Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ to embody a daydream; or an actress giving a performance, or circling an enclosure on her steed; or a woman giggling with excitement because she has to find a place to pee; or the noxious mundanity of trying to get into one’s apartment through the burglar alarm one has forgotten to disable; all these and a myriad more commonplaces, the stuff of daily life but poison to the soul (poison like the ice cream the thug is slurping in the café while he tells Niccolò that he should give Mavi up), poison because the soul is looking for the phrase to complete the line, the line through which to move the object through space.

      … The parabolic line that Niccolò’s filmic space-asteroid takes as it moves off toward the sun (the same as the parabolic line of David Locke’s Land Rover hurtling off into the desert in The Passenger and the parabolic line of the Jeep curving away into the park with the shouting revelers in Blow-Up). In the universe, there are no straight lines.

      The soul is breathing and cannot tolerate that obstructive garbage, matter, clogging every passageway to every horizon. To be bored with the commonplace is to strive to outlast and outdistance it, to work at escape. Boredom is the true vitality. Continually and everlastingly, in its commonplace fashion, the earth orbits around the sun. To break with this, Niccolò strikes up the idea of voyaging to the sun, coming to know it. We have used the sun only as a vehicle for knowing ourselves, and we have come to the end of the line. A “Charlie Bubbles-ish ending” is what John Powers deprecatingly calls this snippet of science fiction footage, which is so challenging and exciting to watch. The color of deep space is not only green but a vivid and forestial green, chlorophyll green, and there is nothing but a superfluity of optimism in the passage of the platinum colored asteroid, which wobbles a little insecurely with the perils of its voyage and thus attracts our sympathy.

      IMPOSSIBLE EXPERIENCE

      The art of storytelling is coming to an end.

      —Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”

      “The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling,” writes Benjamin, “is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times” (“Storyteller” 87): the novel, we might add, that has so often become the film. The novel, dependent upon the form of the book, abjures the storyteller’s idiosyncratic speech, tactile experience, direct unmediated relation to his nature and his world. For a man to be able to find and tell a story, he must relax, withdraw himself from the mechanical pressure and rhythm of the modern world; and, Benjamin sadly observes, such a state of relaxation “is becoming rarer and rarer” (91). Niccolò is in search of a story, very like his creator, who felt himself to be searching for “a new kind of story” (Samuels 92). He believes in storytelling. Perhaps, as Benjamin says of the storyteller, “he has borrowed his authority from death … it is natural history to which his stories refer back” (94), but at any rate there is something morbid about his gaze, his flaccidity, his patience.

      Although Benjamin does not put it this way, for him boredom is a thoroughly appropriate response to modernism, one that symptomatizes the healthy spirit at war with a condition in which we prefer to validate information over intelligence. Information “lays claim to prompt verifiability,” and the “dissemination of information has had a decisive share” in a state of affairs that has seen storytelling decline (89). We may consider the distinction that Patricia Meyer Spacks makes between two usages of the word “interesting” in the history of the novel. The word can apply to the spirits and tastes of the individual: bored, one declines to find things “interesting,” appealing to the self; or it can apply to a social and cultural importance “inherent in the old meaning of interesting” and involving “reliance on communal values” (115). One usage of “interesting” applies to the public realm, then, and the other to “private tastes” (117). For Spacks, a reader can be bored by privileging the private, indeed by denying that public interest might adhere to certain texts or situations. Niccolò is appropriately bored with the quotidian trivia of the world in which he moves with Mavi, and the slow turning of the film and of its protagonist’s movements in searching for her depths is itself a calculated statement about the boredom he experiences in his life. As the modern world of mercantile, journalistic, superficially social, and professional experience seems to tumble by, his boredom is a way of withdrawing in order to be attuned to the voice of an “artisan form of communication” of an earlier, and richer, day (Benjamin, “Storyteller” 91). And the fact that he experiences boredom—a sense of the undifferentiated equality of events and contingencies, a flatness of affect, a constant hunger and readiness for something richer—may lead us to expect that Niccolò will find his story in the end. “Boredom,” says Benjamin, “is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” (91).

      But Adam Phillips more neatly strikes the chord when he reflects, “Boredom, I think, protects the individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be. So the paradox of the waiting that goes on in boredom is that the individual does not know what he was waiting for until he finds it, and that often he does not know that he is waiting” (77–78; my emphasis). We must understand that Niccolò himself is the central character of the science fiction film he eventually makes: he is floating through space on an exploration, slowly approximating himself to the brilliant center of things. What he can know about himself is his own hunger to travel and search, but not precisely what he is searching for, and often—because the search is relentless and occupies every aspect of his existence—not even that he searches. He experiences a “determination of the present by the future, of what already exists by what does not yet exist … which philosophers today call transcendence” (Sartre, “Baudelaire” 38).

      When we are bored the world taxes us by lacking nodes worth special focus. Objects do not stand out as either central or peripheral, light does not assist us by flattering surfaces or points. All of the optical field makes itself accessible uniformly, so that Ortega’s “luminous hero” (of the Quattrocento) is merely a trace memory or a vague hope (“Point of View”). Direction impossible, pathways are indistinct and unnavigable, the lights of the heavens are inaccessible through their very profusion and constant motion, philosophy is a riddle. We move in a fog.

      The eloquent and magnificent fog sequence in this film:

      Niccolò, certain that his house is being watched, escaping through the back door and racing in his silver car to Mavi’s house; fetching her and driving into the country, because he knows that villa he rented once. But on the way they encounter a field of mists, or rather what seems a cloud that has given up its immortality and dropped to earth. The suddenness of this manifestation, its impenetrability, the feeling we must have that Niccolò and Mavi have been waylaid in their life journey by an obstacle that is at once material and insubstantial, practical and ephemeral. As Niccolò advances, the cloud swallows them. “Drive slowly,” says Mavi. A close shot of the white lines slowly slipping under the wheels. “I can’t see,” she says, and he promises to just follow the white line. Directional placards loom up out of the whiteness. Swerving left and right, they hope they are on the right road. A gray sheen of darkness doesn’t quite illuminate them in the car as, through the rear window, we see the papery surface of the fog. A cigarette for Mavi. She offers it to him, and another car’s lights swing up from behind. They kiss. The vehicle behind has gone, but Niccolò sees a traffic light blinking lazily. He stops and gets out, a dark shadow against the swirling mists. The road is glistening. His footsteps as he walks away are crisp and clear, a metrical voice.

      After a few steps he stops and looks around. A dog is barking somewhere. A car, its headlamps blazing into the fog and turning it to pearls. Niccolò watches a man approach a bush, turn, walk away. The sound of another car revving up. The low ticking sound of steps—no, the mechanism of the traffic light, and a whistle as of a train. He backs away as a car approaches going the other way, passes him, turns off-screen. Mavi strains to see through the windshield and confronts nothing in the mist but the headlamps of a parked car blinking on and off into her face. She becomes anxious, opens her door, stands up. Hazy amber light floods her СКАЧАТЬ