Monthly Archives: June 2025

The End   Joshua Oppenheimer  (USA; 1924)  Tilda Swinton, Signe Byrge Sorensen.

Viewed at Losing the Plot 7 June 2025-06-09

ok by me in America

everything fine in America

Joshua Oppenheimer’s ‘The End’ falls into a group of films that one way or another   depict ‘typical American life’.  Two films that come readily to mind are: Sam Woods’ ‘Our Town (1940), Lars von Trier’s ‘Dogville’ (2004).

These two movies are located in small American towns and examine socio- moral underbelly of their respective communities.  ‘Our Town’ deploys the Thornton Wilder script to present a setting of wondrous harmony where the people dwell in neat tidy houses, on neat tidy streets, living in a manner in which they are good, kind and helpful towards each other.  When a bad and cruel thing does happen, it turns out to have been just a nightmare, from which the dreamer awakens, and is able to continue her life in the actual dream world of small town USA.  Von Trier’s movie, feels like retort to ‘Our Town’. Von Trier dispenses with sets representing neat frame houses in favour of chalked out areas marking out the streets places and homes of his small town.  The machinations of the script involve the female protagonist Grace fleeing to the town, claiming to be escaping a vengeful criminal gang that’s after her.  The citizens are initially helpful and agree to give Grace the refuge she seeks.  But as Grace’s vulnerability increases, the plot thickens, the mask slips the knives come out: the true nature of the townsfolk is revealed.   They are two faced, violent exploitative and amoral, out for themselves whatever the cost to others. Von Trier ends his movie with a violent spasm of revenge in which Grace settles her scores with the town, with everyone deservedly annihilated and only the dog spared.

Both ‘Our Town’ and ‘Dogville’ are productions in which the communities exist within hermetically sealed spaces.  The scripts are both about the moral dynamics of living within the American dream which is also the characteristic feature of Oppenheimer’s ‘The End’.

The action take place at some point in the future after an environmental catastrophe. The setting is the prepared bolt hole of the McKays, an upper middle class American family.  Bolt hole suggests a rough and ready survivalist structure. But the McKay’s residence looks like any expensively furnished well proportioned large upper West Side apartment, replete with art works, mainly paintings, and period furniture.  It is a comfortable  re-assuring statement of entitlement and wealth.

Shortly after opening shots of the master bedroom and the location of the apartment as existing inside some sort of salt mine, the movie reveals itself as a sort of musical or perhaps operetta.  Cutting to the main living area, son McKay is building a finely detailed model of a pre-catastrophe townscape.  Unexpectedly he breaks into song,  soon mother McKay joins in, making the number a duet.  The banality of lyrics and tune made me wonder if I could see out the film’s two hours plus advertised length.

Along with the family McKay, there are some other bodies: mum’s best friend and dad’s friend, a woman fugitive plus a butler and a doctor. The latter two’s presence is never explained; you have to presume that a wealthy upper middle class family such as the McKay’s don’t go anywhere without a butler and a personal physician.  As scene follows scene each with its own model of normality and musical number, each with its own costumes and haircuts: it’s clear that ‘The End’ is a parody.  Even after the climate catastrophe the American dream goes on.

There are up’s and down’s a death a birth but the McKays simply live in an endless Lerner and Low musical with a song to mark every moment of life’s rich tapestry  Post catastrophe everything’s fine.  Everything normal.  Life’s a beach. There’s water in the taps (enough for the swimming pool) no rationing – endless food for the table, clothing medicines tobacco, whatever one needs, it’s on stream.  The cup of plenty runneth over for these people.  Post catastrophe?  It’s just like our way of life today. We ride on the hog’s back, enjoying the unending wealth of the privileged Western World.  We have everything.   Like the McKay’s most of us don’t know where our food comes from – we eat; we don’t know where our water comes from – we wash and drink;  we don’t know where our power comes from – we run our computers and appliances.  We consume without understanding either where the stuff comes from or what it costs.   I sit here tapping the keyboard of my computer with no idea how it works how it’s made or the cost of the earth’s finite resources expressed in its manufacture.  The McKay’s are just like us – The McKay household in their putative post catastrophe scenario: we in our current planet-wide climate crisis situation. 

But there is something lacking in Oppenheimer’s two hour parody.   His characters are good representations of their upper middle class privileged types; mother neurotic and controlling, father calm directing, son insecure the black fugitive assimilated, they cruise through the songs and the drama, but are untouched.  Oppenheimer’s script doesn’t go anywhere, it stays within the comfort of the parody. It shies off any sort of moral reckoning. Oppenheimer seems to have reached a level of self satisfaction with his script.  There are two the final shots of ‘The End’.  First, mother McKay and new mother McKay, stare out of their apartment at the salt mine in which their retreat is lodged; second, we see an image of what looks like it might be bacteria (or something?) squiggling across the frame.  Representing ‘life’?  Then cut to credits.  ‘The End’s’ sign off feels incomplete amorphous and smug.

Oppenheimer lacks an ultimate cinematic vision for ‘The End’.  He’s content to rock along in the comfort zone, parodying the contemporary spectacle of ‘life that goes on as usual’ which is characteristic of the West’s current sleep walk into the fire and water trial of global warming.  Without a cinematic moral questioning from within the hermetically sealed unit, Oppenheimer’s film amounts to little more than a shaggy dog story for the initiated.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Spy in Black     Michael Powell, script: Emeric Pressburger (UK; 1939)  Conrad Veidt, Valerie Hobson

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 1^st June 2025; ticket: £7

another good German

Powell’s ‘Spy in Black’ for most of its duration is an exercise in intensities: cinematic intensities and relational intensities.  At the core of the intensity is the transgressive nature of what we are viewing and in a sense its normalisation in the very act of film making.

In ‘The Spy in Black’ (Spy) there are significant echoes of Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’ which he made some 20 years later.  Both films are built around rogue anti-heroes, quasi sympathetic protagonists whose actions violate society’s moral code, but whose characters do not conform to the expected negative cinematic stereotypes. Both films have German lead actors.

In ‘Spy’ the unwritten code that Powell breaks is that of representing in a positive light the German Officer, Hardt, a secret agent trying to carry out a master plan to destroy the British fleet in Scarp Flow during the First World War. (Day of the Jackal another example of strong transgressive protagonist) Hardt is depicted as a career naval officer, committed to serving his country. The film opens with a sequence in Kiel where action against the British fleet is being planned.  In a restaurant used by German military personnel, the conversation and good natured bonhomie of the enemy officers is depicted no differently from that which might have been used to portray Royal Navel officers in a British pub.  The German officers are humorous sardonic and honourable men discussing the war in a professional way consistent with their duty to advance their nation’s cause.  Given the general demonisation of Germans both during and after WWl  (and in 1939 war with Germany was expected imminently) to be a German was equated with being ‘other’. The positive aspects of Hardt’s character as drawn by Powell represents an inspired piece of reverse protagonist creativity.  The disassociation between character attributes and character role builds into the script a dynamic of inner tension that is left for the audience to resolve. 

Similarly Mark as protagonist of ‘Peeping Tom’ is a creation comprising a similar dissociative relationship between character and actions.  With his accent Mark (played by Karl Boehm) establishes himself as a German. in other words he, like Hardy is ‘other’.  It must have been important to Powell for Mark to be identified, marked out as German. We have a biography for Mark because this is key part of the script.  As Mark was born and raised in England his German accent can only be an artifice that was necessarily decided upon by Powell.  Powell obviously wanted Mark to be taken by the audience as a German.  The question is why?  At one level perhaps he might have felt the audience would find the film more acceptable if the serial killer was equated with a demonised nation; or perhaps it was Powell’s way of codifying Mark’s otherness; or perhaps Powell projected onto German identity a quasi romantic twisted vision – a vision of ‘being pre-doomed’ with which in some part of his character Powell himself also identified.

From the first opening sequence of ‘Peeping Tom’, shot mostly from Mark’s point of view as he murders his first victim, a prostitute,  we understand we are in the presence of a cold killer.  But Mark,  as a killer, is belied by the character he presents in his daily life.  Mark’s a loner but he’s also kind considerate and can be seen as lacking self confidence.  The audience understand that he’s schizo, driven to kill by the arousal of an obsessive drive, scripted with some of the same dissociative characteristics as Hardt.  Mark’s representation gives ‘Peeping Tom’ a spring loaded tensility that drives the narrative for the audience.

Central to the scripts of both ‘Peeping Tom’ and ‘Spy’ are forbidden relationships, relationships between a German man and classic English rose type women.  Neither of the women, Helen in ‘Peeping Tom’ and Tiel in ‘Spy’ are victims, they are simply mesmerised by the dark attraction of the ‘other’.  Interestingly both women are in positions of superiority to the men: Helen’s the daughter of Mark’s landlady, Tiel is Hardt’s superior officer. In the plot twist Tiel’s revealed as a double agent.  She is working for the British not the Germans. But whatever hat she is wearing, her attributes always suggest a quintessential Britishness.

The red room and the black room. The heightened erotics of ‘Peeping Tom’ take place in Mark’s ‘ photography darkroom, a room saturated in red that invokes blood death and sex.  The erotics of Spy take place in the noir chiaroscuro interior of the ‘safe house’.  Being a 1930’s film explicit depiction is restrained but the kiss between Tiel and Hardt and the development of the scene leading up to it are marked by an intensity that presages “Peeping Tom’.  Rooms for torture, rooms for forbidden relationships.

Virginal sweet English rose women abound in British movies:  in effect they are angels. They evince certain types of attributes:  women whose role is act as counterweight to the male protagonist’s often destructive instincts (and actions) in their unabashed femininity they draw attention to the voice and presence of the vulnerable, acting as a consciousness representing the dispossessed, caring for the male and nursing them; all the archetypal stereotypical female roles.  And they appear   frequently in Powell and Pressburger’s films: I know where I’m Going, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, A Matter of Life and Death.   But buried in the scripts and acting out of both ‘Spy’ and ‘Peeping Tom’ is the idea of violation, an impulse to effect a desecration of a lynchpin of the British film industry.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk