mayhem reigns in the Aussie suburbs: the art of war

Conversations about Australian films with fellow film students often reveal a striking consensus that our film industry produces not much more than melodramatic narratives designed to inspire melancholia. And sure, there is an undeniable preoccupation within our national industry to convey the gritty realism of heroin addiction (most recently Candy, Little Fish) for example. However, there is also an undeniable ability to retort to such claims with an extensive list of idiosyncratic films that can not be defined simply in terms of the melancholic affect that they may produce within the spectator (Strictly Ballroom, Bad Boy Bubby, Romper Stomper, Kenny…).

What is perhaps a more accurate assessment of the film industry in Australia is that it’s very short heritage casts very a long shadow. The funding policies of the Australian government in the 1970s and 1980s that sought to reignite the industry ensured that anachronism was built into the narratives and themes of many of these early films (Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka’s theoretical text The Imaginary Industry: Australian Film in the late 80s, 1988, is a great starting point to explore these ideas further). 

What I see having developed since the 1980s is an intensified focus on suburbia. In a bid to combat film as a vehicle for mythologising white Australian history, the rural landscape, and in particular the quintessential Aussie Bloke - whether he is the ocker of the Barry McKenzie comedies, the outback hero of films like The Man From Snowy River, or the honourable digger in Gallipoli -Australian suburbia has been identified as that space where multiple and fractured identities reign and the Aussie bloke is fallible (Head-On, The Boys, Wolf Creek).

The reification of the suburbs as the site of a ‘true’ contemporary Aussie identity has perhaps provided filmmakers with occasion to overcome a certain tendency to represent Australian’s as stereotypes (which, for the most part represent women, homosexuals, immigrants, indigenous populations as the counterpoint to an Australian identity, if represented at all). The problem with many of these contemporary films is their reactionary stance that attempts to write these other marginalised identities into the ideology without questioning the political structures that dictate identity politics in the first place.

Suburban Mayhem

In Paul Goldman’s 2006 film Suburban Mayhem, female protagonist Kat (Emily Barclay) is a woman at war. She is the ultimate femme fatale manipulating the white male world around her to secure her selfish and destructive desires: to secure the release of her brother (a convicted murderer) from prison, and to retain custody of her baby daughter (whom she neglects). The target of Kat’s campaign is her own father, the death of whom means the cessation of the custody battle and the financial ability to appeal her brother’s conviction. Her troops include boyfriend Rusty (Michael Dorman)and her brother’s mate Kenny (Anthony Hayes).                 

     

My interest in this film does not primarily lie with the narrative, its success at undermining gender and racial stereotypes in Australian film is ambiguous at best. Rather, it is the focus upon modes of communication, the ways in which A Current Affair style interviews, sms telephone messages, cars as more than just modes of transport, Trading Post advertisements and newspaper headlines, are foregrounded as a structuring principle of suburban living. And more specifically, how these representational modes are woven into the texture of the film itself as a way of questioning identity politics.

The opening sequence has Kat responding to a documentary interview answering questions about the experience of being ‘wrongly’ suspected by police of masterminding the murder of her father. Her head and shoulders are centrally framed and the image is bleached of colour to denote the tele-visual medium. This sequence is then followed by the credit sequence which utilises a mobile phone interface; the credits appearing as a sms message in the process of being typed. The camera then follows a superimposed message icon navigating its way down a suburban street, in through the doors of a funeral parlour and into Kat’s phone which promptly beeps. Kat opens her phone, smiling as she reads the message ‘lets fuck’. In this sequence, the palette of the film is saturated with almost unreal colour, providing a contrast with the interview sequences of the text. A contrast which highlights the disparity between Kat on tv and Kat as she lives her life, but it is also a complimentary juxtaposition in that it illustrates Kat as the master of the technologies at her disposal.

The ways in which Kat utilises the media to (re)construct the tale of her father’s demise and her own role in it, is a localised example of the media’s implicit role in what Paul Virilio terms anthropophagy. In the way that flies are attracted to a pile of shit, the media is attracted to this suburban tale of death and deceit to feed its own gluttonous desire for sensational news. We don’t need to see the media in action, the television aesthetics of the interview sequences are enough to suggest Australia’s evening meal of a current affairs news programs, serving up hyperbolic tales of good and evil being fought daily in your very own suburb.

And the film’s narrative is very much a tale of civil war. Kat is at one with the technology available to her. The ways in which modern technologies re-visualise the cartography of the suburban landscape is fully exploited by Kat in a bid to achieve what she regards is a ‘justness of aim’ (Virilio 1999.68).  In outlining the evolving role of technology in war Virilio posits that ‘nothing now distinguishes the functions of the weapon and the eye’ (1989, 83). The instant interface provided by modern technologies eliminates geographical distance with the notion of real time. Therefore a large component of military advantage does not come from the size or quantity of weapons at ones disposal, but the ability to (over)see, to co-ordinate and control space and the flow of information.  So it is, that the real weapons of power in a military context are those same technologies that define western contemporary life styles: the mobile phone, television, and the internet.

       

Kat’s mobile phone and super-charged cars are two of her weapon’s of choice. These machines extend her sexual power beyond her immediate geographical location. Her phone enables her to remain present in the minds of the various malleable men simultaneously whilst she is fucking another in the backseat of her car. Or, as in the example given above, whilst Kat is attending to her public image as grieving and ever-faithful daughter at the funeral of her father.  

Mediocrity as Mayhem in the Cultural Landscape

I love this film for its perceived mediocrity. It does not attempt to displace the more traditional grand narratives that seek to mythologise an ‘essential Australianness’, nor does it try its hand at the melodrama ordinarily employed to strike at the heart of social issues.

 The text distances its spectators from any potential identification with the characters, instead focusing on a play with filmic and television conventions often exploited to nationalistic ends. Kat is far from the well rounded figure that many wish would provide insight into the motivations of a sociopath. Rather we get a figure dehumanised by the technologies that she utilises to constitute herself, and in turn, that the media utilises to constitute her.

The aesthetic regime of the film renders this theme in a manner that confronts the ambivalent relationship that Australians have to their national media. The overwhelming sense of cultural cringe that many experience when viewing Australian cinema stems from this technologisation (I think I just made up a word) of our national identity, whereby the film and television industries are charged with preserving this definitive identity as if it was a checklist of static characteristics. In some small sense the film goes some way to correcting this focus on quintessentially Australian narratives by highlighting aspects of suburban living that are not at all particular to Australia (ie. tales of patricide and mobile phones and other technologies).

As a final aside: My identification with this story just increased with the discovery that this film may indeed be based on an event that happened just around the corner from where I went to high school. Small world!

“I’m a Secretary!”: the aesthetics of pain

Imagine: a young un-toward woman, Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal), recently released from a psychiatric hospital after six months of treatment for her tendency to self-harm, gets a job at a small legal practice as a secretary. After a short time, her employer Edward Grey (James Spader), engages her in a seemingly sado-masochistic relationship, transgressing relationship boundaries delineating the sexual from the professional, the perverse from the ‘normal’. Following some time apart, and at Lee’s own instigation, they reunite, marry and live blissfully-ever-after, free to revel in the established ’sado-masochistic’ parameters of their union. (Note: the term sado-masochistic is here placed in inverted commas in recognition of Gaylan Studlar’s theoretical work acknowledging the oxymoronic nature of the term, and although this film is largely descibed by film commentators as sado-masochistic, the singular term ‘masochism’ is a more apt description).

I first viewed Steven Shainberg’s film Secretary soon after its release in 2002. Following a more recent viewing, I searched the web for evidence for the expected feminist outcry upon the release of this provocative film - which on its surface appears to reify patriarchal social structures –but to no avail. Although this may say more about my web-surfing skills than anything else, reviews that I have found communicate a certain resonance that the film achieves with its spectators, regardless of their gender.

The resonance lies with the film’s aesthetics of pain. Pain is exceptional in the ‘whole fabric of psychic, somatic, and perceptual states for being the only one that has no object’ (Scarry 1985, 161). Unlike seeing, hearing and touch which relate to the physical world outside of the boundaries of the body and which enables us to articulate a desire for x, or a hunger for y, the ‘complete absence of referential content, almost prevents it [pain] from being rendered in language’ without recourse to metaphoric description (1985, 162).  

When Edward discovers and confronts Lee about her compulsion to self harm he asks

‘Is it that sometimes the pain inside has to come up to the surface and when you see evidence of the pain inside you finally know you are really here. Then when you watch the wound heal, it’s comforting, isn’t it?’

Edward is verbally acknowledging Lee’s compulsion as a symbolic gesture that attempts to breach the skin, that corporeal boundary that marks the limits of physical pain as it is experienced. He articulates the significance of creating a wound, a scar, describing it as an action that seeks to create an object, a referent, a means of expressing the pain negated by language.

The alcoholism of Lee’s father, the physical abuse suffered by Lee’s mother, and the obsessive compulsive behaviour of Edward himself are similar manifestations of personal pain and suffering. Similar in that they resort to self-destructive behaviours that are denied currency within our representational economy. Theirs is an intentional self-objectification that is unable to imagine into being anything other than a closed circuit of communication with one’s self.

Elaine Scarry states that:

‘Through tools and acts of making, human beings become implicated in each other’s sentience. Seeing is seeing of x, and the one who has made the x, has entered into the interior of the other person’s seeing, entered there in the object of perception’ (1985, 176).

This points to the way that Edward breaks into Lee’s - and out of his own - closed circuit of communication not by verbally acknowledging her pain, or even by assuming an authoritative role in her life. Rather, it is through his subsequent actions whereby he substitutes the tools that Lee uses to cut herself with his own hands.

The formal devices utilised in Secretary, specifically the use of sound, framing and editing, points to the cinema as itself a tool, a mode of substitution for the tool that cuts; it incorporates the spectator in the closed-circuit of communication and the fabric of the film embodies a new language for the body in pain.

Following the above mentioned conversation, Edward calls Lee into his office demanding that she bring the letter that she has been typing. As she enters the office behind Edward the camera pans in a sweeping movement locating the two characters within a single frame and emphasising the space that they occupy as a work environment. Lee obeys Edward’s command that she place her elbows on the desk, palms down, and bend over whilst reading the letter. She lowers herself into the requested position, simultaneously lowering herself into the next frame of the sequence, which is a medium close-up of Lee in profile. As Lee begins reading, the shot cuts to a frontal close-up of her, and Edward is visible from torso to knee (his head is excluded from the frame) immediately behind her. Edward begins to slap the behind of Lee with a force that makes her body shudder with each moment of impact. However, what is to become a ritualised ceremony for the two characters is predominantly represented by a a shot-reverse-shot sequence of a close-up of Edward’s face and the fore mentioned frontal close-up of Lee reading.

This particular construction of the scene places emphasis on the experience of pain, it attempts to transgress the corporeal isolation of the sensory phenomenon. The close-up shots of each character do not indicate their point-of-view, what they see, rather it is an attempt to communicate the experience of pain by representing its affects such as contorted facial expressions. Perhaps more poignantly it is a formal technique that denies the viewer visual access to the act being implied. The moments of pause in Lee’s recitation of the letter as a result of the pain she feels flags the ways in which a body in pain is transformed into a site where language is destroyed (Scarry 1985, 172). Furthermore, the sound of Edward’s hand impacting on Lee’s butt displaces the primacy of visual representation, appealing instead to aural senses to produce a visceral reaction within the spectator.

There are two other angles from which this scene is represented: from a canted angle, slightly above and behind the characters; and from the doorway to the office at the approximate eyelevel of an on-looker who could, hypothetically speaking, stumble onto the scene. These two shots have the momentary effect of breaking spectatorial identification with the characters. In so doing, the embodied representation of pain is juxtaposed with a more distanced visual representation of violence. The camera itself is utilised to self-reflexively point to the ways in which a specifically cinematic language is being used to construct a language for pain.

Not only is closed-circuit communication circumvented through the ’sado-masochistic’ ritualisation of pain between these two characters, but the camera, the screen, is also inaugurated as a tool that attempts to incorporate the spectator as an object of perception.

The film challenges the limitations of narrative cinema to create viewer identification, manipulating its ability to simultaneously call upon a number of senses to overcome the isolating nature of pain and suffering in particular.I think it is the monadic quality of pain and suffering that resonates with spectators. Conservative ideologies of gender are recognised by most as influencing the social framework within which the individual characters attempt to terms with physical pain, rather than misidentifying (as I had expected) the film as a treatise on the deep-seeded desire of women to be subordinated in a patriarchal society.

                

The Annihilation of Hegel in Dogville

The Hegelian dialectic is inherently problematic in its construction and subsequent erasure of an ‘other’ through a process that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) termed synthesis. His triadic thesis-antithesis-synthesis model posited an eternal ‘ontological state of becoming’ characteristic of enlightment thinking’s attempts to locate a rational and cohesive identity within the politicized body of the individual.

Hegel’s is at best an idealistic philosophy that rests upon that flawed hallmark of enlightenment thinking, dualism. That is, a tendancy to structure thought through dichotomy and hierarchy, which is an ‘identification’ of difference to create meaning. In our late-capitalist/post-modern Western context, a Hegelian dialectic is no longer credible, or even ideal, given the fractured, multiple identities experienced by peoples saturated by local and international media, and inhabiting diasporic, exilic and multicultural spaces.

However to write off the relevance of Hegel in a contemporary context is to blindside the legacy of enlightenment and idealist (Hegel’s work is considered to be a part of the idealism rather than enlightenment school of thought) thinking on both a political and an aesthetic level. Liberal notions of ‘double occupancy’ and hyphenated identities are extant with the contemporary political imperatives of nation-states, cultural and ethnic groups, religious institutions, etc, to preserve (and impose) their collective identities and protect (and expand) their borders. Imperatives that explicitly rely upon the same notions of difference and antagonism as the Hegelian dialectic; imperatives that also look a lot like the Hobbesian ’state of nature’ that underwrites much contemporary international relations. Seen this way, the idealism of Hegel and the realism of Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) are two sides of the same coin.

Hegelian idealism as Dystopia

Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville enacts a Hegelian dialectic in its depiction of a community striving to incorporate an outsider, Grace (Nicole Kidman) into their town, Dogville. The dialectic is portrayed through the visualisation of border spaces. Specifically, how border spaces are performed in ways that simultaneously seek to reinforce and to erase (Grace’s) difference.

 

Geographically speaking Dogville exists as little more than chalk outlines demarcating a black studio floor into areas representing the homes, the store, the garden, streets, etc of a small village said to be located at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in the US. There is very little that is physical/tangible to reinforce the delineation of community space, which enables von Trier to draw attention to the ways in which space is politicised. That is to say, how space is carved up, who is allowed where and for what reasons, and how it is performed in ways that reify collective and individual identities.

As Thomas Elsaesser poignantly states in his essay Double Occupancy: Space Place and Identity in the European Cinema of the 1990s, Dogville’s boundaries, being marked mostly by chalk ‘are at once imaginary and real, invisible and brutally enforced’ (2006, 655). It is a point that draws attention to the fact that border spaces, such as those that mark out Dogville, contain no inherent meaning but, rather, are assigned meanings that are subject to shifts of perception.

Beyond the physical dynamization of space, for example characters/actors opening and closing imaginary doors, border spaces and access points are reified through looking relations. The most poignant example is perhaps the first instance of Grace’s rape by Ben (Zeljko Ivanek) in the later’s home. At one stage this scene is framed so that Ma Ginger (Lauren Bacall) sitting in her store, occupies the foreground whilst the violence perpetrated against Grace is clearly visible in the background. That Ma Ginger is, diagetically speaking, ‘unable’ to see what is clearly visible to the spectator draws attention to and undermines the ways in which border spaces are naturalised through (violent) performance and complicity. And it is worth noting that sound operates in a similar manner. Grace’s exclusion from the various town meetings conducted to decide her fate, aurally render her outside of the community. On opposite sides of the chapel wall, her ‘inability’ to hear the concerns of Dogville’s residents enable them to speak openly and unhampered by her potential response.

However, it is the changing ways in which these fixed borders are enacted that the Hegelian dialectic is envisaged as a dystopian nightmare by von Trier.

Upon the arrival of Grace in Dogville from ‘the outside’ Tom Edison (Paul Bettany), an idealist not unlike Hegel himself, attempts to synthesise the disruptive and fragmentary force of her presence with the day-to-day functioning of the community.  With the first of the afore mentioned town meetings, provisional acceptance of Grace is achieved. Tom subsequently architects her perminent acceptance by encouraging Grace to servile and gracious temperament - thus achieving the desired synthesis…for a while.

The dialectic at work here is not a static process, it is after all an ‘ontological state of becoming‘. The intermittent visits that Dogville receives from gangsters and police officers looking for Grace serve remind the town’s residents that their newest member is in fact different from them - her primary allegiance belonging to another alien community - thus her presence unremittingly reverts to being perceived as antagonistic. The towns folk ultimately attempt to overcome the seeming impossibility of synthesis (couched in a rhetoric of increased risk attendant to her continued residency) by claiming an increased compensation of Grace’s body.

This requires a shift in how borders and spaces are performed. For example, Grace is no longer welcome to access the shortcut that is Ma Ginger’s garden path. And where Grace was originally required to offer her services to each of the eight homes of Dogville once per day, she is expected to attend to the services of each home for half an hour twice per day which results in an increased survelliance of her activities and whereabouts. And as a final example, the mill renovated as a home and personal space for Grace evolves into a den of forced prositution, no longer insulated from the demands of public life.

 

Grace Annihilates Hegel

When Grace accepts an opportunity to annihilate her abusers at the close of the film, her visage as the ‘model of an ideal immigrant’, accepting of her exploitation and construction as a scapegoat in order to fit in (Elsaesser 2006, 654), is supplanted by a Foucaultian image of power relations that belies the idealism intended by Hegel. It is a moment that refuses spectator identification with Grace and instead re-contextualises the community of Dogville as a rather insignificant participant in the dog-eat-dog ’state of nature’ expounded by Hobbes.

I believe that it is important to understand that although the film can be and is read as allegorical of America’s war in Iraq, the exclusion of former Eastern block countries from the EU, the various immigration policies in place the world over, or more abstractly the neo-libralism versus neo-realism debate, the film’s minimal scenography offers a rather more universalising affect. As a result the film exceeds specific contexts to paint a nihlistic view of humanity and its persistant politics of fear and violence, us and them, that is historically and spacially unmoored.

Far from synthesising spectator thought perceptions with the reason that structures Hegelian or Hobbesian philosophies, von Trier ultimately refocuses upon the sensory, the visceral affects of such political reason.

If this aesthetic aspect seemed absent from the film as result of Grace’s body not bearing the marks of oppression and abuse (or perhaps as a result of Kidman’s wooden performance), the credit sequence shifts register to illicit a visceral, haptic spectator reaction through a montage of depression era and Iraqi wartime photo’s. If nothing else this montage paints a picture of ‘us’ and ‘them’ undistinguishable in the face of human suffering.

David Bowie’s accompanying song ‘Young Americans’ highlights the irony inherent in believing that our much more ‘enlightened’ liberal and contemporary Western ideals are insulated from the historical legacies that bore them.

APC does irony and idealism