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have a friend who loves to hate the films of Spike Jonze and Michel
Gondry, and the screenplays of Charlie Kaufman. "Cold, postmodern
parlor tricks," he calls them. And who can deny that films
like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Human Nature,
and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, by layering
their stories beneath multiple framing devices, risk alienating
audiences by forever undercutting our basis for identifying with
the characters?
And yet to claim that they are the product of our ironic, hyper-alert,
postmodern moment is to overlook an important cinematic history
that lies behind these films, which are fundamentally  indebted
to earlier surrealist works such as Rene Clair's Entr'acte
(1924), Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien andalou
(1929), Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and
At Land (1944), and others. Indeed, much early cinema was
fascinated not only with the story being told, but with the process
of telling the story, as well, as illustrated nearly perfectly in
Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929), especially
the remarkable section where we see the images we are watching as
well the process of how they have been edited.
The problem in dismissing the Jonze / Gondry / Kaufman films as
symptoms of postmodern irony and excess is that it tempts us to
ignore or downplay the surrealist legacy upon which these films
build. Writing about the surrealist films of Buñuel and others,
Scott MacDonald, in his book Avant-Garde Film, notes that these
filmmakers "continually confront one of the central assumptions
of conventional cinema: the idea that the individual personality
and social and political relations among individuals are basically
rational and understandable." The energy and absurdist humor
of a film like Being John Malkovich (with its literal portals
into a mind) or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (with
its characters' realities being erased as their memories are erased)
or Mulholland Drive (with its doubles and shifts between
dream and awake states) has strong roots in the reality-slippages
of films like Meshes of the Afternoon, with its impossible
doublings and triplings and confounding time loops.
In describing his screenplay for Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman
has said that "there's something about movies that's very safe
because they usually play out in a certain way, and also because
they're done. They're dead. It's not like theater where anything
can happen, where somebody can screw up their lines, or there can
be some kind of new interaction or chemistry between people."
At its most potent, surrealism is a theory that recognizes that
the illusions of order, coherence, and rationality that we invest
reality with are just that: illusions. The deconstruction of reality
that we call today postmodernism owes its debt to surrealism, which
recognized that the destruction of the real did not have to be a
violent act, but that it could be invested with a menacing humor,
the sort of humor evident in films like Being John Malkovich
and Eternal Sunshine.
The recent return of surrealism in cinema occurs at the same time
that we see the emergence of reality TV and reality media. Movies
with "real-life" content, like Fahrenheit 9/11,
Super Size Me, and The Corporation have elevated
documentary cinema to a high-water mark in American culture. Rather
than dying off or passing as a fad, reality TV has become the dominant
logic of television itself. Cell phones have emerged as the newest
confessional tools, allowing anybody to make and send a digital
film of themselves. The relentless drive towards realism elevates
reality to deific status, a final and total rejection of the fantastic
and utopian elements that characterized the 1960s.
And yet the triumph of realism today has an unintended consequence,
as the juxtaposition of so many images and texts is itself a form
of surrealism. The surplus of reality—from 24-hour news shows,
to the internet, to cell phones, to digital cameras—creates
clashes that are as potentially radical as any film by Buñuel.
The very availability and speed of images flashing across our screens—a
hostage about to be beheaded, a tsunami chasing a group of people
down a street, a jet crashing into a tower—these images form
the ultimate dialectic montage. What was only hinted at in the technologies
of remote-control channel surfing came to be fulfilled in the pastiche
of ready-to-edit images available on the internet, DVDs, photoshop,
desktop editing, video games, and other forms that allow users to
enact William S. Burroughs's cut-up method with the click of a mouse.
We know—or do we?—that reality is a text, and that like
the little squares that fall from the screen in I Heart Huckabees,
it can sometimes fall apart.
As art, surrealism depended upon the willful rearrangement of reality
in order to release the irrational and absurd from the prison-logic
of reason. In the 1920s, surrealists would rush from theater to
theater, watching only a few minutes of each movie, thereby creating
their own internal movie. Today, the speed of images reaching us
from so many different mediums creates a sort of permanent surrealism:
no wonder the more formally surrealist elements of I Heart Huckabees
or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind seem tame
compared to the surrealism of everyday life.
In the end, it is the excess of realism itself which creates the
conditions for the revelation of absurdity that surrealism makes
possible. At perhaps no time before have representations of reality
been brought to bear with such unremitting force upon us. And at
no time before has the unintended consequence of this surplus reality
been the undoing of that very reality.
--
Nicholas Rombes
To buy the films mentioned
in this article: [click here]
Nicholas Rombes is an associate professor of English
at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he teaches classes in
film and literature, and were he co-founded the Electronic Critique
Program (www.e-crit.com).
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