Tag / Existentialism

by Jonathan M

Black Death (2010) – The Appeal of a Well-Ordered Universe

Existentialism exists as a result of two cultural forces :

The first, which inspired early 19th Century existential authors and thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, was the hollowing out of traditional culture by the advances made in science and bureaucracy.  A process referred to by the sociologist Max Weber as the disenchantment of the world.  This rising tide of scientific thought washed away many old certainties about the meaning of life and the nature of the Universe and left behind it a beach of mere facts.  This left an unexpected hollow at the centre of European cultural life and the work of the first generation of existential thinkers can be seen as an attempt to address the question of how to live with this void of meaning.

The second, which inspired 20th Century thinkers including Sartre, Camus and the Frankfurt School, was the cultural fallout from the Holocaust.  If the first wave of existentialist thought was trying to grapple with the god-shaped hole at the heart of the human condition, then this second wave was an attempt to deal with humanity’s unexpected willingness to fill that hole with monsters.  Indeed, far from heralding a new golden age and a dismantling of the old taboos and prejudices, the disenchanted 20th Century saw humanity choosing to surrender its new-found existential and moral freedoms to a series of psychotic deities who were more than happy to obliterate anything and anyone who stood in the way of their attempt at imposing a moral order upon an otherwise chaotic universe.

Erich Fromm attempted to understand why it was that humanity had decided to surrender its freedoms in such a shocking manner.  His first book The Fear of Freedom (1941) argues that Humans find freedom to be an unpleasant experience.  When the rules that bind a society start to decompose, there is initial elation but before long, people find that being merely free from impediment is not enough.  They need values and boundaries that will give their lives meaning and allow them to orient themselves.  This pushes societies confronted with radical freedom to seek out new ideologies that will lessen the feelings of anxiety, emptiness and isolation engendered by negative liberty.

Christopher Smith’s fourth feature film Black Death is an exploration of these kinds of themes.  Set in medieval England at a time when plague and violence stalk the land, it seeks to answer the question of what it is that is so attractive about a well-ordered moral universe and why it is that humans are prepared to commit all kinds of atrocities in order to defend their beliefs even when they themselves are assailed by doubts.

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by Jonathan M

The Brothers Bloom (2009) – The Failed Re-Enchantment of the Postmodern World

One way of understanding the success of postmodernism is to ask what emotional need it satisfies and one need that always needs to be satisfied is the desire to feel smart.  To be on the inside.  Postmodern shibboleths such as the death of the author and the abolition of meta-narratives satisfy this desire by making it impossible to satisfy.  According to principles of postmodernism, there is no authority or font of knowledge that can be used to settle disputes.  Nobody gets to quote authorial intensions.  Nobody gets to cite historical precedent.  Under postmodernism, there are no outsiders because there are no insiders.  All opinions have some validity by virtue of the fact that they are opinions.  Nobody is excluded.  Everyone is smart.

One way of understanding the success of certain genres is to ask what emotional needs they satisfy and one need that always needs to be satisfied is the desire to feel smart.  Consider, for example, the spy novel whose Cold War popularity pandered to a desire to understand how global politics really worked once you stripped away the ideological posturing and the camera-friendly photo opportunities at which dead-eyed leaders whorishly proclaimed their desire to “do business” with each other.  The same goes for cyberpunk, a literary movement concerned with the lives of the mechanics who operate beneath the selective attentions of the first world’s pampered business-class bourgeoisie in order to keep the great machine of capitalism grinding ever-onwards.  However, while these fantasies of knowledge and agency pervade a great many forms and genres, they find their apotheosis in the twists and turns of the caper picture.  Films like Dassin’s Rififi (1955), Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur (1956), De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (2001) and Lee’s Inside Man (2006) enjoy a magnificently complex relationship with the societies they are set in.  Embodying a blue-collar vision of the examined life, they allow audiences to engage in vicarious fantasies of intellectual and social agency by following the adventures of characters who exists outside of the system whilst also displaying an insider’s familiarity with the workings of that system.  The ‘system’ can be represented by a digital universe, the bureaucracy of Whitehall or the mysteries of human psychology but the caper film is always about the guys who know how to work that system: how to be free of it and how to benefit from it.

Rian Johnson’s second film The Brothers Bloom is an attempt to address both solutions to the need to feel smart.  Ostensibly a caper picture featuring a gang of colourful conmen, it is also a fiercely ambitious work of postmodernist cinema that seeks not only to deconstruct the caper picture genre, but also those elements that make up the genre of postmodern cinema itself.  With targets ranging from the films of Wes Anderson to those of Michael Haneke, Johnson raises a question that cuts to the heart of postmodernism in the arts: Can a work of postmodern art still produce a genuine emotional response?

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by Jonathan M

Three to Kill (1976) – The Infinite Gives the Sniffles

Georges Gerfaut is a man very much like you or I :  He works a mid-level office job that involves plenty of meetings and no manual labour.  He has a wife and kids who put up with his little foibles.  He loves West Coast Jazz.  He drinks a little bit too much.  Georges Gerfaut is a man very much like you or I.  In fact, he could very well be you or I.  Georges Gerfaut will soon kill three men.

One night, Gerfaut is driving home when he witnesses an accident.  Gerfaut is concerned enough to take one of the survivors to hospital but not so concerned that he bothers to leave his name.  Did he do the right thing?  His wife is unsure, Gerfaut is not.  Either way, two men approach Gerfaut while he is on holiday and attempt to strangle him.  Then shoot him.  Then blow him up.  Without a second thought, Gerfaut takes flight.  Leaving his wife and kids completely alone.  He must kill the men who tried to murder him.

Originally published in French under the title Le Petit Bleu De La Cote Ouest, Three to Kill is Jean-Patrick Manchette’s seventh novel.  Shamefully, it is also one of only two works by Manchette currently available in English.  At a little over 130 pages, Three To Kill is a lean and minimalist work of behaviourist hard-boiled crime fiction.  However, despite its relative brevity, Manchette’s novel is a work of considerable grace and challenging profundity as it seeks to answer the question of what Kurtz would have done with his life had Marlowe managed to bring him back to civilisation alive?

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Valhalla Rising (2009)

Videovista have my review of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising.

Valhalla Rising is a beautifully shot and darkly existentialist riff on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which, in the grand tradition of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), moves the action from colonial Africa to the age of Vikings.

It is a densely symbolic and beautifully shot film and… it bored the shit out of me.  My main problem with the film is similar to the problem exposed by Emmanuel Carrere’s La Moustache (2005) and demonstrated by Thomas Clay’s Soi Cowboy (2008).

I’ll expand my thoughts n the problem in the post linking to the review of Soi Cowboy but the three posts kind of interlink.

by Jonathan M

Black Snow (1990) – Points of the Existential Compass

One of the themes I keep returning to in my writings about film and literature is the tension that exists within us between the individual and the collective : On one hand, we all want to be true to ourselves and to express ourselves to the fullest without giving in to external pressures or allowing other people to take advantage of us.  On the other, we are also deeply sociable creatures who yearn for human contact and the joys of sharing our successes and failures with friends and loved ones.  While these two sets of desires are not mutually exclusive, they can interfere with each other.  Resolving this interference pattern is not only central to our day-to-day existences, but also our political system.

Or is it?

It is extremely easy to fall into the pattern of seeing everything as a tension between two diametrically opposed extremes : Good and evil, capitalism and socialism, law and chaos, religion and atheism, nature and nurture, mysticism and rationalism, us and them.  However, the simple fact that this kind of pattern can be applied to pretty much anything does not necessarily entail that it is picking up on some profound fact about the world.  In fact, I would argue that it is a shallow and empty hermeneutic whose very shallowness explains its seemingly universal application.  This kind of shallow analytical framework does pose significant dangers.

Indeed, assuming that our original balancing act is not just an empty truism then how certain are we that it is a universal fact about human life?  While the desire to balance the needs of individual expression with those of social integration is one of the most common ways of thinking about life in the West in the 21st Century, it is by no means clear that this motif enjoys the same popularity elsewhere in the world.  Do members of isolated Amazonian tribes worry about hypocritically trying to ‘fit in’?  In his book Black Mass : Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), John Gray suggests that a tendency to assume that all political cultures are the same as ours is one of the regrettable short-comings of Western liberalism.  It is, he argues, the kind of unwarranted assumption about other people that leads to blood-shed as when we encounter people who are not like us, it is all too easy to move from incomprehension to hostility.

Fei Xie’s Black Snow (Ben Ming Nian) is an interesting test case for the applicability of our dichotomy : Made in China in the late 1980s, the film initially presents itself as a rather generic art house film in which an alienated and isolated individual battles to re-engage with a society he long-ago turned his back on.  However, Fei Xie’s approach to this challenge reveals a political culture with a very different set of attitudes to ours.

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by Jonathan M

Johnny Mad Dog (2008) – Random Acts of Narrative

Two books have recently been weighing quite heavily on my mind.

 

The first is J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a novel that is as striking in its imagery and ideas as it is in its formal innovation.  Rather than providing a coherent narrative, Ballard chops the book up into short paragraphs that are more or less conceptually and thematically related.  Themes, motifs and characters re-appear (sometimes with different names, sometimes filling spaces previously occupied by other characters) but between the disjointed writing style and the abstraction of Ballard’s ideas, it is clear to me that any story one projects upon the book is exactly that – a projection.  The haecceity of the book is not a matter of plots and characters and events.

 

The second is Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound – Enlightenment and Extinction (2007).  A work of surprisingly accessible wide-spectrum philosophy, Nihil Unbound opens with an important distinction between what he calls the scientific image of man – the best scientific model for human cognitive functioning – and the manifest image – the model we use when thinking about and describing others.  The manifest image is grounded in what is known as ‘folk psychology’ and it represents centuries-worth of little theories and assumptions about how humans think.  This image is made up of relatively complex ideas such as Freudian projection as well as more fundamental ideas such as the idea that there is such a thing as the self and it is that which works the controls of the body.  The problem is that the clearer the scientific image becomes, the more the manifest image comes to resemble a collection of empty and surprisingly brittle superstitions.

 

One of the things that I have taken away from these books is the artifice and ubiquity of the story and of the narrative form.

 

As humans, we are constantly trying to make sense of the world around us.  Our brains are optimised for pattern-recognition and, when confronted by a stream of random and unstructured data from our sense organs, our brain starts trying to make sense of it.  We see stories everywhere.  We even tell stories about ourselves, stitching causal histories composed of random fluctuations in hormone levels and neural pathway activation into neat little just-so tales about why we do the things we do.  We are addicted to the story…

 

We build religions around this need to tell stories, we construct therapeutic models encouraging us to piece together the stories of our selves and, when it comes time for us to depict the world around us through art, we happily continue the pursuit – Building characters out of our woefully inaccurate folk psychological notions and marching them through worlds far more ordered and simple than our own.  Sometimes we even confuse our understanding of the world with the world itself and write stories we claim to be ‘realistic’, ‘accurate’ or ‘authentic’.  But all too often, what we take to be the world is just another story… a simplified and conveniently understandable abstraction.  This poses a theoretical challenge to art : Can it ever capture the truth about the world, or is it necessarily a simplification of it?  If it is possible then the chances are that the results will resemble something like  Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog, a film about boy soldiers based upon the novel Johnny Chien Mechant by Emmanuel Dongala.

 

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by Jonathan M

What Happened to Tragedy?

Last night, I went to see Tower Theatre Company’s production of Hamlet and, having never seen Hamlet performed live before, I was appropriately blown away by the sheer complexity of the text; the complex but detailed and intense emotions, the philosophical insights contained within the body of the text and the sheer ontological complexity of plays within plays and madness within madness and how everything mirrors and echoes everything else.  However, what really struck me was the fact that you do not get many tragedies these days.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW : He Died with His Eyes Open (1984) by Derek Raymond

In order to grasp the devastating beauty of Derek Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open (1984), it is first necessary to grasp the devastating beauty of another text; Conrad’s altogether more famous Heart of Darkness (1899).  Conrad’s book ends with one of the most memorable soliloquies in British literature :

“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

‘The horror! The horror!’”

As one of the most commented upon texts in academic literary criticism, this passage has been found to contain endless meanings but one particular meaning has clawed its way up out of the Darwinian jungle of ideas with greater panache and ferocity than the others.  The most common interpretation of that final line is that Kurtz has somehow seen the savage, devouring emptiness that lurks at the heart of existence.  A heart of darkness that can only truly be grasped by the mad or the inspired who can free themselves of the comforting fictions that animate our day-to-day lives.  For Queen.  For Country.  For Myself.  For Love.  All fictions.  One reason for the popularity of this interpretation is that it echoes the themes of meaninglessness that pervade existentialism, that most popular of Post-War philosophical postures.

Noir crime fiction is seen by some as a form of populist agitprop for existentialism.  While Camus and Sartre took over the left bank, it was the Noir writers who were on sale in every news-agent.  It is only natural to read Raymond’s book as a continuation of this de facto intellectual alliance, but I would argue that Raymond’s take on existentialism is almost diametrically opposed to that of Sartre, Camus, Kafka or Marcel.

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