Voyeurism and manipulation

According to a Romantic conceit, we project ourselves on our surroundings. If we are unhappy, we find an echo for this sentiment in the things that we see, from the weather to the play of light and dark. Perhaps one could say that it is difficult to distinguish whether it is our surroundings that cause our moods, or whether our mood alter our perceptual filters so that everything that we see is colored according to it. Of course, we could just as easily maintain that it is a confluence of the two, however, I've have prolonged and extended periods of gloom that attest to something more durable within me. I tend to respond more to darkness than to light, and I am more inclined towards reflection than to action.

Today I was able to see Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1962 film, "Pitfall". I was first made aware of this director approximately twenty years ago, when I saw his classic "Woman of the Dunes" on a local PBS station. It presented an intriguing commentary on modern life, and was heralded as part of the Japanese New Wave of films of the 1960s. It made an impression on me, in particular, in the spectacle of a man who was imprisoned in a house with a woman, and who was given the endless task of clearing away the sand that enchroached ominously every single second. It was a premise that couldn't help but lend itself to symbolic interpretation, for the nature of the struggle which seemed to suggest the human condition. It was also not a heroic struggle, and this pointed as well to certain basic contradictions in human nature.

Pitfall raises different issues, but it continues with this line of speculation with regards to human identity and the limits to solidarity. I was able to benefit as well from the video essay that accompanied this film, one that was prepared by James Quandt from the Cenematheque Ontario, and which presented several stimulating interpretations that I would like to address.

First of all, I am struck by the idea of how this film represents a critique of modernity. Yes, modernity is always associated with the celebratory discourse of freedom and individuality. To be modern is somehow to have reached a pinnacle, but as we all well know, there is nothing necessarily positive about these ideas. Freedom also entails responsability, and this need to choose is also, in its deepest essence, a terrible burden, one that is iluminated by existentialist philosophers. We choose, and in the end, we suffer from the most suffocating loneliness possible, one that underscores again and again how alienated we are from our institutions and from our need to establish connnections with others. And, alienated from ourselves.

This is a process that is much associated with Capitalism and, in particular, with the hyper-Capitalism of the 20th century, in which the discourse of individuality is once again used to repress certain mediating tendencies that seek to addres the extremes of this mode of development. We have this pretence that we as workers should function as free agents, and that we somehow have the ability to resist the aggregating and burdonsome pressures that are put upon us by corporate entities. And in this film, we are immersed in a situation in which these pressures are illustrated.

The protagonist is a poor miner who lives in a condition of perpetual want. He seeks any kind of subsistence employment that he can obtain, and it is evident that he has not been able to integrate himself into any organized labor force that would offer him or his son protection. He is thus forced to flee, as are other workers, from job sites that become too punitive for him to resist, and this is the first indication of how the condition of modernity has led to a divestment of any protective mantle that would have been conferred on him by an institutional affiliation.

What is noteworthy is that this is an environment in which there are labor unions, but these entities are still steadily being challenged and broken up by corporate agents using all manner of tricks and ruses. One thinks as well of current news, for example, the saga of Wisconsin wherein the new Republican governor, a Tea-Party favorite named Scott Walker, can gerrymander the legislative apparatus to divest state workers of their collective bargaining rights. All of this done while claiming a fictive mandate, one that supposedly validated austerity measures over the fulfillment of agreements, cynically using austerity to justify completing the Bush agenda that, ironically enough, provided the cover for this argument of "austerity" because it produced an economic crisis.. Corporate agents, with their unrestricted greed and their financial manipulation, bring upon us one of the worst economic crisis seen in the last fifty years, and then use it as a cover to further their agenda of attacking labor unions, as if the unions were behind this economic mess and not their culture of financial deregulation and speculation.

It leaves one shaking one's head in disgust, as if basic human rights were subject to withdrawal depending on the political whims of sectors who are able to harnass popular discontent and channel it in their favor. And this is precisely the "pitfall" (to borrow the title of this film) that progressive sectors have fallen into in this country, a trap that is anticipated in this film in the story of this labor union that hides within it not only a warning and critique of unrestrained Capitalism but also an earnest reflection concerning the nature of the human condition. Why is it that men have this compelling impulse to prey upon each other?

This film, of course, was prepared during the Japanese economic boom of the early 1960s, after the massive post-war destruction of Japan, and it highlighted conditions of hightened labor strife. Japan had shed its official militarist institutions, but these impulses to segregate and isolate were coming to the fore in the wake of this period of economic expansion. The ideal, as always, is to subordinate the rights of the many to the demands of the few, those few who claim prerogatives when it comes to the mission of development. And yes, development is a mission that is tantamount to a discourse, one that seduces even those that is exploits, in the same way that religion does with people who find themselves in moments of crisis and fall prey.

This worker is led to believe that he will be hired at another location, and he leaves his job and embarks on a trek through a wilderness. In the course of this trek he will find a ghost town, one that has been abandoned by the workers because of uncertainty surrounding the mining enterprise in which they were involved. To wit, there was a report that the shafts were under imminent threat of collapse, and thus, they had to flee. One wonders who issued this declaration of unsafe conditions, and whether it favored the management of the enterprise, who thus might have profited by not having to pay the workers who had invested so much of their time in digging those shafts.

In the course of looking for this location, the worker will encounter a sinister man dressed in a formal white suit and white gloves. This man in white will murder him, an act that seems incomprehensible to us, and with this act, we will have a shift in tone from the gritty realism that had been likened to "socialist realism" to a crime drama with elements of fantasy. From now on, the murdered worker will appear as a ghost, one who is naturally invisible to the living, and who provides in a sense a voice for the questions that we viewers have. Why was he murdered? Why will the candy seller give the police a false story of what she saw? Why does this society seem to be balanced in favor of narrow interests?

The ghost element represents one of many voyeuristic elements that distinguish this film. After all, the ghost can no longer interact with the living, and can only observe or provide commentary. When joined by other ghosts, all of whom realize their predicament and who have become more meditative as a result of this change, having been removed from their immediate circumstances, they do fulfill the role that reminds one of the Greek choruses of old. But this comparison must be hedged for the choruses are share in the questions of the characters, and do not hold any special claim to knowledge even though they do encapsulate the prevailing morality of this society, those ideals that are part of the "rule of law" that is championed by the union workers, but that is all to deficient when it comes to implementation.

Voyeur are those who observe while remaining hidden, and who fail to act to defend those ideals. To act would be to make manifest a claim of solidarity, and this claim is not easily manifest in these characters. The union that represents the miners, for example, has been divided into two units that are in a state of constant conflict. They fight with each other, and further the cause thereby of the corporate and managerial element that seeks to divide them. This state of disunity is also paradigmatically evident in the conduct of the murdered worker's son, a small child who witnesses the murder and lapses into silence, preferring instead to peer from the shelter of wild vegetation, from behind buildings or indeed, taking the cover of walls to peer instead through openings. Thus, the symbolism of the movie poster image.

This voyeurism is shared as well by the murdered candy seller, who watches the murder, then consents to give a false story to the authorities. She could have spoken up but didn't, and instead parrots what the murderer pays her to say, even though she will later be murdered herself. And, the union members themselves peer into the shack of this candy seller once she has been murdered and come to different interpretations, ones that demonize their antagonists (in this case, their rival union head and not management), and thus reveal the depth to which their view is itself obscured. For it is a truth that the voyeur had no priviledged vantage point, and is privy only to a small part of the big picture. The voyeur represents the view of the individual, and as an individual, this view is limited.

Thus, in the course of the development, it becomes evident that this murder is part of a setup, but one whose ultimate author remains hidden even as we see its consequences. The consequence is that the union leaders will be discredited as they are instigated by the inexorable logic of events to murder each other, and it is the mysterious man in white, the one who rides the motorcycle and who has the aid of an air of respectability (he looks out of place among the workers by virtue of his attire) and by his priviledge of surveillance, one that is afforded to the ghosts in the end, but which is divested of any possibility of impelling change because ghosts have no ability to affect outcomes in this world. Nor, it might be added, do individuals who have been seduced by this message of modernity that entrusts them with responsability but at the same time with profound anxiety and fear of the other. of their fellow workers, of their families, of themselves. The condition of modern man is one that is hidden by masks of conformity, and it is strangely like the vanity of the murdered woman, who lives in squalor but who takes comfort from viewing herself in the mirror.

In the end, it is said by the essayist in the supplementary material that is included with this film that the final movement, that wherein the boy is able to once again express his emotions after having spent the entire film watching from behind hidden screens, and in which he runs through the ghost town, escaping along the road to a future that is yet to be revealed, that this ending is far from unambiguous. It might have been seen as a mark of liberation, but it must be said that he will carry with him inner demons that have not been exscorized. We must imagine that the ghosts will remain, weeping at their inability to discover the cause of their misfortune, and suffering under the perpetual hunger that will characterized the murdered miner, at least, who is told that the physical circumstances that defined him at his moment of passing will stay with him for eternity.

The boy has been deprived of a family (one wondered if economic circumstances of privation had deprived him of his mother, or if this was due to illness, or any myriad form of misfortune), but he has also been imprinted by what he has seen and, one may well wonder, has been contaminated. One obtains this impression as a consequence of viewing his prior inability to respond to circumstances, as if he himself has been converted into a ghost, condemned to watch passively as the agents proceed with their play. To be a ghost is to be inactive and to find oneself unable to respond, and in the end, this impassivity is akin to that of nature, one that is indifferent. Is this the final other stalwart that props up the discourse of modernity and individuality? Does this involve either being vain to the point of self-centeredness, or indifferent? Does this make him indifferent to suffering, as is emblematically portrayed in the boy's skinning of the tadpole?

The boy runs along the road at the end, perhaps seeking a different place to haunt, no more consequential than the modern consumer who has become a statistic, an inventory of tastes, shaped and marketed by commercial forces while under the illusion of self-reliance. As an ad for an investment broker that specialized in self-originated broker transactions proclaimed, "Trust yourself". As if you are any match for market conglomerates.

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011