Sarah Van Bonn
A top-notch meal requires a skilled chef and an appreciative eater, a soaring skyscraper needs a strong foundation, and a healthy, happy romance calls for heaps of work. No pain, no gain, as the platitude puts it. Right?
The author of this piece in the NYTimes mag earlier this summer lamented what he saw as a pretentious drive to like art that we don’t actually “get” precisely because we don’t get it. He offered Solaris as an example of one of these aesthetic vegetables we don’t like but think we “should eat” anyway (the original—not the bastardized version with George Clooney, about which I just Google-stumbled on a delightful Salman Rushdie quote). In this guy’s view, Solaris was nothing more than long stretches of obscure imagery strung boringly together for the purpose of giving film snobs something to pretend they found meaningful. He readily admits he didn’t “get” it.
What I don’t get is how you can’t “get” something from Solaris. When I watched it, I saw a heartbreaking film about love, loss, memory, the beauty and folly of the human spirit: the main character forced to watch his dead wife parade around, knowing she is a mirage but not being able to help loving her or pretending partly that she’s real; the throbbing faultless malevolence of the planet below, which these astronauts have failed to comprehend the very sentient aliveness of (just as we here in the “real world” fail to comprehend the aliveness of our own planet); the ending’s false homecoming, showing with piercing clarity how much all the tiny little elements of earth matter, and nearly providing comfort—indeed, showing just how much comfort these details can provide—but in actuality leaving us even more bereft because (as every person experiences living out their own coming-of-age stories), it’s too late to return to what we once had, and “Home” has become something of a simulacrum. I could go on.
So reading this Times mag piece, written by someone whose need to be “entertained” was apparently so demanding that he couldn’t spend two or so hours of his life contemplating the very nature of his own incredible ability to contemplate what that life entails, I was grumbling out loud and clenching my fists a little, and feeling sad and honestly a little personally offended, especially when he mentioned Antonioni.
I get a lot of crap, most of it good-natured, from my non-snobby friends about how much I love art that most people find “difficult” or boring (and for how much I don’t enjoy sappy string-pullers or special-effects popcorn vehicles). And Antonioni has been a centerpiece of some of this ribbing. I once went to a screening of L’Avventura with a few friends, one of whom said afterward to my enormous dismay that his farts were more interesting. (The worst was that he actually thought of himself as an Antonioni fan, because he loved Blow Up (probably just for that awesome Yardbirds scene); clearly he failed to recognize the intensely similar thematic undercurrents of these two films.)
I don’t hate joy or fun, as I’m most often accused of when confessing to people that I detest movies like Indiana Jones and Titanic. And I don’t hate being entertained. But I also don’t think “boring” in the sense that most people might use that word to refer to a movie that doesn’t detonate a nuclear bomb every five seconds or feature Celine Dion’s wrought crooning about eternal love is a bad thing. I love a good TV binge as much as anyone, but I don’t actually think the job of good art and film is to entertain us.
It’s like how I’m quick to defend David Foster Wallace’s idiosyncratic prose, his nearly endless clauses, his narrative (un)structuring, his careful wordiness. I’ll do so any time it comes up, passionately (it comes up less often now that he’s proved the seriousness of his brain by committing suicide because of it). I know I can’t stop anyone from disliking him, but I can, and will, at least try to get them to appreciate what he was doing.
I’m not pretending or putting on airs or trying to act smart or be pretentious in my love of “boring” art, and neither are the artists who made it. Some people probably don’t even believe me when I say I LOVE these films. But I do. I really truly do. I don’t love boring art because it’s boring, but I’d never dismiss it for that reason either. Much of it is powerful and beautiful—meant not to confuse us for pretension’s sake, but to show us things we haven’t seen before and things we didn’t know other people could see too; to paint portraits of us so that we can learn not just what we look like but what we are like; to engage us in a conversation, to help us. The Emperor isn’t naked; he’s dressed in something we have to look hard to see.
No doubt artists exist who create obscure work that is really meant to be “ungettable,” but they are certainly far fewer than their detractors would have you believe. And of course, there’s something to be said for accessibility—you probably don’t want to make something so difficult to decode that your audience gets essentially nothing out of it. BUT…
Let’s go back to the oft-maligned Antonioni for a minute. Antonioni was a master of the sometimes-boring. I was recently totally stabbed in the heart by my first-ever viewing of Red Desert, which NYers had the luck of being able to see on the big screen when it played at BAM in September. I’ve always loved Antonioni, but after seeing Red Desert, I’m not actually sure how my past-self could have loved him SO much before seeing this film: it is so spectacular I can’t imagine A or my love of A without it. His first color movie (and he made that fact matter), it overflows with big and tiny elements that bowl me over (and, disclaimer-wise, what’s discussed here is just what I noticed on my first viewing—there is no doubt a bunch I’m missing).
I was hooked from the start:
Great puffs of fire fill the screen with a regularity that only nature or machine could produce. You can’t see where they’re coming from or what is making them (like so much of what we’re surrounded with in our modern lives). They are majestic, dangerous, captivating. Then it’s revealed: they are coming from a smoke stack. A factory. Industry. And what better symbol of human dominion over nature than fire? I mean, where would we be without it?
And then there’s Monica. Monica Vitti’s general amazingness is not really up for debate, but seeing Red Desert as I happened to—the day after attending a screening of L’Avventura at MoMA—really shows just how amazing that general amazingness is. She acts with her whole body: you see it in L’Avventura as she writhes around trying to push Carlo away and bring him into her at the same time, and you see it in the desperation that has drenched her entire body and spirit in Red Desert. Monica’s Giuliana is suffering with essentially the same struggles as Monica’s Claudia, but here they’ve been pushed so much further (to the limit, if there were such a satisfying teleological thing, which there isn’t and that’s part of the point—even suicide doesn’t work). In L’Avventura there’s no direct acknowledgement of the emptiness inside, the sense of slipping away. It is felt but not named. But in Red Desert, Giuliana tries everything she can to draw it out, pin it down, put words to it, identify it so that she has some hope of coping with it.
With the hungry desperation of a starving and possibly feral person, and probably in an attempt to care for her son or herself, G buys a sandwich from a worker standing outside the factory. She doesn’t care that he’s already eaten part of it (someone who knew the rules of care-taking would), and she offers to pay him for it (immediately we see that she could very well have bought her own sandwich, but for some reason was unable to). She doesn’t know how to get it herself so she uses money to buy it—a perfect little analogy for the alienation caused by modern industry and capitalism, the worker alienated from his own labor. How fitting, of course, that G is, as we soon learn, the wife of a head-hauncho at this sprawling menace of a factory.
The factory, indeed the entire movie, is the locus of a troubling sense that things aren’t quite right. As G’s husband and his colleague Corrado stroll the grounds, we see a giant puff of steam erupt sideways, obscuring the landscape (if that’s the right word), the puffs so loud that they wipe out any other noise and destroy the possibility of conversation (again: metaphor). It doesn’t look normal, and a silent exchange between the two men seems to address this. We see the steam and its blanket of unknown awfulness and wonder: Is it supposed to be like that? Is this a mistake? Is something broken? Will people be harmed?
That unasked and unanswered question of IS THIS WRONG? is a silent, pervasive query hovering over everything in the film, from the industrial domination of the natural environment, to G’s eventual infidelity with Corrado, which you can’t bring yourself to fault her for. The movie is a cascade of IS THIS WRONG? and HOW WRONG IS THIS? and WHAT IS WRONG?
Noise versus silence—the unasked, the unanswered. The factory is alive but the streets are dead. That’s the opposite of how it should be, right? People are alive; machines aren’t. Yet in the middle of the night, we see G’s child’s toy robot move aimlessly back and forth in his room, bumping into things, not knowing how to change its path or set itself up, make itself stop, make itself change, make itself right. In this way, the robot toy is more like G than any of her human cohorts.
Antonioni has crafted this world for our viewing, above and beyond even the most auteurist auteurs. Giuliana, in an attempt to anchor herself to the earth, is planning to open a store. What will she sell there? She doesn’t know. What color will she paint the walls? She doesn’t know. Giuliana walks out from her shop that sells nothing onto the quiet gray street, and walks over to a quiet gray table, where a quiet gray man is selling quiet gray wares. At first glance I thought it was clay, but then realized, it is fruit! Antonioni uses paint–a groundbreaking technique (which is also how he achieves the hyperreality of Blow Up’s greenest green fields) to show us the landscape through Giuliana’s eyes. We see through them often (the blurring of faces that shows she can’t get a grasp on identity, the shifting of colors that suggests her shaky grasp on physicality), and sometimes without realizing it. The line between objective viewing and the subjective tint of a mind’s eye is blurred so that it’s not always clear which lens we’re peering though.
Giuliana’s unsuccessful attempts to define her surroundings aren’t limited to her storeless store. She is helplessly adrift. I just wish everyone who cared about me was surrounding me now, making a wall around me, Giuliana says to Corrado. When she goes to his hotel, and the clerk at the front desk asks her the name of the person she is looking for, she doesn’t understand the question at first. She puzzles over it, Name, what’s a name? before eventually realizing what’s being asked of her.
Corrado is hard to get a grasp on, for us the viewers, and for G. (Also there is clearly some historical subtext I’m missing about his foreignness—he’s Italian but not? A foreigner but not? My knowledge of this kind of thing is totally lacking.) How much of what he expressed to G was real empathy and how much just lust masquerading as understanding, creating a false front of empathy, which is what G so desperately craves. It’s not just emotional intimacy that Giuliana can’t get a hold on. Even the pleasure of physical closeness is denied to her. When she actually wants to make love, she can’t, and when she actually does make love, she doesn’t want to.
And after her failed attempt at gaining something from Corrado, she tries again. Maybe if she leaves this place, this empty gray machine, maybe if she heads to the sea, which she can see is alive, the way she wants to be, maybe then she will be saved. The sea is always changing, she’s told Corrado, which makes it hard to look at the land. With heart-wrenching desperation she asks him: What am I supposed to look at? It’s a sentiment anyone touched by depression’s quiet gray hand can empathize with. She can’t find anything salient on land (as we see repeatedly, when A show us the world through her eyes)—but maybe at sea.
She visits a ship, forms an escape plan, and asks a sailor she finds if there’s a place for her on board. The man replies in another language (I’m not sure which) and she goes on to hold an entire conversation with him without even realizing that they are speaking different languages. Really it’s not that different from all of her other conversations. Language fails. Names fail. Identify fails.
Her grasp on her own identity is as tenuous as her grasp on others’. She describes a girl, who was in a terrible car crash, who tried to take her own life. We know immediately (or at least suspect) that this girl is Giul, and eventually she knows it too. We see another version of Giuliana when she tells a story to her ailing son about a girl who swims every day in the sea. As she narrates, we see through her eyes again, her mind’s eye, and the imagery is stunning. After the bleak dreary gray of G’s actual environment, the beauty of this dream-story beach is a blow to the senses: a feast after weeks of gruel, the smell of thawing earth after months of winter, the ocean after a desert (here: literally). This is what Giuliana wants to escape to, or perhaps what she used to be. The connection between the natural landscape and the self is evident: the landscape sings to her; it becomes alive, the rocks look like flesh. Everything around her is awake and singing. Once she’s realized how alive it is, nothing will be the same.
This is what the environment should be like. But G can’t stay at the beautiful beach; she has to come back to her gray wasteland. She is no less affected by the environment here. The wasteland has its own noise, its own effect. But she can’t stay at sea. She has to come back to land.
The yellow smoke at the end is perhaps the movie’s saddest moment. In a scene that directly parallels the film’s earliest, Giuliana and her son wander the grounds. The anticlimax is just another symptom of the general hopelessness of moving forward or elsewhere, of G’s getting better—all that has happened in the movie has happened, the plot has unfolded, and yet we end up back in the very same place. The sea is always changing, but on land nothing is. As we’re shown by the inexhaustible repetitions of industrial structures that scatter the landscape throughout the film, this environment is recursive, infinite, inescapable.
When her son asks about the sickeningly yellow smoke pouring out of a smokestack, G explains it’s that color because it’s poisonous. What about the little birdies, the son wants to know. The little birdies know not to fly there anymore, G says, because if they do, they will die. This is essentially what G herself is trying to do—stay out of the yellow smoke—and perhaps trying to warn her son to do, but she is failing.
As the movie comes to a close, we see through her eyes one more time, the blur of the industrial landscape, a complex jumble of colors with no discernible features, nothing to hold on to, a sound and fury signifying nothing, which, after we step back from G’s perspective, snaps into focus as a collection of barrels and other factory detritus. Even these simple objects hold no shape to her; she is lost, awash in world with no discernible features and nothing to hold on to, trying her best to keep out of the yellow smokes that fills the bleak landscape of her existence.
So how could this movie not completely blow you away? Well, apparently quite easily. Though my movie companion didn’t fidget in impatience the way he did during the (admittedly slow-paced) first act of the four-hour screen version of The Iceman Cometh I accidentally subjected him to a few weeks prior (it was so good though!), I don’t think he was nearly as enraptured as I was. I don’t think anyone in the theater was, if the number of people scoff-laughing at the end is any indication. (HOW WAS THAT LAUGHABLE? I was fighting back tears). It sounded like they felt they’d been tricked or cheated out of something. That the “boring” anticlimax was somehow an escape on the part of the director, rather than an essential element of his message. I don’t know what film everybody else was expecting something they didn’t get from, but what I saw left me stunned and awed, my eyes a little more open, if also a little bit teary.
That’s the really ironic part.
Being educated postpostmodernism, I’m of course aware that a flim(/texts)’s “meaning” is not a one-on-one author-dictated math formula. Some of the above is perhaps not what A intended when he crafted the flim, and I’m sure I missed much of what he was trying to tell me. Same goes for that other master of “boring”: DFW. That said, I doubt anyone, including these artists themselves, would argue that these art forms are at base FOR and/or ABOUT human beings’ desire/need/maybe-impossible-quest/whathaveyou to connect with other human beings. (I’m referring most specifically to A and DFW here, but it extends.)
These artists who have so thoughtfully, carefully crafted something for us to connect to, whose very art itself is ABOUT the need to connect, the volatility and inevitable disappointing inaccuracy of language and representation, get accused of being obscure, or wordy for words sake, or boring, which they sometimes are, but why is that a bad thing? This is part of why Infinite Jest is so brilliant. Entertainment (lack of boredom) should not be the primary goal of a work of art—look at what “the Entertainment” does in IJ. It literally kills people. ‘Art’/media that is primarily for escapist entertainment purposes creates a neverending and insatiable need for itself. It makes it less and less easy for people to find satisfaction in the real world, driving them further toward escapist entertainment. It’s not healthy and it makes us sad and lonely. (Franzen said a lot more stuff a lot more eloquently about this in that DFW eulogy-of-sorts in the NYer this summer.) I’m also reminded of Cortazar’s short story “The Continuity of Parks” (same guy who wrote the short story Blow Up is based on—coincidence??), which I first read in my undergrad Intro to Comp Lit class (”Reading to Live,” was the course’s subtitle), taught by one of my favorite profs at the University of Michigan. It’s another clear cautionary tale about what passive reading can lead to, and it extends to passive viewing.
We know good things are rarely easy. If you let go of the drive to be entertained, and try to talk through things with your art, the way you would with a lover, you’ll be amazed what you find. It will stay with you for years. It will hold up a dark mirror to your world, show a haunting reflection. It will hold your hand when you’re walking down a dark road alone with what you’ve seen. And in the end, a piece of that closeness we desperately lack (a lack that Entertainment is both symptom and cause of—makes us crave and takes away from us) might just find its way in. For me, that’s worth working for.
