Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation: Getting our fill of the real without the danger of the real?

I will dedicate my discussion of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation to the medium of film since we like to associate The Matrix with this particular theorist. Baudrillard makes the opening statement that "It is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction." A modern Surrealist or Abstract expressionist film is blase precisely because the collective conscious has given up with distinguishing between the map and the territory, so high art abstraction is now in the realm of mundane everydayness. As an example, I can't help but think of Jan Švankmajer's Lunacy, a regurgitation of every conceptual dinosaur of Western ideology all mashed into an intentionally indecipherable film; more on the film can be found here and here. Although the film doesn't look at all like our reality, the tropes bring reality to mind and their chaotic orchestration is about as annoying as a traffic jam.

The documentary film is instead more in vogue having achieved commercial status this century for the first time ever, and signifying a new interest in the closest to the sense of unmediated real that the film industry can come up with. Producer of Voices of Iraq Eric Manes explained that "Without Iraqis as the directors, we would have seen Iraq and its people only through the filter of Western eyes. We certainly would not have had the access or the emotional intimacy that was captured in the film." Benjamin, who is en route to Baudrillard, might disagree with Manes in the sense that it takes creating, distributing, and utilizing vastly intricate equipment as well as having a huge tech crew on hand to offer the average American a chance to view real Iraq. The reality, free of mediation, we are looking for when we seek a documentary is made possible precisely through media, the more technologically advanced, the less mediated the story feels. But the nature of any simulation offers us the kinds of emotions much like the unmediated real does. Manes substitutes the Western director with the Iraqi and we all then surmise that it is much closer to the real so long as Iraqis are directing.

Film critics speak of the camera lens as though it were literally a human eyeball attached to a memory, much like our own eyes and brains work as humans. It is as though the camera lens itself is not a medium, but a true Iraqi perspective in its own right. Baudrillad takes the logic of personifying our technological communication channels a step further into abstraction asserting that there is no real, only simulacra; or the real and the simulation of the real are both equally true. The hyperreal is what we get when the simulacra precedes the territory.

Film does a fine job of this. The real is a desert until the simulacra sows the soil on location. Once we have access to a concept through media, we can begin to impose a multitude of meanings, eventually cultural value, and ultimately posterity. America's illegal occupation of Iraq isn't real to the extent that American masses feel "emotional intimacy" until we have what we consider as credible access, the documentary film in this case. We may begin to talk on deeper critical levels of the occupation and the state of Iraq with some more credibility now that we have had some experience with Iraq after having seen the film. The hand held DV cameras and documentary replace the physical country of Iraq in this sense, which is fine because we still see the kind of positive results over on the American end as if a rush of people took flights to the military bases and interviewed the locals: we see emotional intimacy and open fervent discussion from a broad audience, without the danger of even more people standing in the middle of a violent illegal occupation and civil war environment.

Pynchon's and McLuhan's Coy Pessimism: Marching Towards the Age of Technological Mass Communication

In his popular "cult" book The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan writes, "Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication" (8). Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 takes on a cynical tone as it grapples with this new age of technological media. Pynchon's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is the executor of her wealthy late boyfriend's will. As she takes on that role, she stumbles upon an international conspiracy all seemingly signifiers of her ex Peirce Invararity's alleged master plan.

Oedipa becomes immersed in history and connections which captivate her. Inclined to find some deeper meaning or solution, She travels California with faith that she will solve the supposed mystery of the conspiracy with the aid of the quirky people she encounters. Oedipa's cause is motivated not by the content of the media, the history of the symbols for example, but by her own interpretation of the content so long everything lines up with an assumption she holds about the content; that it is all in some way related to her ex. However, as we discover more and more while the novel progresses, the content is not decipherable. The more "clues" she finds, the more complex her search becomes. Potential conclusions, not the fragmented content, push her forward. Oedipa's demise is brought about because she does not accept that there is no single conclusion. Only possibility and overlap; eternal intertextuality like hyperlinks on the internets. Her paranoia transforms to schizophrenia precisely due to the content of media having no apparent connection or unifying master narrative.

To bring McLuhan back into the picture, Oedipa's journey is shaped by the nature of media because she feels like she is on to something, slowly piecing together a myth that she herself invented. "We march backwards into the future" (75). Oedipa is navigating backwards during her journey to uncover what may or may not be a worldwide conspiracy, the plan of her late boyfriend Peirce Inverarity, or symptom of her own paranoia. Her eyes are in the past as her body moves forward through time, just like the rear view mirror image in McLuhan's book. Serge's Song in chapter 6, in reference to Nabakov's Lolita offers commentary on Oedipa's situation:

And the older generation/ Has taught me what to do--I had a date last night with an eight-year old, And she's a swinger just like me.

The song is a sardonic parody of generational inheritance. The Paranoids, cloaked with the venerable pop-rock Beatles look, cynically point out the redundancy of cultural ailment passing on through the generations. We are romantically linked with the idea of youth just as our predecessors but rather than our desires translating into hope and eventually progressive and adaptive results, our ideals again and again, create dysfunctional situations for ourselves. Oedipa's mystery is really all in her head. The outdated tools she brings to the situation are intended to create order from disorder but since the chaos that surrounds her is completely out of her control, she of course breaks down. Her will to bring order to the chaos can be understood as inherited from Pynchon's fictional original settlers of America. "Nothing ever happen by accident for the Scurvhamite, Creation was a vast, intricate machine" (155). Pynchon provides his reader with the fictional historical narratives so that the reader can draw parallels with past and present. We can surmise that Oepida's world is not conducive to thriving in the narrative's present environment.

It is clear that Oedipa knows no other paradigm other than the ontological. For this, Pynchon punishes his protagonist with her mental breakdown, leaving the reader with absolute possibility: "Oedipa settled back to await the crying of lot 49." Pynchon is clearly telling a story of extreme skepticism towards the age of technological communication as it relates to the generation from which the novel is born, unlike McLuhan who takes on a very coy and playful posture. "Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions" (McLuhan 8). Oedipa embodies social angst in a time of transition. She takes on "today's jobs" with "yesterday's tools" (McLuhan 9) with her insistence upon the existence of a single meta-narrative to organize all of the chaos she encounters then falling prey to the unnamed omniscient narrator's insistence upon entropy, rather than embracing the confusion.

As with most open endings, however, I am always inclined to feel that the author wishes to convey some questioning or doubt of the total pessimism we get up until this last sentence. The Crying of Lot 49 is Pynchon's period piece that leaves us feeling that the 60s cannot handle the new media transformation but over time the tensions of "cultural transitions" fade as the fire of technological revolution eventually cools down and the changes become the everyday.

Response to Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

In his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin describes a significant departure in the function of art around 1900. His essay is ultimately a theory of art that can overcome fascism. Benjamin writes, "the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech." The speed of speech was accelerated hundreds of years before the speed of art in its mechanical reproduction age. Speech was mass produced and distributed with the invention of the printing press. The printing press provided the world with quick and uniform dissemination of knowledge which could inform, motivate, and ultimately congregate huge groups of people with newly acquired power, who would be otherwise powerless and exploited by those in power.

As result, society can be revolutionized at a rate faster than ever before. Fliers, pamphlets, manifestos, dripping with the voices of the oppressed and filtered through a handful of talented writers-- ripped through history like wild fires, destroying ancient regimes and replacing them with an upgrade. Texts such as Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, The United States Declaration of Independence by America's Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, The Communist Manifesto by Marx/Engels, The King James Bible etc. have brought about irrevocable change in society that will continue to ripple through the minds of generations. Every single person born into a society that offers training in literacy will shape an understanding of the world through the filters of each author lucky enough to distribute a work on the massive scale.

If a newly informed individual discovers the concept of oppression and can identify with this word, when that very special solar eclipse comes around again, she or he may choose to lead colleges towards yet another vision of a brave new world. Every wave of feminism, each cultural soldier armed with the red book, every proponent of civil rights, each and every revolutionary in history can thank the medium of literature and the mode of print or for the liberation of Jane and John (and the translations of Jane and John in X number of languages all over the world).

Mechanical reproduction and distribution of another creative medium has a place somewhere in the heart of a volatile society. For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. Every rise of a new regime creates a new kind of oppression and a new population of the oppressed.

Exposure to visual art is instantaneous. Everyone knows what the Mona Lisa looks like but only a tiny percentage of us have made the pilgrimage to the Louvre. Mona Lisa's umbilical cord has been cut by this new age of mechanical preproduction because the painting can no longer rely on its context for meaning. Before mechanical reproducibility of art connoisseurs experience art which has a definite aura. Benjamin calls it the "unique phenomenon of distance however close it may be." The work is distant to a spectator looking at the painting through bullet proof glass because it is a relic of a distant society. After its reproduction, the context is further away and the art is left naked in a sense, vulnerable to the spectator's interpretation. Mona Lisa herself is smug to some and forlorn to others. Maybe she is part of a grand conspiracy. Maybe she's a refrigerator magnet. The masses can make what they choose of art conceptually and physically. "Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself."

Originality seems to be under threat as more and more copies are made, the harder it is to find the original since its copies have given society an excuse to endowed the original with so much more value. It is rare because there are thousands or millions of not so rares. The higher value is set for the original, the cheaper the copies.

However, Benjamin makes the point that art created after mechanical reproducibility would anticipate reproduction upon conception which would still leave possibilities for the germination of critical masses. "Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual." Diego Rivera's mural Detroit Industry relies on aura in the ritualistic sense. We get a vague understanding of his depictions of industry and capitalism when we look at postcard with Detroit Industry printed on the front. However, the sheer grandeur of the original mural moves us in a way a reproduction could not. We are in the corridor of the DIA, in Detroit, Michigan where Fordism all started. Our besotted eyes take in the bright colors, metaphysical symbolism, and historical references as we slowly piece together an overarching story about this place and time, however we choose to spin it. We feel engulfed by the art; by its size, floor to ceiling, telling us this story of industrialization and exploitation.

Buying Death

I am writing a paper for my "Death and Dying" honors seminar that is turning out to be far more massive than I had anticipated. I eventually want to argue that a paradigm change in governance is the only debate relevant to policy regarding death and dying. I hope to make clear that, like hot button political topics such as the abortion debate, there needn't be discussion of private matters in the public sphere. With respect to the public debate surround death and dying, these talks of "individual autonomy" (choosing to pull your life-cord if you feel bad about depleting your family's savings on you and your [for example] half-dead brain in the event that your body is entering its dying process) is essentially bullshit because some people do, and ought to, rely heavily on a traditional upbringing (and some even critique this system which they love) that might clash or even precisely oppose our hegemonic American pseudo-Christian Materialistic culture. Policy should instead leave the philosophizing to the utterly capable individual and take care of our material lives with a more balanced distribution of wealth, resources, and services. No/yes-to-abortion? Can we please reframe and instead worry about taking care of the families and individuals in dire need of basic necessities and protection (I would argue the abortion debate is a class issue more than anything else). Furthermore, let people choose to do whatever they'd feel comfortable with within their own social milieu when it comes to dying (and maybe when we come up with a way to help the government gets it's act together, people may get a chance to die peacefully rather than wanting to die without having to burden their families. This term we have 'death with dignity' cloaks a crucial aspect to death which is monetary). And with respect to our hegemonic milieu in United States, let's do the best we can to overcome the egoism.


Viva La Revolucion!

Here's a draft:

Introducing the Snobby Death

As the film Wit demonstrates, there exists strong tension between uncompromising academic standards and common or ordinary thought. I will explicate these two concepts later. The protagonist, Dr. Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson) is a professor of literature who undergoes treatment for her ovarian cancer. Dr. Posner (Jonathan M. Woodward), who is a recent graduate, takes on the project of studying the effects of a new treatment using Prof. Bearing’s body for his case study. Her cancer progresses to a terminal stage at which point Dr. Bearing must choose one of two options. She may express desires to stop the treatment and let the cancer take its own route in her body. Or, she may choose to continue undergoing severely painful treatment, with no hope of total recovery, and with the potential of dying a miserable death from this treatment, rather than effects of the cancer itself—in order to contribute to the field of medical science (and the selfish Dr. Posner’s celebrity status in his field).
The dichotomy is set up here is between the pursuit of knowledge in academia and the individual ordinary person. The academic standard is a relatively easy concept to grasp as highlighted in my rough sketch that follows. Since the 18th Century Enlightenment movement in Europe and America, which emphasizes reason, science, and rationality and from which the structure of the modern university, with its separate and evermore specialized academic disciplines springs; the academic standard can be understood as the governing principle keeping consistent the contribution of knowledge with respect to each discipline, for and of the society at large (“Academia” Wikipedia).

Since Wit focuses on the case of a medical researcher, albeit a pompous one—academic standards with respect to medical research specifically can be understood as a rigorous persistence to the contribution of knowledge that explores how people may best benefit from treatments with the least amount of side effects and cost, meeting legal standards, and without specific commercial goals. However, ordinary thought, and not academic thought, I argue, is the far more complicated half of the academic versus ordinary dichotomy with respect to death and dying.

Bioethics is the logical extension of medical research with respect to meeting legal standards after any given treatment has been developed and is ready for distribution or practice. The law and bioethics are both professional levels with their roots in the modern university—both with reason, rationality, and the scientific method, due to the 18th century Enlightenment movement, at the very core and circulating throughout. Thus, the endlessly controversial death question that Wildes brings up has at its core the tension between the varying definitions of death and each definition’s requisite codes of behavior versus standardizing the deployment of medical resources.

The poet and philosopher, are they better at dying?

According to Barry, “ordinary thinking is ordinary precisely because it is customary, established, popular, and conventional. There is nothing distinctively individual about it. It’s basically “group think” (Barry 5). Barry makes an interesting claim because the adjectives he uses to describe thinking may as well be applied to defining tradition. What Barry is attempting to do here is frame his argument, which is that a philosophical (a term I will grapple with at length later) approach is in accordance with dying a good death. He distinguished a passive acceptance of death and indubitably life, with respect to the individual’s milieu, from a higher level of cognition and the individual’s personal dedication to colossal questions about the human condition, and suggests that the latter is preferable.

However, this higher level of thought that Barry is referring to is, I argue, another example of tradition sui generis. T. S. Eliot, in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” asserts that “every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.” Eliot describes the appropriate use of tradition by the individual as a fierce dedication to accumulating knowledge of one’s predecessors in order to then find his or her poetic voice before inserting it back into the poetic tradition. For Eliot, tradition is omnipresent. If a poet attempts to write unconscious of the tradition that he or she is essentially participating in, the resulting work will be unsuccessful because pre-established traditions will clumsily slip into the work on their own before having passed through the poet’s creative apparatus. Eliot here is talking about a tradition of higher levels of thought, thus Barry’s claim is erogenous because he wrongfully assumes that higher levels of thought, such as philosophy or poetry, is a separate space from tradition when in fact, creating new philosophy depends highly upon a tradition of philosophers because the philosophic mind is in conversation with its predecessors before placing itself in a unique position in relation to the predecessors. Thus, the philosophy Barry argues for is in part another tradition or custom of the discipline of philosophy.

As Eliot describes “We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition. ...Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure” (Eliot). According to Eliot, we tend to suppress the idea of tradition and instead, encourage the individual mind, as Barry does. He masks the concept of tradition with the words, ordinary, popular, conventional as a rhetorical devise in order to stigmatize tradition.

Despite of the linguistic clash, as Barry denies tradition and views the “customary” in a negative sense whereas Eliot fervently champions tradition, Barry and Eliot essentially take the same position. Let’s consider Eliot’s concept of the traditional poet and Barry’s philosopher as synonymous as I have demonstrated. Eliot describes the traditional poet as one who can converge the old with the new, thus altering the entire discipline of art with the addition of his work since all who follow him must take into consideration his or her point of view, including his of her influences (the entire catalogue of great poets), before a new poet adds to the tradition, and so on, forever.

The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. (Eliot)

Barry uses a derogatory sense of a culturally specific or group thought. Thus, Eliot’s position with respect to the definition of a ‘group’ or the “mind of his country” appears at first glance to be in direct contradiction with Barry since Eliot facilitates this concept in a positive light. One could mistakenly argue that, unlike Barry, Eliot champions tradition since he functions within his academic milieu or culture if you will, of poetic genius and in effect depends upon and celebrates his predecessors. However, Eliot and Barry are precisely in line with regard to the way in which the individual ought to approach one’s mortality, or that one should face it at all.

The poet in Eliot’s sense and Barry’s philosopher are synonymous. “It [tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour” (Eliot). Barry too argues for a specialization of thought, a laborious approach, and a philosophical posture in order to rightly comprehend the cultural “convention” (Bary 5), or “the mind of his own county” (Eliot) in order to reflect most meaningfully on his or her own fleeting mortality. This is in line with Eliot’s insistence that the successful poet should be “of the timeless and of the temporal together.”

What is important here is that both are essentially agreeing that the individual ought to dedicate oneself to the pursuit of existential questions with respect to the individual’s respective milieu or “country.” Eliot’s extension of Barry’s notion adds that this pursuit must be with and through the filter of one’s respective milieu, which is inextricably bound to one’s creativity. The conclusion both authors have is that this dedication to a higher level thought or endless process of personal enlightenment throughout one’s life then grants the individual a better career, for Eliot, and a better death, for Barry.

A Dangerous Philosophy

I will now explain the problematic concept of Barry’s philosophy before I later problemetize the concept of philosophy as the preferable approach to death and dying on behalf of the individual. Barry takes on the task of defending philosophy over ordinary or the passive acceptance of traditional thought, sans critical contemplation. Barry’s philosophy does not account for Eliot’s construction of tradition. For Eliot it is necessary to fuse tradition with the individual voice, and the location of this fusion takes place within the individual creative mind; as I have already argued that these two authors take the same position with respect to how one should approach his own mortality—with Eliot’s point as a redeeming appendage to Barry’s problematic logic.
Ordinary thinking also tends to be naïve, uncritical, and unquestioning, even gullible. Philosophical thinking, by contrast, is sophisticated in the sense of being skeptical and searching. Reasoning—the process of following relationships from thought to thought so some ultimate conclusion—is crucial to philosophical thinking, peripheral to ordinary thinking. Philosophical thinking engages the fundamental questions to human existence in a disciplined, imaginative way; ordinary thinking does not” (Barry 5).

We can begin to see that Barry, like Eliot, is taking a position against the passive acceptance of tradition which conversely will lead to poetic success, for Eliot, or an “imaginative” (Barry 5) approach when contemplating death. However, there is a departure from Eliot’s concept of a poet with Barry’s approach to the “imaginative” death, or the philosopher.
By contrast, the knowledge with understanding that philosophical thinking aims for ideally separates the individual from the herd by moving one in the direction of rational autonomy. “Rational autonomy” basically refers to the freedom of being able to decide for oneself by using one’s own mind. Rational autonomy means living one’s own life, something that suddenly is of utmost importance to Ivan Ilyich. (Barry 5)
Barry is saying here that “one’s own mind” is a separate entity from tradition. For Barry, the pursuit of philosophical knowledge requires throwing off the chains of tradition. Barry implies that philosophy comes from within as some sort of decision or set of decisions that one carries with them through life. It is as if philosophy, for Barry, is a physical space in the brain or appendage on the body and, like a muscle, it must be exercised of the goal is developing strength.

Clearly Barry’s philosophy is an erroneous construction because, as Eliot points out, the mind functions within a tradition when setting a goal for itself. With this in mind, let’s consider Barry’s argument that contemplation leads to a good death with his example of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

And every moment he felt that despite all his efforts he was drawing nearer and nearer to what terrified him. He felt that his agony was due to his being thrust into that black hole and still more to his not being able to get right into it. He was hindered from getting into it by his conviction that his life had been a good one. That very justification of his life held him fast and prevented his moving forward, and it caused him most torment of all. (Tolstoy)

This passage from The Death of Ivan Ilyich illuminates Barry’s position which is that a confrontation with death will prevent such a tormenting final moment of mortality that Tolstoy creates through the fictional character Ivan Ilyich. Let us now compare Tolstoy’s Ilyich with another troubled 19th Russian philosopher and novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky and his foray in the literary grapple with mortality through his unnamed character in the philosophical novel Notes From Underground. Dostoevsky’s underground man writes notes or journals of his life and thoughts, all of which are collected by an unnamed fictional publisher who frames the story.

Unlike The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Notes From Underground is primarily narrated from the first person: the underground man himself. This is an appropriate literary choice on behalf of Dostoevsky because it emphasizes the point that the underground man is a highly philosophical figure. Giving the narrative voice to the character buttresses the point that the underground man is “living his own life” as Barry saids and not living vicariously through an omnipresent author, like Ilyich. The underground man is hyper-aware and thus hyper-opinionated with respect to his mortality. His self-awareness is the primary engine in his life, which is only punctuated by his futile attempts to become a social being. Each attempt leads only to horrible embarrassment, encouraging the underground man’s envelopment in his own despicable construction of the world, thus making him an absolutely detestable, even grotesque character for the reader.

“…..I don't know, to this day I cannot decide, and at the time, of course, I was still less able to understand what I was feeling than now” (Dostoevsky). The underground man returns again and again to past thoughts. He desperately searches for some logical relationship between his immediate situation and his past, in a futile attempt to suspend his confusing and terrible life in some refined logical structure. “I cannot get on without domineering and tyrannising over someone, but ... there is no explaining anything by reasoning and so it is useless to reason (Dostoevsky).”

The underground man’s posture of hyper-contemplation and desperation for a beautiful order to his life leads him to denounce reason because he cannot escape his central problem: getting insulted by other points of views. This negative response to conflicting perceptions has conditioned the underground man to respond with spiteful imposition of his perspective onto other people, as if this response was a natural reflex. He of course is unsuccessful and his attempts to squash other points of view lead to his experiences of total humiliation each time he interacts with another person. He even looses hope of being saved by a romantic relationship with Liza, the whore he almost falls in love with, because he inappropriately condescends to her and she subsequently leaves him. His fate is piteous isolation and self-destruction and we are left with only a severe distaste for this character.

Yes--you must answer for it all because you turned up like this, because I am a blackguard, because I am the nastiest, stupidest, absurdist and most envious of all the worms on earth, who are not a bit better than I am, but, the devil knows why, are never put to confusion; while I shall always be insulted by every louse, that is my doom! (Dostoevsky)

In comparison to the underground man, Ilyich should perhaps be thankful that Tolstoy denied him of self-awareness and philosophic considerations of his mortality. However, the point here is that the reflection on one’s mortality is not an objective or universal answer to avoid dying in regret and sadness, as can be understood with these two extreme examples in literature. Returning to Barry, “A lifetime of philosophical thinking well prepared the gadfly of Athens for death; a lifetime of ordinary thinking left Ivan Ilyich pitifully unprepared” (5). Barry’s comparison is clearly limited and, as I will argue, his championing of a philosophical approach to death and dying is dangerous.

The “Ordinary” Death

As I have suggested earlier, the term ordinary is complex. Barry’s problematic interpretation qualifies ordinary thinking as a tendency “to be naïve, uncritical, and unquestioning, even gullible" (Barry 5). He then asserts that the non-gullible mind, i. e. the philosopher, will attain “knowledge with understanding that philosophical thinking aims for [which in effect] ideally separates the individual from the herd by moving one in the direction of rational autonomy” (5). What Barry dangerously suggests here is that the philosophical route as opposed to the customary or traditional route is not only most successful way to grapple with death (and as I’ve already demonstrated with Eliot’s article—philosophy fiercely depends upon its own customs when generating new philosophy), philosophical thinking is the way that will lead the individual to conforming with the position that “rational autonomy” as a way to standardize death on the broad political and bioethical level is the best answer. This claim is obviously erogenous because we know that the death topic is perpetually controversial, as Wildes points out. If “rational autonomy” was the only answer, then the scorching hot death debate would be a little cooler or even non-existent.

Returning to Barry’s herd metaphor is interesting when in comparison with Miran Epstein’s article, in which Epstein argues that “economic pressures have been part of the historical circumstances that have determined which kind of end-of-life ethics contemporary society has been likely to endorse.” Barry’s herd metaphor that philosophical thinking “separates the individual from the herd by moving one in the direction of rational autonomy” implies that the better sheep will agree with one concept over another, and continue to be as blind as “the history of contemporary end-of-life ethics” (Epstein) when it comes to the political economy of death.

Epstein uses a herd metaphor in an illuminating way. He claims that “most people have little problem with the economics of life and death insofar as the handling of livestock is concerned, they would deem the application of this rationale to humans as utterly immoral” (Epstein). In Epstein’s article, he demonstrates that “autonomy” is a cover-up for the fact that “economic factors do creep into the ethically legitimate decision-making of the individuals and governments as regards to end-of-life decision making” (Epstein). The principles of a good death, as listed in BMJ include retaining “control of what happens,” being able to “leave when it is time to go, and not to have life prolonged pointlessly” (Smith). In addition to these conditions, Epstein lists some reasons for why people have requested physician-assisted suicide—“fear of becoming a burden on others and fear of loss of independence and control over one’s life” and as Epstein points out, any of these interpretations of the preferable death or why one chooses death might very well reflect economic pressures as they relate to a “duty to die,” but the economic factors are never voiced since “official moral codes reject the existence of such a duty [choosing death to spare loved ones’ money]’ (Epstein).

Since the political economy of life and death is suppressed but still relevant to personal decisions about death, we are in a sense a herd, following the definitions and policies that precede our own constructions of death. Returning my argument that the Barry/Eliot definition of creativity is never separate from the individual mind and requires intense dedication when creating a new philosophy or poem; the definitions of death circling through bioethics and law can be added to the tradition from which individual creativity springs. The danger with this is that, as Epstein argues, we become passive receptors of the underlying political economy that influences political decisions when standardizing death. We have returned to the ordinary process of thought, which according to Barry, means that one refuses to think critically or simply ignore a painful or complex issue such as death. However, as Epstein points out, how are we to be “skeptical and searching” (Barry 5), when that which demands the most verbal scrutiny is stigmatized? My point here is not to make any claims about the character of society or that there is any covert effort on behalf of the government to suppress our opinions. I instead hope to point out that much of the debate surround issues regarding death and dying are essentially a language war. I am attempting to organize the major points of the debate in order to redirect the language to the unmarked yet crucial space of political economy.

Philosophical Pluralism

Let us now consider how the philosophical approach is not only not better but even dangerous in a pluralistic society. Returning to the underground man versus Ivan Ilyich, the underground man suffers because he is aware of his own tyrannical subjugation of others.

Even in my underground dreams I did not imagine love except as a struggle. I began it always with hatred and ended it with moral subjugation, and afterwards I never knew what to do with the subjugated object. And what is there to wonder at in that, since I had succeeded in so corrupting myself, since I was so out of touch with "real life," as to have actually thought of reproaching her, and putting her to shame for having come to me to hear "fine sentiments"; and did not even guess that she had come not to hear fine sentiments, but to love me, because to a woman all reformation, all salvation from any sort of ruin, and all moral renewal is included in love and can only show itself in that form (Dostoevsky).

Again, his demise is the lack of sensitivity for other perspectives. The underground man is a tyrant and irrevocably corrupted.
Returning to Ilyich’s redemption after having lived his life with a passive posture with respect to his own mortality: “And death...where is it? He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light ” (Tolstoy). The omnipresent unidentified narrator has redeemed Ilyich, despite of Ilyich’s weak philosophical apparatus. When comparing Ilyich’s sudden redemption with the book of revelations, a clear relationship can be drawn.

There shall no longer exist there anything that is accursed (detestable, foul, offensive, impure, hateful, or horrible). But the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall worship Him [pay divine honors to Him and do Him holy service]

This passage informs Ilyich’s condition because an older Tolstoy, having written this novel near the end of his life, he himself was a philosopher who struggled with his own mortality and eventually converted to Christianity just before he died.

And there shall be no more night; they have no need for lamplight or sunlight, for the Lord God will illuminate them and be their light, and they shall reign [as kings] forever and ever (through the eternities of the eternities).

The comparison is obvious. One can practically hear this passage sounding in Ilyich’s ear as he is dying. “There was no fear because there was no death” for Ilyich just as “there no longer exist there anything that is accursed.” Ilyich was redeemed from suffering because death, as a stigmatized or horrific event was now a “light” because “the Lord God” has illuminated both Ilyich and Tolstoy, becoming their light. The redemption almost seems misplaced because the narrator’s tone suddenly shifts from its specific interest to Ilyich’s condition to a broad theological intimation. The narrator, at this point, remains omnipresent but inserts a specific point of view. This confounding technique seems to deny the existence of any specificity with respect to theological perspective. However, this very technique makes the perspective all the more convincing with its own self-denial, which effectively allows the perspective to expand infinitely beyond the limitations of any single religious or philosophical tradition.

As Ilyich demonstrates, one’s passive lifestyle with respect to colossal questions about mortality can result in a swift, nearly undetectable, insertion of a philosophy into that person’s life through the precise facilitation of a highly developed linguistic strategy. With that said, I will now return to the concept of the 18th century Enlightenment movement in philosophy as I consider the dangers of philosophy as applied to end-of-life decision making in the public sphere. During the time of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment movement brought about an international celebration throughout the West of reason and rational thought. This celebration came about in response to enormous scientific discoveries, such as controlling and suspending light with electricity and the transportation of goods and people at an unheard-of speed prior to the new invention of the railroad system. The controversial debate regarding standardizing a definition of death or the creation of a single philosophy addressing multicultural pluralism and death has been addressed in the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems as quoted in DeSpelder and Strickland:

The president’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine said that the Uniform Determination of Death Act “addresses the matter of defining death as the level of general physiological standards rather than at the level of more abstract concepts or the level of more precise criteria and tests, because such standards and criteria change over time as knowledge and techniques are refined. (DeSpelder and Strickland 165)

To draw again from the Enlightenment movement in philosophy, the approach to end-of-life issues with “general physiological standards” is in accordance with the Enlightenment philosophy, which prefers objective scientific method with testable results. Much like Barry’s philosopher has his or her own tradition of philosophy, the President’s Commission too is assuming a tradition of philosophy specific to the 18th century Enlightenment movement responding to and celebrating the scientific revolution. The physiological standards assume the academic standard I mentioned earlier. This standard can be understood as the governing principle keeping consistent the contribution of knowledge with respect to the discipline of Physiology which itself is sprung from a tradition, specifically the 18th century Enlightenment movement in philosophy and the subsequent creation of the modern university.

With respect to controversial topic of end-of-life issues, the primary realm demanding reformation is the economic factors influencing personal decisions about dying. When considering a pluralistic society, moral considerations are not an adequate discussion for policy regarding death and dying. As I have shown, philosophy is a term that is often misused. To approach the topic of death on a broad level, addressing every perspective of death is inconceivable. Each perspective has it’s own history, tradition, relevance, and vitality. Barry’s derogatory use of the term “ordinary” is an attempt to suppress various traditions in favor of one single tradition. Attempting to create or facilitate a single philosophy with respect to mediating all of the others when offering treatment or technology will only result in the domination of a single tradition over all of the others, much like Dostoevsky’s tyrannical underground.

One may argue that the consolidation of ethnographic papers discussing various interpretations of death would be a solution to addressing a multitude of theologies and philosophies with respect to dying which influences end-of-life decisions. However, this is a problematic solution because, again, there cannot exist a rational method of organizing cultural data because imposing rationality to varying and often clashing interpretations of death attempts to suppress variation and favor the Enlightenment philosophy of reason and the scientific method. Again, we can think back to the underground man’s attempt to organize his conflicting interests with some rational method, i. e. time, which was completely futile. Furthermore, in the case of the development of the most sophisticated method imaginable when organizing cultural data; I would argue for a skeptical position because no conceivable method could account for author biases, erroneous research methods, and the very nature of cultural and philosophical flux, which would essentially exceed the limits of representation despite of the most advanced and precise scientific methodology.

Socialism in Lieu of the Guiding Moral Principle

Engels, paraphrasing Feuerbach articulates, “ philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thoughts and thinking expounded” (Tucker 107-108). Furthermore, “the concepts of good and evil have varied so much from age to age that they have often been in direct contradiction to each other” (Engels in Tucker 725). Philosophy and religion may as well be synonymous since both provide elaborate answers to grand metaphysical and existential questions. No single approach is better than the other. “General physiological standards” does not neutralize “abstract concepts” or “precise criteria and tests” (DeSpelder and Strickland 165) because general physiology, when defining death, is another philosophy in and of itself that can suffocate or extinguish other philosophies interested in their own respective definitions of death. Wildes argues, “we should allow individuals to choose their own definition of death based on their own moral convictions” (Wildes). I agree with this claim and I would extend it to include that moral philosophy as it stands today should be left for the private sphere, completely out present political and bio-ethical debate.

As I do not have a revolutionary manifesto readily prepared to argue for a solution to the current political economy, I would venture to agree with Marx in the sense that “political economy—despite its worldly and wanton appearance—is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-denial, the denial of life and of all human needs, is its cardinal doctrine” (Marx in Tucker 95).

I would also agree that the “denial of life,” as the “cardinal doctrine” to the political economy, as Marx puts it, is evident in the sense that cultural variability is denied when the political realm takes on the topic of moral philosophy in order to standardize understandings of death. As Epstein points out, historically bioethics has failed to address the economic factors that influence decisions regarding death do to the social stigmatization of death and its relationship to economic factors. Marx explicates this stigmatization:

Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanged all things, it is the general confounding and compounding of all things—the world upside-down—the confounding and compounding of all natural and human qualities. He who can buy bravery is brave, though a coward. As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fractionalization of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace” (Marx in Tucker 105).

Marx, like Epstein, asserts that rather than the traditional poet or individual speaking from any number of cultural backgrounds makes his her her own decisions about death, about life, about anything, really—from the perspective of the cost of each respective decision.

Back to the Bible, a solution to the economic aspect of dying is proposed:

Come! And let him who is listening say, Come! And let everyone come who is thirsty [who is painfully conscious of his need of those things by which the soul is refreshed, supported, and strengthened]; and whoever [earnestly] desires to do it, let him come, take, appropriate, and drink the water of Life without cost.

The omniscient narrator suggests that we consider the material state of things in order to improve life. I add that the improvement of life will then eventually lead to better deaths. Rather than our letting our bioethics and policies reach out into the dark with eyes blindfolded, let consider the impossibility and danger of trying organize every perspective of death into a single universal standard of death.

Conclusion

People should be given the space to make up their own minds about dying because they already do anyways. The debate regarding end-of-life issues should switch gears from the philosophical realm to the economic side. The focus of the debate in bioethics should be not how to define death in a general sense, how to standardize the use of technologies delaying the death process, or how to standardize the way people will be allowed to die; but instead be creative itself and develop a new approach to economic factors of dying. Bioethics should consider its own history, which leaves out economic factors as they relate to end-of-life decisions, as Epstein argue.
We are a society largely denied monetary wealth since a small fraction of America’s population owns most of the total income earned in the United States. As Marx points out, people buy “bravery” if they want bravery (Tucker 105). In a sense we express our identities by the products we buy which makes our existence highly dependable on money. Wouldn’t then our death too depend highly on money? Death with dignity or dying a peaceful death implies that our financial situation must be satisfactory. As we leave our loved ones on earth, we must know that they will be in good economic standing. We might even find that our very existence near the end of our lives might in fact deny our loved ones of large sums of money or even burden our loved ones immensely with respect to the high cost of dying. In order to standardize a good death, the government must leave death up to us, each individual and each cultural perspective of death and the moral codes that follow, and instead focus on aiding us with our decisions about death rather then encouraging us to make decision about money while the government makes decision about our own deaths.

Béla Tarr, Damnation / Kárhozat (Hungary, 1988)

Béla Tarr's Damnation is maximally depressing. The entire film is done in just 20-25 shots, many of which are distanced from the action, and takes place primarily in the dark, in the rain, or both. The 116 minute duration weighs down on you like ~200 minutes. The brilliant soundtrack for the first half of the film is mostly composed of the droning environment. The passing buckets, the sound of a razor dragging across a man's face-- the sounds are amplified and interestingly arranged into concertos about dismal everydayness. Furthermore, Tarr uses the soundtrack to add a subtle twist to the overall gloomy attitude of the film. During the opening shot, a single note is held over the 10-or-so minutes as the protagonist (unnamed) plods about, suggesting an intensity of emotion or a foreboding fate. Tarr successfully achieves both perpetual suspense and dejection through the duration of the film. After a character exits the scene, the camera lingers on the door, or whatever the exit, for some 10 seconds. Another interesting decision is how Tarr leaves the dialog relatively scant, except for the protagonist's moment of philosophic despair. Such techniques endows the film with so much intensity despite Tarr's minimalist approach.

Our emotional response to the film is the primary force propelling the narrative. It's the nuances; weird shadows falling on peoples' faces, loose vicious dogs, a 10 second shot of an empty field, a highly sensitive microphone intensifying every sound, the bare narrative-- all of which envelope the audience with the environment. This film reminds me of Miklós Janscó's The Red and the White in the sense that affect moves the story. But equal to the story's presence is a void that impresses itself on us; in the sense that we don't have a typical plot structure or any familiar landmark to orient us. We must take the emptiness--the lack of obvious narrative-- and make it into something-- as enormous and universal or simplistic and minuscule as one's perception wills.

The film addresses at one point as the camera drags across a scene of people facing the camera, a couple of the eyes looking right into ours by ways of the camera. The clusters of faces, a nameless crowd staring back at us, makes us feel cornered. It's as if the nameless faces are mocking us and telling us that we are a nameless, faceless crowd too. The exaggerated cinematography compensates for Tarr's distaste for words. At one point the protagonist is talking to his love interest. He poses a rhetorical question, something like, do words make sense? He then tests this hypothesis: I hate you, he boldly lies to the woman. Maybe words don't make sense but they definitely motivate action, as the man finds out when the woman, angered, leaves him there. Conflicts with no resolve prevail. At one point, a woman is attacked by a boyfriend or perhaps pimp-- the baby we saw just before the camera entered the bedroom where the conflict arises is voiced over giving the scene a soundtrack of hysterical infant cries. Maybe Tarr is mocking us for getting upset over such an easy conflict for a film. Either way, there is a definite sense unresolved void, as if encouraging us to question the necessity of resolve. Can we just accept the sense of void in art? Do we deny our aesthetics from exploring void? Can art represent something that isn't successfully? Nonetheless, Tarr rejects standard thematic continuity.

Cristi Puiu, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu / Moartea domnului Lazarescu (Romania, 2005)

Yet another film dedicated to the critique of the system. Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a film following an old dying man through the tumultuous night [presumably] during the last hours of his life. Puiu is very interested in human interaction as it is captured by the camera lens, not filtered through the mind of the filmmaker. He manipulates the actors and equipment in a way that produces the most accurate--true to life sense. There is no narration to tell us what we think. Rather, the long shots, with little dialog or sound, ask us to feel some pleasure, some frustration, some relief, some anguish; as we do regularly during the oscillating events of our days. The hand-held camera ads a layer of immediacy despite the excruciatingly slow progression of the plot. (The entire plot of this 150 minute film can be summarized as follows: an old cat-loving man feels sick and calls for an ambulance. he is then taken to three different hospitals, all of which are too overwhelmed to help him.) Also, the dizzying scenes of the bobbing camera disorients us a little, and we immerse ourselves further into the unscripted chaos of illness and hospitals. You almost feel like you or someone you know shot the film because the feasibility of the stripped down technology compels us to feel closer to the situation.

The old man isn't exactly a character with which we can easily sympathize. His illness, in part, is his own fault because he drinks ţuică (a VERY strong Romanian liquor made of plums--usually about 50% alcohol by volume) to escape the pain of his condition--which of course causes new ailments. The man can't even hold his medication down because of the liquor destroying his already-afflicted guts. He is also a little snobby--refusing advise from his neighbors. Beu pe banii mei! (kind of like: if I can afford to drink--I will!), he rudely repeats in response.

But we can't help but take pity on the lonely old man. The neighbor complains about the cat hair in the apartment while Lazarescu is suffering and vomiting. Later, in an ambulance headed toward the third hospital for the night, he is desperate for water while the disinterested nurse is busy chatting with the driver and gulping from her water bottle! Puiu successfully presents us with a contrast between this poor old soul, misunderstood and neglected, facing his death all alone versus the absolutely banal world, with its often snobby people.

A glitch in the translation changed the meaning of the film for me. At the point where Mr. Lazarescu is refused life-saving surgery on the basis that he doesn't agree to have the procedure performed (he can't pick up the pen to sign the required waiver, nor can he comprehend the bantering doctors), the pretentious doctor directs a couple of plain questions at Lazarescu. The translation of Lazarescu's responses suggested that Lazarescu was completely incoherant. However, the translation was word-for-word and intentionally off. His speech was in fact grammatically and thematically coherent, just quiet. Had the translation been true to the actual dialog, the tension between a pathetic marginalized old man and an egotistic asshole doctor would have been more successful.

Lucian Pintilie, The Oak (Romania, 1993)

According to Odette Caufman-Blumenfeld, The Oak successfully displays Romania's "loquacity" and "colorful language... in order to make a clear political statement: to swear and to snap the fingers at the others have long become a Romanian way of reacting to and/or resisting terror, privations, and interdictions of all kinds" This statement points to the representation of Romania's personality, which may be accurate on some level. However, it is a stretch to think of The Oak as primarily a realist film.

In the sense that heavy cursing is in play here to demonstrate the rebellious attitude towards censorship and corruption, Pintilie rebels against socialist realist propaganda that romanticized the positive sides of Romania and suppressed negative counterparts. As Cale Kehoe discusses here, we are carried along through the narrative not by a logical sequence of events, but rather through the protagonist's reactions to the world.

Nela is the eccentric central personality who takes off to find the doctor supposedly responsible for her father's death. We meet Nela in her apartment as she and her father watch old videos, presumably of Nela as a young girl in that very apartment years back during Christmas time pretend-shooting the extended family with a toy gun (or an unloaded real one?) and the family pretend-dropping dead. We discover later in the apartment scene that the father is really laying dead in Nela's bed, in a Faulker-esque (see A Rose For Emily) sort of way. Pintilie seems to pick up where Faulker left off as he opens his story with the shocking, and somewhat necrophiliactic, episode following the freakish protagonist's wallow in the past.

Her sister attempts to reconcile with Nela, knocking on the door hysterically soon after the morbid reveal, but Nela just refuses her sister and vomits before setting the apartment on fire. Later, she phones for a second reconciliation attempt, but we discover that Nela's contempt for her sister is rooted in patriarch-envy (In case anyone had their doubts, Pintilie can do the Oedipal thing too. Maybe there is something to be said here about pop-science/literature allusions which end up thematically scant in their new context.)

Throughout the confusing disjointed progression of events, we get a sense of Romania's mood post-Ceauşescu times. Made after Ceauşescu's death and the subsequent fall of communism, the film is retrospective commentary on communist Romania. The common phrase repeated again and again, primarily by the older characters, is: asta-i viaţa, or an insouciant "oh well, that's life" attitude. The film seems to scorn traditional ideologies because, when comparing the indifference of the older people with the promising hope expressed by the young couple, the younger generation is assigned agency in the greater social environment. It's kind of like Pintilie is saying: even if you are totally fucked up to burn your own house down, deny the fact that your father is an asshole, sleep with his dead body in your bed, and carry his ashes around everywhere you go; you can still change the world for the better or at least have babies who will (think they can) when you get old and obsolete. Lastly, a private burial paired with budding love both taking place under an oak tree was definitely a charming ending.

Jan Švankmajer, Lunacy / Šílení (Czech Republic, 2005)

Lunacy is experiemental in form but not avante guarde in the sense that there is little dedication or conversation with human society as a whole. Švankmajer seems to be not at all concerned with the sputters of society. Instead, the symbolism that has culminated in his mind is released and the result is Lunacy--slight pun intended. There is no realism to speak of because Švankmajer is interested in the spiritual or abstract. If we are looking for some kind of reality, we are expected to look beyond the images on screen because they only vaguely refer to familiar things. We must thumb through our own memories to compensate for the incoherent images on the screen if we want this film to make sense. This is where interpretation becomes key. Švankmajer himself expresses preference for individual interpretations of his film, but he seems to reserves critical elitism for himself.

With this film, Švankmajer documents sessions of auto-therapy, which could be called surrealism. Through the opening scene, Švankmajer sets contextual grounds for his film and introduces his art family which includes Edgar Allen Poe and the Marquis de Sade, the latter being a main character in the film who narrates this first scene. The film's blasphemy and subversiveness is also credited to Sade, according to the opening speech. The beginning sequence is a little pretext for us to mull over, as if Švankmajer grounds his argument or justification-- which becomes the driving force for the rest of the film.

"Art is dead," Švankmajer expresses through the narrator. It is safe to say that this film participates in an active debate on the function of art. I think Švankmajer's Marquis de Sade during the opening sequence was responding to modernist modes of art, in which there is a conscious project to remove art from the day-to-day and instead reserve its space outside of or high above the world. Art is removed from reality in order to provide commentary and often simultaneously contribute to the tradition of art by alluding to past achievers. As a response, artists address the self-consciousness requisite of art as creating problems for the liberation of individual imagination because there are now limits imposed on the artist should he or she sign onto this very specific project.

So then the solution is to destroy 'art.' In other words denounce the present point of the evolution of art, however, that may be interpreted. I'd venture to say that there is infinite ways to argue Lunacy is similar to work from Dada artists because both are in conversation with the Enlightenment rigor of reason and logic (leading the world into WWI and massive devastation, not to mention the horrors of WWII with respect to the holocaust). Svankmajer seems to feel the shock that spread over the art community during WWI as the Dada movement flourished. He envisions the world of today as a horrific one that combines the very worst aspects of absolute freedom and punishment/control. This theme is apparent throughout the film. Švankmajer brings out the ridiculousness and utter grotesqueness of unrestrained indulgence as a group of people eat cake at a dining room table, with an over persecuted Jesus statue in the background

We see super close-up shots of the diner guests smearing the cake all over their mouths. The heightened soundtrack captures every nuance of sound coming from the devourers. Another obvious point of unrestrained chaos is the madhouse sequences where we see the chaotic 'treat patients as equals' ordinance in play. The camera lens peeks out a window to record a lunatic whose fetish is hitting things. He violently knocks another man on the head with a shovel. Control and punishment is shown in a horrific light. The madhouse is run by a man whose correctional method is a kind of compulsive mind/body balance quackery to likes of Dr. Benjamin Rush. People whose minds are overdeveloped to varying levels of insanity can be cured with affliction to the body which will then bring the mind back in check. A man has his eyes stabbed out. Another has his tongue removed. Needless to say, Švankmajer is successful when turning his audience off on punishment.

Švankmajer breaks the traditions down as if to refuse any requisite or project which posits a goal or obligation for art. However, like some modernists, such as T.S. Eliot, Švankmajer does include self-conscious elements which draws attention to the film as art by alluding to other artists with the Marquis de Sade character, elements of Sade's writing, the elements of Poe stories, and other references to art. This added, for me, a slightly annoying element of pomp to the film. I felt, while watching this film, a little but like I did when trying to read T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" without ever having read Dante or any of the other works Eliot plays on, as if Eliot has expectations of his readers and those who did not get the memo to read entire body of literature from era, are simply left out of the circle of knowledge (classic Modernist project). But there was pure enjoyment to be had when watching how the film poses itself as the worst dream I've ever had; chocked with humiliation, rape, mutilation, blasphemy, infidelity, one dimensional characters chasing me with a straight jacket, and disgusting slabs of meat writhing around doing human things. Maybe it's a matter of taste.

I argue that Lunacy is a successful example of postmodernism because the narrative interrupts itself and effectively draws our attention to the exhausted plot structures of traditional film. There is a parallel story that vaguely relates to the primary narrative but in total abstraction. The camera cuts to scenes of eye balls, tongues, and other unidentified slabs of meat, dancing, having sex, drinking beer, telling their own story, perhaps as a morbid gimmickry. The film also mocks old-fashioned allusion and reference (and quite literally. The Marquis de Sade sits at an artist's desk directing a tableau vivant of Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People"--so I guess this was a popular thing to do in France, but filming the event too is something like meta-mockery!) Concurrently it mixes time periods and artistic styles, refusing politics and any active agency in society; all of which effectively distinguishes the film as an autonomous work of art rather and not another cultural relic. The setting confuses and disorients to, I think, the point of pleasure because it becomes clear early on in the film that there is no specific setting or logical progression from one time period to another, only a layering or collage of time that doesn't really draw on the plot in any logical way. The spectator is on a playground of time periods spanning from 18th century Enlightenment Philosophy and the French Revolution, to technologies of the 21st century. We see horse drawn carriages, trains, cars, 18th century costumes, archaic methods of punishment, modern-looking lunatic institutions etc. There are references to various historic stories such as Narcissus, Oedipus Rex, King Arthur stories. The film is a network of tropes from Western culture. It refutes knowledge, replacing logic with abstraction that confounds combined with somewhat nauseating images (esp. for vegetarians).

Danis Tanović, No Man's Land / Ničija Zemlja (Bosnia, 2001)

No Man's Land is set during the 1993 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Tanović's film is a cynical absurdest representation of humanity which focuses primarily on two enemies of war; plus a man trapped on a mine, an intruding British reporter with hearts for eyes for a UN officer, and the useless French UN officer, among a few other minor characters. The condition of the Bosnian war is acted out in a Beckett-esque minimalist drama ending with unresolved pessimism. The Serbs are represented by a naive soldier, Nino, (played by Rene Bitorajac) and then we have a temperamental macho Čiki, (played by Branko Đurić) to stand in for the Bosniaks. The film begins with a sense of peace. The morning is sunny and the camera collects beautiful shots of the landscape along with little sound or dialogue giving the scene as overall calmness despite of the obvious war environment. We are introduced to the main character Čiki as the camera closes in on his face, as if to personify war.

Čiki and Nino meet in the ditch soon after Čiki shoots Nino's companion for making a game out of endangering a man's life-- the commander drags the body of this man, who turns out to be a dear friend of Čiki, over a jumping mine that detonates once the weight is lifted from it. The man, Cera, turns out to be alive. He wakes up from his unconscious state to discover that he is in the most absurd situation. If he moves ever so slightly in the wrong direction, he and Čiki, who refuses to leave his side, are dead. The animosity begins between the young Serb and the jumpy Čiki because of hasty assumptions about each other's intentions and backgrounds. Čiki assumes that Nino was in on the brutal game but as it turns out, Nino was just an inconsequential alter-boy not even informed of the commander's name. Čiki reveals his cruelty with his response to murder. Killing, to him, is of little value unless it happens to someone on his side of the fence. Killing from Čiki's perspective becomes a performance. Nino's experience with fatal weapons comes out when he shoots the fun by mistake--revealing his attempt to play the part of the army man. Despite of the relatively minimal murder rate (unlike, say, The Red and the White ) Tanović is throughly successful with his representation of war as absurd by nature, worsened by the failures of bureaucracy, and misrepresented in media. The focus on these particular men and their clashing personalities brings about an element of comedy.

The representation of the UN was illuminating. The blue smerfs show up long after Nino and Čiki nearly kill each other. In fact, they only show up after the two men show a little camaraderie (they discover that they both know the same girl). The failure and absurdity of bureaucracy is addressed with the French UN officer who shows up with supplies and food but is given orders to leave the men alone due to some abstract protocol from unnamed higher-ups (his direct supervisor is unwilling to investigate the situation because he has company--a sexy secretary). The comedy builds and builds. The man on the mine alone is absurd enough to laugh at. At one point a German "mine specialist" (the French mine squad was busy) shows up at the request of the UN officer. But since we already know that bureaucracy fails and hope is just a futile rebellion against an oppressive world in this film, it should not come as a surprise that the young "technician" shows up unprepared to detonate this particular type of mine.

The [British] media is another discipline deserving to be mocked. A promising Ms. Jane Livingston is the head reporter. We think she will provide the rest of the world with a window exposing the absurdity, but no. Again, a cynical artist [i.e. Tanović], is guaranteed to shoot down our sense of hope should we dare to have one. Livingston merely adds to the absurdity, since she is pressured by her supervisor to interview Cera, despite the danger, absurdity, and language block, she manages to get in: "Who started it," "How do you feel" and various other irrelevant and humiliating questions. The entire crew arrives oblivious to the danger. The enormous crew is fussing over and surrounding these three men, two of which don't even understand or speak the language that the cameramen need to film. I think it was Nino who brings up Rwanda-- pointing out the nature of the media with its underlying biases and political agendas, since the hype is concentrated around a bully, a boy trying to look tough, and a man laying on a jumping mine whose immediate concern is shitting his pants and listening to the other men's annoying stories -- and not the genocide taking place in Rwanda at that time. But at least we do get to see a little love story opening up between Livingston and the French UN guy before the film closes on its fatalistic note, with the camera looking down on Cera, as it pulls away, suspended on a crane, leaving him hopelessly alone on the mine (cue heavy music and dramatic camera angle to tells us that we should be sad that the character will eventually die; and not laugh as he will be forced to shit in his pants had he not already done so).

[An aside] I did't see how somebody couldn't just have carefully slid a hand under Cera's back to pull the mine out from under him while holding the button down!

[Additionally] I thought stage direction for No Man's Land as a theatrical performance would be interesting to look at, so I found this youtube clip...

Emir Kusturica, Underground / Podzemlje (Yugoslavia, 1995)

Undergroundis the farcical result of Kusturica's critique of communist systems. Kusturica 's underlying assessment is a departure from Serbia's popular veneration of Tito and his neutral government. Instead, for Kusturica, Tito's weak presidency is a crucial figure in Yugoslavia's political entropy. The Marko character is Tito's right hand man. We see him at Tito's side in the real life clips mixed with Kusturica's film to funnel the social-political reality into the fictional narrative. As an extension of Tito in some sense, Marko literally pens the people up inside of his elaborately crafted illusion of danger in order to exploit them for their labor with the construction of weapons. The people kept under the house are a comical representation of Serbian culture in microcosm. An extravagant wedding celebration takes place and all of the guests lavishly enjoy food and drink, despite the perceived danger above ground. At this point, Kusturica comments on Serbian culture as a persistently positive people, perhaps living in a delusion of perpetual triumph despite the political environment.

The underground situation reveals Kusturica's critique of communist systems. Communism functions by falsely assuring security to the people by ways of equal distribution of labor and prestige spreading out evenly across the professions to give the people a sense of "Brotherhood and Unity" in the sense that structurally, there is a mutual dependence between the people's state and the state's workers. One for all and all for one. (Robin Hood was an early socialist) Communism tends to put charismatic leaders forward as the sunny face for the system. Meanwhile the people are striped of any prestige in their respective fields and exploited for their labor to promote military strategies that in turn makes covert adjustments to the land while keeping the people in their place depending on how the ethnocentric authorities feel at the given moment). The supposed lateral organization of labor and contribution to the state is in fact organized in the way in which resources are concentrated at the center. All for one and horrible scratchy toilet paper, a couple rolls a month, for all. It can be said that people living in communist systems in Europe were in a sense kept underground supporting the terrain above them; which in turn functioned as a ceiling that tops individual economic growth at the level just about equal to the earthworms.

Kusterica's adoration of Serbian culture can be surmised with the amazing band playing Serbian folk songs throughout the film. Similar to Who is Singing Over There the musicians' were both in and removed from the action, and in Underground, as replacement for the soundtrack. During a scene were the men playing pool break out into one of the best fight scenes I've ever watched in film; the band actually reacts to the men, dodging bodies as the continue to provide the film with its soundtrack. At one point, on the cruise ship, a character leaves to piss, and the band takes off after him as a bathroom entourage. There is never a moment where music plays and there is no musician in sight. Perhaps a slight rebel against capitalism, Kusturica refuses to let music take a consumer capitalist role in his film because their is no extended assembly line kind of process involved, (i.e. hiring a band, signing the band onto a commercial label, recording the music in a sound studio, producing and mixing an album, promoting the album, the band having been heard by film makers, getting signed on to the film making project, mixing the soundtrack for the film, and imposing the layer of sound during editing) --his process that separates the laborer from his art, and estranging the consumers or audience from products or art they enjoy. The creators of the music make up part of the film's community. They are both working, as they provide soundtrack to the film, and entertaining the people in the film, and we-- the audience. The musicians function like the people underground who also labor, dance, and drink simultaneously emphasizing the survival of the Serbian sense of community.

The people are kept in the basement for 15 years (although they think it's only been ten since Marko slowed the clocks down-- an interesting performance of the regressive neutrality of Tito's government and communist states in general). Once they are freed, the situation begins to breakdown as can be seen in the heavy handed tragedy sequence. However, the people continue to dance, the band playing the same high energy folk song, as the very ground below them breaks off more and more, much like the frequent partitioning of the former Yugoslavia.

And now: Serbian music (Slovodan Salijevic - Kalasnjikov )

Ildikó Enyedi, My Twentieth Century / Én XX. századom, Az (Hungary, 1989)

Enyedi's My Twentieth Century is an essay on social change at the turn of the 19th century. Despite of the fervor during The Belle Époque in Europe, due to the rush of inventions that revolutionized communication, transportation, and science; the biological producers are of course women. Enyedi takes the focus back towards the creating role of women with the birth of twin girls at the start of the film. Enyedi takes on a polemic edge because My Twentieth Century has its critical eye slanted towards the condition of women and the relationship between man and the natural world during this supposedly positive moment in history.

This enchanting golden age was also a transitional period, when Europe changed far quicker than the cultural comprehension process. Magical realism, which parallels the hypnotic displays of Edison's light bulb, is tinted with irony. We get a glance at the ills of modernity from the start with the two impoverished children selling toothpicks in the snowy urban street.

We hear of optimism from all fields--from the publication of Freud's work revolutionizing our understanding of the human psyche to Einstein's publications revolutionizing physics to the invention of the railroad and telegraph--the latter two having annihilated our classical understanding of space and time. But as we know today, among the many aftermaths of modernity (i.e. world war, the atom bomb, the Holocaust, etc.); the environment suffers greatly and women had no autonomy at that time. And of course, dregs of that moment are still very apparent today.

The narrative carries us along the time on and around New Years day 1900. Two babies are born and are later separated. Played by the same actress, we later see the women grown up living dichromatic lifestyles. Dora is a harlot and Lili is the other kind of libertine, active in political endeavors and somewhat of an anarchist. These two roles are a good fit into the transitional period, both adaptive in their own ways. Dora capitalizes on her femininity and she is quite the successful entrepreneur. Lili, the innocent half, after having been seduced by an oblivious former patron of Dora, transitions a bit herself into the terrorist, mirroring the destructiveness of a society in transition. The binary theme is a reoccurring suggestion throughout. But the narrative culminates in confusion and irony, which suggests that the film would rather subvert, not reinforce, the limited binary perspective of patriarchal society. The linear progress of scientific advancement is addressed with the cyclical structure of the film, beginning and ending with the birth of twins. The animals add an additional layer to the narrative, telling their stories of exploitation and echoing binary opposition: man versus animal.

The narrative style is non traditional, buoyant, and self-interrupting. Scenes of commentary are provided by the operatic stars in the sky, giggling and whispering about the world. The other statements made of the world are of a Hungarian speaking Edison, claiming that nature is at the service of man, who shapes it in his own favor. Even women, in some way, are shaped by man. In the fun house, the girls pose the question: Which one of us do you prefer? His response is both which suggests that society prefers both the innocent virgin and the whore. However, on the role for women in society seems to have some possibility for change, according to Enyedi. The last frame sores through a river ending in a big open lake or sea under a clear sky which suggests a return to the natural and the possibilities from which essential sublime from which beauty can spring.

Krzystof Kieslowski, A Short Film About Killing / Krótki film o zabijaniu (Poland, 1988)

This short film about killing is an extended part of the series of ten shorts by Kieslowski cataloging his renditions of the ten commandments. Despite of the nature of the series, Kieslowski tones down the Christianity, with only a brief glimpse of faith near the end when a priest blesses the convicted boy at his execution. The film is not meant to be a religious didactic but instead an objective or anecdotal sonnet with underlying moral anxiety. Aesthetically, its visual form takes precedence over the films content. The director uses weird filters which obscure parts of the frame and add a sickly greenish tint to enhance the grit and griminess of the action. The symbolism does not work metaphorically or as allusions. Rather, the lens lingers on absurd things like a cat hanging from a noose and a cartoonish devil head as if to ridicule symbolism and blasé foreshadowing.

Another aesthetic point is the sound track. The somber symphonic strings ad weight to the film's emotion which is otherwise scant. Posing itself as an observation or cinematic study of the cruelty of humanity, the audience gets a an unsympathetic perspective without additional romanticism or exaggeration. This is not leisurely entertainment but critical, harsh, and pushing for honesty.

The film is a study of two murders and an idealistic new lawyer. The unlikeable young hooligan murders the unlikeable old taxi driver during an excruciating 15 minute scene that vividly plants itself in your memory. Again, no room for sympathies, lots of space for wallowing in filth and coldblooded murder. However, Kieslowski preserves his unique brush strokes with the intensity of color, contrast, composition, and the use of filters to give real-life grit an artistic perspective in film. With regard to the murders, nothing is left out. The camera expects us to appreciate every gruesome detail and emotion, from start to finish, from head to toe, from inside out. If we can bring ourselves to sympathize at all, it may be the moments where the young killer wishes, if only I had done things that way instead of this, further insisting on wallowing, on comprehension. If film is the best medium to inspire action among the masses, as Walter Benjamin suggested in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Kieslowski seems to be playing on this possibility by directing his audience to face what happens in their own society, to feel Poland's moral anxiety it this time, ourselves.

The idealistic lawyer, fresh out of law school, is a figure one can easily identify with. His is the only psychology the spectator is privy to. He is compassionate, persistent, assertive, handsome, and perhaps the apple of the fortune tellers eye. Ok, maybe a little heavy handed here. It seems that the suggestion here is identify with the goodhearted lawyer. I was sold, especially after the final scene of the film which dwells on the pain of our sexy lawyer and the closeup of his teary eyes. The spectator is alienated from the remaining characters. No psychology whatsoever behind the young boy's murder. No investigation of the crime and very little of the court scene. We forget to care about those points since the action on camera is so heavy and demanding and our eyes and ears soak up the beautiful tones and strings. We do get a little background when the film is ready to stir up our anxieties. The boy is only 20 years old, his precious younger sister killed in an accident for which he is somewhat to blame, he expresses huge regret and we watch him hysterically breakdown in despair. If that wasn't enough to upset us, the chilling unforgettable sequence at the end adds additional twists of the knife. I felt as if I was challenged to act by the end of this film.

Goran Paskaljevic, Special Treatment / Poseban tretman (Yugoslavia, 1980)

Paskaljevic's Special Treatment covers, or uncovers, some of the ways in which authoritarian power functions as it simultaneously ridicules the central figure of power. Sounds like typical bar talk but this topic may not be surprising when sketching similarities between Special Treatment and Who's Singing Over There? ( Dusan Kovacevic is the screenwriter for both films ) Both Who'se Singing Over There and Special Treatment extract and ridicule the dark sides of fascist communism through the frame of a voyage, one being a bus ride and the other, a pseudo-psychological voyage, by bus and otherwise, through treatment respectively.

Dr. Ilić has developed a new treatment for addiction and he takes several alcoholics with him on a retreat. At the center of his theory is the catch-phrase will-power. But his intention to help his patients develop their will-power turns into his imposition of goals and wishes onto the people. His methodology is appropriately critiqued by some of the patients who blame the others for submitting and being the doctor’s parrot.

At the start of the bus ride to the treatment center, Dr. Ilić begins to stink of Nazi mentality, and the emission increases as the film continues. Dr. Ilić regenerates his own legacy by handing down a Red Riding Hood sort of life to his son. He actually reads Red Riding Hood to the boy on the bus and later alludes to the story when advising his son to stick to the path after the boy had picked flowers to give to Jelena. Recall that the story suggests a straight path ideal where the course of life is laid out before you and your part is to simply walk the line, never mind about imagination or whim. The therapeutic treatment for people then, on a societal level, is crushing those groups, or the red riding hoods everywhere, who presumably cannot walk the straight path.

Purity is of course politicized by fascist governments to make essential the hierarchical assortment of the wealthy and powerful, while degrading the less privileged, the foreigner, or whichever other. Dr. Ilić, a lover of nature and classical music, insists that his patients eat apples because they are wholesome and therapeutic. He imposes his utopia onto his patients and any breaking of rules, or straying, are obvious signs of moral decay. The utopian vision takes on ridiculous forms as acted out by the patients. Dr. Ilić has his patients running around flapping their arms because doves symbolize freedom. In a weird confessional theater, directed by Dr. Ilić, the patients recount painful histories as if to purge all of the bad while exaggerating the negative outcomes of alcoholism for all to fear. But its obvious that the personal narratives are far more complex than Dr. Ilić's fable making theater allows. The suicide confession takes on the theme of domestic violence, but the actor is quickly shut up and redirected to the actual source of her alcoholism: her underdeveloped will-power.

The delusional quasi-utopian theory Dr. Ilić envisions not only degrades his patients when played out in reality (especially during the slightly painful-to-watch play scene), it masks his own corruption. His intentions turn out to be of a rather selfish nature. He gathers up the alcoholics to cure them with his plan for the betterment of society. However, he is in fact the sneaky wizard of Oz who exploits his patients so that he will one day rule over Winkie Country, or the Medical Field.

Slobodan Sijan, Who Is Singing Over There? Ko to tamo peva? (Yugoslavia, 1980)

Roll up, Roll up for the mystery tour!

Who is That Singing Over There, written by Dušan Kovačević and directed by Slobodan Sijan, was an instant classic in Serbia after its release in 1981. The film explores clashes between a group of character types riding a bus to Belgrade on April 5, 1941, in the former Yugoslavia. To a Serbian, the date would suggest the film's conclusion because, commonly known in Serbia, the German Luftwaffe's surprise raid of Belgrade showered the city with bombs on April 6-7 that year which killed at least 17,500 people. Despite the looming tragedy, we see that Kovačević takes on a comedic posture with his eccentric character types. A couple of Roma travelers meet the bus at its departure and follow the passengers along their journey. The two boys function as a chorus, addressing the camera as they provide additional commentary through song.

Out on a country road somewhere in Serbia, we see the characters immediately clash as they board the bus to Belgrade. The bus becomes somewhat of a microcosm of Yugoslavia's ethnic landscape under Tito's rule until the the early 80s. Yugoslavia was the grab bag country for an assortment of ethnic groups which were all unified under Tito's policies, but broke off, often violently, into separate 'ethnically clean' countries soon after Tito's death in 1980. If we consider each character type as a representation of a general innate group of characteristics specific to an individual ethnic group, our laughing response to their tensions is somewhat insensitive to the violent struggles for independence post Yugoslavia.

Each quirky passenger has a unique reason to arrive in Belgrade. They endure one another and the dangerous voyage only to find that the trip is futile. The bombs become the ultimate neutralizer among the disputing passengers. "Kill humanity to make a new one," sing the gypsy musicians in the blazing rubble following a frame of white. The gypsies allude to Nazi fascist policies to terminate anyone not in their quality adjusted life years, as it were (i.e. the ill, elderly, non-German, etc.). The gypsies have some what of an intermediary role in Who's Singing Over There. They interact with the characters. They even figure quite central to the film's climactic points with the brutality directed towards them just before raid sequence. On the other hand, they address the viewers directly as the provide additional commentary as it were, but also serving the audience with entertainment, despite of the cynical messages in the songs. The line "Kill humanity to make a new one" is both an observation but demonstrates keen incite on the state of things since we know that about 40 years later, Yugoslavia would experience its own brutal "starting anew." This line might also conjure various mythical deluges or other narratives of massive destruction followed by starting anew. Who's Singing Over There is monumental because of the way in which Kovačević and Sijan tell a very specific story about Yugoslavia's personality meanwhile colossal myth-like narratives are asserted. The camera mediates scenes that at once connect the audience to A) the immediate political context of Yugoslavia after the Nazis raid Belgrade B) a broader sense of ancient or inherent conflict between ethnic groups on that particular plot of land, and C) we are guided along a mythical plot of tragedy and near apocalyptic destruction.

And now: The Bealtes