SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema

Crises of Capitalism in Contemporary Film

Milo Sweedler

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438472812
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the contradictions of capitalism became more apparent than at any other time since the 1920s, numerous films gave allegorical form to the crises of contemporary capitalism. Some films were overtly political in nature, while others refracted the vicissitudes of capital in stories that were not, on the surface, explicitly political. Rumble and Crash examines six particularly rich and thought-provoking films in this vein. These films, Milo Sweedler argues, give narrative and audiovisual form to the increasingly pervasive sense that the economic system we have known and accepted as inevitable and ubiquitous is in fact riddled with self-destructive flaws. Analyzing four movies from before the global financial crisis of 2008 and two that allegorize the financial meltdown itself, Sweedler explores how cinema responded to one of the defining crises of our time. Films examined include Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), Stephen Gaghan's Syriana (2005), Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener (2005), Spike Lee's Inside Man (2006), Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (2013).

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Exceptions and Rules

States of Emergency in Children of Men

IN THE ORIGIN OF GERMAN TRAGIC DRAMA (1928), philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin proposes that “the allegorical way of seeing … is meaningful only in periods of decline.”1 Benjamin offers the examples of the Middle Ages, when “the impermanence of things was inescapably derived from observation,” and the turbulent period of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), when “the same knowledge stared European humanity in the face.”2 Commenting on these passages, Susan Buck-Morss, in her magisterial book on Benjamin’s Arcades Project, concludes that, for Benjamin, “certain experiences (and thus certain epochs) were allegorical, not certain poets.”3 This idea that certain epochs are allegorical is thought-provoking. It suggests that there is something about particular historical periods that lends itself to the allegorical transfigurations that Benjamin finds in the German baroque tragic drama. The overarching argument of the present book is that our own era constitutes such a moment. There is something about the early twenty-first century that calls forth the allegorical mode of representation.

Not all the movies examined in the pages that follow function according to Benjamin’s idiosyncratic conception of allegory, but one of them very much does. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) exhibits many of the features that Benjamin attributes to the German tragic drama (Trauerspiel, lit. “mourning play”). Benjamin’s famous statement that “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” seems tailor-made for a film like Children of Men.4 His assertion that “in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica [the change produced in the face by impending death] of history, as a petrified, primordial landscape” reads like a poetic commentary on the film narrative.5 Cuarón’s movie shares with the Trauerspiel an obsession with fragments, ruins, and remnants. Moreover, if, as Benjamin asserts, in the allegorical Trauerspiel of the seventeenth century, “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else,” similarly, in Children of Men, the various characters, settings, and situations lend themselves to diverse interpretations.6

Foremost among the film’s polysemous tropes is the one that drives the plot. In the movie, set in England during the year 2027, women have stopped giving birth. The last baby was born in 2009, making the youngest person in the world eighteen years old. When the generation that came of age in the 2020s eventually dies, the human race will be extinct. However, what Cuarón encourages us to think about while watching the movie is less the future of human reproduction per se than the myriad problems of contemporary globalization that the film details as it recounts the story of a cynical middle-aged Brit escorting an inexplicably pregnant African refugee across the barren countryside of a hyper-militarized and rigorously segregated England. This chapter argues that the movie’s infertility metaphor transcodes as much the death of politics as it does the degradation of the planet, the ruin of society, or the destruction of humanity itself. Foremost among the problems that the film beckons us to consider, I argue, is the lack of effective resistance to the deleterious effects of globalization that the movie brings into stark relief over the course of nearly two hours.

The interpretation begins with an analysis of the film’s opening scenes, which set the movie’s tone while communicating with alarming clarity its vision of a society unraveling as people go about their daily routines. I contrast these scenes depicting a neoliberal Britain in a perpetual state of emergency, where citizens go about their business with little regard for the disaster unfolding around them, with our first glimpse inside a miniature hippy commune. The visual information on the screen in the latter scene gives vital clues to the film’s conception of history and its nostalgia for the 1960s, which the movie presents as the heyday of social activism. The legacy of the radical sixties lived on, the film implies, up until the 2000s, when it died in the latter years of the decade. I then explore the form of resistance that comes into being when older forms of political contestation perish. The film offers a particularly graphic representation of this new type of resistance in its depiction of an armed uprising inside a refugee camp at the end of the movie. I liken this uprising sequence to the insurrectionary violence that Benjamin provocatively calls the “real state of emergency” in the Theses on the Philosophy of History, his last major work. I then conclude with an analysis of the film’s final scene, in which a boat hopefully called the Tomorrow arrives to take a miraculously fertile refugee and her newborn baby to a mythical outpost on the Azores islands. Unlike the majority of critics who have written on the film, I do not see the movie’s ending as offering an optimistic, redemptive, or hopeful vision of the future. Whatever hope the film offers lies not in the narrative, I argue, but in its unflinching depiction of the horrors of the present. It is the hope that by showing us those horrors, we might see them for what they are and organize an effective resistance to them.

States of Exception

Let us begin with the film’s opening words, read by a pair of news announcers over a black screen.

TV VOICE 1: Day one thousand of the siege of Seattle.

TV VOICE 2: The Muslim community demands an end to the Army’s occupation of mosques.

TV VOICE 1: The Homeland Security bill is ratified. After eight years, British borders will remain closed. The deportation of illegal immigrants will continue. Good morning. Our lead story.

TV VOICE 2: The world was stunned today by the death of Diego Ricardo, the youngest person on the planet.

The film’s opening line here explicitly calls to mind the anti-globalization movement that came prominently into view during the 1999 protests in Seattle, Washington. Those protests brought together roughly 40,000 demonstrators ranging from rank-and-file union members to anarchists, environmentalists, and anti-poverty activists united in common cause against the World Trade Organization (WTO), which was gathering at the Seattle Convention Center for a scheduled meeting. Protestors considered the newly formed WTO (created in 1995) to be “a secretive tool of ruthless multinational corporations” that enabled “sneaker companies to exploit Asian workers, timber companies to clear-cut rain forests, shrimpers to kill sea turtles and a world of other offenses” by transferring market regulatory responsibility from national governments to an intergovernmental organization that favored business interests over workers’ rights, environmental concerns, indigenous ways of life, the livelihood of local populations, and any other concern that might impede the free flow of capital, goods, and services across borders.7 Unsurprisingly, the protestors clashed with police, leading columnists and reporters to dub the 1999 confrontation “the battle of Seattle” or (as in the film) “the siege of Seattle.”

By recasting this one-day confrontation as an ongoing standoff now in its thousandth day, the film situates us, in 2027, in a future where contemporary problems persist in intensified form. The protracted length of the standoff also bodes poorly for the protestors. Unlike the forces of order, which can hold out virtually indefinitely in a clash of this sort, street protestors face myriad logistical challenges, which compromise their ability to continue the struggle even if they do not weaken the demonstrators’ resolve. Although the film gives us no details about the Seattle confrontation other than its length, this single piece of information serves to tilt the balance of power in the government’s favor in the viewer’s imagination.

The second headline takes a similar approach, amplifying the magnitude of a current social conflict, in this case by recasting tensions between Muslims and the British government as a confrontation that has escalated to the point where government troops now occupy mosques. The third headline, which, once again, sounds like an exaggerated version of what could easily be a current news headline, dashes whatever hopes we may have had that the Muslim community might succeed in their efforts to expel the soldiers from their mosques: “The Homeland Security bill is ratified. After eight years, British borders will remain closed. The deportation of illegal immigrants will continue.” The latter headline, which transfers the US Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 by President George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to Britain, condenses a rich historical reference into a few short sentences. Let us take a moment to unpack this reference.

The US Homeland Security Act (HSA) of 2002 consolidated diverse governmental agencies into a single umbrella organization with a mandate “to ensure a homeland that is safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards.”8 The HSA was the culmination of a series of efforts designed to thwart or diminish the severity of threats to national security, threats that the act defines broadly to include anything that menaces “American interests, aspirations, and ways of life.”9 Among the measures leading up to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security is the USA Patriot Act of October 2001, which “allowed the attorney general to ‘take into custody’ any alien suspected of activities that endangered ‘the national security of the United States.’ ”10 The Patriot Act was followed, in November of the same year, by President Bush’s “military order” authorizing the “indefinite detention” of “noncitizens suspected in terrorist activities.”11 As Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben demonstrates in State of Exception, Bush’s order “radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being.”12 The only thing to which the legal condition of these people deprived of the most basic human rights could possibly be compared, Agamben argues, “is the legal situation of the Jews in the Nazi Lager [camps].”13 Like Hitler’s 1933 Decree for the Protection of People and State, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship, thereby creating a class of beings with no legal status, Bush’s 2001 decree authorizing the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists had the effect of creating a class of juridically nonhuman bipeds that it reduced to the minimal condition of existence that Agamben elsewhere calls “bare life”: the pure, naked, unqualified existence of a biological entity with no legal status as a human being.14

Agamben argues in State of Exception that the legal status of detainees in the “new” prison facilities like the US-run Guantánamo Bay detention camp (a status shared by prisoners in the Abu Ghraib facility, which had not yet gained notoriety when Agamben was writing his book) is homologous to that of people interned in the Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s. In both cases, the inmates were stripped of the most basic rights that human beings enjoy. In a previous book, Agamben famously named this figure homo sacer, in reference to an archaic Roman law that deprived certain criminals of legal protections.15 Anyone could kill homo sacer with impunity. Killing a “sacred man” was not considered an act of murder. Such, according to Agamben, was the position of Jews under the Third Reich. They had no rights whatsoever, up to and including the right to live. As philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek points out in his book on the Iraq War (and Agamben will agree with him), the status of the prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay “is directly that of Homo sacer: there are no legal rules regulating their imprisonment; they find themselves literally in a legal void, reduced to basic subsistence.”16 It is they who became, in Judith Butler’s formulation, “humans who are not humans.”17

Numerous scenes in Cuarón’s film depict this sort of reduction of a class of people to the abject state of bare life that Agamben associates with homo sacer. The tracking shot that follows Theo (Clive Owen), the film’s antihero, when he arrives at the Alresford train station and walks along the platform on his way to meet his friend Jasper (Michael Caine) shows a group of people of different ethnic backgrounds quarantined in a steel cage in the left of the frame. The camera tracks past an expressionless British guard with a submachine gun and a caged woman who informs the impassive guard in Serbo-Croatian that there must be some mistake.18 The camera follows Theo from behind as he walks past the woman and a half-dozen other detainees (five European, one African) without taking notice of them. When Theo saunters past a second cage of detainees, also guarded by an armed soldier, the camera pans to an indignant old woman protesting in German to the unresponsive guard. Like the detainees in the previous cage, the refugees quarantined in this second cage are a diverse group, including two sub-Saharan African men, a South Asian woman in a hijab, and a motley group of Europeans of different ages and social classes. The broad racial, ethnic, and social diversity of the prisoners we see quarantined along the platform here calls to mind Žižek’s remark, made in the context of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” that “we are all Homo sacer.”19

Cuarón’s stroke of genius in this scene is to show Theo not caring about the plight of the people quarantined like animals in cages. In her analysis of the movie in The Promise of Happiness, social theorist Sara Ahmed criticizes the film for not taking a clearer position on the horrors taking place in the background of the film. “Theo does not see [the] suffering,” she writes; “indeed, if we adopt his gaze, then our ‘becoming active’ also allows us not to see the suffering.”20 Although it is true that if we adopted Theo’s gaze we would not see the suffering, the film does not encourage us to adopt his po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Exceptions and Rules: States of Emergency in Children of Men
• 2 Mapping Syriana
• 3 Corporate Murder in The Constant Gardener
• 4 Secrets of Primitive Accumulation: Inside Man
• 5 Fictitious Capital and Narrative Spin in The Wolf of Wall Street
• 6 The Meltdown and the Bailout without the Recovery: Blue Jasmine
• Conclusion: Allegories for the Present
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover