The Golden Ass

David Hering, in his review, “World-Wide Western: On Ari Aster’s Eddington” wrote that the film’s characters suffer from a constant “sleep of reason.” Major, key plot elements appear on the scene from the internet, are elements of social media ideological discourse, but have little to no grounding or bearing in the real, concrete, material world. Much of the acting, many of the decisions made by the characters and lines scripted into their voices, similarly, do not resonate well with every day, lived experience. I sense the film could work better as a comic book or graphic novel than as a film. See Sin City as a potential example of what I have in mind. This is, I think, why, for Hering, "Eddington feels somewhat anemic in its provocations, closer to caricature than true satire." I agree with him. As a sort of counterpoint of the film that makes Hering’s point for him, to end his review, he discusses the final frame:

“The most successful element of Eddington is the subplot concerning a data centre that is to be built on the outskirts of the town..It’s here that Aster’s film most deftly combines the Western genre with the material prevalence of the online world, its true form revealed in the film’s final – and best – image, a night-time vista of the completed data centre glowing, spaceship-like, in the middle of the desert, some distance from Eddington..This is such a great, rich image: the data centre’s unearthliness, its domination of the frame, its transformation of the traditional Western landscape into something peripheral and uncanny…what sets it apart from the film’s more facetious humour is that it’s a sincerely disturbing image, one that monumentally and materially reinscribes the threat on the landscape in a way that dwarfs the internecine conflicts of the town. I found myself wishing Eddington had leaned more in this direction. This is where the internet truly occurs: it’s material, and it’s terminal.”

The final frame of Ari Aster's Eddington

Again, I agree here with Hering. When says, “its true form revealed in the film’s final – and best – image,” though - with the term “it” - is he referring to the film itself, to the internet, or to the Western? I am not sure. It is clear, however, that the “unearthliness” refers to the data center itself. What Hering does not mention or discuss about this final frame is that it is from above. It is a three-quarter perspectival view of said data center. In this sense, there is a mirroring sameness taken up in, on the one hand, the subject doing the framing and, on the other, the object being framed. The unearthliness is framed from an unearthly place above it, and that is why I take the film’s final shot to be a recapitulation of the whole. Though the final frame is the best thing about the film, that is shot “from above” also itself betrays everything I take to be wrong with it. What do I mean?

FILM EVALUATION AND MONTAGE

Notably, my point here is something I never would have seen or given attention to if I had not been an architect. It is as an architect that I learned to pay attention to spatial relationships between architectural elements, said elements and the environment, and all with consideration of the human body and its own experience and set of relationships. This is to say that paying attention to relationships between sky and ground, earth and heaven, and to the place of architecture and its elements between them, was something I learned as an architect.

At what is this man smiling? (screenshot from here)

Obviously, architecture and film are different, right? One might just as obviously presume the extended implication that film and architecture should be judged by different criteria. After all, one of the key and central elements of film making is montage. As Alfred Hitcock explains in a famous clip about his own use of montage, the entire purpose of it is narrative movement through and in the content of the medium of film itself. If the director replaces one image with another in a montage, all that surrounds it totally changes in tone and meaning. The example Hitchcock gives is of an elderly man smiling in response to a cute baby playing as compared to in response to a woman in a bikini. He becomes a different character in a different story in each respective scenario. Montage – which, as Hitchcock explains, is the cutting and splicing together, or “assembly” of frames of film material - thus works to move a given narrative along its intended trajectory.

At first glance, the very nature of the medium of film might, then, seem to inherently exclude architectural considerations from our evaluative criteria of movies. Does Architecture tell or inhabit stories? What does the architectural lesson of the spatial orientation of the last shot of Eddington have to do with how we might evaluate the film’s entire narrative flow and direction? How many stories does a building have? How many does it tell or inhabit?

ARCHITECTURE, MONTAGE, AND THE BODY IN SPACE

The basic point of Alasdair MacIntyre’s essay, Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science is that our inhabiting of narratives and telling stories is crucially important to all human knowledge. Implicitly speaking to this question of stories, then, Dr. Ulrike Kuch wrote a piece called, Transmission of Knowledge: Eisenstein, Le Corbusier, and Montage as Image Practice in Film and Architecture. For those unfamiliar, Eisenstein was a famous modernist Russian film maker, and Le Corbusier was basically the most well-known architect of the 20th century. Towards the point of my lesson on the joining together of narration and spatial orientation, in Kuch’s piece, she quotes Russian avant-garde film maker Dziga Vertov:

[start quote] “»I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.

Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects, I crawl under, I climb onto them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an airplane. I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along their resultant, maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations.

Freed from the rule of sixteen – seventeen frames per second, free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded them. My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you« (Vertov 1923: 17f).” [end quote]

“Man with a Movie Camera,” by Dziga Vertov (screenshot from here):

Referring to a film Le Corbusier helped Pierre Chenal make in order to promote French modernist architecture, Dr. Kuch says it “asks us to see if we can find »truth« anywhere.” The key word here for my point is not truth but anywhere.

Kuch also refers to Eisenstein’s “understanding of images detached from their representative character and replaced by a sequence of images that work together to create a montage.” Kuch’s point is that, for both Eisenstein and Corbusier, “The idea [is] of an image that is no longer solely representative, but serves as a medium linking architecture, the viewer, and motion.” For at least Corbusier and Vertov, this displacement of the ghostly image is tied to and bound up with the “anywhere” of the machine’s frame. This is something Corbusier and Eisenstein seemed to see in common in each other’s work, as well.

Speaking of “images detached from their representative character,” V.F. Perkins, in his 1972 book Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies, compares two famous uses of montage by Hitchcock and Eisenstein, respectively:

"I offered the Psycho murder as an example of cinematic excellence, and the Potemkin lions as an example of the critically suspect. But that is not because Eisenstein infringed an aesthetic law on the proper content of a movie scene; rather, because his animals were inconsistent with the discipline which he had himself established. Unattached stone lions had no place in a film which undertook to convey ideas and emotions through the presentation of experiences believably undergone by a group of rebel sailors.”

Everyone reading this has seen Hitchcock’s Psycho murder scene. The “Potemkin lions” – seen here – refers to a series of three montaged clips of stone lions who appear in the middle of a battle scene in Eisenstein’s famous Battleship Potemkin. As Perkins explains, the lions are “so photographed that we seem to see a single sleeping lion awake and sit up in an attitude of surprise or alarm or anger or watchfulness.” Perkins says the lions convey “extreme imprecision of effect,” because of the “absence of connection, in terms of story, action, location – the absence of any connection at all” between surrounding images of Odessa steps, mutinied sailors, attacking battleship, and destroyed gates of the military headquarters. Perkins seems to indicate that their only purpose is the bravado of Eisenstein’s proclaiming his own film editing skill in the montage of images of lions into the scene.

We, of course, here notice that Perkins is raising the same question I addressed previously, that of the relationship between narrative content and orientation to spatial arrangement of bodies and objects by the camera’s framing. I submit that the detached “anywhere” of the Potemkin lions is precisely part of their point. I also want to suggest that they – precisely in and because of their startling displacement - point towards the “place” of the camera in not only the specific film in question but in the medium of film as such. Perkins seems to be missing this. I take it to be key.

Returning to Dr. Ulrike Kuch piece, it thus becomes relevant that, there, we also get the image of camera as machine taking up the tacit place of the human body moving in space according to rhythms and sequences invited and ordered, in turn, by architectural elements that present montaged images to us. Ulrich, referring to the works of Eisenstein, Corbusier, and Vertov, conveys a dynamic interplay of formation, identity, and orientation, of place, movement, and trajectory between self, camera, and environment.

THE CAMERA MACHINE AND HUMAN HISTORY

Me speaking now: this dynamic interplay is that of an architectural-cinematic space depicted well by Clockwork Orange. Whether a given film depicts the human body as a machine or not, and however implicitly or explicitly in the narrative - such as in films about cyborgs, or as in Avatar – the medium of film itself presents the very question of the place, role, and identity of the human body in a relationship between “the ghost and the machine.”

I thus bring Ulrike Kuch’s piece up only to point beyond it, really. I know Corbusier well enough to know that he was intentionally placing modern architecture, and cinema, as well, inside a larger trajectory of human history. The “kino-eye,” and the associated question of its relationship with the body and its limits are not simply or only about the technology of camera and screen. The technology doesn’t exist in a cultural, environmental, ecological, or historical vacuum. For Kuch to reference the machine (of the camera), and to bind it up with tacit knowledge of the human body moving through space, is to reference, comment on, and find some place inside modern displacement from – as Arendt says it - earth bound existence.

Artemis II (image take from here):

Architecturally, Corbusier was reaching back to the Acropolis and extending that ancient tradition into a modern context / environment. It’s easy now to go to the Acropolis and experience it “cinematically,” even though that’s not at all how it would have been proceeded through by ancient Athenians (Corbusier also took a bunch of photos while he was there).

To build a cinematic architecture for a body bound up in the view of a machine with a sequence and montage of images that are non-representational because of our displacement is to build in the wake of Galileo, Descartes, Newton’s mechanical, Clockwork Universe, and Kant (just to name highlights, particularly along shared ground of understanding for at least some of my readers). For Le Corbusier, it is to have been exiled from the earth and then attempt to both name and reconcile with that condition.

This also, for Corbusier, meant taking up the camera while also returning to helping the modern human person remember his or her place in relation to the earth and under the domus of heaven. This is difficult to convey over text or in conversation without familiarity with Corbusier’s work. I do so in my book, but it takes up a lot of print, a lot of space on the page. I hope the point here remains. This reconciliation or return isn’t something mentioned or discussed in Ulrike Kuch’s piece on montage, but it is central to Corbusier’s work in general. I see it in the cinematography of Battleship Potemkin, too, because that film very intentionally re-orients us, in ordered sequences, to sky and ground, earth and heaven, up and down, body and horizon or body and objects before it in space.

THE (LOST) POTENTIAL FOR POETIC RECONCILAITION IN EDDINGTON

Here’s the thing for me with Ari Aster. As soon as any film maker takes up a camera machine, they have found themselves inside that trajectory of human history in question. This is so, whether they realize it or not. The camera, thus, also exists inside a set of conditions. And, we’re all – whether giving attention to film or architecture - tied up together inside that set of conditions where the camera is both also bound up and has a distinct role (or roles).

Further, and more to my point, all of this is very related for me to the other elements of our commonly shared condition that Eddington deals with – namely, ideological antagonisms, and disconnection from reality. Ideology itself is tied to modernity. “Science of ideas” is a pretty preposterously presumptuous notion. And, it depends not only on modern, Enlightenment epistemic frameworks but their being extended from observation of “the natural world” into the political realm. Ideology thus depends on the human person taking up a very similar viewpoint as the camera machine itself. Ideology takes up the camera machine’s disembodied, transcended “anywhereness” (like Kant’s transcendent imagination, speaking of judgement and evaluative criteria).

Trying to find our place in the internet and its algorithms is a further extension of that modern condition – which we all share together. And, this is precisely why I find it so key that the final shot of Eddington is “from above.” Figuratively speaking, the “anywhereness” of the camera machine – no less than the viewpoint of detached, (essentially) non-representational content of ideology’s presumed “science of ideas” - is first and prototypically the transcended “aboveness” of Galileo’s mind that has come to dwell in outer space. Both camera and ideology are and can only be taken up by one who, as Hannah Arendt would say it, lives in the universe. No one who proceeded ritually through the ancient Acropolis owned a camera. The camera was never taken up by the embodied Phidias dwelling upon and bound to the earth and under the domus of heaven. As Vertov’s man-camera said it, “free of the limits of time and space, I put together any given points in the universe…”

EDDINGTON AS SATIRICAL ABSURDITY

Ari Aster’s Eddington is obviously not like Thomas Malik’s The Tree of Life, nor Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. It doesn’t carry such gravitas, and nor does it intend to, exactly. As my friend and pastor Scott Crowder said: it is “nothing like Tarkovsky in its contemplation. It shouldn’t be cast in those comparisons to find merit.”

In this sense, as Scott did, one might suggest that Eddington works more like a Louis Bunuel film in its absurdity. Scott suggested that Aster’s “light-weight terror” is here like Camus and Sartre. Notably, I like Bunel. Or, at least, I used to. Maybe need to revisit. Either way, a Bunuel film is not glib, insincere, caricature, a sick joke, or self-assertive provocation. And, it can hardly be mistaken for any of those things, really (unless we arrive to it with moralizing). His “absurdity” is hardly random. It is not random at all, in fact.

Luis Bunuel dining toilet scene in The Phantom of Liberty, from here:

In so many ways, like Eisenstein, Le Corbusier, and Dziga Vertov, Bunuel is working through the historical trajectory inside of which the camera as such exists in the first place. Bunuel makes appear our disconnection from the body. And he is also thus intentionally working towards reconciliation with body and dust through his surreal absurdity. Take, for example, his inescapably comedic scene of a group of friends sitting around the dining room table to eat a meal while sitting on the toilet.

Bunuel’s cinematography is also very intentional about the (camera) machine’s “anywhereness.” Elsewhere in Bunuel’s oeuvre, the camera machine moving in an elliptical rotation around blatantly and obviously clashing collage of visceral functions serves as rather poignant cultural commentary on our relationship with the body. These depictions of visceral functions in planetary space are microcosmic examples within his larger oeuvre that reveals his particular intention to depict the machine’s historical trajectory in line with Galileo, Newton, and the Clockwork Universe. As in Bernini’s Baroque space, Bunuel’s camera machine moves in line with the elliptical turning of the heavens as models that give images of the human dwelling place as that of the universe. Bunuel’s cinematography inhabits the tension between universe and the human person’s relationship with dust and dirt. His camera inhabits this tension specifically between human dwelling place as outer space and human relationship with concrete and local places, bodies, and persons who appear on screen in the story he’s telling.

Bunuel is masterful with this tension between the body’s place and the camera’s elliptical, planetary anywhereness from above - or below, or eye level, or wherever makes sense in the narrative and spatial set of relationships. And, he pays detailed attention to these spatial relationships as they appear in ordered sequence. None of this is random for Bunuel. And, to again address the above question of shared evaluative criteria between architecture and cinema, this ordered tension is inherent to the modern person’s embodied relationship with his or her environment inside modern space and modern conditions, to which we are all bound together. In everyday practices he or she takes up, anyone who walks through any building or watches any film - from at least his or her earliest days of grade school - deals with this tension between our return to dirt and our dwelling in universal vacuousness.

And, I submit that, where Bunuel, for example, masterfully reveals and works towards reconciliation with this tension, Aster does the exact opposite. Each move Aster made in Eddington put the camera and narrative in line with the trajectory of our disembodiment rather than revealing it or tending to it. It seems to me he’s mostly just wallowing in it. Le Corbusier’s, Eisenstein’s, and Bunuel’s revelatory tension is missing from Aster’s cinematographic form and narrative content alike. Aster is more haphazard. At the very least, Eddington is not ordered by this question of the human person’s place between dirt and heaven. There is a reason why Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie ends with a group of friends walking along a path over the earth and under the domus of heaven in the middle of a grassy field.

Aster’s camera, like his story, is analytical. To make a movie, one must capture the scene. In this sense, the camera, for Aster, is merely incidental and “practical.” That Aster is not trying to find our place again in relation to the earth, I am here submitting, is part of why the story itself, the narrative, comes across to Hering and I as glib, insincere, caricature, as a sick joke, or as self-assertive provocation. It’s not “grounded.” By implication, I’m saying that, in any given film, the narrative and cinematography are inevitably interwoven. Bunuel’s camera machine – like Vertov’s and Eisenstein’s - ironically manages to speak in the poet’s voice. Aster’s camera is written analysis.

IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE AND VIRTUAL PLAYTHINGS

Addressing this question of Nothing’s Anywhere, I find J. C. Chandor’s Margin Call, starring Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacy, and Simon Baker, to be a helpful and revealing counter point. What it is about is virtual and speculative playthings in relation to “on the ground” realities of embodied human lives in the financial industry. Explicit discursive terminology about markets and trading, however, is minimal – just enough to move the story along. What the film centers is the embodied, relational lives of the characters, their everyday burdens, goals, aspirations, and fears. The virtual numbers of markets are in the background…but no less at work in the embodied, visceral movements of places, stories, and characters in the film. I found this to be beautiful and profound.

Screenshot of climactic scene of Margin Call, from here:

Youtube’s @meeptop posted a 50-minute review of Eddington called, “We’re living in Ari Aster’s Nightmare." Meeptop’s review helps us see how and why, with this question of the proper place of the discursive explicitly in view, Margin Call is a counter point to Eddington. The review ends by juxtaposing Eddington’s presentation of cynical, fatalistic passivity against the hopeful notion that “meaning is something we have a say in.” For meeptop, Eddington supposedly invites us to have a voice in “what story we’re telling.” Interestingly, right before that (at about the 47 minute mark of the video), meeptop mentions that we share more in common than we like to believe. Of course, I’ve made that very point in this piece. Meeptop also - after mentioning it a lot prior - here discusses our shared vulnerability, that we are all looking for guidance and relational connection (and meaning). He then expresses lament of and fear for the lack of place for art “in this world” – because Eddington fell flat in theaters. According to @meeptop, the most Eddington could be said to have done was generate conversation:

“At best, it was a platform for more discourse, all because it didn’t pretend to have an answer. Eddington embodies a power of art that seems to be getting lost in a world of immediate solutions. The power to keep you questioning long enough that you lead yourself to a profound truth…Analysis of art, especially here on Youtube, has a terrible habit of encouraging you to engage with art the same way you do with the content you’re being served. It constantly teaches that meaning is rigid, that all art is allegory, morality tales with hidden, targeted meaning. The film is trying to tell you a truth about yourself or about the world. And you need someone else, anyone other than yourself, to tell you what that truth is. In a sea of answers and narratives, we lose sight of the fact that meaning is something we have a say in… (48:52)”

So, @meeptop’s basic point is that, where most film’s analysis, and by extension film itself, is typically trying to rigidly foreclose meaning by teaching narrow lessons, Eddington, implicitly, by contrast, invites its audience to take up that task for ourselves. As an examination of Eddington’s relationship with ideology, I want to offer a few comments. They will be tied to each other, and tied to what I’ve said already:

- I don’t take Eddington’s falling flat as evidence of the lack of art’s place in the world (which is not to say that our world is not artfully challenged). I don’t see Eddington as good art in the first place, really.

- Eddington was (merely) a platform for more discourse, because it was itself so tied to ideological discourse.

- I don’t think the film was good at all at leaving its audience questioning, curious, or “open.” Most of the 50 minutes of @meeptop’s review was - through the viewpoints, words, and actions of the characters - an account of the film’s own account of discursive answers to discursive questions posted by heated online discourse. As for opening us up, The Departed did that. A Serious Man did that. Killers of a Flower Moon also did that (pretty much). Lots of others have, as well. None of those films have been so tied to and bound up with ideological discourse the way Eddington is. In those other films, as in Margin Call, the ideological discourse instead stands in the background.

- Eddington is almost entirely organized around engagement with content exactly as it is served to us on social media.

- It is with precisely these observations in mind that I found Eddington to be so stiflingly rigid, way too literally allegorical, and forcing itself upon us as a morality tale with not so very hidden but definitively targeted meaning. A couple examples of this from the film that @meeptop’s review mentioned explicitly: 1. The cult leader guy representing the internet, per Aster himself; 2. The airplane the anonymous “ANTIFA” attackers flew in on having “something that looks like an internet browser” logo on it.

Perhaps @meeptop has a point, in that Eddington does not end by tying itself up in a neat, comfortable bow. It leaves its audience vulnerably uncomfortable. On the other hand, considering that @meeptop’s review also tours us through the film’s series of Joe’s poor moral choices that build on top of one another, where he otherwise had the choice to face and embrace our common vulnerability, can the fact that he ends up in such a helplessly frail state, and as a direct result of his choices, no less, not be readily interpreted as a common sense move made by a rigidly allegorical morality tale with a closed and hidden, though targeted, meaning?

Architect Louis I. Kahn said, “If it isn’t in wonder you needn’t bother about it” (in A lecture at Pratt University, Fall 1973, as recorded in Louis I. Kahn: Writings, Lectures, Interviews, p. 322). In Eddington, what is one left to wonder about? Where's the wonder? It has no such “opening,” precisely because the logic of every movement is foreclosed around ideological discourse. I thus find @meeptop’s commentary deeply ironic. Eddington “teaches that meaning is rigid, that all art is allegory,” and it presents as a “morality [tale] with hidden, targeted meaning,” precisely because what moves Eddington’s narrative along does so exclusively at the level of the discursive rather than at that of the tacit, the textural, the actual, or the visceral. Unlike what appears in the above screenshot from Margin Call, anything that appears viscerally or texturally in Eddington is the secondary byproduct of the discursive, of the ideological.

TO RETURN TO EDDINGTON’S FINAL FRAME

To tie Eddington’s ideological discourse to what I said above about the camera machine and modern conditions:

Ideology, or “the science of ideas,” is itself tied to the post-Galilean modernity of the Enlightenment. I mentioned the presumptuous preposterousness of this notion and its dependence on modern epistemic frameworks being extended into the political realm. Importantly for my point here, I also mentioned that ideological discourse depends on the human person taking up essentially the same viewpoint as the camera machine itself. To take up ideological antagonisms is to take up the same dismembered, transcendent “anywhereness” of the camera machine. To take up an ideological position over a body of knowledge is different from vulnerably taking your place in the Atheneum with your life and death at stake according to the words to which you give voice before a body of your peers.

Ending of A Serious Man, from here:

Interestingly, The Departed, A Serious Man, and Killers of a Flower Moon do well to “open us up” when they leave us face to face with our commonly shared vulnerability. That is precisely how they “open us up” “beyond” or “outside of” analytical discourse’s hidden but targeted meanings. Ideological discourse depends on transcendence of such vulnerability. That’s precisely why and how it forecloses and targets meaning in the first place, prior to and outside of any questions of the content of specific ideological discourse that eventually comes about. The whole purpose and trajectory of ideological discourse is presumption to foreclose the vulnerability of the unknown with a “science of ideas” (that has now taken shape as what we might call a science of entertainment, but the point remains).

Because the narrative movement of and in Eddington hinges on and depends on ideological discourse, if the film breaks open the fourth wall, it only does so discursively. It doesn’t break the fourth wall actually or viscerally. Or, to be more specific, I mean to say it doesn’t do so actually and viscerally the way The Departed, A Serious Man, or Killers of a Flower Moon do (among others). Yes, Eddington has generated discourse, but it does not actually place us in the action. And that’s because ideological discourse is itself so distant from direct action in the first place.

When I say the fact that Eddington’s final shot is from above serves as a recapitulation of the whole film, this is what I’m pointing towards. The camera machine’s view is firstly Galileo’s mind’s position held from outer space, which is also the view inevitably and necessarily “taken up” in ideological discourse in the first place. Figuratively speaking, this is, of course, an analytical view “from above.” It is here where the evaluative criteria of architecture and cinema share the same space together. It is here where someone in architectural and cinematic spaces, our identities and bodily perceptions having been shaped and formed in the same specific ways, give attention to the same things.