Irreversible: To confront the visage of offence

(this is a third draft and I think it's final but who knows...)

A Civil War colonel being carried off the bloody Gettysburg battlefield was heard to say about the carnage, "man proposes, God disposes." In Gasper Noe's nihilistic, brutal and, at times, tender Irreversible, there is no God to dispose - only man, acting out his most primal desires and fears while God watches silently above.

We are reminded of Tim Roth's character in Invincible when considering Noe's cinematic technique of running the film in reverse: there is no future, "just a state of things and events" where "man hurries past"- and we are also reminded that this was the philosophy of a man aspiring to join the National Socialist elite.

In Irreversible, Noe takes us on a terrifying and disconcerting ride through a single day (in reverse) that "starts" with a brutal murder inspired by an equally brutal rape and ends with a quiet morning under a blue sky, the beginning of this fateful day. What is it all about? Noe only offers at the beginning and end of the film that "time destroys everything." But this is only a day in a life, so we have to conclude he is saying the events of the film are just a microcosm of a larger drama that has been and will go on playing beyond the events of this film. In this sense, time in itself is a collaborator in man (and his civilizations) irrational urge to destroy (or dispose) of all that he holds dear. Where Noe's film fails is in trying to advance a credible reason for all this death and destruction.

Playing off our most primal fears, fear of violation, fear of being ostracized, fear of homosexuals and foreigners is generally the domain of horror and exploitation films and in many ways Irreversible mimics, at least in the beginning, many of the grindhouse genre of those films -- I Spit On Your Grave, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and so on. But Irreversible is not a film that belongs in the horror genre even if it borrows liberally from it. Consider the true first scene, where a sad, grotesque naked man (who played a torturous butcher in Noe's previous film) sitting on a bed in an apartment above an S&M club where a murder has just taken place intoning the movies "catchphrase": "time destroys everything." But we then learn that it isn't time that has destroyed this man, although age has certainly ravaged him. Instead he is an ex-convict, put in prison for having sex with his daughter - in other words his despair and circumstance is related to the very bad and destructive choice he has made. Another man, sitting fully clothed on the same bed responds:

Clothed man: "No bad deeds, just deeds."



Naked Man: "We gotta start over.  Gotta live. Go on fighting. Go on living"



Clothed: "Right. Got something to drink?"

The clothed man suggests man in his costume, hiding his true self and apologizing for his unspeakable deeds. The naked man represents man's irrepressible Id who confirms his unceasing drive to continue to destroy ("go on fighting"). They then cackle, much in the same way the Fates do in Macbeth over the action going on down below them. Fate is invoked several times in this film. First, of course, with the catchphrase which implies that time destroys things and that man is helpless to end it. Later in the film the female lead, Alex (Monica Bellucci) also invokes fate and says she "read" it is inescapable because of dreams of premonition.

Later we find that Ms. Bellucci's character dreams she was in a "tunnel that broke apart" and later that day she is raped in a tunnel. Her rape then enrages her male friends who subsequently commit a murder in a club below the two cackling men. In both cases, bad choices are made, emotionally driven in some cases and just stupid in others (Bellucci's character's choice to walk alone in a darkened tunnel). Noe's thesis, if this was his thesis, falls apart immediately. Time and fate aren't in play. The Fates are just as unknowing as the rest of us.



Or perhaps this is what Noe really meant but just made an incoherent film that doesn't support his thesis. Some reviewers have suggested this is the case. Noe has been interviewed as saying he just wanted to show a psychedelic trip which goes from good to bad - was he just joking or did he really intentionally intend to show something so blase and inconsequential. Press releases stated that the movie was made in a very short period of time and was, in some cases, improvised. His star Ms. Bellucci when asked what the film is about can only say its about vengeance. Critics like Rex Reed who have applauded the film say so because of the "ideas" it presents - but Reed is unable in his review to state just what these ideas are.

Let me take a stab. First, Noe does not believe in Fate. Yes time destroys all, but it is man that is time's agent. This film further suggests Noe instead has a belief in a world in which the most base and horrible things happen because of the human male's basic psychosis. Notice that I said male and not just human. The Dante like Hell that is "The Rectum" which opens the film has been criticized as being homophobic but I think Noe is just using the setting because it is one in which he can show ONLY men. It is ONLY men that are shown in the first half of the film, after all. Even the prostitutes, we are to find, are all transexuals. The two thugs that accompany the men in search of the rapist. The men in the restaurant. The taxi driver. All men.

We see scenes where two men, one who is repeatedly referred to as an ape and the other who appears calm and rational, racing through the streets asking people "where is The Rectum" and when they find the club called The Rectum asking the denizens where is La Tenia, Spanish for the tapeworm. The Rectum is the void - the void in man's heart and soul and the tapeworm is the psychosis that lives there. And in fact, La Tenia, the "villain" of this piece is, based on the rape scene, an extremely psychotic character. Like the two men that open the film, the two men (Marcus and Pierre) represent the Id and the ego that when combined can release murderous rage. That Pierre (the cool rational one) is the person who commits the murder and the fact that the person who dies is innocent (and not La Tenia) suggests a further absurdity.

In the second act we see our first woman. Not coincidentally, she is comatose, beaten and bloody. This second act features a seemingly equal number of men and women at play but for all the fun and games that goes on, at the bottom of it is a deep sexual tension. During this act, the fulcrum of the movie is a rape in the tunnel of Marcus and Pierre's lover and friend, respectively. For the only time in the movie, the camera rests and watches the horrible event unfold. It is a hard to watch 10 minutes of an anal rape followed by a brutal beating. Time goes backward from that scene into a party that verges on an orgy. Sexual tension between the main characters, near sexual orgies in a bedroom, the offer of sex (and sex enhancing drugs) in a bathroom dot this scene. In the only real non-sexual part of this scene, Monica Bellucci's character (Alex) hugs a pregnant friend and pats her stomach suggesting that there is a deeper seriousness lying in women made possible by their ability to create via childbirth. We later find that Alex herself is pregnant.

The film reverses again to a subway scene prior to the party, where we see the three main characters having a conversation about guess what, sex. The characters are uncomfortable even as they loudly argue about the most intimate details of their lives. Monica Bellucci's former lover and now friend (Pierre) is pressing her to tell him about her current sex life and why he we not a good performer with her. She tells him that he cared too much for women and he should care more about his own pleasure. Her ideal partner is her current boyfriend who we have seen mostly as a sort of asshole who says whatever is on his mind and only thinks of his own pleasure. But she also tells him that she can get off not just from physical activity but from seeing her partner get off. Whether she knows it or not, she is suggesting woman's basic predicament in being tied to men in her life in light of what the filmmaker seems to think about men in general.

The third act is set in serene places such as Alex's golden-hued home and an idyllic park. We are still in a male-female world but here the women is more in charge. The man (her boyfriend Marcus) teases and tries to trap her but she is making the decisions as to when and how they are going to have sex. The man retreats to go to the store and kisses Alex through a plastic shower curtain. They are together and despite their intimacy and despite the joy that their intimacy brings to them, they are still apart. Marcus leaves and Alex takes a pregnancy test and smiles in joy at the results. In another film, this scene might be more poignant since we are to assume that the brutal assault she will endure later that day will probably end the pregnancy but Noe presents it matter-of-factly.

The next scene is just as visually stunning as the first scene (the one featuring the murder) but is totally opposite. Instead of weird droning electronic music, we hear one of Beethoven's most beautiful pieces (the 7th Symphony). This final scene is simple. Monica Bellucci lays in a park reading a book as the camera swirls overhead. But through the magic of DVD, an examination of this final scene could not find any men in it. All the other people in the park are either women or children and most of the children look like little girls.

The scene also invokes Kubrick. It is an obvious homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not only is the starchild poster shown but the combination of the music with the swirling camera evokes both the spaceship scenes in 2001 and the final swirling psychedelic ending. Many have criticized Noe for having the pretensions to compare himself to Stanley Kubrick but I have always believe that Kubrick never really made movies about the actual subjects. Instead his movies were more about larger themes -- Full Metal Jacket (another movie with a first act that had no women), for instance, is about a similar issue - the tension between the sexes as personified by war -- The Shining is about man's cruelty to others based on societal pressures... I think Eyes Wide Shut is about repressed desires. I have no problem with Noe trying to identify with Kubrick.

Noe has made a visually stunning, cleverly structured film that is not really about a psychedelic trip or about just vengeance or even just a horrible day in a life of three people but instead a bleak, nihilistic message that man as a whole is doomed because of his inability to relate to women and each other and because of his own basic primal fears and desires. But his view of women seems simplistic in light of this. Are they not also destroyers and aren't men needed (at least in design) for the act of procreation. The rage that Marcus and Pierre feel would be justified, wouldn't it? Would it be safe to assume that if Marcus and Pierre were female they might have acted the same?

And then there's the ending. It looks hopeful, maybe or maybe not. The camera turns to a blue sky and through the shutter of a strobe light we see the cosmos. The strobe though is intense and hard to look at. Is the camera pointing at God? What is his role in all this? Or is Noe suggesting that because God remains so distant and dazzling that there is no hope? With that ending, I'm a bit lost. Is the message of hope just an artificial one seen through the shutter of an artificial medium - film -- or is it suggesting that man's brutality can't be cancelled out by woman's role in creation?

It took me several tries - but I think this is what Noe is getting at. Well, you may have your own opinions. If anything, this movie causes people to either gnash their teeth because of the a) violence b) rape scene or c) supposed racism/homophobia... but it has also caused some praise Noe as the Next Big Thing often without a good reason except that he's showing the brutality of the world to the petite bourgeois masses. I'm not ready to declare him the next Kubrick (and even Kubrick didn't always live up to his own baseline) but I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next as I'm sure it will be challenging.

Notes: As I may have suggested, this is by no means a "family movie" or even a first date movie. If you see it with other people, though... I would consider putting a moratorium on discussions about it until you give it several days to sink in. Also, watching it on DVD allows for some experimentation. I watched it once through by forwarding through the controversial scenes (you know which ones) to see if the film worked without them. I couldn't really come to any conclusions or insights doing this but its nice to be able to deconstruct a film like this. One might also try to watch it in the original order -- I didn't do this but I tried to do it with Memento (a movie which also uses a similar reverse time technique).