Brutality, Oppression, and a Brain-Damaged Hippie

The great cultural critic Fredric Jameson is famous for saying, “Always historicize.” Meaning, always locate objects, images, experiences, feelings, statements, and memories within a historical continuum. And also grasp the forces (economic, political, environmental) that purposely or accidentally form the ups and downs, the twists and turns of that history. A person with this orientation has, like the angel in Klee’s painting, their back to the future and faces the past. History blows them into the future. With all of this in mind, let’s turn to three films (one old, two new) and see where they are located in the course of history.

The three films are The Rules of the Game, The Time That Remains, and The Music Never Stopped. The first film is French, the second is Israeli, and the last is North American. The French film was released in 1939, the Israeli in 2009, and the American in 2011. In the French film, we see the spectrum of French society on the eve of Europe’s second great war. With the Israeli film, it is the violent shock that Palestinian Christians in Nazareth experienced during the formation of the Jewish state. With the American film, it is white middle-class America in the late 1960s, the moment of national crisis. In short, these films cover a defining period of 20th-century history, from World War II to the Vietnam War. We can see these points as marking the entrance and exit of the American period—Jameson is also famous for saying: “We cannot not periodize.”

Each film has a defining sequence, a core around which other elements of the story orbit. We will look at each of these sequences and attempt to grasp some final sociohistorical meaning.

The defining sequence in The Rules of the Game, directed by Jean Renoir, and considered to be one of the great works of cinema, happens almost exactly in the middle of the narrative. The film concerns a circle of upper-class types who go to the countryside to deal with their love problems—the adventurer loves the Austrian beauty, the Austrian beauty loves the rich man (and also her best friend, played by the director), the rich man no longer loves his lover, the lover’s heart is broken.

They all go hunting. The poor people make a racket, the animals run out of their hiding places. The rich people fire rifles and kill the animals. The scene is simple but profound. It’s not that the violence of the hunt is an omen of the violence of the war—the war that is soon to officially erupt and consume the whole of France, the whole of Europe, the whole of the world. It’s that human brutality is displayed as ordinary. Indeed, we feel in this scene a pull toward Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” It’s just everywhere, happening all of the time. After the shooting spree, the love games resume: The Austrian beauty sees through hunting binoculars her rich husband kissing his curvy lover in the marshes.

Though The Time That Remains, directed by Elia Suleiman, begins with the war that established the Israeli state, most of the film takes place in the 1960s and concerns a middle-class Palestinian Christian family that’s in a state of shock. Their whole world has collapsed, the presence of the army is constant, the police show up at all hours to take people in for questioning. The harassment grinds all of the happiness out of these people. They are left with nothing but sadness and silence. And this is a comedy! Which is why its core sequence is so funny: It is a clip (or clips) from Kubrick’s Spartacus. We see Kirk Douglas giving a speech to the slaves about freedom and justice and the need to fight for these important things—the slaves cheer. This fantasy of a slave revolt is the final joke: Resistance, the struggle against oppression, and other democratic actions can be commodified and consumed as entertainment by people who are actually oppressed. This is why the film, though critical of Israeli militarism, is so undecided, so in the air about things: What’s to be done about this oppression? Go to another country? Throw stones at it? Drink tea all day and dream about the time before the fall? Dance to Arabic techno? The movie almost ends with Palestinians and Israeli soldiers enjoying an Arabic techno beat.

Finally, we come to The Music Never Stopped, which, unlike the first two films, is bad. It’s about a teenager who leaves home to live hippily ever after. Twenty years later, he returns with a damaged brain. A tumor has made him stupid. He can’t remember anything unless you play him hippie music—Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, and, of course, the Dead. If this hippie music is not on, he has no idea where he is, what is going on, whom he is talking to, or what he is talking about. This is not a comedy.

The core of this film happens on a bench in a park. The brain-damaged hippie sits next to a pretty woman who works in the cafeteria of the rehabilitation center. Her name is Celia. Unfortunately for her (and us), Simon & Garfunkel happened to sing a song about a woman named “Cecilia.” The permanently addled hippie sings this song to her repeatedly. He is a broken record. Indeed, our own time so desperately wants to see the 1980s, the period in which this film is set, as the dustbin of all the radical aspirations of the late 1960s and early ’70s. Reagan was the great garbage collector. He got all of that shit out of American homes. From then on, pop music would be deprived of its teeth—this is exactly how The Music Never Stopped ends—and revolutions wouldn’t happen on the streets or in your head but only in the products in the bathroom cabinet. The ’60s, like the memories in the hippie’s muddled mind, are forgettable and irretrievable.

This, of course, is a fantasy. Keep all eyes on Cairo.