One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975, by Miloš Forman, based off of the book by Kesey, is a historical and political allegory of the responses to the Enlightenment and Counter Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was called the Age of Reason; Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) is a product of this enlightenment. The “enlightened” believed in a Science of Man; they thought that the rationality of Newton’s physics could be applied to humanity – a sort of blueprint for society with rules and formulas. It was a prescriptive philosophy; Nurse Ratched is a tyrant of prescriptive tendencies. She runs the ward with cool, calm, collected rationality. She sees herself as a steward of the rights of man, and steers her patients on the route towards the greater good, as she sees it. A product of the Enlightenment is Utilitarianism, created by Jeremy Bentham. Utilitarians don’t believe in the concept of “rights” but believe in utility instead. One of the responses to Nurse Ratched’s despotism is Chief Bromden’s (Will Sampson) nightmares of a giant machine that kills his ward mates in the night. Utilitarianism strives to create a “happy machine” that creates the greatest good for the greatest number. Chief’s nightmares illuminate the fearful concept of what happens to those that have no utility? Historically, there were three wings of enlightened thought: the Scottish, the French, and the German. The Germans were responsible for the philosophical development of the movement and also the counter movement. Immanuel Kant, the most prominent German philosopher, said Sapere Aude, “dare to think.” Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) said “You're not an idiot. Huh! You're not a goddamn looney now, boy. You're a fisherman!” The only difference between the two is the vernacular. McMurphy’s arrival in the ward symbolizes the arrival of epistemological doubt in cold reason. He walks into the ward and finds men with no faculty of judgment, men who follow the rules of reason as set down by someone else. This is where the key to the Counter-Enlightenment comes in; what is a man who knows nothing but reason? Kant and McMurphy’s answer – not a man. And so, the first bildungsroman was written. Emile by Jacques Rousseau, is a book about the education of a child. But, it is also tells us that to become mature men we must move from a state of cold reason to a state of reason plus something else, be that passion, patriotism, or craziness; a life lived by reason alone is a half life. The Emile of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is Billy Babbit, who starts off as a stuttering boy but becomes an autonomous man, for the briefest of moments, after standing up to tyranny (reason) and sleeping with a hooker (passion or craziness, or maybe both).
The concept of the bildungsroman story grew in literature and developed certain guidelines. More than a coming of age story, a bildungsroman chronicles how society affects the protagonist’s growing up morally and psychologically. Usually the protagonist is jolted into a journey of maturation by discontent at a young age. The protagonist must find his way back into society while developing into a mature and self-confident adult. These guidelines followed the bildungsroman into film, and from there, into popular culture. The teenage rebellion movie has become a cultural hegemony, thanks to directors such as John Hughes, that has crossed seas and borders into the collective unconscious of a newly globalized world. How the world has taken this model and modified it with individual popular cultures can be seen in modern foreign film.
Hollywood’s bildungsromans are the John Hughes films such as The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. They, along with the actors in them, are cultural icons almost as famous as the music that is vital to their composition. Though far from the quintessential bildungsroman novels, such as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that had become the cornerstones of the genre, these movies are in a way closer to the original Emile. The movies strip the complicated syntax and prose found in the novels and portray in shocking simplicity, the education of youth and the importance of autonomy. As mentioned before, the music is one of the reasons that these movies became markers of a generation. The music also helped as a vessel of transport over cultural lines; there is no transnational culture flow as powerful as music.
And so it is not shocking to see similarities between the John Hughes films and Buenos Aires 100 kilómetros, an Argentinean, French, and Spanish film by Pablo Jose Meza. This 2004 film is about a group of Argentinean teenagers growing up in a town 100 km outside of Buenos Aires. As a group, they are immobile in time and in a stagnant small town. They struggle against this immobility as they struggle through their teenage years. Individually, their lives are far from tranquil; each of the boys faces personal turmoil at home. Esteban (Juan Ignacio Perez Roca) acts as captain of the football team and confidant for his friends’ traumas, Guido (Alan Ardel) returns home every night to an abusive father, Damian (Juan Pablo Bazzini) finds out that he is adopted. Matias (Hernan Wainstein) is often ignored and abandoned by his parents, and Alejo (Emiliano Fernández) has to come to terms with his mother’s lover and her humanity. These stories are relatable globally. The identity crisis of Damian and the disconnection of adult and teenager found in Matias’s story are common themes in the modern teen bildungsroman. It is in Alejo and Guido’s stories that we begin to see strong Argentinean veins coming through.
The overwhelming masculine dominance found in Guido’s father is familiar to Latin-American culture where machismo – a custom that justifies masculine subjection, and protection, of women - is still practiced and abided. In Buenos Aires, we see how modern youth deals with this ancient tradition. Meza gives us a dual face of machismo - first, the misogynistic masculine population in Guido’s story, and second, the objectifying of women sexually and, in Ajejo’s case, sacrosanctly. The image of the sacred mother in Latin-American society “is explored and perverted with realism through Alejo and his mother’s relationship, as the child is forced to open his eyes to the unknown, disgraceful face of his mother”(sneersnipe). The boys have to deal with the negative consequences of both faces on the stoop of a women’s hair salon.
Buenos Aires shows the same simplicity as the John Hughes films, yet with a certain quota for poetry still reached (Martinez). Reviewers of the movie agree that it achieves success in its realistic portrayal. It is “a notch franker than most TV fare,” (Young) and “Unpretentious and refreshingly touching” (sneersnipe). Like Emile before it, it focuses on the simple education of the young. It ends with returning to society which, for the boys, means joining in as honest and respectful members of a football team in one last game. A classic and clean bildungsroman in many ways, Buenos Aires is unique in its faithful depiction of the society and culture it portrays and questions.
The way we examine ever-changing societies has become a relatively established technique since the Enlightenment. The typical bildungsroman has remained stable also. But now we are redefining society due to globalization. Social borders are blurring and new holes in borders are opening up for culture to come flooding in and out. Where an individual was once constrained by an intimate society, he is now being constrained by a global one. Does this change in one of the vital factors of the bildungsroman vitally change the genre? Themes that were once local are now becoming global – such as teenage rebellion and pubescent hormones discovering the opposite sex; does this mean that local themes are disappearing? In the wake of films like Buenos Aires, we see that they are not. Because of the generalization of some themes, when local ones are found they shine out even further. These themes are becoming the vital factors of the modern bildungsroman.
No comments:
Post a Comment