The etymology of “monster” offers a few entries into Jodies Foster’s thought-provoking movie. The Latin term monstrum highlights the ominous (and signifying) dimension of her filmic project. The story calls forth different features of our world, with some underlying ethical call(ing).
“Money Monster”, avowedly referring to the name of a TV program that occupies center stage in the film, conjures up the Sphinx of Antiquity who would devour those who could not decipher its riddles. The TV show turns serious matters (investments) into a form of crude entertainment, trading numbers and human existence.
A cruel game dematerializing real-life consequences, dismissing responsibility as role-play, reenacting the cruel gods but without the relief of a deus ex machina.
Chronos eating its own children.
Let’s consider the different protagonists/players in this highly choreographed cinematic achievement (show) and Kaleidoscopic collision of images and motifs.
Danny Boyle’s movie proposes another version of SF come true—a tale of warfare as stardom. Steve Jobs dramatizes the true visionary era of the advent of the personal computer and the rise of its “oracle”, as one protagonist labels the eponymous hero. The early words and prophecies sound like history now, yet the magic remains. The film stops short of the recent developments to focus on the beginning pages of this modern Odyssey and groundbreaking steps of its undaunted Ulysses. We share in the enthusiasm of the early chapters of a true “poem”—the making of a wonderful machine (little did we know, then, that the tool would claim unexpected prerogatives as a quasi extension of the human body).
A lot of fans have complained about “repetitions”. But repetitions in a different context are repetitions with a difference. So is Star Wars: The Force Awakens sequel, prequel, or coquel?
With The Hateful Eight, Tarentino once again skillfully blends Western and Southern genres, and uses the resources of the grotesque mode, calling on a type of comedy that comes with the baggage of terror. The French title “Les huit salopards” silences the ambiguity inherent in the term “hateful”: if Tarentino’s latest characters are “bastards”, they are also full of hate, which is perhaps the main issue of the movie.
“I don’t record a dry history of events and facts. I’m writing a history of human feelings. What people thought, understood and remembered during the event. What they believed in or mistrusted, what illusions, hopes and fears they experienced … I’m searching life for observations and nuances, details. Because my interest in life is not the event as such, not war as such … What I am interested in is what happens to the human being…” (quoted in NYRB November 19, 2015, p. 10)
2015 Literature Novel Prize Svetlana Alexievich’s words could be used as an epigraph for Suffragette. The subject’s encounter with the Law and her/his resilience is given pride of place in this historical drama dealing with the suffragette movement in early 20th century Britain. Working wife and mother Maud has to deal with the law of the jungle prevailing in the microcosm of the laundry where she has been abused since her childhood; inspector Steed has to come to terms with the laws he has to enforce against his own sympathies. The movie artfully rehearses History and stories with a cameo appearance of Meryl Streep who is very convincing in her role as Mrs Pankhurst, the mentor and politician towering above her devoted followers. Depictions of a political class ruling through hypocrisy and empty promises intertwine with sketches of individual journeys to empowerment. The film also explores the theme of female bonding and solidarity in an unforgiving world. A turning point in the battle takes place with Emily’s personal sacrifice in an act of self immolation reminiscent of recent similar gestures, when all that is left to oppose the logic of power is your own body—whether it means standing nonplussed in front of approaching military tanks or setting yourself on fire in a desperate attempt to draw some attention to your existence. Mrs. Pankhurst ‘s call “Never give up the fight” is literalized by one person’s decision to go to her sure death in order to bring life to others—a martyr to the “cause” in an ultimate form of commitment and generosity.
Samuel Beckett : “If you don’t love me, I shall not be loved”
Israel Horovitz’s film is based on his own play. There IS a theatrical dimension to the movie, in particular beautiful and powerful dialogues. And a “huis clos” mood until a cathartic exit opens up. The movie rehearses a couple of enjoyable interfilmic references (the mirror scene of Taxi Driver; the two-fold ending of Deliverance); it stages the Parisian street and a reluctant “Flaneur”. At first, Mathias Gold (known in New York City as “Jim”) fits the cliché of the expatriate who has shed his American identity with the hope that France will adopt him: a man of two cities, he soon becomes a man of two countries. Displaced, Mathias ultimately comes to terms with space and—perhaps more importantly—with time. His search for a new future indeed brings him face to face with his past as he revisits his roots and identity by retrieving the lost link with his father. In the process, he moves from being a passive observer to being a participant in city life, as illustrated in his encounters with the opera singer, for example: the first time he sees her, he just overhears her singing; the second time he meets her, he gives her the cue and they sing together in a “Paris is a Moveable Feast” moment. Gradually, Mathias exorcises his demons, regaining agency over his life. His journey leads him to pay tribute to his dead father, coming to terms with a mysterious quote by Samuel Beckett he can now appropriate for himself.
The thematic explorations revolve around family and storytelling. Love/passion versus family commitment/social status. Loneliness and aging. Remembering and forgetting. Nemesis and haunting. Illusions and delusions. Curses and sudden reconciliations. Imagined hurts and real wounds. The master narrative is the family story patiently reconstructed from pictures, artifacts, memories offered or extorted, words uttered amidst screams and tears. And silences.
The other ingredients of the film include a gallery of interesting characters such as a real estate agent who lives on a barge on “the blood of Paris”—a tramp of some sort who, like Mathias, might be in search of meaning and truth. The playful linguistic dimension—the “franglais” and the recycling/recontextualizing of selected colorful expressions (“petit bouquet” and fellow travelers)—illustrates what Rosi Braidotti describes as “words not standing still”, and “following their own ways” (Nomadic Subjects 29). As she adds, “There are no mother tongues, just linguistic sites from which one takes her starting point” (NS 40). From her/his old lady to her/his new one, there is a will. And a way.
Wim Wenders’s movies bespeak his fascination for the American Wilderness. In such films as Paris, Texas and Don’t Come Knocking, however, the Western hero is prevented from walking away into the sunshine: he is trapped in a past that just will not go away.
Is the stage, for the actor, what the arena is for the bullfighter? The reference to Hemingway early in the film provides unusual grist for the theatrical mill. Like the torero, the actor has to deal with “grace under pressure” and keep his “purity of line” in the face of adversity. For him, adversity means “losing it” to bad memory, fatigue and aging. The public might embody the bulls he has to face throughout his career: he cannot turn his back on them for fear of undergoing symbolic death—becoming a “freak” or a fraud. Yet, the fiercest bull is his own self roaming on the secret stage of his expectations and delusions.
Hannah Arendt notes in The Origin of Totalitarianism that the disasters of the twentieth century had proved that a globalized order might “produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages” (quoted in New York Review of Books June 2013, p. 6).
The artist’s task is to find the right language and images to address the breaking of this world—in particular, to reintroduce the literal into the figurative, the raw material behind the symbolic gloss. French philosopher Jean Pierre Dupuy, for example, has argued that the financial world is a way to contain (contenir) the violence of competition, placing it into acceptable (symbolic) forms away from primal—and primary— physical competition.