During my first week at the Mill Valley Film Festival, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Danielle Venton for KRCB. We sat on a bench at the main junction in the centre of town and chatted for half an hour about the film, population and environmental issues. Danielle was smart, funny, well-prepared and asked good questions. It was a lot of fun. Here is the interview.
I wrote this post at the airport while waiting for my plane:
One of the comments on our Indiegogo campaign page mentioned the need for good music; it was a passing mention, but it got me thinking about a song I remember and still enjoy: Istället för musik, Förvirring by Bob Hund. The translation of the title (and repeated chorus) is Instead Of Music, Confusion. Here’s the video:
So here I am in Heathrow Airport, sitting in a packed cafe, drinking my coffee and waiting to catch my plane to San Francisco. To my right, a couple from Finland in their late fifties. In front of me, the counter; servers from South America, Asia and Eastern Europe serve the non-stop flow of customers. A cart rattles by piled high with trays, clattering on the corrugated metal floor. To my left, a row of tables, all occupied, everyone’s nose buried in their food, their phone or their laptop. The one or two exceptions that prove the rule stare off into the middle distance.
From speakers mounted throughout the room, some warbling approximation of what people call music nowadays burbles away, inoffensive lifestyle wallpaper – what I call “music for people who don’t like music”. Branded hoardings surround us on all sides, reminding us how great this place is, how pure the company is, how fresh the food, how healthy and homemade all the sandwiches trucked here from the depot are.
Directly next to me, maybe three feet away, two men stand at the coffee countertop where they drop sugar and milk into their cups. They talk to each other in low tones but I can hear every word. Why wouldn’t I? They’re right there.
In fact, I can hear everything said at the counter. They’re right there as well – ten feet instead of three.
A server breezes past, drops a tray onto the stack on the counter with a clatter and moves off again. Back and forth, back and forth. The gritty sound of plastic wheels rolling on laminate and steel. The clang of the coffee machine as another dose of grounds is chambered and then blasted with hot water.
Outside the cafe, an alarm goes off briefly – for ten seconds the rotor squeal pierces my ears.
I like traveling, principally because it is absolutely the best way to meet new people, and I love people. I’m fascinated by their stories, their faces, their ideas, their relationships, the way they behave, the way they make their decisions. That’s why I would have studied anthropology at university if I hadn’t been so singularly convinced that I was going to be in a platinum record-selling rock and roll band when I was a teenager. That’s why directing in particular attracts me – interacting with, examining and understanding people. Their motivations, their emotions, their actuality.
So if I love people so much, why make a film about population issues and crowding? Why write about the distractions, the noise, the intrusion of this fairly typical public place?
I love music as well. I play the drums, not so much these days though – my shoulder ain’t what it used to be and my bald spot doesn’t look very sexy under a spotlight. Zappa said “music is the best”. Stephen King calls it “the fabled automatic” for its ability to transport us instantly to a memory, a state of mind, an emotion. Magic, pure and simple.
But music is based on principles of melody, harmony, form and composition. Even dissonant music, of which I’m a big fan, has order within it, intentionality. Two of the most important elements of powerful music are restraint and quiet. The guitar solo you love probably wouldn’t be so beautiful if the guitarist tried to play every note on the guitar the whole time. Restraint. The part where the song pares down to a single instrument, holding a pulse or tune, and then it builds, slowly, tremendously, to a thundering climax that makes your heart race, your hair stand up, your skin go goosey – if it was full-on loud with everyone playing at once for the whole song, it would lose its power. It would lose its implicit order, its intentionality. It would cease to be music and instead, become confusion.
The beginning of Jungle Boogie, when the bass kicks in, is one of the funkiest moments in the history of music. If you don’t find yourself moving to it when it takes off, get your pulse checked because you may be deceased. Why is it so balls-to-the-wall funktastic? Because the bass isn’t playing up until that point. When it kicks in, you notice, because it is new, insistent, intense.
John B. Calhoun, the doctor whose experiments form the narrative backbone of Critical Mass, described a phenomenon among the rodents which he called “overliving”. As more and more rodents crowded together, they bumped into one another ever more frequently until it became unbearable for them. Too much unintentional contact with one another eventually made meaningful , intentional contact between them less likely, even impossible. A society, which is fundamentally a network of individuals communicating meaningfully with one another for their mutual pleasure and benefit became instead a muddle of competing noises and competing interests. Connections were briefer or non-existent, lost in the cacophony.
Going back to my three-chord punk band at the age of sixteen, which morphed into a prog outfit playing twelve-minute through-composiitions – there were four of us. Perhaps with five, ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty people, we might have written truly exceptional material, way beyond what only the four of us were capable of. But if there were fifty, a hundred, a thousand people in that band, what melody, harmony, form or composition would be possible then? Would it have been music, or confusion?
When I set out to make this film, I wanted to learn about the subject of population and introduce people to it so that we could have a real dialogue. I wanted to know what kind of music we used to play, what we play now and what the songs of future will be if we don’t change anything or could be if we do.
I love people, just as I love music. That’s why I think we should have an open conversation about what is going on around us, so that in the future we, our children and our children’s children can have music instead of confusion.
What moviemaker’s blog would be complete without at least one post reading a meaning no-one else sees into some movie?
Just in case you missed the block capital letters in the title of this post, I am about to share my interpretation of the environmental meta-narrative in Rian Johnson’s new film, Looper, and that will involve mentioning key plot points as well as the ending. If you have not seen this film, do not read this post until you have. It’s a movie worth seeing with fresh eyes. Don’t let me ruin it for you.
If you’re still reading this post, that means you’ve seen the movie, so I won’t recap the story for you. I’ll cut to the chase.
During the film, you may have caught many references that implied a period of instability prior to the 2040s setting of the film. The present day of the film is rife with neo-Western lawlessness, the Hobbesian war of “all against all”. A man shoots another man in the back for stealing his suitcase. Hoodlums run riot with guns. The line between law enforcement and the criminal element is non-existent, one behaving as an extension of the other.
The primacy of precious metals as currency points to some sort of economic collapse. The repeated mention of Mandarin being the language of the future, paper money being emblazoned with Mao, the sage advice that China rather than France is the place to go – these story elements tell us that the economic collapse was followed by the rise of China.
Cars, with few exceptions, are either battered ‘old world’ cars with solar panels or electric cars. The homestead on which Emily Blunt lives operates on solar power, which features heavily in the background of most of the exterior shots. Her crop, sugar cane, means biofuel. Her flying field sprayer points to small-scale domestic agriculture as a target market of innovation. At one point, when faced with the suggestion that they should burn her crop to get a clear view of who might be coming, she says that even if the crop is failing, it still contains the seeds for next year. No Monsanto terminator crop, then. Also, a telling statement that what we have now is worth something for the future and should not simply be defensively liquidated. All this points to the fact that the present day in Looper is a post-peak oil world. This is important, because peak oil entwines the environmental and economic elements of society. The morality play at hand here can be read ecologically or financially, socially or politically – by arguing that this is a post-peak world, I am saying that all of these are present intentionally as a holistic image of a near-future global situation.
So what of the characters? The four primary characters can be split into simple categories:
The ‘old’ generation: Bruce Willis, representing the Boomer generation.
The ‘present’ generation: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, representing those of us between the ages of 20 and 40, a group in which I include myself.
The ‘next’ generation: The boy, representing those currently too young to have political or social sway but still held hostage by the behaviour of the other two generations, in one scene literally.
These three make a trinity very obviously akin to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – the child’s telekinesis provides his character with an otherly nature that fits this interpretation. The conversation between Willis and Levitt in the diner is a father/son argument if ever there was. The idea that they are the same person strengthens my theory that they represent the cyclical destructive habits that one generation learns from the other.
This leaves Emily Blunt’s character: Mother Nature. Gaia, if you’re a fan of James Lovelock. She nurtures her child, the ‘next’ generation, in the face of the chaos and violence wrought by man. She is fierce and protective but not cruel. She is, eventually, held hostage by both the ‘present’ (Jesse, the hitman sent to find Levitt) and the ‘old’ (Willis playing out the Terminator/Sarah Connor dynamic). She makes peace with Levitt once he recognises how she and her child should be treated.
So how does this analysis frame Looper as an environmental morality play? Here goes…
The ‘present’ generation is engaged in a cyclical, self-defeating hedonistic exercise dressed up as a fulfilling life, mainly geared towards either repeating or clearing up the mistakes made by their forebears, the ‘old’ generation. The ‘old’ generation have rules that make this cycle of behaviour both inevitable and pointless – old criminals are sent back to be killed by their younger selves. The serpent devours its own tail. Administrating this closed loop is an ‘old’ generation puppet, who governs the ‘present’ generation with brutal control. Are we not currently ruled by the ‘old’, mainly through fear and brutality?
The addiction to ‘dropping’ (using a drug dripped into the eyes) can be read as any number of particular behaviours – fossil fuel usage, drug abuse itself – which quite literally cloud one’s sight, make one unfit for much other than alternating bouts of anti-social and hedonistic activity, lead to dependence and harsh withdrawal in the event of the drug’s unavailability. One could even read this as a representation of anti-depressants and more broadly the use of psychoactive prescription medications to allow people to be happy, or at least not catatonically depressed, by their senseless and unsatisfying existence.
All of the violence committed by the ‘present’ generation only afford them, eventually, a 30-year retirement as a member of the ‘old’ generation, in which they can do whatever they want with themselves, spending the money they accumulated off the back of the ‘present’ generation. The fact that both ‘worker’ and ‘retiree’ are the same person makes the metaphor all the more telling. Eventually, the ‘old’ man is sent back to be killed by his ‘present’ self – the loop is closed, the retirement account is spent/annulled, another worker retires to take his place. The serpent devours its own tail.
Enter Mother Nature, guardian of a child who in the future will wreak a horrible revenge on the ‘old’ generation by revolution, forcing them out of the picture altogether. Why? Because of what was done to it by that generation. By brutality, short-sightedness, selfishness and greed. The ‘present’ generation is in a curious position of simultaneously working for the ‘next’ and ‘old’ generations; do we not work for our children and our parents?
What is the ‘old’ generation’s reaction to this upstart ‘next’ generation? To destroy it in order to preserve the things the ‘old’ generation enjoys; Willis wants his life back, his wife back, his peaceful retirement back. To achieve this, the ‘old’ generation attacks not just the ‘next’ but also the ‘present’ generation, but there is a bitter twist to this: in the loop of time, the death of the present generation destroys the old generation but still leaves the next generation alive with what’s left of Mother Nature.
The only way that the ‘present’ generation can save the ‘next’ generation is by destroying itself, and by extension the ‘old’, in order to leave room for the new. Mother Nature can only watch as this all-too-human drama unfolds. She is held hostage, threatened, occasionally in jeopardy, but ultimately it is the human who is extinguished by human activity – Mother Nature survives. The ‘present’ generation is forced right to the brink, only making the decision of self-sacrifice when faced with watching the ‘old’ generation and ‘old’ ways obliterating any hope the ‘next’ generation has of doing things differently, of evolving. Levitt’s character, to atone for his earlier feckless selfishness, has to break the loop of repetitive and destructive foolishness against Mother Nature and the ‘next’ generation, and in so doing, he is redeemed.
All of the social, political, economic and environmental upheaval around us is right there on the screen. The age of austerity, trading the future of an entire generation for the retirement accounts of a few. The consumption of resources now that can never be used again. The bizarre trap our present generation feels, on the one hand knowing that to keep more for the next generation we have to take from our parents and grandparents, on the other hand slowly realising that whatever choice we make, it is us today, here and now, who will have to make do with less or even nothing at all.
So, Mr. Rian Johnson, my compliments to you, sir. Either intentionally or not, you have crafted a morality tale for the peak oil age, one where we live inside a time loop, visiting the sins of the father unto the son, robbing Peter to pay Paul, running in circles until we go extinct. It ain’t hopeful, but dammit, it’s good cinema.
And that’s the movie you didn’t see. Thanks for reading.
We have special previews of Critical Mass coming up this month. There will be Q&A sessions with me after all three screenings.
West Coast:
October 13, 1:30pm @ Sequoia 1, 25 Throckmorton Ave., Mill Valley, CA
October 14, 5:45pm @ 142 Throckmorton Theatre, Mill Valley, CA
Tickets available here.
East Coast:
October 20, 6:15pm @ Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center, 144 W. 65th Street, New York, NY
Tickets available here.
The Calhoun family will be attending the New York show, which will make it a very special night indeed. Please join us.
And don’t forget our Indiegogo campaign – we need your help to distribute this film.