Decay & Decrepitude in Motion Picture
Decay >>>TAKE3
'A common man carries the burden of a suffocating city' (author's interpretation)
Addressing decay of our apocalyptic culture in motion picture has grown to become a recognizable fact. Cinema has, as Frederic Jameson notes, replaced the novel in art’s traditional function of illustrating the characteristics of the society in which it is produced, even if the culture of the simulacra makes this relationship problematic (Sharrett, 1). The producers of dystopian films then try to extract just that, a non-subtle wake up call of our culture’s decay accentuating on the problems associated with it. Decadence in postmodernity calls for the end of the social and crisis of meaning, and this undeniable fact is increasingly reiterated in film today. Terms such as ‘decay’ and ‘decrepitude’ seem to reappear in postmodern culture, and ultimately on silver screens, marking the change in our society which is apparently in severe need of reconstruction. Let’s take this premise to evaluate ‘decay’ in following feature dystopic films.
Arguably the most important film in the history of cinema, ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ was the first nightmare film of the apocalyptic era. Its Expressionistic set designs and use of cinema to explore the madness of man and the world around him is groundbreaking. The cinematic expression experienced a dramatic shift between natural sets to the man-made sets. No longer did the camera have to be plunked before natural landscapes, but in contrary, the sets are painted and artificial, buildings could tilt, characters can be robotic - the audience can now be completely engulfed in an artificial world - they can view a story through the eyes of a madman. This style of the set choreography created mystical and psychological treatise for the future of the fantasy genre films. It was considered controversial at the time of its release because of its negative impact on social well being. The celebration of violence and manipulation of the law was the arbiter behind this picture. However horrid, it showed the true vision of the world through the eyes of Francis, one of the main characters in the movie. His apocalyptic vision of his surroundings raised questions in the audience about his sanity and self control. True, he was mad, but this had a lot to do with his understanding of the bureaucratic instability of the social system and its overcomplicated methods of presenting order, its antiauthoritarian administration which nobody else could seem to be able to comprehend. This drove him to demise, as the same laws which cultivated order, brought one to commit a murder. This ambiguity accentuates the notion of moral decay in the political system. Furthermore, the unnatural feel of the set such as the structurally impossible relationship between the floors and walls, awkwardly shaped buildings that could never stand, labyrinthian feel to the surrounding enhance the notion of chaos and decay. The world of the film is the product of Francis’s subjective vision, not of the director’s objective one. Robert Wiene, the director of the film, has intentionally used the grotesque décor of the film in a perpetual war against nature (Mast, 132). To some critics the film’s expressionist designs were a conscious departure from Hollywood style or a reflection of a post-war angst, other than the example of self-reflectivity or cinematic deconstruction (Parkinson, 58). The visual and formal extravagance of the film never had any successors: its far reaching importance was in showing how expressionism of a limited kind was the cinema’s natural method; how images could be used to reflect and interpret psychological state and interior action (Robinson, 93). In this respect, this film successfully touched on the sensitive parts of the social system, ones that were to blame for our currently decaying world. According to Robson, this picture is the supreme expression of headlong flight from a world became too horrible to contemplate; flight to an escape the world of introversion, of speculation amid the apparently inscrutable workings of the human mind; flight to the prostrate worship of the ego, to subjectivism (108).
Many film directors attempted to recreate the ambiguity of Caligari, but none more successfully than Stanley Kubrick in his masterpiece ‘A Clockwork Orange’. His understanding of the political corruption of the 1970’s was sufficient for its remarkable recreation on silver screen. Because of its intentions to obliterate a then corrosive state of patriarchal values and rapacious capitalism, some of its content is still contemplated and often referred to today. It was one of its kind, a genre of its own, a movie that critics still talk about in attempt to distinguish its art from a grotesque exploitation of domestic violence and sexually offensive visualization. In these attacks over to which category the film belongs – art or not art – operate not only discourses concerned with the changing definitions of obscenity and theories of audience effect but also the discourses of intertextual comparison (McDougal, 44). There is film’s critical line between its artistic expression and exploitation of sex and violence makes the film teeter-totter between positive or negative criticism. There is a mutual agreement there is a bit of both, but the film’s ideology transcends beyond its visual interpretations, and attempts to tell a story of greater evil that lurks amongst domestic violence: a decaying factor of apocalyptic culture as a whole, for those that break the law as well as for those that enforce them. The undercurrent of the film’s major thesis belongs to exploration of the idea of morality of free spirit against the corruption of the bureaucratic model of authorship and failing political structure. The premise of the original novel by Anthony Burgess expressed just that: ’the power of choice of free human being must prevail’. The film’s representation of Alex, the main character, was one primary site around this debate over ideology and morality focused. Both in the abstract and via comparison in the novel, reviewers thought Kubrick had created a central protagonist with whom the audience was to side. Alex “has more energy and style, more humanity than anyone else in the movie” (McDougal, 48). As the movie progressed from its chaotic and relentlessly violent to moderately ordered state, at the time when Alex, the leader of the gang, was captured by the police, we see a change in the tone in the political authorship. Kubrick makes us believe the state has all the power and prevails over the street horrors, but the wittiness and free spirit of Alex, quickly ridicules the temporary control of law and order. There are glimpses of Prison Chaplain, who I believe is a pivotal character in the movie, shows weakness in his persuasion to control order. Perhaps why his character is shown in more humoristic manner, as evidence that police as a state authority figure is helpless and unconvincing, due to the corruption of political propaganda and state alliance. This is clearly shown near the end of the movie, when Alex accidentally runs into his old buddies who are now a part of the police authority. Strangely enough, instead to control peace, they throw more fuel in the fire of violence tantalizing Alex with some ‘taste of your own medicine’ beatings. The authoritative and philosophical issue of morality is proved to be a vicious cycle of self-incarnate exploitation of violence and corruption. Kubrick’s conspiracy against political ideologies has now been physically revealed. One can agree, rather the movie is and experiment in avant-garde film media or just plain pornographic, as some critics may call it, it retains its qualities as decaying representation of our current social structure.