Cache, Crash and Gus the Polar Bear: Towards a Definition of "Complex"

The dictionary defines the adjective form of complex as "consisting of interconnected or interwoven parts." And if that definition establishes the boundaries of the Mondo Complexo, than we have no choice but to allow recent films like Crash and Syriana into our little world. Both of these films are indeed composed of many interwoven strands, brought together in the end to make a grand point, in the manner of Robert Altman and his disciples, both successful (we're still waiting for another Magnolia, P.T.) and less so (any Alan Rudolph sightings lately?). However, "complex" has become such an overused word that, like "freedom" and "terror", it has become meaningless. At this juncture, however, a bit of etymology might be instructive; the word comes from the Latin complexus, the past participle of complect, which means "to entwine." What's interesting, of course, is that "entwine" has such positive and negative connotations. We go to the movies to become entwined, to become completely swept up in a world of the filmmakers' creation. Yet if we become entwined in "complex" films like Crash or 21 Grams, we find ourselves bound and struggling to unravel puzzles whose facile and mechanical solutions do not validate our effort.

Where to begin with Crash, the Grand Canyon of the new millennium? People, including Academy members, saw it as a thoughtful meditation on the state of race relations in America today. But has there been a film in the last few years that has felt so clunkily overwritten? It's like one of those medieval allegorical plays where each character represents Something in a clumsy attempt to convey a Message. From Don Cheadle's opening monologue (where the only way we can have any contact is to CRASH into each other. GET IT??), to dialogue straight out of a high school sophomore's entry in a creative writing contest about racism, to the overwrought ironies and ridiculous coincidences, to characters changing 180 degrees in a matter of seconds, the success of Crash, to paraphrase Tony Scott in the Times, says more about the impoverished state of our discourse on issues like race than anything else. Roger Ebert defends the film by saying that great authors like Dickens and Shakespeare often trafficked in such implausibilities. Well, is Roger going to run out and buy a Brittney Spears album of jazz improvisations and defend her by saying Coltrane did the same thing? Invoking Dickens to support Haggis merely strengthens Scott's point about how far we've fallen. Crash reinforces the queasy feeling that the only thing more dangerous than having no dialogue on race at all is to smugly believe that we're having one when we're not.

Soon after seeing Crash, I got a chance to see Michael Haneke's Cache. This is a far from flawless film, and I was uncomfortable as I usually am with his gleeful torturing of his bourgie subjects. Yet in so many ways, Cache embodies the kind of complexity we're looking for here at the Mondo. In the most superficial sense, it is wonderfully reminiscent of the great Godard films of 1964-1966, where the politics was omnipresent yet never in a harsh spotlight: on the radio, on a TV in the background, in a newspaper someone off to the side is reading, or, as in Masculin Feminin for example, in a brief digression. The subject of Cache, just below its glossy Hitchcock-like, videotape-paranoid suface, is nothing less than the legacy of the Western subjugation of the Muslim world. A crucial plot point hinges on a historical reference to an infamous incident from the late 1950's, when hundreds of Muslim protesters decrying the French presence in Algeria were set upon by the Surete; hundreds were killed and injured. As our upper middle class Parisian protagonists go about their evening routine, images and sounds of the current Iraqi conflict come from the TV in the background. Cache soon evolves into an exploration of how the political becomes the personal and vice-versa, and how the scars of oppression never simply disappear when the oppression itself ends. It all comes together in the strange, unexpected concluding shot of the film, which actually runs under the closing credits. It's a moment that suggests both the idea that we pass our sins on to our children in an endless cycle of violence and retaliation, as well as the possibility that our children may be the ones who will actually end the cycle. The beauty of Cache is that unlike films like Crash, none of what I've just described is even alluded to by the characters in the story, let alone clumsily underlined in writing that insults its audience's intelligence. Yet it's all there, in its complex glory, insisting that we puzzle it out for ourselves.

In a sense, the perfect metaphor is the famous story of Gus, the polar bear at the Central Park Zoo. A few years back, his keepers noticed that Gus was listless and blue for no apparent reason. An animal psychiatrist was brought in, and after some study, it was determined that Gus had lost his zip because he was by nature a hunter, yet he was being handed his food in a bucket every day. Without a challenge, Gus had lost his sense of purpose. The prescribed treatment was simple and ultimately effective; they now fed Gus his fish frozen solid in a bucket of ice, so he had to work a bit to get his meal. Thus, a film like Cache is a crisp bucket of frozen sushi, while Crash and its ilk are more like dead herrings in the moonlight, to quote Billy Wilder. But then again, you didn't need me to lay that all out for you, did you...