My tastes in film and story stray toward the abstract, the complex, and the combative. These days, I wouldn't trust an artist who was sure of themselves; the modern world as a backdrop demands strands of uncertainty in the cultural narrative, and it's an appreciation of this sentiment that I look for in great contemporary cinema.
In movies like Von Trier's AntiChrist, Noh's Irreversible, the recent Italian film Gomorrah, and western political pieces like Steve McQueen's Hunger, the audience is heavily dosed with gut wrenching absurdity, stern and all the more scary for its realism. These are glimpses of the insanity any sane person has flirted with, human society being what it is.
As the Dalai Lama remarked in Ethics for a New Millennium, "Modern industrial society often strikes me as being like a huge, self-propelled machine. Instead of human beings being in charge, each individual is a tiny, insignificant component with no choice but to move when the machine moves." Indeed, in this climate of collective questioning and general uncertainty, the mythos of the hero not only seems unlikely, it seems irrelevant. (The recent stellar success of novelist and dread monger Cormac McCarthy also sings to this theme.)
The aforementioned film Hunger takes on the complex topic of the 1981 Irish political conflict and subsequent hunger strike. In the narrative, the goals of the characters are subordinated to the extreme deadlock of the ideologies at work. We learn that the prison guards (stand-in representatives for the status quo governing establishment) are not in positions of "real" authority at all, but are in fact slaves to the wills of the activist inmates, mere caregivers and house cleaners, obligated as thus by a petulant and reactionary society. The antagonist prisoners are the true masters in their utter determination to use the system's rigidity against itself. In this world, David does not defeat Goliath in open battle, but instead endures a terrific beating, the punishment of a lifetime, until the onlookers are so disgusted by themselves and the gruesome display their 'civil' society has allowed, that Goliath must heed the public outcry and surrender to societal obligation. The same way the machine forces us to move when it moves, it is forced to stop only if we truly stop (in Hunger, this is exemplified by extreme asceticism).
In a time when leaders are so afraid to speak frankly about the gravity of our predicament that they hide behind hundred year old platitudes about progress; In a time when the dexterity of a rabble of religious clans in the Middle East can sucker the world's most omnipotent empire into it's own drawn out and inevitable defeat, movies like Hunger provide us with the depths of theme we need to make some small sense of reality.
The voices of these filmmakers give hope to those looking for the kind of artistic substance that might save us from ourselves. They show me that even if the machine is impossible to halt completely, its most effective navigators are those who understand its function and are willing to stand up for what they've come to believe, not with the certainty of a fundamentalist, but with the unwavering inquiry of a scientist.
In essence, these films do not prove anything, instead they provide us with some very interesting evidence that, no matter how you look at it, is difficult to refute.
