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Rotterdam 2004
Torn in Dream
By Adrian Martin

Whatever your opinion of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol 1, there is one moment in it that makes everybody in the audience laugh: the spectacle of Uma Thurman striding through an airport with her lethal sword exposed. With this nonchalant joke, the movie tells us how blithely disconnected it is from the real, present-day world.

Actually, when you think about it, the only 'symptomatic' meaning in the entire, jolly, unreal film is this: the heroine's absolute global mobility. Tarantino is so fond of the imaginary airline he created for his killer-babe that he keeps returning to it like a B movie gag. It allows her to go anywhere, do anything, in a flash.

No airline, no airport, no airspace regulation can hold her. Her bloody heroic quest is as simply achieved as the line squiggled on a kitschy, animated map. Likewise, murder is a consumerist shopping list: Uma ticks off the names one by one (in a car, on a plane: all is movement and travel in this film) like Homer Simpson having to remind himself occasionally just who he is.

And the Uma character is no slouch, self-development wise, when it comes to the business of international border-crossing. When she arrives in Japan, she can speak Japanese (with Sonny Chiba, no less). Local languages and customs, no matter how complex or secretive: they're all a piece of cake for Uma.

It's almost as easy for Ewan McGregor in Tim Burton's Big Fish. At least we see him devouring an Asian language book – for about two seconds – on the wartime plane taking him to the other side of the world. Once there, he is perfectly fluent, and his charm hooks him up with a Siamese-twin pair who aid him in his global barnstorming.

Since both of these films are American, the tour of world cultures is of course subservient to a single-minded, tunnel-vision, individualistic quest: get revenge, or find a girl. Both films spin around the notion of family: families lost, families broken, families reconstituted; symbolic families, real families. Transmission between the generations – Uma and her baby, Ewan and his father – becomes an intense motif.

Meanwhile – film fans have to shake themselves to remember this sometimes – the real world is in a really terrible state. What trace is there of September 11 or the war on Iraq in these movies? It seems an old-fashioned question but today it's unavoidable. And, today, good old Hollywood escapism twists itself into new, grotesque forms.

Burton slinks into his cute mode of 'magic realism', while Tarantino waxes on – incoherently, we might add – about the crucial difference between the 'Quentin world' of his previous films and the 'movie world' of Kill Bill. OK, but if the Quentin-world is already a movie-world, and neither declares or explores any kind of relation to the real world, do we have any fruitful dialectic here?

The fantasy of global mobility propagated by Kill Bill and Big Fish (two short, sharp, very American titles!) is at absolute odds with the messy, ugly realities of terrorism, war, social upheaval. Hang on: maybe, in the worst possible way, both films project a kind of an awful truth, a revelation of a country's mindset.

Absolute mobility is the fantasy that – suitably displaced - wafts like a cool breeze from the aggressive, beyond-negotiation foreign policy of the USA. The pained romance of internal unification – of hearts, couples, families – flies in the face of the massive breakage of social structures and cultural traditions elsewhere in the world. A suffering that is rendered unseen, unwitnessed, immaterial in our corporate mass media, in all the mediocre Lara Croft and Bad Boys entertainments (similarly obsessed with instantaneous world travel and gleeful destruction), and also in our auteur-blockbuster movies.

Just eight years ago – a universe away and a lifetime ago, it now seems – Tim Burton had a radically different sense of humour happening. In Mars Attacks, he turned the old sci-fi cliché of a previous era (which survived intact into the contemporaneous Independence Day) completely on its head: if it's an American movie about a global invasion, then only America, effectively, exists and only America matters – the devastation of France, say, can be registered by a strangled cry on the end of an off-screen phone.

It is a strange thing, doubtless a somewhat distorted perception, but almost every film or body of work I currently look at from the past has more of a critical angle on world reality than these present-day extravaganzas. Like Brian De Palma's Scarface, of all things: a political disaster occurs in that story precisely because an unlovely Colombian killer cannot speak English, and doesn't know his way around Washington. He is, on all counts, the anti-Uma.

Or the cinema of Raúl Ruiz, to which Rotterdam is paying homage this year. Many of us, at one time or another, have regarded his films as essentially apolitical, devoted more to metaphysical games of identity, storytelling, and what they call on Star Trek the time-space continuum, than pressing matters of history. But, right now, his films seem to me insistently, disquietingly political: torture, murder, terrorism, corporatism, mainstream movie escapism, government dissimulation and media disinformation, the casual destruction of cultures and lives – all this fills his movies, from the earliest Chilean experiments to That Day and Vertigo of the Blank Page. And suddenly, compared to the cutthroat sentimental destinies of Uma and Ewan, the Ruizian litany of identities lost and scattered seems like not such a bad passport to our new, horrifying world.

At any rate, I prefer Ruizian horror to the mainstream, cult and 'indie' versions of the genre at present. Today, the subversiveness of Romero, Craven, Carpenter et al is forgotten, trampled underfoot by a glut of horror movies (28 Days Later, My Little Eye, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, Cabin Fever ...) that refuse to see anything much in the genre's rich, ever-potential panoply of socio-cultural metaphors. In Australia, the horror film Undead and the psychological thriller Visitors show aliens rounded up in compounds and desperate refugees out at sea without the slightest hint of social relevance or critical irony.

At the start of this whole, underwhelming horror 'revival', The Blair Witch Project inadvertently said it all: the biggest terror for gormless young Americans is to be confronted with 'unreadable', foreign-made maps. And that's what international film festivals like Rotterdam are for: the difficult but salutary experience of foreignness, the resistance pitched by pockets of locality to the fantasies of easy global mobility and the instant surrender of borders. I dream of a version of Divine Intervention in which Uma and her magnificent sword are stopped at visa control ...

© Adrian Martin December 2003

Adrian Martin is the author of The Mad Max Movies, Co-Editor (with Jonathan Rosenbaum) of Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, and Co-Editor (with Helen Bandis & Grant McDonald) of Rouge (www.rouge.com.au), which has just published, in collaboration with the Rotterdam Film Festival, the first Rouge Press book Raúl Ruiz: Images of Passage.

This text is re-printed with kind permission of Adrian Martin and of "De Filmkrant in Rotterdam", the daily festival edition of the Dutch film magazine "De Filmkrant".

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