VIVA LA REVOLUTION! Day 3: The price of revolution

Viva la Revolution! The Agitation of the Mind joins forces with The Film Connoisseur for three days of revolution on film.

In this final day of “Viva la Revolution”, I’ll be casting an eye over films in which the revolutionary goes up against an oppressive government/state/system/establishment (delete as applicable) to their cost. Where the system defeats the individual, either by breaking their will or killing them outright. This will essentially be the flipside to Franco’s article over at The Film Connoisseur celebrating those films in which the revolutionary achieves his ends.

But this is not necessarily an article about failed revolutions, victory for the oppressor and the destruction of the individual. Sometimes a murder creates a martyr. Others are thus inspired by the resilience of someone who stands firm in their beliefs so passionately and intractably that even the very real possibility of their own death does not deter them.

Then there is the plight of ostensibly very ordinary people (such as the working class George Nada in ‘They Live’, discussed in my first “Viva la Revolution” piece) who, although they might be apolitical, are thrust into situations by the random upheavals of chance or circumstances and find themselves taking action. In direct contrast to the physically imposing and wisecracking Nada, but just as randomly catapulted into a string of life-changing events, is Sam Lowry (Malcolm Pryce), the decidedly ordinary protagonist of Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’.

Offbeat, visually arresting, quirky, sometimes funny and often coruscatingly angry, ‘Brazil’ is a film that could only have been made by Gilliam. Partly a riff on ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and partly a howl of frustration against the pettiness bureaucracies of British government, the film starts with a dead fly dropping into a teleprinter and the resulting typo setting off a chain of escalating events as various civil servants either try to cover up the resulting administrative error, or take it as evidence of dirty work and terrorist subversion within the government. When the innocent Jill Layton (Kim Griest) is implicated, Lowry – finding himself drawn to her – tries to save her from the clutches of the Ministry of Information’s counter-terrorist wing, the blandly yet somehow sinisterly named Information Retrieval department.

Lowry undergoes an awakening of his revolutionary spirit as understated as that of Winston Smith in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’: he simply comes to his own realization that the government is wrong, that his colleagues are either bullies or buffoons and that human life has a value beyond mere paperwork. The full corrosiveness of Gilliam’s vision is reserved for the final scene, in which Lowry – arrested, accused, cautioned, questioned and finally faced with excruciating torture courtesy of a man he considered his friend – simply shuts down emotionally and intellectually, retreating into himself; his mind projecting an ideal of the life he was striving towards. “He’s gone away from us,” the head of the Ministry muses.

‘Brazil’ makes no bones about the capacity of the system to crush the individual – either with jackboot, paperwork or both – but the poignant ending is a reminder that even a man reduced to a state of catatonia may be argued to have wrought a pyrrhic victory if something remains within him that clings to the beliefs that drove him.

Sidney Lumet’s ‘Network’ depicts the system (in this case a TV network) first exploiting then defending itself against a one-man revolution staged by news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a man whose revolutionary principles – here a commitment to the truth behind the news stories – lead to his assassination, albeit by an unexpected antagonist. When Beale is pensioned off after falling ratings, he uses his final broadcast to announce that he intends to kill himself. Viewing figures soar. Ambitious producer Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) persuades venal corporate honcho Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) to oversee Beale’s new show – in which he rants and raves like a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher – much to the chagrin of his previous producer and close friend Max Schumacher (William Holden).

In the film’s most famous scene, a dishevelled and manic Beale exhorts his viewers to get angry about the state of the country; to go to their windows, open them and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Beale taps into the frustrations of his audience simply by calling it like he sees it and deriding as “bullshit” anything that smacks of falsity, commercialization or corporatism.

His show earns the network an impressive share of the market, enough that Diana is able to push through her pet project, ‘The Mao Tse Tung Hour’ – a documentary series about revolutionaries. In a chillingly funny scene, Diana and a phalanx of her corporate cronies sit around with armed members of the terrorist group about whom they have agreed to make the series; these bastions of anti-capitalism end up arguing as vehemently as any agent or lawyer about residuals and profit shares.

Things take a downturn when Beale makes comments potentially harmful to a deal between the network and Saudi Arabian investors. Network president Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) browbeats Beale into towing the company line. Traumatized, Beale’s broadcasts lose their messianic intensity; a sense of defeatism creeps in. His audience loses interest. Viewing figures plummet. Jensen, blind to the financial repercussions and loss of face in the industry augured by an unpopular show, insists that Beale – now dancing to his tune – remain on TV. Hackett and Diana rope the terrorist faction into a scheme to get Beale off the air. Permanently.

‘Network’ is a fascinating entry in the canon of revolutionary films as (a) it depicts an agitator on the cusp becoming a bona fide revolutionary (the “mad as hell” scene implies that Beale is building a following); and (b) shows an initially complacent system (the network exercise no censorship over Beale just as long as his controversial monologues are analogous to high ratings) suddenly becoming ruthless when he presents an actual threaten (a potentially scuppered deal; loss of viewing figures). That the revolutionary group are corralled by corporate executives into assassinating Beale provides a suitably stark and darkly satirical sting in the tale.

In a perceptive comment on my first post in this series, Samuel Wilson of the excellent Mondo 70 stated: “I agree with you that the rebel is the person who says No. The revolutionary is a somewhat different creature because there's usually a Yes in his agenda; he's interested in replacing one system with another, and that usually leads to the rebels in his camp turning against him. There's no simple good guy/bad guy opposition between the two, but the tension between the two impulses is something you've probably noticed in movies and life alike.”

I’ve probably moved away slightly from the original remit of “Viva la Revolution” in some of my choices, being drawn to rebels as much as revolutionaries. Whereas Franco at The Film Connoisseur has focused many of his choices on films drawn from actual events, I guess what captures my imagination is that initial impulse to stand up against a system or establishment. How that impulses manifests, and how far the individual carries forward a message, campaign or organized display of insurgency, arguably provides another dividing line between the rebel and the revolutionary. Howard Beale – committing in one of his broadcasts the cardinal sin of urging a TV audience to switch off and think for themselves – is on the verge of leading a revolution. Not one of bloodshed, but of freedom of thought and rejection of an industry – television – which too many people (executives, advertisers) have too much money invested in to allow to be challenged.

D-Fens (Michael Douglas) – the anonymous former defence worker (the nomenclature derives from his personalized licence plate) whose one-day rampage through the culturally and economically depleted landscape of contemporary urban America is chronicled in Joel Schumacher’s ‘Falling Down’ – dies without attracting any followers. Except perhaps the audience. Schumacher’s achievement, even though it contributes to a tonally uneven movie overall, is to yolk a serious point about mental instability and the fragility of the individual’s breaking point to a wish-fulfilment narrative where D-Fens’s every outburst (be it verbal or machine gun fire) is guaranteed to raise a cheer from anyone who’s ever been downsized, ripped off, treated contemptuously or stuck in gridlock for hours on end.

Whether trashing a corner shop for overcharging on a can of soda, raging at a fast food franchise employee for serving him a burger that looks nothing like the product on the adverts, punching an obnoxious road user into unconsciousness, protesting against needless roadworks by simply blowing the obstruction up, or going hell for leather at a couple of rich dudes on a golf course, D-Fens does and says what most of us have wanted to do or say at one point, but hold back on due to the very real likelihood of arrest, lawsuits or custody. Of course, D-Fens dies in the end (much in the manner of, say, a gangster in a 1940s Warner Brothers movie having to pay for his sins mortally, never mind how appealing he might have been to the audience) but not before he asks uncomprehendingly, “I’m the bad guy?” It’s a question he’s asking on behalf of the audience.

The difference between D-Fens and any number of big screen vigilantes is that in a world inhabited by his audience, D-Fens would have followers. In fact, it’s not too great a leap from D-Fens to Tyler Durden in David Fincher’s ‘Fight Club’. Whereas D-Fens’s micro-revolution is immediate and on the streets, Tyler’s starts underground. Quite literally. In the cellar of a seedy bar where he starts up a bare-knuckle boxing club which soon attracts a following of disenfranchised twenty-something males from various walks of life. Fight Club provides a cathartic release for their frustrations. It also taps into an anarchistic part of their psyche and soon things move out of the cellar. Tyler instigates Project Mayhem: a campaign of pranks (the destruction of corporate artwork), sabotage (franchise properties are vandalised or bombed) and finally outright terrorism (a plot to destabilize the economy).

‘Fight Club’ is arguably American cinema’s equivalent of ‘If…’. Like Lindsay Anderson’s film, it ends as the revolution begins. Gunfire fills the soundtrack in the last scene of ‘If…’, the explosion as a tower block is destroyed in ‘Fight Club’, a disturbingly prescient image given the 9/11 attacks that happened two years after Fincher’s film was made. The only difference is that Travis in ‘If…’ remains resolute right till the end, whereas the anti-hero of ‘Fight Club’ bears helpless witness to the bombing having faced up to an ostensibly defeated his more militant and extremist alter ego. There are many levels on which this last scene can be read, not least as a punchline that treats the film entire as a gallows-humour joke. But there is also a small strand of ‘Animal Farm’-style satire going on, the original remit of Fight Club spiralling into the darker territory of Project Mayhem (not unlike the gradual bastardization of the animals’ Seven Commandments under Napoleon’s hard-line regime). Whereas the revolutionaries in the other films I’ve looked at today are crushed by the system, ‘Fight Club’ depicts the revolution as something of a Frankenstein’s monster, its creator bringing into being something he ultimately cannot control.

I’ve only looked at a small selection of films in this piece. There are a wealth of movies about real-life revolutionaries which pull no punches in depicting their eventual fate: Michael Collins (Liam Neeson) gunned down by an Anti-Treaty Republic in Neil Jordan’s eponymous biopic; William Wallace (Mel Gibson) tortured and executed by his British captors in ‘Braveheart’; Emiliano Zapata (Marlon Brando) lured into an ambush in Elia Kazan’s ‘Viva Zapata!’; Pancho Villa (Wallace Beery) similarly despatched in Jack Conway’s ‘Viva Villa!’

With Franco concentrating on socially-grounded depictions of revolution in cinema, I have chosen to focus primarily on fictional revolutionaries during the three days of “Viva la Revolution”. There are still many films out there with a fighting spirit and a revolutionary message. I’ll be making a point of looking at more of them – and some of those I’ve already mentioned, but in greater depth – during the course of the year.

The revolution continues!

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VIVA LA REVOLUTION! Day 1: Reasons to rebel

Viva la Revolution! The Agitation of the Mind joins forces with The Film Connoisseur for three days of revolution on film.



What makes a revolutionary? What causes someone to rebel against the accepted (or enforced) order of things? Where exactly is the dividing line between the freedom fighter and the terrorist? How easy is it to cross the line? These questions occupy a middle ground between idealism and activism; between the realization that a government/system/establishment is oppressive and the reality of risking one’s life/taking up arms to do something about it. These are powerful and morally difficult questions. It’s no surprise, then, that filmmakers have responded to the dramatic potential of the revolutionary figure.

Over these next three days, I’m joining forces with Francisco at The Film Connoisseur to present a celebration of revolution on film. Francisco will be exploring the cinematic representation of real-life revolutionaries, including an in-depth appraisal of Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che Guevara biopic. He’ll also be looking at films which celebrate the revolutionary achieving their political or social aims and instigating change.

Here on The Agitation of the Mind, I’ll be kicking things off today by considering what makes a rebel or a revolutionary. Tomorrow, I’ll be posting an article on depictions of revolutionary activity in my home country, with specific reference to movie adaptations of two of George Orwell’s most famous novels. On Wednesday, as a counterpoint to Francisco’s piece on successful revolutionaries, Agitation will sound a requiem for those who died for or because of their beliefs.

But let’s start by asking: what do we mean by “rebel” or “revolutionary”?

Personally, I don’t think anyone’s ever bettered Albert Camus’s eight-word definition: “A rebel is a man who says ‘no’.”

There’s a sliding scale to saying ‘no’. We’ve all probably done it at some point in our life. Ever sat through an appraisal at work that you’ve considered unjustly critical or had a complaint made against you by a colleague that was bullshit and as a result you’ve stood up against your line manager and spoken your mind and refused to take the crap that’s being dished out at you? You have? Congratulations: you’re a rebel. Now imagine that your firm is the government or your line manager is a corrupt despot. Imagine that instead of arguing the toss in a meeting room you’re carrying a gun and hiding in the forests or the mountains. Imagine that instead of possibly losing your job you could possibly lose your life.

Like I say: it’s a sliding scale. The point is, you don’t have to be political, idealistic or reactionary in your mindset. The average joe can become a revolutionary. It just takes a convergence of circumstances. Something that tests your mettle or opens your eyes to the truth. In John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’, transient labourer George Nada (Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of sunglasses which filter out the sheen of “normality” behind which the truth of the world is revealed: everything is propaganda. Behind the images on advertising hoardings, behind the columns of print in newspapers, behind the glossy photos in magazines there are orders: OBEY, MARRY AND REPRODUCE, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT; the design on banknotes hides the reminder: MONEY IS YOUR GOD.

Although pitched, particularly in its second half, on a borderline comedic level, ‘They Live’ is as acerbic, bitter and righteously angry as, say, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ or ‘Network’ (considered tomorrow and Wednesday respectively) in its depiction of a controlling oligarchy who deliberately subjugate and mislead the masses. Nada fights back as bluntly and unsubtly as one would expect of a working class hero, and the majority of his struggle is to open other people’s eyes. The scene where he gets into a five-minute punch-up with a friend who’s chary of donning the glasses is an hilariously satirical metaphor for the lengths to which some people will go for a quiet life – people who don’t want to see the truth and are more comfortable to accept things as they are.

John Carpenter’s work is full of rebellious characters who have no respect for authority and are willing to go the distance if provoked or disenfranchised. Arguably the most iconic of these characters is ‘Snake’ Plissken (Kurt Russell) in ‘Escape from New York’ and ‘Escape from L.A.’ The first film posits a dystopian future where the island of Manhattan has been turned into an open prison, walled off, the bridges leading to the mainland mined and escape attempts across the water quickly terminated by helicopter patrols. The prison, which contains only criminals, has developed its own form of society where the strongest, personified by The Duke (Isaac Hayes), rule and those with special abilities (such as Harry Dean Stanton’s Brain, who has refined the fuel that allows The Duke to run his ramshackle kingdom) are protected as long as their fealty is paid.

Into this environment hurtles an escape pod jettisoned from Air Force One: the President (Donald Pleasance), evading the freedom fighters who have gained control of his plane, finds himself out of the frying pan and into the fire. The establishment responds by recruiting recently arrested career criminal Plissken and coercing him into undertaking a suicide mission. The injection of a slow-acting poison into his bloodstream with the promise of the antidote once he delivers the President from harm – and, more importantly, the diplomatic MacGuffin the President alone has a copy of – is all the persuasion he needs.

‘Escape from New York’ flips the middle finger to the system during every minute of its running time, with Carpenter’s biggest “screw you” reserved for the finale in which, having made good on his side of the deal, Plissken scuppers the President’s ploy for a peaceable solution to the foreign problems threatening his administration. America, it is suggested, is in for one motherfucker of a shit-storm thanks to Plissken’s reactionary stunt; but everything that Plissken has gone through up till that moment leaves you in no doubt that the powers that be had it coming.

The sequel, while inferior on many levels and badly let down by embarrassingly shoddy effects work, certainly ups the ante in terms of Plissken’s final act of rebellion. In a film that follows its predecessor’s narrative arc with the slavish fidelity of a join-the-dots puzzle, Plissken strolls off into the end credits having not just fucked up world peace but pretty much sounded the death knoll for the planet’s future. The message is stark and brutal: shut down; start again.

‘Escape from New York’ was, of course, made as the 70s gave out to the 80s, the door just beginning to close on an astounding decade in American cinema where a new breed of directors were kicking down the doors and questioning the system. German cinema, in the last decade, has been demonstrating a similar renaissance, certainly in terms of movies which shine a penetrating and unflinching light on the darker aspects of Germany’s recent social and political history. ‘Downfall’ was the watershed film in this movement: the first German production ever to depict Hitler. What made it more thorny was that it was even-handed in its approach.

Just as thorny – and for the same reason – was Uli Edel’s ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’, which packs an immense amount of politics, ideology and compromised morality into its two and a half hours. The film charts the history of the group from Ulrike Meinhof (Martine Gedeck)’s transition from crusading journalist to activist, through Meinhof, Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtrau) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek)’s eventual arrest and trial, to the actions of the second generation members. Here, the focus is on explicitly political motives for revolution, and the sometimes awkward but always compelling combination of Bernd Eichinger’s incisive script and Edel’s bludgeoningly unsubtle direction present a depiction of the bastardization of ideology and the crossing of the line from revolutionary to terrorist.

An artistic/intellectual awakening is the focus of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s ‘The Lives of Others’, in which Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a Stasi surveillance expert, is deployed by his weasly boss Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) – himself a tool of corpulent and eminently corrupt politican Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) – to stake out the home of playwright Georg Draymann (Sebastian Koch), who has come under suspicion because of his association with dissident artist Paul Hauser (Hans Euw-Bauer). The old saying “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” gets a two and a quarter hour exposition in von Donnersmarck’s astoundingly assured directorial debut. Essentially, the film is the story of two awakenings: that of Draymann, who is inspired by Hauser to write a potentially contentious article for publication in the west; and that of Wiesler, whose hitherto blind adherence to the party is challenged by the humanitarian values of the man he’s sent to spy on and a gradual realization of the venality of his superiors’ ulterior motives.

If ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ and ‘The Lives of Others’ represent a strand of cinema rooted in social realism and driven by the political failings of recent history, then themes of rebellion couched in sci-fi tropes recall the golden age of that genre when political protest, social disaffection and an exaggerated extrapolation of contemporary issues cast a shadow over filmmakers’ visions of the future. Examples are myriad both in cinema and literature: H.G. Wells contesting the arrogant complacency of the Victorian era in ‘War of the Worlds’ (a subtext utterly neglected by both Byron Haskins’ and Steven Spielberg’s big screen adaptations); George Orwell contemplating the dark side of the socialist ideal in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and ‘Animal Farm’ (of which more tomorrow); Evgeny Zamyatin contemplating a similar theme from within the system in ‘We’; Aldous Huxley pinpointing the production-line slavery of Henry T. Ford’s car manufacturing plants as the genesis of human slavery to the industrial impulse in ‘Brave New World’.

Science-fiction, at its best and most cerebral, has held up a mirror to contemporary issues and had the naked courage to accept that the future, whether postulated as utopian or dystopian, presents a worry prospect. A utopian society is depicted in the under-rated ‘Aeon Flux’. There is cleanliness, social order, and protection from an outside world, 99% of which has been destroyed by a viral pandemic. The ruling dynasty are “descended” from the scientist, Dr Goodchild, who developed a cure. And yet the Goodchilds have become a ruling class, their interests protected by a private army and their power built on a secret hidden for centuries. The eponymous Aeon (Charlize Theron) works for an underground movement, the Monicans, who are dedicated to challenging the status quo. The world of ‘Aeon Flux’ recalls that of ‘Logan’s Run’ (one of the films being considered by Francisco at The Film Connoisseur on Wednesday): aesthetically pleasing, peaceful and seemingly affluent, its citizens wanting for nothing … except personal freedom. And yet people disappear. The Goodchilds rule with an iron fist in a velvet glove. The populace are deceived as a matter of course.

The future of Joss Whedon’s ‘Serenity’ – his big-screen farewell to the unjustly cancelled TV series ‘Firefly’ – is in sharp contrast to ‘Aeon Flux’. This is definitely a dystopia. How so? Well, our ostensible hero Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillon) is the leader of a ragtag group of outlaws reduced to robbing payrolls after fighting on the losing side against the Alliance, a patriarchal government who control a ring of inner planets where the younger generation are effectively brainwashed and “operatives” take care of anyone who questions or threatens governmental supremacy. The further flung planets are the province of Reivers, a vicious criminal society who practice their own form of despotism. Mal and his crew become unlikely rebels when they give passage to a psychic, River (Summer Glau), who has questioned the Alliance. As with the Goodchilds’ empire in ‘Aeon Flux’, the Alliance has been founded on a criminal act and a supposedly “better” society is the product of lies, whitewash and propaganda.

Every genre of cinema has had its share of cinematic rebels – I haven’t even touched on, say, the Zappata westerns; and biopics of revolutionaries, successful or not, seems to be a cottage industry in and of itself – and the films I’ve mentioned in this article are but a random sampling. Some of these I’ve already reviewed on the blog; others deserve in-depth stand-alone pieces.

Tomorrow, I’ll be narrowing the remit to a more specific selection of movies: those which consider an English perspective on revolution. In the meantime, don’t forget to head over to The Film Connoisseur - today, Francisco presents an in-depth and socially grounded analysis of the films 'Romero' and 'Salvador'.

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Viva la revolution!

“A rebel is a man who says no.” – Albert Camus

“While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” – Eugene Victor Debs

The Agitation of the Mind will be teaming up with The Film Connoisseur in January 2011 for a celebration of revolution on film.

Join us.

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