monday, january 28, 2008
If...
Lindsay Anderson’s If…. is a film that persistently defies simple explanation and, in that respect, it is maddeningly like life itself.If…. slides from bizarre to hallucinatory with disturbing ease. Anderson is keen enough an observer to know that that strange rituals of the boarding school are absurd enough to not need much prompting to become flights of fancy.
Is a man playing guitar while using the toilet any weirder than committing a giant alligator to the flames? Not really. But the constant succession of odd images eventually overwhelms the viewer so that by the time the chaplain pops up out of the drawer it’s almost mundane.
Almost. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Perhaps it’s best to start at the beginning or, even better, at the center. And the centerpiece of the film is Malcom McDowell.
As the film’s protagonist, Mick Travis, McDowell less acts than embodies the spirit of rebellion. He saunters around the school with a feral grace that reminds one of a young Mick Jagger more than any preening movie star. He’s dangerous and irresistible.
McDowell’s Travis arrives on the scene of the bustle with his head hooded with a brimmed hat and face covered with a dark knitted scarf. All that is visible are his eyes with their piercing blue and unsettling mixture of mischievous charm and malicious intent.
Unveiling himself - revealing himself – he still is concealed behind a moustache. Perhaps he’s trying out at being an adult or perhaps not – either way he remains a cipher. He shaves it off but the questions linger. He’ll answer them but only on his own terms.
Asked why he grew it his wry response is simply, “To hide my sins.”
At the start of the film he speaks in epigrams like “Paradise if for the blessed, not for the sex-obsessed,” and “There is no such thing as a wrong war. Violence and revolution are the only pure acts.” Rather than professing his creed he seems more trying out ideologies to see which will fit him the best”
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That’s important because the volume of chatter he is surrounded by can be deafening. The setting of the film, a fictional British all-boys boarding school called College House. The school is a complex social milieu where a small group of students known as The Whips hold the power in the name of the actual authorities.
They hold power through complex and meaningless rituals that serve to cement the intricate pecking order. Even common roughhousing of the younger boys is channeled to this end (but, Travis and his friends roughhouse with quite a different intent)
For most of the students, all of this means an unquestioning compliance with the directives of the Whips no matter how distasteful.
Hunter S. Thompson once derided his experience in the military as enduring “A crude attempt at lobotomy using rules instead of scalpels.” Anderson seems of the same mind of the British education system and, in turn, of British society itself.
It’s a bit odd watching the initial banquet after the innocent romanticizing Harry Potter has played upon the same setting. Rowling depicts it as a wondrous welcoming event while If…. lays the bare tawdriness and sad perversions on the tables from the onset. It’s hard to believe the two representations depict the same thing.
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The strange mannerisms and routines are rife for ribbing and Anderson takes to the task with relish. The absurdity of the combat sequence when the “attackers” are told with all seriousness to assault a tree is sufficiently droll to fit in any early Monty Python skit. It’s probably no accident that famous troupe began their efforts a year later mining the same fertile fields Anderson found rife for rebellion in the name of satire.
If…. was on the cusp of a new era for film and, although it anticipated a great deal of what is to come, it still stands apart. If….'s inevitable comparison with Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (notably due to the two films sharing the same lead actor) are interesting upon reflection.
And although both directors are laboring to reveal the insanity of a society that believes itself indubitably sane they take rather divergent paths to achieve it. The hallucinatory colors and fish-eye lens effects of Kubrick’s film are more than evenly matched by the matter-of fact absurdity in play in Anderson’s.
The most distinctive – and famous – visual aspect of the film is the seemingly random transposition of scenes in black and white footage that are scattered throughout the film. Their meaning – or lack thereof – is difficult to discern and the subject of a great deal of debate.
“There is no symbolism involved in the choice of sequences filmed in black and white, nothing expressionist or schematic,” Anderson later confessed. “Only such factors as intuition, pattern and convenience.”
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Watching the films in the late 1960s they would have immediately reminded the audience of the era of black and white films that had held sway just a decade or so prior – a callback to a different type of cinematic rules and a world where those films were mundane.
A Clockwork Orange, although seen as such a futuristic vision at the time, is now a hopelessly archaic work. It could not have occurred at any time but the 1960s. Their look and feels are indelibly associated with the era. The same is not at all true of If…. and that’s deliberate.
Anderson’s aim was to tell a more timeless tale and purposefully drained the movie of any contemporary references so it could be accessible to any viewer on their own terms. Not surprisingly, the viewer tends to connect with A Clockwork Orange on a visceral level but with If…. on an intellectual one.
Yet Anderson isn’t being exactly subtle either. Images of violence, weapons and skirmishes between students begin from the earliest scenes and gather momentum as the story progresses.
You can almost track them by watching the magazine clippings proliferate on the walls. Pin-up girls compete for space with Chairman Mao and the Nazi high command. The images of soldiers brandishing weapons start to multiply at an increasing rate.
It’s all not much different than the staid paintings of the College House pontificates in the dining hall with that renowned rule-breaker Henry VIII placed right in the middle.
The contrasts of images becomes more than simply a backdrop, it starts to seep in and affect your viewing of the scenes themselves. As the film progresses the camera lingers on the strange contrasts of sex and violence, privilege and human suffering.
The final climax of the film isn’t a surprise, it’s the only logical resolution. The minister warns the boys from the start “Work. Play. But don’t mix the two.” The walls are a testament to the failure to follow his creed.
Today, watching the attack at the end of the film, it’s impossible not to be reminded of school shootings that have claimed dozens of lives over the past decade. The violence of the actual acts echoes loudly in our conscience when we watch the slaughter but it’s important to see the difference between that time and today.
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“They are not anti-heroes, or drop-outs, or Marxist-Leninists or Maoists or readers of Marcuse,” Anderson noted. “Their revolt is inevitable, not because of what they think, but because of what they are.”
The question that drives Travis isn’t one of ideology; it’s about his basic humanity.
“When do we live?” he asks. “That’s what I want to know.”
As much as the ending of If…. has been labeled as allegory the bodies on the green and the deadly intensity of the shooters makes little doubt of their conviction in the matter. In the end the minister of the church, the old ladies of the establishment and their intimate persecutors from the school all take up arms against them.
“The world rallies as it always will,” Anderson wrote. “And brings its overwhelming firepower to bear on the man who says ‘No.’”
That’s not the point of the film, though (and the reason it ends sharply while gunfire still rings from the rooftops) The power of the film comes from seeing what makes a man reach the point to saying no rather than simply looking at the destruction wrought in the aftermath of his decision.
At the time of its release, the film evoked disturbing parallels in the wake of student revolts occurring worldwide. At Colombia University students occupied many of the buildings and had to be forcibly removed by the police. In France protests that originated with students at the universities presaged to the eventual collapse of the De Gaulle government.
Two years later the allegorical aspect of the film’s finale was even harder to admit after Kent State and the wave of protests that followed.
While all of these protests led to little immediate concrete change but they marked a broad social shift from the old society which valued religion, patriotism and respect for authority to the modern point-of-view that holds a premium on individualism, sexual liberation and a respect for human rights. It isn't that either perspective is better than the other, its that whichever one become entrenched tends to lose sight of it's original inspiration - as Lord Acton pointed out.
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That If…. ends with bullets rather than rotten vegetables doesn’t change the reason both end up being thrown for the same reason.
But, as Alan Moore once pointed out, that mean “without leaders” not “without rules.” The latter seems to be the popular perception of the credo and it’s a famously short-sighted one. Travis seems much too aware of the workings of his world to fall for such a canard.
He’s looking for a new way of running the world and, in that sense; he tapped into the zeitgeist of the ‘60s. If…. arrived a generation after World War II when the world was ready to move past the institutions that conflict had created. The world today is, in many ways, the opposite of those times – the institutions that hold sway are very much based on the precepts Travis and his companions held so dear.
Is it time for things to swing back again? Perhaps. Or perhaps there is a deeper lesson in all of this Anderson is trying to express.
One of the film’s more subtle points is that the two perspectives are constantly depicted as polar opposites; you are either one or the other. It is the inability of either side to give any ground to the other that leads to the eventual confrontation (although it’s clear a bit more of the blame has to rest with the powers-that-be for having the ability to allow discourse and adamantly denying it).
That’s a lesson that holds particular resonance today. One would hope we watch If…. and learn lest we travel down the painful path of destruction it so mercilessly depicts.
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