unreconstructed

I just watched Irreversible....very difficult to watch. On the surface, the movie is very exploitive. It simultaneously arouses the two worst feelings possible: anger and helplessness. Below the surface, the movie may be more depressing than the rape of Monica Bellucci and the mistaken vengeance that it inspires. I think there's a deeper philosophical idea underlying this movie and it's not a happy one. At one point we see a poster of 2001: A Space Odyssey as the movie keeps segueing into the past. How is Irreversible related to 2001? Recall how Kubrick showed a very brief glimpse into the prehistory of humans at the beginning of 2001, before leaping far into the future Space Age? And in both time periods, Kubrick's work is imbued with a chronic pessimism about humanity. During the prehistoric era, our capacity to evolve and survive depended on the ability to create crude tools which we promptly used to exterminate rival gangs of pre-humans. In the Space Age our ability to break the bonds of Earth and explore Space depends on our ability to create more sophisticated tools: building and programming supercomputers, like HAL. But eventually that also winds up biting us in the ass. Noe, does the opposite, sort of. He shows segments of three individuals' lives but he starts in the Present and keeps going back further to the past. Noe seems intent on showing how what happens to humans is not just dependent on the past but, in fact, strictly determined by the past. At the end of the movie he has apparently gone all the way back to the Big Bang (Really intense flashing white light and sonic rumbling from the audio track). What is Noe getting at? Is it something more deeply pessimistic than even Kubrick dared imagine? What does Noe mean by the title "Irreversible" ?

Is it that conditions for the subsequent evolution of our universe were fixed by the initial conditions of the Big Bang and nothing can change what happens later; and the really radical idea that this strict determinism applies to human actions just as much as it does to, for example, star formation in some far-flung corner of the universe??? That humans do not in fact possess Free Will but are just part of the universe undergoing changes by responding to forces and psychological pressures which all follow precisely from what has happened in the past?? If this is what Noe is conveying, it is very very DARK in a way that goes beyond Kubrick: we're not just violent and hedonistic, we really don't have any choice in the matter. For Noe, being "One With The Universe" isn't a pop slogan from the 60's accompanied by warm feelings of emotional wellbeing; it's a stark physical fact involving a collapse to nihilism. As Time destroys everything, maybe there are no good or bad deeds, just simply "deeds", or as a physicist would call them, "events". Noe = Nietzsche ??: Psychologically, intelligent beings can't evolve in any other direction: the struggle for existence forces us to conceive of ourselves as Free. One of necessary preconditions in the struggle for survival may be intellectual Error. Our perception of ourselves as free sentient inner-directed Agents: just a little joke played on us by the universe as it bends us over and we take it in the Rectum.

"Irreversible": the universe as one big Process that, once set in motion, will evolve according to it's own laws and cannot be changed even by human awareness of this Process since our awareness is just one aspect that's been set in motion. Anyway, I hope this isn't what Noe intended because it's very depressing. And even if Noe didn't intend this, maybe it's true nonetheless. Scary thought.

The downfall of this movie begins when two of the teenagers break into a morgue to visit the corpse of a dead friend. They are met there by a really bad plot device in the guise of a mortician. Morticians are expected to have coarsened sensibilities due to working alongside death every day and maybe a little eccentric as well, but this one is way over the top. Of course, he's not there as a real character but rather as a means to give away the plot along with any lingering mystery still contained in the movie. How he knows what he knows we dare not ask, we're just supposed to accept that someone who deals with corpses on a regular basis has a deep metaphysical insight into how death operates. Not only that, he also knows the precise predicament that the teenagers are in even though he's never met them. His only real function is to trim some time from the movie's length so that the real characters don't have to expend any excess energy discovering what they're up against. I guess the other thing I didn't like about the movie was the "teenage twist" factor contained in the movie's ending. You know how it goes: the supernatural or fate, in this case, must play by certain rules so that the movie will seem more like a game to the target audience, mainly teenagers. But rules are kind of constraining and predictable, even to teenagers, so the movie sets up a false ending that's not really the ending because there's one more act to the game before it's over. Most recently the movie "The Ring" did this false ending along with countless others before it.

To be honest, the movie overall is inferior to a decent X-Files episode. For example, the FBI agents just do not command respect; somehow they lack the deadly seriousness portrayed so well in that series. The victims in the movie are dispatched in particularly gruesome ways and although some are very effective in jolting the viewer it does give one the feeling you're watching a teen slasher movie with an invisible diabolical John Denver working in place of Freddy or Jason. I'm really kind of disappointed that Morgan and Wong didn't do a better job given their extensive background with the X-Files.