Torn in Dream

This piece was commissioned for the ephemeral Filmdagkrant – the special daily version of Filmkrant – for publication & hand-to-hand distribution during the International Film Festival Rotterdam at the start of 2004.

Whatever your opinion of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), there is one moment in it that makes everybody laugh: the spectacle of Uma Thurman as The Bride striding through an airport with her lethal sword exposed. With this nonchalant joke, the movie tells us how blithely disconnected it is from the real, present-day world.

Actually, when you think about it, the only symptomatic meaning in that entire, jolly, unreal film is this: the heroine’s absolute, global mobility. Tarantino is so fond of the imaginary airline he created for his killer-babe that he keeps returning to it like a B movie gag. It allows her to go anywhere, do anything, in a flash.

No airline, no airport, no airspace regulation can hold her. Her bloody heroic quest is as simply achieved as the line squiggled on a kitschy, animated map. Likewise, murder is a consumerist shopping list: Uma ticks off the names one by one (in a car, on a plane: all is movement and travel in Kill Bill), like Homer Simpson having to occasionally remind himself just who he is.

And this Bride is no slouch, self-development wise, when it comes to the business of international border-crossing. When she arrives in Japan, she can speak perfect Japanese (with Sonny Chiba, no less). Local languages and customs, no matter how complex or secretive: they’re all a piece of cake.

It’s almost as easy for Ewan McGregor as Edward Bloom in Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2004). At least we see him devouring an Asian language book – for about two seconds – on the wartime plane taking him to the other side of the world. Once there, he is perfectly fluent, and his charm hooks him up with a Siamese-twin pair who aid in his global barnstorming.

Since both of these films are American, the tour of world cultures is (naturally) subservient to a single-minded, tunnel-vision, individualistic quest: get revenge – or find a girl. Both films spin around the notion of family: families lost, families broken, families reconstituted; symbolic and real families. Transmission between the generations – Uma and her baby, Ewan and his father – becomes an intense motif.

Meanwhile – movie fans have to shake themselves to sometimes remember this – the real world is in a really terrible state. What trace is there of September 11 or the war on Iraq in these films? It seems an old-fashioned question, but today it’s unavoidable. And, today, good old Hollywood escapism twists itself into new, grotesque forms.

Burton slinks into his cute mode of Magic Realism, while Tarantino waxes on – incoherently, we might add – about the crucial difference between the ‘Quentin world’ of his previous films and the ‘movie world’ of Kill Bill. OK, but if the Quentin-world is already a movie-world, and neither of them declare or explore any kind of relation to the real world, do we have any fruitful dialectic there?

The fantasy of global mobility propagated by Kill Bill and Big Fish (two short-sharp, ultra-American titles!) is at absolute odds with the messy, ugly realities of terrorism, war, social upheaval. But hang on: maybe, in the worst possible way, both films project a kind of an awful truth, a revelation of a country’s mindset. It’s akin to what Siegfried Kracauer mused on back in the 1920s: escapist whimsy is the most helpful X-ray of a society because, in a sense, nothing is hidden there, everything is bared to the light.

So: absolute mobility is the fantasy that – suitably displaced – wafts like a cool breeze from the aggressive, beyond-negotiation foreign policy of the USA. The pained romance of internal unification – of hearts, couples, families – flies in the face of the massive breakage of social structures and cultural traditions elsewhere in the world. A suffering that is rendered unseen, unwitnessed, immaterial in our corporate mass media, in all the mediocre Lara Croft and Bad Boys entertainments (similarly obsessed with instantaneous world travel and gleeful destruction), and also in our auteur-blockbuster movies by the likes of Tarantino and Burton.

Just eight years previously – a universe away and a lifetime ago, it now seems – Tim Burton had a radically different sense of humour happening. In Mars Attacks! (1996), he turned the old sci-fi cliché of an older era (which survived intact into the contemporaneous Independence Day [1996]) completely on its head: if it’s an American movie about a global invasion, then only America, effectively, exists, and only America matters – the devastation of France, say, can be registered by a strangled cry off-screen on the end of a telephone line. Fritz Lang could not have managed that massacre more economically!

It is a strange thing, doubtless a somewhat distorted perception, but almost every film or body of work I currently look at from the past has more of a critical angle on global reality than these present-day extravaganzas. Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), for instance: a political disaster occurs in that story precisely because an unlovely Colombian killer cannot speak English, and doesn’t know his way around Washington. He is, on all counts, the anti-Uma.

Or the cinema of Raúl Ruiz, to which Rotterdam is paying homage this year [2004]. Many of us, at one time or another, have regarded his films as essentially apolitical, devoted more to metaphysical games of identity, storytelling, and what they call on Star Trek the time-space continuum than pressing matters of history. But, right now, his films seem to me insistently, disquietingly political: torture, murder, terrorism, corporatism, mainstream movie escapism, government dissimulation and media disinformation, the casual destruction of cultures and lives – all this fills his movies, from the earliest Chilean experiments to That Day (2003) and Vertigo of the Blank Page (2004). And suddenly, compared to the cutthroat sentimental destinies of Uma and Ewan, the Ruizian litany of identities lost and scattered seems like not such a bad passport to our new, horrifying world …

At any rate, I prefer Ruizian horror to the mainstream, cult and indie versions of the genre at present. Today, the subversiveness of George Romero, Wes Craven, John Carpenter et al is forgotten, trampled underfoot by a glut of horror movies (28 Days Later [2002], My Little Eye [2002], The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remade [2003], Cabin Fever [2003] … ) that refuse to see anything much in the genre’s rich, ever-potential panoply of socio-cultural metaphors.

In Australia, the Spierig brothers’ horror film Undead (2003) and Richard Franklin’s woeful psychological thriller Visitors (2003) show (respectively) aliens rounded up in compounds or desperate refugees out at sea, without the slightest hint of social relevance or critical irony.

At the start of this underwhelming, so-called revival of horror, The Blair Witch Project (1999) inadvertently said it all: the biggest terror for gormless young Americans is to be confronted with unreadable (to them) foreign-made maps. And that’s what international film festivals like Rotterdam are for: the difficult but salutary experience of foreignness, the resistance pitched by pockets of locality to the fantasies of easy global mobility and the instant surrender of borders.

I dream of a version of the Kill Bill saga by Elia Suleiman in which The Bride and her magnificent sword are stopped at visa control, with suitably catastrophic and/or hilarious results …

© Adrian Martin December 2003