Blip Time: Part 6

Rating: Null/10 (14 July 2010)

"Scorsese is old-fashioned and is making the same films that DW Griffiths was making early last century." – Peter Greenaway
(For Part 5 of this quest, see my review of Cronenberg's "Camera")
The schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, discontinuous and disconnected material, signifiers failing to link up into a coherent sequence. Like the "heroes" of Cronenberg's later films, the schizophrenic does not know personal identity (identity depends on the persistence of an "I" or "me"), is unable to create concrete models of self and world, and is incapable of experiencing continuity through time.
These symptoms are themselves associated with our postmodern era, a schizoid age which philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls "the control society", in which fragmentation extends like a blanket across every aspect of our lives, from the sciences, to modern psychoanalysis, to our economic models, to technology, to culture/familial/social relations, to art and communication and further outwards and inwards in all possible directions. The last paradigm here is genetic engineering and nano-medicine, fields which are slow moving.
Eventually this schizophrenic confusion scrambles or destroys the possibility of critical perspectives altogether, such as those found in modernist traditions. This is a direct contrast to the modernists who founded cinema, guys like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Murnau, Renoir, all of whom were loosely allied with an ethic of social realism, and who attempted to capture the vital elements of social reality on screen. Such realism was depicted, for example, in the epic struggles of the Russian Revolution and classic depictions of poverty, exploitation, and upheaval within society. Over time, both modernism and realism followed the path of photographic representation, visible in a plethora of documentaries, docudramas, historical dramas, and other forays into cinema verite.
Eventually, the modernising ethic spawned by Enlightenment rationality and 20th-century industrialism intersected with such wildly divergent influences as Capra, Huston, Visconti and DeSica. When modernism died in the 70s, postmodernism began absorbing the trendiness of Existentialism and reacting to the failure of Positivism's reductionism, and the collapse of socialism's New Left. It re-introduced content, but only ironic content, rejecting any form of realism and becoming anti-realist.
So, in a very general sense, we move from the modernism of the 30s-60s (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Renoir etc), to the last burst of rebellion in the 60s and 70s (new-modernists like Antonioni, Kubrick, Kurosawa etc who both upheld and critiqued Enlightenment principles), to an age of defeat, giving rise to the increasingly nihilistic, nostalgic and fantastical postmodern era from the late 70s onwards (Scorsese, Leone, Tarantino, Spielberg, Lucas etc). Or, using this century long period as a brain model, we have birth, a burst of hope, increasing disillusionment, impotency, a flight to fantasy and a mental collapse which gives way to pieces of rubble; the schizoid experience. The task now is to sort the rubble, re-organise and rebuild.
This, of course, is what the character of Spider tries to do in David Cronenberg's "Spider" ("Spider" is the same film as "Shutter Island", "wife" replaced with "mother"). Cronenberg calls this his "internet movie", Spider slowly web-browsing through the debris of history so he can determine whether his father "traded his mother in for a new one". Except, the old mother is the new mother, both are prostitutes, and Spider's nostalgia, his need to recreate a happy family that didn't exist, is ultimately what corrupts or skews his own little internet search engine. Cronenberg's typical mind/body splits are thus reversed from this point onwards. The subject's "computer memory" isn't reconstructing the past, but actively and constantly destroying memories specifically so it can create new ones which satiate its short term desires.
Enter "The Departed" and "Shutter Island", two of Scorsese's most schizophrenic films, which operate solely by cannibalising the past and serving it back up as a kind of postmodern, schizoid blip-time carnival. "I don't want to be a product of my environment," Jack Nicholson says at the start of "The Departed", announcing the film's disregard for any larger, real world universe. "The environment", in this case, is but a collective data-bank of past images, memory traces which Scorsese rearranges and spits back out as mediated drug rush. If "Goodfellas" was every gangster cliché jazzed up for modern audiences (the very theme of "Goodfellas" is the falsity of itself as a film) "The Departed" is "Goodfellas" jazzed up, a mash-up of a mash-up, an amalgamation of an amalgamation, blended smoothly together to appeal to testosterone-laden males who get high off the head-shot gratification. In our post "The Wire" world (if "The Wire" hopes the map the world, "The Departed" turns away and serves up static), such things come off as pointless.
Far more interesting is "Shutter Island", if only because it shows how far Scorsese has drifted from the neorealist ethic. In this case, the plot is a standard issue Scooby Doo tale in which a police detective investigates a crime at an insane asylum. Throw in countless "homages" to Hitchcock, Kubrick's "Shining", Lang and a plot that rips off everything from "The Cabinet of Dr Caligari" (it's the same film as both the 1920 and 1962 version), "Repulsion", "Spider", "Next Door", "Shock Corridor", "Perfect Blue", "Fight Club", "A Tale of Two Sisters", "Lilith" "Detour", "After Dark My Sweet", "Le Orme", "Memento", "Inland Empire", "The Sixth Sense", "The Others", along with the Holocaust flashback-inserts of Lumet's "Pawnbroker" (Scorsese reduces the Holocaust to confetti), and you have one ridiculously evil movie, arguably Scorsese's worst since "Cape Fear". Of course it's also his most profitable film to date.
The Departed – 7.5/10
Shuttler Island - 4/10
Compare Cronenberg's undercover movie, "Eastern Promises" (watch it again, it's gorgeous), with Scorsese's undercover movie, "The Departed". Then compare his schizoid movie, "Spider", to "Shutter Island". Cronenberg examines the very condition Scorsese now wallows in.
(For Part 7 of this essay, see my review of "Demonlover")