Geometry of Force: Abel Ferrara and Simone Weil Tag Gallagher
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Geometry of Force: Abel Ferrara and Simone Weil Tag Gallagher Uploaded 30 June 2000 7165 words Abstract The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.... To define force-it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing....It makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all...From [force's] first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another..., the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet-he is a thing....And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this residence, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required of it? It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done.... Perhaps all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer violence; yet this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men's eyes....They have in common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species: the weak see no relation between themselves and the strong, and vice versa.... [The strong], wielding power, have no suspicion of the fact that the consequences of their deeds will at length come home to them....[But eventually it does, and] nothing, no shield, stands between them and tears. This retribution, which has a geometrical rigor, which operates automatically to penalize the abuse of force, was the main subject of Greek thought. It is the soul of the epic....To the Pythagoreans, to Socrates and Plato, it was the jumping-off point of speculation upon the nature of man and the universe. ... In Oriental countries which are steeped in Buddhism, it is perhaps this Greek idea that has lived on under the name of Karma....The Occident, however, has lost it, and no longer even has a word to express it in any of its languages: conceptions of limit, measure, equilibrium, which ought to determine the conduct of life are, in the West, restricted to a servile function in the vocabulary of technicians. We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in their apprenticeship to virtue.... Thus violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. It comes to seem just as external to its employer as to its victim. And from this springs the idea of a destiny before which executioner and victim stand equally innocent..., brothers in the same distress.... [The Iliad's] bitterness is the only justifiable bitterness, for it springs from the subjections of the human spirit to force, that is, in the last analysis, to matter. This subjection is the common lot... No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is. ...The sense of human misery is a pre-condition of justice and love....Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice. Those who think that God himself, once he became human, could not hold the severity of his fate before his eyes without trembling with anguish, should understand that the only people who can appear to rise above human misery are those who mask fate's severity from their own eyes with the help of illusion, drunkenness or fanaticism. No one who is not protected by the armor of a lie can suffer force without being struck to the soul by it. Grace can prevent this blow from corrupting us, but it cannot prevent the wound. (1). Cahiers du sud, XIX, 230, December -Simone Weil. "The Iliad or The Poem of Force." 1940. English translation by Mary Written in 1939, in response to the coming war. Signed McCarthy (except for final paragraph), Politics, November 1945. with an anagram, Émile Novis, because a Jew could not have been published. (1) Ms. 45, in the 1981 movie of the same name, is an innocuous young woman, until she is raped twice. Then she gets a forty-five and goes looking for men to execute. As in Death wish (USA 1974). Except that the point there is that Charles Bronson is unaffected by his murders, whereas here Ms. 45 changes costume with each excursion, progressing from nice convent girl, to sophisticated model, to high-class hooker, to dominatrix, and does so not to bait her prey, but to luxuriate erotically in her own sadism, in the foreplay of attraction. We can avoid paying a toll to force and morality with Bronson, but not with Abel Ferrara. Pleasure, in the world of his films, usually becomes pain, sex becomes violence, virtue vice; the victor is destroyed as surely as the victim. Ms. 45's climactic identity is as a nun, by which she intends to represent not her own sexual repression, but rather desire and death, the violence of the feminine that attracts only to deny, the vice in virtue. Yet she herself has reached a point where pleasure can be achieved only in intense pain, where neither satisfaction nor even release is anymore attainable. Most Ferrara heroes will reach a similar point, insatiably addicted to force. Life is hell in Ferrara, torture without escape, without a moment's release. His movies doubtless owe much, conceptually, to Nicholas St. John, friend and scenarist of most of them. But they are less about concepts than feelings- how it feels to live without grace, to be victim of force. Alienation is portrayed so intensely, in colors, shapes, surfaces, lights and bodies, that one thinks of the Murnau of Sunrise (USA 1927), alive today and making exploitation flicks. Ferrara's movies are bad trips, very bad trips, uncompromisingly moral. Says Ferrara: It's more feelings and emotions and how colors and textures bring about certain feelings. It's not the theme--I (2) "Moon in the Gutter: Abel Ferrara don't think about the theme of the movie. The goal is not interviewed by Gavin Smith," Film the film; the goal is to be whole, to be involved as a comment 24, no. 4 (July-August 1990): 44. human being--knowledge, self-knowledge, group knowledge, whatever.(2) Fear city (USA 1984) is about strip tease and Ferrara's women (and men) are even more erotic than Hawks's. They love making every little movement into erotic turn- on. But Ferrara's women don't behave like pros, they're really having a good time. In the way Melanie Griffith, wearing only a thong, takes evident pleasure contorting her body for a paying male audience, there is no hint of "tease," no hint of the "sin" with which Sirk stages a milder scene in Imitation of life (USA 1959), only a kind of contentment that might have existed in an appleless Eden. But, intercut with Melanie Griffith and outside of Eden, the men react like raging depraved ghouls, with no dignity, while one man with a knife, in an alley outside, with almost unwatchable violence, slashes and mutilates an off-work stripper. The slashing is as much a reaction to the second set of intercut material (the ghoulish men) as to the first (erotic Melanie). The slasher is a youth who passes his days doing (erotic) martial-arts drills nude, with extraordinary dignity. He is totally pitiless to the pain he inflicts with his knife, a characteristic of all Ferrara's "vampires." We understand he intends his life to be a demonstration of (3). There is a "good" love story in Fear his ability to retain male dignity (male eroticism) by city, in which Melanie and her co-workers defying women and tenderness and the debasing are saved by her talent agent, who, emotions they inspire. But like Ms. 45, he has made however, must first recover his will to himself a slave of his own eroticism, has consumed his fight (like John Wayne in The quiet man). life in his sex drive, has sold his soul to force, so that "You think you're a hero? Well, maybe each of his victories makes him more force's victim. you are," a policeman tell him at the end. But, with the exception of Kathleen Are the women responsible for the men's reaction? Are Conklin's resurrection in The addiction, the men simply snakes? Ferrara seems be saying, like anything like a happy ending seems, in a Murnau in Tabu (USA 1931), that no one is free from Ferrara film, implausible, impossible, and what Simone Weil calls the "gravity" of human society, inconsistent. The moviemaker's lack of in which beauty becomes pain, love becomes violence, commitment is evident in the relative lack [3] of stylization with which many such dignity becomes brutality. It's feelings that are subplot scenes are staged, here and in other Ferrara's themes: here the polyphony of three contrasting films in which decisions were imposed by reactions to erotic play.