The Dreamers: 3-Way Cinephilia

Les cousins dangereux

Previous advisor had this one on the syllabus of an undergrad film theory course, and for good reason (although many of us would never put it on any syllabus). It doesn’t take a critic or a scholar to see that Bertolucci’s obsessions with politics, sex, and cinema all collide here. This film is worthy of consideration from numerous vantage points. A study of its spaces would be worthwhile, for example. The apartment functions in a new way from that of the apartment in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. Here, it’s loaded with Freudian imagery and phenomenological implications. This apartment is a nest, as Gaston Bachelard would probably have it. It’s a safe haven for idealists who pretend to be political while being ignorant of real politics. They are on a backwards journey, returning to a womb-like state at the phase in life when they should be growing up. The two French siblings, Theo and Isabelle, are twins, so their need to be together in a shared fetal state makes some sense. Only an outsider like Matthew could offer an alternate point of view and insist that they need to “grow.” Isabelle’s fractured psyche, split into multiple selves, comes out most overtly when we see her for the first time in her bedroom. She first appears as Venus di Milo, presenting herself as a sex object with no arms (i.e., no agency). This hearkens back to a subtle early scene in which her father displays frank affection to Isabelle with his hands. Once Isabelle approaches Matthew in her bedroom, she is captured by three mirrors, illustrating her different selves precisely at the moment when one Isabelle (the carefree hedonist) is interrupted by another (the little child incapable of maturing), as she hears music from the room next door where she knows her brother is being intimate with another woman.

Fake chains; poser

It’s also a study in France during the late, politically revolutionary days of the 60s. Unlike other, more mythological 60s films, The Dreamers doesn’t take a simple, nostalgic route. Something tragic is present from the beginning, largely due to the obvious idealism of the young characters and the background political dissension. The characters love cinema, so the film uses cinematic tricks to connect those issues in the 60s with the film before us. The twins’ failure to recognize their own political idealism (read: ineptitude) is part of the film’s tragedy, and Matthew’s failure to recognize his unique brand of American idealism is another part. Bertolucci examines modern film theory with a reverse lens. Rather than a study of spectators in a theater imbued with life experiences and sometimes mistakenly seeing reality in the screen, these youths see the screen everywhere in the real world. They talk and move as if they are in films, and Bertolucci intercuts the film with other, older films. They inhabit a fantasy world inside an apartment and escaping mostly just to visit the cinematheque. They get just as riled up over whether Keaton or Chaplin is greater as they do regarding the Vietnam War. It’s not that they don’t care about the war to some extent, it’s that they care about movies just as much.

Darkroom, or, the id-side

Then there’s the poetry vs. politics element. Theo and Isabelle decry their father’s political ambivalence on account of his status as a poet. He prefers to write what he writes and let his poems do the rest of the work. His children, on the other hand, love filmmakers like Godard who infuses all of his films with political ideals (incidentally, political ideals of the sort that did not ultimately cling to the cultural fabric in a lasting way). The film seems to present the youngsters as something like naive hypocrites discovering their own way in life and failing; it is called The Dreamers, after all. Their existence is an affluent one in an apartment removed from the political goings-on of the real world. Their own misguided voyage of self-discovery brings them into a little tent, a fascinating picture of three adolescents desperately trying to rebuild a womb to reenter. Once they’re back in, who else discovers them but their parents, confused and saddened. Once Isabelle realizes they were caught, she attempts a murder-suicide, one of the more dramatic attempts at creating an identity and legacy that history has known. Even a gesture such as this, however, fails. A part of the political demonstration outside the apartment literally invades their intimate and doomed space via a broken window. They wake up and Isabelle quickly covers up her attempt to kill herself, her brother, and Matthew. Now that the political realm is right outside their window, Theo and Isabelle take up arms in the futile cause. Matthew is at least consistent enough to know he shouldn’t take part in a violent demonstration. The twins, however torn from the womb they are, participate in an outside cause based on convenience and ease. Their attachment to each other becomes a mobile womb, since the womb in the apartment has been compromised, violated. Matthew’s previous inclusion is perhaps to blame, so when they’re given the chance to part ways with him, they seize it.

Art or politics

The originals...

...the copycats

...and Freaks.

Injecting cinema into life

 

Culinary idealism

Cracked & broken

Screen goes fuzzy

Politics stuck in the background

Repression depression

Death in the womb

Rebirth?

Quickies, Vol. V

The Adventures of Robin Hood (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1938): Triumphalistic as only Errol Flynn movies can be. A celebration of camaraderie and littleness. So much so that you can just envision a made-for-TV-movie satire based on the life of Robin Hood after King Richard returns to the throne. He gets fat off of royal monthly checks, Matron Marian leaves with the kids, Friar Tuck excommunicates him, and he attempts a Sylvester Stallone-like comeback once he decides Prince John was the real man of the people.

Last Tango in Paris (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972): An incomplete viewing this time around by virtue of not finishing it and disabled subtitles. Still, hard to miss the basic idea. At the risk of dismissal, it’s one of these post-Antonioni existential soliloquies on the emptiness of life, but without the movement, the process of The Passenger or even Zabriskie Point.

Pineapple Express (dir. David Gordon Green, 2008): Watched it awhile ago, but funny enough to deserve mention. R-rated comedies have long loved to shock audiences with sex, but not so much with violence, making this something pretty unique. It thrives on character chemistry: we’re not yet sick of Seth Rogen, and we were definitely sick of seeing James Franco in James Franco roles. May be the final (or only?) subtle performance of Ken Jeong, who is normally too funny for his own good.

The Last Emperor

According to Yosefa Loshitzky’s chapter “The Quest for the Other: Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky” in her book The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor is best understood politically and psychoanalytically. The idea is that sex and politics are intimately intertwined, both having to do with power and relationship with the Other. The author makes a good point, or rather many good points, but her argument is suspect because it makes Bertolucci’s film a remarkable failure. This is possible, but improbable.

"...wherever he may go!"

For one thing, she makes the case that the Forbidden City is reified, or in her words, made into a spectacle, by Bertolucci. This point invites debate, because it raises multiple questions before it can be answered. It would seem, though, that the Forbidden City was built with the idea of spectacle in mind as a major priority. It legend, aesthetic, and history make this point. Second, film itself is a medium of spectacle by definition. Therefore, whether Bertolucci intended for the Forbidden City to appear as a “spectacle” in The Last Emperor is nearly beside the point. Spectacle plus spectacle equals spectacle. Bertolucci would have had to go to enormous pains to avoid the Forbidden City looking spectacular. Since it did look spectacular in the film, we can safely assume that he was quite comfortable presenting the palace as it is.

Watching the perversion

Still nursing at 12

The idea of the palace as the womb, the embodiment of the woman, holds potential but is taken too far. Taken to its logical conclusions, the Forbidden City then signifies a level of feminine identification that encourages excessive deuterohermeneutics. That is to say, this position causes one to read into the film too much. Perhaps when the 3-year-old emperor emerges for the first time from the palace and pushes through the golden translucent sheet we are to take it as a metaphor for the birth canal. And perhaps, before that scene, when the young boy is transported into the Forbidden City for the first time, this is to be understood as penetration/impregnation. Perhaps. Problem is, when one sees a motif such as this, it’s all too easy to construct a relatively coherent justification for it. If it seems a stretch, it might be worth sticking to the more overt meanings of the film.

Industrialization outside the Forbidden City

The author’s main argument, however, is interesting and provocative. The argument observes that the emperor’s memories (1) occur during a time of crisis, (2) are brought on by free associations, and (3) fundamentally distinguish the politics of China before and after the Cultural Revolution.

1.    The film’s diegetic “presence” is found during the deposed emperor’s period of interrogation and reeducation in the labor-camp-slash-detention-center. Times of crisis tend to “color” one’s past recollections, as is literally done in the emperor’s memories. Were one to view the film solely on an aesthetic basis, it would seem that Bertolucci was glorifying pre-Cultural Revolution China as the utopia that the West should emulate. That period contains richer, deeper, and simply more colors than the film’s depiction of Maoist China. The camera shots, too, are grander and more varied (from both above and below).

2.     Seemingly random occurrences spark the emperor’s memories. The first flashback (which is of dubious recollective value) takes place when knocking on a door in the detention center psychically connects the emperor to his first entrance into the Forbidden City at the age of three.

Mr. O'Toole: what would colonial films be without him?

3.    Most importantly of the three, the film is divided into a few pieces, but most importantly into two stages: the remembered and the present. The remembered past is connected with the feminine, the unconscious, and the imagined. China at the time was powerless, seen in the fact that the Forbidden City had on its throne a clueless child. At the child’s coronation, we glimpse the only woman in the film to hold any kind of power: the dying empress. And this is the point; she is dying. She delivers a few lines before a large, black pearl is inserted into her mouth, signifying her death. Before dying, however, she tells the boy that men are not permitted in the palace past dusk. The “men” that surround them are not really men, for they are eunuchs. Only the emperor himself may live in the Forbidden City. Thus, the city is emasculated, as its one male is still a child.

Once the boy enters adolescence, it turns out that he has poor eyesight and needs glasses. Peter O’Toole’s very Western character puts up a fight to ensure that the boy receives the spectacles. The article makes the point that his lack of site corresponds with his overall (Freudian) Lack. In classic Oedipal form, the boy’s castration matches his lack of sight. It has also been argued, however, that the boy’s glasses illustrate enlightenment, which can be easily connected with Western enlightenment/knowledge, since it was Johnston, his tutor, who got him the glasses. In this way, the past portion of the film illustrates lack of knowledge and consciousness.

Coronation of a puppet

Actually, how it illustrates unconsciousness isn’t totally clear. Presumably, the emperor’s lack of awareness of what is taking place beyond the walls of the Forbidden City is an instance of this. Once he finds out that he has been deposed and imprisoned, it’s much too late to do anything about it. As for the imagined, this refers to the earlier point that the emperor’s crisis-driven memories are tinted by his lack of knowledge at that time and need for imagination to fill in the gaps of knowledge.

Once the Cultural Revolution occurs and the film takes us to the “present” full-time, the emperor’s reeducation show that this is now a stage of knowledge. His imagination is not useful, because it is objectivity that now matters. When he attempts to exercise any kind of imagination, he is chastised and punished. Perhaps most significantly, women slowly disappear as the film moves into the stage of communist China. The ex-emperor loses both of his wives. The pilot woman fades away. The only display of femininity is masked in masculinity, as the woman dance on the street during the “parade” wearing men’s clothes. As has been observed, this was probably less influenced by Bertolucci than by the social reality in China, where women must wear men’s clothes in order to lessen the sexual distinction.

The author’s main contention is that Bertolucci’s attempt to glorify the Chinese utopia of communism failed. It failed because, for all his innovation, Bertolucci falls back into very normative sexual politics by reducing the past to femininity and the idealized present to masculinity. The point is actually not nuanced at all, even despite Bertolucci’s strong adherence to Communist principles. It can be added that Bertolucci also failed for idealizing his ideals and not being conscious enough of his own psyche. The drabness that covers China after the Cultural Revolution is not inspiring at all. Could it be inspiring to someone like Bertolucci, who is at his best when he gives free reign to colors and opens his lens full-throttle? As a member of the Italian Communist Party, it is shocking that Bertolucci sees post-Cultural Revolution China as the utopia when it was the pre-revolution that looked so much more appealing. In this way it is Bertolucci’s honesty that did him in. To depict Imperial China as drab and Communist China as beautiful would have been disingenuous. The film would have been seen as a propaganda film rather than an epic. So in the end, perhaps it is better to have before us a flawed epic than a glorious exploitation film.

The Conformist

This is a remarkable film. I suppose that’s the point of almost all the films I’m posting on here these days, but this one is unique for its accessible complexity. It’s highly psychological, ingeniously edited, beautifully shot, philosophically oriented, and powerfully didactic. Before this, had only seen from Bertolucci: The Sheltering Sky and Besieged. Have somewhat avoided his other stuff on moral grounds, but this one was on the list. Reading the chapter on it in Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Marcus, 1986, Princeton) was quite enlightening. So if anything below seems particularly intelligent, that’s where it’s from.

Marcello Clerici, the title character, only holds the title of “the conformist” ambiguously and, more than that, ironically. The idea is that he conforms to Fascist idealism during World War II in order to suppress tendencies (both psychological and sexual) that resulted from a traumatic experience as a child. He marries a simple, unintelligent woman, joins the Fascist secret police, and drowns his “other” desires in heterosexuality, all to meet the status quo.

Early in the film, Marcello meets his blind friend Italo in a radio studio. Clearly, “Italo” personifies the nation at the time, blindly adhering to Fascist ideology under Mussolini. Through a glass, the two men see three women performing. They are dressed identically, singing in unison, and dancing together. They seem to illustrate the nation of Italy at that period in all its conforming. Following their performance, Italo goes on the air to spread Fascist propaganda, which seems to be linked not only to his blindness, but to the previous performers.

The shots of the office of the minister (where Marcello receives his orders) are curiously similar in style to the walls of the asylum where Marcello’s insane father is housed in a straight jacket. I’m not sure if this is deliberate, but it seems consistent with the rest of Bertolucci’s style.

The film’s editing is amazing. It’s rather violent, just as the flashbacks that we witness are intrusions on Marcello’s psyche while trying to fulfill his orders. An early shot of the Eiffel Tower seems out of place until later, when Marcello and his wife find themselves there during Marcello’s psychological crisis. There are also lots of split screens – split by walls and room divisions, often while the characters are still conversing through the dividers. This pictures not only Marcello’s solitude, but his fragmented and conflicted state of mind. The crooked, diagonal shots (almost surreal in nature) also seem to indicate Marcello’s skewed view and non-conformism. Despite his efforts, he does not fit into the mold in which he has placed himself.

The flashback of Marcello’s childhood trauma is orchestrated with supreme competence. (Though Bertolucci is lauded for the editing, in interviews, he gives all of the credit to his editor, without whose input Bertolucci would have never considered doing it the way he did.) Marcello’s present movement flagging down the car are paralleled to perfection with those of his while he was a child. When he was a child, his flagging down a car led to his first pseudo-murder, just as he knows that flagging down his personal thug Manganiello will also result in murder at his hand. The continuation and conclusion of the flashback while in the confessional solidifies that Marcello is in a moral dilemma with very moral ramifications. His sense of guilt from his past requires him to confess his sins. But more than that, he is pre-guilty over the murder he will commit in the near future. Knowing that it must be done, however, he visits the priest for absolution before he commits the sin. The priest tells Marcello that his sexual liaisons thus far in his life are not “normal,” as he believes. The priest urges Marcello to normalcy by having a wife and family. Now the church, symbolic both of Italy at the time and of the moral status quo, tells Marcello to conform further. At a party shortly thereafter, Italo, surrounded by other blind friends, speaks to Marcello more about being “normal.”

One of the most significant parts of the film occurs when Marcello finally meets with Professor Quadri in his study. Marcello brings up Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Bertolucci cinematographizes the myth by allowing light from only one window to enter the room, with Marcello’s shadow cast up on the wall until he opens another window, causing his shadow to vanish immediately. It is Quadri who makes the explicit connection between the allegory and Fascism in Italy. By linking The Conformist with Plato’s allegory, Bertolucci again indicates that this film is about morality. What is not mentioned in the film, but further reading of Plato teaches, is that the lesson of the allegory is not chiefly epistemological but rather ethical. The man who discovers the truth by coming out into the light of day is constrained to revisit the cave and tell his companions there of the illusion versus the truth. Quadri’s escape to Paris to form an anti-Fascist movement (that does nothing but distribute pamphlets) is a cop-out. Rather than returning to the belly of the beast (Italy), he flees and does not fulfill his moral obligation to root out Fascism where it exists.

Also, Bertolucci has made clear that cinema is an example of Plato’s allegory. It has light cast into a theater by means of a rear projector while an audience watching the images on the screen, often taking them to be real. Bertolucci’s film is making a moral statement: that its viewers leave the theater to spread truth, the sort of truth portrayed in the film about psychological honesty and political obligation.

The dance scene is another famous example of Marcello’s inability to conform. After sitting while the others dance, he eventually gets up, but remains by himself in the middle of the floor, moving in the opposite direction from the rest of the dancers, who are joined by hands. Five years later, he teaches his daughter the Ave Maria. His daughter is blond-haired and blue-eyed, unlike her parents but just like one of Marcello’s victims, Professor Quadri’s wife, whom Marcello desired. The walls in his daughter’s room are painted to look like blue, cloudy skies. Not only does the image connect with an earlier one when Marcello walked past a similar painting, only to have its background be nearly identical, but it again pictures Marcello living in an artificial and contrived world in which he does not belong.

The film’s final scene almost perfectly correlates to Plato’s allegory. But significantly, though Marcello is facing the truth about himself psychologically and sexually, the fire is neither in front of nor behind him, but rather beside him. The ending is ambiguous, leaving the decision in the hands of the viewers. Bertolucci acknowledges Marcello’s dilemma but transfers the moral responsibility from the character to the viewer.