Burnt by the Sun

About fifteen years ago, the Soviet Union – its flag, its revolution, its endless crimes against human individuality – had just recently faded into our collective past.  In its stead we embraced an open Russia because we felt, and rightly so, that the worst years were long gone and that all the perpetrators of these misdeeds were deceased.  What good then to speak of the unspeakable and name the unnamable?  Russia in particular (some day, we may see the same occur with other large communist states who shall remain anonymous) was in need of a rewrite.  World history had been so distorted by the alleged class struggle and ensuing bedlam that many old heroes had to be demolished, and the real purveyors of truth and justice, to use a classically Soviet term, rehabilitated.  Apart from the millions massacred or led helplessly into massacre by the Soviet government, the greatest toll of the revolution was the irreparable damage inflicted upon its literature.  In the first ten years of its existence (1917–1927) New Russia, or whatever it called itself, had assembled the greatest collection of contemporary first-rate poets and writers in one country since Ancient Greece: Bunin, Blok, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelshtam, Gumilyov, Mayakovski, Bely, Khodasevich, Esenin, Olesha, and Ilf and Petrov (among many other lesser lights), as well as the crown jewel of the land that abandoned him, Nabokov.  From this superior stratum, only Bunin, Olesha, Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Nabokov would live past 1945, with Olesha, Pasternak, and Akhmatova (all of whom were not allowed to flee the country) laboring under critical and societal repression.  Russian literature, which in the late eighteenth century was still mostly composed of epigoni and imitations of European models, had risen to the apex of cultural traditions only to be decimated and destroyed by a government that prized, in no small irony, the uniformly mediocre tastes of bourgeois society.  Yes, this is certainly a topic for much debate, and the core of the controversy surrounding this early post−Soviet film.

Our protagonist may or may not be Dmitri (Oleg Menshikov), first seen in Paris talking impatiently to an uncle of his who seems, like many émigrés, to be more proficient in French than Russian.  The year is 1936 and the handsome thirtysomething Dmitri, a polyglot and trained pianist, will be returning to his homeland on business.  What that business entails is not elucidated in detail until the film’s end, but knowledge of the happenings of that year and the next might provide a clue.  His destination is a peaceful hamlet in the Russian countryside which happens to house the great General Kotov (Nikita Mikhalkov, also the writer and director).  I say “great” because Kotov is completely convinced of his greatness and everyone else appears to agree with him.  As a display of his power, he halts an entire battalion instructed to do something dreadful to a crop field.  There is also the lovely if overly picaresque scene in which Kotov, accompanied by his much younger wife Maria (Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė), seven-year-old daughter, and other familiars, treks down to a local river to swim and sunbathe (they also rehearse, with melodramatic gusto, a gas attack).  Father and daughter slip away from the madding crowd on a small boat, and the great general finds this an opportune time to talk about the greatness of socialism and the future generations of this great nation, and so forth, all under the blazing sun.  This sun, we understand, is a powerful symbol of the omnipotent state which has made Kotov a demigod and cast Dmitri out to do, well, whatever he seems to be doing over there in Paris.  So when Dmitri comes back, he and Kotov look hard at one another because each of them knows the crimes on the other’s conscience.  There will be at least one more crime to count by the end of it all, at which point Dmitri will cease his disingenuous laughter and Kotov will no longer thump people on the back and wish them well.

The real problem with this film, say its many detractors, is that it was made by Mikhalkov.  As an actor whose family survived all the purges and whose grandfather composed the somber Soviet anthem, his attempt at political correctness comes about sixty years too late.  In an interview in Moscow several years ago, Mikhalkov (who, shall we say, is not lacking in confidence) defended his preeminence by saying that his family was “like the river Volga, flowing past all the powers that be over all the centuries” – a lovely sentiment, but one that will doubtless seal his reputation for later critics.  We wonder whether a more humble approach to the subject matter, whose sequel is actually due out later this year, might have quelled the roar of indignation that attacked him when he won both the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes.  Yet the film itself is beautiful.  The haunting chiaroscuro of the old house full of secret corners and engravings and the lushness of the countryside cannot be denied.  All this wonder and lightness is tempered, however, by the inevitable results of hubris as well as by revenge, revenge that was a long time coming.  But I fear that all of this, whether it be of generals or of artists, is ancient history.

The Exorcist

In a much older land than ours, we see an archeological dig in what once was this Mesopotamian city.  There we are led to an elderly Jesuit that has decided to reinvigorate his existence with the pursuit of ancient artefacts, and we know from this type of setup that he will find something astonishingly evil.  The object in question is a pendant.  “From a much earlier period,” says one of his Iraqi colleagues.  One side of the pendant has an inscription whereas the obverse is effaced. He continues burrowing through the reddish earth until he comes across what he feared he might come across, a grinning icon that cannot be anything except unholy.  This image was worshiped by ancient dwellers like a god, and a statue was even erected which, for some reason, has survived the ruins and erosion of time.  It stands, dirty but fully intact, amidst the civilization that is no longer, and one gets the very unpleasant impression that it might have been instrumental in its demise.  Our Jesuit, whose name is Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow), senses this coming confrontation the moment the icon finds his hand and does what so many must do when evil crosses their path: he tries to convince us (with, wonderful to relate, almost no words) that his premonition was incorrect.  But he doesn’t believe it and neither do we.  He stands before the statue and sees a guardsman whose face is darkened by the shadows of the rubble; wild dogs, almost hyenas, fight and snap at one another; and suddenly he is standing mere inches away from the crazed, inhuman smile.  Thus begins this monumental film.

We move continents to a genteel district beside the most famous of American Jesuit universities.  There we sweep the steps of another priest, a Greek-American called Damien Karros (Jason Miller), who is destined to become the younger foil to Merrin.  Karros is not only a Jesuit, he is also a psychiatrist, having been sent by the Brothers to study at Harvard and Bellevue, yet his actions and words belie his education.  Karros prefers boxing (and physically resembles a young Sylvester Stallone) and bemoaning his lot at the local watering hole.  How strange it is that the priests banter and gripe like policemen – spiritual policemen, one supposes – bereft of all purity of thought or intent!  For all his training and exposure to both science and theology, Karros has still managed to lose his faith or at least enough of it to question why he still wears the collar.  The Georgetown campus is also the site of a film whose star Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) has taken up residence in one of the area’s posher houses, with a view onto the Potomac and adjacent to a treacherous flight of steps.  Materialist, rude, arrogant, hysterical, domineering, and devoid of any religious beliefs, MacNeil remains someone whose milk of human kindness has long since soured.  She has a twelve−year−old daughter Regan (Linda Blair), but her estranged husband only appears as the target of her telephone jeremiads.  Like all children, Regan intuits that the problems between her parents are far graver than her mother allows her to think and withdraws ever so slightly from activities.  Even with little knowledge of the film’s progression, the viewer detects the contrapuntal relationship between the wealth and atheism of MacNeil and the horrific events to which her daughter will be subjected.  That MacNeil’s first name is the essence of the faith she will require to save her child is obvious.  Slapdash research shows, however, that in Gaelic MacNeil means “son of might,” or “son of a dark complexion,” or “son of a champion,” or “son of a storm cloud,” and Regan means “the king’s child” or “impulsive, furious” – all of which augments the suggestive nature of these names into allegory.

Regan becomes the battleground for two forces that require no introduction but much more information, which the film, as it were, wisely does not provide.  This is not and never wishes to be a documentary.  Although loosely based on purported events, the possession for which graphic detail seems to have been created has the savory, coincidental quality of fiction and is best kept in that realm.  Instead, we are asked to consider the subtle touches.  Should we remember the face of the homeless man sitting in the corner just a couple of yards away from a train Karros is about to catch?  Will that face twist into the epitome of darkness?  Perhaps his words will turn out to be more important.  And what of Karros’s dream, where he sees that pendant (the first link between the two parts), a black dog, a glimpse at something horrible and inhuman, and then his mother, distant, far out of earshot, descending a subway station and himself powerless to stop her?  And the ward where his mother is kept, as all the inmates accost and swipe at him as if trapped within a prison of souls, a small arc of one of hell’s larger circles?  So when the baffled neurologists (all eighty−eight of them) suggest that Regan has “a disorder that we don’t see anymore except in some primitive cultures,” we laugh at their incompetence masquerading as smugness (topped only by that of an even more insufferable hypnotist).  But their first instinct is in a way very right: familial strife breeds the worst type of behavior, and its collapse can destroy a person, especially a child, permanently (that is not to say, however, that we are watching an allegory for a failed family).  Then a scene that has no scientific explanation takes place and we understand, at last, what we might be dealing with, while doctors insist that there is a lesion in Regan’s temporal lobe although their encephalogram indicates nothing at all.  I suppose they didn’t notice that Regan had taken to drawing hyenas and black dogs.

A Fresh Can of Air

A rather prescient essay (“Luft in Büchsen”) written in 1972 by this German author.  You can find the original in this collection.

For a while now at the train station of the Berlin Zoo, cans have been sold with the label “Berlin air,” surely nothing more than a sentimental token for anyone leaving the city.  This rather amusing invention on the part of the souvenir industry could soon turn, however, into a bestselling item.  And it wouldn’t have to read “Berlin air,” only “air.”  Not oxygen, not what iron lungs provide, but just your average, run-of-the-mill breathable air.  Every morning we could send our kids off to school with a couple of cans of air, take a couple to work at the factory or office, and during breakfast or lunchtime, between our sandwiches, milk, and coffee, take a couple of sips of fresh air.  Since water (not mineral water, but your average, run-of-the-mill spring water) is already available for purchase, air in cans doesn’t seem like a satirical exaggeration.  In this productive and efficient world of ours (of us Europeans, in any case) centered around sustainable profit and increasable turnover, there will always be enough bread, wine, and distilled beverages to go around; there will even be enough milk, butter and beer.  But there will no more water or air.  Every so often, when I park my car in a parking garage or lot, I would love to have a can of fresh air on me.  If we – brave, modern people that we are – are searching for a modern myth in our modern industrialized society, there is really only one available: that of King Midas, who turned everything he touched or came into contact with to gold.  If one understands gold as productivity, efficiency, profit and growth, this myth could soon fit the bill.

Soon, average, run-of-the-mill breathable air will be treated like treasure, just as we drive countless miles into the countryside to somewhere that still has normal, proper drinking water.  In bottles, balloons, or tubes, we take water home from these weekend excursions because we have determined that it tastes better than what our water dealer delivers to us every day or every week.  All the fruits and nuts of the world are at our fingertips, but we’re low on water and fresh air is a rarity.  And there, in the middle of our glorious megalopolises where we build metro stations so as to make more room for cars, an ancient, Eastern–looking figure will reappear: the air merchant.  But he too will have a large tanker and, for a Deutschmark or two, let us take a few drags from his air hose.  Extinguishing fires in modern homes and buildings has already created a new industry: the file incinerator or shredder.  Since one can’t burn anything – and I mean anything – in one’s own home any more, it is natural that one wouldn’t wish to deposit all one’s files or one’s entire correspondence in the trash.

We have speculated about the exploitation of man by man since the dawn of our existence, but we have consecrated far less time to pondering our exploitation of nature.  In our blind, profit-ridden optimism, we have industrialized our world for more than one hundred and fifty years.  We’ve always got the goods when the money’s right.  Even when the money’s only halfway there; although now it turns out that we are not only exploiting man and nature, but also poisoning and displacing the elements.  There have been enough architects, sociologists, psychologists, and even on occasion a couple of theologians who have warned and scolded us, but until now, little has occurred.  And if one thinks it over, why is that hard-to-define segment of humanity that one calls youth so apathetic or even pessimistic?  Shouldn’t we ask ourselves what kind of future we’re readying them for, or what we think their quality of life might entail?  Even the water merchant and the air merchant cannot reconcile themselves with this suicidal civilization.

According to what the Secretary General of the United Nations has announced, by the year 1985 we will have spent nine trillion Deutschmarks on the arms race.  That’s one nine and twelve zeroes, an almost mythical amount owing to the burden of handling all those zeroes and putting all those numbers into words.  In order to prevent a water crisis, we will have to spend two hundred thirty-four billion Deutschmarks by the year 2000, a number equivalent to ten times our defense budget.  And to prevent all possible catastrophes, which I will not enumerate here, there must also be regional planning, city planning, traffic planning, health services, educational reforms, and environmental protection.  New values must be established which will inevitably come into conflict with the existing mores – profit, productivity, increase in turnover – and which have to be taken into consideration in all these complicated, embedded problems because it is high time and time passes oh so quickly.  And every politician who believes all this can be done without an increase in taxes is either lying to himself or to others.

No longer does it seem like pure nonsense but rather suicidal cynicism when, in the face of the problems only touched upon here, a word like “plan” is denounced by the Christian Democrats and their allies.  These same Christian Democrats (and same allies) who claim to be able to resolve our domestic and foreign problems.  How are these problems supposed to be solved if there isn’t a plan?  The opposite of “plan” does not need to be “freedom,” it can also be termed “a lack of foresight.”  And the consequences of industrialization bereft of both foresight and consideration lie right before our eyes.

Breathable air and drinkable air should not be the property of a privileged stratum who can afford to drive out into the countryside, to their second house or second apartment, where, it should be said, they have access to two things which city dwellers rarely have at their disposal: a fireplace (and a fire in that fireplace) and soil, the earth and land of a park or garden.  The new term “quality of life” is not a thing of beauty.  It stands for something very old, those elements necessary for life itself: air, water, fire, and earth.  And there is something else rarely included on the list of classic elements that must, however, be counted with them: peace and quiet.  The number of those disturbed by noise increases every day, as does the number of those who cannot afford to flee this unbearable din because, by doing so, they might lose their jobs.

The legend of the air merchant could soon be as true as the legend of the seller of peace and quiet.  In the near future we may have an inventor of a system that can grant these poor, wretched, crazy, persecuted successors to Midas a little bit of tranquility – and the water merchant, the air merchant, and the peace-and-quiet handler will only be retailers.  Wholesalers and corporations will form, sell and hoard water, air, and quiet, and sell them to retailers for an immense profit.  It is already unimaginable that, in the face of this development that has already come to pass, words like “plan” are still denounced, although one has been planning now for quite a while.  Advertising “campaigns” are also being planned, and they are called “campaigns” just like the “campaigns” of military terminologists.

Not only states and communities have budgets, the earth has one as well.  It has an oxygen budget, a nitrogen budget, and we are already living on credit.  In the blind construction phase of the Federal Republic, exploitation and selling−off were achieved in thoughtless euphoria with only profit as their goal, and the rest of the world was astounded by this reconstruction and thought it a miracle.  The reason for this miracle was not only diligence, but also collective blindness.  We’ve always got the goods when the money’s right, halfway into our paycheck envelope or halfway into our stock earnings.  These are glorious times, simply glorious.  But the second miracle will be a bit more difficult.  It won’t need any type of national planning because the problems have long since been international ones, as the Soviet scientist Sakharov told us years ago writing about our ecology and its fate.  Writing, in other words, about the budget of our earth.

Blok, "Незнакомка"

One of the greatest poems ("The Stranger") of the twentieth century, as composed by Aleksandr Blok.   You can read the original here.

Above the bistros and the day,
A warmer air, both wild and dumb,
Holds shouts and cries of drunken sway,  
The noxious breath of springtime come.

Afar, above the crossroad dust,
Above the languor of dachas plain,
Street pretzel stands sell golden crust,
And children’s cries ring out in vain.

And every eve beyond barred ways,
Fine bowler hats are cocked on tip,
Near ditches ladies stroll and gaze,
As raconteurs their barriers strip.

Above the lake are oarlocks moored,
A female shriek finds no remorse,
And in the sky, to all inured,
A senseless disc repeats its course.

And every eve a single friend,
Reflected in my sordid glass,
As tart and secret potions blend,  
Shares all my stunned and quiet past.

Beside the tables of our confreres,
The servers sleepy tasks amass,
And dizzy drunks with eyes of hares
Exclaim: "In vino veritas."

And every eve, in time prevailed
(Or am I foolishly asleep?),
A girlish shape, in silks regaled,
Moves by the foggy window’s deep.

Between the drunks, still gliding slow,
E’er unaccompanied, alone,
Perfumes and fogs she has to show,
And by the sill she makes her home.

Beliefs of ancients coat the winds:
Elastic silks reform unplanned,
Funereal feathers of past sins,
And rings upon a narrow hand.

In strange closeness so ensnared, I
Escape beyond the darkened veil:
A shore enchanted I espy,
Set softly by enchanted dale.

Unspoken secrets find their tomb,
Between my hands a sun falls grey,
And all wine’s dregs have spun their loom,
My soul’s red thread has gone astray.

And ostrich plumes bent in restraint
Relieve my mind of its dark lore;
And endless eyes of bluish taint
Refract and bloom on distant shore.

And in my soul a secret hides,
Its key is only known as mine!
O, drunken beast whom man derides,
There is indeed much truth in wine.

La Moustache

Our souls have little recourse these days: we neither believe in anything greater than ourselves nor have faith in our own jaded path.  From one side we are assailed by the backwash of persons who interpret religion (and, it should be said, everything else) for the solitary purpose of lining their pockets, while speaking with the righteousness of men who have endured the worst of human atrocities.  From the other side we are faced with the nihilist materialism of indifference and moral irresponsibility that has become the calling card of twentieth− and twenty−first century philosophizing.  Everyone is inherently evil; everyone is always selfish; we are all ants on a hill, slaving and bowing before phantom rules; we can know nothing except that there is no God, because if there were, He would surely have made things much easier on the world.  Between these two trenches one finds a group of ecumenical optimists, steeped in learning and aimed at abolishing pain in the world regardless of creed, gender, race, or any other category that, in the end, means nothing at all.  There are, of course, other groups.  But one has a choice, as a privileged citizen in a privileged land, to make a difference, even if the difference is simply noticeable in how we feel and think about our universe and how we treat one another.  Among all of mankind’s disgraces, our treatment of those who might be mad or not socially commendable is one of the greatest abominations.  We see this from an early age, when the weaker and more vulnerable are immediately targeted by resident bullies; when we laugh at the humiliation of others who cannot seem to fit the pattern of acceptable mediocrity that society promotes; when we put down everyone and everything that tells us of history’s triumphs — and its lessons.  One thing that history has indeed made clear is that we are not islands: we need others to formulate our identity.  We may think of ourselves in a certain way, but we are free to change our opinion as the winds might shift and flounder.  Others do not have this luxury, however, which brings us to this unusual film.

The titular whiskers belong to Marc (Vincent Lindon), a strapping if dull Frenchman in his early forties preoccupied with the normal tasks that a man his age might find interesting with the important exception of children.  He and his wife Agnès (Emmanuelle Devos) talk in the normal manner so commonly incident to married people who know every last thing about one another.  One day, Marc suggests shaving his mustache, to which Agnès replies: “I like you with it; I wouldn’t recognize you without it.”  Just another humdrum exchange in a life long since liberated from spontaneity and surprise?  We are led to believe this is so until a dispute arises between the couple on a most ridiculous subject: whether Marc had a mustache to begin with.  Thereby is launched a sticky little game that may not make sense initially and may seem even more baffling as the film rolls to its concluding scene.  We get a variety of conflicting information: Agnès claims Marc has never sported facial hair; Marc finds mustached pictures of him in Bali which Agnès pretends never existed; a policewoman (representing, we suppose, both legal authority and objectivity) whom he meets on the street tells Marc he does have a mustache in his identification card photo; and, most revealingly, Marc makes two mistakes.  He forgets — if that is the right word here — that his father passed away a year ago, and goes on and on about two very good friends of theirs, Serge and Nadia, that Agnès does not know in the least.  There are more telltale signs of unhingement, and then Marc overhears Agnès talking to her friend Bruno (Hippolyte Girardot) about committing Marc to an asylum, at which point the film’s pulse quickens.

You will not discover my interpretation on this page, but I will say that Marc is not mad.  Nor, I hasten to add, is the director on whose novel the film is based.  There is a sad red thread through all the events that suggests a connection between the death of Marc’s father, his own lack of offspring, and the befuddling omnipresence of Bruno in which computerized minds might detect something altogether sinister.  Yet the key detail is that different people are divided on a facial feature that is so difficult to miss as to suggest that anyone who cannot see it must indeed be insane.  The only person who does not waver is Marc himself, because we are not really talking about his mustache but about Marc.  And who is Marc, anyway?  A remarkable final scene that goes against everything else in the film except one important sliver of evidence might shed some light.  And if not, at least you will become very familiar with Hong Kong ferries.