Little White Lies web piece on the flipside of escapist cinema.

 

Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose…

With the silly season upon us and even such cultured and otherwise urbane organs as LWL meekly kow-towing to the blockbusting power of summer’s fantastical tentpole releases, it’s time to once again slap the Fassbinder box-sets back on the shelf and get down to the Enormo-plex to wonder at the vomit-streaked leviathans and popcorn-studded behemoths that Tinseltown has prodded before us.

Escapism has always been Hollywood’s watchword, and flying around the galaxy, cleaning up Gotham or slicing up mutants with fish knives strapped to your fingers is all well and good: such flights of fancy might very well succeed in sating our occasional need for momentary diversion and even send us from the cinema wearing the beatific smiles of the chemically castrated. Unfortunately, once this buzz has worn off we find ourselves reclaimed by the cold, grey shadows of our everyday lives, picking our way toward the grim noblesse of the grave with nothing to look forward to but regular quiz nights down the pub and two weeks on some flyblown Greek anthill every July.

These films offer a utopian promise that most of us yearn for, but are never likely to realise. The heart-swelling emancipation of ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ or the transmigratory epiphanies suggested by the closing moments of ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ are simply beyond what most of us might reasonably expect from the average day. There are, however, a few films in which freedom from one’s responsibilities, worries and disappointments are won not by logic-free prison breaks or benign alien abduction but by embracing the less aspirational, more mundane elements of daily life…

The most obvious component of our lives is work, and as novelist Chuck Palahniuk notes in his paean to the daily grind, ‘Choke’, ‘masochism is a valuable job skill’. Unless you number amongst that minute, ever-decreasing and unutterably smug fraction of the workforce that actually enjoys it’s trade, the lion’s share of your life will consist of vast brown swathes of terminally stifling drudgery interspersed with trips to the lav. The outlook might seem bleak, but if you were to follow the fine example of Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay) in John Schlesinger’s ‘Billy Liar’, you’d realise that the treadmill is in fact a yellow-brick road that leads to the Elysian Fields of Freedonia. Lying, cheating and dreaming his way through the working day, Billy proves that those Germans were really on to something with the phrase ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’. 

Workplace tedium is also the lot of Sam Lowry (Jonathon Pryce) in Terry Gilliam’s absurdist dystopian fever-dream, ‘Brazil’. Threatened with torture when the authorities suspect his new ladyfriend of being a bomb-crazed terrorist, Sam does the only rational thing and takes a total psychotic break from reality. This wise move finally affords him the Eden that the rusty cage of his recently departed body has only ever denied him.

Madness might seem like an extreme solution, but it’s mere bagatelle to the hero of ‘I Am Legend’. Previously filmed as ‘The Last Man on Earth’ starring Vincent Price and ‘The Omega Man’ with Charlton ‘Cold Dead Hands’ Heston, the most recent incarnation of Richard Matheson’s horror novel saw Will Smith as the only survivor of a global biological snafu. Big Willy has no demands upon his time and can indulge his every whim but - with no-one else around to show-off to - he starts to suspect that he’s gone a little overboard in his pursuit of that permanent vacation. The rest of us can gird ourselves for such shenanigans when pig flu eventually comes barrelling through the Channel tunnel.

Any number of drug films suggest themselves for contention, as do the excesses of such drink-dramas as ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ and ‘The Lost Weekend’, but let’s sidestep the obvious for a more allegorical take on short-term memory loss. Christopher Nolan’s thorny puzzler ‘Memento’ presents us with the confused and forgetful Guy Pearce waking up every day with a newly-minted tattoo: a finer metaphor for the morning after than night before is hard to imagine. Those who forget the past may well be doomed to repeat it, but they are at least spared the shackles of conscience that so constrain the rest of us.

Incarceration is the name of the game in both ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ and ‘The Enigma of Kasper Hauser’. In the former, William Hurt and Raul Julia are freed from everyday demands to gambol through a fully realised fantasy world by the desperate privations of an especially squalid South American prison cell. Kasper, on the other hand, spends the first seventeen years of his life in a windowless cellar somewhere near Nuremberg with no form of human contact whatsoever. Booted out into the gale-force pandemonium of early-Nineteenth century Germany, the poor sod must have felt like anything was a plus after his cruelly overextended stay in the naughty corner.

The unseen ministrations of an all-powerful Big Brother assure the continuation of Jim Carrey’s drably Arcadian existence in underwhelming media satire ‘The Truman Show’. Born into his own private universe, where cameras lurk to record his every move, Truman’s subsequent life is screened 24/7 to the mouth-breathers and chowderheads out there in TV Land. Only when he starts asking some uncomfortable questions do the golden-fretted halls of his own personal Asgard come crashing down. The lesson is clear – if God gives you lemons, you make lemonade.

In the future as predicted by ‘The Matrix’ we will see a massive growth in such superintended pod-life. The most persuasive of many science fiction films to investigate the oft-predicted paradigm shift between man and machine, it promulgates an inevitable evolutionary leap after which humankind will be kept in blissful suspended animation while our atrophied bodies are used to power the machines that wet-nurse us through our virtual lives. No job, no bills, no hassle, just leather trench coats, killer shades and fun, fun, fun.

Let freedom rein, indeed.