"Hunger" (2008)

"Business of the soul" they say. 66 days hunger strike. Bobby Sands dies alone. All men die alone. The only political status a man has, when all else is uprooted and thrown away, is self-representation. If a man's right to political status -- to voice and speech -- are taken away, then his body remains the last site of jurisdiction. Visible suffering; but also: internal suffering. Business of the soul. The right to wear one's own clothes. The right to spend one's time as one wishes (to meditate, to do nothing, to sleep in peace, to smoke cigs). The right to converse with other men, other prisoners, and to pursue self-education, recreation, advancement. The right to read letters addressed to oneself, and to receive the gifts of goodwill from the outside: family parcels, lovers' griefs, children's pictures. The right to receive remission when opportunities are pirated away by the leadership. The central command of shield-banging; black boots and the gauntlet of masked aggression. Against such facelessness there is but one solution: the right to self, and that self an Irish self. Northern Irish, but of one Ireland. Catholic but also Protestant. Irish but also not-British, subject to neither the Crown nor to Maggie Thatcher. One begins with a comrade; one ends with a dream of youth. Cross-country runner, Bobby was, the best of Belfast. The endurance to persist in the cold frost of a morning, when he last remembered the light of a chill sun and the frightened sparrows rush out and fall away into airy patterns, was what he envisioned at the moment his soul fled away into a dark grove. They wheeled poor Bobby out, champion runner, on a stretcher, and tears could not have pooled at the corners of his emaciated face. What eyes he had were the sores on his back. "Jesus had backbone." So did Bobby when his skin and muscle sunk and wrapped for dear life around it.
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The film is worthy of study chiefly for its structure, besides the acting; this is where McQueen's training as an artist shines through. The film is divided into 4 parts: the prologue, prison life, interview/confession, hunger strike. The Prologue (not truly a prologue but I call it so because its power lies in its ability to conceal the inner chambers of the film and rather hints at the violence to come) has us contemplating the routine life of a nondescript, well-fed, well-dressed, seemingly honorable man who happens to be a prison guard. McQueen focuses not only on the trifles of his passing hours but most expressly on his bruised hands, which the prison guard constantly has to submerge in a sink of warm water to soothe their swelling when we see that they are freshly cut and bruised time after time. What does he do that hurts his hands so? Rather, who does he hurt to make his hands hurt so? This recurrent image is powerful enough -- of an irishman hurting, as we assume, other irishmen, and ends up bruising himself -- and its strength of expression gains resonance by indirectly suggesting an unseen, off-screen violence. The 2nd part, which I call Prison Life, follows a fresh prisoner into a cell where we are cast with him into the shit storm, literally. We're gradually made aware of the absence, the delayed introduction, of Bobby Sands: neither of the two young men with whom we inhabit the 2nd part of the film is Sands, and this makes the everymanness of the prisoners' ordeal poignant. When Sands is finally introduced we don't immediately recognize him: hardly any one in the film is referred to by name or cast into sharper light by dialogue: speech among the characters is sparse, arising only in the necessaries of actual human functions, when something vital has to be said. Who in prison would waste the energy to blabber when everything is at stake? The prisoners/rebels are displayed to us like monks in a cloister who practice the virtues of silence, endurance and forbearance; not merely because they are rebels thrown into the pen, but because they are irishmen sworn by blood to their country; something greater than them is in peril, must be preserved. The 3rd part, by which time we know who Sands is (played imperiously, magnificently by Michael Fassbender) leads eventually to the extended dialogue scene involving Sands and a Catholic bishop. This scene, acted with virtuoso solemnity by both parties, weighs everything down, and leads theoretically to the actual hunger strike, of which we see only Sands' martyrship. The ending, having nothing to do with the beginning (except in terms of cinematographic light, in their share of color and tone), flares out in birds and death; Sands' martyrship stays with us until the last credit rolls, and all that had happened before doesn't come full circle as other films do, and instead spirals outward into a haunted sky. What was done is done. "It is finished."

"Two-Lane Blacktop" (1971)

Stripped down to the essentials: chassis, engine, oil, water. Machine and fluid; so too is man his matter and the aqua vitae. The classic Cartesian Dichotomy returns in the form of a pulp film: Mechanic and Driver. (The characters have no name, not even the girl, who plays the romance interest, who is simply "The Girl"; or Warren Oates, credited as "G.T.O."; because man is the sum of his parts, he is his car; in action, at rest.) The beginning credits, no music, neither the ending credits; the film begins in a blur of pavement as the camera zooms by, and the movie ends in a dissolve of celluloid, as the grey 55 Chevy speeds toward the unknown distances, into the oblivion of pure velocity. The nothingness of racing.
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"I'll tell you one thing, there's nothing like building an old automobile from scratch and wiping out one of those Detroit automobiles. It does give you a set of emotions that stays with ya. Know what I mean? Those satisfactions are permanent."

They are permanent because they are ennobled beyond the ordinary measure of practicality. Immeasurable because they are fast and constant.

"Antichrist" (2009)

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The film is ludicrously dedicated to Tarkovsky... and yet there is reason for this. The "Prologue" that begins the film is beautifully directed, in a crystal b&w cinematography, slow-motion, lots of water: in a shower two people making love, or spilling from a plant jar tipped over by a child; as the jar breaks, water. The love-making in the shower includes a pornographic feature which is aestheticized to maximum effect, and the love-making in general is draped in a luxuriant cadence by the slow-mo, by the baroque music, by the pristine sheen of the camera-shots. The von Trier of old -- the Tarkovsky acolyte who lacked all of Tarkovsky's mysticism, poetry, substance, but none of his eye or technical gift -- returns in the "Prologue," a pleasure-principled exercise in style. 

Why is the film dedicated to A.T.? Because it is something of the opposite, the direct, epicurean antinomy to A.T.'s fundamentally spiritual praxis; an exercise in style proposed and sought by von Trier out of resignation (that he is nowhere in A.T.'s league) and also out of a weird modesty: not wishing to ape the master's poetics, von Trier, the provocateur, chooses strategically to avoid any and all pretentiousness (a strategy that fails in many respects to achieve its aim; it is altogether too easy to think of von Trier as "pretentious") and instead work as the "antichrist" (in the Nietzschean sense) to A.T.'s christian mysticism. The anti-Tarkovsky, relational and obsessed, not with locating the self in God-origin but with locating the self in a nihilist daemonism. 

What is the purpose of the "Prologue"? To introduce the first chapter, titled "Grief," the cause thereof: a toddler falls to its death while the parents make love. ("He" and "She"; they are not given names because they are meant to embody the two sexes, masculinity and femininity, animus and anima, with no regard for gender or socialization, since von Trier is trying out severely reduced psychoanalytic foundations.) We see the toddler die while the couple make love: sex gives birth to life but it also takes life away. This is the principle of regeneration: sex is always death, not as "the end of life," but as the beginning of life, or the continuation of life, repetition interminable, reincarnation out of endless obsession with carnality: one dies to be reborn again, and again, and again. This is the telos of sex: reincarnation. The body and the obsession with the body is the cause for embodiment throughout the history of matter. "One re-enters the womb door": because one is committed to sex, as pleasure and as fate and as life-purpose. Because sex begets death begets life. A circle constructed within nature is constructed within the body, which is the very springboard of nature. 

Why is this film so profoundly Freudian? Firstly, the theory of "repression": "The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious." What "She" represses is not her grief -- her grief is written all over her, it is inscribed on her body, it makes her quiver, it makes her violently unstable -- rather, she represses a memory of a distant past that is only awakened by her grief, by the loss of her child. The couple go to the woods because she has a dream about walking through a particular wood and staying at a particular cabin. As she learns to go beyond her grief she learns something about herself that unsettles her deeply, irrevocably, something which the loss of her child made painfully clear to her only in an automatic way. Her concealed memory isn't just distant, it is ancient, as ancient as the origin of the sexes; and this hidden seed in her isn't just a self-identifying agency, it is a collective mania. She learns (as the film develops) that she is an unconscious vehicle of nature: she is the womb that embodies carnality and gives birth to the very organs of growth. She is a "witch" only to the extent that "nature is satan's church"; her religion is the ancientest in human history, it is pagan, it is cyclical, it is preserved by carnality. Her church is nature: nature is in her very organism. She has only thus far repressed a rememory of the very principle underlying her sexual existence: her dream was a dream of the ages, a dream as old as the oldest acorn-dropping tree. She gives life, but in this faculty she is also given the ability to take life away, to produce pain as well as joy. (We learn also that she is at fault for the child's death: she watched the toddler fall to its death as she experienced orgasm; in order to give birth to something else, she had to allow the shedding of life in another direction.)

Secondly, there is the Freudian concept of "transference": the therapist, her husband, is too entwined with her emotionally and sexually to be able to circumvent the unprofessional act of transference, a fundamental problem in dealing with patients. If the therapist is affected by the patient, he/she loses the requisite distance to effect any change or unconceal what is concealed in the patient's neurosis. The real horror begins when "He" becomes affected by "She" through an unwilled and accidental love-making, after which they reform a dyad that daily engages in the sexual activity of an unloosed and perilous subconscious. The transference develops into a violent counter-transference, emotional at first ("He" begins to have disturbing symbolical dreams and he starts having unsettling visions), and then gruesomely physical: they both begin to hate their own sex and sex in general, because it produces an unendurable misery, a deep-rooted despair which is a sickness unto death: all life is generated only to die; this is an intolerable condition, the daimon's most intimate knowledge. She eventually enacts her wrath (against him, against herself) because she is finally emptied of her shattered persona; she becomes vengeful Nature itself, Nature personified, and her wrath against the audacity of mental life is one equally at war against the impudent vocabulary of psychoanalysis. If man in his carnality is ontologically enslaved to Nature, then man must die as Nature wishes: bodily, painfully, joyously, but always in a sharp and unavoidably unstable sentience.

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