Lessons
from Parasite: Let’s talk about 1917, Marriage Story and the art
of Oscar-nominated closeted conservatism
So
Parasite won, history has been made,
and an international film in a language other than English has finally bagged
the Best Picture Oscar.
This
momentous victory will of course spawn worldwide conversations about cinema
without borders and South Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s inventive, startling take on
socio-economic divides. Hopefully, it will draw further attention to the
subtlety with which Parasite manages
to hold the wealthy accountable for their blinkered existence, the blindness to
their own privilege and sometimes even unconscious, unintentional cruelty, all
without demonising the moneyed classes or canonising the poor.
And
if we are lucky, maybe, just perhaps maybe, a discussion will begin on other
nominees in the Best Picture category that preferred to speak in binaries while
pretending not to do so and that faked nuance while in fact telling a
one-sided story.
Have
you ever watched a film that completely drew you in, yet even while being
thoroughly engrossed by it you were aware
of its deeply troubling aspects?
In
2020’s Oscar season, 1917 did that to
me. Roger Deakins’ cinematography in this British film directed by Sam Mendes
has rightly won an Academy Award with its purposeful creation of the impression
that the entire story had been shot in one take. It is an experiential venture, the sort that justifies the existence of
giant screens and cinema halls in this age of cellphone viewing, as it
transports audiences to early 20th century Europe and the brutality of the
First World War.
Unfortunately,
the talk surrounding 1917 has been
focused primarily on its technical achievements and secondarily on its
unequivocal opposition to war, without a whisper about the doublespeak in the
film’s claims of noble goals.
In
an interview to Time magazine in the
US, when asked why he made 1917 now,
Mendes said: “In war, you see human beings pushed to their extremes and forced to
confront what it means to be alive, and what it means to sacrifice yourself for
other people.”
His co-writer
Krysty Wilson-Cairns informed the UK’s Guardian newspaper that one of her grandfathers told her “understanding
history is the only way to avert future catastrophe. The first world war was the stupidest thing humanity ever did to each other”.
And Mendes explained to the same journalist: “People who are attached
to some sort of nostalgic vision treat these wars retrospectively as triumphs.
In fact, they were tragedies.”
Yet,
whether unwittingly or with insidious intent, 1917 repeats the mistakes of the past by taking sides despite
making a great show of being objective and neutral. Throughout the narrative,
there is no question that the German – evil, scheming and alien – is the other,
while the British are helpless participants in circumstances not of their
making. This is not the point of view of the characters but the point of view
of the film itself.
At
the centre of 1917 are two young British Lance Corporals traversing
war-ravaged terrain on their way to deliver an urgent message to a senior
officer who might otherwise fall prey to German strategy. In the miserable
position that they find themselves in, I am not suggesting at all that Mendes and Wilson-Cairns’ screenplay should have found space for well-considered, impartial
chats between these two fictional men about the accountability of all the
countries involved in WWI. Of course it is very likely that two youth terrified by
gigantic rodents might tell each other, as Tom Blake and Will Schofield do in the
film, “Even their (German) rats are
bigger than ours.” A soldier’s antagonism towards or suspicion of the party
responsible for decimating their fellow nationals makes for a believable
portrayal of real life. The film reveals its own position though (spoiler
alert) by choosing to feature a scene in which a German airman, in the midst of
being saved from death by one of our heroes, turns on his saviour with brute
force. (Spoiler alert ends)
The
First World War was triggered by a complex set of circumstances, none of which
was the virtuousness of the countries that fought Germany. To reduce it to that
though, to single out one country as the devil incarnate, is a simplistic and
lazy recounting of that ugly history. This revisionist retelling, it must be
said, is no different from the othering that plagues the contemporary world, overcome as it is by a wave of
Islamophobia and hatred for immigrants.
The
kind response to 1917 would be to say that perhaps Mendes and Wilson-Cairns are themselves victims of
propaganda and conditioning. Perhaps. But no such kindness can be extended to
Noah Baumbach whose Marriage Story
is decidedly sneaky in the way it purports to give us an unbiased view of a
crumbling marriage but pulls every trick out of the bag to lean imperceptibly
towards the man’s side.
In Marriage Story,
Scarlett Johansson plays a woman suffocating in a marital relationship that has
revolved around the husband’s needs, wants and career dreams. It begins well
enough, but just when it seems like it will fairly show us how one partner
might, by not openly communicating with the other, end up encouraging his
unintended selfishness, it sets off on its actual mission. Having lulled us
into buying into its apparent sense of justice, Marriage Story metamorphoses into a tale of how nasty Nicole
traumatises and almost bankrupts the well-meaning Charlie through the divorce
process. It does so by showing us more of him than her, by highlighting
instances of her lawyer’s meanness in contrast with his first lawyer’s
incompetence and showing little to none of what must surely have been
his own second lawyer’s machinations, and by intentionally suggesting an
equivalence between the complete marginalisation of Nicole’s dreams during
their marriage with the inconvenience of Charlie forced to live in a bare-bones
flat in a desperate bid to get joint custody of their only child since Nasty
Nicole spirited him away to a new city.
The really epic moment comes though when Charlie absolves
himself of his infidelity by pointing out that he could have done so much more
– yes sir, I kid you not, he tells Nicole he had ONLY one affair although he
could have had so many more because he was young, hot, successful, intelligent
and scores of women were interested. Be grateful I did not cheat more, is all
he skips saying, but he may as well have said it anyway.
The
problem with 1917 and Marriage Story is not so much that they
take sides, but that they camouflage their aims. The problem with them is not
that they are prejudiced, but that they are dishonest, clever and dangerous
because of how convincing they are.
Somewhere
in a cinematic paradise of my imagination, Bong Joon-Ho
and Taika Waititi, the writer-director of the delightful Jojo Rabbit – which was also in the reckoning for a Best Picture
Oscar – are holding a master class in what it means to be non-judgmental and
truthful for Messrs Mendes and Baumbach.
This
article was published on Firstpost on February10, 2020:
Photographs
courtesy: Wikipedia
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