Known and unknown territory

OK – he’s a recovering alcoholic with an ex-partner and an indifferent relationship with authority. He likes to do things his way, often without telling anyone else. He goes on his instincts. He is not good looking but always ends up in bed with someone attractive. Cop story – you bet.
It’s a cop story set in Norway. What do I know about Norway?  Fjords and a massacre in 2011 of 69 young people from the left side of politics by a lone gunman. That’s about all. Since reading Jo Nesbo’s book The Snowman, I’ve learnt a little more.

Wikipedia says of Norway: “Key domestic issues include immigration and integration of ethnic minorities, maintaining the country's extensive social safety net with an aging population, and preserving economic competitiveness. … Although having rejected European Union membership in two referenda, Norway maintains close ties with the union and its member countries, as well as with the United States. Norway remains one of the biggest financial contributors to the United Nations, and participates with UN forces in international missions, notably in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Sudan and Libya. … Norway has extensive reserves of petroleum, natural gas, minerals, lumber, seafood, fresh water, and hydropower. … The country maintains a Nordic welfare model with universal health care, subsidized higher education, and a comprehensive social security system. From 2001 to 2006, and then again from 2009 through 2011, Norway has had the highest human development index ranking in the world.”

We find out a little of the larger Norwegian context in The Snowman but not a lot. It’s mainly a story of cop after serial killer. It’s well written and gripping but doesn’t quite have the scale of societal focus that Stieg Larrsen has in his books, for example.  One reviewer wrote “Like all great cop plots, the Harry Hole series depends on an expectation that the enemy will as likely come from within, and above, as he will from the world outside.” I liked the slight glimpse into the politics of the police department. I also liked Nesbo’s ruminations on relationships and sex – which percolate through the character of Harry Hole (pronounced ‘Hooler’).

One reviewer, Wendy Lesser,  speculated as to why Scandinavian thrillers are “so much better than anyone else”? I’m not sure this is true – there are a few LA based writers who could give this region a  run for their money – but it is intriguing reading about this area of the world.

Lesser says:

“In the right hands, the mystery novel becomes not only a thrilling cat-and-mouse game between a fiendishly clever murderer and a doggedly persistent detective, but also a commentary on the wider society that spawns, polices, and punishes murder. It is this wider view—the social view—at which the Scandinavians excel.”

Then she says

“Perhaps we can attribute this in part to the small size of these far northern countries, their relatively homogenous populations, their stable cultural traditions—a setting, in short, in which murders (and especially serial murders) stand out starkly and beg for analysis.”

 She speculates on the place of the long, dark winter in the attraction – though this to me seems more a reason for Scandinavians to read than to be read. The most interesting thing she writes is about the politics of these countries – that just possibly

“this wider focus is connected to the firmly if mildly socialist perspective of even the most conservative Scandinavian governments, a view in which individual behavior contributes to or detracts from the public welfare.”

I like reading about this little-known (to me) country that is played out within the generic global formula of a thriller. Unknown territory within the known.

Dark and crazy

What little I know of life in Romania has been conveyed mainly by films until now. I have seen some splendid films including Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which I thought about a lot when I was reading The Appointment. In the latter film, an old man is carted from hospital to hospital in the course of one night, getting sicker and sicker as doctors keep refusing to treat him and send him away. The plot line of The Appointment is not dissimilar. The main character (unnamed) is on a tram journey across town which lasts the course of the book. She has been “summoned” by the authorities for interrogation; this trip is just one of many already taken. The journey in the story allows for the character to reflect on her life while adding a kind of forward impetus to the narrative. We are keen to find out what will happen to her as we linger in the surreal and muddy waters of life under the Ceaucescu regime.

It’s a hard book to read. There is nothing desirable about her life and awful things happen to most characters. As occurs in toxic regimes (and this applies to workplaces as much as cultures and countries), people behave very badly toward one another when there is fear and scape-goating around. Or they drink to escape or have nihilistic or abusive sex. All of these elements pertain in this novel. I can’t say that I enjoyed reading it but it provides both a sense of truth, and some very fine writing. Take the following for example:

“The water squirted and gathered around the tree trunks in shallow pools, full of drowned ants. The earth drank slowly. Then Grandfather said You go out for a walk and the world opens up for you. And before you've even stretched your legs properly, it closes shut. From here to there it's just the farty splutter of a lantern. And they call that having lived. It's not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.” (p80)

This novel was written by Herta Muller who emigrated to Germany in 1987, two years before the Ceaucescu regime was overthrown. She accurately captures the way in which the individual is made powerless by the state in writing: "there's nothing to think about, because I myself am nothing, apart from being summoned." One reviewer, Costica Bradatan, wrote: “Müller's work is political not in any superficial way, but in the more profound sense of literature as bearing witness. ‘Bearing witness’ is just the right phrase – it doesn’t make it an easy read but it does make the narrative compelling. It reminds me of the novel I read earlier in the year set in Libya (In the Country of Men). In that case, the author made the politics more palatable by telling the story through the perspective of a small boy. I liked that novel a lot but I’m glad that Muller didn’t try to make it easy to read. Like the ride with Mr Lazarescu, you kind of need to endure the awfulness and the craziness. I guess the other obvious comparison is anything by Kafka, but I haven’t been in that territory for a long time.

Bradatan also writes:

"There is a Romantic misconception that terror has always to be impressive, fierce and appropriately Luciferian – in other words, that terror is nothing if it is not spectacular. However, that's rarely the case in real life. As Czeslaw Milosz excellently put it in The Native Realm, “Terror is not … monumental; it is abject, it has a furtive glance, it destroys the fabric of human society and changes the relationships of millions of individuals into channels for blackmail…That's why Herta Müller's work is so important: It maps out, with surgical precision, this mediocre yet sinister face of European totalitarianism, which is something that has been largely unaccounted for."

a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5403283-jillwilson">View all my reviews

An encounter with my younger self

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

I went to see The Conformist last night – though it was released in 1970, I have never seen it. It follows the story of a man named Clerici who becomes involved with the fascist regime in Italy and has the job of trying to assassinate his old college professor. One of the stand-out things for me was the use of light and colour in the film – this is lush and stagey and dramatic and gorgeous.

Scenes worth a mention just for the way they are filmed include:

- The dance scene between Clerici’s wife and Dominique Sanda in Paris – very sexy

- When Clerici arrives at his fiancee’s flat and has lunch with her and her mother - see the YouTube clip

- The hunting scene (hunting Dominique Sanda) in the forest in France – One critic noted how many film makers had since been inspired by this scene including the makers of the Sopranos

-Clerici visiting his father in the lunatic asylum – a critic described this scene as:

There are excesses in the film, but they are balanced by scenes of such unusual beauty and vitality that I couldn't care less. I think particularly of a scene in which Marcello and his mother
visit his father in the courtyard of a mental hospital that looks very much like
a surreal Greek market- place. It could be Oedipus and Jocasta come to call on a
crazy Laius. Vincent Canby in the New York Times

He nails sensuality – the scenes of Sanda and Clerici’s wife (Stefania Sandrelli), of Clerici and his wife on a train caressing as she tells him about her first sexual experience (the content of which should be shocking but Bertolucci transgressively uses the material, of the women dancing. Lush, lush lush.

The story itself – of a weak man trying to find a place in the world – a fascist world – vaguely interesting – but the way it's told – very seductive.

In 1970 - two years before The Godfather's Oscar validated the approach - Bertolucci took a brave step in making a film where every character is unlikeable and pathetic, even the protagonist. Ben Sillis in Eye for Film

Taking no prisoners

“Visceral: 1: felt in or as if in the viscera, deep, 2: not intellectual : instinctive , unreasoning, 3: dealing with crude or elemental emotions, 4: earthy."

I seem to use the word “visceral” a lot more lately. If someone had asked me what it meant, I think I would have said “bloody, tangible, of the body” with an edge of violence. But maybe this is because it is often used about violent scenarios. Brainyquote has a number of examples of ways that other people have used the word including Penn Jillette who said “When you're watching Psycho, there's that moment when you have a visceral reaction to watching someone being stabbed. And then you have the intellectual revelation that you're not, and that's where the celebration comes in.” Then I was kind of surprised when I looked up the Macquarie and their definition related solely to the biological: “soft interior organs in the cavities of the body, eg the brain, lungs, heart, stomach and intestines”.

The word certainly came to mind a lot when I was watching the film Hunger. Seeing this film is like been run over. In a very sophisticated way. It is very, very violent, as you would expect in a film about a prison. It’s about the decision of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands to go on a hunger strike in 1981 to protest the fact that IRA prisoners were being treated like the criminal class of prisoners by the prison authorities.

I vaguely remember this in the news but little about the story. It is just one large fragment in the very long and fuzzy set of news clips that form my understanding of Northern Ireland’s politics. A 31 year-old colleague had never heard of the IRA. She’s not uneducated; it‘s just that “the troubles” have been sorted to some extent and Northern Ireland is no longer a key part of daily news bulletins. When Bobby Sands was starving himself to death, I was learning to teach in Swan Hill; I had other things on my mind.

The film opens with a set of images and sounds that take the viewer right into the guts of the prison. (Guts- visceral!!!) You hear rather than see a rattling of pots and pans in a protest rally. The noise becomes deafening, nearly unbearable, even as the close-ups of the items being banged look like pieces in a factory assembly line, then we experience some of the daily rituals through a prison officer who soaks his bloody knuckles in water and checks the undercarriage of his car for bombs before leaving for work. This is the almost the only time we experience events outside the prison except for voice-overs by Maggie Thatcher that contextualise the British Government’s position and one other challenging scene that helps to further unsettle us.

The film is very claustrophobic; the action is both internal to the prison and internal to the body. It’s a film which seeks to explore what happened at one historical point in time, to one person, without providing much surrounding context. This is a very interesting strategy. We learn almost nothing about the larger context except that both the IRA and the British authorities were extremely violent in pursuit of their conflicting goals. I like the fact that it is so concentrated but wonder how it might be interpreted by people who know nothing about the politics. In this case it becomes almost solely a film about the decision to use your body as a tool for political activism. Does a man have the right to kill himself and lead others to their own suicides? Will it accomplish anything? Won't this just play into the hands of Margaret Thatcher? The broader range of questions which we might now apply to suicide bombers or to asylum seekers who sew their lips together etc.

The visceral part? The hunger strikers had tried a “no wash” campaign which included smearing their own shit on the walls of the cells and flooding the hallways with urine. They are forcibly washed by guards. There are maggots. The feeling of being in this with them is intensifies by the lack of dialogue which pervades the first third of the film. There is a lot of silence which heightens the impact for other senses.

This is the first film for director Steve McQueen who is apparently an accomplished and well known visual artist. The visuals are really compelling. He pictures the inmates in one scene as a large group of Jesus like figures – they have long hair, beards and bare chest and their gauntness reminds me of the many, many images of Christ on the cross. This image is reinforced towards the end of the film when Bobby Sands collapses in the bathroom and is carried back to bed by a guard, Pieta style. And towards the end of the film, we begin to occupy Sand’s body, maybe devouring it in the way that some organs might be cannibalising other parts of the body in a kind of hideous and desperate attempt to stay alive. We hear and see the world in a fuzzy disconnected way as Sands is dying. His body is covered with suppurating sores. It’s pretty ghastly and hard to sit through.

Many reviewers have commented on the set-up of the film- in 3 acts with an extraordinary dialogue in the middle between Sands and a priest. It’s not necessary for me to describe that here except that it’s brave to expect an audience to stay the distance. This part enables us to understand why Sands has decided to take this course of action. "Putting my life on the line isn't the only thing I can do—it's the right thing." It tells us a little of Sands’ background; from an early age, he has been able to make tough decisions.

This long scene is characteristic of the whole film in that I felt for Sands but not in a deep emotional way- I was horrified by what happened to him, by the choice that he felt he had to make, horrified by the conditions in the prison, by the brutality of life for everyone in the prison (guards and prisoners) but film style is extremely dispassionate. Because of the sort of person I am, I usually like to connect with the characters – this enables me to feel things deeply and I don’t think the film provides this opportunity to any extent. It doesn’t diminish the film but has made me reflect about how film–makers get into your psyche and what the most effective techniques are.

For me, the film Wendy and Lucy, which I saw at the film festival, does this best. That film forced the viewer to experience the same anxieties and tension as the main character, by moving slowly through her emotional landscape, feeling her vulnerability and the strength of character. Maybe in Hunger, we just experience the strength of character and not the vulnerability and this is why I am not as emotionally connected. WE can see that their bodies are vulnerable but they are so tough in the face of the brutality that it's hard to feel the emotional force of the experience.

Despite this, I admire the film and the director. It’s powerful and interesting. It takes no prisoners. It's worth the difficulty of sitting through.