Entering the Void

The fact is we are all given a death sentence. Once you're born you begin to die. But let’s say you get some very bad news, as some people do, and you’re told that you just have six months to live. You’re life is now finite. Something like this was what happened to the neurologist Oliver Sacks when he was informed that he was dying. Sacks had always been enormously productive in his work as a doctor and writer, the latter feeding off the former, but as odd as it sounds the news he received only motivated him more in both his work and his life. In an Op-Ed piece (“My Own Life,” NYT,  2/19/15), he quoted David Hume in describing his state of mind, “I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study and the same gaiety in company.” Some might take a different approach when given such a prognosis. They might slip into melancholy and self-pity or decide that since their days were numbered, they were simply going to gratify all their senses and do whatever they want. The might argue that they have spent their whole life working, being a parent or attending to their own parents in their years of convalescence and now it’s there time, meaning a license for self-indulgence. Sounds a little like the prisoner on death row, allowed whatever he wants for his last supper, no? This is precisely the plot of Kurosawa’s Ikiru which translates as “to live.” The central character, a civil servant named Watanabe, learns that he is going to die. At first he indulges in a Walpurgisnacht with a Mephisto like cohort, but the pleasures of wine, women and song pale against the void he's facing (Enter the Void is by the way the title of Gaspar Noe’s film about death which, like Ikiru, also has scene of Tokyo nightlife) and he finally finds solace in the notion of helping others and in particular by building a park for children. The last scene of the movie depicts him on one of the swings in the park he has built singing softly to himself and it’s one of the most touching and indelible images in the history of cinema.

'Tis Pity She's a Whore

                                                                photo: Richard Termine

Gasper Noe’s Enter the Void deals with the incestuous love between a brother and a sister. Set against the strip clubs and drug dens of a hallucinatory Tokyo, with a nod to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the film also provides a good deal of backstory that enables the viewer to believe in the characters. The British Company Cheek by Jowl now offers a production of one of the most infamously incestuous dramas of all time, the Elizabethan playwright, John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Where the brother and sister of Enter the Void have been brought together earlier in life after their parents are killed in an automobile accident, the challenge of staging 'Tis Pity lies in the fact that the intimacy of Ford’s two characters is de facto, functioning primarily as a premise to ignite the ensuring revenge drama. Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary is transformed to John Ford Our Contemporary for Declan Donnellan’s production at BAM. The adolescent Annabella’s (Lydia Wilson) room is covered with film posters from classics like Gone With the Wind,  Breakfast at Tiffany’s and True Blood. True Blood is the one citation that has some relevance to a bloody revenge tragedy that ends with a broken hearted lover sawing out his beloved’s heart; the red set of the teenager’s bedroom also recalls Brian De Palma's  film version of Stephen King’s Carrie. Though Ford was censored for ‘Tis Pity, there is no doubt that the perversity of the love is one of the reasons it has survived and continued to attract directors. Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (presented in theatrical form with Carrie Mulligan last summer) also dealt with incest between a brother in sister who like Noe's characters are orphaned albeit in a more metaphorical sense--by a narcissistic artistic parent. Cheek By Jowl’s production helplessly flails with surfaces in an attempt to lay its mark on Ford’s work. It’s one distinction lies in showing how an interpretation that initially turns tragedy into bedroom farce can result in a bloodbath.

Enter the Void

Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void pays homage to Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, both in the prominent portrayal of drugs and an iconic toilet scene. Enter the Void is shot in the psychedelic style of films like Terry Giliam’s Brazil, but it has the mythopoeic breadth of Joseph Campbell. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), the central character, takes a drug called DMT that mimics the feeling created by an enzyme the body shoots into the brain at the time of death. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which describes the moment of death as a replay of life, is cited just as Oscar meets his drug-induced maker, and the book’s prophecy plays out in handheld camera shots jerkily hovering over scenes from Oscar’s past—the gruesome death of his parents in a head-on collision (searingly repeated throughout the film), his sister Linda’s (Paz de la Huerta) abortion (including a graphically depicted fetus), and his witnessing, as a child, the primal scene of his parents fucking in the doggy position. In an anomalous twist, he even observes his own cremation. Oscar’s subjective mind is the doppelganger hanging over the movie, and it presents a curious paradox, since utter subjectivity is invoked to depict the death of the self. Noe’s early Irreversible achieved notoriety due to a graphically violent eight-minute rape sequence. Noe’s camera is equally unflinching in Enter the Void. In what must be a cinematic first, the penis is shown entering the vagina from the point of view of the vulva. However, despite the violence, drug addiction and pornography that constitute the director’s palette, Enter the Void is ultimately a family drama, albeit of a gruesome sort. Their parents’ death is the driving force in both Oscar's and Linda’s lives, and it’s what cements their incestuous bond. Unlike more traditional cinematic excursions into the territory of trauma, Enter the Void suffers from a lack of plot—maybe because of the director’s globally ambitious approach to his subject, which is life itself.