February 10, 1998

REVIEW: Kundun

I knew upon going in it was a piece of propaganda. The supernaturalism of the revisiting Dalai Lama’s pastlife recollections—an impossibility, fool!—slides in unobtrusively, reincarnating the power of myth out of the aura-producing power of contemporary filmmaking techniques, let alone the not-at-all subtle score which leaves no vertebrae untingled.

The ghosts of Lamas past roam up and down the dark screenroom hall. Even the juxtaposition of the earthy Tibetan dance ritual, with accompaniment by African-American-sounding wails and drum beats, to the slick and overproduced sound of the Chinese Communist march tells the tale of the evil of all that is not Western capitalist democracy. All that comes too late, though, because we know from the beginning that “Kundun” was an America-worshipper even before the proceeds flowed in from the Tibetan Freedom Concert. Our “modern man,” just like the next man, wants automobiles and movies, and to simultaneously maintain his myth. Just like us, he wants to put off the cost of material comfort and sophistication, in order to preserve time for prayer. The film is one of the best examples of this idle American wish.

The aura of the actors’ generic Asian accents makes it easy to forget that this neoprimitivistic tale of lamentation is none other than that of a twentieth-century theocratic dictatorship. Mao’s henchman speaks the truth about the West’s imperialism and wage-slavery imported especially for the Third World, just as the Dalai Lama consolidates his own authoritarian power by refusing to appoint new ministers. How now the Tibetan Operation Rescue?

We should not let this avert our eyes from the role of the USA on the twentieth-century world-political stage: Tibet is in search of Israeli-state status. “Kundun” ‘s Tibet is an inverse-Iraq from the inside-out, i.e., from the inverse of the perspective of the ubiquitous and yet mystical international community, from that of the good international underdog. I still wonder how it is that “Kundun” is not to be embroiled in politics, as his advisor advised against, when all the monks already have guns. We left the Middle Ages, let alone the Han dynasty, long, long ago.

The secret of the monastic-ascetic image the film so adroitly exploits is an open one. We, the audience, cannot tolerate outright martyrdom any longer, not after M.L.K., our last best hope for popular moral leadership, was shot to death. The bitter end of the convert to martyrdom, Malcolm X, reinforces the doctrine of anything-not-nonviolent. The monks in Kundun are far ahead of our naïve sense of justifiable selfdefense: the dismemberment of the human body is essential to their rituals, seemingly in order to let no death go unmutilated. The real hidden secret of these monks’ asceticism is also found in a ritual: that of the sand painting and subsequent smearing; the ritual destruction of the tedious labor of these monks reenacts and reinforces the discovery of the senselessness of all labor under forced conditions (in their case, the coercion of religious tradition) and the inevitability of repetitive destruction itself, over and over again. This secret is fruitful for analysis, because it puts us only one step from realizing the importance of one of the tenets of Buddhism itself, that is, an explicit longing for nothing, i.e., nihilo. And don’t all religions practice and prepare for annihilation in similar ways?

In the midst of our quasireligious search for a new cause, these very irreligious rituals of annihilation point the way to a truth: the apparently eternal recurrence of the failed incarnation of our beloved metaphor for once-real Messianic hopes in postpostChristendom.

tibet martin.scorsese democracy monarchy mysticism spectacle