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Project X
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Years ago, I had a quotation from Georges Bataille
stuck above my desk: “Laughter is more divine and in meaning more elusive than
tears”. At that time, tears often seemed to me to be so much theatricality: mock hysteria, contrived
sentimentality, media manipulation – too obvious and too anguished. Laughter,
on the other hand, was ironic, complex, knowing, playful. Strangely enough, it
was The Trial of Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin, 1974), seen one night on TV
in 1983 – particularly the last hour’s worth, which is a non-stop festival of
weeping and wailing – which suggested to me, at last, that tears can be pretty
damn elusive too. Crying can still be petty (just as laughter can be reflex),
but I’m more taken these days with the excess and the profundities of
sentimentality.
Jonathan Kaplan’s remarkable Project X brings
all this back to me. It’s a film that will make many people uncomfortable, for
it is a full-on tearjerker about … animals (chimps, to be precise). Oh god,
animals – in the Disney-Spielberg school of (fake) sentimentality, those cutesy,
wide-eyed, defenceless creatures that exist to take the wash of our mawkish
tears. Animals, aliens and children all function as the same thing in a certain
kind of cinema – as reassuring minors who
allow us to exercise our parental or social-welfare mentalities. These Others
are almost always eventually made same, integrated into community, family and
ego; never the question of a threat, never the shadow of a doubt. You could
call it the E.T. Syndrome.
Something else is going on in Project X. Here
is an intransigent bunch of chimps – some old, some taciturn, all rebellious;
each one characterised with a set of unique desires and goals. There’s a hero,
a leader amongst them (named Virgil), but he is – in true socialist-realist
style – the representative of a collectivity, not anyone particularly special.
You might imagine this would all constitute another
familiar variation on animal cuteness: making animals appear, move and behave
just like humans. Animals as, once again, our reassuring mirror. But Project
X begs to differ on this point also. It keeps its humans and animal
characters resolutely separate: what the chimps do, they achieve for themselves,
and they don’t even take Jimmy (Matthew Broderick) with them into paradise at the
end.
In fact, what Jimmy is made to learn in the course of
the tale is that the chimps are a kind of untouchable and sometimes barely
fathomable Other – to himself, and to human culture in general. He observes
their desire and their vast, despairing rage; and he respects them from his
proper distance. It’s a moral that runs through several of Kaplan’s films,
particularly the breathtaking Heart Like a Wheel (1983): even within contrived, bogus
units like the nuclear family, each member of the group must learn the lesson
of his/her own and everyone else’s fundamental autonomy.
There’s a strong link between the way people typically
use screen-animals as figures upon which to project their fantasies and
anxieties, and the way those same people relate to real-life animals,
particularly domestic pets. Everyone knows the sentimental attachment to a pet
can be enormous – to the point of becoming frightening. I fully believe all
those tales of old people on their deathbeds called back to life by the meow of
their previously lost beloved cat. I believe it, because (some) pets have the
power to transform me, too, in a split-second, into an intense, attentive
child. My voice, my manner, everything changes when a cat approaches me. It’s a
moment when my self meets a little bit of my other that is inside me –and
never knows quite what to make of the encounter afterwards.
Early in Project X, as Teri (Helen Hunt) meets
Virgil for the first time, she is told to expect a long period during which
they will slowly get used to each other. In immediate contradiction of this prediction,
Virgil jumps straight into her arms (it’s about here that the audience’s tears
start flowing). This scene makes me think that animals (in life as on screen)
symbolise, for we poor humans, the ideal of a pure, unmediated emotional
relation: all heart, no defences.
This is what true, valid sentimentality is; the dream
of breaking through numerous walls of personal and social repression and being
able to let the energy of one’s emotions flow straight. Pets allow many, many
people to live out this ideal quietly, in a socially sanctioned and hence
invisible way; but what they give to their cat they might never be able to give
to their lover, parent or child. This is not simply a funny or pathetic state
of affairs; it’s actually (to me) awfully sad.
I find it amusing that so much animal-speak goes under
the hippie alibi of ecology. The ecological cause is, of course, valid and
important. But the human love of animals is more often like a love that dares
not speak its name; through these handy creatures, we play out the dramas and
walk the fault-lines of our own repression in the social order, not the natural
order.
In fact, his psychodrama of human and animal, self and
other cuts two ways. The animal is the human shrunken to its essential.
Sentimentality translates as pure heart, unimpeded emotional flow. This is our
ideal, positive Other – the chimp, the lion, the dinosaur. But there is also a
negative other, a darker mirror image. Sometimes when humanity shrinks down to
its core, that core is revealed to be something inhuman, nasty, disgusting. Or
just an inert, unfeeling blob. Then it’s time to let in, not those creatures
who bounce and play, but the ones who fly, crawl and
drool – the insects and the pests.
Note: A later version of these thoughts on animals,
aliens, children and Others in cinema appeared as the chapter “Dear Data” in my
book Phantasms (1994).
MORE Kaplan: Brokedown Palace, Immediate Family, Love Field, Unlawful Entry, White Line Fever, Fallen Angels © Adrian Martin June 1987 |
