Goodbye to Language: Brecht in 3-D

There’s Godard’s much talked about dog Roxy who has more than a cameo in Goodbye to Language and there’s the subversive use of 3-D. In a kind of cinematic guerilla warfare, this highest level of perspectival illusion is usurped throughout the film. But Godard either mistitled his movie or is so caught up in the Babel myth that infuses it (at one point it’s remarked that everyone will need interpreters) that he misses his own point. From the beginning of the film everyone is reading. They’re reading Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. The skewed 3-D is mirrored by the overlays of constant and wonderful aphorism (particularly relating to Hitler): “Everything Hitler said he accomplished,” “Machiavelli, Richelieu, Bismarck, Hitler did not invent anything.” “society accepts murder to solve unemployment,” “inner experience is now forbidden by society in general,” “the dog is the only creature who loves you more than itself.” Zero and infinity, adieu and dieux. “Kamera," we are informed, is the Russian  for prison. Monet is quoted and Shelley and Byron make cameo appearances at the end of the film. Truffaut Fahrenheit 451 was a futuristic tale based on a Ray Bradbury novel about the burning of books. But Goodbye to Language is no Kristallnacht. And while Godard may romanticize the closeness of Roxy’s relationship with reality, we cannot be assured that the dog shares his master’s continuing and exuberant delight in the female body. Godard has always exuded Courbet’s love for wanton displays of femininity (in specific the mons pubis which has become a near extinct species of beaver in our pedophiliac Brazilian wax culture). A better title for Goodbye to Language would be Goodbye to Reality. The film’s begins by declaring “those lacking in imagination take refuge in reality” and it’s really Brecht in 3-D with Verfremndungseffekt acting as a didactic tool. If Bergman was the great metaphysician of modern art house cinema than Godard is its epistemologist. Le gai savoir was based on Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile: Or On Education. His subject is, in fact, language, consciousness and history on both an ontogenic and phylogenic basis. In Goodbye to Language the arguing couple of Contempt (played here by Heloise Godet and Kamel Abdeli) return for an encore. Microcosm and macrocosm—his couple’s utterances and nudity have both theological and semiological significance (“nature” and “metaphor” are recurring titles for sequences). At the end, Godard credits his actors along with a list of great thinkers, who he is wont to quote. His screen does go black and his soundtrack silent, but is his movie a swan song for language? Hardly. Andre Malraux wrote his Anti-Memoirs. He couldn’t have made this masterful anti-masterpiece without it.

Pending Vegan

Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Maurice Quentin de La Tour

The central character of Jonathan Lethem’s recent short story, “Pending Vegan,” (The New Yorker, 4/7/14) has just gone off Celexa. Paul Espeseth’s psychiatrist Irving Renker has warned him that “in withdrawal from Celexa some patients have described a kind of atmosphere of rot or corruption or peril creeping around the edges of the everyday world.” But, it’s not so much corruption as self-contradiction that plagues Espeseth who had named himself “Pending Vegan” even before he went off his anti-depressant. The name is in response to his reading of a library book which prophesied “the world’s collapse into unsustainablility under the weight of its human population.” However, it’s not only the contradiction between things like “animal-love” and “the pleasures meat-eating” that plagues Espeseth aka Pending Vegan, he feels almost honor bound to educate his daughters Chloe and Deirdre in the perception of paradoxes, contradictions, aporias and “cognitive dissonances” amongst them the fact that  “Mommy and Daddy fought but loved each other” and “that human beings were miraculous and shyness ought to be overcome, yet also that they should violently distrust the too eager stranger as a probably monster.” Restoration comedy named characters after their personality traits (Horner, Wishfort, Flutter are central characters in classics like The Country Wife, The Way of  the World and Man of Mode) and the fact Lethem has a central character named Pending Vegan wandering around the campus of SeaWorld (which has in reality been the subject of a CNN expose, Blackfish ) is a piece of caricature worthy of Wycherley, Congreve or Etherege. Yet it's instructive at the same time. What better metaphor for the state of our civilization than to have a patient, with an aversion to animal cruelty withdrawing from his anti-depressant at SeaWorld and in the process ruminating on the education of his four-year-old twins? In "Pending Vegan”  Lethem is producing a comic version of Rousseau’s Emile: or On Education to accommodate the ambivalent nature of 21st century man. And what better name for our fecklessly ambivalent protagonist than that of the titular hero, Pending Vegan?

The Master

The theme of The Master is the whole human project, that is the endeavor of reforming human character--as represented successively in Rousseau, in Marx and Freud. The director Paul Thomas Anderson is a retrograde form of original. There Will Be Blood, his previous film was jagged edged, a larger than life East of Eden with Lawrentian overtones. Here too the palette is rich and full of leitmotifs. The director loves the sea and the gnarled morphology of imperfect bodies. There’s a wonderful scene of fulsome nudes that could easily have been drawn from Poussin. You are confounded by hosts of associations. Is Anderson presenting man in nature or man in some self-created hell? Is there an Adamic or for that matter Rouseauesque form of innocence to return to? To discountenance The Master’s debt L. Ron Hubbard, is to hijack the ambition of the movie, which deals with a science fi writer who invents a form of therapy called “processing” (Scientology’s Dianetics) which deals with both past traumas and past lives. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the Master, Lancaster Dodd. His disciple is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), who bears no small resemblance to the savage Alex of A Clockwork Orange. He is the litmus test, the petrie dish in which Dodd’s theories will be tested. If The Master is filled with cultish perversity, Quell is one of Freud’s case studies, The Rat Man for example, viewed in a fun house mirror. But the brilliance of the film lies in a disquisition which defeats causality. Scenes occur with no warning and no build up. The chaotic Freddie drunkenly stumbles onto a yacht where a wedding is about to take place and enters history. We go back into his past as he is treated with harrowing “applications.” Then his own psycho-history takes on a life of its own, in which he is eventually released from the jaws of memory into something worse, the despair of his own life. Abandoned by his Pygmalion, Freddie returns to one of the earlier set pieces of the movie, as a helpless creature curled up against the haunting figure of a woman carved in sand.

Another Life

Photo: Carol Shadford

At the very beginning of  “Another Life,” the Paul La Farge short story that appeared in a the July 2nd New Yorker, the author places Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, into his protagonist’s hand. “Nature commands every animal and the beast obeys,” the protagonist (identified only as “the husband”) quotes Rousseau as saying. “Man feels the same impulsion, but knows that he is free to acquiesce or resist.” The husband takes the Rousseau with him down to the bar of the hotel where he and his wife are staying and the volume functions as an ironic leitmotif as La Farge’s character proceeds to cheat on his wife with the comely and literary young bartender. Indeed neither the husband nor his wife, who shows up only to run off with a character described first only as a “sleazebag” (and is then given the name, Jim LaMont), turns out to be free. What we have is an irrational universe of the kind that Nietzsche might have described in Beyond Good And Evil or The Birth of Tragedy. La Farge’s tone is taciturn, resigned, even stoic. His protagonist is revealed to be a writer who is not reading the Rousseau because he wants to but because he has to teach it.  “I’m being compelled to read about freedom!” he muses. He describes himself to the bartender as someone who “writes short stories about the confusion of life and the unknowability of the heart.” When the bartender invokes Chekhov, the protagonist brings up Nabokov “with his unreliable narrators.” After the sex, the husband blacks out on a bench in a nearby square and the young lady who also eventually and significantly is given a name (as if her character unlike that of the husband is still in the process of formation) returns to her room and “starts working on a story.” Rather than Nabokov, La Farge himself is reminiscent of Chekhov. His current offering bears comparison to a sad, sweet Chekhov classic about another evanescent relationship, “The Lady with the Dog.” 

Moonrise Kingdom

All the things that commended classic Wes Anderson films like Rushmore and The Royal  Tenenbaums come to naught in the recently released Moonrise Kingdom. The Royal Tenenbaums paid homage to Franny and Zooey, but it had it’s own colorful take on genius. In Moonrise Kingdom the themes of childhood precocity and genius and the countervailing picture of adult ineptitude and also irresponsibility lie at the heart of the canvas, but all the characters and settings are wooden. Anderson has a highly estheticized view of innocence. It’s not Rousseau so much as the Pre-Raphaelites that are the apparent influence and the film is replete with dazzling visual inventions and camera set-ups that exude a surrealistic panorama, a kind of filmic magical realism only equalled by the Coen Brothers. But the visual sleights of hand—a candy cane lighthouse, a map come to life, a police station that looks like a dog house, an island called Penzance and a scout camp called Ivanhoe—are self-conscious gizmos that lead nowhere. It’s as if you have all the bricks and mortar, the palette of the Wes Anderson style and themes including that of mental illness (Coping With a Very Troubled Child is a pamphlet carried around by Anderson’s 12 year old mascara wearing protagonist, Suzy Bishop, played by Kara Haywood), without any accompanying earned or even unearned emotion. It doesn’t help that Anderson’s A list cast including Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Ed Norton, Bruce Willis and Tilda Swinton, iterate their lines as if they’d fallen asleep at a backer’s audition and had absolutely no idea what their cartoon characters were about. Anderson’s young hero Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), a prepubescent portrait painter who's already turning out nudes, spots his love interest at a production of Benjamin Britten’s Noye's Fludde. Robinson Crusoe, Lord of the Flies and Our Town then provide the cultural padding for the movie’s not very pristine and unnatural world.