psychopolitics: neoliberalism and new technologies of power [byung chul han]

Once upon a time, the theory goes, there was an Orwellian big brother who sought to scare his subjects into submission. He was a twentieth century phenomenon. He ruled with gulags and execution squads and ford falcons and martial law. He strode around the world shaking his fist and some called him fascist and others communist and an old Etonian wrote a book about him, a book that defined him as a bogeyman who would haunt the dreams of little children and old age pensioners alike. There was only one problem: big brother’s tactics were scary but in the end they weren’t that effective. People resisted. Dictatorships were overthrown. People don’t enjoy living in fear and they got so sick of it that they tore down the walls and the statues and installed something known as democracy. Which meant big brother needed to find another way to get people to do what he wanted. He had to do it under the rubric of choice. And also around this time, the start of the 21st century, a phenomenon known as the internet began to invade people’s lives. In a much more effective way than anything big brother had dreamed of. And the interaction of the internet and the people created data. Which could be processed, manipulated, used to understand and control the subjects. It was done not by threatening them, but by asking them what they liked. And what they didn’t like. And promising to deliver these wishes. It created, in the words of Han, “a dictatorship of emotion”. Which also served the purpose of making people more stupid. Because stupid people are docile. They don’t think, they feel. Feelings can be manipulated and satiated. Thoughts are harder. People weren’t really worried about whether or not the information big brother was feeding them was true or false: the point was that it felt good to receive it. Like children being given sweets. And because the data had been studied, big bother always knew which people liked which sweets, and it was no skin off big brother’s nose to give them those sweets. And make them pliant and happy at the same time. 

Byung Chul Han’s text is indeed a text for the age of Cummings, the age of digital data manipulation, the age that we live in. It’s not always an easy read, but it ought to be a compulsory one.  Should you have any interest in understanding why you are thinking what you are currently thinking….

fraylandia (d sebastián mayayo, ramiro ozer ami)

Fraylandia is a classic documentary which adheres to a well-worn formula of following various characters in order to tell a complex story. The story is that of the Botnia plant built at Fray Bentos on the Uruguayan side of the River Uruguay, a plant which was claimed, on the Argentine side, to be contaminating the river. The dispute lead to the bridge spanning the two countries being shut for nearly five years. It was a low-key dispute in a low-key part of the world. The film follows life on both sides, focusing on various characters: a Uruguayan living on the Argentine side of the border, one of the protestors; another Uruguayan who’s a vigorous defender of the plant, a Finn who works there, and loves the life in South America, and finally a woman who had a relationship with a Czech worker who returned home but sends her baleful love letters, regardless of the fact she’s now seeing someone else. The pace and tone of the film are gentle as it seeks to maintain an even-handed, affectionate appraisal, which rather skirts the issue of any possible contamination and the potential effects on the environment. 

the german room [carla maliandi, tr. frances riddle]

The German Room is one of those diaphanous Argentine novels which is so slight it feels almost, but not quite, transparent.  The narrator is a pregnant Argentine who is returning to Heidelberg, the city she and her parents fled to in exile during the Argentine dictatorship, fleeing a failed marriage. She has no active connection with the city, until she runs into Mario, a friend and fellow exile of her parents. However, this is in no way a turning point in the novel. Neither is her discovery of her pregnancy. Neither is the suicide of the Japanese girl who befriends her.  This is a novel that seems to relish its lack of direction, as embodied by the protagonist. Life, the author seems to suggest is banal. We seek mystery to lend meaning to it, but this is just window dressing. Or at least the author appears to be saying so, until the mystical tinge of the final pages. There is a playfulness to Maliandi’s text, which has something in common with the writing of Schweblin and Chefjec, but all the same The German Room ends up feeling something like a milenesa en dos panes without the milanesa.  

once upon a time in hollywood (w&d tarantino)

For a while it feels as though Tarantino is back where he belongs. In Hollywood, poking fun at the bear, as only he’s allowed to. The film feels less ‘talky’ than some of his more recent endeavours. There’s a flow to the edit. The design, as ever, is impeccable. You know you’re in for a long ride but it’s going to be a good one. Then, gradually, the ride starts to fizzle out. Perhaps it’s when Pitt’s lop-sided grinning stuntman visits the Manson ranch and nothing happens. Perhaps it’s when the director decides to interrupt the action approximately two thirds of the way through and skip six months. Whenever it is, there’s a gradual realisation that this film isn’t really going anywhere. It’s just driving around the Hollywood hills, looking at itself in the mirror, saying “you’re looking mighty fine”. A friend of mine said it was a bit like a slacker movie, which it is. A low-key buddy movie, where Brad and Leo hang out and chill. Nowhere does the film feel more like itself than the scene where the two of them watch an old ep of DiCaprio as a villain in the series “FBI’. Right there you feel you could almost be hanging with Quentin, chuckling at the hammy acting and the melodrama and plotting how you’re going to find a way to fit this into a movie some day. 

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with any of this, but nevertheless it all feels mighty smug. Perhaps Tarantino has always been smug but when he kicked off he succeeded in recalibrating the use of dialogue in US movies, employing a Mametian use of subtext. His early movies (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown) also seemed as though they were saying something about race, even if that something was nebulous. Always a stylist, the style started to completely overwhelm any real attempt at content. Extreme semiotic gestures replaced any need for plot. A candy-coated wish-fulfilment ethos began to dominate. Tarantino discovered he, like Shakespeare, could rewrite history. Once Upon a Time is the culmination of this. A real-life tragedy becomes a grotesque comedy. Flame-throwers are cool. Sharon lives. Polanski’s a harmless sixties pixie. The question is whether this means anything, apart from the fact that Quentin gets to do whatever he wants with his mates? In a Trumpian dystopia, the notion that Hollywood can make everything doozy feels even more of a cop-out than ever. Politics is irrelevant because it will all work out well in the end. Some might say there’s some high-end Zizek intellectual irony at play, but I don’t really buy it. A generation of US moviegoers get to see their favourite stars larking around and come away with the adrenaline high of justified violence. At the end of the day, one suspects people will look back on Tarantino as the high priest of American imperialism, the greatest spinner of fake news in the greatest fake news factory on earth. 

robinson crusoe [daniel defoe]

How to place a novel whose impact on the Western psyche has been so immense? There can be few novels more famous than Crusoe, and the image of a man alone on his island has invaded the consciousness of every British child growing up, perhaps, since it was written.

Atomisation - Crusoe is the Garbo of imperialism. He wants his own island, but he wants to be left alone on his island. Long before he reaches the island, Crusoe is a loner. He quits his family, takes to the sea, is captured by Moors, escapes, returns to the sea, goes to Brazil, lives a solitary life on his own plantation there. He simultaneously laments his solitude but also relishes it. Even in the final chapter, when he supposedly finally acquires a family on his return to England after over thirty years, he soon ups and leaves again. He’s a restless soul who is also a progenitor of Mersault, the original anti-social man. In spite of the famous idea of Crusoe and Friday, Friday only actually appears as a fleeting figure in the book, alone with Crusoe for little more than a chapter. Above all, what emerges is the vision of a man who it comes to feel hasn’t ended up in isolation by accident. There’s a dangerously strong urge in the modern psyche, an urge assisted by technology, to break away from society and construct a world where the individual is lord and master, freed from the chains of social relationships. Crusoe isn’t actually all that far from the mainland (he can see it from his island), and it isn’t until the island begins to become overrun by visitors (cannibals, mutineers, Spaniards etc) that he finally commits to leaving. 

Globalisation - Crusoe is the son of immigrants who settled in Hull. He inhabits an expanding world. South America, Africa and Europe are all inter-connected, with the slave trade one aspect of this. Trade is booming and Crusoe ends up rich, not as a result of the treasure he finds on board the Spanish galleon that founders off his island’s coast, but the investment in his sugar plantation in Brazil. This is not a closed, inwards looking society. Even on his island, he finds himself visited by people of various races and cultures. 

Slavery - The great underpinning motor of the story is the slave trade. Crusoe himself is a slave at one point, in West Africa, before he escapes. He ends up on his island because he agrees to go on a slaving expedition to get labour to work the sugar fields of Brazil. When he comes across Friday, he instantly assumes that Friday will become his servant, as he does. Said’s Orientalisim detailed the significance of the Orient as underpinning British literature, but in Crusoe, it’s the driving winds of trade, and specifically the slave trade, which lure the protagonist to his shipwrecked destiny.

Shipwrecks - Shipwrecks were the sliding door of the day. As in Shakespeare, with the Tempest, Pericles and Winter’s Tale, the shipwreck is the deus ex machina, the hidden hand of fate, which permits a character to undergo transformation. In this sense, for much of the world, little has changed. People are still risking their lives on the seas in search of another life, which is at the mercy of the lottery of the tides. There are so many shipwrecks in Crusoe it’s hard to keep up. They provide a religious dimension to the narrative, the hand of god. 

la fundición del tiempo (d juan alvarez)

Alvarez’s film is one of those which you begin to enjoy far more the moment you step out of the cinema. This is not a back-handed compliment. There is a code (codigo) to watching cinema, and when a film wilfully disrespects that code, as a viewer we feel disorientated, unsure of ourselves. However, the act of breaking the code, of fucking with time, is something that a bold filmmaker is prepared to do in order to assault and reform perception. There were times, watching La Fundición del Tiempo, when I struggled with the lassitude, but within seconds of leaving the cinema, stepping out into the actuality of Bartolome Mitre, I was basking in it. A curious paradox, but an admirable one.

The film is split into two halves. One is set in Japan. It studies a tree doctor who saved some trees which had been half-carbonised by the nuclear bomb at Nagasaki. The doctor continues to grow trees from the fruit of those atomic trees. The second half occurs in Uruguay. It focuses on a man who tames wild horses. The process is documented in painstaking detail. We learn little about the man, but everything about the process, the way in which man brings nature to heel, with a mixture of cruelty and kindness. Alvarez’ camera lingers, frets, rides with the tamed horse, as it buckles and resists before it ultimately capitulates to man’s will. 

The two halves are married by an extended, Reygadas-esque sequence of mist and white light. Images appear and fade away; a metaphor for the process of watching a film where the viewer’s engagement seems to drift in and out of focus. In that sense this is a profoundly meditational experience. Rather than seduce us with narrative and flow, the film challenges the viewer to reflect. The translated title of the film might be: The Casting of Time. Alvarez compels the viewer to question their relationship to time, as a viewer and as a human being. 

the lives of michel foucault [david lacey]

part 1

Last year, an Argentine play, helmed by a distinguished director, called something like “Searching for Foucault”, arrived on tour in Montevideo. It was about a teacher having a nervous breakdown. There was disappointingly little about Foucault himself. It was clear that the play was using his name to give itself a certain caché. Apart from the fact I had wanted to see more of this director’s work, it felt as though I had gone to see it under false pretences. Still, the title demonstrates the curious allure of the philosopher’s name. More than any other late twentieth century intellect, the myth of Foucault has grown from the days when I first studied him, a year after his death, at York university. If the last thirty years have been the age of any given figure, we might well look on back on them as the Foucault years. 

Macey’s book traces Foucault’s life from birth to untimely death. As well as detailing the story of his life, it also tackles the story of his intellectual development, not an easy task for such an intellectual magpie. Suffice to say that Macey is rigorous and comprehensive in his detailing of Foucault’s work, which is the most important element of his life. However, as regards the secondary issue of describing the person, Foucault remains as enigmatic a figure upon the conclusion of the book as he was at the start. He’s a bundle of contradictions. Sage-like but quick-tempered. An espouser of political causes of all kinds who was criticised for not being political enough. An ascetic soul who was also a hedonist who frequented the bathhouses of San Francisco. A would-be outsider who was very much an insider in the highfalutin circles of French academia. Perhaps these contradictions are fundamental to the construction of a mind that taught the world to think in terms of matrices rather than absolutes. 

Nevertheless, even Macey’s book seems to cling to the notion of an absolute truth that underpins thought. The final pages relate a coded secret account of Foucault’s past (written by a possible ex-lover) as though this might indeed be the key to understanding him. (One that made me think of Hanecke’s Caché.) One imagines Foucault himself would not have warmed to this theory/ conceit. Or perhaps this was a way for the biographer to acknowledge that whilst his book discloses a great deal of information about Foucault, the philosopher, it also leaves many a stone unturned. 

+++

part 2

Additional note written whilst reading this book:

“On reading Foucault’s biography:

When I first read Foucault, in 1986/7, it felt as though one had discovered a writer who could map out the shape of the world. Not just the world as I knew it to be then, but also the world which was to come. In so many ways this proved to be correct. Foucault was the prophet of identity, of post-truth (for better and for worse). The iconoclast of the post war systems he and my parents grew up with. However, this is not the thought. The thought is thus: the world requires a successor. For the first time since those days, one is conscious of the fact that Foucault’s view (pendulum) is no longer sufficient. In the ensuing decades three things have occurred which have yet to find a mind capable of synthesising them. These elements are the digitalisation of the world (internet; personal computers; robotics etc); climate change; accelerated globalisation. The latter has always existed as a concept, but has been hyper-extenuated by the rise of aviation and the digital shrinking of the world. The other two factors were no more than flecks on the distant horizon back in 1987. There may be writers/philosophers who address any of these issues with imagination and insight. But I have yet to come across anyone who has in any way synthesised these elements of the present, permitting the reader to peer into a future and begin to comprehend the shape and needs of advancement/ survival within this future. The global warming of information. The rising simulacrum tide.”

balnearios (d mariano llinás)

Llinas’ first film is a blink-and-you-miss-it 80 mins long. Watching this, if he reminded me of anyone as a filmmaker it’s perhaps, no matter how tangential this might feel, Adam Curtis. An idiosyncratic vision which gives free rein to an intellectual playfulness. (Curtis might not like this word but all the same it seems appropriate). Llinas headed off towards the waters of fiction, whereas Curtis is all heavy-hitting politics, but watching their films feels like a similar experience. We are in the hands of a conjurer who will come up with unlikely associations and unpredictable combinations. They also both leave the viewer with the feeling that they are basking within the timeless waters of cinema. Even this reduced length film felt like it had an elastic timeframe. You never quite knew where you were headed or when the film might come to a natural conclusion. 

Balnearios, a word which is probably best translated as ‘resorts’ opens with some lovely archive footage of the Argentine and Uruguayan coast. The film is constructed out of various parts. There’s a section on the balnearios’ annual cycle, the transformation from the dead times of winter to the frenzy of summer. The film ends with an extended, warm-hearted section about an eccentric sculptor. At times the film feels like a slightly cobbled-together piece, a bricolage if you like, hints of a student movie, albeit one touched with brilliance. Towards the end of the first half of the film, however, there’s a section which is pure Llinas, anticipating Historias Extraordinarias. The story of a once-glorious, now decayed hotel is related via photos and recreated footage, detailing  how the hotel has passed through various hands in dodgy business dealings, at one point being owned by a fraudulent playboy with a French chanteuse wife. One of her songs plays balefully over images of the crumbling hotel. The sequence has a lazy Borgesian charm; an epic narrative recounted in ten minutes with a few broad brushstrokes, no more than a subset of the movie itself. A clear pointer for the direction in which this idiosyncratic filmmaker was headed.

woman under the influence (w&d john cassavetes)

Cassavetes' film is a gruelling, grimly compelling watch. Now regarded as a modern classic, it seems superfluous to offer anything other than a few observations.

Violence. The most disconcerting aspect of this film might be the very final sequence, after the kids have gone to bed, after Peter Falk’s Nick has slapped Mabel for the second or third time, after she has cut herself. It’s disturbing not because of the violence, but because of the way that the director seems to want to present this moment, as Mabel and Nick tidy up together, return to domestic normality, as an upbeat ending. The music is cheerful, Rowlands smiles, there appears to be complicity between the parties. I haven’t read commentaries on this and prefer to come at it cold: it feels almost crass. Just as much as this is a film about female psychosis, it’s also a film about domestic violence. Nick is a bully. A charming bully but also a violent one. HIs normalisation of violence (both physical and psychological) is surely the key driver in Mabel’s need to become insane to cope with it. Is Cassavetes being wilfully provocative with this conclusion? Or is it a testament to an era and a culture where this kind of patriarchal violence was the norm? However you look it, it’s a coup de grace, after all that has preceded this moment, that it should feel so chilling precisely because nothing shocking is happening. 

Acting. Without doubt, Rowlands and Falk offer masterclasses of a kind. What the film perhaps shows is how limited is the day-to-day palette of psychological representation. Cinema demands a shorthand approach to characterisation. Scenes are generally kept short and sharp; the emotional status of a character is conveyed through metaphor and elipsis. In Woman Under the Influence, the handbrake is off. Rowlands and Falk are permitted to explore in great detail all the ticks, mannerisms, weaknesses, strangenesses of their characters and their relationship. The long scenes permit a descent into the moment, captured by the camera, which is harrowing, bordering on the absurd (which is what any domestic dispute inevitably and tragically becomes). Hence a degree of reality infiltrates the camera which more conventional scriptwriting/ storytelling doesn’t permit. The nearest point of contemporary comparison is Reygadas’ Our Time. Acting in film is so often about minimalism, (think of Caine talking about how everything can be communicated by the face), but here Rowlands’ whole body seems immersed in the character, a body which seems to hum with inner tension and a secret inner life which is repressed by the restrictions of her day-to-day existence.

los últimos romanticos (w&d gabriel drak)

It would be tempting to use Los Ultimos Romanticos as a template for a less than perfect script development process. The film is essentially a buddie movie, constructed around the affable characters of Perro and Gordo (to Spanish readers those names alone perhaps suggest something slightly too easy), who get by selling marijuana plants in a small Rio de la Plata balneario. The off-season seaside village is deserted, as most of the residents are Europeans summer there in the European winter. However, one Hungarian couple have remained. Perro finds them dead in their bed. He also discovers a stash of four million euros in their home which he removes and hides with Gordo’s help. The title of the script refers to the fact that the two are in theory writing a film script, (although they seem to have no connection at all to the film business in any shape or form), hence the maverick cop who will prove to be their nemesis ascribes the duo the titular nickname. A couple of bohemians living their lives free from the system. The problems with the film are thus: firstly, neither character seems in any way ‘romantic’ (in the poetic sense of the word). Secondly, the discovery of the money should be a Maguffin, rather than the driver of the plot. Thirdly, the twists feel predictable. Fourthly, there’s no tension at all. In the end, Los Ultimos Romanticos falls into that dangerous comedy-caper territory which is so hard to pull off. For undisclosed reasons, filmmakers all over the world choose possibly the hardest genre of them all to carry off with recurring frequency. The bonus is this allows the script to include jokes for the locals to enjoy. The downside is that it’s very hard not to make a pedestrian comedy-caper movie, especially when the caper element is as contrived as it is here.