We've been through some very intense and politically charged days and nights over here in Greece and I just couldn't get myself to write this review. I’ve been thinking I should put this one at the back of my head and write about a more lighthearted one (yet no less important) but then it came to me that The House is Black remained relevant to what I’ve experienced these days, that not being the have fun-love all-buy all holiday spirit of the season.
When I was silent my life was rotting from my silent screams all day long.
Forugh Farrokhzad, an important Iranian poet and controversial figure at her time, directed this one, a short documentary about everyday life in a leper colony that stands between realism and drama in a territory I’d call poetic realism. Farrokhzad recites passages from the Koran and the Old Testament along with her poetry that is preoccupied with death, the limited joys of life and freedom, most times from a confident feminine point of view. This film, her only one, opened the way for the Iranian new wave, but apart from its historical value, it is a film of intense beauty and sensitivity, though candid and direct.
The Eye.
The film opens with this shot, so shocking in its beauty. The whole film is comprised of striking images, dense in symbolic value, that are juxtaposed in a dialectic way. The woman looks into the mirror and her image (through the slow travelling of the camera into the mirror) is translated into ours. We are looking at our own reflection. The lepers are not just “humans like us”, they are us, therefore their disease is a disease we all have, ignorance, inertia, the unwillingness to face reality in all its monstrosity and act. Instead we prefer to close our eyes to the world.
This game of seeing continues. We are compelled to look at the world through different eyes.
A child tries to stand up and we explore the surrounding world through his/hers eyes.
A “pure”, uninfected creature looks around the world it was born in and sees decay, pain and stagnation. That could easily be its future.
The baby in the wheelbarrow sees everything.
The House of God is just as damaged as the body of the lepers. Inside, the soul cries for a cure for pain. Broken frames like crooked antennas tuned to heaven. Who is this in Hell praising you O Lord? Who is this in Hell? This Hell is man-made and only man can turn it into heaven. The Hands. We learn early on in the film that leprosy is not a hereditary disease. The young ones in the colony can escape the fate of their parents. Their future is not predetermined. It would just take something more than prayers, because leprosy, we know, is curable. We see the doctors treat their patients, distribute medicine and we learn that it’s through exercise that the stiffness of their limbs can be alleviated. So it’s a matter of who can answer their hopes for a better life: a metaphysical entity that dwells beyond this world or is it “the very soul of mankind”, the configuration of our inner world that makes man a “problem solver”? The kid steals the crutch and goes around to play. A bit on the cheesy side maybe, but an effective image of freedom and creativity nonetheless. We also learn that leprosy goes with poverty, so the whole issue here can't be just a disease. Forugh seizes the opportunity to draw parallels to the social reality in her country (oh, well, the social condition in most places). People must rely on their own powers (=science/logic) to change their lives and be free of pain and suffering in their limited time on this earth. Leprosy is a social disease. It keeps the lepers isolated from the rest of society (so as not to disrupt the fragile image of normality), it keeps people isolated from their own lives, with which they can only hope to reconnect through prayers. -Name a few ugly things. -Hand, head, foot… -Write a sentence with the word house in it. -The house is black. Forugh casts a sympathetic glance on their condition and isolation but at the same time, she is not willing to dwell on this sentiment alone, because it amounts to nothing on its own. We, the lucky ones, are not superior to them in any way, even within our sympathy. She shocks you by showing you that beneath what we call monstrous is a man like everyone, with the very same hopes and dreams and needs and flaws as anyone and she proposes a way out through dialectic montage. Watching the film again these days urged me to re-read that old "Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties" by Bertolt Brecht. The belief that truth is absolute and waits to be unveiled may be a problematic one (just the same as absolute trust in science and logic, as suggested in the film, is) but that doesn’t mean we should leave this world and the monopoly of truth to the “bad guys”. We were brave enough to dissect. We shouldn’t be scarred by the responsibility to reassemble the pieces in a better-working configuration. Hope is a heavy stone. Its weight carries you uphill towards the promised top yet it also breaks your fingers and breaks your back. You can only see your steps that follow an imaginary path uphill, eyesight reduced to tunnel-vision, the weight that pushes your feet onwards is mistaken for "fate" and everything around you is reduced to shadows. C'mon, drop the stone and have a coffee instead. Choose your mountain, straighten your back, uncurl your fingers, see the world. A woman's fingers are pressed under rocks to regain their proper form. Limbs that are stiffened by the disease should be exercised. This is basically an uplifting film. It reassures me that the core of man is always capable of the best despite all diseases inflicted on us by society. Yes, I know that there is no such thing as purity and basic goodness in man in the Christian sense but that doesn’t mean we should surrender. "There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons", as Deleuze put it. So, may this be a good year to you. Know your enemy and be good to each other. Feel the strength from within, do you believe it's a sin The voice.
Clinging at the throne of power. Nothing good ever came out of that. 
Around the first third of the film we're introduced to the medical stuff of the colony that treats the lepers as patients, treating wounds and exercising their limbs. When this part ends, we see the lepers pray for salvation and we're naturally shocked. If people have the power and knowledge to alleviate their fellowman's pain, then why all hope rests in the hands of God? 
To find the power lying inside your mind?
Not from the cross or the gun,
Not from the Moon nor the Sun,
But rising from the very soul of mankind .
I'd like to thank you, Canada
Videodrome is a turning point in Cronenberg’s career. It sums up all defining characteristics of the body horror genre and introduces the theme of “how real is reality” (enter the ghost of Philip K. Dick showing his stigmata) that is going to re-emerge later on in eXistenZ, in a less intriguing and much more evident way. Cronenberg, along with Lynch and a few other directors, are considered a good entry point for anyone beginning to become interested in cinema as an art rather than just entertainment, or at least that was the case when I was a teenager in Greece. This is the film I consider to be his best work. Long live the new flesh is also one of the strongest lines in cinema. I have watched this, thought and wrote about it so many times that the following may seem more like a rant than a review. You have been warned.
A Brief and Boring Synopsis of the Film, I won’t provide this time
I've thought a lot about this. The whole point of the review is re-watching a film and re-thinking about it. If you haven’t seen the film the review has no artistic merit on its own, I assure you. On the other hand, if a guy writes a couple thousand words on a movie you haven’t seen, then it might be worth the time watching it, right?
Too much TV is Bad for your Eyes
Early on Mr. Cronenberg hints at the direction the film is going to take by doing something very clever here. He transfers the action from actual space to screen and then to another place. He does that constantly and in a consistent way.
First we are here, in a small room, with suspicious looking gentlemen, ready to watch a new video. The video starts and…
…they watch Samurai Dreams. We watch Samurai Dreams. We are now in the screen following the action in the images.
Now we are reminded that we are watching a video, a representation of reality.
And then we find ourselves in Max’s office. We were transfered through the screen to another time and space while we were watching the show. Our perception was not only directed into the images on the screen but it was also transferred through the TV space-time to “real” space-time. We will see that a lot through the rest of the film until it develops into its main drive.
First off, we see Max in this tiny monitor. The show is about to start.
Then we cut to the real Max, sitting in a real chair, in a real place. He looks to his left to see the other guest. The camera moves to the left following his eyes…
...and we see the other guest in a screen. He he. That was cool. Everything is mediated by the screen; his perception, the viewers’, ours.
Right after that we see an isolated TV set and the show begins. This TV set is ANY TV set. It is not in the studio, it isn’t one of the crew's monitors, it can be anywhere. Notice the black background. We are in limbo. We do not know where we are. We can be anywhere since our perception is focused on the screen. The background fades. And then we are transferred back to the studio. It seems like we could play this game throughout the whole film… and, yes we can. When the illusions start, induced by the growth/new organ, who can tell us what is “real” space and time and what is not?Imagine a dark cellar and you standing facing the door and the thin ray of light that comes in from the keyhole. What lies behind your back becomes a dark undimentional space. When the door opens, you could be standing anywhere. Space and time, as we know it, becomes irrelevant. It's not that it actually disappears; it's just that movement doesn't matter anymore, as long as the transmission is continuous.
We can push this even further. Is there any real difference between Tokyo and New York or London and Hong Kong? The same shops, the same advertisements, the same philosophy behind architectural space. Well, I know there are some differences still, especially in countries on the margin of the western capitalist world, but they are progressively disappearing in front of a unified culture. Is there any real difference between a tourist resort in the Canary Islands and one in Indonesia? Not really. Same products, same services, same exploitation mechanisms, different background to swimming pools and depressed employees and consumers. Natural space is irrelevant. What matters is the flow of information. It's not that the real world is not there anymore. It's just that we are taught/built so that we can't perceive it. We do not use the same tools anymore. All these might seem a bit farfetched to some, especially in relation to Videodrome, but I am just trying to illustrate how the same mechanism and philosophy behind television and the world of the images in general, applies to our experienced reality as well-fed, busy, bored and miserable consumers/citizens of the market world. Anyone noticed how we don't refer to people as citizens anymore, preferring instead words like consumers and viewers?
The Binary Language of Desire
Nicki asks Max for porn to “get her into mood”, that is she needs the image in order to articulate her sexual desire. When she discovers the Videodrome tape, Max warns her that this is not porn; it’s actually just torture and murder, not exactly sex. “Says who” replies Nicki and goes on to show that what matters to her is not the narrative, the meaning behind the image but the image itself, the stimulation upon receiving the signal, the shock, the neural surge. What matters is stimulation.
First they are viewers. They have to take in the new images in order to articulate their desire. Past generations used to do this through literature, songs, traditional manerisms etc. We do it through the images.
Max also seems to welcome this new language of intensity after he watches Videodrome. In McLuhan’s words, the medium has been the message.
When they have sex the first time, it seems they are already in Videodrome. Reality now will be perceived through the language of the spectacle, images meant to stimulate, "special names — names designed to cause the cathode ray tube to resonate".
Human beings have two bodies, a biological and a cultural one, so we learn to articulate basic needs and urges through this cultural body into what we call desire. We articulate sexual desire through narratives; we make up stories in our head, we act out scenarios, some more elaborate than others. This mechanism is an intrinsic part of our existence. There lies the difference between “I want” and “grmffff”. Nicki, seems to propose a new articulation of desire, which resembles the 0-1 language of computers and cybernetics; stimulated / not stimulated. The term "cyborg" (as in cybernetic organism), emerges here.
Nicki demonstrates she’s perfect for Videodrome. Notice how difficult it is for Max to accept this cigarette and yet how irresistible it seems. It’s not just a cigarette he accepts; it’s a whole new perspective. Videodrome truly changes you.
A Note on Body Horror
The Body Horror genre is all about metamorphosis and, of course, the ultimate metamorphosis procedure that is sex. As if we don’t feel alienated enough from our bodies’ grotesque geography through culture, sex transforms us from “someone” to “anyone”, bringing to surface animal automatisms and dissolving any notion of identity. Body horror remains at the core of Videodrome, while Cronenberg chooses to focus on perception, another bodily function, and the horror that comes from its distortion and, let’s face it, basic relativity.
Nobody Knew They were Cyborgs
Viewers “take civic TV to bed with them”. Early on in the film we are presented with the major theme of the film, that of the symbiotic relation between man and “machine”, the viewer and the network. What we see in the TV screens in this film works not just as a narrative device, parallel to the action, but as a living part of the characters’ world, space and time and body included.
Max’s apartment is a mess. Appliances and garbage everywhere, bits and pieces of technology and biological life clashing. It’s not just that Max is a very busy man and can’t clean his space. His relations with technology seem to be on the aggressive side, with technology invading his body life and the TV set ultimately transforming it.
Sex and images and video and food stains that look like blood. Need I say more?
Professor O’Blivion is a prophet for the new information age. Most of what he says sounds remarkably similar to McLuhan’s theories for the media. Our perception of the world is mediated by the TV screen and we reach out to the world through the information networks. The TV is our eyes and ears and also our brains, so it is only natural to consider it as a natural organ of our bodies, since we already experience the world mediated by our other organs. Information media are extensions of our neural system and whatever happens on screen, in this hyper-reality of the images, we perceive it directly.
Cronenberg is really funny sometimes in a subtle-subversive way. The hostess directs him while he is looking the other way... Priceless.
Max meets Professor O'Blivion who has already transcended into a new existence.
Inside the Cathode Ray Mission. Social misery is caused by lack of exposure to the images. These people live outside society because they live outside the images. They are not connected. Look at the happy-creepy homeless guy. He doesn't care what he watches; he is happy to be exposed to the signal. Definitely one of the funniest/scariest moments in cinema for me.
O’Blivion is a new human being, a cyborg of sorts. He has transcended his bodily existence to the world of information. He now exists as a nebula of information, stored in tapes in his office, that are organized to a cohesive image at the receiving points of the network. He is in Videodrome. He is translated to information, and for Max to transcend to that stage as well and become the new flesh, he should embody the new language of the networks and ultimately kill his physical body, as it is only a manifestation of a certain kind of existence. He is to inhabit the networks, to inhabit his extended nervous system in McLuhan’s terms, in the same way O’Blivion did.
Our cyborg; part man, part receiver. This idea will be followed to its extreme conclusions: Max can be programmed to be the perfect assassin.
He is to become a nebulae of information in the limbo behind the screens, more than a human and way past the human. He is to become a pattern, a blueprint for a human that will inhabit a hyper-reality, that is a reality constructed by the new mediums (like the old one was constructed by old mediums such as language and narrative devices associated with writing and typing) as a virtual space-time, one that “can be” instead of “is” or “will be”.
Humans have never been “human” since they first picked up a stone as a tool and made an axe. The time when we were “naturally human” is close to when we were animals. Our technological ivilization makes us cyborgs by augmenting our physical abilities and strengths, extending our presence and grip outside our physical bodies through the tools we create. That is why the term “cyborg” really means nothing yet it also describes the human condition so accurately. It hints at alienation and self-mutilation (body horror anyone?) that best describe our existence inhabiting two bodies (physical and cultural) and, quite recently, the experience of projecting ourselves through networks.
A perfect merging of flesh and tool. Furthermore, the man becomes the tool. He is but the cancerous outgrowth of the network, a vessel of its message. Gun= penis and shooting= ejaculation. He is trully the video word made flesh.
A malignant Betamax tape. How much more sexual can it get?
A TV set made of flesh that shoots out the video truth. It just screams: SEX!
The Dream is our Reality
Belly-dancers! And tsoliades! Oh, our eastern cousins and their sensual ancient culture...
Max, meets this old lady producer in an eastern restaurant. East, apart from being the exotic fantasy land of the mysterious and the ancient, it is also the place of the cultures of language, as opposed to modern western cultures that are based on image. She brings something that is too old-fashioned, a program with a story, heavy on sensuality, that is the opposite of “real sex- what people really do in their bedroom”, and of course Max seeks the “real”, meaning something more intense. So, “real” = “intense”, and when this is not enough, he must seek something that is even more real, more intense, and so on and so forth. Audiences get desensetized and so the hunt goes on. But we know what happens to Max's reality eventually: it vanishes and this intense “hyper-reality” of the images is unleashed. What we get here is that by mistaking the real with the intense, what we’ve known as reality gives way to a hyper-reality.
Cronenberg introduces at this point the whole story about the Videodrome signal creating a tumor that is in fact a new organ for perceiving a new reality, that of the screen; the hyper-reality which’s language is the signal, that basic 0-1. What we experience as a reality is of course not real at all. We all know that by now, right? Reality is a construction we create, both collectively and personally (remember that biological/cultural body configuration I mentioned earlier?), based on what our inadequate perceptive organs tell us. We can never directly experience the real because it doesn’t exist. What exists are stories, a 2D map drawn by hand aboard Victoria. Hence, the constant search for “something real”, meaning something stimulating, apart from a clumsy desperate attempt to re-experience our lost physicality, is a futile endeavor, resulting in the disappearance of reality. When this hunt for the “real” reality is mediated by the media (heh, that’s what they do) and the reality they construct and communicate, we get a kind of hyper-reality. We believe that the map produces territory.
Reality is never real. What the western citizen/viewer ultimately seeks in intense stimulation is a reminder of his/her mortality, of his/her physical existence that has been numbed down by the meaningless social existence within late stage post-spectacle and its automatism. In a world were nothing is at stake, nothing has any meaning and humans are creatures of meaning, that is they can only inhabit a world of meaning. It’s the end of history (remember?) and now we can live in comfort, safe from the dangers of pursuing ideologies and dreams. Capitalism won and it’s now the best and only (that totalitarian combination) way of living. We are now free to consume and enjoy ourselves in whatever way we please. Sadly, this is not what humans need. In a world where capitalism has become total capitalism (meaning that it describes every aspect of our social and personal lives, as well as how we experience our bodies- fashion/cosmetic surgery anyone?), depression is not a disease; it’s a logical reaction to a hostile environment. Us net-cyborgs are depressed and we don't know how to express it for lack of the proper tools. All is not lost. Amidst this organized chaos and reconfiguration of our identities, we must also create a new language to express our lack of freedom and construct new tools for our struggle against power. We know that this is all a game but not all the moves have been made. We have dissected the poor lady but now we have to put it all together so that it works.
Videodrome is basically a grotesque image of the ‘80s, where the hero is the media man and the world, our private and social lives, is dominated by television and video (hence the somewhat outdated title). These conditions gave birth to the ‘90s and the ‘00s and the vast expansion of information networks to the point that we have to drastically re-invent our identity as social and biological entities. So, despite all its merits, it has aged a bit, in the sense that the cyborg it discusses has already evolved beyond the man-television configuration. Our bodies are now nests to various information networks through portable devices and the "man as information hub" metaphor now dominates our culture. However, Videodrome remains powerful and shocking (with its irony and everything) to this day because it deals with basic stuff that still apply to our condition.
...and Into the Night!
Jacques Tourneur, the son of French director Maurice Tourneur, was one of the many directors born in Europe who went to live in the US and work in Hollywood. He was also not the only one to first work in horror films and then in noir. Tourneur produced some excellent horror movies, focusing on the supernatural (let’s pretend you can focus on invisible things), like Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and, of course, Night of the Demon, which remains a great piece of cinematic art, despite the short-sighted intervention of the studios that destroyed the whole unseen-threat mechanism. In 1947, Tourneur directs this beautiful and classic film noir. I have a soft spot for noir. I just thought I’d let you know at this point.
A Brief and Boring Synopsis of the Plot, just in case.
Robert Mitchum is the ever-cool-yet-so-vulnerable former detective Jeff Bailey who now owns a gas station in a small town. He is dating Ann Miller, a local girl (Virginia Huston plays the ultra-good blonde girl so gracefully) but he has a secret past he will now have to reveal to her (in a flashback of course!) since he was visited by Stephanos, a tough guy that works for Whit Sterling (played by a young Kirk Douglas), a charming big time crook. Jeff's true name is Jeff Markham and he was once employed by Whit to find his former girlfriend, Kathie Moffat (played by the overwhelmingly beautiful Jane Greer) who ran away with a lot of money after shooting him.
A "coloured-only" club I suppose.
He follows her trails to Mexico City and falls in love with her, believing her to be a damsel in distress.
They fool around like children and lovers do. Tension builds up!
A kiss...
A gust of wind and nature invades this room.
And then rain. A tropic garden. Wind. Rain. Rain. Sex. That's class people! All the intensity and inevitability, all the tension released with a powerfull and effective image. That's what sex was like; a tropical storm.They run away to San Francisco where they live hidden until they are found out by Jeff’s former assistant who now threatens to sell them to Whit. Jeff tries to reason with him but Kathie shoots him and escapes. Jeff buries his old partner and tries to build a new life with Ann. But his past raises its ugly head and Whit wants him back for another job. Jeff decides that this is a chance to face his past and leave it behind once and for all but he soon realizes that he is called to play the fall guy in the elaborate schemes of Whit and Kathie, who is now back in the fold and has an agenda of her own. After much confusion, double-crossing and cigarettes lit in darkness, Jeff decides to give Kathie to the police, instead of running away with her, her being a double-crossing succubus after all, and… oh you know the rest. It’s a film noir. Everything goes wrong.
It's a Film and it's Black.
You know what to expect from noir films in terms of visual style. However, there are not that many stairs in this one nor do they play an important role, no mirrors and broken reflections, no clocks, no crooked angles and other key images of the expressionist tradition.
Tourneur shots from below a few times to create tension and reveal characters in the awkwardly lit faces of the protagonists but he never takes this into extremes. He also uses high contrast photography, especially when the action moves into the city or indoors, concealing faces, allowing shapes to hide in deep shadows, trap the hero in a web of black lines, but then, again, he has his own language and never goes as far into expressionism territory as other classic noir films go.
Light comes from below so that the faces come out, revealing features and blowing small things to megaproportions. A quick glance is of major importance and reveals character. Plus, this lighting establishes a secretive atmosphere and translates to image what Jeff is actually doing, that is dispensing the dark, shedding a light on his past. A dim and confusing light of course.
The lines distort and the room gets smaller. Jeffs gets trapped in lines and shadows. We are meant to take this literally.
More examples of noir lighting.
Amidst the chaos of confusing signs, Jeff and Ann meet in the forest. The light breaks down forms. Aglance interrupted, a gesture fragmented by shadows and stripes of light.
Tourneur has a thing for corridors, both actual corridors and corridor effects. He does this with country roads, city streets, inside the hotel etc.
An example of this corridor-effect he likes so much. It's all just linear perspective by the book. All the lines meet in a bright area in the horizon.
There's another one.
Look at how he sets his shots in an almost "renaissance" way, linear perspective and all. He also places vertical lines inside his images (I am talking about images here because once they are set they remain almost still- it’s like a painting with moving characters).
Check out the depth of this one. Not unlike Orson Welles’ deep focus shots, it is meant to reveal not amaze: there is work to be done, a car to be fixed, humble and simple work, the church is just down the road (another corridor effect) so this is obviously a place blessed by God, the sky and mountains beyond all, so this is as close to natural living as it gets within a society, and the man in black from the city comes to ruin it all. There, we have America spelled out for us. Enter the contrast between pure and tainted, innocence and corruption, the small town and the city, the town-upon-the-hill and Babylon. All in one shot. This antithesis between nature (represented by the village or small town) and the big city, often translated as day vs. night, is a dominant theme in film noir and the backbone of Out of the Past.
They look like paintings, don't they? The innocence and majesty of the great American outdoors tainted by this dark figure. Sublime photography. Everything comes out so clear. American cinema always knew how to distinguish the background from the action.
It's all about contrasts. Water is fluid, rocks are solid, humans are neither.
Lines cross and not a single one is straight. There are no surfaces, just deep shadows. What should be familiar is dark and abysmal.
The noir detective, trenchcoat and all, trapped inside a web of shadows. His form is fragmented by boxes of light and all kinds of lines (the windows, the crane, the ladder...).
The Night that is the City and some Notes on Determinism.
It's always night in City Noir.
All these antitheses actually spell out: city = evil. The metropolis can destroy a man. Too many people, no sense of community, too many agendas, too many hidden powers, too many faceless ones, a man can’t make a difference, individuality becomes isolation and man is prey to a machine that promises happiness but deals misery more often than not. When it does deliver what it promises, it does so at the price of someone else’s misery and the loss of a man’s dignity and values. There we have that American romantic ideal, so accurately captured by Steinbeck in his books. We’ve found out that capitalism (what the American city is all about) is truly a beast. We shouldn’t forget that the tradition upon which film noir flourished was that of the pulp detective/crime novels by writers who grew up and wrote during the Great Depression. But just you wait, the 50s are around the corner and the beast will take its revenge, ending the film noir period by means of black lists and commitees on un-American activities. Film noir is actually more political than the gloves of a femme fatale and the fear of women (though all these play a huge role). It’s just sad that Americans have forgotten this great tradition of theirs and tend to believe that things like socialism and labor unions are alien viruses from outer space while they're as American as apple pie and the statue of Liberty (you get my point here). Humans and their history…. so complicated. Oh well, let us not be sad about some re-writing of history for now and return to the film.
I consider Out of the Past to be one of the most typical noir films because it perfectly portrays the existentialism-determinism combination that I believe is the core of these films. Revealing dialogue follows:
-Buddy, you look like you’re in trouble.
-Why?
-Because you don’t act like it.
-I think I’m in a frame.
-Don’t sound like you.
-I don’t know. All I can see is the frame. I’m going there to look at the picture.
By introducing here the term determinism, I don’t imply fate or cause-and-effect laws and other narrative tools we use to make sense out of it all. It is only in retrospect that we can construct sense and any attempts to extend these mechanisms into the future in order to determine its shape are helpless due to our forgetting that they are but mechanisms. In other words, they are but abstractions, not blueprints that are bound to produce reality. They are useful and rather unavoidable tools if you don’t want to exist in the same way a tree does. Fate or God introduce metaphysics into our system, and as any noir anti-hero knows, there are no such things. The current state of a determinist system gives rise to the state of that system in the following moment (as Mark Bould so cohesively phrases it), and so on and so forth, in an unforeseeable way.
The noir world is presented as a determinist system, especially, as we see in Out of the Past, the city. The hero, with his unique, often obsolete, deeply personal set of values that are in contrast with those of the rest of the world (hence existentialism) is trapped inside its belly as a living moving part of it. He can observe the wheels and cogs and other strange machinery and try to find a vantage point from which he could observe the whole system work, find out the way and the purpose so he can free himself. He can see the frame but he can never see the picture. Machine parts have no faces, you know. There is a hint of order in this chaos but time is running short or he is too entangled in it to make sense out of it. Jeff returns to the city and gets trapped in plans and schemes that are hard to figure out. All he can see is the confusing shadows of the machines at work but not how he fits into all this and how to break free. When he eventually understands the layers of the web in which he is trapped and acts to solve the puzzle it is already too late. He is tainted. There is no way out for him, there can’t be. No happy endings here. Jeff was doomed from the start, since he decided to play the game. But was there really a decision made there in Mexico City? Hm… Damn you deterministic universe!
It all leads to this point. Looking at another dead man.
The Horror + the Horror + an Experiment.
In the scene right before they leave together, Kathie tries to convince him that he is as rotten as she is, because he fell for her in the first place, and so they deserve each other. There is no point in him trying to escape it. It’s time for him to realize this and forget his dreams of honesty and a sincere relationship with Ann. Jeff understands what she says in a slightly different way. Since he couldn’t resolve this and still has feelings for her, hidden in his harsh words to her that seem to repeat “I am rotten” rather than “you are rotten”, even though he knows what she is, there can be no hope for him. There is something wrong with him, something that can’t be fixed. There is no guarantee that he was right all along, if all he is now is the man his past created and that past is inescapable. That’s his fear. What good are his concepts of right and wrong if he can’t seem to make them ring true inside when he faces his past? He decides to escape this maze and return to the dream of a future with Ann by double crossing Kathie and calling the police. A last shot at happiness, with desperation written all over it and doomed to fail.
Let us try something out now. Let’s just assume that the whole movie from the point Stephanos comes to call him back to when Jeff and Ann meet in the woods and exchange promises that will not be kept is a dream. Let’s take that liberty and edit the film again, adding blur effects where this starts and ends. Let’s say that Jeff revisited the city the way we revisit a trauma, by reliving it in the monstrous form of a nightmare. The story with Kathie and Whit was just another love triangle story which ended with Jeff broken hearted and Kathie back in the fold, ego boosted and all. Every ounce of guilt, every fear is augmented in this dream sequence; the framing, the confusion, the betrayals. Scary heh? Noticed how we just produced the plot for Lynch’s, excellent and haunting, Lost Highway?
Out of the Past, for me, deals with the inevitability of the trauma, its everpresence, the constant reliving and re-negotiating the meaning of these little disasters around which we build ourselves. Can we face the arbitrary nature of our construction? Can we move beyond our past? Can we leap our own shadows? Are people really capable of change? Is there a possibility for resolution or every moment everything is at stake? Maybe Jeff is right. Maybe a man has to do what a man has to do and this is all there is to it. Maybe there can never be a resolution (how could we untie the knot we are) and traumas are never fully healed since there is now a human being grown around them. Maybe all we can do is face them and renegotiate them, produce a more useful configuration of our parts. It’s just us and this is all there is after all, right? Right.
