May 15, 1999

REVIEW: Celebrity / Siege

In The Siege we must tolerate for two hours mushspeak about the erosion of our constitutional rights from Denzel Washington's FBI agent character, who has been promoted several times too often, to a position too high up in the crimefighting machine really to have been able to remember any such thing; we must hear witness to Bruce Willis's fivestar US Army General torturing someone, as though there were no lower-level functionaries ready and willing to do so; we must grin and bear the griefstricken visage of Annette Bening's sorrow-torn-yet-wearily-beautiful woman CIA agent character who taught the Islamic fundamentalists to blow shit up, and is therefore now the embodiment of the movie's "moral dilemma," the one who pays the price when the chickens come home to roost.

But other than via the sacrifice of her character, the movie makes no attempt to resolve its moral tensions, ending finally with the loudest proclamation in words and images of feel-good-about-America's-military-industrial-complex-anyway propaganda in the film, and we feel as though we have been let down, as though we had been watching a newsreel from 1942, or reading a Hearst paper from 1898.

All the while, however, the nakedness of the ideology, which the producers, directors, and writers could not have seriously imagined us really beleiving, invites us to disbelieve it. But this retreat into hyperbolic xenophobia, presumably to "get the point across," is neither satirical nor funny. This form of reflexive critique (and I am giving the film the benefit of the doubt; it could have just been a bad action movie, overexcited about its function as an apologist for Orientalism), which can slide by you if you are prone to jingoism, but which you will grasp only if you are already critical of it, has no choice but to be unfunny, grave, morose, and also weaker than confrontation, weaker than old-fashioned, in-your-face denunciation and analysis. Why, in the first place, has Ideologiekritik migrated into the action movie? Probably to expose itself to a different audience from the usual. But why must it hide itself in plain sight, risking its clear, unmistakable "message" in the process? For its own survival's sake? For our puzzlesolving fun? So as not to end up thoroughly misunderstood in the face of its inevitable failure to bring about the revolution, like Warren Beatty's Bulworth?

The same type of question arises in Woody Allen's Celebrity, with the additional sine qua non that all critique must approach infinite convolution (one who has thought the critique will learn nothing from the movie; one who has not thought the critique will learn nothing from the movie), and these movies have no reason for existing other than critique (they are not beautiful or sublimely ugly—one must visit the new horror genre dominated by Todd Solondz, the Coen brothers, and Neil LaBute for the latter—and they certainly do not show us a world different from our own), each aspect of the world which is to be criticized comes wrapped in a discrete plot element or character. This is pure reflection of our world's very own totalizing-yet-nonintegrating dynamic. Celebrity's artifice, however, is a bit more complicated than that of The Siege.

In Celebrity, Woody Allen's standin, Kenneth Branagh, plays a character who is a victim: no more, no less. The character is pathetic-sympathetic. We can understand his desire to join the media spectacle, to the pursuit of which he subordinates his entire life. We also know that this is a stupid way to define oneself. It does not help the character that he is a coward, afraid of success. The New Age self-help syntax shows through Allen's psychoanalytic pretensions, inviting us to forget what we should know already: the coward always has a reason to fear what he otherwise desires, as the fate of Judy Davis's exwife character will show.

Celebrity is poisonous even of what is not celebrated, in this case, the entire world mediated by the media. Branagh's character fails miserably in his pursuit for no reason other than his prior victimization, the reason for his pursuit anyway —his alienated essence, self-identity, recognition as self by others which will finally allow him to recognize himself. His worst failure and his total defeat follows upon his delusion by the antagonist: his final belief that all he is not, the mediated fantasy of himself, the media illusion of the longed-for res celebritas, is actually real, therefore within reach, and that he must merely "grasp it" (the sacred image helps those who help themselves) with a will to power reminiscent of Nietzsche's artliving Übermensch: he goes insane, believing that his life is already an aesthetically crafted spectacle, including a woman, Winona Ryder's character, who he is certain he has "created." The initially healthy but unselfconscious fear of his object of desire has taken its perverse revenge: residing in his psychosis is the lefthanded acknowledgement of his life as artifice, inverted avowal of the danger which always lurked in the object of desire. It is merely "unfortunate" that his media-constructed and -determined life is not also a focus of mass attention.

But Allen's script has already condemned this character of solipsistic sickness. The fact that this accusation is a conscious intention means its meaning must be more than "mere" solipsism. The forthright admission is misleading. "Hmm . . . the meaning must be novelistically / algorithmically encoded in the whole . . . " But one knows that whatever this code has to reveal will be a cynical, unnecessary convolution in the end because the aesthetic "code" reveals that it is a "code" as soon as the literature critic character openly identifies the content of Branagh's character. By snatching the unequivocal meaning out of our hands by pulling it up into the image, Allen intimates that "there is something deeper here," a clandestine whisper to the esoteric initiate, an open secret which only each "intelligent" member of the cinema crowd will enjoy, letting them in on the fact that the movie contains a trick, which, however, destroys the trick as a trick.

In any case, the joke should be on Allen, whose practice in Branagh's character reveals contempt for the audience, both those who are "intelligent enough" to know that and how he is pulling down the wool, let alone those who go away thinking that the movie was indeed about media-induced solipsism, which is, of course, true, but not, of course, in any "simple" way: we must also factor in Allen's incestuous casting practices, the inbred, white, upper-middle-class crowd which attends his movies (usually eager to think themselves smart for doing so), and the anxious, twisted, compulsively-extroverted inwardness of Allen's whole oeuvre, before we understand what solipsism is really all about.

The counterdynamic to this character's condition is what begins as his divorced wife's innocence. Judy Davis's character is pathetic in her victimhood as well. She is swallowed whole by the spectacle. Like a whirlwind Cinderella, she goes along for the dance. She is thus pathetic-fantastic. She is not sympathetic only because she is totally unreal, beyond the grasp of any little girl dreaming Prince Charming (Joe Mantegna). She is even made a stranger to herself: her insecurities wither when planted in holy ground: no star can be afflicted with, among other character flaws, a sense of social responsibility (she was a teacher in her previous life); self-image problems; or "terrible luck with men." Fame exacts its price anyway, of course, in spite of her naïveté. Its amplification into consummate blindness to the meaning of what has befallen her is its cost. This would be guilt, willful and conscious recklessness of the type her exhusband is guilty of, were to be locked into unselfconsciousness not precisely her tragic fate, the shadow substance of her fame, the ether-stuff of celebrity, and the other half of the overdetermined meaning of Celebrity.

The automata make mechanical meaning motions, no matter how convoluted the twists, no matter how contrived the turns: one character represents false consciousness and the other innocence; they are locked into an antagonistic, mutually constitutive relationship —failed synthesis / conjunction, i.e., failed marriage and divorce— and are deposited on either side of The Medium, a vast, swallowing chasm, the singular black hole, which spits up images and money instead of gamma rays and x-. Allen shows us that he knows what he is doing—he's so clever! —with these two droids when one of the spat-up images—which has been "in production" the entire course of the film; which is the very product of the film, a rigged identity of meaning and intended meaning—turns out to be a cry for help, from within the spectacle, the antagonist, within the spectacle again, the movie Celebrity! Imagine that! Like us in the shady movie house, Allen's Branagh character finds himself a spectator of someone else saying the only thing he could possibly have to say; the object, the gearclacking robot projector with celluloid sinews, speaks with the lost voice of the living dead. How ironic! How uncontroversially true, reminds our afterimage, of us and our sore, cinema-sitting asses. But we sure are smart for having realized, in the middle of the movie, when it announced it as loudly as possible, when it flashed its reflexive hand for the whole pokerfaced crowd to see, that the joke was meant to be on us. But Allen sure is stupid for having thought he could teach us a lesson so easily, especially when we who "get it" knew it already, and we who don't get it don't understand why the meaning is not that "simple," once-alienated solipsism.

This form of reflexive critique (and I am giving this film the benefit of the doubt, because it could just be "mere" masturbatory narcissism, projecting the machinations of a famously "neurotic" sensibility into flashy silverscreen dysfunction) is weaker even than critique hiding in plain sight (though it is more intriguing and "artful," complicated and boobytrap ridden) and has even fewer possible justifications. It is nothing but pretty to look at and flattering to those who know something about mass-media manipulation. When we remember, because of its all-too-realistic comportment and its slice-of-regular-life plot, that this movie has no possible point other than a critique of some kind, we have to wonder who Allen thought he was enlightening, and why he felt he had to flatter his audience in order "to get the point across."

One interested in a pithy critique of ideology might have set up a projection of the movie-theater audience watching itself watching itself watching itself, etc. Or merely taken someone on a walk through any department store's electronics section, where the cameras watch and display you to ask you to buy them. But critique must convoluted. Why? For fun? To waste time sufficient to fill a life? Perhaps the better question would be to ask why critique must also attempt to entertain, or to pose as art. Or perhaps the better question would be to ask why entertainment and would-be art is even attempting to critique society.

Perhaps those cultural producers who find themselves wishing to "say something" with their work would do better to avoid any such attempt. Or, perhaps, if the guilt of living in the spectacle at the expense of those who fail becomes overwhelming they should simply leave it by refusing to produce any more grist for its mill.

The best, last question would be to ask why we have cultural producers instead of artists.

The.Siege Celebrity Woody.Allen Bulworth Denzel.Washington movies celebrities spectacle