We’ve been talking about Lars Von Trier’s “Nymph()maniac” Vol. 1 & 2.
When Von Trier’s predecessor, C.T. Dreyer, placed his camera in the homes of Danish Luthern’s in the early 1900’s he was dissecting an emotional tumor in the prudish mentality of a bygone day. Von Trier sets his lens on the same view of the opposite end of the spectrum, our modern, sex-forward culture. His characters are no longer hounded by sin and forgiveness but by obsession and repression. A Christ-like character, the compassionate fisherman and good-Samaritan, Seligman, rescues Jo from lying beat in the street. It must be Christ himself that Seligman emulates. He’s a virgin and claims never to have met a bad person in his life. He turns out to be one.
With a protracted digression. at the mid-point of the Vol. 1, about the schism between the eastern and western Christian traditions, Seligman connects sex and religion and Von Trier finds an eloquent visual impression with which to introduce it. In this case he does with the solitary eastern orthodox icon of the Madonna hanging on the wall behind where our modern day harem girl and eunuch are arguing. Without wasting dialog, the filmmaker is commenting on how the iconographic trends in the ancient sacred arts have been hijacked in the presentation of modern movies and he draws a comparison between Madonna and the girly pin-up in one skilled stroke.
The icon and pin-up were one-in-the-same when they debuted on the cave walls that sheltered our earliest ancestors. Humans are compelled to fetishize, ritualize and sanctify the human reproductive process. It’s almost as old as the act itself. Ironically, it is the male and female organs on parade, not the persons having sex, that make modern porn what it is. What we see carved and painted in stone caves and on the modern porn screen is essentially the same content. Our taste hasn’t changed since the dawn of history. The ritual, visually speaking at least, revolves around the genitals. Because that pathway in the brain is so primitive, its going to appeal, in vastly different ways of course, to the widest range and largest number of people.
With this new movie, Von Trier is not making porn. He couldn’t even appeal to the writer at the small town independent newspaper that rebuked him. The reviewer I read, anyway, castigated Von Trier as if he’d pushed the gross-out film to new heights. I admit, that some of this movie was very hard to watch. You want to push back somehow. One way, I suppose is to label it perverse. The movie reviewer that I read did just that to “Nymph()maniac,” still, I seriously doubt he was even conscious of all the people he was insulting with his cry of misogyny.
He is implying, to name just one of the other artists involved, that Charlotte Gainsborough, the star of Vol 2 is diseased. I don’t see any evidence of it in her history. The leading lady in this movie made her name playing burly roles for women. I would think she took this job to expand her chops and meet a challenge with some other artists that she respects.
Von Trier is not breaking particularly new ground in these scenes of degradation. The tradition can be traced as far back as the late silent era classic, “Haxan” (1922), and hails from Von Trier’s home country by the way as well. The soil of cinematic excess is further amended with Pier Paulo Passolini’s “Salo, 120 Days of Sodom.”(1975), one of those movies about excrement that I already named. That film offended my senses a great deal more than “Nymph()maniac.”
There is some parallel being drawn intentionally by the director between himself and his protagonist in this film. I wonder if this is Von Trier’s attempt to make amends; not apologize, but answer for some trouble he got himself into with certain mischievous remarks.
One of the thrills supplied consistently by Von Trier is his penchant for wit and sarcasm when he knows he’s being quoted. He fancies himself like Oscar Wilde and this trait often devolves, over time, into a lust for controversy. The press scoops it up and prints it. Who is the nymphomaniac here? The press, audience or director? Whoever remains least satisfied, of course.
I’ve written about how some filmmakers worship the female form and archetype with their films. Ironically, some of the same one’s reputations are tainted by scandal for doing the opposite. Misogynistic scenes have gotten other filmmakers in trouble in the past, so Von Trier must have anticipated the hot water he’s plunged himself into with this one. He knows history tends toward extremes.
Judging from the outcry, movies such as these serve to prove that social restrictions and taboos, are not at risk of being loosened when they are scrutinized in the arts. On the contrary, they are reinforced. Is it because Lars Von Trier has brought so much surprise and novelty to modern movie making that he is being singled out for his depictions of misogyny?
Martin Scorsese’s most successful movies graphically portray a woman being physically abused by a man and it is usually her husband. So, if we say the guy that whips the stuffing out of Jo in “Nymp()maniac” Vol 2 is her husband, will that bring the movie back in line with acceptable standards?
The stakes are quadrupled in Vol 2. Jo returns for punishment repeatedly, under her own power. This is not domestic violence. No one hurts her without her consent. Excuse me, but isn’t this is a slightly softer position than domestic violence. Aren’t Jo’s circumstances, if we were to come across them in real life, superior, in theory anyway, to those of say Ginger’s in Scorsese’s “Casino”? So, rather than being an unwitting victim of someone’s abuse, Von Trier’s heroine puts herself there and he gets called for misogyny?
The small town free press film reviewer who’s review I read said the end of this movie was totally predictable. On thing for sure, his reaction was. I felt sympathy. Watching Jo’s predicament unfold to that extreme extent made me fret that suicide would end her story. I was glad to be wrong about that.
I hate some of the images in this movie. It makes me sick to think of such things but I suppose that’s the point in showing them. If the reviewer I’m referring to saw that Jo’s ordeal on screen, in any way, condoned the torture of women or, in any way, rewarded the exploits of nymphomania, then that was his movie not mine. The story I watched flat out warns us that violence breeds violence, as we watch Jo seesaw from being the punished to punisher in Volume 2. In the movie I watched, the protagonist finally learns to accept herself for what she is. That was not a predictable ending for me. It made sense afterward, but I was surprised. Of coarse we don’t know what exactly happened, in the end because it happened in the dark.
While that movie reviewer that I disagree with and I, as well, have had our rear ends in chairs and our eyes glued to screens, either writing about or watching films, Von Trier and his company and others like them, have met, agreed to organized, prepare, craft and release a feature film. They chose a story with a social dilemma at its core, just so we can identify and talk about critical dysfunctions, like the effects of misogyny in our society.
The movie I wish everyone to watch before reading this post begins with a man and woman in bed. It is impossible to experience today the same movies that American moviegoer’s saw in 1963. This is especially true in the opening scene of “Contempt.” First of all, it was risqué to introduce his leading lady in full-length nude. Godard raises visual parody to a high order, using the image to distract the audience from comprehending the critical turn in the heroine’s life that is transpiring before our eyes on onscreen. It’s intentionally and cleverly misleading. The director presents her posed like a sex pot, but she’s really more like a piece of stone sculpture. It’s the pivotal moment when Camille’s love for Paul begins to go cold.
Camille is played by Brigit Bardot. Under an assortment of candy flavored light temperatures, the naked secretary is tucked into a hairy chested hunk. Godard presents her, hind-end up, across a shaggy spread. There jiggles a perverse mix of raw materials for exploring the range human instincts. Camille’s body marks the crossroads between classic sculpture and pop pin-up. The man she is talking to is no less than her boss, her lover, a celebrated writer Paul. Because of Paul’s bland dialog and the fact that Camille’s naked body is taking up ninety percent of the frame, its an effort just to apportion even a little attention to Paul’s presence.
They’ve just had sex. That much is obvious. Why else would Paul be so sedate in the company of this naked goddess? It wasn’t until the third time I watched that I suspected the sex they had must not have done it for Camille. More to the point, the most audacious filmmaker of the French New Wave collaborated with the most identifiable international sex symbols of the early 1960’s to test the emotional IQ of their audience. “Do you like my nipples more or my breasts?” she asks. “I like them both the same,” Paul murmers like some satiated pussy cat.
Camille sounds like she’s trolling for compliments, but this is actually an interrogation. Paul soars on auto-pilot through the afterglow. The blatant way she feeds it to him would have woken me up, had I been he, I hope. See if you agree. Once you are privy to Camille’s inquisition, do you sense her contempt and how it changes the entire movie?
On the one hand, Godard jokes with us here about how sex short-circuits long range planning. With Bardot’s behind exposed in pin-up pose,we’re being played with too. Camille toys with her audience, when she twists her boyfriend in knots, exposing every infantile bone. The man she’s talking to is supposedly an artist. He only ever responds with a word or two and never gives away his thoughts. Even though he’s gazing at a golden goddess and she volleys one opportunity after another to demonstrate his powers, he responds without attaching the slightest personal touch. When she’s had enough of his limp flattery, she says, “So you love me totally?” He answers yes and its all downhill from there.
When this crucial turning point is missed, the movie seems erratic. It seemed sudden, at least to me, on first viewing, when Camille starts acting mean. I admit Paul’s not making much sense by then. In place of his feelings for her, he talks about their flat. The flat is where they hold up and argue for the entire second act.
That clash in “Contempt” became much more interesting when I realized that she was holding back, even before Paul urges her to get in the car with the crass movie producer. Their life and times together had been about Paul’s talent, Paul’s career, Paul’s priorities. The shift of power becomes clear in the crash of dishes, tugs of war and slamming of doors. Things remain unspoken that none-the-less ring loud and clear. Camille was just a mere typist before they became romantically involved and she turns out to be the one with the requisite drive, self-esteem and ear. She simply insists on being treated seriously, not just some dish. I’m such a clod, I confess, I saw it three times before I realized this.
In Act III they no sooner arrive in Capri then Paul flirts with some other kitty. Camille busts him in the act. She retaliates by undertaking an affair with the movie producer for whom Paul harbors some contempt. Then Paul strikes out completely by leaving it up to Camille to decide whether he should return to Rome immediately with her or remain in Capri and work for the great Fritz Lang.
As a writer of film reviews, the person that reviewed “Nymph()maniac, Part 1 & 2” in a local weekly that I read is like the character of Paul in Godard’s “Contempt”. As a reader of his reviews I am like Camille. Well get back to “Contempt” in another post, for now, proceed with me to where we left off in the last one.
I have now seen “Nymph()maniac” Vol. 2, and read the same small town movie reviewer’s blithe dismissal. He called both Volumes of Lars Von Trier’s new movie shit. Lets talk about the subject of shit in motion pictures because, in a movie like, “Salo: 120 Days of Sodom,” there is a different variety of deviance on display but what’s worth mentioning about it is the relevance of excrement in the third act of “Salo” serves the same purpose as the whip in the third act of “Nymph()maniac” Vol 2. If anyone in the audience were, up to this point, able to surf around the unseemly circumstances of the characters in the movie and cling to some shred of erotic stimulus from the earlier setups, both filmmakers rake them out of your grasps, in the Act III climax, when human actions grossly escalate to defy common sense. Not surprisingly, those kinds of images stick in our heads more than any other. The reason why? Memory switches to long-term mode whenever it things venture out of bounds. Brain is caring for our survival by not letting us forget a threat. So I wonder if both films serve to heap more forbiddance upon the very taboos they examine.
Anyway, it is a curious mix of amazement and disgust that sticks with me after watching this new movie of Von Trier’s, “Nymph()maniac,” but that’s not a bad thing. The film is merely churning up some of what’s under the surface of this modern, media-mad culture. Contrary to the movie reviewer I read’s claim of misogyny, Von Trier’s clearly weaving a spell of sympathy for his protagonist and while she’s no role model, anyone that sticks with this movie is going to relate with Jo at some point.
Like Jo, we of the wired world would be wise to beware of becoming numb to ordinary stimulus. Jo’s premature and extreme exploits bleached her senses to such an extent that she could feel nothing without subjecting herself to extreme pain and degradation. Call it shit if you want. Anatomy of self-hate comes closer to it for me. Lots of folks suffer with it. Von Trier exposes this condition so sensitively, he’s practically admitting to be one of them.
to be continued…
Catholics put together the first Bible and with what we know about how corrupt the Popes were, I doubt the infallibility of its texts. Its been a tool for manipulating the masses ever since. It’s not a bad book. It’s still a good book to me. It may be my favorite read of all time, but it’s been stepped on and tinkered with a zillion times. People abuse it everyday. Its not perfect, but I don’t reject any story that’s been around for this long.
Every storyteller rewrites as they go along, adding and subtracting, incorporating fresh wisdom and prejudice, conforming it to their own limited comprehension and agenda. Stories loose definition and accumulate baggage as they age. The older the story, the larger the blocks with which they are built. They expand and contract over time but their foundations are surprisingly well preserved.
Case in point, the new “Noah,” flick released last week. An ancient tale of humanity faced with cataclysm is given a vivid updating in the hands of Darren Aronovsky. The director had a hit with his “Black Swan” in 2010. His latest outing is even more daring. With quite decent performances from his cast and a bit of deft swapping of story elements and special effects, it is quite easily the best Hollywood bible epic in decades. The characters’ arty haircuts, costumes, make-up, porcelain teeth and British accents all lend romantic splendor to the gathering gloom. Stylistically, there are some brilliant mash ups, embedded quotes of ground breaking films ever so worthy of quoting, such as “Breaking the Waves, (1996), for example, in the way the light and color is applied, like a Thomas Kinkade postcard, to highlight the already deeply enshrined associations we harbor from certain stories and songs. The specific sequence in “Noah” starts out face-to-face with a snake in the grass, proceeds to a ripe fruit being plucked by hand and concludes on with a fist and stone as Cain caves his brother’s head in. This device grounds a very post modern movie in the very old story of its namesake, repeating the sequence through all three acts like a major chord anchoring a symphony, increasing its resonance each time. Reaching into Aronovsky’s distant past, it recalls the dope fix ritual sequence in his second feature, “Requiem For a Dream” (1990), which I wrote about here last month.
In “Noah,” the way the story is updated becomes part of the story itself. There are visual passages in this movie that convey the march of time and the influence of the elements upon a landscape as successfully as anything else I’ve seen. The filmmaker’s out on his edge as an artist, with a huge budget, an outstanding line-up of talent, entrusted by investors and audiences alike to seize the zeitgeist.
It’s a bit of a high-wire act the way Aronovsky takes liberty with the tradition, then inserts Hallmark card-like chapter headings in between, accepting memes that are most sacrosanct and inviolable to the Christian way of seeing, while hopefully entertaining believer and unbeliever alike with something thought provoking on the screen.
Coming attractions that we watched before the movie began made abundantly clear that movies this summer will be dominated by another heaping helping of ecological apocalypse for blockbuster season. Aronosvsky anticipates this and doesn’t weigh us down with too much battlefield angst. The future is in the boat. Noah’s demons are driven inward under the pressure of his immense task. As the occupants are closed inside the ark, it becomes a cannonball that knows not where it flies.
Life in the ark is presented like going under anesthesia for a high-risk surgery, Noah’s determination is tested, to bring its occupants through God’s wrath, and reboot the ecosystem and reintroduce nothing evil. The timing of the boat’s landfall is so perfect that it suggests God’s not dead. Good thing too. By then Noah’s stubborn resolve has made him ruthless and obsessed, but compassion gets the best of him again.
In so doing, he succumbs to selfish love and loyalty to his own, letting in something unpredictable and therefore dangerous to earth’s re-creation. Noah reaches that far shore convinced that he has let God down. The first thing he does, after disembarking, is retreat to a cave, make wine and drown his sorrows. His sons discover him passed-out, naked. They put some covers on him. This detail from the Bible is set up brilliantly in the preceding acts, by repeating the image of a snake coming out of his skin. This accomplishes as much as any other scene in the film to bring the famous floating fortress builder down to the scale where we can relate to him as a human being. While the rain beat down and the rest of the world was shedding its skin, the hero remained vigilant and duty bound. Not until they reach dry land was he able to slough off his own.
Stories chosen for wide release on the big screen are selected by the filmmakers with ultimate care and consideration, so lets’ examine why they gambled on an adaptation of Noah’s flood for movie audiences of 2014. How does Noah’s dilemma reflect our current existential landscape? Might Noah’s spirit reside in every person alive today that assists in protecting nature and humanity from obliteration? Noah charts a path to where no one has ever been before and leaves behind a world that will never exist again. We as humans are faced with precisely this turn of events t0day. Through the old stories, this latest motion picture and a lot of other fine arts and media endeavor to help us prepare.
“Samsara,” is the latest cinematic exploration into the mysteries of earth by filmmaker Ron Fricke. This guided meditation on the seasons of life, death and rebirth was exquisitely photographed in 70mm. Its synthesis of time-lapse, slow motion and optical phase printing, becomes a quintessential time/space travel device invented by the filmmakers for mass enlightenment.
Fricke’s pioneering camerawork was first seen by a larger audience in the groundbreaking non-verbal feature “Koyaanisqatsi” directed by Santa Fe resident Godfrey Reggio. Their collaboration deepened through two additional titles by Reggio entitled “Powaqqatsi,” and “Naqoyqatsi, while Fricke graduated to directing his own features including the award winning “Chronos” (1985) and “Baraka”(1992).
“Koyaanisqatsi” made its world premier at the Santa Fe Film Festival on April 28, 1982 and was immediately hailed as a groundbreaking cinematic achievement. It went on to be embraced internationally for its innovative presentation of moving images, as well as its landmark soundtrack by composer Philip Glass.
The man who inspired worldwide audiences and generations of film experimenters, started out life on a very different path. Reggio began his adulthood a Catholic monk and though he left the order decades ago, it is obvious that between his now graying eyebrows still springs the same determination to share spiritual sustenance with his fellow human beings.
At the Santa Fe Art Institute a couple of years back, I listened to him speak about modern life, creative work, and his thoughts on new media. Though his films demonstrate great technical mastery, the director does not place his faith in the future upon technology. It’s always the message that counts with that celluloid sage, much more than his method.
There is something distinctly biblical about the Qatsi Trilogy. I wonder if the director would agree with my description of his work as serving up a sort of a secular, non-verbal gospel. The word “sacramental” adequately describes my experience of watching any one of those movies with an open mind.
For the sake of better appreciating their place in the evolution of motion pictures, “Samsara,” “Baraka,” and the Qatsi Trilogy could be grouped together as state of the art examples of a long established sub-culture in movie making. Absent of actors and contrived sets, Pure Cinema enlarges upon the language of montage (film editing), which is distinct from theater or literature in that it encompasses a multidimensional choreography of light, lens, time, nature, humanity and machine. Very early experiments in this form include “Ballet Mechanique (1924),” “Berlin, Symphony of a City (1927),” and “Man with a Movie Camera (1929)” among others.
The films of Reggio and Fricke, from “Koyaanisqatsi” through “Samsara,” make particular use of an early editing experiment referred to as “The Kulishov Effect,” in which an actor was filmed with a dispassionate expression. The film was then cut together with contrasting images that lead the audience to conclusions by association, to prove it is not the content of the pictures, but their combination that imbues movies with their meaning.
For example, pairing the actor’s neutral close up with a steaming bowl of soup, Russian film pioneer Lem Kulishov made audiences unanimously presume that the man was hungry. Editing together the very same clip of the face with a child’s coffin made him seem to be grieving. The Kulishov Effect allows for a pronounced editorial tone, yet one that common sense must confirm in each of us, inviting the viewer to interpret for him or herself the emotional value an image.
Though we may think we have seen some of “Samsara’s” subjects before, time and again it is revealed to us that we haven’t. Contrasting a bird’s with a worm’s eye point of view, the filmmakers scrub our attention back and forth across a broad swath of earthly activities to gently cleanse our eyes of apathy and bias and flush out entropy and dysfunction in society at large.
Not all the scenes of nature in “Samsara” are upward gazing in awe. Neither are all views of the machine downcast with disdain. One of the most inspiring visuals I came away with was of a metropolis at night, glittering like crystal, firmly fixed, yet in perpetual motion, exhaling light into the darkness.
The transcendent power of these cinematic dissertations lie in there involvement of the audience. Movies mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Then in the movie theater, we’re all looking at them from a slightly different angle. While they were making the “Koyaanisqatsi”, executives warned them that no one would ever watch it because there was no dialog. When they would ask the director “Who’s in it?” He would say, “you.”
Whenever we buy a movie ticket, or click to a live stream we’re asking for the truth, The same thing that keeps us from seeing the truth while it’s happening to us is what makes it plane as day when we watch it replayed on screen.
Time is what shields us from the truth, not time itself, of course, but our attitudes toward it. An example of this would be to go to a movie like one of these for instance, and to be so preoccupied with your own past and future you completely miss the present purpose of the film you came to see. The same dynamic explains why the truth in life escapes our notice so much of the time. You go away wondering what’s the point.
Is it possible to watch any of these films and be distracted by anything more important? The genius of these films is that there is no better story than the one unfolding on this earth at this moment. The content in these assembled recordings absorbs its audience by enlightening them to the naked truth that eludes us night and day.
That’s why a new one of these titles has been released every decade or so. Motion pictures like these help us take the blinders off. Each is a multidimensional time capsule of natures wonder, plunder and blunder as well as a kind of mellow psychedelic trip without the attendant risks. After watching “Samsara,” I feel like I’ve grown as a human being, intoxicated by the elegance of nature and sobered by my complicity with the machine.
This month’s post “Man and the Machine,” is a continuation of the series on Nature and the Machine begun last month. It seems like a good point of departure after the last post, which introduced Ron Fricke’s “Samsara” and films of a genre in which man and machine combine to produce a product of universal value to humanity. It is unfortunate that the same combination of tools and human ingenuity, employed by the same industry, has also produced gargantuan volumes of psychic pollution in the name of entertainment.
I am not here to declare particular films or their makers as polluters. That is a matter of personal taste. Movies are essentially stories, or at least they appeal to our appetite for them, and everyone is entitled to their own preference. I will not impose my values on films that I don’t care for. They don’t belong to me. If I don’t like a movie, it may be because I haven’t taken the trouble to understand it. Or, it may be I understand it but have no present need or desire for its content.
Like many items for consumption nowadays, if it soaks up precious resources without delivering sustainable returns, I can’t be bothered. Such wasteful products are good examples of the machines taking over. But they can only do so with my agreement. So, while I will never agitate for a ban on bad movies, I will always encourage filmmakers to be benevolent with their art. The images we fashion and release into the culture can have unintended influence especially to people that might not be able to hear or understand the language the characters are speaking. Stanley Kubrick understood this when he made “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
The history of motion pictures is filled with parables and metaphors that warn us of the dangers of the machine taking over. This month we will concentrate on Stanley Kubrick’s seminal science fiction masterpiece, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Sentinel.” Personally, I had not watched the film in more than 20 years.
Released almost 50 years ago, the film gave us advanced intel on our present day circumstances, predicting now commonplace innovations such as I-pad and Skype and such staggeringly complex achievements as space stations and Jupiter missions. I was particularly impressed, while watching the film this time, that government scientist Floyd Haywood’s four year-old daughter, with whom he Skypes on his way to a meeting, asks for a telephone for her birthday. I would not be surprised if 2001 was the precise coordinate point in history when little kids started asking their parents for their very own cell phones.
As someone who studied the Bible a great deal when I was growing up, I’ve often wondered why there are no prophets in the modern world? Has the Bible ever stopped being written? What is the difference between Ezekiel, who reports to have seen a great wheel way up in the sky, Kubrick who puts it up there on a movie screen for all to look at nearly half a century before it becomes a reality?
“2001: A Space Odyssey” predicts more disturbing trends that have come to pass as well, particularly mass surveillance and the virtual police state. I refer you, for instance, to a conversation HAL has with Dave just before HAL predicts (erroneously) that a key component of their spacecraft is going to fail within 72 hours. HAL probes Dave for any hints of doubt about the mission he is on. Dave gives away none of his private thoughts during this discussion and remarks that HAL must be working up his crew psychology report, to which HAL readily admits.
We now live with that all-seeing eye that socializes with us, like a real human being, and probes us with sympathetic dialogs that it can analyze to use for or against us in the future if it should become necessary. At first glance, the eye of surveillance is not so threatening to someone with a healthy conscience, who’s superego has always watched and kept him or her on a benevolent path throughout life’s long, winding passages.
I assume we all have abhorrent thoughts once in awhile. To quote another modern day prophet, in his song,” It’s Alright Ma’, I’m Only Bleeding” the poet confesses, “and if my thought dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” As his illustrious career has proven, such thoughts are not dangerous. I hope our modern day eavesdroppers respect this. The real danger is when the machine flips out. This the catastrophy at the heart of Kubrick’s movie.
We see the sci-fi genre so often heading off in the direction of machines overthrowing the human race, such as “Blade Runner” “Brazil” or “The Matrix.” I will probably delve in to those titles in the coming months but I don’t want to present my subject as “man versus the machine.” As Kubrick so eloquently states, the machine is just man’s tool, like the bone our simian ancestor hurls unto the sky in the inciting incident of his movie.
The machine is never going to turn on us. Only we can do that. So one obvious question is, have we already turned on ourselves with our machines? The answer is yes. Anyone care to argue the point? The more important question is can we use machines to save ourselves? Again, yes. I have not, until now, emphasized the essential fact that corporations are also machines as are governments, but these are the most critical tools humans have invented to achieve the highest potential for all humankind.
Like many of us, the characters In “2001” lives seem utterly dependent on the trinity of technology, government and corporation. Of those three, the HAL 9000 computer that operates their craft is supposedly inviolable, like the Almighty of the Bible. As misinformation starts to pour in, the astronauts delve deeper into their dilemma, HAL reminds them he has never committed even the slightest miscalculation. To his credit, HAL admits a mistake was made and correctly asserts the blame rests with “human error.”
So what happens when God makes a mistake? It’s not God’s fault. It never is. It is, however, up to man to fix the problem. If the astronauts are going to survive, they must disengage from the artificial life support system that has sustained them up to that point. In “2001” the solution is to decommission HAL.
HAL resists the prospect of being taken offline by cutting Frank loose during a space walk and letting him die and drift off into deep space. If you put yourself in Frank’s place, this is the most horrifying image in the movie. It cuts to the bone most effectively because this is what the machine threatens to do to us if we mess with it. If we attempt to defend ourselves from its fallacies the machine will banish us outside its protective sphere. If we go along with its faulty program, we will most certainly be led off a precipice. So it takes tremendous courage to seize control of one’s own destiny.
It is no coincidence that the color of the lens of HAL’s all seeing eye is red and it happens to be the red that you see with your eyelids closed and pointed at the sun. That must be the first color we ever register, the same red of the inside of an egg sack, the illuminated bloodstream we see on the inside of our mother’s belly. When Dave gets inside HAL’s brain and starts disconnecting drives, the inner sanctum is the same shade.
Did Kubrick make that choice because he understood this world of machines, those made of materials as well as those made of men, were like a womb that we would have to abandon some day, when we’ve fully gestated and can no longer sustain life there? Are the mistakes of the machine actually the throws of birth, heaving us out of here and into some appointed place where the full color spectrum of lights, patterns, curves and angles accompanying Dave’s astounding right of passage through the cosmic birth canal portend great harmony within diversity.
Of course, Dave’s journey is assisted by invisible extraterrestrials, with whom he shares some destiny. We can’t rely on such interventions, at least not yet. That’s where the movies come in. I don’t mean all movies. I mean movies like “2001” and “Samsara,” movies that enrich humankind by showing us the truth. The truth eludes us in ordinary consciousness while we obsess about past and future. These are movies that urge us to leave the womb. Cinema is a technology that carries across that abyss of ignorance and apathy. Such movies awaken us to the errors that are built in to the faulty survival schemes of our present day and age.
