Bare People and Grisly Men: Shortbus, Grizzly Man
Two Anecdotes
I once had a lunch with some cinematographers in San Francisco; one of them worked for ILM and told us that if you explode a model, you have to film it in high speed, and then play it back at regular speed (in effect, slowing it down), because that's the only way to make the rising smoke look proportional to the size of what the model is a model of.
I once watched a special on Back to the Future II where Robert Zemeckis said that he used to think the easiest way to film hoverboards would be to invent hoverboards, and film them.
Unsimulated Sex, Reel Death
I recently watched two films that are known for their blurring of reality and filmic representation:
- Shortbus is the story of a bunch of unsatisfied New Yorkers exploring their desires at a sex-club called Shortbus (it's for the special people of the world), and as all the reviews mention, the sex in this movie is "unsimulated";
- Grizzly Man is Werner Herzog's exploration of Timothy Treadwell's life among, death at the hands of, and original footage of bears in Alaska, with the audio-tape of his death described but not played for the audience.
Although I started this post with anecdotes about the relation of film to reality, I'm not sure how much there is to say about that issue (or how interested I am in saying any of it). Filmic representation clearly has a claim for mimetic realism that its closest analog, animation, does not, but this "reality effect" of film is curious because, although manifestly true (what you see is what you get), it is also manifestly illusionistic (for instance, different film stocks register color differently).* But what interests me more in these movies is the representation of utopia, which intersects with notions of realism (what does utopia really look like?), but which I am going to talk about here mostly in terms of desire.**
Bearing your desires
It might seem like a stretch to see a utopian thrust in Grizzly Man, which ends in death, whereas the utopian thrust in Shortbus is more salient, a wave of electrical orgasm spreading across NYC, banishing the darkness of a power blackout. But I think there is a utopian story in Treadwell's life; as many commentators within the film say, Treadwell was looking among the bears for some connection with others and a simplicity of life that he didn't find among humans, and if that's not a utopian project, then I don't know what is. We could also note that Treadwell's life among the bears resembles other American utopian projects of the self, like Whitman's poetry from Leaves of Grass -- "I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d; / I stand and look at them long and long"; or maybe, even more apt, might be the comparison to Thoreau, Treadwell's story being Walden Pond rewritten for the Alaskan frontier (and just as Thoreau obscured his relation to female labor by not talking about how he used to go home for dinner, so Treadwell's video-recorded story obscures Amie Huguenard's role; also like Thoreau is Treadwell's mix of wonder at nature and desire to master it).
Similarly, though Shortbus has a triumphant climax where Justin Bond sings "we all get it in the end" as an orgy is about to break out among reunited lovers and about to be united strangers, two notes ring false, or at least trouble the otherwise utopian aspect of the communal journey towards orgasm: one is the pockets of private melancholy and mania that stick out from the sea of desire -- the husband who looks over at his unsatisfied wife, the depressed dominatrix screaming with a (non-sexual) joy that comes across as forced; the other note that rings a warning is the vague referent of "it" in Justin Bond's verse "we all get it in the end." That is, besides the implied anal sex joke, the "it" that the characters get in the end of this movie is pleasure; but we could also say, with as much justification, that the "it" that people get in the end is death, and this is a subject which the film ignores. There are ways for death to be integrated into utopia; and there are clear ways in which orgasm could serve as a model for an utopian understanding of death as a connection that surpasses non-being (as Barthes wrote, every man in the moment of orgasm is the same man) -- after all, they don't call it the little death for nothing. But after depicting a death-drive in in one character's near-suicide, the film treats death as a solved topic. That is, near-suicide serves as a little death of its own, bringing the suicidally depressed back into the utopia of communal orgasm. But under the utopian surface, ignored death still lingers (you may not be interested in death, but death is interested in you -- and we all get it in the end). Ultimately, though Shortbus may be an utopian project, I can't help shake Justin Bond's earlier remark: of an orgy, he declares, it's "just like the '60s, only with less hope."
But after saying that, can I say that Grizzly Man is any more utopic? Doesn't Treadwell willfully ignore the threat of death, just as they do in Shortbus, or play with it, banishing it with verbal excess, noting all the ways he could be killed ("If I show weakness, if I retreat, I may be hurt, I may be killed.... For once there is weakness, they will exploit it. They will take me out, they will decapitate me, they will chop me into bits and pieces, I'm dead")?
That seems true, but ultimately, Grizzly Man seems more moving as a representation of utopian desire. The triumphant end of Shortbus leaves me unsatisfied because its desire for utopic sex is short-circuited by a romantic banishment of death that seems a sort of bad faith, and, really, the problem of "unsatisfying sex" being solved with "more sex" is a narrative that is easily coopted by the mainstream world from which Shortbus (the club) is supposed to be separate. As a critique of utopia, this movie shows that the utopian enclave may be implicated with the larger, captialist world, but the movie doesn't think of itself as a critique of utopia -- rather it sells itself as utopia itself.
Grizzly Man is likewise a film about the failure of utopian longing (Timothy Treadwell remains human despite his stated desire to become a bear, only reaching bearhood in the form of bear-food -- which may be one bridge to reintegrate death within utopia, but broken here by the killing of the bear that ate him); but this movie doesn't hide its failures or wish them away, whether those failures take the form of a lack of representation (the last audiotape not played for the audience) or the form of Treadwell's own failure to bridge the gap through his desire. As Treadwell says to the bears at one point, "I love you and I love you and I don't understand."
Whereas Shortbus, in stripping its actors and having them have sex with each other, offers a false clarity (that's only skin-deep), Treadwell's failure to know utopia seem to offer a more realizable map to follow in order to fulfill our utopian desires.
Notes
*I also think it curious that the manifest realism of film inheres more in the visual than in the audio; for instance, when the visual is contradicted by a voice-over, the visual is most often narratively true; or, for another example, note that in A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe's hallucinated friend is introduced aurally before he's depicted visually -- sound is more spectral, more uncertain, a conclusion which would point to a discussion of Psycho if we had time for that discussion.
**I am curious that everyone seems to feel the need to comment on the tragedy/justice of Treadwell's death, following a rather simple binary: for liberals, everything is a tragedy; for conservatives, you get what you deserve. And with this story, critics find some possibility of both tragedy and justice; as the helicopter pilot notes, Treadwell got what he deserved, but it was a tragedy that Amie Huguenard also died. I find it curious that people want to have a moral relationship with Treadwell's story, seemingly paralleling Treadwell's desire to have a moral relationship with the bears.