<
BACK
Roy
Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor gives us a tour of a
town full of ghost-white, self-absorbed, aging men and their lonely
love-starved women. The movie feels like a big screen adaptation of
the Book of Ecclesiastes. These joyless, burnouts have wasted their
lives “striving after wind.” Now, in their realization of emptiness
and ruin, all they have to hold on to is empty air.
I’ve
never seen a town like this. I’ve never seen a movie like this.
Filmmakers have given us all manner of futuristic hells, from Blade Runner
to 1984 to A Clockwork Orange. Many of these visions prophesied a world full of random
violence, rampant injustice, hard-hearted masses, and chaos. (Hmmm,
think it’ll ever really happen?) But nothing – not even Terry
Gilliam’s Brazil, the movie this most resembles – has offered
us such a pageant of deranged behavior. The only way to get through
it is to interpret it as poetry -- something along the lines of The Hollow Men. Apocalypse Now’s General Kurtz would have
loved it. It’s a cold clinical dissection of a contemporary,
capitalistic heart of darkness.
A
man goes to an office building innocently looking for someone, but
it mistreated and driven out of the building, only to step outside
and get mugged by a passing gang. And compared to the other kinds of
violence to come – both passive and aggressive -- that scene is
almost comforting.
Everywhere
men are losing their jobs. They go home and ignore their wives and
lovers. Bosses advise their employees to consider suicide. Fathers
humiliate their sons and their sons drown in drunken misery.
Bitterness and hatred hang over the town like its own everpresent
fog, and the sunlight never gets through. Thus, the men look sickly
white, even the one lying in a tanning bed. And the only characters
with good color are those women who are still trying to offer these
men some love.
But
the men aren’t interested in love. They’re preoccupied with staring
into the abyss. An ash-dusted, smoke-blasted man staggers into a
caf?where his son has been waiting for him. He carries a brown paper
bag that holds the ashes of his life’s work. “I want to talk to you
about the future,” he says to his son, “about how it’s going to be.
About how we’re going to get by.” It’s not hard to see that whatever
solution he’s about to propose will not be optimistic.
The
madness extends much further, into the realms of the surreal.
Unexplained, a parade of flagellants trudge down a city street, each
person whipping the person in front of them in unison as the whole
line rhythmically cries out. Buildings seem to move on their own.
And ghosts rise to haunt those who owe them debts. Through a
sequence of bizarre scenes in cold pale rooms, we hear authoritative
figures expounding on a history of “knowledge and experience”, two
qualities that have failed to serve. In a perfect illustration of
just how little “knowledge and experience” have done for this
community, its city is troubled by an endless traffic jam, in which
commuters travel a few yards in eight hours. Consumed by bitterness,
with no one but themselves to blame, they gather like wolves around
a young girl and disillusion her without a hint of conscience.
Things
are breaking down in other ways as well. Just as love has failed, so
has religion, business, and government. Everywhere, people are
failing at their vocations. We can only assume that their failed
performances in the office reflect failings at home in matters
parental, marital, or sexual. One man, a magician, does the “saw man
in half” routine before a live audience, to disastrous results. A
“member of the board” is going senile, losing important papers.
Military men gather to salute an aging superior officer, offering
him a tribute while his nurse positions him over a bedpan.
And
where is the church in this world? Oh, they’re present in full
ceremonial garb, but they don’t seem to remember anything about
holiness. When a despairing man appeals to a priest for comfort, the
good father replies with his own complaints about the stock market.
“There
is a time for everything,” an aging man tells his adoring lover as
he pushes past her brusquely and heads off for work. She is
abandoned, her sexual advance completely ignored, perhaps even
unnoticed. Other women have clearly given up trying. And just as the
men are vocationally past their prime, the women are in the autumn
of their sexuality.
Andersson
is known for making some of the world’s strangest, most surreal
television commercials. He must have come to appreciate what he can
accomplish in short scenes. The film movie feels like a reel of
short films; each scene is shot as one steady sequence of events.
The camera never moves, which increases our tension and sense of
paralysis. His bizarre imagination seems to be the fruit of a
lifetime watching The Seventh Seal and the aforementioned Mr.
Gilliam, but there is a wicked wit that also suggests he is familiar
with Lars Von Trier’s creepy miniseries The Kingdom, and in
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s dark French comedy Delicatessen. Much of
the film takes place in offices, hospitals, and asylums, but he is
clearly suggesting that capitalism has made the world itself an
asylum. Every soul seems consumed by greed, every face suggests its
wearer is staring at last into the heart of darkness and finding no
hope whatsoever.
In
the film’s most nightmarish sequence, an entire community gathers to
coax a blindfolded child towards a terrible doom. Is this a
sacrifice, or some sick form of amusement? It’s not clear, but does
it matter? The evil of this behavior is excruciating to watch, and
the camera never blinks. “No one would ever do this, “ we say to
ourselves, trying to find enough detachment from the horror to
laugh. But we know that such things are actually happening all the
time. Most nations do, after all, defend abortion in the name of
freedom, personal rights, and science, mass execution without
sufficient justification. Capitalism allows corporations to market
all manner of poisons to young people for profit.
In
spite of all these visual horrors, I do not think the film is
intended as a shrug of hopelessness. Rather, it feels like the
impassioned cry of a prophet at the gates of the city, mourning the
blindness of its inhabitants to an obvious answer. The prophet has
gone half mad, laughing in order to avoid further weeping. I suspect
this because Jesus is everywhere you look in this film. Literally.
In
one of the film’s recurring references to scripture, a heartbroken
young man visits his brother, who was formerly known as a poet, in
an insane asylum. He offers his incapacitated brother verses that
might have been his own, we are not told. But the verses resemble
Jesus’ beatitudes: “Blessed be the man who sits down. Blessed be the
one who catches his finger in the door.” You can almost hear Monty
Python characters outside the room, adding, “Blessed are the
cheesemakers.” The sick brother listens silently but will not
respond; he seems to be constantly weeping, but his voice and his
tears have long since run out. He is, you see, a poet, and by
writing poetry, by pursuing beauty and meaning in this hellish
context, he has gone mad with what appears to be grief. He is like a
Christ who broke under the burden.
Crucifixes
are everywhere, even though these businessmen treat them as just
another commodity. Jesus sells, so they offer crosses, complete with
agonized savior, in many convenient sizes and styles. The constant
visual reminder of the crucified Christ becomes a powerful visual
element of the film. In one particularly startling sequence, one of
the sculpted Christs loses a nail, and swings from one hand back and
forth, back and forth, as if wildly trying to get the attention of
the morose people. It’s the funniest, strangest thing I’ve seen in a
film this year.
This
sort of twisted humor runs through the whole film; without it, this
would be an unbearably dark piece of work. But why are we laughing?
I would guess that some are laughing in bitter recognition of their
own emptiness. Others, however, are laughing in dismay at the
blindness of these loveless, self-absorbed people. They are laughing
because they know, or suspect, a better way, even if they have not
taken it themselves. That way cannot be taken on our own strength.
As the Beatitudes suggest, we must rely on God’s grace, who blesses
us in our frailty.
The
film’s final scene involves one man driven to the edge of madness as
guilt, alienation, and failure come crashing in on him. He takes up
a crucifix and hurls it onto a junk pile. Then he takes another, and
does the same with it. He is crucifying Christ, over and over, with
a vengeance. As his doom encroaches, our attention, which would
usually be fixed on the advancing tide of ghostly zombies coming to
claim his soul, is instead distracted by the pile of rejected
Christs.
You
won’t “enjoy” this film. It doesn’t have “main characters” or a
traditional plot. No one comes to any life-changing epiphany; no one
escapes this crowded metropolitan hell at the edge of time. You
might not make even make it all the way through before you have to
run out into the air for reminders of beauty and human kindness. I
found myself feeling a bit suffocated during the film’s last half
hour. But you will carry away from it a long list of sketches
illustrating just how little progress humankind has really made on
its own steam, and just how blind we often are to the answer: he is
hanging right in front of us, full of love, broken-hearted, despised
and rejected.