kalvin dot life

Left the farm for better things. There was no time to write, to think. Just farm. I feel quite bad. Who will pick the vegetables? But it’s time to catch up on the blog and catch up on life. They say you should either do something worth writing about or write about something worth doing. I’ve been focusing on the former recently and now maybe it’s time to focus on the latter.

Here is something I’ve wanted to write about for a long time, a scene from the movie The Square (2017). A recent-ish Swedish-ish film comedy-drama about modern art, modern society, modern dating, modernity, and whatever else, you can read the Letterboxd reviews. It stars Elizabeth Moss and Terry Notary, the motion capture guy from Planet of the Apes and Kong in Kong: Skull Island. There’s a pivotal scene where Terry Notary puts on an ape performance at a fancy dinner put on for rich art donors and it quickly gets out of hand. It may be my favorite scene ever and every person I show it to hates it. Here is a link to the scene starting at 1hour 44minutes 30seconds. The time doesn’t seem to work as a hyperlink so you’ll have to copy and paste.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11_ETpDWM7jz2Qs6TXrGX7YeRGLT4qL9o/view?t=1h44m30s

I’ve wanted to write this analysis for three years and my initial thoughts may have calcified a bit, their banality peaking through the surface, but I think the compacted sedimentary layers remain and there may be some gems to discover during the exhumation. On both the surface and in its depth it is a scene making fun of pretentiousness- of characters in the movie, of viewers of the movie, of the actors in the movie, and the movie itself. It is an ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. I suggest you watch the 12 minute scene before continuing on, but either way, let’s examine the layers.

Level one. The donors come to watch a man act like a monkey. They want to see skill, a great ape motion capture artist, perform his talent. They are warned and take this warning as part of the bit. They do not see themselves in the performance because they are paying for something and within the system, you don’t pay someone else to let you do work to entertain yourself. That is unless you are a fool and their success and propriety have precluded foolishness.

Early in the performance there is a shift and the scene becomes real to the guests. This is level two. The guests start to feel uncomfortable and soon become scared for their safety. They signed up and purchased something they didn’t entirely understand. The lifestyle of the bourgeoisie comes with built-in protection, not only from productive work but from everything authentic, including danger. Nothing can be authentic if you do not work, because everything of value created by humanity was created through work, including the implementation of protection from the dangers inherent in nature. Now think about what was said at the beginning of the performance. ‘I’m asking for your utmost precaution during this performance. Welcome to the jungle. Soon you will be confronted by a wild animal. As you will know, the hunting instinct is triggered by weakness, if you show fear the animal will sense it. If you try to escape, the animal will hunt you down. But if you remain, perfectly still, without moving a muscle, the animal might not notice you. And you can hide in the herd, safe in the knowledge that someone else will be the prey.’ Maybe this layer has more nuance. Maybe the dinner guests paid for and got exactly what they expected. They wanted gladiator-style entertainment and to see one of their own sacrificed, simply betting on the chance it wouldn’t be them. Maybe we all do this every day, enjoying our little moments of schadenfreude.

The performance artist Oleg Kulik understood this. He was a Ukrainian-born Russian performance artist on which the scene was based on. From Wikipedia ‘He [once] performed in the gallery chained next to a sign reading “dangerous”. An international scandal occurred when he not only attacked members of the public who chose to ignore the sign, in one case biting a man, but also attacked other artworks within the exhibition, partially destroying some pieces made by other artists.’ Although Ruben Östlund, the movie’s director, can’t chase you out of your own home through his medium, he can achieve the second-best thing- making you reflect on it. He does this famously in Force Majeure. He drops in hints of this same idea throughout the film, even giving the character played by Elizabeth Moss a monkey as a roommate.

The third level beings to take shape when you begin to feel uncomfortable. By the end, the scene has achieved this expertly. By the end, you feel out of control. You think within the performance there was a mistake made somewhere and maybe outside the performance the director has gone too far in displaying our carnal nature. Maybe the performance has been pushed past its proper limit. But actually, the mistake in yourself and the creation of limits. It’s in the society you live in and the mental structures that it built within your mind, making you prefer the pretense of nature to nature itself. A version of Nassim Taleb’s Platonicity, our tendency to focus on our Platonic representations (here the performance nature), “at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.” (nature itself) or, in other words, to “mistake the map for the territory.” A harmless and much more comedic version of this was performed by the comedy troop Nick Offerman performed with during his Chicago theater days. A living room scene is built on stage. A man sits in front of a telephone reading a newspaper and the telephone begins to ring. It rings and rings and rings and rings and rings, possibly for 20 minutes. Maybe until all the audience has left and the show must be repeated another night. But sometimes, someone in the audience stands up, walks onto the stage, picks up the phone. Hello? Instantly the man drops the newspaper and rushes off the stage. The rest of the cast whisks the props away and the audience member is left holding a silent receiver as the curtains drop. The audience becomes the bit and we are reminded of the role we play in the entertainment created for us.

With this in mind, move one layer up, layer four, and perceive yourself outside interaction of the events in the film. You, in your bedroom with your foreign-built laptop purchased on a promise of work subsidized by two world wars and 3 billion underpaid laborers, are watching entertainment. You are the dinner guest the scene was made for, the one the dinner was thrown for. Do you hear the silence in the phone held up to your ear? Can you feel the bite of the dog?

When approaching the movie thoughtfully, most everything I’ve written in this essay is apparent from the scene and it can be internalized and digested while simply watching the events unfold. The credit for this goes to the skill of the director, actors, and the rest of the studio crew. I definitely suggest reading this Vulture article on the making of this scene, which lends it so much more credence and authenticity, plus providing way more detail than I’m comfortable with plagiarizing here (like there being actual, real-life billionaire donors as part of the extras during the scene [layer five?]). But putting the experience into words lends an opportunity for self-critique and a moment for reflection, of which I often forget to perform on myself because I too am more comfortable in the safety of society. Most of the time.