Bang Go the Caresses

Posted on July 3, 2013 by James Romberger

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Contempt inventively deviates from cinematic convention and probes gender relations while it explores miscommunication between people. The storyline is loosely adapted from a 1954 novel by Alberto Moravia, Il Disprezzo [A Ghost at Noon) and depicts the production of a film-within-a film, a cinematic version of Homer’s classic Odyssey. Multileveled ambiguities complicate the narrative of the movie enough that many writers have misinterpreted Godard’s premise. They fail to understand why the female protagonist becomes disillusioned with her husband. I will interrogate those critical misapprehensions to suggest another reading of her response. I will further attend to a sequence that is rarely mentioned in the copious literature about Contempt. The scene in question is a mise en abyme staged in a movie theatre auditorium, which displays in microcosmic form the primary deconstructive and reflexive techniques of visuals and sound that Godard uses throughout the film. In that scene, through a critique of the dominant ideologies of Hollywood and by exploring male and female relations, Godard reveals how women are diminished.

In an interview done while he was working on the film, Godard reduced the plot down to one simple sentence: “It’s the story of a girl who is married to a man and for rather subtle reasons begins to despise him” (Feinstein, 9). This quote indicates that the director considers the primary theme of the film to be the disaffection of the couple, with a particular focus on the feminine rationale; however, the way in which Godard reveals the response of a woman to her husband’s behavior is far more complex.

The narrative can be more properly synopsized as follows: a young writer, Paul Javal (played by Michel Piccoli), is commissioned to write a screenplay for a filmed version of Homer’s Odyssey, which is to be directed by Fritz Lang, who plays a version of himself. The film is financed and produced by an extremely arrogant American, Jerry Prokosch (played by Jack Palance), who cannot speak the languages of those involved in the film production, but relies on his assistant/interpreter Francesca (played by Giorgia Moll). Prokosch’s demands strain not only the progress of the film, but also Paul’s marriage. The writer takes out the brunt of his frustrations on his wife Camille (played by Brigitte Bardot) and he uses her to curry favor with the producer, which eventually leads to the separation of the couple and her death.

When Contempt was first released in 1963, it was the most widely promoted and renowned of Godard’s films and indeed, of any film connected with the French New Wave. A huge literature has built up around the film in the time since its release and a newer burst of analysis occurred after the release of the Criterion Collection DVD in 2002. However, many of the critics that have been written about it, both at the time of its release and more recently, seem to have misread the reasons why Camille leaves the callow, compromised writer Paul, to go with the crude and bullying American producer Prokosch. This confusion is in spite of, or perhaps due to, the fact that so many writers have dismissed the importance of Godard’s story content. They echo the commentary in David A. Cook’s textbook, A History of Narrative Film: “The narrative portion of Le Mépris, which concerns the dissolution of the scriptwriter’s marriage, is less important than Godard’s use of the self-reflexive conceit” (542). Cook’s claim results in a distorted view of the film because he privileges Godard’s reflexive techniques over the content of his narrative. In fact, the nature of Godard’s practice is such that the representations and socio-political content in his narratives are every bit as important as the cinematic forms of depiction that he uses. They are intricately and essentially bound together. Godard is always self-reflexively pointing to the way the film industry and his personal life are tied together and how representations inform the relationships between men and women.

Alternatively, the cinematographer of Contempt, Raoul Coutard, remarked that the director made the film to be a “million-dollar (love) letter” to his soon-to-be-ex-wife Anna Karina (Horton, 210). Seen in this light, Contempt is Godard’s self-analysis of certain of his own negative behaviors, which by explicating them in the course of the story, he acknowledges to have contributed to the eventual dissolution of his marriage. Therefore, the film is rather a confession or apologia, than a love letter as such. There is a high degree of personal investment in the narrative, which shows that that narrative should be accorded the same level of critical attention as the technical aspects of the film.

Many have said that the success of the film is largely due to the conspicuous presence of the famous beauty Brigitte Bardot in the cast. Her erotic presence and star power inform public reception. Likewise, veteran American tough-guy character actor Palance is used effectively as the American producer Prokosch. His casting incorporates the audience’s expectations, as noted by critic Robert Stam:

In the cinema the performer…brings along a kind of baggage, a thespian intertext formed by the totality of antecedent roles.(…) By casting Jack Palance as the hated film producer Prokosch in Contempt, the auteurist Godard brilliantly exploited the sinister memory of Palance’s previous roles as a barbarian (in The Barbarians, 1959) and as Attila the Hun (in Sign of the Pagans, 1959). This producer, the casting seems to be telling us, is both a gangster and a barbarian, a suggestion confirmed by the brutish behavior of the character (548).

Palance is so famed as a portrayer of gangsters, even to the French, that his presence in the film telegraphs “villain” to the audience fully as much as Fritz Lang indicates “venerated director” or Bardot indicates “sex kitten.” Palance and Bardot are both used reflexively within Contempt, as their extra-screen images carry meaning in very different ways into the narrative of the film. They each indicate stereotyping, or rather they reflect the traditional male and female characters that are produced for Hollywood narratives, but in Contempt they demonstrate how those stereotypes complicate real-world expectations.

In fact, male/female relations are a central concern of Contempt. At a screening that Lang has arranged to show Paul and Prokosch rushes of the film in progress, the producer arrogantly makes claims to understand how “the Gods” feel, but then leers and sniggers in a degraded way at shots of a nude woman swimming onscreen. He forces his assistant and interpreter Francesca to bend over, while he uses her back as a desk to write a check buying Paul’s rewriting services.

Disturbingly, Francesca serves his efforts to control the film, since she is not only selective in how she chooses to translate Prokosch’s English words for the film team, but also, she edits what she relays of what they say back to him.

Stam also points out how Francesca chooses to perform her functions as translator: “(she)….mediates between the monolingual American producer Prokosch and his more polyglot European interlocutors.(…) Francesca’s hurried…translations invariably miss a nuance, smooth over an aggression, or exclude an ambiguity” (549). As will be seen to also apply to the other female characters, Francesca primarily is ventriloquized by the male characters; the words of Prokosch and the other male character are filtered through Francesca. She does not speak her own thoughts or opinions, but can only edit, at best. Francesca sometimes subverts her employer’s interests — when Lang frequently makes disparaging remarks about the producer in languages that Prokosch doesn’t understand, she often either mitigates them by altering their meaning, or doesn’t bother to translate them at all. However, her discretions regarding Prokosch’s proclamations and the responses they elicit are wasted on the multilingual Lang, at least, because he is aware of exactly what Prokosch is saying.

Many critics have wondered why Camille falls out of love with Paul in the course of the story For instance Colin McCabe says that he cannot see how Paul’s behavior can “explain [Camille’s] contempt for her husband, nor her decision to have an affair with Prokosch.” (155). McCabe misconstrues the reasons for the couple’s disaffection and blames it, as if by default, on the woman involved. This is a misreading apparently based on the spurious, sexist views of “liberated” female sexuality that were prevalent at the time the film was first released, rather than anything seen in the film. Significantly, Camille is traded like a commodity between Paul and Prokosch. Neither man cares about her opinion. Paul silences her and betrays her trust. He and Prokosch both attempt to remove her agency. This represents the way in which the dominant ideologies of Hollywood deprives women of their voices and uses them only for their physical beauty in films.

Despite any protestations Paul makes to Camille and to Lang in his consultations with the director, whose advice he seems to ignore, the writer goes along with Prokosch’s desires regarding the script he is supposed to be working on. In his behavior, Paul shows himself to be no better in his way than Prokosch is in his. It is notable that to curry favor with Prokosch, Paul repeatedly pushes Camille at the American. First, Paul arranges for Camille to ride with Prokosch in his sports car. It is the first major blow to the marriage. Camille is disgusted that Paul entrusts her to the care of such a man. Paul is then late himself in getting to where Prokosch drives her and he makes an unconvincing explanation for his tardiness. Francesca arrives at the destination on her bicycle belatedly and just after Paul, which gives them the appearance of collusion and we, the viewers, cannot say whether or not there is justification for such an implication.

Subsequently, Camille’s worst suspicions are apparently borne out when later, she enters the interior of the Capri residence to see her husband casually fondling the interpreter. Camille observes that Lang is also forced to work with Prokosch, but shows obvious contempt for the producer.

Throughout the film, Paul displays no ethical backbone at all. He whines to Camille and vacillates about whether or not to compromise his talents, as he is unquestionably in the process of doing just that. He has taken Prokosch’s check after the producer made a fool of himself in an absurd tantrum. Yet, Paul blames Camille for his compromises. He says he must do so in order to make more money to pay for the apartment that she likes. In his escalating argument with her, Paul condescendingly describes Camille as a “typist” who he has somehow elevated in status by his attentions, even though typing is the only activity we see him do.

Additionally, Paul has been hiding things from his wife that she subsequently discovers: that he is a member of the Communist Party and that he has a gun. In the extended apartment scene, the entire relationship slips over the edge when he unexpectedly, shockingly slaps her. She then says that she fears him and that “it wasn’t the first time either,” implying that he has physically abused her previously. Later, Paul pushes Camille on Prokosch again and insists that she leave with him on his boat while Paul remains behind on set. Paul later spies Camille and Prokosch kissing, and blames Camille.

Paul brings a gun onto the set for the purposes of threatening Prokosch, but he does not follow through, apparently because it would endanger his employment.

The auditorium scene (the chapter titled “7. An Audition” on the DVD) is rarely noted in articles and papers about Contempt, but it forms a microcosmic view of many of the most important themes of Godard’s innovative mise-en-scène. It can be usefully examined by splitting its elements into two parts: one that focuses on the visual aspects of the scene and one that concerns itself with Godard’s use of sound. The scene is staged in a movie theatre and/or auditorium that is being used for a casting call that is set up in the form of a dance performance.
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Visuals

The scene in question is prefaced by another, much shorter scene that takes place in a cab. This short interlude links the very famous long take within Paul and Camille’s apartment to the scene under particular examination here, the casting call that takes place in an auditorium. After the emotional sequence in the apartment, Camille escapes in a cab, trying to leave Paul behind, but he runs to catch up to the vehicle and hops in. There is a brief interchange between the couple and then Camille apparently surrenders, to be taken to the casting call. Her anger and disgust at Paul is emphasized by the abrupt imposition of a dark filter over her image. This is one of several occlusions of Camille, which foreshadow what becomes of her at the end of the film and also echo the use of colored filters in the nude scene at the beginning of the film.

In the present scene, the dark filter leaves only the silhouette of Camille’s head and the whites of her eyes visible, whites which glitter strangely. The filter simulates a temporal passage from daylight to early evening, but it also represents an occlusion of the character of Camille. The darkening, taken with the swelling at that moment of the non-diegetic score, symbolically predicts her fate at the end of the film.

Inside the theatre, the girl onstage mimes a pop song as she dances in an eroticized manner, wiggling her hips and shimmying from left to right and vice versa. The other performers behind her onstage simply walk in male/female pairs from one side of the stage to the other, only to turn and walk back again, repeatedly. One of the couples separates as a woman goes offstage; her male partner then wanders back and forth among the other couples as if confused. They are all shot with sweeping back-and-forth horizontal movements of the camera. This is similar the other slowly swiveling horizontal pan shots in this film, but in this case the actors have their lower legs and feet cropped out.

Their movements become groundless and their shifting figures seem to be sliding in different directions, which creates a dizzying, unmoored sensation in the viewer. Simultaneously, the shadows of the performers project via multiple light sources onto the movie screen behind them and above the stage, replicating their images in ghostly overlays and reflexively emphasizing the nature of film itself, as 2-dimensional images representing 3-dimensional reality, created by projected light. The lead dancer lip-synchs the song while she dances with occasional odd high-stepping leg movements, as if pulling to extricate her legs from a mire.

When the view reverses to show the audience and the production team in the auditorium, again with slow, to-and-fro horizontal pans, Lang and Camille are on the left side of the aisle. Camille speaks to Lang and they exchange private gestures of disgust about those on the other side of the aisle, but we cannot hear what she says. Francesca is behind them, reading a newspaper and translating for Prokosch, so she is heard, but she is often blocked from view. On the right side of the aisle, Paul sits with Prokosch, who eventually rests his arm on Paul’s shoulder in an overbearing manner that implies Paul is simply furniture. A photographer repeatedly emerges from behind Paul and Prokosch to crouch in the center of the aisle and shoot pictures with a flashbulb of what is transpiring onstage (aiming towards the fourth wall that separates viewer and film).

As they are leaving, Prokosch crows that he has convinced the singer to appear nude at a later shoot. This resonates with the major demand made on Godard by one of the real producers involved with Contempt, the American Joseph Levine, that a nude scene of Bardot be added to the beginning of the film. Godard managed to turn this compromise to his advantage by making that scene work beautifully and support his narrative. However, that was not Levine’s desire. He just wanted Brigitte Bardot naked in the film for commercial reasons. In Hollywood, even such a star as Bardot is only there to stimulate the erotic desires of a male audience. Sex sells; it is the basis of the economy of cinema. At the end of the scene, the film team goes up through the aisles of seats while discussing the actors’ roles within the adaptation of Odyssey. Camille rejects Paul’s conciliatory efforts, but reserves a smile for Lang when he cites her (Bardot’s real) famous initials, “B.B.” Camille then removes herself from the group to pass through an upper row of seats, separated from the others. Prokosch moves ahead and reaches the exit first; he then turns, dramatically placing one leg up on the seats at the end of the row Camille is navigating. When Prokosch asks Camille why she doesn’t speak, the theatre lights are cut and she is again plunged into darkness, one not quite so deep as that which enveloped her in the preceding scene in the cab, but echoing its affect. The shadow around Camille obscures her and reduces her to just a shadow, as she reiterates her muteness.
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Sound

The sound of the scene is also key to deciphering its reflexive narrative qualities. Camille and the “singer” onstage are depicted as voiceless, sexualized bodies. Francesca is also voiceless, but in a somewhat different way; she functions as a mediator and such limited agency as she has is limited to withholding small bits of information. These characters symbolize the roles forced on women by Hollywood that relegate them to a lower class. Women may perform, but words are put into their mouths by men and their acting roles are most often passive and subservient—they may be mothers, homemakers, servants, secretaries or sex toys. They may mediate between men or be traded as commodities among men, but whenever possible, their proactive participation in the power structure is avoided by the male-dominated film industry, then and often still.

As previously noted, in the taxicab sequence that links the famous apartment scene to the auditorium scene, as Paul forces Camille to accompany him to the audition, a filter darkens the image of Camille as the non-diegetic Moravia score swells up portentously. In this way, visual and auditory cues influence the viewers to ascribe great significance to the obscured image and dramatic music–which with hindsight, appear to foreshadow what will become of Camille as the movie’s events unfold. Then, the scene cuts to the approach to the auditorium.

The team working on the film of Odyssey is at the theatre to watch a casting call occurring on a stage in front of a large movie screen. A “singer” who is not actually singing dances onstage in front of a “dancing” troupe made up of couples who hardly dance. Because there is no alteration in the volume of the lead vocal of the song as she shimmies and slides far past the microphone in either direction, it becomes clear that the woman is lip-synching to a recording. One wonders what role she could be cast for then, since she is just a body, an apparent “speaker” for the music with no voice of her own. The diegetic music is murky, brassy and too loud for the auditorium’s audience to have a conversation over.

However, when the view reverses to show the audience, the diegetic music cuts abruptly so that the conversation of the main characters, seated in the front rows of the audience, can be clearly heard. Harun Farocki explains the significance of this device within the greater arc of the director’s filmed corpus: “…it is Godard’s way of comically obeying a rule of sound mixing which he almost always breaks: the rule that ‘background’ noises should be lowered during conversations” (Farocki & Silverman, 49). Farocki understands how Godard alerts the viewer to the ways in which sound is typically presented, in order to demonstrate its artificiality.

In the commentary track included on the DVD, Robert Stam also finds the reflexive manipulation of the sound of this scene comical. However, what is revealed of the characters in the conversations that become audible because of the dropout of the diegetic music is anything but amusing. Both Lang and Camille display revulsion primarily through miming, each for their own very good reasons. Francesca must mediate between the male parties and Paul sulks, but continues to acquiesce to the crass Prokosch’s ongoing bullying.

Two online commentators who reviewed the more recent DVD release of Contempt have opposing views of the sound in this scene. Glenn Erickson takes the scene to represent a theatrical presentation; he misunderstands the purpose, which is actually that the characters are attending a casting call, but he points to the deliberation of the sound techniques that Godard used:

When the leads attend a typically artificial and unconvincing theater performance, Godard takes the opportunity to deconstruct the movie making process. A ‘slotted’ playback tape is used, to which the supposedly live singer on stage lip-synchs. The audio crew has spliced specific holes of blank tape into the playback reel. The appropriately timed gaps of silence allow the spoken dialogue to be recorded in the clear. It’s a standard musical technique, I saw it used on the big dance number in 1941. But here in Contempt, instead of remixing the scene with clean, uncut music, Godard leaves it raw. The jarring holes in the playback punch in and out, making the scene purposely artificial, unfinished…anti-slick (Erickson).

Even as Erickson misses the narrative point of the scene, he apprehends the technical innovations involved. Godard even has the sound cut-off occur within a single shot. For instance, as the film team is shown, the music is heard, then drops out so we hear the conversation. Then the music resumes before the camera shows the stage. In this way, the director draws the viewer’s attention to the various multi-levels of narrative taking place and the fact that the conversation could not be heard unless the music was muted.

Joshua Zyber understands what transpires in the scene, but he treats the director’s handling as negative and possibly accidental:

Like most of the director’s films, Contempt is filled with pretentious attempts to play with or deconstruct the language of cinema. (…) An overbearing score often drowns out the dialogue. During a scene in which Jerry auditions singers, the music and singing abruptly cut out on the soundtrack whenever the main characters speak (Zyber).

Whether or not Godard’s work is “pretentious” is debatable, but his effects are entirely deliberate. As Zyber notes, the music does “drown out” the dialogue in other scenes, but in this scene, the music drops out whenever Prokosch, Francesca, Lang, or Paul speak.

They sit in the front row, first Lang beside Camille, with Francesca seated in the row behind them, and then across the aisle, Paul besides Prokosch, who pontificates while Francesca translates. Francesca has no authority or agency; her words are never truly her own, although she occasionally edits her translations in the interests of diplomacy. Rather, she is a conduit between men, she is a body used for transmission. Often Francesca can’t even be seen; her positioning makes her invisible, a disembodied voice that has no apparent source. Her skills as a linguist or mediator are never acknowledged and she is never thanked by those that she serves.

Camille seems to be primarily there as an erotic presence. She is not actually part of the production and she hardly speaks while they are seated. When she does, it is overridden by the diegetic music. Paul speaks to her, but she doesn’t answer him back. Several times, she gestures as if she is exchanging words with Lang, but she cannot be heard. As they leave the auditorium, the party continues to discuss the movie project. Paul attempts to speak to Camille, only to be angrily but silently rebuffed. Lang is reflexively faux-ventriloquized by Bardot, as he ascribes a Berthold Brecht quote to her nickname “B.B.” This reference seems to prompt Camille to soften for a moment and silently smile. Lang then specifies those initials as signifying Berthold Brecht, another reflexive touch.

Prokosch makes an announcement regarding the arrangement he has made with the singer: “She agrees to take off her clothes, Tuesday morning, 8 o’clock on the beach” (ironically reflecting the demands made on Godard and Bardot by the real American producer of Contempt). Again, the singer’s voice isn’t heard, her words are only mediated through Prokosch. As the group traverses the aisle on the way out, Prokosch says in English to Camille, “Why don’t you say something?” As Paul and Lang both turn to look at her, a loud click is heard and the lights of the auditorium come down. Camille is eclipsed in shadow as she looks up at the stage and answers (according to the subtitles), “Because I’ve got nothing to say.” This indicates that as with Lang, Camille also understands English and so is more aware of the significance of the various conversations and manipulations occurring around her than she lets on.

According to Kaji Silverman and Farocki Harun, Camille’s silence reflects her symbolic role within the Homeric allegory that the film represents:

HF: …Camille is the only one of the four major characters who never offers a verbal interpretation of Odyssey—the only one who makes no claim to stand outside it, to relate to it from a distance.
KS: Instead, she accepts her preassigned role from the start, and simply persists in it (50).

This interpretation implies that Camille-as-Penelope is locked into a voiceless role, a view echoed by the singer onstage, who is also voiceless in her lip-synching, who pulls yet cannot extricate herself from the cropped-off, boundless space of the stage and who will also soon enough be stripped bare by Prokosch for his pleasure. Similarly, Francesca has no real voice of her own; she merely parrots for the men more palatable versions of their words to each other.
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Throughout the film, Paul emotionally and physically abuses Camille whenever he has a chance to address her without anyone else seeing. It is his violence, his shallowness and his lack of integrity that drive her away. And the result of all of Paul’s betrayals, compromises and rejections is the worst possible one for Camille: Prokosch is eventually the death of her. In the end, after Camille leaves Paul, she and Prokosch are killed in an automobile accident.

Camille’s death at the end of the film is also misconstrued by some Godard scholars, such as Douglas Morrey, who says it “appear(s) as distinctly arbitrary and as such, it is difficult not to conclude that Camille is being punished for her actions, and punished indeed for her gender which appears solely responsible for those actions. The sudden death at the end of Le Mépris has no generic or narrative motivation….but nor is it realistically motivated…” (20). But a conclusion such as this seems again to reflect preconceptions on the part of the critic, rather than observation of the events depicted in the film. Camille makes no actions that are not precipitated by Paul’s inexplicably cold, contrary and even abusive behavior.

Few Godard scholars misread Contempt as offensively as does Jeremy Mark Robinson. At the outset of his examination, Robinson writes:

Contempt is a film about Brigitte Bardot’s ass (and a very nice, smooth rounded ass it is too). Bardot’s butt is the super special effect, the mega-buck production value item at the heart of the film. The writer Paul quips in the film that if you show a woman a movie camera, they’re happy to show off their behinds. Contempt demonstrates that, time after time. It’s a film of what Godard called the “civilization of the ass” (161).

Here Robinson attempts to ascribe his own sexism to Godard. But in his quoted comment as well as in his self-reflexive movie, Godard alerts the viewer to the absurdity of the patriarchal film industry, to the idea that the producers are self-important, tasteless “asses” who, ironically, are apt to align themselves with Robinson’s literal interpretation. Robinson says of the initial nude scene with a similarly derogatory tone:

The lengthy shot…frames Bardot’s back and buttocks and legs, cutting out the heads of the couple, and the film will do this a number of times, as if telling the viewer, no, you’re not really interested in faces or what the people are saying, you want to see Brigitte Bardot’s naked body. The instinct of the (sic) Contempt’s producers was spot on, of course. And Godard was happy to do what was asked (167).

Again, Robinson assumes wrongly that he comprehends Godard’s motivations and is qualified to judge his integrity. These quotes instead indicate the depths of the critic’s misogyny and his condescension to the audience.

More reasoned is the description by Colin MacCabe:

…there can be little doubt that Contempt would be a much less beautiful and moving film without the long opening scene of Bardot naked on a bed. This highly stylized scene, both in the repetitive naming of the parts of the body and in the use of very strong primary colour filters, delivers neither the pornographic charge nor the psychological explanation which Levin wanted. It does, however, provide perhaps the most beautiful portrait of Europe’s most photographed woman and a hint of the married bliss which will turn to catastrophe in the course of the film (154).

McCabe appreciates how Godard satisfied the producer’s demands while simultaneously subverting them, no mean trick. As a result, the film can sustain a feminist reading of its depiction of an abusive relationship even as it plays on its status as a star vehicle for one of the most objectified of actresses, Brigitte Bardot. Even by the values of 1963, it should be seen that it is Paul who is as Camille says, “an ass.”

A large part of the shock value of the film is watching a man callously maltreat his wife, as Paul does; the abuse is emphasized in seeing it happen to a character played by the famously desirable Bardot. Her various close-ups, even when subversive in content, still achieve exalted heights of glamour and help to propel the film to legendary classic status. In one profile shot that echoes the painted statue sequences that are interspersed through the film, Camille speaks a transgressive list of obscene curses, then turns and her face crumples in pain. In another close-up, she nurses her burning, slapped cheek.

Despite the actress’s engagement in her role, the character of Camille is as much the intoxicating Bardot as “Lang” is Lang. Godard’s ability to play on this adds to the reflexivity of the film in many overt and subtle ways. In her bathtub scene, Camille reads a biography about Lang, and quotes his words. Lang in his role as himself speaks lines that express Godard’s own theories. And, as noted earlier, in the auditorium scene, Lang quotes Bardot’s ubiquitous nickname “B.B.”

Even as Godard embeds in his film specific depictions of how creative people are used and abused by the money interests of Hollywood and other players in the commercial movie world, he shows how women are specifically maltreated and exploited within that system. Godard pulls aside the curtain on the private emotional interactions between men and women, to expose and comment on the shallowness of male sexism and weakness of character. He shows how relationships can be dismantled through one partner’s realization that their love has been taken for granted, or that their sexuality has been exploited for the purposes of career advancement, or by a victim’s rejection of escalating mental and physical abuse. In this way, Godard makes a classic film, yet one that destroys the artifice of film. Contempt raises questions about female agency and the female voice. It points to problems which it does not answer, but at least Godard notices that the problems exist. He made Contempt to be derisive in tone, towards a society that rewards sexism and cruelty and towards the processes of filmmaking that demand so much compromise from artists.

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Bibliography

Contempt (Le Mépris). Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Perf. Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance. Criterion Collection, 2002. DVD.

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd Ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Print.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. State University of New York Press, 1997. Print.

Farocki, Harun and Kaja Silverman. Speaking About Godard. NYU Press, 1998. Print.

Erickson, Glenn. “DVD Savant review: Contempt”. 5 Dec. 2002. Coolector Movie Database. 15 March 2013.

Giannetti, Louis. Understanding Movies. 8th Edition. N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999. Print.

Godard, Jean-Luc. Interviews. Ed. David Sterritt. University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Print.

MacCabe, Colin. Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70. UK: London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Print.

Morrey, Douglas. French Film Directors: Jean-Luc Godard. UK: Manchester University Press, 2005. Print.

Robinson, Jeremy Mark. Jean-Luc Godard: The Passion of Cinema. UK: Kent: Crescent Moon, 2009. Print.

Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Print.

Temple, Michael, James S Williams and Michael Witt. Forever Godard. UK: London: Black Dog, 2004. Print.

Zyber, Joshua. “Contempt (Le Mépris) (Blu-ray)”. 22 Feb. 2010. Hi-Def Digest. 15 March 2013.

Good Dogs and Fickle Gods

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

[Spoliers throughout]

Twenty years is quite a length of time in the world of comics but it has been nearly that since Graham Chaffee last published a comic. Some old timers do remember him however, and he does retain a measure of respect for two books he drew back in the 90s namely, The Big Wheels, and The Most Important Thing and other stories. I wrote a review of those two publications way back then but I have to say I can barely remember what I wrote or even much about those books.

Of the cartoonists offering the author support on the back cover, James Romberger comes closest to the truth when he suggests an alternate history where the art form was not shuffled into a nether world of superheroics:

“…a book seemingly lost in time…his clean appealing storytelling and expressive brushwork evoke an alternative golden age of comics; an age perhaps in which superheroes never existed and the medium told more straightforward, poignant stories.”

The approach here does seem to hark back to an earlier age of cartooning and pacing—not so much in comic books but in newspaper strips and the woodcuts of Lynd Ward—one which might in fact be compared to an earlier age of film making where structural clarity and a vague kind of verisimilitude was of the essence; a kind of doggy neorealism of the Italian school. Chaffee largely eschews panels which are filled with multifarious meaning and intricate correlations, adopting congenial, unsensational storytelling, evoking time, place and character; the gentle rhythms of a nostalgia associated with the early to mid twentieth century. And as with the meaningful look of the dog, Ivan, in The Most Important Thing (see third image from top), the artist has lost none of his powers of observation, all the requisite emotion of his characters channeled not so much into words but the gentle strokes of his brush.

The publicist statement comparing the comic favorably to Animal Farm and Watership Down seems quite unnecessary if not a bit pompous. It is evident that we are to see our foibles in the actions and fates of the dogs which populate Chaffee’s comic. The central questions being tackled here appear to be those of belief, ideology, and faith. A tangential discussion of deist philosophy may not be out of the question as well.

The third page of Chaffee’s debut comic, The Big Wheels, shows a kindly dog licking a man lying in a drunken stupor on the pavement, and the “good dog” of his new book is clearly a reiteration of the dog in the title story of The Most Important Thing, a tale which I remember comparing to Tolstoy’s moralistic fables. Two pages from the latter story should help to elucidate the mysteries presented to us in Chaffee’s latest offering:

In answer to the cat’s question (“What’s the most important thing?”), Ivan answers “faith.” The cat’s answer is “independence–freedom of thought and deed.” A raven, not seen in these two pages, offers a third unspoken answer which appears to be despair and hopelessness. In Chaffee’s new comic, the responses of the cat and dog take center stage.

The initial scene in Good Dog shows our protagonist in the midst of a dream where a shepherd instructs him in the act of herding. Ivan seems quite successful at his task but in a cruel twist, all the sheep are transformed into rabbits. He gets a stern scolding from his master and the shepherd’s eyes even turn into little crosses.

In this master-dog relationship, we can see a mirror for our own relationships with our earthly and, if one is so inclined, unearthly masters. There is the question of correct and incorrect action; of duty; and a projection of “original sin” which has little to do with justice or any blessed theodicy than with pure chance and bloody-mindedness.

Once this premise is set up, our dog carries on in his good way leading the vexatious life of a stray, a seemingly hand to mouth existence. The key incidents from this period in his life can be narrowed down to two encounters. The first is with a young black woman called, Babe, who works at a bar called Ray’s 8 Ball (a character culled from the first few pages of Chaffee’s The Big Wheels and a short story in Drawn and Quarterly Vol. 2 #3). It turns out that she needs a watch dog for some chickens in her backyard. His second encounter of note is with a pack of strays led by a Malamute (with wolf ancestry) called, Sasha. The Russian sounding name is probably no accident recalling that hotbed of irreligious brotherhood which is the antithesis of the master-worker dynamic promoted by the bar proprietress.

Sasha’s sole purpose is a kind of heroic striving against merciless life, cruel fate, and unnatural masters—to leave a mark in this world. There is, of course, nothing unusual in this, especially among men of ambition. A familiar example might be Lincoln who was accused in his early political life of being merely a deist and not a proper Christian (he was not a member of any church). We can see in his remarks to his law partner William Herndon that mixture of belief and purely temporal concerns, the urge to be remembered in ways which seem out of keeping with any firm acceptance of a creator:

“…oh how hard it is to die and leave one’s Country no better than if one had never lived for it.”

The black woman—not the usual wizened bearded Ancient of Days—tempts Ivan with kindness, water, and food. The impermanence of this arrangement is highlighted earlier in the comic in the story of a dog called, Oliver—leashed to a harsh horse riding instructor who he deserts for the pack upon his death. Another canine friend of Ivan’s, Kirby, is found tied to a tree by his drunken master-god. He is the very image of the foolish, all-trusting believer.

Since this is a comic, one could be forgiven for seeing in that faithful bulldog a metaphor for that greatest of superhero artists. The correlations only go so far though Kirby’s gluttonous, intoxicated, and cruel master may be viewed in some quarters as an accurate portrayal of Marvel.

Chaffee’s presentation doesn’t question the existence of the otherworldly; it is as tangible as the humans which walk around the dogs in his comic. And these creatures are certainly without written creeds or ossified revelation. What matters to them is that single moment of physical comfort and emotional sustenance, ephemeral as it all may be. The death of the pack leader, Sasha, at the hands of the female bar owner leads to the dispersion of the pack and an existential crisis. Some continue their lonesome wanderings but Ivan finds his place at a water bowl left as a token of friendship by Babe—the cryptic epistle written above that bowl as mysterious to him as any divine apocalypse.

Perhaps it is a mark of man’s strange and natural religiosity that he is attracted to it.

At this point, Ivan encounters the Malamute’s right hand dog, a terrier by the name of Sawney. He looks enigmatically at Ivan at rest by his water bowl, presenting us with the singular mystery of the comic. Is that look a sign of disapproval and disgust? Or is it one of longing and satisfaction that Ivan has finally found his place in this world. The answers to these questions, so obvious to many, are in the end quite beyond mere human understanding.

Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore, Mom

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This is something of a follow up to my review of Dan Clowes show at the MCA which ran in the Chicago Reader last week.
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Dan Clowes published Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron as a collection in 1993; he published Wilson in 2010. The first is a surreal, dream-like pulp grotesque; the second is an exercise in the quotidian mundanity of literary fiction. Yet, despite their separation in time and genre, the two books have a major plot strand in common. That plot strand consists of two parts. (1) A man searches for his wife who has sunk into sexual debasement. (2) She dies.

In both comics, also, the women’s stories are simultaneously the center of the narrative and marginal to the psychodrama of the husbands. In Velvet Glove, Barbara Allen’s death happens in a blink-and-you’ll miss it off there on the panel edge joke, and is “retold” through a filmed showing for Clay Loudermilk’s benefit.

In Wilson, Pippi’s death occurs completely off-panel, narrated to Wilson over the phone as he sits in prison. Both deaths are carefully, deliberately degrading. Barbara is shot in the head during a pornographic fetish film; Pippi dies of a drug overdose. The anti-climactic awfulness of their passings is both a joke and a validation, underlining the nonsensical, adult viciousness of Velvet Glove and the banal, adult viciousness of Wilson. As in a gangsta rap song, or in one of the country death songs that both the names “Barbara Allen” and “Loudermilk” reference, coolness and a kind of manliness or maturity is conveyed through the killing of women, and, through the studied casualness of that killing.

That maturity is in fact what is at issue is made quite clear in both books, albeit in different ways. In Velvet Glove, the search for Barbara Allen is tied repeatedly to the obsessive search for pop culture collectibles…and thereby to the comics medium. Clay Loudermilk discovers Barbara in the opening pages of the comic performing in a violent, bizarre cult fetish film — a provocative, unique bit of alternaculture which stands in for and references Like a Velvet Glove itself. Loudermilk’s shocked need-to-know following the exhibit is diegetically because his wife was in the film, but for alternative comics fans it also has to reference the awakened passion of the collector.

This is only underlined when the search for Barbara becomes obscurely enmeshed with an iconic cartoon character, Mr. Jones, who appeared in old-time advertisements and is improbably tattooed on Clay’s foot — as if his search for obscurities has become a mark of personal identification, so that he has become his own infantile obsessions. When he shakes Mr. Jones, it is not to transcend him, but to embody him. His arms and legs (and Mr. Jones tattoo) are torn off by a steroidal, adolescent-power-fantasy of an antagonist, and Clay becomes a swaddled stump, cared for and fussed over like a baby.

In Wilson, the connection between women, comics, and childhood is routed (as is just about everything in Wilson) through Charles Schulz’ Peanuts. The non-funny gag strips substitute glib profanity and gallow’s humor for Schulz’s bizarre aphasiac non-sequitors and odd tangents, but the model is still clear enough. Pippi, then, is a grown up little red-haired girl; Wilson a grown-up Charlie Brown who, of course, hasn’t really grown up. The shifting styles veer back and forth between cartoonish/neotenous and more realistic, so that Wilson exists in a constantly vacillating iconic no-man’s land between kids’ fodder and serious fiction.

In both works, then, comics, cartooning, childishness, and women function as a knot of meaning, loathing, and desire. Clowes is a very self-aware cartoonist; I don’t think it’s an accident that the initial fetish film Loudermilk sees includes an image of a grown man dressed as a baby and crying.

Similarly, I’m sure the Freudian connotations of arrested development and desperate, childish bid for control are entirely intentional when Wilson sends his in-laws a giant box of dog shit. Both books present their protagonists as infantile, or in danger of, or tempted by, infantilization. Both books in turn, link their own medium of comics to that same infantilization. The narratives then become engines for demonstrating and reveling their own childishness, while simultaneously disavowing it.

Both the reveling and the disavowal are accomplished in no small part by making comics women, and then killing them. As Clowes is I’m sure well-aware, a fetish is technically a displaced symbol of the mother. Barbara as collectible, then, functions as a doubly referring, vacillating system, feminizing comics and comicizing femininity. Again, the final image of Clay, armless and legless, trying to draw on a pad with a pencil in his teeth while his monstrous fish girlfriend declares her love, fits neatly here.

It’s a masochistic, self-pitying vision of comics artist as child — distanced both through its own adult violence and through its vision of the femininity as monstrous. Similarly, Barbara’s brutal death is commanded by a young girl who spins out the stories that are used in the fetish film. The comic, then, is, Clowes tells us, under the control of a feminine infant — whose whims result in very adult violence and femicide. The narrative’s grown-upness is guaranteed by the fact that it makes sexualized violence out of a child’s story.

In Wilson, Clowes actually self-reflexively acknowledges the comics own investment in female degradation. Wilson insists that Pippi, after leaving him, ended up on the streets, in a life of prostitution and drug use. She keeps telling him that much of this is not true, but he either doesn’t believe her, or doesn’t want to listen to her.

In the terms of the narrative, Wilson wants Pippi to have fallen apart after she left him because he wants her to have made the wrong decision. But the comic itself seems to have its own motivations. Yet, despite all her denials, Pippi does in fact die of a drug overdose. Clowes, like Wilson, it seems, just can’t quite resist the idea of Pippi, or Barbara, humiliated and dead. And no wonder; violence, sex, perversion, death — everything that separates Clowes from Charles Schulz, or from the infantilized medium of comics, is neatly summarized in the image of a woman’s corpse. If, Bloomian poets must kill their fathers to replace them, Clowes suggests that serious comics creators must kill their mothers to escape them. Genius comes out of her grave.

Dorothy and the Wizard in Letters

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Comixology.
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That’s the first page of the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz, written (of course) by L. Frank Baum, and illustrated by W.W. (William Wallace) Denslow. As you can see, Dorothy is leaning on the first letter of her own name, standing beside a Kansas wheat stalk. She stares into a mysterious fairie twilight…and not coincidentally, also seems to be staring into the book itself, with its own mysterious fairie treasures. Dorothy is about to enter the story, and she’s also the story itself; she’s an image and a name. You can’t show her without showing the start of the book.

Denslow used illustrations like this, incorporating a letter into his picture at the beginning of each chapter.

In some sense, these are just flourishes; you don’t need the illustrations to follow the story, as you would in many comics. Yet, the intertwining of words and images fits Baum’s story unusually well. Rereading The Wizard of Oz in comparison with, say, The Hobbit or a more recent series like Patricia Wrede’s The Enchanted Forest, it’s striking how shallow Baum’s narrative is. Not that it’s not delightful or even moving — it’s both of those things. But Oz, the world itself, seems about an inch deep. You get the sense that Baum has thought only a sentence or so ahead of his protagonists, if that. The yellow brick road doesn’t so much lead Dorothy through the narrative as it skips rather desperately ahead of her. Ummm…creatures with bear bodies and tiger heads…and then, ur, flying monkeys, and…a city of china people! And next…creatures that shoot their heads like cannon balls! And the queen of the mice! Each section seems to come into being in the nick of time, just before Dorothy can put her foot down upon it.

Partially for that reason, one of my favorite passages in the book is when Dorothy and her companions are in the poppy field. Dorothy and Toto fall asleep. The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow can carry them, but the lion is too heavy, so they urge him to run ahead and get out of the field. So he “aroused himself and bounded forward as fast as he could go. In a moment he was out of sight” — running ahead of the story, and so vanishing into the poppies and dreams.

Literally, as it turns out. The others find the Lion

lying fast asleep among the poppies. The flowers had been too strong for the huge beast and he had given up, at last, and fallen only a short distance from the end of the poppybed, where the sweet rass spread in beautiful green fields before them.

“We can do nothing for him,” said the Tin Woodman sadly; “for he is much too heavy to lift. We must leave him here to sleep on forever, and perhaps he will dream that he has found courage at last.”

On the next page, there’s this striking illustration, showing Dorothy and Toto asleep and the giant, deadly poppies twining around them and breaking out of the panel borders. The poppies seem to be trying to reach and intermingle with the text on the facing page, as if to suggest the words are in Dorothy’s dreams and vice versa.

In that context, it’s worth noting too that the Tin Woodman’s hope for the Lion — “perhaps he will dream that he has found courage at last” — is exactly what happens. The wizard is revealed as a humbug…which is to say, he’s a storyteller.

The Scarecrow’s body rests on the letter “N” while the wizard takes the head to stuff it with brains — or, more precisely, with the word “brains.” The text is what surrounds the scarecrow and what’s going inside him, just as the Lion gets not courage, but a dream of courage. Which is, as it turns out, the same thing.

In his 1971 book The World Viewed, critic and philosopher Stanley Cavell argued that for the film version of The Wizard of Oz:

The unmasking of the Wizard is a declaration of the point of the movie’s artifice. He is unmasked not by removing something from him but by removing him from a sort of television or movie stage, in which he has been projecting and manipulating his image. His behavior changes; he no longer can, but also no longer has to maintain his image, and he demonstrates that the magic of artifice in fulfilling or threatening our wishes is no stronger than, and in the end must bow to, the magic of reality….

Whether or not this is the case for the film, it seems much less clear-cut in the book. Oz is revealed as a story teller, but he doesn’t stop telling stories, and those stories don’t stop being real. In fact, he seems a better wizard once he’s been exposed, not because he’s more real, but because — what with dispensing brains, hearts and courage — his humbug is more convincing. How can you tell the magic of artifice from the magic of reality anyway? How can you separate what you say from what you see?

That’s the last page of the book. Dorothy has skipped across the desert back to Kansas with her magic silver shoes, and they fall behind her. You can see one of them has fallen off already; it’s dropped in the “A”. Except…when I first looked at this drawing, I thought the shoe was Dorothy’s foot; it took me a moment to realize that it had gotten detached. Which seems apropos. Dorothy’s still in the text, even after all these years. The home she comes back to isn’t any more real than the words “Home Again” which float like a sign-post above the twilit Kansas sky. Which is to say, both aren’t real, and are.

Blood Feast in 5 Frames

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Nicolas Labarre

Utilitarian Review 6/28/13

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

News

The lovely and talented Patrick Carland is joining us as a regular blogger. Welcome aboard Patrick!

On HU

I talk about the smaller-than-life soul of Womack and Womack.

Voices from the Archive: Marc Singer on morality in All-Star Superman.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys explains why all the superpowers have to be dull.

Chris Gavaler on Man of Steel, eugenics, and why do DC films have to be so dour anyway?

I did an extended analysis of the father’s day card my son made me. Because it’s my blog, damn it.

Subdee on Saint Young Men and divinities as boho slackers.

Patrick Carland on the Hunger Games, Battle Royale, and neoliberalism putting children to the scythe.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I wrote about:

The Dan Clowes show at the Chicago MCA for the Chicago Reader.

Being a man trapped by the male gaze for the Good Men Project.

A doc about a gay couple and their 8 weddings for the Atlantic.

And for Splice Today:

The Scorpions’ first album was fucking awesome.

Why reading doesn’t make you more human.

Edward Snowden, Russia, and thuggish bullies.

Other Links

Tom Spurgeon with a magnificent, endless, amazing obituary for Kim Thompson.

Janet Potter on the Ladydrawers show in Chicago.

Jeffry O. Gustafson analyzes a kid’s comic about some stick figure falling into a vat of toxic waste.

Ben Schwartz with a sweet tribute to Kim Thompson.

Jonathan Bernstein on Wendy Davis and why talking fillibusters are still a bad idea in the Senate.

Survival of the Purest: Neoliberalism in The Hunger Games and Battle Royale

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Patrick Carland

Having only just escaped my own teenage years, I have a lot of mixed feelings about adolescence. Listening to people older than me, I often hear that teenagers are mean, histrionic little know-it-alls with nothing but angst, self-absorption and empty-calorie cynicism flowing through their veins. And having only just been a teenager myself, I can’t also say there’s there is no truth to that; teenagers are insecure, they’re hormone-addled, and in the 21st century have access to an array of technologies that let them broadcast versions of themselves they might later wish to live down to the entire world. But even if contemporary wisdom dictates that adolescence has always been a time of angst and cynicism, there seems to me something far more cynical about the way that teenage suffering has been normalized, made into something that everyone between the ages of 13 and 19 should anticipate. Emotional suffering doesn’t simply arise in a vacuum; it is almost always created through external conditions, and even the most banal teenage whining should be assumed to be grounded in some outside social forces. But what is the cause? Is it all hormones? Is it insecurity? Is it just a natural part of “finding yourself,” as so many young adults narratives stress? These could all very well be central factors, but a recent strain of young adult narrative – the “kill your friends because you are forced to” kind – seems to suggest something more systemic at play.

The general premise of Avengers Arena, an ongoing series written by Dennis Hopeless and illustrated by Kev Walker, is one that’s become strangely familiar in the past 5 or so years; a group of teenagers, isolated and rendered helpless by some outside force or organization, are forced to run around killing one another until only a single person, the Übermensch among them, still stands. Some of them will refuse to fight (and they die quickly), some of them will try to run (and they die just as quickly) and some will take to the game immediately, thrilled to finally have the chance to release their inner demons and kill everyone who’s ever said something rude to them. But mostly, it’s a brutal game of survival, a literal dog eat dog nightmare designed to breed the most ruthless, brutal and efficient members of society. Sounds like High School, right?

We all probably know where this train starts; when Koushon Takami’s novel was released in 1999, and adapted into a film in 2000, Battle Royale created an enormous stir in Japan and a significant one abroad. Coming out at a time when Japan was just getting out of its Lost Decade (only to fall headfirst into another one, as fate would have it), Battle Royale combined the titillation of a slasher film with the concrete issues facing Japan’s youth at the time, namely the plight of the precariat (precarious proletariat, those unable to find work beyond temporary, part-time positions) and the consequences of a prolonged recession that forced young people to go at each other’s’ throats constantly in their attempts to secure stable employment, which was thought of as a birthright just a generation before. It takes place in an alternate-world 1997 Japan, where the country’s economy has collapsed and unemployment has become so rampant most students have stopped attending school, seeing it as a waste of time. Seeing the very foundations of their society crumble, Japanese authorities pass the Battle Royale Act, stipulating that once a year a randomly chosen 8th grade class must fight to the death until only one student remains standing.

While the Battle Royale bills itself as a celebration of the idea of survival of the fittest, it is clearly a battle of the most aggressive; any alternative means of survival, such as hiding, escaping or simply choosing not to fight are cancelled out with the inclusion of an island location, detonating collars and mines that force students to continuously come closer to one another until all are dead. Class 3-B, the class chosen for the Battle Royale, initially has no idea what is going on when they’re kidnapped and spirited away, but soon after the game starts, several students take to it quickly, especially Kazuo Kiriyama, a mute, psychopathic character who willing signed up for the Battle Royale because he thought it might be fun. The movie is in turn a character study and a bloodbath, intimately concerned with the psychologies and motivations of these young people forced to kill one another. We have Mitsuko Souma, a child sexual abuse victim who ultimately killed her abuser and learned to never trust anyone, Hiroki Sugimura, a boy whose tracking device would let him easily win the game, but who ultimately uses it to track down his fellow classmates to make amends over past wrongs, and the protagonist Shuya Nanahara, whose only motivation is the protect his friend Noriko, determined not to lose anybody else after his father’s suicide and the murder of his best friend at the beginning of the film. These students are not angels, nor are they “tragically flawed” in the half-assed way slasher films make their characters to justify their deaths; they’re teenagers, hormonal and exuberant and forced to murder one another so that the adults can keep their society the way it is.

The killing, of course, is metaphorical; we can’t simply allow all these teenagers to waltz into adulthood, they’re not prepared! Adulthood is a brutal exercise in Social Darwinism, where only brute strength and cunning can be relied on for survival. But even if the forces that be in Battle Royale use this idea as a theoretical justification for their systems of domination, the practice is much different; rather than work communally towards mutual survival, the students of Class 3-B are forced to kill each other, or else be killed by their detonating collars. The artificial conditions of the Battle Royale parallel the artificial conditions of the world that created it; a system of exploitation, a neoliberalism that always reproduces conditions of deficiency and inequality so that it may continuously justify its own existence. Not enough wealth, not enough resources? Let the free market take care of it! It’ll find a place for everyone and everything. Except when it doesn’t, as is the case in capitalist crises and the system must find new means of justifying the accumulation of capital at the top at the expense of everybody else. In the case of first world countries like Japan, this usually entails an assault on a middle class anxious about their own socioeconomic status. By ensuring the middle class, and in particular the youth of that class, must cull their own numbers (quite literally) to ensure its own survival, the ruling class stays on top; while the students must kill one another, the teachers idle their time away.

The notion of class is taken a step further in the most famous American manifestation of this genre, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. In the book and film, two children from each of the twelve outlying Districts of the nation of Panem (a dystopian, post-nuclear America because we’ve never heard that one) are forced to fight to the death as a means of paying tribute to the Capitol, as penance for a civil war waged 74 some-odd years ago. The very name of the nation references its predication on inequality; the tribute the districts pay, called the Hunger Games, are a form of Panem et Circenses, bread and circuses built on the back of the lower class for the enjoyment of the higher ups. And just to keep future generations from ever questioning their position, the Capitol makes sure to keep them busy and divided by making the Games into a public, much spectacle and a means for any given District to win glory (and much needed food) for themselves.

While Battle Royale shifts panoramically across different characters and storylines, Hunger Games focuses on one character, Katniss Everdeen, a girl from the lowliest beginnings who volunteers to participate as a means of saving her little sister who is originally chosen. In her own way, Katniss represents a contemporary conception of the American dream; throughout the games, she manages to succeed not by brute force or cunning, but by being charismatic and resourceful, kind to her allies and smarter than her opponents. When she’s in danger, she is often saved by others (like Peeta, a boy enamored with her, and Thresh, who does so as part of a blood debt), and when she kills, it is only to survive or out of righteous fury, as when her friend Rue dies. Ultimately, her actions begin to sow the seeds for open revolt throughout the nation, and when it comes down to her and Peeta as the final two survivors, she chooses to take her own life alongside him, forcing the Capitol to call of the games and name them both winners.

If one continues reading the Hunger Games series, they’ll see it ultimately plays out in a similar style to Battle Royale; the system of domination and exploitation, targeted primarily at young people but also at the middle and working classes in general, cannot be defended or sustained, and must be subverted and overthrown so that the cycle of violence may end. But in the course of the killing spectacle itself, the characters of Battle Royale are often fleshed out, developed, made into believable human beings and then killed, while in Hunger Games, Katniss seems to survive without ever having to truly compromise her ethical values, the other characters either acting as shields or protectors of her. In Katniss, we see a character who manages to survive by doing just the right things at just the right time, succeeding with cleverness and just a bit of luck. In Battle Royale, the protagonists Shuya and Noriko only manage to survive when one of the teachers ultimately lets them, motivated by a combination of pity and obsession. While in Hunger Games, there is the suggestion that success in a system of domination, even a conditional, unstable success, is still attainable, still within the grasp of the most adept and resourceful regardless of status, Battle Royale maintains no such hope, acknowledging that ultimately it is only through connections and social status that one can survive.

Fans of both Hunger Games and Battle Royale vociferously argue that the two works are completely different, and to an extent I agree with them. For while both share a similar premise, one grounded in an understanding of systems of oppression as well as an anxiety regarding recession, the decline of the first world, and the long “crisis of capitalism” that has been ongoing from the end of the 20th century to the 21st, they ultimately approach their own metaphorical models in different ways. In Battle Royale, we find little reason to hope for anything but full overthrow of the system at hand, while Hunger Games seems to suggest there might still be hope for success. But even if we accept the intimations in Hunger Games and agree that even the lowliest and meanest among us can rise to greatness, what of the remaining tributes killed? Were they not resourceful, kind and determined like Katniss, with their own backstories and hopes and dreams? We never get to know, as the majority function either as allies dedicated to Katniss, evil enemies determined to kill her, or nameless, faceless casualties we never know anything about. For the Hunger Games narrative to work, we must believe in the power of the individual to overcome, even if this requires one individual being prioritized above all others. In Battle Royale, such a gesture is futile.

Is this difference in attitude towards the system a reflection of the mindsets within their respective countries of origin? In Japan, the economic recession has been an ongoing crisis for more than 2 decades, while we here in the States know it as a largely new phenomenon. In Hunger Games, we can still see the potential for success in a rigged system, however fleeting; in Battle Royale, there is an overwhelming sense of resignation, a sense that if we cannot escape the system of domination, we must enjoy it or seek to destroy it. And on the topic of enjoyment it should be noted that as a film, Battle Royale is far gorier than Hunger Games. W hile Hunger Games actively attempts to distance the viewer from scenes of gratuitous violence, Battle Royale revels in them and even sexualizes them, titillating the viewer with a spectacle they ought to otherwise be horrified by. While Hunger Games takes a principled stand against the violence, Battle Royale submits to it, even enjoys it.

So what can be said of this nascent genre? Is it political, or decadent? Should it enjoy its own violent spectacle, or take a principled stand against it? Will it become the new “zombie film” of pop culture? God let’s hope not. Although I haven’t read much of Avenger’s Arena, where it ultimately takes the genre will be most telling; it could go down the Battle Royale route, positioning itself along the lines of horror films in saying that hey, if we can’t escape the violence, we might as enjoy it, or the Hunger Games route of keeping one’s chin high even in the direst of circumstances. Neither approach is perfect, each has its merit; while Hunger Games refuses to revel in the spectacle of violence or enjoy it, Battle Royale shows that the only way you can hope to beat a system of exploitation is to resist it with everything you’ve got. Avenger’s Arena has the potential to push the genre in one of two directions; towards gory, ideologically hollow exploitation, or towards a political attack on the ways in which youth are brutalized, sexualized and forced to fight one another in media and society, a critique especially salient in this age of precariatism, unpaid internships and the never-ending recession. Either way, as long as it keeps being fun to watch and continues giving grown-ups the middle finger, it will find an eager audience amongst adolescents and young people alike. Whether it will be pure entertainment or motivation towards some greater, more nebulous and worthwhile goal, remains to be seen.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon