The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recently opened an impressive and exhaustive retrospective of the art of Willem de Kooning (1904-1997).  Born in Rotterdam, the Dutch artist immigrated to the United States as a ship’s stowaway in 1926.  He gained notoriety and success in the New York galleries by the late 1940s and became intrinsically linked to the Abstract Expressionist movement.  Despite his enormous success, de Kooning’s work still remains less familiar to viewers today than the more celebrated works by Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko hanging alongside de Kooning in the MOMA’s permanent collection.  De Kooning has not received nearly as much exhibition attention as either Pollack or Rothko, and, in fact, the current show represents the first comprehensive, all-media retrospective on the artist to date. De Kooning was a prolific artist, who produced work over the course of seven full decades and as MOMA’s show proves, one that is more than worthy of a full retrospective. 

The greatest success of this show lies in its thorough, almost painstaking tracing of the artist’s progression from teenage apprentice to veteran artist..  The seven galleries, filled with over 200 paintings, sculptures and works on paper are divided into seven corresponding periods of de Kooning’s career. The galleries are organized in chronological order, allowing viewers to appreciate the clear changes and developments in the artist’s work over the course of his life.  His methods receive ample attention in the wall texts and labels and reveal a methodical and calculated approach, despite the often spontaneous appearance of the finished paintings.  These wall texts are less helpful, however, in helping the viewer get any sense of what might have been behind de Kooning’s drive to create works full of such intense agitation and anxiety. In tracing his long career, the only thing missing from this excellent show is a sense of de Kooning as a man and an intellect, of his identity beyond the canvas. 

As de Kooning once said, “I have to change to stay the same” and in fact this aptly defines the retrospective from start to finish. Each of the seven galleries attest to this drive to change, displaying works that fall into at least one (and sometimes several) of the artist’s favorite themes.  Images of women, landscapes, and varying degrees of abstraction seem to serve as guideposts in his lifelong quest to explore new artistic techniques.  It is only in the first gallery, representing the artist’s early career, where viewers will find images of still lifes and of men. These early explorations give way in the proceeding rooms to the aforementioned themes, which the artist visited and revisited for nearly forty years. 

The earliest work, a detailed still life in bright pigment was executed when de Kooning was only twelve years old.  This and other early work display his talent as well as his commercial art training; he served as an apprentice to a decorative art and design firm in Rotterdam during his teenage years.  In fact, de Kooning’s understanding of commercial art methods would help shape his own later artistic production. Though he utilized commercial techniques such as tracing and layered collage, he used those techniques in such innovative ways that the results were always more avant garde than Madison avenue. 

De Kooning produced a series of male figures from 1937 to 1944 but never returned to the subject again.  These figures reveal a sense of melancholy and agitation that would become increasingly magnified in his later exploration of female figures.  The artist often served as his own model for the male works, but intended them to represent the everyman and more specifically, the Depression-era everyman, who had become disheartened, downtrodden and alienated.  These works convey a real feeling of anxiety that continues to color much of the later works as well. 

The first gallery also reveals the artist’s initial explorations with total abstraction in a series of paintings dating to the late 1930s.  Influenced by the works of Picasso and Mondrian, whose paintings de Kooning had seen on display at MOMA, the works from this period show a marked shift away from the limits of figuration. These works, including Father, Mother, Sister, Brother (1937) nonetheless still retain a suggestion of the figure in their abstract forms.  Indeed, in these paintings de Kooning seems always to be walking the often fuzzy line between representation and abstraction, a practice he would continue throughout his long career. 

The following three galleries trace de Kooning’s career through the 1940s and 50s, charting his innovations in technique and his intense explorations of the female form, abstraction, and landscape.  The abstract works of this period are more nuanced and original, and it is clear that the artist was slowly developing his own style and moving away from the influence of giants like Picasso and Miró. His series of black and white abstract paintings, including the enigmatic Black Friday (1948) comprised the artist’s first solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948.  As the artist explained, he intended his abstract works to still contain “hints” of representation.  The paintings from this period are meant to function as a passing glimpse of something seen quickly. For de Kooning, abstraction is less about minimizing form than it is about adding an often layered and usually chaotic emotional depth to it. It is no surprise, then, that it was these works that really launched de Kooning’s reputation as one of the foremost and most influential artists in the circle of the Abstract Expressionists, and they represent a clear shift into new territory for the artist.

The true pinnacle of the entire exhibition, however, occurs at the halfway point with the impressive installation of the artist’s third series of women.  De Kooning began this series with Woman I, [HJ1] perhaps his most famous painting.  Begun in 1950, this work occupied de Kooning for two and a half years before he finally finished it in 1952.  He also executed five other paintings of women in this series, as well as dozens of preparatory works on paper.  The resulting series contains images of women portrayed in varying degrees of abstraction, flattened and at one with their colorful backgrounds.  The women, especially the figure in Woman I, appear distorted, grotesque and ferocious.  When these work were first exhibited at the Sidney Janis Gallery in the spring of 1953, they caused a considerable uproar. De Kooning was quickly labeled a misogynist and simultaneously derided for his return to the figure and retreat from abstraction, the hallmark of the current avant-garde.  Although the female figure is perhaps the most traditional subject in the history of art, de Kooning’s women are radically different than those created by, say, Titian and Rubens, whom the artist greatly admired.  Stylistically, these paintings are innovative in their merging of background and subject while maintaining a bright, wild color palette with some sense of visual order.  The chaotic, yet carefully planned execution of paint gives the works an added sense of anxiety.  And then, of course, there are those haunting, toothy grins on the faces of the women.  These works seem intentionally disturbing and yet viewers learn nothing in this show about de Kooning that might provide a clue as to how to interpret this series.  Although his two previous series of women paintings contained a decent amount of melancholy and angst, the third series takes this psychological state to a new level. The great mystery of de Kooning lies in these works and that makes them all the more fascinating.   

To say that the rest of this lengthy show could not compete with the first half would be a bit unfair. However, the stylistic nuances and evolving combinations of abstraction, figuration and landscape begin to blur together after having already been awed by roughly one hundred works of art, including the tour de force that is the aforementioned third series of women. Yet, de Kooning had another three decades of art left in him, and so, we press forward.  Fortunately, in the next gallery, de Kooning’s large, colorful “abstract parkway landscapes,” completed in 1956 and 1957 feel soothing in the simplicity of their wide brushstrokes and lack of figuration.  Critic Thomas Hess termed these works, “full arm sweeps” in reference to the broad brushstrokes that comprise the artist’s efforts to capture the roadways that lead into and out of Northeast cities.  His color-blurred canvases artfully convey the feeling of whizzing down a tree-lined highway, barely able to discern the shapes of the things passed by.   

De Kooning’s exploration of the shifting nature of abstraction continues through the remaining galleries.  In 1969, the artist began experimenting with sculpture for the first time, and over the next decade produced a range of small to large abstracted works.  These were modeled in clay and cast in bronze, giving them a unique appearance in their combination of modern sensibility and traditional medium.  While some of the works incorporate found objects, most are as inscrutable as his abstractions on canvas.

In the final gallery, visitors find de Kooning in the twilight of his career.  With his health beginning to deteriorate, the artist was forced to take a more minimalistic approach to his paintings.  F These beautiful works—pared down offerings compared to de Kooning’s earlier works—are the most serene of any of his paintings.  Here, ribbons of color float across large white canvasses, signaling the final innovative phase in de Kooning’s seventy-year quest to understand his own artistic vision while at the same moment staying true to it.  

de Kooning: A Retrospective is on view through January 9, 2012

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In 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò, or, the 120 Days of Sodom, was screened at Italian art houses just a few months after the controversial filmmaker was murdered. By that time, Pasolini had distinguished himself as one of the great filmmakers and cultural critics of post-WW2 Italy, using his films and novels as a medium for his critique of consumer capitalism and consumer culture. Salò, which portrays acts of unspeakable violence and brutality being enacted upon helpless teenagers by a wealthy and degenerate fascist officialdom, shocked and scandalized audiences everywhere. Since then, the film has become something of a cult phenomenon amongst devotees of vintage grind-house and exploitation films. However, what its fans and detractors fail to realize is that the film was just another installment of Pasolini’s ruthless and enraged attack against what he labeled “neo-capitalism” and “consumerist civilization.” It is this that makes Salò different from the average grind-house and exploitation film. Pasolini described himself as a Marxist, and indeed, was for a time, a member of the Italian Communist Party. Yet he held a cornucopia of unorthodox and contradictory political views, views which (along with his publicly avowed homosexuality) led him to be expelled from the ICP. What were his views, then? And how are they relevant for today? What’s more, did his prediction of the 60′s hippie counter-culture degenerating into an a-political conservatism, come true?

Pasolini was, in many respects, the first critic of mass consumerism. For him, consumerism, unlike, say, Italian fascism, or German Nazism, was able to carry out the “homologation” and “anthropological transformation” of  European man in a way that was never thought possible. This is because consumerism is tied to a hedonistic ideology, an ideology that teaches us that we do not have to, nor should we, delay our own personal individualistic gratifications. Paradoxically, however, by adhering to this new type of hedonism, one does not achieve, according to Pasolini, individuation.

Rather, by defining who you are by what you possess or what you wear, as well as by what others own and wear, one loses one’s individuality and sense of personal worth. And if there should happen to be any individual who refuses to conform to this scheme of things, and refuses to let herself be defined by whether or not she owns a Play Station 2, then that individual is looked upon as “weird,” or “abnormal”;  she is someone who doesn’t know that its “human nature” to buy and consume.

In short, for Pasolini consumerism was the new fascism, the new conformism. The fascism of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, at least, demanded that the individual sacrifice himself for the sake of the collectivity. In German National Socialism, the collectivity was represented by the German “race,” in Italian fascism, by the Italian nation. It was an ideology requiring some degree of asceticism and self-sacrifice.  Consumerism on the other hand, requires no sacrifice of the self, but rather invites a kind of self-indulgence. It is precisely this hedonistic element in consumerism that enables it to captivate the individual soul in a way that fascism was never able to do. (The infamous scenes of copraphagia  in Salò, in which the victims  and their ‘masters’  are served a gigantic meal of cooked  human feces, days old,  in a “Banquet of Shit,” were described by Pasolini as a critique of the processed and fast food industries, and of  mass production, which , according to him, produced  “useless refuse” that we then consume).

Everyone wears the same mass produced clothes; everyone buys the same mass produced furniture. In a gentrified, neo- liberal world, a world of gray skyscrapers and uniformed office workers,  a world where brand names like Prada and Gucci dominate the landscape of the city, and where reality T.V.  Has become the principal intellectual staple of the average American, Pasolini’s gloomy predictions take on a chilling reality. The French Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously implied that the youth of the 1960s were the children of Marx and Coca Cola. For Pasolini, they might, more appropriately, be considered the “children of Mussolini and Coca-Cola.”

Because Salò is often considered by most critics as Pasolini’s greatest film, it would be fitting to give a lengthy synopsis and history of the movie; especially since it is also the most virulent expression of his anti-consumerist views ever shown on the screen. The film is set in Italy in 1944, during the Republic of Salò, the Nazi and SS backed puppet regime of Benito Mussolini, which was established after his liberation from Allied captivity by Hitler. Whereas Mussolini had previously shared power with the Savoy monarchy and the Vatican, he was now, with the Nazis’ backing, enabled to create a true totalitarian dictatorship. This is probably why, in Pasolini’s writings, the Salò Republic is often used as a metaphor for absolute tyranny.

Four fascist officials: a duke, a bishop, the president of the local court, and a banker—the very pillars of bourgeois respectability and morality—kidnap 18 teenagers and bring them to a deserted villa near Marzabotto, in Northern Italy. (Marzabotto was, in fact, a town that was razed to the ground by the Germans in 1944 in retaliation for the murder of SS officers by Italian partisans.)  They also hire four middle-aged prostitutes whose job it is to tell arousing stories of sexual acts, which will “inflame the passions.” They then begin to torture, rape, and abuse the youngsters for three months, before finally killing them by means of mutilation, while the four officials look on at the executions through binoculars.  Among the brutal tortures and humiliations the young men and women are subjected to are: being forced to eat food laced with nails and shards of glass, being raped, having to crawl on all fours on a leash, and barking like dogs, being forced to eat and drink their own and each other’s’ feces and urine, licking the four officials’ boots, and finally, being mutilated by scalping, having their tongues cut out, etc. The film, parodying Dante’s Divine Comedy, is divided into four parts, or “circles”: The Ante-Chamber to Hell, The Circle of Manias, The Circle of Shit, and The Circle of Blood. The brutality that is shown in the movie is so extreme that it sometimes descends into the ludicrous and, in a sick way, the comic.

Salò is often looked upon as a modern transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, or, The School of the Libertines. And it is. Whereas de Sade set his novel in Central Europe during the Thirty Years War, Pasolini has the events of his film take place in Fascist Italy, during the Second World War. Yet there is more to the film than just the switching of historical periods, which nevertheless was a stroke of genius. De Sades’s novel, which he wrote during his imprisonment in the Bastille in 1789, was only discovered and published in 1905. Even though he was born into the French aristocracy, de Sade was very critical of the moral degeneracy and corruption of that class, and, when the French Revolution broke out, he immediately joined the revolutionaries. Indeed, The 120 Days of Sodom was meant to be a scathing critique of the degeneracy of the aristocracy, of the silliness of their views on property rights, and an affirmation of the Enlightenment view of man’s agency trumping the Divine Will.

In Salò, Pasolini is attempting to accomplish something very similar. In one of his last interviews, Pasolini stated that by coming up with the idea of setting de Sade’s novel in the time of the Salò Republic, he finally had a real insight into the “true choreography of Fascism.” In fact, Pasolini himself lived in Salò in his early twenties.  He personally witnessed horrible acts of brutality committed against the local population by the Fascists and the S.S., particularly against the region’s Jewish inhabitants (which, before the German invasion of Italy, had always been protected by Mussolini). Pasolini, then, had a first-hand experience with the brutality of fascism.

Like de Sade, Pasolini wanted to expose the moral degeneracy of a particular class (the Italian bourgeoisie), and its collaboration with fascism. However, unlike most Italian Marxist theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci who saw fascism as a “progressive” phenomenon because it supposedly drew segments of the proletariat and petty bourgeoisie into power, Pasolini had a much more radical viewpoint. In his view, fascism is all about the transformation of the human body into an object, a commodity. Many of his critics accused Pasolini of wanting to make just another exploitation film, since the only connection Salò has to fascism is in its setting. Oppression, torture, the dehumanization of people that are looked upon as “subhuman”-all of that is in Salò.  And what was fascism, but the systematic oppression, degradation, and torture of humanity? The Nietzsche and de Sade-quoting-“masters” in the film treat their victims as things, as objects to use and abuse for their pleasure; they are things to be used, ”consumed,” and destroyed. And it was this objectification of the body that Pasolini saw as the ultimate connection between fascism and consumerism. For fascism and consumerism are not tied to each other just by the fact that they force the individual to conform to an ideology and mode of behavior. The ultimate connection between the two is the process of objectification; that just as fascism attempted to turn its victims and their bodies into dehumanized objects, mass-consumerism , in a less obvious, but even more insidious way, turns the individual into a soulless thing, always eager to conform.

It was his views on the sub-proletariat, or, as many liberal and conservative sociologists today like to call them,  “the underclass,” that scandalized Pasolini’s fellow Communists the most.  He (correctly) viewed the working class with suspicion, as capable of being infected with the middle-class mores of the Italian bourgeoisie. The real opponent of bourgeois hegemony, according to Pasolini, was the peasant and the ragazzo di vita (young man of life), the young, unemployed hustler of the Roman borgate (slums), projects, and shantytowns. These were the people who Pasolini described to the Italian journalist Furio Colombo, in his last interview, as being “poor and real people who struggled to defeat the landlord without becoming that landlord.” According to him, “Since they were excluded from everything, they remained uncolonized”). These were people who refused to accept bourgeois, middle-class values, who refused to accept the white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant work ethic. These were people who fought against their oppressors, without wanting to become like their oppressors. Like Richard Wright, who also came to the same conclusion in his struggles with the American Communist Party, Pasolini saw that what the bourgeoisie should fear the most are not the workers, but rather those “abnormal” and “bohemian” types who refuse to accept its values, norms, and work ethic.

Of course, this did not sit well with most orthodox Marxists. Pasolini’s almost Weberian emphasis on  social attitudes and lifestyle instead of on class, his love for the peasant, and his romantic idealization of the lumpenproletariat, as well as his distrust of the laboring classes, was a complete reversal of the schema presented by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. This view of his also runs counter to the goal of every social worker, anthropologist, and sociologist on the planet.  Both the liberal and the conservative sociologist view the existence of the urban underclass as a problem that should be solved. For the conservative, the answer is less government dependency. For the liberal, the answer is for government programs for the alleviation of poverty. Pasolini sees the problem those who study the city have. In his 1958 article, The Shantytowns of Rome, he writes, “Ethnologists recognize the problem (of the underclass), the difficulty of conceiving an irrational state within a rational state in such a way that it does not seem gratuitous and schematic.”

Yet he will have none of their solutions.  For him, the underclass should stay, for it is the only thing standing between the modern city and the process of total gentrification. In Italy, this process of gentrification is described by Pasolini in a 1973 interview as a “process of acculturation, of the transformation of particular and marginal cultures into a centralized culture that homogenizes everything” and that “occurred more or less simultaneously all over Italy.” And in his 1958 article, The City’s True Face, he describes the Roman underclass’s  “acculturation” as an attempt to “mutate the deep mix of anarchy and common sense of these people into a kind of American -style indifference, a ‘standardized’ type, repeated obsessively, hundreds of thousands of times,”

Pasolini’s  romantic love for the underclass, an underclass vibrant and healthy and uncorrupted by middle-class values, as well as his sympathy foe society’s outcasts, were the two ideas that dominated his literary and cinematic works. These ideas are depicted in almost every single one of his films. His first film, Accatone (Street Urchins), which came out in the 1950s was a romantic, homo-erotic glorification of the young hustlers and hoodlums of the Roman borgate. Indeed, so realistic were the scenes in the film, that there were cries for censorship, particularly from the Christian Democrats, the  CIA-backed center-right party that ruled Italy, with very few interludes, from 1946 to the late 1970s, and which, in Pasolini’s view, was mainly responsible for  destroying Italy’s peasant culture in the name of “economic development.” His second film, Ricotta Cheese, depicted a semi-proletarian who is chosen to play Christ in a passion play, and who literally dies on the cross after having eaten some bad ricotta cheese. In The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, which, of all his films, is the most widely seen in the United States,  Pasolini portrays Christ, not as the gentle Good Shepherd found in the Gospels, but rather, as an angry, dedicated revolutionary who cares about the plight of the poor and is ultimately crucified  by the governing elites.

His so-called “Trilogy of Life” films—The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights—were immensely popular and became huge hits. In fact, it was the immense popularity of these films that, at least in part, prompted Pasolini to make Salò; for one of his greatest fears was that, in producing popular entertainment for the masses, he was helping to keep them in their condition of oppression; hence the shocking brutality of Salo. Unlike Chaucer or Boccaccio, though, who centered their tales on the heroic escapades and sexual adventures of the Italian and English aristocracy, Pasolini, in his film adaptations of their stories, like a true socialist, took a different tack.  In his versions of the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, the action is centered on the moral struggles waged by a hardy, but oppressed, peasantry, in their conflict with a dissolute aristocracy. In Porcile (Pigsty), two social outcast—a homosexual and a coprophiliac—find themselves in their fight against a society that oppresses them and views them as outsiders. And in Torema, (Theorem), which some critics say is his greatest film, we see a middle-class Italian family take in a stranger as a lodger. The “lodger” is really a bi-sexual extra-terrestrial who winds up seducing the mother, father, and the teenage son, and ultimately destroys their bourgeois susceptibilities. There is a constant theme, running like red thread, throughout almost all of Pasolini’s films. The theme of the young ragazzo and street hustler, and the social outcast and outsider who is oppressed by society and its “respectable” value—these twin loves of Pasolini’s are the very heart and soul of his films.

It is this concept of an oppositional subculture being co-opted by the culture of the establishment, that led Pasolini to formulate his critique of the beatnik and hippie counter-culture of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. For Pasolini, the hippie was the quintessential symbol of acculturation and cultural co-optation. At first glance, the hippie represented the very apex of cultural resistance to the bourgeoisie. The long hair, the drug use, the sexual promiscuity—all these things are the antithesis of bourgeois respectability. The hippie chooses a lifestyle that is contrary to the typical middle class norm. And it is precisely this emphasis on personal choice, on lifestyle, that Pasolini sees as the chief danger in the hippie’s world outlook. Many of the flower children of the 60s later became conservative. They kept the weed, but not the values. Pasolini saw that there was something inherent in the hippie counter-culture that led it, in an almost deterministic fashion, to become subsumed by the dominant establishment ideology. Why? Because of the inherent, hedonistic, consumerist character of the worldview of the hippie. The hippie of the 1960s, (who usually came from a middle-class background) emphasized the importance of the freedom to choose one’s lifestyle, one’s sexual orientation, one’s style of clothing, etc. It is a very personalized, customized ideology, an ideology that was co-opted in the late 1970s and early 80s, by the attempt of neoliberals to portray capitalism as a post-modernist utopia, where everyone is free to choose his own personal brand or style. Ultimately, it degenerated into an a-political and even anti-political, worldview. In his brilliant essay, The Hippie’s Speech, written in 1973, Pasolini commented on the middle-class snobbery of the hippie, and of the possibility of his being snatched up by a consumerist, and even fascist, culture. According to Pasolini:

That long hair (of the hippie) was hinting at right- wing ‘stuff’. The cycle is concluded. The subculture in power absorbed the subculture that was in opposition and took possession  of it with devilish ability, and passionately made of it a fashion that, if we cannot  really call it fascist in the classic sense of the word, is after all extremely right- wing….Now the long hair is saying, in its inarticulate and obsessed  language of non-verbal signs, in its vandal symbolism, the ‘things’ of T.V. and commercials, where it is now inconceivable to foresee a young person without long hair, something that nowadays would be a scandal for the power in charge….Nowadays no one could ever distinguish, from the physical presence, a revolutionary from a provocateur. Left and Right have physically merged.

In the early part of the century, one knew who was a fascist and who was not. The fascist had either a shaven head or a crew cut, he wore a black or brown uniform and armband, and raised his hand in the Roman salute. Now, one can have a short haircut, a clean shaven chin, and look like a “square,” and be on the Left, and a long-haired hipster can be on the Right, all as a result of a-political hedonism.

Pasolini may have been an unorthodox Marxist, but his views shocked those of the Left and the Right. His advocacy of what Furio Colombo called “a sort of magical paleo-Catholic and neo-Chinese monasticism” may sound a little strange, but his ruthless criticisms of a new, heartless capitalism that stultifies the intellectual life of modern man with shiny baubles, is as relevant today as when he began his crusade in what was then still an industrially backward nation. In an age of reality shows, of Entourage and America’s Next Top Model, Pasolini’s gloomy message should be hearkened to. And in a  United States with the largest underclass in the world and one of the highest poverty rates in the Western hemisphere, Pasolini’s prediction that “The core of the struggle for the Third World revolution is really America,” should be taken seriously.

So why is Pasolini’s social philosophy still relevant? Why should we read his essays and poems now, at this particular historical junction? We are living in an era of neoliberal capitalism; a capitalism that is trying to stamp out any form of cultural and political resistance. It is an insidious form of capitalism that tries to dull us with Gucci hand-bags and reality T.V. shows. By remembering Pasolini and his message, we can learn that what the bourgeois fears the most are oppositional cultural norms, rather than mass strikes. Let us hope his message will be remembered for as long as the bourgeoisie remains with us.

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Invasion! is a really fun and funny play. I want to state that right at the beginning before it gets lost in what’s to follow. Smart, funny, highly theatrical; it is proof that political theatre need neither be dry nor preachy to explore important issues. Okay: now for the rest.

During a post-show chat early in the current off-Broadway run of the 2006 Swedish play Invasion!, playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri revealed that he had never thought about his 2006 play in connection to New York and 9/11 until very recently. This came as a surprise to everyone in the audience; seeing this play only steps from the World Trade Center, in September of 2011, it was nearly impossible not to read it as a meditation on, and indictment of, the politics of identity and terrorism in the early twenty-first century.. Even panel moderator David Henry Hwang, whose own sophisticated comedy about ethnicity and identity is about to open on Broadway, admitted to being surprised, and said that this was the first time he’d heard that Khemiri’s play wasn’t originally set in NYC. Indeed, the play had a shorter run in a smaller space last season, with much of the same creative team, and won a 2011 Obie for “helping us see ourselves, as Americans, more clearly.”

For Khemiri, even though he allowed and even encouraged his collaborators in New York to change the setting, and to adjust certain cultural and topical references accordingly, Invasion! is a play about Sweden. That it feels so topical, timely, and relevant in a setting 4,000 miles from Stockholm, is certainly a credit to translator Rachel Willson-Broyles and director Erica Schmidt, who have successfully made the play sound like New York, or like a version of New York envisioned by a playwright with a biting sense of humor and a love of language. It is also, of course, a credit to Khemiri himself, who has written a probing, intelligent play that is at turns funny and alarming, challenging and engaging, political and heart-wrenching. Finally, it is an indication that, despite the tendency of those of us in the United States to think we’re at the center of everything, the play’s topicality—its articulation of anxieties surrounding identity, immigration, political asylum, terrorism, and the simultaneous omnipotence and impotence of the criminal justice system and of “experts” both political and academic—is applicable elsewhere as well. Explaining why they decided to change the setting, director Schmidt quipped that, to New York audiences, lines like “everything is Sweden’s fault” would be kind of funny. She’s right that it’s difficult to imagine blaming Sweden for the current geopolitical mess, but I suspect the line plays as kind of funny in Sweden as well, even as it is also an important reminder that citizens of a non-“superpower” nation still grapple with the question of their place in the world, and their responsibility for it.

Invasion! is not an easy play to write about. Wisps of plot twist and turn, both illuminating and obscuring one another and, ultimately, this isn’t a plot-driven piece. There are also several surprises along the way that it would be unfair to reveal, including one that the publicist specifically requested we keep to ourselves. And yet describing the play in terms of its themes and politics, as I have a little bit above, creates another problem: it might sound self-important, dry, pretentious, when it is none of those things.

The play centers on a character who may or may not exist.  Abulkasem may be a legendary figure from Arab history; he may be the gay uncle, visiting from Lebanon, of one of the play’s characters; he may be an urban legend; he may be a terrorist, or a revolutionary, or a misunderstood asylum seeker. Because Abulkasem may be any, all, or none of these, the name itself becomes a highly unstable—and yet almost totemic—vessel for a great many people’s anxieties, insecurities, aspirations, and fears.  During the post-show chat, Khemiri, who is half Tunisian, talked about his father, a professor of Arabic and French, demonstrating how differently people reacted to him if he spoke with a French accent than if he spoke with an Arabic accent. It is clear that the playwright’s love of language and his fascination with identity are deeply entwined, and that both have informed his work as an artist and his reading of various political issues.

What keeps this play of ideas from feeling like a sterile exercise in gratuitous cleverness, is how aggressively, intensely theatrical it is.  Khemiri has said that he considers himself primarily a novelist (Invasion! was his first play, though he has written several since), but this play does not feel like a writer’s dalliance with an unfamiliar form. Everything about Invasion! is designed to exploit and maximize the material conditions of the theatrical form. Actors play multiple roles, change costumes on stage, and break the fourth wall, as in many plays, but that’s only a small part of what I’m talking about. Throughout the play, the tension between actor and character, between narration and action, is playfully explored. We are told one thing, but see another. We see certain scenes from more than one character’s point of view. A character is described as screaming, but remains relatively calm. These are techniques that are particularly well suited to the theatrical medium, and Khemiri clearly loves to play with them. There is also a moment, which I’ve been asked not to discuss, that Hwang called one of the greatest coups de théâtre he had ever seen.

Schmidt, her actors, and her design team have crafted a fast-paced, quirky production that meets the challenges of the script and keeps the audience on their toes without disorienting them unnecessarily. As I’ve already noted several times, the play is very funny, sometimes sweetly so, and at other times acerbically so. The humor itself is also an effective theatrical device, because several moments are both funny and unsettling, the laughter fading as the implications of the situation become clear.

This is the first of Khemiri’s plays to appear in the United States, and I wish it were getting a longer run. I also hope that this isn’t the last we’ll hear from Khemiri on this side of the Atlantic. Until we get another play, though, it’s worth noting that his novel Mantecore was recently published in the US, and that it, too, was translated by Wilson-Broyles. I haven’t read it yet, but I downloaded it as soon as I got home from the theatre.

***

I first saw Diane Paulus’s production of Hair during its Central Park run in the summer of 2008. I was worried at first, when a woman took to the stage before the show not only to welcome us to the Delacorte Theatre but also to thank, without a hint of irony, Bank of America for sponsoring the production. It was a gloriously, distressingly perfect example of how anti-materialist, countercultural movements are coopted and commoditized. That said: I enjoyed the show. I thought at the time that it was probably as good as Hair can get: not perfect, but highly effective and enjoyable, and with a kick-ass onstage band. There were, of course, aspects that didn’t work. The squeaky-clean young actors who made up the ensemble weren’t always very convincing as hippies, and certain moments ended up feeling like a theme park attraction about the late sixties, but I left impressed and energized by the production’s many successes.

The production went on to Broadway and a national tour. At the end of the tour, it made its way back to Broadway in 2011 for a limited run with the touring cast. Of course, shows that have been running for that long, and have been through that many cast changes, lose some of their luster. When I was offered very inexpensive tickets to the return engagement, though, I looked forward to revisiting Hair, and brought a guest who had never seen the show. This time, the balance was off. There were moving moments and some great voices, but the flaws and ironies seemed more amplified.

My friend was frustrated that the strongest voices didn’t have the lead roles, and that those casting decisions seemed to have been made along racial lines. We were both distracted by the uniformly perfect, impossible-looking bodies of the entire cast. Dozens of trimmed and waxed young gymbodies danced around on stage while singing about how hairy they were. Of course, that kind of body is an asset, a commodity, and I have no objection, really, to selling sex. But for everyone on stage to look like that was a bit much.

I had a similar response to the current Broadway musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It’s a fun, campy show that tries way too hard to please, but often succeeds in doing so despite occasionally feeling desperate. There’s a lot of talent on stage, and there are a lot of beautiful bodies, and some of the numbers work well (though others fall surprisingly flat).

But here’s the thing. I know some drag queens. And I know some hippies, and they don’t all look like Abercrombie and Fitch models, or like they’re auditioning for the next season of True Blood. The decades-long quest to address images of women’s bodies in popular culture hasn’t resulted in more realistic images of women; it has instead resulted in less realistic images of men. I guess that’s a move toward equality in some sense (we’re all objectified now), and again: I’m not entirely against the objectification of bodies and the commodification of sex. But I do wish that in the theatre, of all places, we might make some effort to recognize that there is more than one way to be sexy, and that there are kinds of diversity not reflected in Benetton catalogues.

Invasion!, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri. Translated by Rachel Wilson-Broyles. Directed by Erica Schmidt. With Francis Benhamou, Nick Choksi, Andrew Guilarte, and Bobby Moreno. Sets by Antje Ellermann; Costumes by Oana Botez-Ban; Lights by Matthew Richards; Sound by Bart Fasbender. Produced by the Play Company, at the Flea Theatre, 41 White Street, September 6–October 1, 2011. Running time: approx. 90 minutes. Tickets: $15­–40. Visit www.playco.org for tickets and more information.

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On approach, Death By Audio, one of Brooklyn’s Do-It-Yourself, all-ages concert venues, is unassuming – and strikingly so. The north side of South 2^nd Street’s sidewalk runs unevenly, from solid concrete slabs at the corner of Wythe Avenue to mid-block cracked asphalt and unkempt grass. Ailanthus tree branches drape over a gravel-pathed parking lot, surrounded by blank facades of anonymous warehouse space. The south side of South 2^nd Street boasts new commercial spaces and freshly built, still mostly unoccupied condominiums. If the south side of the street exemplifies the spectacle of progress, the north side lays paused before pedestrians, not unlike the neighborhood’s elderly residents, watching passers by from their front steps on a Sunday afternoon. They’re living monuments to the neighborhood’s past, and their rigid silence suggests foreboding and anxiety over whether they’ll fit into the Williamsburg of tomorrow. For many, the Williamsburg of tomorrow – a condominium covered refuge for Manhattanites, dormant industrial warehouses rising into a Frankenstein-like Battery Park vis-à-vis Miami Beach – is already the Williamsburg of today. On a stifling August afternoon, Edan Wilber, one of a few individuals who run Death By Audio, reflects on the dramatic development with self-aware awe. “When I started booking shows here, this was the only thing on this block,” he explains. “Now there are three restaurants, a bar, those condos, and a movie theater on the corner. All of that sprang up in 18 months.”

For many New Yorkers, be they those suffering from the financial challenges of gentrification or those resigned to it with the presumption of inevitability, the conversation is dreadful and devoid of long term context. There are few local topics that incite more despair than the false choice between caricatures of salivating opportunists and heartbroken liberals. In historic terms, Williamsburg’s acclaim as the newly-crowned center of New York cool is a recent phenomenon, but gentrification – the development of under-utilized urban areas by and for wealthy interests, while displacing low-income residents – is a phenomenon that can trace its roots to Second Empire Paris.

Beginning in 1852, Georges Eugène Haussmann’s renovations of Paris promised to transform the city from medieval to modern. As Haussmann would have it, gone were the slums and narrow roadways where the urban poor had organized barricades in violent stand-offs with the state. In their place, the new Parisian boulevards, lined with bourgeois apartments, were designed to facilitate military suppression of political protest and to enable commercial transport, epitomizing the connection between a city’s modernity and its commercial viability. While his influence, known as Haussmannization, can be witnessed all over the world, its manifestation in New York is particularly striking.

Robert Moses, the man who had a greater impact on New York’s urban planning than any other individual in the last 150 years, admired Haussmann’s work, and many of the features of daily life that New Yorkers take for granted – from bridges and highways to public works – have been shaped by his prerogative. Moses favored the interests of the city’s wealthy minority over the lower income public, divesting money from inner city public transportation and resisting investments into poor urban neighborhoods (often destroying them in the process), instead supporting suburban expansion and commercial interests. In the mid-1990’s, former Mayor Giuliani proceeded from where Moses left off, aiming to transform the city into one part tourist attraction and one part status symbol for the world’s wealthiest people. His actions were the logical extension of an ideology that seeks to distance public and private space from presumptions of public good, in order to maximize private wealth. The notion of the neighborhood itself has been transformed from a sprawling community to real estate organized by commercial interest, turning all space, both public and private, into one homogenous economic entity.

Today, in New York City, the monthly charge of rent and minimum cost of living are so demanding that any act on the hierarchy of needs lower than strict survival can be nearly impossible for many people.  Acts of artistic expression often require free space for development, but most concert venues and art galleries, focused on making money at every possible opportunity, in large part to pay their high rent, cannot offer the flexibility artists need. David Harvey reflects on the legacy of Haussmannization in his essay The Political Economy of Public Space. “What had been lost was the idea of the city as a form of sociality,” he writes, “as a potential site for the construction of utopian dreams of a nurturing social order.” But now, in North Brooklyn, ground zero for the gentrification debate, an alternative economic model for the arts, with broad implications for all New Yorkers, is gathering steam amongst a loose collective of artists and musicians. In venues like Death By Audio and Silent Barn, free space for art is a necessity, not a luxury.

One can discover Death By Audio from the slightly ajar, nondescript door facing the sidewalk of South 2^nd Street, flanked on either side by columns of frosted glass. In a neighborhood inundated by ad campaigns for its apartment complexes, assorted flyers, and brightly lit marquees, the lack of identification around Death By Audio’s entrance seems intentional. Inside, past the volunteer collecting donations in the doorway, stacks of the DIY community’s self-published art project/leaflet Showpaper, and an L-shaped hallway with exposed piping, the venue is broken up into two rooms. The front contains the performance space, and the back is used for selling merchandise and socializing. Art and graffiti cover the walls, including a striking mural, painted by Screaming Females vocalist Marisa Paternoster, which faces the audience from behind the stage. Amidst its cartoonish expressions and mischievous insinuations is a depiction of a bearded man brimming with excitement, looking out at the room in adoration. On good nights, the audience will crowd around the stage and look back at the man’s image with the same enthusiasm. That man is Edan Wilber.

Wilber currently books shows for Death By Audio and plays an integral role in Brooklyn’s DIY all ages movement. Wilber moved from Florida to New York over ten years ago to attend NYU film school, but was forced to take a year off because he couldn’t afford it. Although he went to shows every night after work, he often wasn’t allowed in because he was under 21.  “I used to go to Mercury Lounge and stand outside,” he says. “It got to the point that the bouncers were like, ‘We know you. We know you’re not 21. There’s no way you’re getting in here.’”

Joe Ahearn, the managing director of Showpaper and one of the organizers behind Silent Barn, argues that “there are many reasons to run a 21 plus event, but the primary motivation is economic. Making sure everyone in attendance is able to drink allows you to perpetuate a bar-and-alcohol model for your business, offsetting the cost of rent and whatever your overhead may be. All-ages events are almost never an economically successful model for throwing shows.”

Faced with such challenges, Wilber and others who run Death By Audio rent the performance space from a landlord but also live on the premises, in the same warehouse structure. Money, which comes in at the door, largely goes to the band. Liberated from the bar-and-alcohol business model, Death By Audio is free to let anyone and everyone in, whether eight years old or 80.

“Philosophically, we’re similar to Death By Audio,” says Nathaniel Roe, one of the organizers behind Silent Barn. Over seven years ago, Silent Barn began as a renovated warehouse used for band rehearsals, before transitioning into an innovative model for maintaining the artistic integrity of a performance space – all within a city that defines its sense of modernity by its commercial viability. The organizers of Silent Barn are now actively pursuing a new space, which will afford them the option to legally reside within the venue that they also hold performances in. “Without public grants or private donors, the only way you can run a venue without making it a blow-out, with tons of people buying booze, is to live in your venue,” Roe asserts. “It frees you on a financial level. Art values rather than money values.”

Even though the Brooklyn DIY scene’s innovative tactics for self-subsidizing space in a restrictive market breaks rank with much of the precedent set by punk’s past, the scene stills draws influence from a legacy established through thirty years of counter culture. The DIY culture, and the all ages movement which rose from it, began in the early 1980’s American punk and hardcore scene. These bands and audiences, primarily teenagers, were disregarded by the mainstream music industry, deemed incapable of producing anything commercially viable. If they wanted to keep producing art and music, their only choice was to do it themselves. And they did, creating touring routes across the country and dotting the American landscape with independent venues, press, and record labels, often in unconventional locations. Michael Azerrad, author of the definitive text on America’s DIY movement, Our Band Could Be Your Life, explains, “For musicians and audiences, DIY spaces are a way of separating their community and its culture from commerciality, making it more about the joy of getting together and having fun – which is exactly the right priority.”

“We call it living in the stew,” Roe says. “To me, living in the venue symbolizes a complete turnover to aesthetic values – there’s art everywhere all the time. This is a complete immersion in artistic value.“

Instead of occurring in a vacuum, these experiments in the public utility of private space are catching on. “People are disillusioned with capitalism, even if they’re not anti-capitalist,” says Amy Klein, of the band Titus Andronicus. “They know that the economic system is failing and we need something new.” Titus Andronicus utilizes another DIY venue, the so-called Shea Stadium, as a rehearsal space and recording studio. The band The So So Glos runs the space and oversees its day-to-day operations. “These venues aren’t just about space,” Klein adds. “They’re about fostering a particular style of music with a philosophy that says anyone can do it – anyone can make music. Your music is more important than your financial status.” According to The So So Glos’ drummer, Zach Staggers, the features of these spaces are essential to the integrity of the final product. “Music is supposed to be listened to in spaces like ours; it’s an atmosphere of freedom.”

Upon departure at the end of an evening, Death By Audio shrinks deeper into the anonymity of its unassuming façade with each passing step forward. The urban spectacle of a viable alternative from the dreadful norm lingers in the air – or in this case, in the divisions of cracked sidewalk slabs, accompanying the departing crowd fifty feet in all directions from the venue’s door. If, in fact, the use of public and private space often nakedly reveals people’s determinations and the values of their time, what conclusion can be drawn from understanding Brooklyn’s DIY scene? As Amy Klein sees it, “We are in a time of economic upheaval. With rent being so high, young people are opting out of the traditional lifestyles that aren’t even possible anymore.”

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One of the first glimpses of The Social Network came in July, when an early trailer appeared on YouTube. It was a music video of sorts, featuring a children’s choir singing Radiohead’s first single, “Creep,” over images of typical Facebook photos and status updates—the latter typed into the blank text box in faux ‘real time,’ as in the recent Google ads. The pictures were the standard utopian scenes of youthful recreation that mark the many related genres of online photos: all-too-perfect snapshots of daytrips, candid clips of backyard BBQs, careless grins showcasing the finest balance of composed spontaneity. We see anonymous smiling faces frozen in scenes resembling an Urban Outfitters fall catalogue, which is what Facebook photos have essentially become.

They pop on-screen and disappear the way you click through a friend’s party. Click, click, click, and entire chains of happy days blossom and fade in split seconds. What takes hours to plan, document, sort, and upload then provides your third-grade best-friend with less than twenty seconds of entertainment on their iPhone, 2000 miles away and twenty years later.

A cursor arrow clicks on “add friend” and “confirm friend,” while recent graduates smile, arms wrapped around each other. Then a moody profile shot appears, with a hand reaching toward the camera lens and covering it. This is the other genre of the social network: the solo pose of self-representation, as tired as a freshman year art project. It signals an interruption to the fun. Suddenly someone types on a friend’s wall, and reveals the burrowed longing nestled in the heart of Facebook users everywhere: where are you?

Instructively, the choir answers through the point-blank confession of Thom Yorke’s stripped down loner: “I want you to notice when I’m not around.” What was grunge pathology becomes a prescient analysis of the emotions fueling the dot-com boom still to come. One asks to know, one wants to show, and billions of dollars follow. Time, distance, and desire converge in new wires that no longer require real-time communication between the curious and lonely, such as a phone-call, but instead function like a mass email to everyone. Connecting everyone is Facebook—a corporation that, as founder Mark Zuckerburg exclaims mid-way through the film The Social Network, takes the entire experience of college and puts it online.

The Radiohead lyrics overlaying these otherwise ubiquitous images are beautiful and eerie. They stamp what is perhaps a central and controversial theme of the film: that Facebook is not a technology of communication and connection, but one that exists to exploit alienation and exclusion. Any brouhaha about the truthfulness of the film’s representation of Zuckerburg is completely beside the point. Alienation and exclusion are the subjects of The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, and what appear again and again in the brilliant performance by Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Zuckerburg as the film chronicles his years before and after Harvard earlier this decade.

The riveting opening scene is an awkwardly dark conversation about social status between Zuckerburg and his date, Erica (Rooney Mara). Zuckerburg wants to join the elite Harvard social clubs where the children of the rich and privileged mingle, party, have sex, and build the affective bonds that will connect their professional and social networks for the rest of their careers. Erica is incredulous and more than a little disturbed by Zuckerburg’s open and cynical ambition. Over the course of the discussion they break up, and Zuckerburg return to his dorm to humiliate her in a blog, and subsequently invent a “hot or not” Harvard website with the help of his only friend, Eduardo Saverin. The site crashes the server.

The desire that Zuckerburg first channeled into a hierarchy of hotness is the same that animates the arrows that click “add friend.” Behind the spectral glow of the screens and photos are the missing bodies that these images and updates represent and display. This desire has many gradations and circulates with different intentions. It flows and morphs far beyond the urge to peek through the binoculars at the neighbors. Facebook isn’t about looking at strangers. Weirdly, it’s about looking at your friends and family, and also the people you only kind of know. It provides intimacy where intimacy is desired.

This desire for intimacy doesn’t necessarily come from lonely people. It doesn’t expose an overflow of information. It reveals the infinite desires that bodies make. It connects a disconnected, insatiable generation. It reveals that we can never be connected enough, despite our protests that we are too visible.

Zuckerburg’s loneliness and isolation inadvertently produced a technology to distribute the infinite waves of desire that flow through all relationships. This is in part because users themselves extended the logic of college friend profiles and began using them to mediate all social relationships. This caused some weirdness a couple years ago, when recent graduates found friend requests from their parents, or from “friends” they made in dance class the summer after eighth grade.

Discussions about the flattening of the past, the meaning of “friendship,” or the impracticalities of contemporary privacy miss the essential point of Facebook’s expansion. The growth of this entire company was propelled almost entirely by the desires of people everywhere to connect to one another. The company’s sole task, as Zuckerbug realizes in the film, was merely to provide channels to define, categorize, and capture that desire. It didn’t need advertising or need to convince anyone to join, aside from a few recalcitrant and independently minded individuals.

No one had to sell anyone else on Facebook, or Myspace, or even Friendster. The purpose of social networks was and remains obvious. People need to connect because they feel disconnected. They’re alienated. They’re distant from the people they love and care about. We live in a culture and in an economy that demands we act in our own self-interests. At best, some of us are able to live with people we love. Many don’t, or can’t.

Facebook—like communication technology in general—reflects a need that goes beyond putting the experience of college online. In the film, Zuckerburg uses Facebook to make friends, even as it alienates him from the one or two he already has. Facebook, then, isn’t so much a technology of connection as it is a revelation about the fractured and mediated nature of contemporary friendship.

It’s not a sign we’re more connected than ever—not quite. It’s a sign our bodies have never been more isolated from the bodies we want to be with. At the same time, the bodies we want have never been so visible. Facebook has more in common with porn than one might think.  Not coincidently, Zuckerburg stumbled onto the idea only after he created a “hot or not” site that crashed the Harvard servers. And that site came only after he was dumped.

In the film, Zuckerburg wants to be inside the Harvard clubs, and he wants to be with the girl he offends in the opening scene. The other half of that desire, however, is the desire for status, since it’s also status that makes the otherwise undesirable desirable. Zuckerburg can’t rely on an athletic body, and he doesn’t have the charisma that is so valuable in a US social culture that more and more resembles US corporate culture, where who you know, how energetic you are, and how positive you seem has as much to do with your success as talent or hard work.

The most important function of the “status update” is that it literally signals a status update. One’s friends have become one’s fans. The psychology of celebrity has been democratized – it’s no accident that the site rose to fame alongside the success of reality television and Youtube. Facebook is the logical extension of MTV’s The Real World. It’s a site where status and desire intersect, and those intersections are also where the film engineers its plot.

Status and desire are inseparable and fickle—and profitable. And so it’s impossible to separate what’s creepy and desperate about Facebook from its utility as an instrument of self-production and self-promotion. As an instrument for self-production, Facebook primarily encourages users to promote themselves and their way of life. Its function is in that sense reproductive of status, of class life, and of the digital architecture that provides actual maps to the bars, apartments, houses, concerts, and restaurants that physically sustain and excite the body. It’s one giant “app” for friendship.

To the extent that friendship accompanies the rituals that nourish and pleasure the body, Facebook is the prosthetic skin that envelopes collective relationships. It’s become the digital skin of friendship that allows us to graze each other from afar, like a touch in the hall.

As such, the site is perhaps the ultimate product of the neo-liberal era of privatization and modern corporate power.  Facebook has privatized social communication, class status, and, at the extreme point of this logic, all the human relationships that use it. It’s done this by monetizing friendship itself. It has turned the last location without corporate branding into a space of corporate intervention. Facebook is the first corporation to capitalize on relationships between people, and not simply the relationship between people and products, or between people and celebrities that sell products.

Embedded too within the company’s 25 billion dollar value is also the free promotion of products, companies, and businesses that people can “like,” and thus promote for free. It’s a site that captures the entire ethereal chain of viral marketing and solidifies it. Facebook has digitized desire. It’s channeled affections into categories. It has discovered how to formalize relationships by setting up a system for their public legitimation: one is “in a relationship” or “engaged to,” or “married to.”

In addition to providing a space for individuals to upload their lives—to digitize their values and desires and turn them into usable information and media for other companies—Facebook has allowed consumers disconnected from the production, promotion, and even consumption of products to push those products for free.

People push for what they “like” as naturally as they push to promote themselves and their friends. This is the privatization of advertising, propelled by human desire, and thus inaugurates the creation of a new kind of consumer-producer. One has become the ad for oneself. In one’s pictures one can create an ad campaign for his or her own lifestyle. One links this lifestyle to products. In some sense, Facebook has become the marketplace for selling our lives to each other. This is how we reproduce ourselves: we make ourselves desirable, and we link our affections to sites that ultimately make money.

Mark Zuckerburg turned his desire to be intimately close to desirable bodies into a technology that allowed everyone to do the same. He made billions turning friendship into a brand. Using that technology, we made profiles that essentially function like brands. Our profiles link to businesses and ads and companies. This is the synergy of US-style capitalist democracy. We are all Mark Zuckerburgs.

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Jean-Luc Godard’s 1980 film Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie), known in the United States as Everyman for Himself and in the United Kingdom  as Slow Motion (on account of its most conspicuous special effect), has just finished a welcome revival at Film Forum.  Often hailed as Godard’s “second first film,” a moniker that originated with Godard himself, on balance the film both fits and eludes this definition.  What is not in question is that the film marked Godard’s return to the European film industry, and it was his first film to have a theatrical run in the United States since Tout Va Bien in 1971.  He has been working steadily, if not as prolifically as in his unsurpassed first decade, ever since: promoting his work at the usual festivals, granting interviews, and doing his best to remain the enfant terrible of the cinema with his generally oracular persona.  While even by Hollywood’s low standards the last thirty years have marked a coarsening of movies (with the rise of the Steven Spielberg “Blockbuster” as an emblem for this trend in Godard’s own view), Godard’s work has become more difficult, relentlessly so in some cases (see King Lear), to the point where critical opinion, noblesse oblige aside, is thoroughly divided between enthusiasm and bewilderment, to say nothing of the experience of the casual viewer or even the fan of Godard’s earlier work.

But Godard would not have had it any other way.  As his most recent biographer, Richard Brody, has noted, Godard’s offhand comment to an interviewer at Cannes in 1960, two months after the premiere of Breathless, accurately predicted what would become a tumultuous relationship with critics, audiences, and the industry.  Godard observed, “I have the impression of loving the cinema less than I did a year ago – simply because I have made a film, and that film has been well received, and so forth.  So I hope that my second film will be received very badly and that this will make me want to make films again.”  Part of why Godard had this impression about his “first first film” is because of how well it was received, a fact that is difficult to overstate.  Because of Breathless, Godard was touted as the next Orson Welles or D.W. Griffith: a director whose first film both reached a popular audience and revolutionized the medium.  Positivists might speculate that Godard bristle at such praise on account of his privileged upbringing and background.  He didn’t need the money; unfortunately, his underwriters did. 

At the beginning of Everyman , twenty years of fighting and bitterly compromising with the cultural establishment is clearly wearing on Paul Godard (Jacques Dutrunc), Jean-Luc’s avatar and the protagonist of the film, as we find him making phone calls from his room at what could also have been Adorno’s residence, “The Grand Hotel Abyss.”  Despite the tenseness exuded by Paul, the scene has a comic charm.  His neighbor in the hotel is a soprano wailing the “Suicidio!” aria from La Gioconda.  Godard bangs on the wall when her singing interferes with his phone call.  Then in an inspired absurdity, they both leave their rooms and the hotel alone but together.  She continues singing as they navigate to the giant hotel’s exterior: as they wait for the elevator; while they descend the escalator in the lobby. 

If there is a meaning to this unreal coincidence it is perhaps that the properties of an out-of-place fragment of an opera are transferable to Paul and by extension Godard himself.  La Gioconda is making a heroic sacrifice in killing herself, after selflessly helping her lover escape, to avoid a life of servitude to the villainous Barnaba.  It is not simply that such a heroic sacrifice for love and freedom is no longer possible in the film’s modern context.  Rather, it is as if the possibility of heroism is a nagging question for Godard, one that will not go away.  He wants to be a ruthless businessman of a director, a TV producer who doesn’t look for inspiration or worry about political struggle anymore, and yet romanticism is following him into the elevator and fighting with him over a taxi.  But if it won’t go away, still it isn’t possible for it fully to return.

“If I had enough courage I’d do nothing. But since I don’t I go on making films,” remarks a embitter Paul later that day to a classroom of aspiring students.  The saddest thing about this line, as Paul himself doesn’t hide in the least, is that it isn’t even his.  It belongs to Marguerite Duras, who he was supposed to bring to the class but failed to deliver.  The quote from Duras, like the a cappella aria, is nothing new in Godard’s films.  He has always been fond of borrowing fragments from cultural and artistic traditions.  Far from signaling a lack of inspiration, the accumulation of such fragments signals Godard’s underlying aesthetic, that of the melancholy allegorist.  Godard is painfully aware that the tradition of art has been subsumed and corrupted by capitalism; but he refuses to give in, holding up fragments from that tradition as a badly damaged moral compass within an a-historical consumer society.

The twist that Every Man gives to this well-known pattern is that Godard, through his avatar, steps out from behind the camera and into the frame. (Finally two films later, in Prenom: Carmen, he dispensed with avatar and began to play himself.)  Thus one experiences the dying, noble tradition not as a multimedia collage interpolated into Hollywood pastiches and peppered with leftwing cant, but as the cross Godard feels he must bear.  And it makes a difference when he is pestered by the classical music instead of the audience, or has to say his deep thoughts to a half-bored classroom instead of whispering them in voiceover to shots of beautiful women.  In both cases the melancholic as tragic hero has become a clown.

Another result of implicating himself in such a wilted, self-loathing protagonist is that the roles assigned to women are freed of the victimhood and scapegoating of the “first” Godard.  Paul’s girlfriend Denise (Nathalie Baye, who won a Cesar for her performance) is leaving him, but not, as in earlier Godard, for another man or with no plan at all.  She wants to escape the city, the relationship, and her stressful job at the television studio.  The film is masterfully ambiguous on the meaning of her new dream.  Is it a regression to want to live on a farm in the country and write for the local newspaper?  Or is it an attempt to grow up and move on?  Perhaps it’s both.  In any case, Godard’s camera loves Baye in the film, particularly when she rides her bicycle on country roads in slow motion.  The same roads where cannibals and interminable traffic once resided in Weekend are now safe for a bit of carbon-neutral afternoon exercise.  If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.

Denise’s double, the film’s other woman and the only one not physically repulsed by Paul, is the most conspicuous remnant from earlier Godard: a prostitute named Isabelle, played with robotic precision by a young Isabelle Huppert.  The film is divided into a series of chapters with titles that recall Godard’s cinematic essays from the Sixties: “The Imaginary,” “Fear,” “Music,” etc.  Isabelle first appears in the film around the beginning of the chapter marked, unsurprisingly, “Commerce.”  She picks up Paul outside a movie theater; I guess he didn’t really want to see the film.  Though the Every Man marks her for its more desperate and humiliating acts, she’s not just a victim.  And even as victim she seems to have been instructed to play the part so as to inspire as little sympathy as possible.  In any case, in a scene that would have been impossible for the first Godard because of censors and a certain antiquated patriarchal version of authority he naïvely presumed, Isabelle’s sister comes to visit her.  In need of money to help friends make bail, she wants to join the oldest profession.  Isabelle doesn’t try to convince her not to; she just wants to make her aware of what it will mean.  When her sister remains intent, she asks to see her breasts; judging them acceptable, the conversation moves on as if nothing traumatic had occurred.  At the end of the film the car that runs over and kills Paul is driven by one of the sister’s clients.  What’s left of her humanity compels her to roll down the window to examine the body.  It’s the most sympathy Paul has inspired in the entire film.  Her john decides it will be a hit and run; Paul’s ex-wife and daughter similarly abscond.   

When the film was originally released in 1980, it was mostly at odds with the satisfaction of many on the French Left who had just swept the socialists and Mitterrand into power.  Thirty years later, with its vision of a society connected seemingly only by exploitation, Every Man’s time has come.  It’s an art film for after the neoliberal crisis from the moment when its seeds were just being planted.  But alas, the timeliness of the film for current political and economic realities is hardly worth dwelling on.  Most people go to the movies to forget such realities; and even the small fraction of those that do go to see Godard will be more interested to know the fortieth anniversary print of Breathless returns to Film Forum just after Every Man leaves.  After all, something has to wash away the bitter taste of the latter.

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10 More Academic Films

In a previous GC Advocate article I presented my list of Top 10 academic films.  I received some insightful feedback from various people who read the list.  (And I heard from a couple of friends who chastised me for including John Singleton’s Higher Learning.)

To recap:  I am interested in the academic film as an extension of the “academic novel.”  Several of the works listed below were adapted from such novels.  As the critic John Lyons simply put it in his 1962 critical study, The College Novel in America:  “I consider a novel of academic life one in which higher education is treated with seriousness and the main characters are students or professors.”  Extending this basic concept to film, my objective here is to find works that seriously examine the meaning of higher education in some way. (And I do believe that humor is certainly a valid way to examine higher education.)

Considering the literary form of the novel, it comes as no surprise that so many academic novels are set in English departments and deal with literature professors.  And considering that several films have been adapted from this pool of academic novels, that dominance extends into academic films.   I’ve tried to identify a few more films outside of literature, and I’m always on the lookout for more.   Apparently David Cronenberg is at work on an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table, a novel about an academic physicist, so there is some hope on the horizon.

Limiting my previous list to 10 films meant excluding a number of other worthy examples in this genre.  So here are some brief comments on 10 more academic films I considered for the previous article.  Just the for the fun of it I’m ranking these as well, from 20 to 11.   I am also including a short list of several other notable films that fit the criteria, though this is certainly not a comprehensive list.  If anyone has any more suggestions, we’d love to read your comments.

20. Possession (2002) –  This film is based on the novel by A.S. Byatt. The director Neil LaBute is known for some appallingly awful male characters, but the closest we get to that here is the faint whiff of crass Americanism in the character of Roland Mitchell (Aaron Eckhart), a literary scholar from the U.S. studying in England on a fellowship.  The film follows the story of Mitchell and British literary scholar Maud Bailey (Paltrow) as they research a romance between two fictional Victorian era poets.  Rarely has any film dealt with the intricacies of literary scholarship at this level of detail, (though, yes, all the sleuthing is a tad exaggerated). The period setting and costumes in the overlapping historical narrative were quite lovely.  That said, I imagine this film is precisely the kind of dry, pretentious exercise that most people have in mind when I tell them that I’m interested in films about higher education.  Still, this is just too much of an academic film to dismiss entirely.  Unfortunately the rich material in Byatt’s novel just did not seem to transfer well to the screen.

19. The Squid and the Whale (2005) – Directed  by Noah Baumbach (who has made a name for himself chronicling the lives of discontented yuppie intellectuals)  The Squid and the Whale is a family drama centered on a couple of PhDs raising a family in Brooklyn’s Park Slope in the 1980s.  Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) is a pompous literature professor and novelist who is oblivious to the fact that his literary star is rapidly fading.  His wife Joan (Laura Linney) is growing tired of his cantankerous attitude, and has literary aspirations of her own.  Their two young sons (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) get caught up in the mix of their divorce, start acting out in various ways, and are forced to accept that their father may be more of an intellectual bully and manipulator than they realized.  As for the academic content, there’s a storyline where Bernard takes up with a young female graduate student.  His literary opinions also make for some biting moments of dry humor (in one dinner table conversation he dismisses A Tale of Two Cities as “minor Dickens”).  However, much of the story centers on the emotional family drama which is why, as much as I like it, I rank this one lower than other films that deal directly with higher education.  Still I find it a wonderful film otherwise, especially if you happen to be familiar with this particular neighborhood and its literary denizens.

18. A Single Man (2009) – Based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood,  the film was directed by fashion designer Tom Ford and  it certainly has its share of pretty people, in pretty clothes, in pretty settings.  However the film also calls attention to the homophobic political climate of the 1950s and 60s.  Isherwood’s ironic title is mean to invoke the lack of social validity for homosexual relationships during that time.   The main character, George (Colin Firth), is a British professor of literature teaching in Los Angeles in 1962, but he is far from a single man.  He has in fact just lost his partner of 16 years in an automobile accident, but he is not even allowed to attend the funeral. (It’s for “family only” a sympathetic relative of his partner explains to him over the phone.)  Claude Summers at glbtq.com has written an extensive and insightful article comparing the Isherwood novel with the film adaptation. As Summers put it:  “If the film lacks the political edge and spiritual profundity of Isherwood’s novel, it compensates to some extent for these failings by its intense feeling, as well as its sensual and elegant style.”

17. Wonder Boys (2000) – Adapted from Michael Chabon’s novel of the same name, Wonder Boys features Michael Douglas as Grady Tripp, a pot-smoking creative writing professor and novelist at a university in Pittsburgh who has been working on an interminable novel for seven years and is dealing with a recent divorce.  Two of his students are James Leer (Tobey Maguire), a socially awkward young writer who is obsessed with the details of celebrity suicides, and Hannah Green (Katie Holmes) who is infatuated with Tripp. The main set piece for the film is the university’s annual WordFest, a literary event that brings publishers and literary agents, among others, to the campus.  The cinematography is striking, featuring lovely gothic campus scenes in the winter.   I have not yet read the novel version, but the film seems to work well on its own as an entertaining satire of the obnoxious eccentricity one sometimes finds among the students and professors in the nation’s MFA programs.

16. Tenure (2009) –  This film came out in 2009 but apparently didn’t get much of a theatrical release.  It features Luke Wilson in the role of Charlie Thurber, a young English professor up for tenure review at the fictional Gray College.  Unfortunately for him he has spent his time becoming an engaging and effective teacher rather than padding his resume with boring peer-reviewed journal articles. The film is far from an accurate representation of how the tenure process actually works, but its heart is in the right place. It humorously addresses a very real and serious issue in academia: that devoted teaching is often valued less than academic stardom.  Among the funniest bits in the film is the storyline with Thurber’s best friend (played by Jay Hadley), a wacky anthropology professor who spends his time combing the woods for evidence of the elusive Sasquatch.  The online reviews of the film are middling, which might scare people off. And yes the film indulges in romantic comedy clichés (Gretchen Mol plays the hot young professor from Yale who is hired to replace Thurber, and they fall in love.)  Still, I think the film has spirit and portrays the academic life with humor, thoughtfulness and a refreshing lack of pretention.

15. Disgrace (2008) – Here is another novel adaptation, this one based on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.  John Malkovich plays white South African literature professor David Lurie.  Lurie is a literary scholar in his soul, and a lover of Wordsworth and Byron, but in a corporatized higher education system that has become dismissive of anything but the most immediately marketable subjects he is relegated to teaching dull “communications” classes to disinterested students.  (Honestly, I cannot recall how well that distinction is driven home in the film, but it certainly resonated in the novel.)  The story begins with an ill-advised relationship between Lurie and a “coloured” female student, a scandal which forces Lurie out of his teaching post.  He leaves Johannesburg to visit his daughter Lucy in the countryside where they end up being the victims of an unrelated brutal attack by three young black men.  The attack and Lucy’s complicated response to it, which is contextualized in the novel, really needed more historical-political background than the medium of film could allow. But otherwise it is a competent, well-paced adaptation of the novel, and a haunting and resonant piece of work on its own.

14. Educating Rita (1983) – In this film Michael Caine plays Frank Bryant, an apathetic and alcoholic literature professor who tutors Rita (Julie Walters) a spunky 26 year old working class student taking Open University courses. (The British equivalent of our adult education programs here).  In this Pygmalion inspired screenplay Bryant takes a particular interest in Rita and introduces her to the world of literature and ideas.  As Rita takes to her literary interests she finds that her newly discovered intellectual curiosity unexpectedly drives a wedge between herself and the working class community she came from.  At the same time she does not feel at home in the privileged world of the academy either.   The film is a wonderful representation of a student’s evolving consciousness and self-confidence, and is ultimately a compelling story about the kind of liberating self discovery that can come through an education in the humanities, particularly among students for whom such high-minded pursuits are considered materially “impractical.”

13. Something the Lord Made (2004) –  As you may have noticed, most of these films are about the humanities (particularly English professors) but here is a great academic film that deals with the sciences. This HBO film tells the story of Viven Thomas (wonderfully portrayed by Mos Def), a black surgical assistant who assisted Dr. Alfred Blalock (Alan Rickman) in developing an open heart procedure to cure “Blue Baby Syndrome.”  Much of the film takes place in university research hospitals, at Vanderbilt University where Blalock first hired Thomas, and then later at Johns Hopkins University. Though he possessed a rare gift as a surgeon and was a self-taught  medical researcher, Viven Thomas was never able to afford to pursue his own medical degree. (The Depression of the 1930s exacerbated his financial troubles.)  Thomas was hired and paid under the title of a janitor even though the work that he did for Blalock was that of a research assistant. The film subtly portrays the institutional and cultural racism of its time, such as one scene in the film when Thomas and a black friend are walking down a sidewalk chatting, casually stop their conversation to step aside and let white couples pass, then pick the conversation back up again without missing a beat.  That Thomas did all this groundbreaking research while working in university hospitals where he was not even allowed to walk through the front door is just one of the many stories of injustice and institutional discrimination faced by African-Americans in the Jim Crow era.

12. Back to School (1986) – Rodney Dangerfield stars in this film as the buffoonish street-wise millionaire Thornton Melon, proprietor of a successful chain of “Tall and Fat” stores. To encourage his son Jason (Keith Gordon) to go to college and acquire the formal education he never had, Melon decides to enroll in school with him.  This film is certainly a silly comedy chock full of Dangerfield’s signature one-liners, but it also captures something essential about the American attitude towards higher education.  On the one hand we see college as a democratic means of upward mobility, but we also scoff at the college as a bastion of elitism and unearned privilege. Particularly interesting in Back to School is the conflict between Thorton Melon and Dr. Barbay, a pompous economics professor with whom Thorton is competing for the affections of English professor Diane Turner (Sally Kellerman).   From Bill Gates to Kanye West we revel in our stories of rich and famous college dropouts.  Dangerfield plays this quintessential archetype, a businessman without a college degree who made truckloads of money and gleefully gives the finger to all those smug college dons who insist that education is the only way to success, happiness or fulfillment.  As much as I support higher education I think it’s also important to honor and cultivate that autodidactic, do-it-yourself spirit.  The film splits the difference by showing Melon encouraging his son to pursue an educational opportunity even though he took a different route in his own life.

11. Kinsey (2004) –  I have to confess that I really dropped the ball on this one.  I saw this film in theaters when it came out in 2004, but it took another recent viewing for me to appreciate what an accomplishment it really is.  This definitely should have been near the top of my previous list.  Perhaps more than any other film I’ve listed so far Kinsey drives home the importance of academic freedom, and demonstrates how rational academic inquiry can have a huge impact on the larger society.   The film is a skillfully constructed biopic based on the life of biologist and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (played by Liam Neeson) and the groundbreaking research on human sexuality he spearheaded at Indiana University.  The film shows how Kinsey’s interest in zoology and the mating habits of insects and animals led him to question why similar scientific study had not been applied to human sexuality.  The film dramatizes how important it is for public health, and for the health of democracy, to have accurate scientific knowledge about sexual practices available in the public sphere.  It effectively portrays the dark ages of hypocrisy and misinformation out of which the feminist and gay rights movements emerged, and manages to do so without compromising on all the emotional and political complexity involved.

A few more films:

(Here are just a few more academic films that I identified but did not include in the Top 20)

Another Woman and Husbands and Wives. Both directed by Woody Allen.  Another Woman is based on Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and featured Gena Rowlands as a philosophy professor on sabbatical in New York writing a book.  Husbands and Wives includes a storyline with Allen as a novelist and creative writing professor at Columbia University.

A Beautiful Mind –  Directed by Ron Howard the film stars Russell Crowe as Princeton University mathematics professor John Nash.

Elegy – Based on Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal featuring David Kapesh (Ben Kinglsey) a professor of literature and “public intellectual.” Much of the academic content of the novel is absent in the film, but there’s plenty of naked Penelope Cruz, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Gaudy Night – Technically not a “film” but a 1987 three part BBC mini-series based on Dorothy Sayers’s 1936 mystery novel, set in an Oxford women’s college.  Beyond the mystery plot, the story also deals with the politics of women’s education.

The Great Debaters – Produced by Oprah, directed by Dentzel Washington who plays Melvin Tolson, a poet and professor who directed the debate team at historically black Wiley College in Texas and led them to a pioneering debate against Harvard University. (It was actually against the University of Southern California).

Iris –  Based on John Bayley’s memoir about his life with the novelist and professor Iris Murdoch.  Murdoch and Bayley met, and both taught, at Oxford.  Judi Dench gives a heartrending performance of Murdoch as she struggled with Alzheimer’s in her later years.

A Serious Man – The most autobiographical film from the Coen Brothers so far.  The story centers on Larry Gopnick, a Jewish physics professor in 1967 suburban Minnesota who is best by a series of Job-like calamities.  Joel and Ethan Coen were raised in Minnesota by two academic parents. (Their father was an economist and their mother an art historian).

Stomp the Yard – Like Spike Lee’s School Daze, this was also filmed on my alma mater’s campus.  But unlike Spike Lee this filmmaker seemed to think that black college students are incapable of any intelligent communication beyond snarling, scowling, fighting and dancing. Disappointing.   

The Savages – Indie film stalwarts Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney play siblings who reluctantly have to care for their estranged father.  Hoffman’s character is a theater professor in Buffalo, NY struggling to write a book on Bertolt Brecht.   

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf –  A classic film (based on Edward Albee’s play) starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.  The film is more about an academic couple’s marital drama than about academia itself, but at least one other critic found it an iconic work of academic fiction. (“Who’s Afraid of the Campus Novel.”)

Even more films

(I haven’t seen these yet, but GC Advocate editor James Hoff has already been on my tail to hurry up and get something posted to this blog, so perhaps I’ll write about some of these in future posts.)

The Absent-Minded Professor

College

Dark Matter

Love Story

Mona Lisa Smile

Proof

P.S.

Revenge of the Nerds

Spinning Into Butter

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The president and his national security team might want to know a bit more about what you are doing on the internet, just to be safe! As a recent Washington Post story notes:

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.

While portrayed as a “technical clarification,” the request has touched off a firestorm among civil liberties and privacy advocates. A former Justice Deparment lawyer under Bill Clinton exlained that the change would be “bringing a big category of data — records reflecting who someone is communicating with in the digital world, Web browsing history and potentially location information — outside of judicial review.” A lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that their “biggest concern is that an expanded NSL [national security letter] power might be used to obtain Internet search queries and Web histories detailing every Web site visited and every file downloaded.” According to Raw Story, “Internet attorney Marc Zwillinger even speculated that it might give the government access to social networking activity. ‘A Facebook friend request — is that like a phone call or an e-mail?’ he asked. ‘Is that something they would sweep in under an NSL? They certainly aren’t getting that now.’”

This most recent controversy is part of a much larger pattern. An important new report by the American Civil Liberties Union (described in a press release here) provides us with a full briefing on “National Security, Civil Liberties, and Human Rights Under the Obama Administration.” It worries about a “New Normal” where policies begun under Bush and continued (or even expanded) under Obama become standard operating procedure for the executive branch. The ACLU report (PDF) is about 20 pages and is worth reading in full but I’ve summarized it below, breaking it down into the key “positive” and “negative” elements.

Positives

• Some improvements in transparency, for example better rules governing classification, appointing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ombudsman, and releasing the Department of Justice memos that formed the basis for Bush’s policy on torture.
• Disavowal of torture, Geneva Conventions protection to be granted prisoners held by the U.S.
• Have not denied visas to foreign scholars and writers the U.S. government might not care for, as Bush did.

Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, a second Guantánamo.

Negatives

• Transparency: refusal to release photos of detainee abuse as ordered by an appellate court and support for an amendment to FOIA to bolster that refusal; refusal to release numerous documents that would cast further light on the Bush torture regime; releasing fewer documents relating to prisoners held in Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan than the Bush administration did for prisoners in Guantánamo; aggressive pursuit of government whistleblowers.
• Accountability: no push for accountability for Bush administration officials who created the torture policy and indeed invocation of the state secrets doctrine to avoid releasing documents (Obama does not want to “look back”), no sympathy (much less support) for those who were tortured and are now seeking justice, most notoriously in the case of Maher Arar.
• Failure to close Guantánamo, but more importantly embrace of “the theory underlying the Guantánamo detention regime: that the Executive Branch can detain militarily—without charge or trial—terrorism suspects captured far from a conventional battlefield.” Bagram in Afghanistan and/or a prison in Illinois might well become (or actually already be, in the case of the former) the new Guantánamo.
• Authorization of targeted killing of suspected terrorists (including American citizens) outside of war zones.
• Embrace of military commission trials (with some modifications) that Obama had previously decried.
• “With limited exceptions, the Obama administration’s positions on national security issues relating to speech and surveillance have mirrored those taken by the Bush administration in its second term.”  Basically Obama has fully supported the assertion of the Bush administration that it’s fine to spy on Americans when the government deems it necessary for national security, and there’s nothing American citizens who are spied on can do about it.
• Expanded use of terrorist “watch lists,” including the addition of thousands of names to the notorious (and highly inaccurate) “No Fly List.” As the ACLU notes, in a passage that reminds one of Kafka’s The Trial, “Individuals on the [No Fly] list are not told why they are on the list and thus have no meaningful opportunity to object or to rebut the government’s allegations.”

The ACLU is at pains to emphasize that the Obama administration made some genuinely positive steps soon after taking office, though they are clearly outnumbered by the negatives. Overall they cast their report as an effort to persuade the administration to right its course and turn away from what Dick Cheney literally called the “dark side.” There are few encouraging signs though in terms of a change of direction, and assuming that continues to be the case the ACLU’s conclusion about the future is bracing:

if the Obama administration does not effect a fundamental break with the Bush administration’s policies on detention, accountability, and other issues, but instead creates a lasting legal architecture in support of those policies, then it will have ratified, rather than rejected, the dangerous notion that America is in a permanent state of emergency and that core liberties must be surrendered forever.

And there’s the rub. It was bad enough when the Bush administration was raging open warfare on the constitution, our international treaty obligations, and the basic rights of Americans, but what does it mean when an ostensibly “liberal” president puts his stamp of approval on that same approach? What future president, of either party, would ever attempt to rein in policies that aggrandize the power of the executive and which were okayed by two presidents who supposedly could not be more different?

Unlike health care, financial reform, or any other aspect of policy that requires a difficult legislative path, Obama had a fair amount of authority to chart his own course when it came to issues of executive authority. He largely has not done so, instead choosing to hew fairly close to the path of his predecessor, albeit with some notable and important exceptions. Back in late 2007 candidate Obama articulated quite different views on many of these questions during a Q & A, and I find myself wishing that fellow was sitting in the Oval Office right now. As Kevin Drum remarked in reference to the request for more info on our internet activity, “You know, if I’d wanted Dick Cheney as president I would have just voted for him.”

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eighth blackbird just performed an incredible concert here at Music10. This concert was devoted to works by the three principal composers that I mentioned in my last post: Joel Hoffman, Stephen Hartke, and Martin Bresnick. The whole concert was good, congratulations to all involved, etc., etc., but the standout works of the night were, undoubtedly, Hartke’s Meanwhile: Incidental Music to an Imaginary Puppet Play and Bresnick’s My 20th Century. The two works, as staged by eighth blackbird,  would seem to warrant the term “music drama” more than anything Wagner ever wrote, if only that term weren’t so fraught.

Every season, eighth blackbird completely memorises a work and choreographs it; Meanwhile is one of these works. Before composing the work, Stephen Hartke looked up clips of different types of Asian puppet theatre on the internet. He said to me after the concert that he basically took on the role of “fake ethnomusicologist” in this piece, and created new instruments that he thought would be appropriate for some kind of puppet theatre. I think Hartke summed up the piece best when he told the audience before the performance that the instrumentalists in this piece narrate some kind of story, but he’s not sure what that story may be. Throughout the performance, the members of eighth blackbird moved around the stage, acting with their instruments and with each other as much as playing. Here are some photos:

Look ma, no music! Lisa played one of Hartke's "fake ethnomusicologist" instruments for a large part of the piece, in addition to her usual instrument, the piano.

Nick rocking out on the cello (apologies for the blurriness)

This was a really intense moment

So was this

Martin Bresnick’s My 20th Century was my favourite work of the night. It sets a poem by a close friend of his, Tom Anderson; you can read the whole poem on Bresnick’s website: http://www.martinbresnick.com/programnotes/mytwentieth.htm . Bresnick doesn’t set the poem to music in the sense that someone sings the text; rather, the music that he composed surrounds the poem, which is recited by the members of eighth blackbird, stanza by stanza, at significant moments throughout the piece.

Before the performance, Bresnick told the audience that the poem was at times funny and at times deeply meaningful. This is how I feel about Bresnick’s piece, as well. The work starts with an energetic, driving ostinato that is catchy enough in its own right, but accrues layers of meaning and beauty as Bresnick transforms it throughout the piece. Also  breathtaking are the moments when the ostinato drops out altogether.

Here is a shot from My 20th Century. Michael and Matthew are reciting lines of the poem to each other while the others play.

It was so inspiring to get to see eighth blackbird play together in the midst of these crazy two weeks of rehearsing with them, eating with them, hanging out with them. They are an incredible group of performers, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to learn with them and to get to know them in such a unique setting.

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Klaus Lowitsch in Fassbinder's Welt am Draht

Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder 

Few, if any, film careers come close to the star-crossed wonder and terror that was the life and work of German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who burst onto the scene in the late 1960s and who blazed, a baleful, maleficent, darkly beautiful comet across the nighttime sky of ’70s cinema, making a little over forty films in some thirteen years. These numbers alone are extraordinary, all the more so when looked at against the energy and turbulent life of the work, the high quality of so many of the films, and their daunting formal and generic diversity, ranging from the dramatic character studies of Fassbinder’s early and middle periods—Katzelmacher (1969, literally, Cat-Fucker) and Angst Essen Seele Auf (1974, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul)—to Fassbinder’s reinvention-by-destruction of the gangster film (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod: 1969, Love is Colder than Death), the Western (1971’s Whity, a Gothic-Western-family-incest-with-torture drama), and the historical-pastiche classic-novel-adaptation film (Effi Briest, 1974, from Theodor Fontane’s novel of the same title), to the great, definitive Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or BDR, trilogy, the crowning work of Fassbinder’s late period and career: Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979, The Marriage of Maria Braun), Lola (1981, a retelling of Josef von Sternberg’s 1931 Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel]), and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1982, Veronika Voss). 

Along the way Fassbinder created a genre of film reminiscent of Douglas Sirk’s but uniquely his own, the camp psychosexual melodrama, aided by a rotating cast drawn from a commune of actors, friends, and lovers. These films are devoted, unsurprisingly, to the troubled lives of flawed, conflicted people, many marginalized by outlook, habits, and desires (Fassbinder’s favorites, in art and in life, rampant drug use and all kinds of paraphilia and fetishism), all of them touching (and touched) in the manner of Warhol’s Superstars and People You Know: the film-scene trash of Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (1971, Beware of a Holy Whore), the fashion divas in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), and the gullible, innocent Fox in Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975, Fox and His Friends). Fassbinder wrote all of these films, as well as the others, and acted in many of them, even starring in some, further adding to his legend. Along the way he managed to turn out the fourteen television episodes of his adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s Berliner Alexanderplatz (1980, at 894 minutes, some fourteen-and-a-half hours long, one of the longest narrative films ever made), plus a number of plays and short films,—a demonic, almost satanic, output, redolent of folklore and myth, like the damnation of Faust, who traded his soul for unlimited knowledge, or Paganini’s rumored-at trading of his soul for a fiendish virtuosity with the violin. Unlike the breakout careers of many auteurs—Jean-Luc Godard’s unprecedented ’60s films, which yielded to his less-celebrated work in the ’70s and ’80s, come to mind, as does Robert Altman’s defining ’70s work, which ended with Popeye in 1980—Fassbinder’s meteoric successes kept on coming until he died, from an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills, at the age of thirty-seven. 

One of Fassbinder’s works for television is the three-and-a-half-hour 1973 science-fiction Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), recently restored and on view at the Museum of Modern Art. While certainly not Fassbinder’s best work, World on a Wire has enough interesting and diverting moments that make it worth viewing; its style (if not its subject matter) and technique, in addition to its obscurity (it wasn’t screened in the United States until the MOMA run), make it a fascinating, if flawed, addition to his canon, a radiant cinematic gem, multifaceted and shimmering. A lot of this glitter is quite literal, a product of the film’s meticulous, on-a-television-budget set design: as with so many of his films, Fassbinder fills his interior spaces—here, largely a suite of offices and the private homes and playgrounds of the technocrats who staff the IKZ Cybernetics Institute—with all manner of mirrors, windows, screens, glassware, and other reflective and refractive surfaces. Often we see the actors’ faces and bodies broken into many shards by these image-making props, a formal quality that mirrors one of the film’s dominant themes, the fracturing and shattering of the human psyche and humanist philosophies of the self, language, and knowledge, by the assault of mass media and modern technology and by the challenges posed by twentieth-century philosophies and movements usefully labeled postmodernism. This theme, which displays several key postmodern concepts—the self as a performance, the contingency of identity, the instability of memory and perception; the constant presence of technology as a mediating agent between humans and the world; the challenging or discarding of enlightenment, humanist, and democratic values—is also reflected in the film’s plot, which centers on the scientist Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), who becomes increasingly paranoid after the mysterious death of his former superior at IKZ, Dr. Henri Vollmer (Adrian Hoven). Vollmer’s death is somehow connected to IKZ’s current project, the construction of Simulacron 1, a virtual-reality world that houses nearly a thousand electronic lives, all programmed by the doctors and scientists at IKZ to provide a dynamic model by which to predict future political, social, and economic events and long-term trends. As Stiller desultorily investigates Vollmer’s death—World on a Wire is part picaresque police procedural, a genre dear to many postmodern narratives—he begins to suffer an increasingly disturbing sequence of events: he first imagines the disappearance of IKZ’s security chief Günther Lause (Ivan Desny), only to learn that no-one, not even the firm’s computer, has ever heard of Lause; he cannot recognize, and cannot trust, the “real” security chief, Hans Edelkern (played with silky menace by Joachim Hansen); he suffers hallucinations, acts erratically at work and at home, and is almost killed in a bizarre construction accident. Worst is Stiller’s growing dissatisfaction with IKZ and its head, Herbert Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgerau), who has been promising private test-runs of Simulacron 1 for private corporations looking to make a killing in the brave new market of the cybernetic forecasting of the future: Stiller sees Simulacron 1 as having untapped social benefits that would be traduced by commercial co-optation and the dominance of his research by profit imperatives. 

Fassbinder (second and third from left)

Stiller, like so many postmodern antiheroes trapped in worlds and narratives not of their own making—one thinks of Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, also from 1973, or any number of Philip K. Dick’s slouching, addled, incompetent protagonists (of which Jason Taverner, whose official identity disappears, all records of his life gone, in 1974’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, is not a bad example)—is quite clearly losing it, but the film is clear from the start that “it” wasn’t much to begin with, a bit of neural smoke and mirrors, linguistic computations, false memories stored and looped again and again, but nothing approaching a stable, whole, grounded human psyche or soul, as earlier generations had maintained. Many of the scientists are aware of this, and discuss epistemological issues while tinkering on Simulacron 1 or sitting in meetings—“You are nothing more than the image others have made of you,” is one such chestnut, a line both dorkier and more portentous than most water-cooler chatter, but one that nevertheless serves to reiterate the film’s themes. If all of this “Do-We-Have-Souls” chatter begins to sag a bit during Stiller’s quest—along the way he learns that his reality is itself a computer simulation inside the “actual” Simulacron 1, a fun idea but one that’s been drained of its shock by later films like The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor (both 1999, the latter based, like World on a Wire, on Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 novel Simulacron 3)—one has to give Fassbinder credit for trying, and on television, no less: the film is a bit dutiful in its exposition of the ills of postmodern, corporatized, mediated life, but it’s a beautiful dutifulness, all chrome and fluorescent lights and long echoing corridors (themselves an echo of the long echoing corridors of Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville, an important predecessor for World on a Wire and whose star, Eddie Constantine, makes a brief cameo here, a nice film-geek mise-en-abyme), with chunky, bright-colored plastic telephones and thick glass ashtrays, each meticulously arranged object seeming somehow weightier, more solid and real, than the humans moving and speaking among them. Seen in its cultural contexts, among novelists like Pynchon and Dick, or critical and cultural theorists like Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard—whose The Society of the Spectacle and Simulacra and Simulation, published respectively in 1967 and 1985, thematically and temporally bookend World on a Wire—the film is both of its time and uncannily prescient, an anticipation and dress-rehearsal, if not for the total affective heat-death of the modern world, then for the various challenges to (and opportunities for) life and survival that are posed by our own post-postmodern, post-human, post-everything present. 

If anything, World on a Wire is a sunnier, more naïve version of post-humanism than the ones we’re steadily being acclimated to, with our apocalyptic visions of anthropogenic climate change, the Pacific and Atlantic Garbage Gyres, resource wars, economic crises and looming energy crunches: if the world of the film is only a simulation, at least it’s one in which the omnipresent, sinister security staff (one of whom is played by Fassbinder regular El Hedi ben Salem, who is unforgettable as Ali in Angst Essen Seele Auf) wear immaculately-tailored pinstriped suits and echt-’30s-gangster fedoras. Fassbinder’s vision of an icy, mortified, denatured future is infinitely preferable to our own present’s rape camps and forced migrations, paramilitary assassination squads, and illiterate child soldiers. This is a vision of a weightless, gleaming postindustrial information age before cyberpunk—in the form of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)—came along and finished it off with its edgy haircuts, body mods, leather jackets, and mirrorshades. World on a Wire presents postmodernity without the crumbling cities and the ubiquitous grime and drip of these later works: a kinder, gentler dystopianism, a vision of the world as an endlessly gleaming shopping mall-cum-office park, as if the city-in-a-dome of Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run (1976) had been populated with the dissolute elites and murderous professionals of J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975) and Super-Cannes (2000). Fassbinder’s ruling passions—gay sex, cruelty, drugs, transgression—may be largely absent from World on a Wire, but his directing, all sinuous glides and quick close-ups, and the overall look of the film make it compulsively watchable; while not his best work (a fraught notion with a director as prolific as Fassbinder) there are nevertheless brilliant glints of fire and light at the heart of this icy diamond.

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