisis through which she is going, explains that he would love to talk, would love to come down and have a beer, but it is after 11:00 and he must be getting to bed.

The soundtrack of the film’s final minutes is suffused with a recording of Erwin/Elvira talking about her past suicide attempts. Convinced that something terrible is happening, the neighbors attempt to enter Erwin/Elvira’s apartment, but are thwarted at the door by Saitz’s guard, who insists he cannot let anyone in. One by one, Erwin/Elvira’s daughter, wife and even Sister Gudrun arrives. Each must be searched for weapons by Saitz’s sentry before they can enter. When they finally gain entry into the apartment, Erwin/Elvira is found lifeless on her bed as Red Zora and Saitz emerge, oblivious to her fate, from their embrace on the floor beside her. The viewer’s experience of this scene is hampered by the insistence of the continued recording of Erwin/Elvira’s suicidal monologue. This has the ultimate effect of highlighting the inevitability of Erwin/Elvira’s death, while at the same time preventing the viewer from experiencing any real emotional involvement with the truth of it.

It can be argued that among filmmakers, Fassbinder had a greater understanding and a greater grasp of the emotional violence with which we treat those closest to us in part because he was a great practitioner of this violence in his own life. He may have seen his portrayal of this cycle in his films as a sort of penance for his own actions. Whatever the case, he was, in his films, able to reflect the awful banal truth of this emotional mayhem in a way very few other directors could and there may be no better example of this than In a Year With 13 Moons.