Ah! Here we have a proper tableau, placed upon an “invisible battleground of socio-psychological scars.” Atomization, alienation, fragmented communities, a pervasive loneliness, a vacuous intellectualism that cannot penetrate our inauthentic lives. Fabulist, phoniness, cinematic, play-acting, etc.
“I don’t think life can be like these strange worlds which bar reentry once the doors close.”
“I’ve never known how strangers can make conversation…It’s best to sit there in silence or talk a lot, which is the same…”
In Tati, real life moves at a leisurely pace. It is a natural movement. It ambles, winds and weaves, hesitates, shifts, reverses course, then suddenly is dragged along by the undertow of contrary forces, jostled and shoved, this way and that. The movement is mimicked in both narrative and temporal form. Nothing is rushed. There is no punch line to get to, no hard set up in order to sell the joke. The gags are there but no cue card held high to remind the audience when to laugh. The humor emerges, stealthily, by our insipid attempts to thwart this natural movement by making it conform to the artificial patterns of modern life.
If real life is natural, modern life is steadfastly artificial. Modern life imposes artificial patterns that slowly strangle the joy of living. Modernity appears and is of no practical benefit (chairs are beautifully designed, but useless to sit in). We are forced to adapt to these artificial patterns in a clumsy manner (uneven hops along stepping stones) because modern life interferes with our natural movement. Children and dogs best embody this ideal, while Hulot is the grown up child bumbling his way through life, caught between two conflicting worlds. The conflict of pattern: this is Tati’s genius and the neverending source of his humor.
So where does such a finely ingrained sense of humor come from? Allow me a moment of speculation. The comedian sees the world as a well-choreographed dance. Only the dance partners keep stepping on each other’s toes. “Les lignes géométriques ne rendent pas les gens aimables” (“Geometrical lines do not produce likeable people”).
Watching a Tati film (Monsieur Hulot ‘s Holiday, Mon Oncle, Playtime), a wide smile appears on my face, then grows into a grin, then slips into a chuckle, then finally overwhelms me in an uncontrolled fit of laughter. If you are in on the joke, there is no end to the joy of these films. But beyond the profound humor, beyond the biting satire against the cult of consumerism and the comedy of manners, there is something so grounded in Tati, so humanistic, something that so resembles real life, that an incredible feeling of familiarity and nostalgia takes hold.
Do not rush Tati. Do not insist we get to the joke in a speedy fashion. Live in his world. Act as the mischievous whimsical children and be swept along by the play of irreverent forces. Set aside your personal demands, your checklists, your projected desires on the screen. Be free. Be alive. Then carry that spirit into your real lives.
If life is movement, can we ever be happy?
The God Problem: Joy flows from movement. Happiness is mere contentedness. Begin the day in joy, end the day in happiness. Sorrow yields new joys.
The problem with AI is not its ethics. It’s the aesthetics, that is to say, a problem of conception. You can assemble all the pieces, make everything adhere to a strict pattern of seeming life, of virtual consciousness , and yet we are left barren, no life, no consciousness. Why? Because the truth isn’t out there waiting to be seized like a prized possession or devoured like a meal. The truth is found in the aesthetic experience, a shared sensibility that shifts and vibrates and oscillates in every fiber of our being. AI, at least in its nascent form, attempts to fixate its defined boundaries. AI quickly becomes a mental cage (as we fret and obsess about making its ridiculous output somewhat less ridiculous). It is dead life without time. Time is the secret ingredient that we are lacking. Experience under conditions of time yields consciousness. This is life, this is biology. And like life, we resist any aesthetic that feels like shackles and chains. The anarchy of our spirit.
Tati’s metaphysics can be summarized as follows: Nothing goes according to plan, the way God intended.
Tati’s revelation is a miracle.
“Life’s real joy is found in making others happy.”
“Bad guys like us never die. It’s the innocent who die.”
There is a unifying principle that underlies Fassbinder’s critique of modernity. Fascism isn’t a political program. Fascism is an inherent, pervasive condition, a cancer at the center of modern life. How do we deal with this fascism? How do we hold it at bay? Characters seek out the safety of anonymity, the cold comfort of depression, passionless lives, the perfection of inauthentic, tired, rote mechanical repetition. This is one possible response to fascism. Violence, extreme self-destruction is another. Neither are a cure, of course, but a temporary salve, a mild palliative at best. Sadomasochism in this sense is not a disease unto itself in need of further psychological treatment, but a logical response to fascism. The cauldron broils, the frustrations builds. Scapegoats become necessary. There must be a cause to our ills. This is why left wing critiques were off mark. You can not reduce the complex psychological makeup of a character to prototype. Petra’s loneliness, madness, and cruelty have nothing to do with her lesbianism, and everything to do with the fascism of modern life.
Is there no way out of this? Perhaps not. It is a bleak, pessimistic view of modern lives. The role of the artist is to bring this disquieting truth to the forefront, examine it under extreme conditions, not to present a 15-point political program to cure fascism once and for all.
What if we inverse the cinematic denouement: the hero dies and the bad guy wins?
Well, that’s just tragedy, no?
Okay, but what if we turn it into a mass slaughter?
Cue: The Great Silence by Sergio Corbucci. The effect is oddly unsatisfying. Why oddly? After all, the audience is denied the typical gratification, the tasty dessert of Justice revenged after a cold, hard meal. What’s odd about that? Well, this is not the satisfaction, I mean. What I mean is this: there is no redemption, no arc to justify the purpose of the story as presented. Not character redemption, but a narrative one. There is only cruelty and oblivion. We are moving away from political pessimism and closer to political nihilism or quietism, defeatism, though I doubt that’s the impression the Director was attempting to convey. On an artistic level, what am I supposed to do with the hour and forty odd minutes preceding that point? I can’t flush the experience away, nor would I want to. It’s a great film! The setting is inspired. The snow bound western, the stuff of legend. It’s movement is anatomical and clunky in parts, but that give it a real charm. The acting is powerful. Kinski is unsettling in his calm sociopathy. When is Trintignant ever not incredible? Muted Hope in a brutal world. There are no fair fights. The man who is as good as his word is as good as dead. The ending makes sense as a rejection of cinematic troupes. But we are no longer in the realm of drama perhaps and have almost crossed over to…documentary?
The promise and lie of cinema is that it can reveal unbarred the living soul. In this, I detect a cautionary tale of the dangers of hyperrealism. We’ve become too sophisticated cinephiles. We know full and goddamn well that film is a projection of our desires. But as we lose a feeling of reality in our lives we seek a projection of our lost reality into film. Hyperrealism is the threshold, live at the max, dial up to 100, exaggerated authenticity, etc. The desire to be grafted onto the medium of film, to be absorbed and lost in its orgiastic possibilities.
The Hack 