Screening Solidarity: Neoliberalism and Transnational Cinemas 9798765101414, 9798765101421, 9798765101438

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Screening Solidarity

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Screening Solidarity Neoliberalism and Transnational Cinemas Helga Druxes, Alexandar Mihailovic, and Patricia Anne Simpson

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2023 Copyright © Helga Druxes, Alexandar Mihailovic, Patricia Anne Simpson, 2023 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Earlier versions of material in Chapter 3 of this volume were published in the January 2014, April 2015, and October 2019 issues of the online journal Kinokultura: New Russian Cinema. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: En Guerre, dir. Stéphane Brizé © Nord-Ouest Films/photograph: Carl Collonier All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Druxes, Helga, 1959- author. | Mihailovic, Alexandar, author. | Simpson, Patricia Anne, 1958- author.  Title: Screening solidarity : neoliberalism and transnational cinemas / Helga Druxes, Alexandar Mihailovic, and Patricia Anne Simpson.  Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Through a focus on recent film, this study examines the representation of neoliberal subjects from contemporary European, Russian and American cinema”– Provided by publisher.  Identifiers: LCCN 2022045977 (print) | LCCN 2022045978 (ebook) | ISBN 9798765101414 (hardback) | ISBN 9798765101407 (paperback) | ISBN 9798765101445 (ebook) | ISBN 9798765101438 (pdf) | ISBN 9798765101421 (ebook other)  Subjects: LCSH: Politics in motion pictures. | Neoliberalism in motion pictures. | Motion pictures–History–21st century. | Motion pictures–Political aspects. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.P6 D78 2023  (print) | LCC PN1995.9.P6 (ebook) | DDC 791.4309–dc23/eng/20230105 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045977 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045978 ISBN: HB: 979-8-7651-0141-4 ePDF: 979-8-7651-0143-8 eBook: 979-8-7651-0144-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrationsvi Acknowledgementsvii Introduction: A Cinema against Precarity and Predatory Neoliberalism  Helga Druxes, Alexandar Mihailovic and Patricia Anne Simpson1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Working-Class Solidarity as Project in Contemporary Franco-Belgian Factory Films  Helga Druxes29 Arts of Resistance in the Post-Socialist Workplace  55 Patricia Anne Simpson Fevered Dreams of Neoliberalism in Films Made for the Russian Market  Alexandar Mihailovic 77 The Neoliberalization of Russia in the Films of Andrei Zvyagintsev  Alexandar Mihailovic 101 Becoming Other: Neoliberalism and “Suboptimal” Bodies  141 Patricia Anne Simpson Debased Black Masculinity as an Engine for Neoliberal Economies in African-American Cinema  Helga Druxes 159 Aging Out of the American Workplace: Intentional Communities and the Lure of the Open Road  Helga Druxes 181

Epilogue  Helga Druxes, Alexandar Mihailovic, and Patricia Anne Simpson221 Bibliography227 Index240

Illustrations 1.1 Sandra speaks with Alphonse 1.2 Laurent and co-workers protest plant closing (En Guerre, dir. Stéphane Brizé; @ Nord-Ouest Films/photograph: Carl Collonier) 2.1 Christian (Franz Rogowski) and Marion (Sandra Hüller) share a moment of wonder In den Gängen (2018) 3.1 Russian Psycho. Sviatoslav (Ivan Makarevich) shows off the space of his future restaurant to his fiancée’s wealthy father (Vitaly Kishchenko) 4.1 Thinking of her convalescing husband, Elena (Nadezhda Markina) lights a candle in front of an icon 4.2 Leviathan. Katya (Elena Liadova), shortly before her death 5.1 The “goldfish” take a road trip 6.1 Get Out. Chris finds cotton for plugging up his ears

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91 109 124 154 169

Acknowledgements We would like to express our gratitude to the colleagues and institutions that have provided invaluable support during the coauthoring of this book. The conversation emerged from a research seminar on neoliberalism at the Oakley Center at Williams College. Though our writing—and so much more—was derailed and redirected during the pandemic, we nonetheless continued to benefit from the Center’s support, particularly that of Krista Andrews. In addition, the Dean of Faculty’s Office at Williams College and the CAS Dean’s Office at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln helped sustain our respective efforts to complete the research and writing during leaves and lockdowns. We would like to thank Mika Hirai at the Office for Information Technology at Williams College for her technical assistance with the images in this volume. We are also grateful to the colleagues at Bloomsbury Academic, especially editor Katie Gallof, for her patience and commitment during the review process. Two sets of readers’ comments and critical feedback contributed greatly to the rethinking of our collective project, and we thank the anonymous readers for their insights. Finally, we want to acknowledge the help of family and friends and our gratitude for the cooperation that enabled us to coauthor this book.

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Introduction: A Cinema against Precarity and Predatory Neoliberalism Helga Druxes (Williams College, USA), Alexandar Mihailovic (Bennington College, USA) and Patricia Anne Simpson (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA)

In this monograph, we consider recent cinema as a site for imagining alternatives to apocalyptic scenarios that emerge as the natural consequence of neoliberalist ideologies and economics. We investigate films from four particular screen cultures—French, German, Russian, and North American—that identify moments of resistance. These films represent instances of politicized human connection despite the material and psychic conditions in which they exist. Due to its world-making potential, film, both in its high art and popular entertainment forms, can provide counterhegemonic imaginaries. Claudia Breger argues that contemporary engaged cinema offers viewers ways to “rethink collectivity in more affirmative terms.”1 Struggling for solidarity between dissimilar groups and characters on screen allows viewers to work through the “messy entanglements of affect and collectivity.”2 Complex characters may display, in Breger’s terms, a “layered range of divergent affects,” prompting viewers to do more than empathize, that is, respond critically to the presented motivations and behaviors.3 Breger claims that transnational cinemas are best positioned to resist “accelerated globalization” for the simple reason that they regard “the contingent genealogies and unstable contours of collective identifications” as being more significant than “notions of interculturality” and blithe assumptions about the power of cinematic universalism.4 As specialists in German and Russian studies and French critical theory, we as authors bring our respective areas of expertise to the project of finding common purpose in Screening Solidarity. What engaged cinema cannot do is supply a comprehensive blueprint for citizens and nation-states—a guide as to how they

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might reorganize their current behavior and recalibrate entire political systems to emerge from the exploitive intensifications of current Western neoliberalisms. Thus, we turn our attention to the world-making capabilities of transnational cinemas, as aggregations of non-programmatic aesthetic and media practices that position themselves against the failing mantras of neoliberal ideologies. The films from these cinemas draw our attention to social bonds that are, as Breger puts it, “continuously changing and open to contestation.”5 We would argue that the open-ended character of these films is precisely what renders them into the potent rebuttals to the hegemonic values of personal and national economic optimization that neoliberalism espouses. Our theoretical approach combines two strands: neo-Marxist critiques to bring economic and class exploitation into view, and neo-Foucauldian critiques of the affective effects of internalized disciplinary regimes on the individual. Briefly, we understand neoliberalism to be an intensification of late capitalism, in which the exploitation of raced, gendered, and working-class bodies is accelerated on the one hand, and their new responsibilization as “entrepreneurs of self ” becomes deeply internalized by its participants. With affective investments in privileges of whiteness and First World belonging coming into focus through a neoFoucauldian lens, concerns about economic dispossession are best formulated through a neo-Marxist approach. In our volume, we examine cinema that addresses the ways in which power is distributed away from the eroding nationstate into a network of globalized corporate interests, and the internal affective distortions and contradictions that result from the implementation of neoliberal ideology. We choose films with a progressive vision that seek to reexamine understandings of the common good as a means to achieve solidarity across difference. This study investigates the impact on, and evidence of, neoliberal hegemony in twenty-first-century film cultures from a national and transnational perspective. Through an examination of films and visual arts from Europe and the United States, the authors identify the potential for human solidarity inscribed in the reframing of national political crises, together with their transnational architecture as a response to the homogenizing effects of globalization. The rebellious protagonists refuse to accept the given architecture and function within it, embracing collective action to open up more equitable possibilities. So what then is neoliberalism? The notion that it is an “extreme version of capitalism” points to its accelerative qualities, without addressing the highly distinctive modal properties of its operation or its innovations over the capitalist

Introduction

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strategies used to control the workforces in heavily industrialized economies.6 We may define neoliberalism as a “self-organizing [market] economy” that is subsumed by—or strongly informed by—the perceived “necessity for a continual crisis.”7 Bearing in mind Marcuse’s critique of technology as a medium that can “promote authoritarianism as well as liberty, scarcity as well as abundance,” we may also understand neoliberalism as a technocracy in which the “greatest technological efficiency” is regarded as the supreme value, a “higher goal than the welfare of the whole society or the self-fulfillment of the worker.”8 The immediate goal of neoliberalism is to further atomize a workforce that has already become segmented within their disparate geographic or onsite locations and disembodied through labor that is often carried out online. The sole cinematic or filmable aspect of neoliberalism is what Ewa Mazierska characterizes as the melodrama of one worker striving for justice in the form of a “race for a specific good.”9 The purpose of anti-neoliberal cinema is to bring the lives of “ants,” rather than individuals, into “visibility,”10 thereby rejecting the diegetic temptation of showcasing one person’s struggle for overcoming adversity. Even visibility can be commodified as in the case of sex workers and those who labor in the service economy.11 Alienated visibility is an important aspect of affective labor, which may be defined as work that “produces an emotional affect in another person” with the goal of reinforcing (or increasing) the surplus value of the products manufactured by a capitalist enterprise.12 While the interaction between salesperson and consumer—or office worker and client—may involve a moment of eye contact suggestive of mutual empathy and trusting regard, the entire communicative exchange can never be more than what it actually is: an asymmetrical encounter between the purveyors of capital and its petitioners with the former tapping into a technocratic “bureaucratic libido” that takes pride in selectively avowing responsibility with a virtuosic skill (Mark Fisher). Antineoliberal cinema strives to make operations that are typically obscured, dark, or invisible (as in the case of the phone-banking protagonist of Boots Reilly’s 2018 Sorry to Bother You) fully watchable; it opposes the claim that certain human operations are by their very nature unfilmable or that they cannot be compellingly represented in any cinematic form. In the remainder of this introduction, we provide a historical overview of the varieties of neoliberalism in post–Cold War economies, the forms of opposition to neoliberal policy and practices, and the ways in which anti-neoliberal cinema represents and dramatizes these forms of resistance.

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Screening Solidarity

Films that oppose neoliberal practices make a principled distinction between alienated visibility on the one hand, and solidarity-building multidirectional viewing and assessing on the other. As Ewa Mazierska puts it, we should hardly be surprised that “the ultimate medium of the [neoliberal] times in which we live is computer games, in which individuals have the ultimate illusion of being active participants (players), although in reality [follow] the path prepared for them by the creators of the game.”13 That kind of alienated visibility, which offers a promise of individual agency that it delivers only on a transactional basis, is addressed by several of the films that we examine, including Dmitri Tiurin’s Thirst with its depiction of video-gaming as a realm of false consciousness for Russian veterans of the second Chechen War. Because of their interest in enhancing the range of its audience’s gaze, anti-neoliberal cinema is by its very character granular, which is to say that it seldom offers up in any one film a comprehensive or utopian vision for social change. Mazierska points out with some chagrin that anti-neoliberal films “are strong in making criticisms” yet are “much weaker in offering solutions,” a political flaw that may be attributed to their occasional “lack of closure and slow narrative pace,” as well as their reluctance to embrace “ideas which for many decades were regarded as backward or right-wing, such as nationalism.”14 But films that oppose neoliberal practices should not be in the business of dictating solutions to their consumers. It is our contention that the strong suit of anti-neoliberal cinema is precisely its attempts to provoke from the audience reactions that may become solutions and which were unanticipated by the filmmakers themselves.

Correspondences and Differences between Western National Neoliberalisms Western European neoliberalism has its roots in Ordoliberalism in the aftermath of defeated Nazi Germany. Its key architects, the economist Alfred Müller-Armack,15 the inventor of social market economy, and the Freiburg School economist Walter Eucken, conceived of it as a hedge against the chaotic economy of Nazi fascism with its leadership reliant on the masses.16 Like Hayek, they saw a state-regulated market as a guarantee of order and stability, guided by “a functional hierarchical elite of regimented political intellectuals.”17 As the economist David Kotz notes, “the concept of neoliberal, or free-market, capitalism does not mean that the state plays no role in the economy. Market

Introduction

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relations and market exchange require a state, or state-like institution, to define and protect private property and enforce the contracts that are an essential feature of market exchange.”18 The degree to which states would intervene to regulate the market to protect socially weaker groups differed most starkly between the United States and the German Federal Republic. Social Market Economy (Soziale Marktwirtschaft) combines the idea of free markets with the state’s social-political responsibility for groups otherwise unprotected from the vagaries of the market (sozialer Ausgleich). In 1967, German Social Democrat finance minister Karl Schiller formed a new advisory commission (Konzertierte Aktion) that consisted of union representatives, corporate CEOs, Federal Bank officials, political representatives at the community, regional and federal levels, as well as academic experts in finance and political science. Their goal was to develop a variable interventionist policy based on Keynesian principles: in a weak economy, taxes would be lowered and public works projects would be initiated to stimulate economic growth, while in a strong economy, taxes would be raised to create a financial reserve for future downturns. Its overall goal was domestic stability, but this was resisted by the banks and the corporations who resented the constant recalibration of taxes and profits and the state’s mixing in their sphere of influence and their profit seeking.19 Up until and including an important coordinated strike in 1974 for a double-digit wage increase (after the Oil Crisis of 1973 which caused a widespread economic recession, also affecting the United States), a raise they pushed through despite Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt’s opposition, German unions had a seat at the table and were influential partners in wage-setting negotiations.20 Kotz points out that Left governments from the seventies onward were no less neoliberal than conservative ones: “in Western Europe during this period social democratic parties would run for office against liberal parties, promising a reversal of neoliberalism, but once in office they have maintained the direction of neoliberal restructuring.”21 As the political background for our first chapter shows, Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder initiated austerity and welfare cuts with his program Agenda 2010, which in turn would serve as “inspiration” for incoming French President François Hollande in 2012, for instance, with his own program of privatizing wage-setting at the firm level and introducing new laws that in effect created a youth labor precariat on temporary contracts that were easy to cancel. Before 1990, levels of unionization remained higher in the Federal Republic (30 percent; down to 18.5 percent in 2018) than in France (8 percent by 2019), where

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different forms of bargaining units took over aspects of union work and where the state set and annually adjusted salaries for large segments of the working class. In Germany, collective bargaining sets salaries. Though its global scope and entanglements sustain neoliberalism as a hegemonic force, regional and national histories necessarily inflect its implementation. Among the forces that “flattened”22 the world, to evoke Thomas Friedman’s term for the top ten moments of globalization, the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) precipitated the collapse of most communist/planned economies, accelerated the advance of capitalism across Eastern Europe and beyond, claiming to render redundant or irrelevant the lofty ideology of solidarity among workers across the socialist international brotherhood. The fall of the Wall and series of “revolutions” that led to the unification of Germany and the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s form the nexus of social and political ruptures; these ultimately served to strengthen the institutions not of democratic reform but of the “free” market. As Ben Gook argues, “[r]e-unification, coming as global neoliberalism ticked into its second decade as policy’s lodestar, proved a time for Germany to experiment.”23 Concurrently, he observes, eastern Germans had to accustom themselves to the logic of privatization with all its social and economic upheavals. After the ordered liberalism of the West German postwar era, the extension of western institutions eastward in the 1990s, the founding of a Eurozone and its fiscal disciplines, and the 2008 economic crisis, the rationalization of labor effectively imposed “neoliberal reason, as western Ordoliberalism and a sclerotic eastern state socialism contended with a newly reigning economic orthodoxy.”24 This economic landscape renders signposts of solidarity barely legible, consigning the blips to the heterodox subject positions of the disgruntled. Phillip Ther, who emphasizes the processes of “cotransformation” in postcommunist Europe, describes a near-dystopian vision of peripheral, non-urban spaces dotted with “[e]mpty apartment blocks and derelict factories,”25 attesting to failed socialist efforts at modernization. Indeed, visual and material reminders of socialist ethics of work, consumption, and solidarity have been consigned to the scrapheap. It is difficult to imagine or recall, for example, the drastic and dizzying changes of 1990, when the euphoria of “freedom” had subsided. The transformation of consumer practices—not to mention the deluge of advertising and exploitative scams directed at Easterners with limited purchasing power and no experience—inflicted a kind of amnesia on the population of eastern German states as the juggernaut of unification overtook them. The cinematic responses to these stunning changes range from

Introduction

7

the gritty, unvarnished examination of marginalized lives in the films of the Berlin School, Andreas Dresen’s foremost among them, to the popular, poignant comedy of loss, consumption, and regained appreciation for the solidarity of socialism in Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). A sharp turn toward predatory neoliberalism characterized the takeover of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) by the Kohl government, whose pro-corporate stance was ideologically in line with Reaganomics. In 1990, just before the dissolution of the GDR, both sides created a trust of corporations and government representatives (Treuhand) to oversee the dismantling of East German businesses. This trust systematically undervalued former GDR businesses. Tax incentives were awarded to West German companies for cheaply buying up their potential eastern competitors. These buyouts were not premised on job creation, however. As a result, many viable producers and work collectives were shut down rather than modernized. Eastern regions continued to suffer high unemployment over the following decades, while sustaining structural damage. Working-age residents moved West in search of jobs, schools and hospitals closed, and cities and towns became dismantled from the outside in, ironically destroying recently built housing complexes with better amenities in favor of expensively sanitizing historical cores. Jens König and Nadja Klinger show the transformation of child poverty into a characteristic eastern phenomenon: “in the West approximately every eighth child grows up poor,—in the East, it is every fourth child. In towns like Halle, Görlitz or Schwerin, 35% of children live in poverty.”26 By 2006, a second micro-effect of neoliberal ideology reshaped the management of the unemployed: the state now incentivized unemployed individuals to found start-ups or small businesses (Gründungszuschuss). The federal rationale, as a regional lender in Germany’s most populous state expresses it, states: “[F]ederal support will promote the access of the unemployed to independent employment (Selbständigkeit).”27 In a punitive mode, it cautions: “[G]ood preparation is necessary for the successful applicant” and “you must establish your business 150 days before your unemployment benefit runs out or you will forfeit your right to ‘Gründungszuschuss.’” This wording shows that an individual is tasked with all aspects of a project that most of us would need proper business skills to bring to fruition. Yet federal funds for continuing education for the unemployed were not budgeted. Butterwegge concludes: “Hartz IV furthers societal processes of precarisation and pauperization, thereby becoming the central gateway for the working poor and for their eventual, inevitable descent into old-age poverty.”28

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Screening Solidarity

In the United States, it was the Democratic Party Carter administration that started neoliberal restructuring in the late seventies. Kotz notes: “While it intensified under the successive Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush, there was no reversal after Bill Clinton took office.”29 Neoliberal streamlining included cuts to welfare in favor of workfare, prolonging years worked before American workers may receive the full amount of Social Security (currently at $2,000 per month for those aged 68–69, but younger retirees receive only $600, or insufficient disability payments). Ronald Reagan infamously ginned up anti-poor resentment of the “Black Welfare Queen,” when in fact most families on welfare are white (37 percent), as opposed to African American (26 percent), Hispanic (16 percent), Asian American (3 percent), and Native American (2 percent).30 The journalist Bryce Covert recalls that the welfare queen stood in for the idea that black people were too lazy to work, instead relying on public benefits to get by, paid for by the rest of us upstanding citizens. She was promiscuous, having as many children as possible in order to beef up her benefit take […] a potent stereotype, which helped fuel a crackdown on the poor and a huge reduction in their benefits, and it remains powerful today.31

In a similar vein, mid-2000s German tabloids Bild and political weeklies Spiegel and Focus as well as TV talk shows like Anne Will created fake stories about parasitic, uppity unemployed with headlines like “Germany’s most outrageous dole recipient.”32 The sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer and his Bielefeld team trace de-solidarization effects longitudinally in their study Deutsche Zustände (2002–2011), noting that subsequent to the financial crisis of 2008, “one third of Germans think, that the economic crisis makes it unaffordable for the nation to afford equal rights to all, while 61% of Germans believe too many weak groups are benefitting from state funds.”33 A salient cultural difference between the United States and Germany is home ownership, and the American habit of financing excessive consumer spending through borrowing against rising home values. Several times beginning locally in the Southwest in 1997, real estate bubbles burst. As we show in Chapter 6, racist lending practices like redlining barred African Americans from obtaining mortgages. Demand for home ownership among low-income groups was served by aggressively marketing subprime lending, which required no standard down payment. Together with the deregulation of banks thought “too big to fail” who ventured into areas of business previously closed to them, accelerated bundling

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and transnational reselling of risky mortgages caused the financial crisis of 2008. Many subprime homeowners defaulted on their mortgages because the value of their homes went underwater, that is, declined far below the level of collateral they had represented. These effects of home loss are explored by films in Chapter 4, where white working-class denizens go bankrupt for reasons like large medical bills, death of a spouse, or job loss. They live in their cars or vans, traveling around the Southwest and the Midwest as nomadic temporary laborers: field hands, Amazon fulfillment center workers, or in the service industry. Even so, they cannot pay for health expenses not covered by Medicaid, for example, dental work, or elective surgery. The scandal of such a gig economy of underpaid seniors is airbrushed with rhetoric about the American spirit of independence and Manifest Destiny. The German government’s response to the 2008 crisis differed from that of the United States, “reflecting the far greater influence or workers and trade unions.” Government subsidies to big employers prevented layoffs, whereas in the United States, “when the government bailed out and nationalized General Motors, the company laid off 21,000 workers.”34 In 2020–2021, during the Covid pandemic, the German system of workforce retention and safety net short-term working schemes (Kurzarbeit) was imitated by France, Italy, and the UK. This attitude stands in stark contrast to the United States. On the one hand, unreconstructed Trumpists as well as the Republican Party on the whole adulate big business and have abetted Trump in dismantling environmental safeguards for even more rapacious oil industry ruination of natural resources, and media pressure to rein in government spending for the public good, which pillory it as wasteful, bad for business, or deride it as socialism.35 On the other hand, attempts to unionize, even at large companies like Amazon, and mass protests against racial injustice now experience a renaissance. A recent mainstream news piece states: “A 2018 MIT study shows that approximately 48% of nonunion workers would join a union if they could—representing some 58 million workers and nearly half of the nonunion workforce. Gallup estimates that as of 2020 65% of all Americans approve of labor unions; including 83% of Democrats, 64% of independents and 45% of Republicans.”36 Self-avowed socialist Bernie Sanders and the Democrat “squad” of progressive lawmakers are putting pressure on centrists from the Left. The perfect storm of the pandemic, climate change, and the obscene wealth gap between global elites and essential workers might shift public awareness toward new, less-opportunistic forms of political community. Progressive cinema such as that of the Berlin School, French Neorealism, and the emerging movement

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Screening Solidarity

of Russian neorealist cinema spearheaded by filmmakers such as Andrei Zvyagintsev, Kantemir Balagov, and Elena Lanskikh can help foster alternative visions of belonging by highlighting mechanisms of exclusion and psychic manipulation that form the core of neoliberal ideologies.

The Post–Cold War and Its Discontents The new “European” states, formerly relegated geographically to the “east” in their controlled market economies and regulated public spheres, continue to undergo a period of rupture, which is visible since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the establishing of the European Union, and the displacement of manufacturing farther east. In the literary and visual arts, a generation of writers and filmmakers probes the edges of the neoliberal marketplace in a search for vestiges of hope. Increasingly, scholarly studies turn to the impact of neoliberalism on film production. In an era of accelerated economic productivity, the contexts shift quickly according to considerations of marketability. The introduction to a 2017 collection devoted to cinema and neoliberalism defends the conviction that “the only way to overcome neoliberalism effectively is through introducing global communism,” arguing that neoliberalism should be critiqued from “liberal, Humanist and nationalist perspectives,” with the goal of determining whether such points of orientation focus on particular or localized manifestations of neoliberalism at the expense of calling into questioning the flourishing of its system on a global scale.37 In our book, we devote attention to films that use granular examinations of neoliberal practice as a means for contemplating the dismantling or cessation of it. The national film industries that we examine are singularly well positioned to contemplate such a synthesis of neorealist close readings with aspirations for alternative modes of living and working. For intelligent observers who lived in those countries, the “end of history” that was purportedly brought about by the collapse of the East Bloc was bittersweet. The end of hostilities and the predatory incursions of the capitalist West into the territory of the despoliated East only served to draw attention to the fact that the central divide within the history of the Cold War was not between countries dictated by unfreedom and those that revered liberty, but rather between two clusters of nations that represented strongly competing imperial domains. In this book, we have chosen to focus on films from Belgium, Germany, the United

Introduction

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States, and the Russian Federation because of the ways in which they frame the end of the Cold War as neoliberalism’s advertisement of itself, as set of values and policies that triumphed over the forces of unfreedom and anti-individuality. As these films demonstrate, such moral claims are both meretricious and unearned. This project, once articulated, comes with a significant note of caution. The reterritorialization of humanist and nationalist critique of an utterly dehumanizing economic system is itself subject to criticism, given that it risks replicating a Eurocentric determination of what constitutes the human. The category of gender in fiction, film, and art that critique neoliberalism is often explicitly foregrounded: how is a neoliberal female worker/citizen affected? Oftentimes in the West, the moral panic over the body of the female worker who is caught between traditional assumptions about motherhood and female subservience on the one hand, and the corporatized model of optimized individualism on the other, undercut any critical treatment of neoliberal practice. In dismissive treatment of women, social class may also intersect with stereotypes about femininity. Brown notes, for instance, in the contemporary United States, that even as more women attain higher education and enter the paid labor force in greater numbers, they still “remain disproportionately responsible for care work of all kinds, they earn less than 80 percent of what their male counterparts earn and are radically underrepresented at the top of all professions.”38 Women, she goes on to argue, are “the invisible infrastructure sustaining a world of putatively self-investing human capitals,” in a neoliberal economic system that intensifies both the exploitation and the invisibility of these persons and groups.39 In another paradox, neoliberalism encourages people to transcend their animal selves, while reducing them to the status of organic cells within a larger biopolitical swarm.40 Late Foucault’s emphasis on biopolitics actually complements (rather than regressively deviates from) Marx’s analysis of class as the fulcrum of worker oppression, as philosophers Jeffrey Nealon and Wendy Brown show.41 Nealon argues that Foucault turned to the private sphere as the site of internalized biopower “and the workings of biopower in turn commit him to examining different, ever-more-micrological sites of power’s deployment and functionality. […] a research itinerary concerning subjects and their relations to themselves—the production of their supposedly ‘personal’ states and everyday lives.”42 Wendy Brown resurrects a category Foucault neglected, or saw only lingering in the subjects’ relation to itself: homo politicus in a

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Screening Solidarity

Rousseauian understanding: namely, as she puts it, that “we are free, sovereign, and self-legislating only when we join with others to set the terms by which we live together.”43

Modes of Resistance to Neoliberal Ideologies and Practices The achievement of social justice and democracy requires robust efforts by the state to regulate capital flows and tax havens and to harness capital and oversee legislation to reduce inequalities in power among citizens. In unfettered neoliberal markets, a global elite is abetted in its search for cheap labor and unrestrained profit. Its political life does not serve the common good. While neoliberalism de-democratizes societies and abolishes state support for “public goods ranging from health care to quality education, economic redistributions, and strong prophylaxes against corruption by wealth,” a democratic state modulates and attempts to at least partially redress inequalities of political access, voice, and treatment.44 Brown defines the social state as a social democracy that strongly regulates capital enterprise. The social state needs to fight back against neoliberal and far right tactics of disparagement, standing up against the erosion of government agencies intended to steward social welfare. Brown states that in actually existing neoliberalism, this dismantling takes place on many fronts. Epistemologically, dismantling society involves denying its existence. […] Politically, it involves dismantling or privatizing the social state—welfare, education, parks, health, and services of all kinds. Legally, it involves wielding liberty claims to challenge equality and secularism along with environmental, health, safety, labor, and consumer protections. Ethically, it involves challenging social justice with the natural authority of traditional values.45

This last strategy is central to the populist right across all the countries we study. Discrediting big government and the cadre of professional politicians as useless, populist nationalists as different as Marine Le Pen, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, agitate for marches and plebiscites to express the will of the people. Yet it is important to note that such movements do endorse the concept of a strong state, which they insist is distinct from the regulatory mechanisms of democratically elected government. The nationalist state safeguards or guarantees “traditional” understandings of cultural belonging and affiliation.

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With their focus on the heteronormative family as the outlet of “natural” religious and political convictions, these antidemocratic groups make an unexpected alliance with Western neoliberalism in shrinking down moraleconomic agency to the scale of the neoliberal subject and the nuclear family—the smallest units in society. This is not to say that right populists support globalized neoliberalism, as it drives jobs abroad. The working class understands this dynamic but can be distracted by appeals to whiteness, disinhibited freedom, or wounded masculinity. When it suits them, they call for big government support to regions and local communities. The state, they think, should intervene as caretaker even though they refuse to acknowledge technocrats like Macron, or Merkel, or Biden as representing them. Demagogues like Trump and Putin gain a following as populist strongmen who appeal to nationalism and fortified borders, while they, too, are beholden to a crony culture of donors and corporate interests. It follows that time spent in privacy in backstage spaces that we identify as sanctuaries is a restorative precondition for emerging back into the social world with agendas of our own. Several protagonists in the crisis films we explore use time with family to rediscover what Shoshana Zuboff calls “organic reciprocities.”46 Together, they formulate an action plan that involves asking workmates to stand in solidarity with them. They insist on the right to work while preserving their own dignity and that of others. Other mobilizing tactics are the consumer boycott, and the embrace of conflict and uncertainty—all of these may shift public opinion against sources of oppression and injustice. The directors and writers we study imagine progressive alternatives under rogue capitalist conditions; they insist on the “human expectation of sovereignty over one’s own life and authorship of one’s own experience.”47 This feeling of re-empowerment is moderated by a humbler vision of ourselves as part of an ecosystem that moves as it decays and reconstitutes itself. The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing studies contaminated histories of interspecies friction that may lead to renewal even though it may have been prompted by reflexes toward the dominance over competitors for resources.48 Similarly, Donna Haraway rethinks the continuities and partitions between nature and culture along a spatial axis.49 Radical anti-capitalist McKenzie Wark envisions this merging as expressing “some aspect of the inert world [that] is part of the human” while also giving voice to an “aspect of past praxis is also part of the nonhuman practico-inert.” Wark writes that “praxis is a matter neither of the human folk politics of fused groups or of the nonhuman seriality

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of planning but rather the inhuman construction of situations that are muddled hybrids of both.”50 Neoliberalism misframes distributive issues to determine the grammar of recognition and representation according to marketized ordering mechanisms. Economic rationality becomes expanded as individuals “are made to assume new levels of ‘responsibility’ for their lives (…) in a new postFordist mode of subjectification.”51 They are obligated to ceaselessly manage and optimize their human capital. This corporate model of self-management extends into the sphere of intimate relationships as well as into the workplace. As the sociologist Saskia Sassen argues in Expulsions, neoliberal practice not only amounts to a “savage sorting” in that it “dispossesses entire populations of the displaced and imprisoned”: it also accelerates the destruction of land and water on a global scale. “Deeper [unfamiliar] systemic dynamics,” Sassen contends, “operate in the biosphere beyond our familiar divisions into urban versus rural, Global North versus Global South, East and West.”52 How to fight back against an oppressor that increasingly separates the oppressed and keeps them at bay within a decentered power system? Even so, how can we identify sites that may give push-back against such practices at particular moments? Humanistic and artistic approaches (while not per se immune or outside of neoliberal constraints) effectively polemicize against neoliberalism and suggest practices that resist its technocratic language. With unarguably global reach, neoliberal practices manifest themselves differently across geographical regions and artistic media. In particular, the visual arts, cinema foremost among them, explore the possibility of resistance to paradigms that erase or displace human agency. The dialectical drive of economic globalization has reconfigured labor, markets, and indisputably the very category of the human. In classical Marxist thought, the need for resources and markets drives imperialism, colonialism, and industrialization, displacing work and workers beyond Western nation-states; the practices of neoliberalism reduce the human being to its basic “function” as a working, consuming body. With its focus on film, this study examines the representation of neoliberal subjects from contemporary European and American cinema in order to understand the ways the human body is marked by gender, nationalism, consumption, race, and labor. In 2021, unions in a wide range of American industries staged more strikes than in the previous three years combined, in response to exploitive working conditions that were made worse by the pandemic.53 The political scientists Boris Vormann and Christian Lammert see labor unions as key elements in

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15

strengthening civil society: “improving the organization of civil society also means that labor unions must regain influence. They do not have to be the industrial unions of Fordism. But there is nothing that in principle prevents workers in the service sector, for example, from organizing more effectively. This requires political will and civic engagement.”54 Brown argues that “today’s deproletarianized and deunionized workers enter the ‘sharing’ and ‘contract’ economy, where they transform their possessions, time, connections, and selves into sources of capitalization” (Brown, 38). As Michael Feher puts it, such workers are told to follow the model or ideal of the entrepreneurial subject, who is tasked with taking charge of areas previously provided by the state: creating a “portfolio of self-investments” to enhance its own capital value.55

The Representation of Workers as Critics of Neoliberalism The achievement of social justice and democracy requires robust efforts by the state to regulate capital flows and tax havens to harness capital and oversee legislation to reduce inequalities in power among citizens. In unfettered neoliberal markets, a global elite is abetted in its search for cheap labor and unrestrained profit. Its political life does not serve the common good. While neoliberalism de-democratizes societies and abolishes state support for “public goods ranging from health care to quality education, economic redistributions, and strong prophylaxes against corruption by wealth,”56 a democratic state modulates and attempts to at least partially redress inequalities of political access, voice, and treatment. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, seeks to disassemble the institutional guardrails that would render viable and real the otherwise highly abstract concept of the “common good,” redeeming it from the hackneyed mystifications of it that are often audible in the arguments of management and of the proponents of free-market purism. Brown states that in actually existing neoliberalism, this dismantling takes place on many fronts. Epistemologically, dismantling society involves denying its existence […] Politically, it involves dismantling or privatizing the social state—welfare, education, parks, health, and services of all kinds. Legally, it involves wielding liberty claims to challenge equality and secularism along with environmental, health, safety, labor, and consumer protections. Ethically, it involves challenging social justice with the natural authority of traditional values.57

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Condemning or, in the case of Russia, legally putting a stop to the public self-expressions of gay and trans people (claiming they intend to prey on children), these populists advocate a return to strict family values. As the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat points out, in his February 2019 declaration of a “national emergency” in regard to the “invasion of our country with [sic] drugs, human traffickers, with all types of criminals and gangs,” Trump was doing nothing more than “repris[ing] the language of Pinochet, Berlusconi, Duterte, and others.”58 Certainly, films such as the Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night, and Andrei Zvyaginstev’s Leviathan and Loveless, are sharply critical of such attempts to distract workers and the working poor from their plight.

Chapter Overview The films discussed in this book were chosen for the ways in which they address the refugees and discontents from the free-market evangelism of the neoliberal project, whether they are People of Color, the disabled, and those workers who were left behind by the rise of supply-side economic policies or the incursion of capitalism in the political space of the former East Bloc. Throughout the book, we use a neo-Foucauldian critique of the affective dimensions of internalized disciplinary regimes upon the individual. In the first chapter (“Working-Class Solidarity as Project in Contemporary Franco-Belgian Factory Films”) Druxes discusses the updating and transmutation of the genre of the French-language “factory film” in the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night. For the genre of neorealist factory film, political cinema “wrests a new potential from the past” by reanimating the process by which unionized labor makes solidarity and interrupts the neoliberal paradigm or, in Baumbach’s words, “pulls the emergency brake on the locomotive of world history.”59 In positing the right to meaningful work as a human right, Two Days, One Night concomitantly traces the emotional journey of a female factory worker from depression and suicidal ideation to happiness over regaining a sense of social inclusion via a communal fight. Several films by French director Stéphane Brizé and the Belgian Dardenne brothers portray the struggles of workers to collectively protest and redress neoliberal workplace constraints. This political message is achieved through the directors’ reimagining the spectator’s participation as their form of critical labor. Acting out the laborers’ fight as a group process on screen affects viewers in two ways: First, it gestures back to the past of communist labor history in France

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and Belgium, in which workers won significant concessions through active self-representation before neoliberalist doctrine took hold. Resurrecting the memory of those successes reactivates a cross-generational awareness which the neoliberal schema, with its presentism and myopic focus on self-optimization, tries to obliterate. Second, by staking a claim to happiness as something gained through communal struggle for the rights of others, factory film suggests a way out of anxious self-absorption and class blindness. We follow our first chapter about the genre of the Franco-Belgian “factory film” with “Arts of Resistance in the Post-Socialist Workplace.” In this chapter, Patricia Anne Simpson examines the collaborative effort between Clemens Meyer and Thomas Stuber in In den Gängen (2018; In the Aisles, 2019). The film depicts a Großmarkt (wholesale market) and posits its aisles as a post-socialist heterotopic space in which a socialist ideology of labor and the inherent dignity of workers persist in spite of a turbo-charged consumerism and relentless banality of the environment. Meyer and Stuber collaborated on the screenplay, which is based on Meyer’s 2008 short story about Christian Gruvert: he works the night shift, stocking shelves and mastering forklift navigation. The dramatic tensions within Meyer and Stuber’s film resonate with Carol J. Greenhouse’s observation that neoliberal reform “has restructured the most prominent public relationships that constitute belonging: politics, markets, work, and self-identity.”60 As the logic of late capitalism devolves into a global dystopia, so poignantly reflected in the genre of science fiction, narratives that emerge from the interstitial spaces of the marketplace’s brutality may call attention to the human dimension of work and its hermeneutics. Analyses that draw on classical Marxist thought argue that the need for resources and markets drives neoliberal practices to extend their global reach in the pursuit of corporate profit, thereby displacing work and workers to geographies beyond Europe. Processes of transnational corporatization that reduce the human being to its capacity to function as a working, consuming body have garnered attention in the global south and east, which have become regions of alterity, resource exploitation, and post-colonial chaos. The film provides backstories for the characters, dividing the audience’s attention by applying nearly equal pressure to each of the three protagonists (Christian, Marion, and Bruno). In accordance with this tripartite approach, each character is engaged in practicing modest arts of resistance to the machinery of well-oiled capitalism. In Chapter 3, “Fevered Dreams of Neoliberalism in Films Made for the Russian Market,” Alexandar Mihailovic examines three lesser-known movies, which were not slated for global distribution: Stanislav Govorukhin’s Weekend,

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Dmitrii Tiurin’s Thirst, and Konstantin Konstaninopolskii’s Russian Psycho. Govorukhin, who passed away in 2018, had an impressive resume, ranging from Soviet-era detective miniseries to post-Soviet documentary filmmaking; Tiurin and Konstantinopolskii are young filmmakers whose work so far seems reminiscent of the journeyman work in different genres that Govorukhin was involved in at roughly the same early point of his career. What all three directors share in their approach in unfolding the action of these films is an unabashed foregrounding of a prickly dialogue with Western cinema, which takes place with the goal of decolonizing their films of both nationalist agendas and the demands of the global cinematic marketplace. The hegemonic American movie narrative often calls for a protagonist who is caught up in a quest for a personal freedom that may involve a morally ambiguous triumph over others, as in the Westerns of John Ford, film noirs, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and Coppola’s three Godfather movies. These three films push back against the notion that goals of personal liberty and the accumulation of capital exist in any natural or inevitable relation with each other. All three films are enriched by the insights of the economic historian Karl Polanyi, who took literally the claims of classical economists that an unregulated market seeks to abolish rules. In a way that is fully consistent with Polyani’s critique, the market of these films is “self-regulating” only if we understand the state as freely playing a dramatic role in its operations. Such deus ex machina interventions of the administrative state into the (nominally) free market is very far indeed from the self-regulation that Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations (1776), understood as a force that emerged organically from the flow of the free market’s quicksilver operations and as the cumulative result of the self-interests of different actors serving as useful counterpoints to each other. Russian cinema continues to find itself in a longue durée of negotiating between the budgetary constraints of production and attempts to forge a national cinematic identity that is neither purely entertainment-driven nor simplistically patriotic. In the contemporary Russian context, managerial neoliberalism co-opts the most exploitive aspects of both industrial and postindustrial economics. Building on his examination about the representation in Russian cinema of the political state as a new form of management, in the next chapter (“The Neoliberalization of Russia in the Films of Andrei Zvyagintsev”) Mihailovic focuses on the idiosyncratic manifestation of the free market that is practiced in the Russian Federation. In his films, Zvyagintsev provides us with a vivid representation of what living in a state-run and controlled neoliberalism would

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19

actually look, and feel, like. In their 2018 study From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries, Hilary Appel and Mitchell A. Orenstein take note of the paradox that Vladimir Putin in his first term of office brought together an “authoritarian, centralizing push with an embrace of some neoliberal reforms,” such as “a low 13 percent flat tax on personal incomes and adopted pension privatization,” a lifting of “barriers to trade and capital movements,” a maintenance of a full convertibility for the ruble, and “the liberalization of labor markets and partial liberalization of the land market.”61 As Zvyagintsev portrays it, this neoliberalism is an uneasy amalgam of austere practices of self-optimization on the one hand and strictures of localist crony capitalism on the other. The three films that represent the core of this chapter’s discussion, Elena (2011), Leviathan (2014), and Loveless (2017), foreground a new stage in statist neoliberalism, in which the manipulations of the market are grotesquely synchronized with popular culture, digitization, and social media. As three “chapters” in the same part or book in the larger novel of Zvyagintsev’s filmography, these films also draw our attention to a gradual center-staging of a very new kind of character in his work: the person who does not want to be filmed and who in some cases openly resists the intrusive cinematic gaze. We see intimations of this rebellion in the title character of Elena, stronger suggestions of this reflex in the enigmatic and tragic figure of Liliya in Leviathan, and finally, in the character of the lost boy Alyosha in Leviathan, an embrace of a programmatic refusal to be fully understood and “consumed” by others. In the epilogue, we outline what the achievement of social justice and democracy might require from the state as a robust guarantor of the common good. In the literary and visual arts, a generation of writers and filmmakers probes the edges of the neoliberal marketplace in a search for vestiges of hope. In Chapter 5 (“Becoming Other: Neoliberalism and “Suboptimal” Bodies), Simpson focuses on German-language feature films that work against the hegemony of neoliberal ideologies by telling stories of everyday resistance against dehumanizing workplaces or intentional, strategic rebellion against an all-absorbing, deadening work un-ethic. In Sheri Hagen’s Auf den zweiten Blick (At Second Glance, 2012), the Nigerian German actor and director brings stories to the screen to represent Black lives beyond their dominant portrayal in criminalized cinematic milieus. Her desire to tell “everyday stories” (Hagen 2020) aligns with a compulsion to bring Blackness and blindness to the screen. Hagen uses “not being seen” in German society as a trope to bring together social issues of race and ability that ends in quiet tragedy. By contrast, director and

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producer Alireza Golafshan, who was born in Iran and emigrated to Germany, explicitly attacks the relentless pursuit of profit in his 2019 tragicomedy Die Goldfische. The protagonist, a portfolio manager (Tom Schilling), exemplifies the neurotic, exacting workaholic with a greater appreciation for his car than for his girlfriend. He emerges from a car accident he caused paralyzed, and allies himself with a social worker and a group of physically and mentally challenged patients—“exceptional” (therefore not optimal workers) to retrieve ill-gotten cash from a bank in Zurich. In both films, the directors make “disability” visible in different ways, working in and through issues of racial and gender difference, to disrupt the neoliberal model of transactional human relationships. In Chapter 6 (“Debased Black Masculinity as an Engine for Neoliberal Economies in African-American Cinema”) Druxes examines two recent social thrillers, Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele, 2017) and Sorry to Bother You (dir. Boots Riley, 2018), that satirize racial injustice and neoliberal narratives of advancement through constant work in the “post-racial” United States. The films’ African-American protagonists, the up-and-coming photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and the working-class Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), naively believe that they live a society that allows them to contribute as “post-Black” individuals.62 In contrast, the filmic narratives establish that racial bias still runs deep on a national level, leading to horrific acts of violence against Black bodies. Both films reveal the neoliberal paradigm of constant self-optimization as destructive to Black bodies and minds, which are either enslaved by imprisonment or pressed into whiteness in order to perform in the global workplace. The neoliberal imperative to be on 24/7, and as Crary points out, virtually sleepless, counter-intuitively allows Chris to discover the persistent racism of a seemingly liberal white family. Yet he can only evade victimization by pretending to fail as a neoliberal operative, thus feeding into their racist perceptions. Cassius must project whiteness to succeed but ultimately suffers racist violence. Both Black protagonists experience racism through direct physical debasement that extends the legacy of slavery. Both escape at least the most grievous forms of assault on their personal integrity by taking collective action. However, the future for each of them is bleak because systemic racism has not been dismantled by their rebellion. Kevin Wynter makes this point in his book-length study of Get Out when he states, “the survival he fights for is essentially hollow for there is no world that he might return to or restore.”63 In Peele’s film, it is the work of an artist/photographer that both documents and dismantles the biopolitical exploitation of Black bodies which is at the center

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of the film. These rejuvenated “grafted” bodies regain an uncanny accelerated mobility, as is evinced in the secretive nightly marathons of the symbiotic white elder/Black groundskeeper. This cyborg body’s propulsive speed is an indicator of the uncanny cycle of self-transformations that the neoliberal economy demands. The naive visitor (and intended prey) Chris Washington barely escapes a collision when this malevolent force hurls itself at him. Ultimately, however, he frees himself with a very simple, and almost invisible, act of vandalism in the corrupt white master’s house: he picks at the armrest of the chair where he is tied up, stuffing his ears with cotton against the hypnotic sound he was manipulated to obey. “Get Out” suggests that it is possible to counter toxic exploitation with both artifice (like Odysseus) and art (Chris’s camera flash disrupts and breaks down the fake performances of the “grafted” personas, at least temporarily). Photographs and cell phone videos wielded by Black community members become instruments of witnessing racism with the intent of circulating this evidence to a wider public, which might become galvanized into corrective action-taking. By combining the local with the global and drawing attention to the claims of excluded groups, these amateur documentarists of the everyday offer us, in political theorist Nancy Fraser’s formulation, “expanded possibilities for contesting injustice.”64 Rounding out this book, in the final chapter, Druxes turns to the United States because its economic system disadvantages the elderly (and other groups) in its headlong momentum toward deregulation, de-industrialization, and the implementation of austerity policies. Working-class seniors are especially vulnerable to homelessness and poverty and forced to work in retirement as participants in the gig economy. In Chapter 7 (“Aging Out of the American Workplace: Intentional Communities and the Lure of the Open Road”), Druxes examines Chloe Zhao’s Oscar-winning film, which is based on journalist Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction account Nomadland: Surviving America in the TwentyFirst Century (2017), and Alexander Payne’s feature Nebraska (2013), about the declining fortunes of a white working-class family. Zhao softens Bruder’s biting critique of America underserving its working-class seniors, a group that, despite working hard all their lives, cannot afford to retire. Zhao’s film reuses several of the subjects in Bruder’s study, nonactors who now play a more idealistic and, for some, poignant version of themselves. She depoliticizes their economic plight by reviving tarnished American myths about rugged individualism, Manifest Destiny, and life on the open road. Despite its visible savage sorting into haves and have-nots, and its paean to noble poverty, Nomadland focuses exclusively on

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white plight. By omitting Latino/as, African Americans, and Native Americans from the working poor, the film plays to white disgruntlement, see-sawing between that emotion, and a sense of entitlement that has, as its obverse, an understanding of the suffering of the white working class as being especially poignant or unique. Zhao and her scriptwriters twist Bruder’s research to their own ends: to seduce white viewers into believing the myth of the open road and mutual aid might compensate for the acute misery and bare subsistence living of a displaced band of senior citizens and others relegated to a transient underclass. Alexander Payne’s feature Nebraska slowly unfolds images of the economic crisis that ravages America’s agricultural heartland post-2008 global financial crisis. Elders of the silent generation share the toxic fantasy of a big win that might erase the shame they feel after lives spent struggling against downward mobility. The film portrays the onset of dementia in old age as a crisis that compounds existing strains on family but also sets the demented person free from doing the expected. The father-son team becomes zany interlopers who disturb the resigned torpor of the former homeplace. Mixing in capers familiar from 1930s screwball comedy, Nebraska mainly parodies elements of the Hollywood Western: the duel, masculinity, and the heroic loner, even as the plot follows a reverse trajectory from traditional expansionist myths by traveling East before returning to the family’s Montana home. All the males in this film struggle with the classic fetishist’s dilemma: they vacillate between sober awareness of their lack of social power and a desperate cathexis onto an eroticized distraction, which here takes the form of an unhealthy fantasy of free money. The film finally depoliticizes its own message by choosing the reinvigoration of family loyalty over making solidarity with strangers.

Conclusions: Solidarity across Difference Always at stake in the examination of neoliberalism’s consequences is the human being, marked by race, gender, nation, ability, and economic performance. Furthermore, the representation of the body in the neoliberal Anthropocene engages questions of human and nonhuman networks that disperse any centralized notion of agency. In this study, we devote particular attention to the transnational history of those networks as represented in cinema across European borders. In addition, the politics of migration extend the geography to encompass a range of sites in which film genres decenter the white supremacist

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project of history. One of the paradoxes of neoliberalism is that it is globalist in its aspiration toward interdependence of nation-states, while also catalyzing policies of stricter border control and demonization of those who seek employment and citizenship. The works we discuss aim to undo cleavages between groups of people who have every interest in combining forces, by drawing attention to greater systemic inequities that pervade neoliberal capitalism. By exposing the material causes of oppression in the workplace and the street, filmmakers and writers point the finger at the many ways in which “poverty and inequality are rationalized to absolve the state and capital of any culpability.”65 An agenda for restorative social justice includes alliance building between oppressed groups. For example, the cynical use of Islamophobia that found expression in Donald Trump’s “Muslim Ban” has a lot in common with racial profiling of African Americans. There is nothing so unique in anti-Black racism that it would preclude making solidarity with Latinos, Muslims, Jews, women or the disabled, or other oppressed groups. What the films show us at the micro-level of daily interactions is that the struggle for solidarity matters. Peele’s dystopia US portrays white families living in affluence precisely because they dispossess and oppress their Black counterparts, while they are intimately bound up with each other. Their possibilities for agency are far from equal. Taylor voices this imbrication succinctly: “The essence of economic inequality is borne out in a simple fact: there are 400 billionaires in the United States and 45 million people living in poverty. These are not parallel facts, these are intersecting facts. There are 400 American billionaires because there are 45 million people living in poverty. Profit comes at the expense of the living wage.”66 Wage slavery is not only fate of a Black underclass, as the erosion of the economic situation is also felt by 76 percent of whites who have experienced poverty at some time in their lives. Internal divisions and antagonisms equally exist between whites, as the Franco-Belgian and Eastern European films about working-class lives delineate. Several of the films we discuss, notably those by Zvyagintsev and the Dardenne brothers, remind us that power circulates differently in centers as opposed to peripheries. The progressive artists in our study demand we work against an increasingly polarized and splintered society that demeans certain groups as abject and irresponsible in order to justify their ongoing immiseration. Shaming practices directed at unconventional bodies, be they differently able, poor, or aging, are exposed as practices of governmentality intended to enmesh them in self-beratement. To oppose these effects, in the words of feminist

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Angela McRobbie, we can “envisage forms of media […] that would refute the genres which currently continue to degrade those who have suffered from the intensification of poverty.”67 In this volume, we argue that the emergence of a transnational school of anti-neoliberal cinema is the foremost among the transgressive forms of media that McRobbie posits. By combining the local with the global and drawing attention to the claims of excluded groups, these artists offer us, in political theorist Nancy Fraser’s formulation, “expanded possibilities for contesting injustice.”68

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

Claudia Breger, Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 3. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 21. Ewa Mazierska, “Introduction,” in Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology, ed. Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen (London, UK: Routledge, 2018), 4, 6. Ewa Mazierska, “Introduction: Work, Struggle, and Cinema,” in Work and Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition, ed. Ewa Mazierska (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 9. Ibid., 13. Mazierska, “Introduction,” in Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology, 7. Mazierska, “Introduction: Work, Struggle, and Cinema,” in Work and Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition, 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 15, 17. Mazierska, “Introduction,” in Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology, 8. Ibid., 18–19. See Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 189–93 for a historical account of Müller-Armack’s economic innovations and how they differed from others of the Freiburg School. Viktor Vanberg, “The Freiburg School: Walter Eucken and Ordoliberalism,” Vol. November 4, 2004, https://www.eucken.de/wp-content/uploads/04_11bw. pdf?x34410.

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17 Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (New York: Verso Books, 2013), 43. 18 David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 9. 19 See klz, “Vor fünfzig Jahren: der Bundestag beschließt das Stabilitätsgesetz,” May 4, 2017, https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2017/kw19-kalenderblattstabilitaetsgesetz-505290. 20 See Bernd Faulenbach, “Social Democracy, Labour Unions and Civil Service in West Germany since the Second World War,” in European Socialists and the State in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. Mathieu Fulla and Marc Lazar (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 149–69. This chapter provides a historical overview of the relationship between the Social Democrats (SPD) and the unions, emphasizing that the SPD understood extending employee codetermination as part of “democratization” since the 1960s. 21 Kotz, 9. 22 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005). 23 Ben Gook, “Backdating German Neoliberalism: Ordoliberalism, the German Model and Economic Experiments in Eastern Germany after 1989,” Journal of Sociology 54:1 (2018): 33–48, here 44. 24 Ibid., 44. 25 Phillip Ther, Europe since 1989: A History, tr. Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmüller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 9. First published as Die neue Ordnung auf dem alten Kontinent: eine Geschichte des neoliberalen Europa (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 2014), this book combines economic history with personal perspective to challenge prevailing notions of the unidirectional (west to east) movement of neoliberal markets. 26 Nadja Klinger and Jens König, Einfach abgehängt (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2006), 82. Translation Druxes. 27 Christoph Butterwegge, Hartz IV und die Folgen (Weinheim: Beltz Juventa, 2015), 166. 28 Butterwegge, 128. 29 Kotz, 9. 30 Heather Hartline-Grafton, Ellen Vollinger, “New USDA Report (2019) Provides Picture of Who Participates in SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program],” Food Research and Action Center, 2020, https://frac.org/blog/newusda-report-provides-picture-of-who-participates-in-snap. The co-authors, directors of the welfare agency, find: “According to one calculation, the average monthly benefit per household was $258 in fiscal year 2019.” This is hardly a

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34 35

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37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44

Screening Solidarity sufficient benefit even if one-third of SNAP households rely on an additional net income of $398. The result is food insecurity, going hungry before the month ends. Bryce Covert, “The Myth of the Welfare Queen,” The New Republic, July 2, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/154404/myth-welfare-queen. See Butterwegge, 251–75. Thorsten Arndt, “Entsolidarisierung—Die neue Heitmeyer-Studie über deutsche Zustände,” Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, March 24, 2010, https://www.boell.de/de/ demokratie/demokratie-entsolidarisierung-heitmeyer-deutsche-zustaende-8883. html. Kotz, 166. Carolynn Look, “Explaining Kurzarbeit, or Saving Jobs the German Way,” The Washington Post, September 23, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ explaining-kurzarbeit-or-saving-jobs-the-german-way/2020/09/23/d690b5cc-fdb311ea-b0e4-350e4e60cc91_story.html. Abigail Johnson Hess, “How the Coronavirus Pandemic May Be Causing Support of Labor Unions to Rise,” CNBC, January 29, 2021, https://www.cnbc. com/2021/01/29/support-of-labor-unions-is-at-65percentheres-whats-behind-therise.html. Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen, eds. Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology (London: Routledge, 2018), 11. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2015), 106. Ibid., 107. See Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm, tr. Erik Butler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). Also see Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 84–5. Nealon traces the transversal link between Marxian subsumption of the worker into production and the genesis of Foucaultian biopower. For Marx, the social mediation of production intensifies and “saturates the socius” (84). For Foucault, Nealon concludes, “[C]ontemporary capitalism has not gone about setting boundaries on work, but rather has sought to increase work’s saturation into the very fiber of everyday life. […] A highly intensified mode of biopower, then, is what one might call the ‘operating system’ of contemporary economic and cultural life, at least in the so-called first world” (85). Brown, 50–78. Nealon, 90. Brown, 95. Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 26.

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45 Ibid., 37. 46 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2019), 501. 47 Zuboff, 521. 48 Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 29. 49 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 47–57. 50 McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead. Is This Something Worse? (Brooklyn: Verso, 2019), 140. 51 Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press [2009], 2010), 127. 52 Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 5. 53 Abigail Johnson Hess, “How the Coronavirus Pandemic May Be Causing Support of Labor Unions to Rise,” CNBC, January 29, 2021, https://www.cnbc. com/2021/01/29/support-of-labor-unions-is-at-65percentheres-whats-behind-therise.html. 54 Boris Vormann and Christian Lammert, Democracy in Crisis: The Neoliberal Roots of Popular Unrest [2017], tr. Susan H. Gillespie (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 178. 55 Michael Feher in Brown, 38. 56 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 27. 57 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 37. 58 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2020), 86. 59 Nico Baumbach, Cinema/Politics/Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 129. 60 Carol J. Greenhouse, “Introduction,” in Ethnographies of Neoliberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 3. 61 Hilary Appel and Mitchell A. Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 164. 62 Ryan Poll, “Can One ‘Get Out?’ The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 51:2 (Fall 2018): 69–102, 80–1. 63 Kevin Wynter, Critical Race Theory and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 147. 64 Fraser, 57.

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65 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 25. 66 Taylor, 198. 67 Angela McRobbie, Feminism and the Politics of Resilience (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020), 11. 68 Fraser, 57.

1

Working-Class Solidarity as Project in Contemporary Franco-Belgian Factory Films Helga Druxes

The video artist Hito Steyerl argues that cinema is the factory of today. Spectators have to do the work of the factory worker, “to look is to labor.”1 Political cinema engages spectators in this labor not only through their senses and aesthetic faculties, as Steyerl eloquently argues, but also by appealing to their critical acumen. As actual factories downsize and owners outsource production to remote countries where labor is cheap, a nostalgic genre of factory films has sprung up, which confronts clashes between workers and owners of the means of production over the value of their labor and their right to work. Class struggle in the globalized neoliberal marketplace is more ramified than the genre suggests, as the commodities that can be traded have become more immaterial and their ownership opaque. Marxist theorist McKenzie Wark calls attention to the “vectoralist class,” a new stratum of information aggregators who profit from controlling access to it. I analyze films that even as they are based in factories are aware of mediatized information’s influence over shaping public opinion, regardless of the facts on the ground. The emerging genre of post-2008 gritty realist factory film thematizes class struggle and the collective fight to make solidarity among workers as they oppose layoffs, factory closures, as well as structural sexism and racism.2 Martin O’Shaughnessy argues that through their use of raw chunks of social reality embedded in a loosely constructed narrative, the “current wave of socially engaged French films […] drive us urgently to engage with the real, asking us to search for answers and meanings that are lacking. […] The spectator is asked to share actively in the production of a politics.”3 Viewers will likely be aware of pressures and inequities in the social world yet may not have reflected critically on options for workers in workplace negotiations or the struggles of laid-off older workers (or those with burnout) to

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return to full-time employment. By making these facets of the real apparent in a film setting while withholding a totalizing, explanatory narrative of the social, progressive filmmakers challenge their audiences to interrogate the status quo and confront hidden violences, ultimately sending viewers back to real-world struggle. These films contend that connectivity to others is not fixed; it has to be co-created. Withholding a predigested social recipe or transcendent ending, these committed films use, in O’Shaughnessy’s thinking, “the productiveness of melodrama and the capacity of its generic repertoire and some of its typical themes to restore eloquence and visibility to socio-political struggle.”4 In these films, those at the bottom of social hierarchies refuse to accept their allotted places and resist determinedly. Debate, setbacks, and recalcitrant struggle are presented as dynamic and theatrical, as we see in the condensed timeframe of Two Days, One Night. In At War, viewers have to infer an act of great violence from the protagonist’s grainy cell phone footage: his public self-immolation at the company offices after his colleagues anonymously accuse him of being a sellout. The Measure of a Man ends in the protagonist’s moral victory by quitting his humiliating job in customer surveillance but he will be rejoining the ranks of the unemployed. The real-world effects of rising inequality have produced mass protests in France, not only from leftist groups like the Jeunes Insoumis*es but also from right-leaning groups like La Manif pour Tous and the Yellow Vests. The Jeunes Insoumis*es protest their conditions of entry into the labor market, which the Macron government deregulated further in addition to cutbacks during the Covid pandemic. They also declare their solidarity with other salaried employees and high school students and established local chapters in several French cities.5 The Yellow Vest insurgency formed in November 2018 over the new environmental fuel tax, and the high cost of living, especially for those on low pensions. They staged more than sixty consecutive weeks of protests against economic hardship, mounting inequality and a discredited political establishment, and had a resurgence in the election cycle of early 2022. La Manif Pour Tous is a conservative movement that wants to overturn gay marriage and domestic partnerships (PACS) and bar gay couples from adopting children, feeding on observant Catholic supporters. While reducing the top tax rates to about 50 percent in the late 2000s and further reducing rates on capital income after 2013, in 2014, the French government also raised consumption tax (VAT) to 20 percent, disproportionally affecting lower-income groups, who are already having difficulty with the

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high cost of living and increased fuel taxes. Piketty traces the development of rising inequality between top earners and the national average: “the difference between the average national income before tax and those of top earners has almost doubled over the preceding thirty years. The top 0.1% average income increased from 21 times above average in 1983 to 37 times in 2014, while the figure increased from 71 times average to 129 times for the top 0.01%.”6 He also mentions the context of “declining labor bargaining power and privatization policies,”7 which further exacerbate income inequality. Despite presenting viewers with many divergent points of view among the workers, these films engage an economic and social power structure that would distract and dissuade workers from organized activity for their rights. I turn to three recent films, the first two by French director Stéphane Brizé and the third by the Belgian Dardenne brothers: The Measure of a Man (La Loi du Marché, 2015), At War (En Guerre, 2018), and Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit, 2014). These films offer visions of resurgent worker solidarity; they prompt viewers to question what is humane, and what might distinguish collective ethical responses as effective counter strategies to the calculative thinking that neoliberalism demands. Representatives of a neoliberal managerial class seek to divide workers by means of surveillance, sexism, racism, and when those fail, disavowal of responsibility for the legitimate grievances of the working class. The managers and the owner class work hand in hand with the nationstate government and the police force to subdue and criminalize public protest. Brizé’s cinema increasingly points to mediatized images of strikes and physical altercations that distort the workers’ concerns by depicting them as violent animals. While public attention is necessary to engender broader support for their cause, Brizé highlights the omnipresent role of media in the workers’ lives, ranging from news media to cell phones. Union organizers like the fictive character Laurent Amédéo in At War attempt to defuse aggressive showdowns between various union syndicates, even as they present their right to be heard in a forceful manner. Brizé demystifies the process of cinematic production by including overt references to cameras as instruments of surveillance. For example, in The Measure of a Man, he toggles between the perspective of unwary shoppers browsing the aisles in a big box store and the grainy video footage of their activity as tracked by store detectives in a back room. Resistance in these works derives from speaking out in public about a dilemma into which management unfairly places an individual or the group and persuading other workers to recognize the underlying immorality of ignoring their justified

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demands. Before a public intervention like a protest or strike comes into effect, local organizing is shown as hard, dramatically intense door-to-door work to state one’s cause and make solidarity among workers who may have abandoned union organizing and have little to no contact with each other outside of work. This is the focus of the Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night. As the title indicates, the time frame for Sandra, a solar cell factory worker, to reclaim her job after a sick leave, is just one weekend. By contrast, Brizé’s films develop the protagonist’s dilemma over the longue durée. In Measure, we follow Thierry, an aging machinist who has been unemployed for twenty months, in his attempts to retrain and get another job. The time frame in At War chronicles many months of strikes against the closure of a French auto-parts plant co-owned by a transnational conglomerate of French and German firms. The prehistory of the strikes involves two years during which the workers agreed to work an extra five hours a week without pay in exchange for the promise of job security during the coming five years. After two years pass in this manner, the owners decide that the profitability targets they set are not being met despite the workers’ sacrifice, and they unilaterally terminate the agreement. Brizé turns from exploring the deleterious effects of unemployment on an individual and their family in the earlier film to a collective subject, the diverse group of workers striking for their rights, and how this coalition is built through verbal negotiations between them, and continually shifts in their struggle to cut through the layers of management to address the president of the French Republic and confront the German owners. Laurent as their charismatic organizer plays a central role, but he is agentive as part of a group, at least until the dramatic climax, in which, after all efforts for resolution having come to naught, he sets himself on fire outside the French company’s head office. Disturbed by the bad press the suicide generates, the German owners agree to restart negotiations and to stop legal proceedings against a group of workers who had physically attacked their CEO. Brizé’s and the Dardennes’ films provide alternative visions of communitarianism, giving rise to resilient subjects that are bound in solidarity across lines of difference. Remaking a sidelined or obsolete worker into a resilient agentive subject requires the support of a diverse group, the willingness of others to listen to their stated needs, and the respect of the other as a whole person. Within a neoliberal regime of pharmaceutical self-management by medicating away uncomfortable thoughts or impulses, even arriving at an acute sense of the sources of oppression is beset by inward-turning, self-blaming impulses. Sandra in Two Days exemplifies such a worker. She becomes chronically depressed by

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the double burden of her work assembling photovoltaic cells in a solar panel factory, misled by the false promise of class mobility, which lured her and her husband into buying a single-family home they can ill afford, no matter how many hours they work. Lauren Berlant calls such a mindset “cruel optimism,” subscribing to an ideology that is not good for one. The dream of rising into the middle class through consumerism of goods and status symbols that suggest one partakes of the good life embodies such a lure for the working class. We repeatedly witness Sandra taking Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication, every time she becomes stressed. After setbacks when it seems she cannot convince enough of her co-workers to vote for her to stay, she overdoses on these pills and is saved just in time. Sandra often retreats to the bedroom to sleep in the middle of the day. This mother of two young children is exhausted by the routinization of her precarious employment and blames herself for having gotten sick. What allows her to gradually recover her fighting spirit is the validation by female co-workers and her husband, all of whom urge her not to give up and speak up for herself. The laws protect workers with a psychic or physical disability, yet Sandra is told by management they doubt she could ever work as well again as before her depression came on. The Dardennes explore the sexism of a maledominated administrative apparatus on the factory floor. Because of a French law banning filming inside working factories, the Dardennes limit workplace scenes to a nondescript lunchroom, a locker room, and the managerial offices at Solwal.8 (Similarly, Brizé shoots At War in an abandoned factory that still has some of the machines, so he can simulate work being done there.) When Sandra’s closest female friend Juliette urges her to plead with the boss M. Dumont, he is shown quickly exiting the building to his car to avoid having to talk to them, as his secretary claims he already left. However, they catch him before he can drive off (7:09). Juliette gets him to agree to a revote among the workers on Sandra’s termination since the foreman was trying to influence the outcome in favor of management. He presents the choice as between Sandra keeping her job and the workers keeping their bonus. As M. Dumont says directly to Sandra, it is nothing personal; rather he feels pressure from Asian competitors so that for him, profitability is key. The real reason is explained later on by another co-worker, Julien, as cost saving. Sandra’s absence means that sixteen workers perform the work of seventeen for a bit of overpay, and because this temporary solution worked well, management now wants to regularize it. The language of the upper classes relies on big words and obfuscation. They speak of competitiveness when they mean profitability. All the CEOs and their

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minions in the films invoke the market as an external force that governs their actions. Within the first few minutes of labor dispute in At War, the French company director M. Borderie states: “[T]he reality of the market is extremely harsh, neither you nor or can […]” (2:42); previously a young accountant he refuses to engage the worker’s demands by invoking unmet profitability targets as if these were neutral numbers, repeating numbers, and the words margin turn, claiming he cannot draw up a financial balance sheet with such bad returns (Je ne sais pas faire le bilan financier avec des tours de marge pareils, 1:54). At first, the management denies that they broke their promise to the workers by blaming them for what they choose to call “low” productivity. The workers counter that the profit targets are set too high because the transnational shareholders expect ever larger returns on their globalized investments. They state the root cause as greed and demand moral justice for their sacrifice. In the film commentary, Brizé calls this the “moral pedestal (socle) on which he built the film” (06:21). Brizé uses almost exclusively lay actors who play roles they know well from their professional lives, so, for example, M. Borderie is a company CEO in his real work life, a laid-off government worker plays a ministerial employee, an accountant generates likely numbers that might make sense in real life, and so on. A Brechtian reality effect is thus created so that viewers cannot dismiss the action as exaggerated fiction. They take sides critically, analyzing the issues at stake. Their distance from the main character is also reinforced by showing few scenes of Laurent’s personal life, so that it becomes more difficult to form a sentimental attachment to him that would distract from the political agenda. We eventually hear, for example, about an adult daughter, who announces her pregnancy to her divorced parents in a cell phone call, but we do not see her pregnant body or face until much later, and then again in mediated form, as a series of digitized snapshots with superimposed speech bubbles. The camera does not adopt an omniscient point of view. During the debates around the table, Brizé used three cameras in the room to capture diverse points of view, without over-focusing on Laurent’s reactions. Showing Laurent often side by side with his co-worker Mélanie, her viewpoint is emphasized as complementary and equal, as she is also given many lines. The fight to prevent the layoffs is as much her fight. Two Days, One Night and especially At War put center stage a process of re-establishing a supportive collectivity that unfolds over time. Solidarity is discursively produced by listening to diverse voices in a group; there is disagreement; emotions run high; at times, individuals lash out, disrupting the

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process of solidarity making. Brizé’s “war” drama is generated by the various stages of the verbal contestation between the workers, management/owners, the law, and the French government. In At War, the dissonant jazz instrumentals of composer Bertrand Blessing establish a tense mood, as do the cuts to black. Two Days, by contrast, screens out ambient noise and uses little background music. The sonic quiet in which Sandra operates increases the tension; it mimics for viewers Sandra’s relative social isolation. The drama is created by the timeconstraint and the varied worker reactions to Sandra’s pleading: Sandra has only a few days to persuade at least nine of her sixteen colleagues to forgo their bonus so that she can keep her job (see Figure 1.1). In both cases, viewer suspense is driven by the protagonist’s challenge to create a functional collective out of discordant, understandably self-interested individuals who are all underpaid. This puts the project of the films in opposition to the dominant neoliberal worldview, which rests on maximizing profit. Following a Marxist pro-worker stance, the three films starkly pit the exploited working class against an aloof, morally tainted managerial class and absentee owners. In At War, the workers and their lawyer, a Maghebri woman, appeal to the owners’ “moral responsibility” (14:34), while the company director advises the laid-off workers to “move to another region” (39:08), lacking empathy for the 1,100 workers and their families, roughly 4,000 people affected by the closure. Capital is mobile and transnationally networked, which allows it to outsource jobs to cheaper countries to maximize profit. Laurent articulates that

Figure 1.1  Sandra speaks with Alphonse.

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he is keenly aware of their modus operandi, stating: “they close this location and reopen in Romania, where they will pay workers five times less” (38:33). The workers appeal to the French state to intervene to protect their jobs. The government representative’s argument is an anxious one: if the state stepped in now, it would be counter-productive later because foreign investors would be scared off, which would result in diminished job growth (15:14). Neoliberal market ideology relies on the state to maintain a stable framework for its operations,9 but here the citizens demand that the state should do something different: it should protect the socially weak. Brizé scripts the striking workers as tenacious: after several weeks, a large group, 260 of the 1,100 travel to Paris to present their demands to the president, namely that he phone Hauser, the German director of the Dimke group, and bring him to France to face the workers. Wearing armbands with the number 1,100, the protesters remind viewers that their group is much larger. Their hopes to force a meeting with the president are dashed, as the president’s staff claims not to know his whereabouts and soon calls the police. We see the workers’ group waiting patiently in the foyer; only after the police surround them and begin pushing them inward with their plastic shields does the confrontation become physical. Brizé refuses to stage graphic violence; he shows pushing, shoving, and some kicking. If he created greater realism, he could be held accountable by the authorities for inciting anti-police sentiment. On French streets, police brutality in the 2019 and presently still ongoing yellow vest (Gilets Jaunes) protests against neoliberal changes to the pension system is much more severe than what At War intimates. Police have been issued kinetic impact rubber bullets that shatter eye sockets and skulls, creating horrific injuries among passers-by and protesters. People have lost eyes and hands; by the end of 2019, there were 1,700 injuries. After the extensive vandalism to monuments, banks, and high-end stores in Paris and other French cities that began in November 2018 and continued until April 2019, with demonstrations gradually fizzling out, Macron issued an order to “hit them hard” (leur taper dessus) as a signal to discourage future protests.10 The actors in police uniforms have bulletproof vests and shields, but actual police wear full-body armor, helmets, and visors. Given that Brizé shot his film over twenty-three days in October–November 2017, his depiction of social protest is prescient. In his film, worker rallies unite with chants like “all together” (tous ensemble) (1:13:48), “we shall not break solidarity” (nous ne nous désolidarisons pas) (55:55), and under banners such as “Our lives are worth more than their profits” (Nos vies valent

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Figure 1.2  Laurent and co-workers protest plant closing (En Guerre, dir. Stéphane Brizé; @ Nord-Ouest Films/photograph: Carl Collonier).

plus que leurs profits) (43:15). These slogans serve as concise reminders of the main points the film wishes to make (see Figure 1.2). In addition, Brizé focuses on the commodification of the protests into media material. Here, his argument aligns with McKenzie Wark’s emphasis on a new class they term the “vectoralist” class that “owns and controls the vector on which information is routed, whether through time or space.”11 The owner class aligns itself with media outlets, which edit and recycle their images to cast the workers as “animals” (sur Internet, on est passés pour provocateurs, des abrutis) (48:21). The workers are constantly aware of the power of these images to shape public opinion of their struggle. They are aware that the cycle “comes around” (les images sur Internet, à la Télé, ça tourne en boucle) (1:35:14), a phrase that is repeated throughout the film, and that their rightful demands can be defeated by these images. One worker asks the others: “With those images, what can we do?” (avec ces images, on fait quoi?) (1:35:16). Wark further argues that the capitalist owner class has diversified their assets into the information sector: One could also think of the big banks as a subset of the vectoralist class rather than as “finance capital.” They too are in the information asymmetry business. And as we learned in the 2008 crash, even the car companies are in the information business—they made more money from car loans than cars. The military-industrial sector is also in the information business. […] Perhaps the

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Screening Solidarity vectoralist class is no longer emerging. Maybe it is the new dominant class. […] The older class antagonisms have not gone away. It’s just that there is a new layer on top, trying to control them.12

Toward the conclusion of the film, the workers finally get their meeting with M. Hauser, who chides them for being utopians who want to live in a different world (as if that were a bad thing). He himself “lives in the world that surrounds us (le monde qui nous entoure) and is applying its rules” (1:24:45). He attempts to set himself up as a rational actor, who maintains a market-based global outlook (la vision globale des choses) (1:20:39).13 The market is once again invoked as a supreme entity beyond regulation, the key credo of free-market neoliberals. But his refusal to engage is contested by the workers’ lawyer, who deploys a more critical global perspective with specifics, beating Hauser at his own game. She argues that “three factories were closed in eight years in different EU countries, the UK, Spain and even Germany, affecting 140 000 Dimke group employees, while profits rose” (1:29:38). He refuses to sell his shares to the French group Alkam, an intransigent attitude that shows transnational corporate ventures in a bad light, supporting nationalistic tendencies by making the vilest capitalist of the lot a German, a member of a mobile transnational elite with a nativelike command of French and a vacation home in the Camargue. Hauser even claims grandiosely that he bought into their French factory out of love for the country and respect for his half-French heritage. However, these warm feelings do not extend to committing to keep these jobs active in France. He refuses point-blank to change his decision to close down the plant. After Hauser exits the office building and enters his car, he is surrounded by irate protesters who punch the car and end up tipping it over with Hauser, his driver, and bodyguard inside. TV cameras film Hauser being roughly pulled out of the wreck by his feet, bleeding from a head wound. The strikers have lost the war of images, and they know it. While some of the workers finish a last job order before their plant shuts down for good, the camera cuts to a close-up of Laurent cleaning up graffiti on his home and then pans to broken glass on his kitchen floor. The graffiti reads: “we lost everything a–hole” (on a tout perdu connard, 1:40:35). He scrubs vigorously but is unable to remove the insult, which is symbolic of his hurt feelings. Even though Laurent fought unremittingly for the workers, some end up by blaming him. After this shot, the camera cuts to black, and then a blank cell phone window opens in the middle of the dark screen. At first, we just see sky and then a paved area. The swerves of the cell phone camera lend a reality effect to

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this scene because they look like an amateur video. Laurent suddenly enters the frame, pours gasoline all over himself, and sets fire to his body. No voiceover or human intervention happens. The final background music is a muffled song in English, which repeats the line “it takes you over, you don’t know why exactly” as the camera zooms in on the concerned sad faces of Laurent’s former colleagues standing around outside. Like Laurent, they end up on the street. The process of negotiation is restarted, but its outcome remains uncertain. Brizé comments in the extras that he wanted to show a worker suicide because these often happen after job loss and the media never shows images of these deaths. This conclusion is more sobering than the conclusions of Two Days and Measure, in which the protagonists are filmed from the back walking away from a demeaning job or the offer to stay on under unfair circumstances. These scenes suggest that an individual, whether male or female, can refuse immoral proposals. There is a coda to Measure, in a bird’s-eye view establishing shot, as Thierry drives his small white car out of his parking space in the vast big box store lot. Right as he exits, a bigger car aggressively drives up and moves into his space. This detail may suggest that Thierry is just a cog in a brutal machinery that continues its operations. In Two Days, the emphasis is more hopeful, as Sandra walks away, calling her husband on her cell phone, concluding “we fought well, I am happy” (On s’est bien battu, je suis heureuse) (1:31:30). Female characters like Sandra or her colleague Anne state at rare key moments that they feel happy and motivate this feeling from their ability to express opposition to violent male intimidation regimes, be they in the workplace or at home. What are some of the common themes and major differences of At War with Measure? The false promise of the tale of opportunity is a preoccupation in Measure. Thierry’s family circumstances are fleshed out more fully than Laurent’s in At War. In several scenes in the modest single-family apartment, we see him and his wife interacting lovingly with their young adult son, who has a developmental disability. His schooling requires extra money, especially if he is to continue his education at a residential facility in the next town. While his parents treat him with humor and kindness, the school principal berates him about his performance, infantilizing him. According to the neoliberal code, Mathieu does not successfully embody an “entrepreneurial self ” and therefore deserves public humiliation.14 A parallel scene shows Thierry from the side sitting at his home computer during a Skype job interview, where the employer blames Thierry for not staying current with the upgrades of the specialized machines he used to work on once he was made redundant. Of course, outside the factory, hands-on

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access to these machines is not possible (10:35–11:03). Similarly, Sandra in Two Days is berated behind her back by Jean-Marc, the foreman, who manipulates the outcome of the vote by gossiping about her depression and her presumed inability to do her job well because of it. The sideways view of Thierry creates an impression of him as reactive rather than in command during the interview. We only hear the interviewer’s questions but do not see him. This is the first intimation of the Foucauldian Panopticon, that is, a spatial arrangement that favors an unseen controlling gaze. The lesserpaid job Thierry eventually takes as a security staffer places him on the other side of the screen: now he is one of the surveyors. He looks at a monitor bank, scanning the store for shoplifters. Not only is it obvious that he is bored; the shoppers themselves appear drugged as they wander the aisles, fingering goods on display, adding them to their carts only to take them out again (48:55–54:35). Brizé presents a range of increasingly impoverished and ageing customers, including some of the cashiers, who are disciplined for hoarding coupons. There is also a racial dynamic shown in criminalizing the poor. The first individual accused of stealing a cell phone cable is of Arab or Maghrebi descent; one of the female cashiers is Black. A white female store detective uses the informal “tu” instead of the appropriate “Vous” form for strangers in speaking to these People of Color. She asks the young, uncooperative man insistently to provide ID, implying he might not have any papers (sans papiers) and hence no legal standing within the French nation (38:22–41:31). Race matters are more muted in At War, limited to showing some co-workers who are Maghrebi in non-speaking roles, and the Maghrebi lawyer, who however does get a lot of important lines. Her highly visible spokesperson role indicates that solidarity can cut across racial lines. In Measure, we see Mme. Anselmi, a pension-eligible cashier who hoards discount coupons, apparently in a minor scheme to save some money for herself and her son for whose costly drug rehab she pays. After she is publicly shamed and fired for this bagatelle, she commits suicide at work, an act that is referred to but not shown. While her boss and coworkers attend her funeral, the manager refuses any responsibility for her death, treating it as unrelated to the firing and the loss of face (1:14:25). In the background of the lunchroom are some diagrams with profit projections and the headline “deep discount sale” (démarque totale, 44:26). This slogan also supplies an ironic commentary on the value of the older worker: in an economy with high unemployment, they, too, are cheap commodities. While the middleclass manager pretends that they are all a happy family, most of the employees

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are underpaid and do not make enough to put food on the table. Brizé highlights these inequities by mixing employees and customers among the delinquents; for instance, an experienced store detective warns Thierry to suspect everyone the camera tracks (54:36), including the cashiers, punctuating his observations of people browsing with the phrase: “it’s not normal” (c’est pas normal) (48:55– 54:37) as he scans the cameras for crimes that do not occur. The store has eighty cameras trained on all the different store shelves, indicating nearly complete visual control of the spaces. The framework of sorting people into “normal” versus “deviant” opens up a chasm between the harsh judgment on the side of the store managers and the customers’ overwhelming rule compliance or employees’ minor infractions. That the socially dominant narrative is neoliberal, chastising the poor, pensioners, or the disabled as “people who refuse to make themselves into someone the market would validate”15 further becomes evident in a scene at the local bank, as Thierry attempts to take out a loan. He is advised to sell the apartment he and his wife worked all their lives to buy in order to liquefy his resources, pay off some debt, and assume more risk with the rest of his money (19:46–20:26). He is told to sell the vacation camper, another demeaning negotiation as the buyers try to depress the sale price by criticizing that it does not offer the latest mod cons. The bank employee also badgers Thierry to buy life insurance, even hinting that, as a last resort, he might kill himself to provide more money for his family that way (21:26–22:24), since he has no savings set aside. Moreover, viewers witness Thierry’s understandably discouraged performance at an interview workshop. He undergoes a mock interview, with all the other participants invited to find all the things he did wrong. From his posture to his lack of smiles to his intonation, minute aspects of his public self-presentation are found wanting (33:56–34:47). The verdict is that he falls short on amiability and relatability, which he must project abundantly in order to make employers want to hire him. While At War chronicles the collective building of solidarity, Measure shows the ruthless tearing down of an individual’s self-esteem by strangers. No sphere of life is immune from the invasion of regulating techniques, which focus on the successful embodiment of a public persona. Thierry and his wife take dance lessons at a dancing school. They manage basically fine dancing together until the dance teacher comes to check and intrudes to count out the beat (16:24–18:09). As the teacher gives commands about Thierry’s posture, he

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also takes over the female part, asking Thierry’s wife to step aside. When she does not move off far enough for him to execute the jive dip, he tells her to step even further away. The lesson that was meant to provide a fun relief from the daily grind turns into an unhealthy competition between two men of different social classes, once again emphasizing Thierry’s lack of comportment. The teacher pretends that he can perform the woman’s part better than an actual woman. Viewers see that this is false, as a harmonious performance depends on the cooperation between the couple. As was the case during the mock interview, Thierry is shamed in front of the class for not exhibiting ease to make his moves appear effortless. He fails to self-optimize enough, even as he makes the effort to learn new skills, as a neoliberal worker ought to do. Instead, these turn out to be painful lessons in humiliation. At the dance academy, working-class people like Thierry and Sandrine are surrounded by seemingly “classier” petit bourgeois décor, photographs of famous dancers on the wall, and flocked wallpaper. None of the couples dance with evident ease or enjoyment. However, at Thierry’s home, away from prying eyes, we witness a spontaneous group dance between all three family members. They cooperate to roll up the carpet, begin to dance, and then include Mathieu, who loves the music. Mathieu’s body is not “perfect” to begin with, he has various disabilities, but his family interacts lovingly with him. This care-taking relationship is opposed several times as a counter-narrative to neoliberal monetization of feelings. Thierry bathes his adult son in one scene; in another, he patiently helps him get dressed. He is confident and careful in his gestures, unlike his awkward public self-displays that middle-class authority figures demand of him as proof of his potential for social mobility. It is also interesting that there is a disconnect between the agonizing amount of physical labor Mathieu has to perform to speak intelligibly and the education system’s critical perception of his student performance in the sciences; the subject biology is mentioned several times as one where is he not doing well. In one scene he and his parents are called in to meet the principal, who uses neoliberal terminology to discuss Mathieu: Expressions such as “une petite baisse des ses resultats” and “if faut vraiment que vous mobilisiez,” “luttez” might equally be applied to stocks and investors (56:49; 58:31; 59:03). This language contrasts with Thierry’s defense of his son that the consistent work (travail) Mathieu does at home is not rewarded by the system. The principal ridicules Thierry’s opinion by paraphrasing it in more vulgar language than Thierry himself uses: “You are telling me that you are busting your chops (que vous bossez, bossez, bossez), but it is imperative

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that you mobilize, objectively—fight” (59:03). Whenever middle-class social actors wish to show off and intimidate, they use a different register, employing locutions that require complex tenses like subjunctive or past tense, with verb forms not all classes use equally comfortably in everyday speech. This put-down strategy is also noticeable in the cross-examination of Mme. Anselmi for coupon points theft, who defends herself by stating that despite this infraction of the rules she remains “serious in her work” (1:06:10), while the manager declares pompously “my trust—you had it, but you don’t anymore” (vous l’aviez, mais pas maintenant). The soundtrack in the store scenes is punctuated by electronic beeps, similar to a scanner ringing up merchandise. In the final scene, as Thierry decides to quit and walks out of the store, we hear slow, mellifluous guitar music, the song “Black Sands” by Bonobo. The track suggests that Thierry chooses feeling over his alienated labor that revolves around punishing and dehumanizing the economically weak. On the level of sound and voice, the neoliberal regime is disrupted by Thierry’s refusal. The camera tracks Thierry from the back as he walks away confidently and then shifts to a bird’s-eye view shot of his car in the parking lot as he drives away. However, right after this follows an act of microaggression where a dark sedan turns to park in Thierry’s spot, driving too closely behind to an elderly man walking forward toward the camera. The length of this final shot makes it clear that the driver is intentionally menacing. The elderly and the disabled along with minorities and the working class are the losers in such a society. How does being female affect the labor of making solidarity, and what kinds of females are shown as heroic? Marion Cotillard, the lead, is not only a star; her body in the film is very thin. The costuming emphasizes an androgynous look: cowboy booties and jeans topped by red, pale, or pink T-shirt tops with either spaghetti straps or deep décolleté. She looks fragile and ill. Her friend Juliette is stocky, wears jewelry and makeup, and is dressed in a soft blue-andwhite flowery top and pale pink rain jacket. The color coding suggests that these characters are feminine and would non-threaten the status quo. This is incorrect, but it indicates that the directors play the sympathy card by coding these females as outwardly conforming to meek stereotype. As soon as Juliette and Sandra team up and speak out, they get concessions either one would not get alone. The issue of voice and voicing provides an exit out of neoliberal commodification. Human beings are more than their ability to work. Furthermore, Sandra’s family actively supports her, for example in an early scene around the family dinner

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table, when the husband Manu and the two children all pitch in to help Sandra find the addresses of her co-workers (12:51). However, Sandra continues to be beset by self-doubt and crippling anxiety until a turning point when her repeated efforts unexpectedly change the mind of a reluctant more affluent female colleague. I will discuss this scene shortly. Her feelings of worthlessness are produced by the stressful work itself, then exacerbated by not being able to earn money, and compounded by the risk of being fired. Throughout the film, Sandra battles feelings of depression and not being seen, even as she persists with her public quest to create solidarity for her situation. Unlike the male leads Laurent and Thierry in the Brizé films, Sandra verbalizes her feelings and at critical moments finds a sympathetic listener. She starts out feeling “as if I do not exist” (C’est comme si je n’existais pas. Mais ils ont raison, je n’existe pas, je suis rien, je suis rien du tout) (11:34–11:39). Sandra collapses on the floor. Manu listens empathetically and then affirms that she does matter to him and her colleagues. He asserts: “For them, too, you exist. Before they thought about their bonus, they thought about you. That is why you need to go see them one by one this weekend” (11:54–12:14). Sandra’s self-advocacy is softened from seeming too “unfeminine” or aggressive by domestic scenes that establish her as a good mother. She bakes a fruit tart for the kids, and carefully makes their beds and puts their room in order. These decisions muffle Sandra’s feminist success by embedding her in a nuclear family framework and stating that she needs her income not just for herself but to help maintain the family (Je veux garder mon salaire. On en a besoin à la maison) (16:55). In the face-to-face discussions, various reasons emerge why some workers need to keep the 1,000 Euro bonus and vote against Sandra. Few of her colleagues are rude when Sandra pleads her case, but some of their spouses or adult children behave brusquely, even violently. The Dardennes keep viewers in suspense who will vote for or against, although a pattern of minority workers supporting her is established from her first attempt, a phone call to an unseen worker called Kader, an Arabic name. A white couple, Willy and his wife, explain that they need to pay 600 euro a month for their daughter’s university costs (23:11). We see Willy working at a second job salvaging floor tiles; his backyard, where their conversation takes place, is stacked with them. Willy’s wife reveals that she herself is laid off and on unemployment since February (23:45). We can tell from the birdsong and the flowering bushes by the side of the road that it is now early summer. Across the eurozone, with austerity cuts to entitlements, the conditions for receiving long-term benefits have worsened.

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They usually involve spending down all one owns or saved before one may qualify, with recent changes instituted by Macron in late 2019 demanding that the claimant would have worked six out of the last twenty-four months to be eligible.16 The deindustrialization rate in France is the second highest in the euro zone after Greece, which means that exactly the factory jobs we see in the three features are the ones to disappear. The Dardenne Brothers film in and around Liège in the French-speaking region of Wallonie. In Belgium, worker mobility is curtailed by a highly politicized language barrier: the northern region of Flanders requires speaking Flemish, while French is the official language in the south. The multinational investor-skewed OECD report on Belgium criticizes a wage-setting system that creates high taxes on labor, especially for low-skilled workers.17 Wallonia has almost double the youth unemployment rate (27.9 percent) of the Flanders region (14.1 percent), which puts further pressure on older workers who can easily be replaced unless they are unionized.18 Young people are given fixed-term contracts and have no seniority when it comes to wage disputes, which the minority worker Alphonse explains when he discusses why he is afraid to vote for Sandra. Alphonse is African; in the real-life Belgian workplace, racism against this group is the most pronounced. Alphonse fears punitive action by the foreman because he made some mistakes as he was learning his job as a welder. He fears he will be terminated if he openly shows solidarity with Sandra, and this fear is realized in the conclusion of the film, when M. Dumont announces this bad option to Sandra in exchange for her returning to work. Sandra is not out for self-interest; she covered for another minority worker, Timur, who broke solar cells in his first week on the job. Timur therefore feels obligated to Sandra and chokes up when she approaches him on the soccer field where he coaches young children on the weekend. He almost immediately blurts out that his conscience bothers him because he did not take Sandra’s side and that he will do so now. We observe structural racism at play in the allocation of care labor among the fictional workers, despite the film’s overarching message to make solidarity across skin color and a range of economic circumstances. Aside from Sandra’s husband Manu, a white ethnic, the brunt of the emotional labor of meaningfully supporting Sandra is shifted onto minority workers, who have the most to lose because they are either on fixed-term contracts or work second jobs under the table to make ends meet. The Moroccan character Hicham exemplifies the second job burden when his wife will not tell Sandra where he is and eventually, as Sandra insists she needs to speak to him as she is about to be laid off, calls him

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on her cell phone. Shortly after this scene, Sandra accidentally runs into him in a convenience store where he stocks shelves. Taking her to the back to converse out of earshot, Hicham explains why he refused to vote for Sandra: for him, the bonus equals a year of electricity bills, and the foreman has it in for him because he was on sick leave once (40:37). He also admits that Jean-Marc phoned him to tell him “a person who was sick can’t work as well after” (41:37), even though Hicham knows from personal experience that this is not true. He tells Sandra that he disagrees with Jean-Marc but that he still cannot afford to lose his bonus. He sees that Sandra is dejected. When the Monday vote comes, he is one of the eight who vote for her after all. Out of the eight three are minority men and two are white women; three white men also sacrifice their bonus. The repetition of Jean-Marc’s toxic attempts to influence the vote erodes Sandra’s confidence. She confides in Manu: “He is right, I am not up to it anymore” (43:51). Again, we see Manu perform care labor when he contradicts and consoles her. Manu does this consistently; he models excellent support as he helps Sandra drive to some of the addresses, urges her to take breaks to eat something, and encourages her by keeping a tally of how many she has already swayed. Their loving interaction models a way of being in opposition to the neoliberal paradigm, and it radiates out beyond the couple in the care labor Manu and Sandra show Yvon, an older colleague who gets into a fist fight with his son over Sandra’s demand, or Anne, who needs a place to stay after a serious fight with her husband. On the one hand, Sandra says: “I know they feel like hitting me, and I also feel like hitting them” (taper dessus) (49:37). We witness Lucien’s angry outburst about his and his father’s right to the bonus (On a bossé pour l’avoir) (47:37); he forcefully pushed Sandra away from his father and causes her to fall down and hit her eye, and then punches his father so hard that he falls and loses consciousness. Immediately, Sandra rises, runs to Yvon, and tries to help. Manu does the same; they manage to bring him round with Sandra’s water bottle. Their care-taking labor contrasts with the graphic violence of Lucien, the son, who aggresses his own father and his female co-worker, only to drive off angrily after ordering his girlfriend to get into his car. Lucien takes no responsibility for his rage; he feels entitled to it. This is one of two pivotal moments in the film when internalized neoliberal precepts about warrior-like masculinity are shown up to be destructive of intimacy and friendship. The second instance occurs at midpoint in the film, in a scene where Sandra revisits Anne to see if she has reconsidered, as Anne had promised. As soon as the women begin speaking outside the house, Anne’s husband bursts through the door, grabs Anne, and

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orders her rudely to return inside, while yelling at Sandra: “You find it fun to aggravate people?” (ça Vous amuse de fâcher les gens) (1:03:56). Sandra hears loud arguing behind the door before she turns to leave. Viewers assume that Anne is cowed into submission. Sandra is so discouraged by these displays of male violence and expressed dislike that she briefly retreats to her role of homemaker and mother. A long take shows her making her son’s bed carefully. The children’s bedroom is colorful, indicating that Sandra and Manu try to give their children a happy and imaginative space. There are drawings of ocean creatures on the wall over the bed and plush animals of an octopus and a fish. Sandra carefully places these on the bed. She does another chore. Then, with the same scrupulous attention to order, Sandra empties her whole pack of Xanax into a toothbrush holder, drinks up, rinses the cup, and replaces the empty pill strips back in their package. This scene is filmed from behind Sandra, whose downcast face we can see in the bathroom mirror. This technique of the long take shows the uncanny routinization of domestic labor and is reminiscent of Chantal Akerman’s feminist cinema.19 The mirror scene might also remind cinema buffs of an uncanny scene in Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour where Elle returns to her hotel room after telling the traumatic execution of her German lover during the Nazi invasion of France to her Japanese lover, a survivor of another grave national trauma. Elle addresses her dead lover through her reflection in the mirror and asserts that she is forgetting him and has already forgotten him. Social exclusion and the denial of the right to work are elevated to a national trauma and a feminist issue by this implied parallel with Hiroshima. As Brizé similarly indicates with his title At War, neoliberalism declares war on people’s intimate relationships, their sense of self-worth, and ability to make supportive community. Feminism emerges most openly in the scenes when Anne visits Sandra to tell her she changes her mind and will support her. Sandra smiles for the first time. She then confesses that she just swallowed all her Xanax pills, which means she now does not want to die (1:10:42–1:11:18). After Anne and Manu take her to the hospital, and Sandra regains consciousness having her stomach pumped, she asks Manu whether Anne went home. Manu tells her that Anne stayed and is out in the waiting room. This gesture of solidarity reinvigorates Sandra. She tells Manu that they will still visit the last two people on the list that same night, which is all the more impressive because it contrasts with Sandra’s dejection before, where setbacks made her want to give up. Between the support of her work friend Juliette, who had tried to call her to see how the mission was coming along, the support of Timur, the unexpected support from Yvon, her oldest male

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colleague, and now Anne, the film emphasizes that varied social bonds outside of the heteronormative couple are needed to create community. That such a new altruistic community can be subversive is shown when Anne announces that she is leaving her husband: “I decided to leave my husband. […] It is the first time that I decided anything about my life” (1:14:09). Sandra offers Anne that she can stay with them for the time being. The three of them sign along in the car to the radio show “The Hour of Rock,” to the upbeat song “Gloria” by Them. “Gloria” with its ecstatic line “I feel alright” stands in dramatic counterpoint to the 1966 pop song (performed in French) by British singer Petula Clark, “La nuit n’en finit plus” (Needles and Pins), which Manu and Sandra listen to earlier as they drive. Sandra tells Manu not to turn it off but does not sing along. Clark’s song laments that life seems endless and solitary: Dire qu’il y a tant d’êtres sur la terre Qui comme moi ce soir sont solitaires C’est triste à mourir Quel monde insensé Je voudrais dormir et ne plus penser J’allume une cigarette J’ai des idées noires en tête Et la nuit me parait si longue, si longue, si longue. (To say there are so many humans on earth / Who like me are alone / It is sad to die for / what an unfeeling world / I would like to sleep and no longer think / I light a cigarette / I have black ideas in my head / And night seems so long to me, so long, so long.)

Completely opposed, the joyful chorus of “Gloria” celebrates the arrival of someone you love. This fits with Anne’s comment to Sandra: “I am happy to support you” (Je suis heureuse de te soutenir) (1:16:29). Given the quiet ambient soundscape of the film, these bursts of song stand out as iconic. They are in their own way as beautiful as the pure sound of an unseen warbling bird, as Sandra and Manu sit on a bench eating ice cream cones (43:51). Sandra listens and then comments to Manu: “I would like to be in its (sa) place” (44:16), an ambiguous reference here because “sa place” could also mean “his place,” since Sandra has just then mentioned Jean-Marc’s power position over her and the other factory workers. The class implications here are clear: rather than be a neoliberal operative like Jean-Marc, Sandra would prefer to be like the bird, an allusion to the Sermon on the Mount: “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of

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more value than they?”20 It is clear that Sandra cannot be like the bird; she has to go on toiling, but “Gloria” underscores that the workers rebuild solidarity in the face of uncertainty. Aimee Bahng puts it succinctly in her anti-neoliberal critique of Asian futurities in speculative fiction: “Even amid severe conditions, (this assembly of human and interspecies characters) and their friends enliven worlds of possibility in everyday practices of care.”21

Spatial Segregation in Two Days, One Night Sandra’s physical trajectory to the various homes of her work mates shows up socioeconomic differences among them. On the lowest rung are minority workers like Hicham, whose apartment building suffers regular electricity outages; at the other end of the scale we see Anne’s recently built single-family house in the suburbs. Approaching her house, Sandra is shown in a long panning shot walking along a promontory above the town. Anne and her husband are the only couple among those Sandra visits who plan to use Anne’s bonus for home improvements that are not absolutely necessary: they intend to build a patio out back and perhaps a small retaining wall because “mud flows down” the incline toward their house (il y a la boue qui descend) (54:04). We might well read Anne’s remark symbolically: the upper echelons release “mud” on those further downstream. Interestingly, it is also young white men without children (Anne’s husband and Lucien) who are the most unsympathetic and violent toward women: both push their partners; both grab Sandra’s arm and aggress her: Lucien pushes her away so that she falls backward, while Anne’s husband closes the door in her face. Deleuze and Guattari already realized in 1972 that “the world-wide capitalist machine […] has its organized enclaves of underdevelopment, its reservations and its ghettos as interior peripheries.”22 This spatial division is repeated internally in the division between decrepit apartment blocks in the inner city, then Sclessin, a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts with a gigantic slag heap left over from the days of coal mining, and a sports stadium. These neighborhoods differ markedly from the light and space available on the suburban hills. Both the factory and Anne’s house appear to be in those more affluent locations. We get the sense that most of the workers live far away from the Solwal factory, requiring the use of a car to get to and from work. The minority workers Kader, Timur, Hicham, and Alphonse and their families live in older apartment blocks. Their white colleagues live in modern high rises

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or bungalows in developments a bit more outside the center. Minority spatial isolation is borne out by the 2011 census results for Liège as well as Antwerp and Brussels, which find that “macro/national factors such as housing policies and territorial processes seem to shape the segregation patterns.”23 The authors of the comparative housing study find that the disappearance of urban manufacturing jobs in favor of the new service economy created a bifurcation between a new class of highly paid professionals and low-paid service workers, leading to a rise in residential segregation. It is interesting prior to Sandra’s intervention, very few of the workers socialize outside of work, and if they do, it is only white men with other white men, minority men with other minority men, and so on. While the Dardenne brothers for the most part eschew specific local markers so that the same drama could be taking place in other urban agglomerations, place name clues are dropped from time to time. For example, Anne offers that Manu and Sandra might drop her at “Place Kuborn,” or Manu says that a couple of workers live out in Sclessin. To get to the various addresses, Sandra takes a mixture of buses, walks, or is driven by Manu in the family car. These choices might indicate that driving everywhere uses up too much gas, which is expensive. On the other hand, Sandra is also shown as agentive and determined by repeated shots of her walking in her low-heeled cowboy boots. Wallonie is not shown as having its own distinct local culture; rather its Americanization is notable. The semi-detached housing and streets are bland enough that they could be anywhere in the Global North. The food the family eat is either at the cafeteria Lunch Garden, where Manu works, or they consume take-out (pizza), or small bakery items (pizzetta, sandwich). They do not spend money on nutritious unprocessed food, which also signals that they are poor and always short on time. Deleuze and Guattari observe: “[B]ehind all this, there is an economic situation: the mother reduced to housework, or to a difficult and uninteresting job on the outside; children whose future remains uncertain; the father who has had it with feeding all those mouths … an unbearable economic dependence.”24 We witness Sandra’s desire to withdraw and die because for the first half of the film, she internalizes the social exclusion imposed on her. Her ongoing efforts to advocate for herself revolve around her value as a worker, but she also asserts that someone who was depressed still has the right to work and be acknowledged as a person. Sandra becomes more self-confident after her failed suicide attempt; for example, she persuades a reluctant colleague on a temporary contract to vote for her, arguing their names will be secret in the revote (1:20:46), but her efforts are not uncontested: late in the film, Julien argues in favor of capitalist efficiency and self-interest. He asks why the owners would increase the numbers back to

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seventeen employees, once they realize they can get the work done with one less. He also argues that everyone is glad to make a bit of extra cash, claiming self-interest trumps loyalty. His kind of capitalist realism is revealed as a cynical denial of his co-worker’s humanity and workplace rights. Showing suicide on screen breaks a taboo, as Brizé notes in the voiceover for Measure, and yet worker suicides occur often as a result of harassment at work.25 In a landmark case in late 2019, three Telekom executives were convicted of triggering a spate of thirty-five worker suicides, implementing company-wide policies aimed at demoralizing workers so that they would quit. The Dardennes (more optimistically than Brizé) show white industrial workers finding common ground with postcolonial workers of the Global South. The communist activist Bifo Berardi has given up hope that such alliances can be forged:26 Divested of a strategic horizon of social emancipation, unable to recognize exploitation as their common lot and their common ground of identification, Western workers are following nationalist agendas in order to avert the effects of globalization, and resorting to nationalist and racist forms of identification.27

He also states succinctly that “only the emergence of a third actor, that is, conscious solidarity among workers beyond the limits of nations, may dispel the final catastrophe.”28 The Dardenne brothers depict various instances of successful outreach across difference in the service of building a community. Brizé amplifies the theme of injured moral dignity and the fight to retrieve it through collective action-taking in the neoliberal workplace. In the next chapter, solidarity-making between workers is focused on insisting on the dignity of labor, a legacy of the socialist workplace, and resisting the anonymity and neoliberal hierarchies at a wholesale market in the former East German provinces. The struggle for worker’s rights is more muted against this backdrop because neoliberal capitalism was introduced so brutally and rapidly, pushing aside reformers and protesters alike who had hoped for a new Germany with a modified socialism.

Notes 1 2

Hito Steyerl, “Is a Museum a Factory?,” in The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 65. Women made up just 30 percent of the top 10 percent of French earners in 2012. See Bertrand Garbinti, Jonathan Goupille-Lebret, and Thomas Piketty, “Income

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6

7 8 9

10

11 12 13

14 15 16

Screening Solidarity Inequality in France,” in World Inequality Report 2018, ed. Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 101. Martin O’Shaughnessy, The New Face of Political Cinema: Commitment in French Film since 1995 (London: Berghahn Books, 2008), 23. O’Shaughnessy, 31. La France Insoumise, October 20, 2020, https://lafranceinsoumise.fr/2020/10/20/ partout-en-france-les-jeunes-insoumises-font-vivre-une-rentree-pleine-de-lutteset-de-propositions/. Bernard Garbinti, Jonathan Gupille-Lebret, and Thomas Piketty, “Income Inequality in France,” in World Inequality Report 2018, ed. Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, 106. Ibid., 107. Godard cited in Steyerl, 69. For a critique of the neoliberal redefinition of the relationship between state and market, see Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (New York: Verso, 2013), 56–8. Pauline Bock, “Emmanuel Macron’s Year of Cracking Heads,” Foreign Policy, November 29, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/29/emmanuel-macronsfranceyellow-jackets-police-europe-year-of-cracking-heads/. Accessed February 11, 2020. See also: Physicians for Human Rights, “French Court Decision to Allow Police Rubber Bullets Violates UN Principles,” February 6, 2019, https://phr.org/news/ french-court-decision-to-allow-police-rubber-bullet-use-violates-un-principles/. McKenzie Wark, “Capitalism—or Worse?” in Capital Is Dead. Is This Something Worse? (New York: Verso, 2019), 45. Wark, 45–6. Mirowski, 61 unpacks “rationality” as a hallmark of neoliberal thinking: “In practice, neoliberals can’t let others contemplate too long that their peculiar brand of freedom is not the realization of any political, human, or cultural telos, but rather the positing of autonomous self-governed entities, all coming naturally equipped with some version of ‘rationality’ and motives of ineffable self-interest, striving to improve their lot in life by engaging in market exchange.” Mirowski, 92 makes this point. Mirowski, 118. For 2014, the rate was 4.5 percent, the second highest number between 2005 and 2018. See https://www.statista.com/statistics/459886/long-term-unemploymentfrance/. Long term is counted as twelve months or more. For the 2019 cuts by Macron, a neoliberal investment banker before he became president in 2017, see Déborah Claude and Clare Byrne, “Unemployment: 200,000 Jobless People in France Set to Lose Benefits,” The Local, November 1, 2019, https://www.thelocal.

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26 27 28

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fr/20191101/hundreds-of-thousands-of-jobless-people-in-france-set-to-losebenefits. Accessed February 20, 2020. OECD, “Economic Policy Reforms 2019: Going for Growth,” https://www.oecd.org/ economy/growth/Top-2019-economic-reform%20priorities-2019.pdf. Accessed February 21, 2020. See “Context Analysis: Liege, Belgium,” Atlas of Transitions: New Geographies for a Cross-Cultural Europe (2017–2020), 1. http://www.atlasoftransitions.eu/wp-content/ uploads/2018/03/CONTEXT-ANALYSIS-Belgium_HL.pdf. For racism in the labor market against Afro-descendants, it states: “[S]ome nationalities or secondgeneration migrants (Congolese, Moroccan) are particularly excluded […] around 60% of the Afro-descendants are educated, but they are four times more likely to be unemployed than the national average, and 80% said they have been victims of discrimination from a very young age.” Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, dir. Chantal Akerman) uses protracted scenes of the widowed female lead (mother to a teenage son who is off in school during the day) making up the bed after she sexually serviced customers there to supplement her meager income. Similarly, when Jeanne shops for food, she is increasingly dejected. Sandra is scripted analogously, as she frequently enters bakeries for water or cheap snacks, looking down and leaving quickly. For Sandra, the marriage bed is a site where she retreats to be alone when the pressure mounts. However, she cannot relax; her existential misery drives her as she cannot fall asleep. Matthew 6:26-34, The Bible, New King James Version, https://www.biblegateway. com/passage/?search=Matthew+6%3A26-34&version=NKJV. Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 132. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 231. Rafael Costa and Helga de Valk, “Ethnic and Socioecomonic Segregation in Belgium: A Multiscalar Approach Using Individual Neighbourhoods,” European Journal of Population 34:2 (2018): 225–50, 225, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ articles/PMC6241109. Accessed February 21, 2020. Deleuze and Guattari, 356–7. See kmm/ng, “France: Orange Top Bosses Caused Employee Suicides, Rules Court,” Deutsche Welle, December 12, 2019, https://www.dw.com/en/france-orange-topbosses-caused-employee-suicides-rules-court/a-51751140. Accessed February 24, 2020. Bifo Berardi, The Second Coming (Medford, MA: Polity Books, 2019), 23. Berardi, 25. Ibid., 34.

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Arts of Resistance in the Post-Socialist Workplace Patricia Anne Simpson

In her introduction to a collection about neoliberalism and ethnography, Carol J. Greenhouse argues that neoliberal reform “has restructured the most prominent public relationships that constitute belonging: politics, markets, work, and self-identity.”1 She further proposes that under the sway of neoliberalism economics overtakes political science; as a result, inquiries through the lens of ethnography and culture accrue significance. Screening anti-neoliberal cinema across national film cultures, we can identify a range of responses to the self-optimization imperatives dictated by the new work order. The economic “shock therapy” Tomas Matza describes in post-socialist Russia reverberated throughout unified Germany, though the juggernaut of neoliberal capitalism imposed by West German policies nonetheless sent shock waves felt in the former German Democratic Republic. As the logic of late capitalism devolves into a global dystopia, so poignantly reflected in the genre of science fiction, narratives that emerge from the interstitial spaces of the marketplace’s brutality call attention to the human dimension of work and its hermeneutics. Fredric Jameson’s perspicacious description still applies: “What ‘late’ capitalism generally conveys is rather the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive.”2 This assessment, conceptualized in 1991, anticipates the dialectical force of neoliberalism that accompanies the collapse of the three-world model. From classical Marxist thought, in which the need for resources and markets drives imperialism, colonialism, and industrialization, displacing work and workers to geographies

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beyond Europe, the practices of neoliberalism ostensibly saturate globally in the pursuit of corporate profit. Processes of transnational corporatization that reduce the human being to its capacity to function as a working, consuming body has garnered attention in the Global South and East, regions of alterity, resource exploitation, and postcolonial chaos. The new “European” states, formerly relegated geographically to the “east” in their controlled market economies and regulated public spheres, continue to undergo a period of rupture, visible since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the establishing of the European Union, and the displacement of manufacturing farther east. In the literary and visual arts, a generation of writers and filmmakers probes the edges of the neoliberal marketplace in a search for vestiges of hope. In the collaborative effort between Clemens Meyer and Thomas Stuber, the film In den Gängen (2018; In the Aisles, 2019) inhabits a Großmarkt (wholesale market) and posits its aisles as a post-socialist heterotopic space in which a socialist ideology of labor and the inherent dignity of workers persists, despite the turbo-charged consumerism and relentless banality of the environment. Stuber’s film thematizes the purportedly invisible forces of the neoliberlization of eastern German work. Immediately after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Federal Republic of Germany’s own neoliberal agenda governed the rapid annexation of East German territory and the deliberate ruination of any of its still viable businesses by the “trust,” an agency charged with its devolution (Treuhand). Its overarching goal was to transform the new states into a landscape that would be attractive to foreign investors. To finance the restructuring, a so-called solidarity tax of 5.5 percent (Solidaritätszuschlag or “Soli”), introduced in 1991 and ended in 2021, paid over the next thirty years to modernize the ailing infrastructure and clean up environmental damage. Big global investors like the Chinese would in turn, so they speculated, bring jobs to the eastern regions and develop consumer appetite for Western and international goods. This never happened. The 2020 Annual Report on the Status of German Unity revealed 10 percent lower pay in the East, higher unemployment, and a third lower economic output compared to the rest of Germany.3 Clemens Meyer’s laconic short story collection Die Nacht, die Lichter (2008) chronicles the local eastern effects of the turnaround (Wende) and quite literally provides the script for a filmic exploration of the bleak New World Order and possible moments of resistance in In the Aisles (2018), on which Meyer and director Thomas Stuber,4 another Easterner, collaborated. Their modest budget of 340,000 euros cobbled together from a mixture of funding sources,

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for example, the Franco-German art film channel ARTE and regional German TV boards, such as Mark Brandenburg, Baden-Württemberg (whose film academy Stuber attended), shows the tight neoliberal conditions under which contemporary German filmmakers operate. Adding star vehicle Sandra Hüller, the seasoned female lead who had helped create Maren Ade’s box office success Toni Erdmann (2016), as well as male lead Franz Rogowski, who had previously acted in films by internationally known directors that won prizes—Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2017) and Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018)—ensured the attention of their fan base and distributors. Meyer and Stuber collaborated on the screenplay, which revolves around the protagonist Christian Gruvert: he works the night shift, stocking shelves and mastering forklift navigation. The film provides backstories for the characters, applying nearly equal pressure to each of the three protagonists (Christian, Marion, and Bruno) and dividing the film structurally in accordance with the tripartite approach; each is engaged in practicing modest arts of resistance to the machinery of well-oiled capitalism. The film delineates the consequences of neoliberalism on the everyday, the slow unfolding of history. The end of the Cold War triggered an abrupt transition, even ruptures, from planned to unregulated economies. A series of corollary events ensued, including German unification (1990), the Velvet Revolution, the official demise of the Soviet Union (1991), and later EU membership for some former Warsaw Pact states. When, in 2005, Thomas L. Friedman numbered the fall of the Berlin Wall the first of his ten global “flatteners,” events of globalization in the early twenty-first century, he did so with equanimity; the epithet seems nearly anodyne in retrospect.5 The access to market economies for the former second and third worlds struck a transiently optimistic chord. In the Aisles portrays workers who cannot share that optimism. In his foundational critique of neoliberalism, David Harvey characterizes neoliberalism as a form of capitalism marked by dispossession; foremost among its attributes is privatization.6 Through the politics of economic reform after the fall of the Wall and breakup of the Soviet Union, Western economists advanced a neoliberal agenda. With reference to the work of Jeffrey Sachs and others among whom there was consensus about the need to accelerate reforms, Patrick Hamm, David Stuckler, and Lawrence King observed that “[n]eoliberals expected that unless firms were privatized during the brief window of opportunity afforded by the period of ‘extraordinary politics’ following the collapse of communism, managers and workers of state-owned enterprises would seek to halt, or even roll back, privatization and liberalization efforts in order to prevent lay-offs and

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other unpopular consequences of restructuring.”7 The rush to privatization, based on global models generated in the Global North and West, but extended to the South and East through globalization, had staggering impacts on the ceded territory of Eastern and Central Europe. The stories of those workers remaindered or left in precarity by the “loss” of ideological investment in the means of production rarely received the attention that economic statistics did. This does not imply that the workers necessarily owned factories or property; nor did the state socialism deliver on the rhetoric of empowering the worker and farmer. The narratives of new accommodation in the impersonal retail and wholesale worlds of consumption emerge from the nexus of personal and political efforts to survive the workplace with something like dignity. For the loss of even illusory sovereignty feeds the nostalgia for the socialist workplace and a political system that, however flawed and abusive it may have been, was propped up by a sense of collectivity. Those models invite reexamination because of the historical collapse in controlled markets of the European east, involving primarily privatization of a different antecedent. The verbal and visual texts considered in this chapter prompt that reconsideration of a political, rather than corporate economics and the consequences of their collapse. Consonant with socialist rhetoric of eastern states under the umbrella of Soviet influence, GDR-specific ideology of labor and the valorization of the working body links it with a socialist gender politics rarely, if ever, realized in practice and daily life.8 Despite the rhetoric, the GDR model worker skews male. Scholars have conceptualized heteronormative hegemonic masculinity in groundbreaking ways, but these tend toward under-examined topographies. The eastern states of Germany repudiated the militarized masculinity of the Western male workforce, sublimating defeat into a work ethic that fueled the economic miracle. Instead, the dutiful, monumentalized socialist man, working to build the utopian state, established the ideal. Yet both men and women worked; theoretical equality was guaranteed on paper, though seldom did this emancipation result in anything but the notorious “double burden” for east German women.9 Recent studies of gender relationships in the former eastern states profile the self-reliant Ostfrau and the underemployed Ostmann.10 However disparately gendered attributes affect quality of life and personal satisfaction, the ultimate political effects of privatization and globalization in the eastern states levels the working field for many unskilled Germans, resulting in downward mobility. The “in the aisles” project, I argue, constitutes a quest for gendered working identities that do not replicate the power imbalance between men and

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women; that enact intersubjective relationships with a redemptive potential transcending conventional romance; and that foster an ethos of recycled rather than remaindered bodies. The political economy of the former GDR as portrayed in the story and film trickles down into the work environment in the new global marketplace. Poised between the utopian past and dystopian present, the Großmarkt as mise-en-scène constructs a hybrid space, regulated by excess and scarcity. The ostensible plenitude and overabundance of the wholesale market proves to be a surface, undergirded by a thrift that dominates work life among the laboring dispossessed. The local arena of the heterotopia encapsulates the global economy. The dispossessed workers scrounge among the surfeit of consumable goods while delivering them to the shelves for purchase. The regulation of their actions, behaviors, and bodies dominates the space; and they internalize that regulation. On a global scale, the process of dispossession and “savage sorting”11 takes on particular importance in relation to production resources— but also human labor. Under these conditions, workers assert their humanity in acts of resistance, however banal. These often undignified, diminishing acts are burnished into glimpses of accomplishment and even beauty; they are especially poignant in the former eastern states, where the hope of prosperity equal to that enjoyed by their Western counterparts was overtaken by the juggernaut first of unification and then by globalization. Any residual concept of the sovereign human body and dignity of labor had deteriorated. In place of a borderless national and transnational union, a new European map, one crisscrossed with dehumanizing displacement, downward mobility, and the debris of formerly more robust social welfare protections, has emerged. All bear witness to a constant conflict enacted on the territory of the human body. When the focus turns to ethnic German victims of globalization, frequently the discourse dwells on the politics of paranoia amplified by the far right. Robin DiAngelo, who began writing about “white fragility” in 2011, prefaces this debate. In brief, she argues that whites, insulated from race-based stress, are complicit in the enforcement of institutional and everyday racism.12 In contrast, Meyer and Stuber’s intervention rehabilitates the humanity of a beleaguered body, perched on a low rung of the neoliberal food chain. With historical updates, the possibility of common cause among workers’ bodies inscribes itself into the narrative of neoliberal globalization. Arguably, this development mirrors the evolution of the transnational trend in “German” film toward realism, the articulation of which potentially

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reimagines the present and immediate future. Such was the project of the Berlin School of cinema. As Marco Abel writes: “Understood this way—as attempting to wrestle away utopian images from preexisting social reality— the Berlin School films can be regarded as a cinema that is engaged in the difficult task to improve Germany’s reality in the age of post-wall globalization by providing better images for it.”13 In contrast to the earlier films of Andreas Dresen, Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, and others, the romanticization of the banal in the films and works of the late 2010s instead punctures the real with the emptiness of aestheticization of experience as potential refuge from reality. And yet. Meyer, with the publication of his novel Im Stein (2008) and the appearance of its accomplished English translation (Bricks and Mortar, 2016), underwent an image transformation, from the voice of a lost generation, narrated in the novel Als wir träumten (While We Were Dreaming, 2007), which was adapted for film by Andreas Dresen, to an internationally recognizable figure in the European literary landscape. The novel, long-listed for the International Man Booker Prize, helped secure a wider reputation. Scholars have argued about the criteria of world literature with its echoes of Goethean Weltliteratur still audible. In her work on Meyer, Frauke Matthes argues that his singularity constitutes the ability to write “transnationally,” which in turn enables “universalizability.”14 Matthes notes the “transnational turn” in much contemporary literature and her interpretation of the more recent novel in that context are convincing. My aim, however, is to take a wider approach to the specifically post-socialist workplace as itself the constitutive element of experience under the conditions of latecapitalist neoliberalism. The film seizes the opportunity to visualize the effects of downward mobility on the workers. Defining the workspace cinematically strengthens the impact of the quotidian as spectacle. The wholesale market encapsulates the granularity of worker’s existence. Suspended between the empty rhetoric of a real existing socialist state, comprised of empowered, enfranchised farmers and workers and the either/or of un- or underemployment under the neoliberal market economy, the work crew “in the aisles” occupies the space between utopia and the dystopia of science fiction. The film accents the heterotopian elements in the fictional prose. In his lecture on utopian and heterotopic spaces, Michel Foucault outlines the characteristics of the latter once he establishes the virtual nature of the former. Heterotopias constitute hybrid spaces:

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On the one hand they perform the task of creating a space of illusion that reveals how all of real space is more illusory, all the locations within which life is fragmented. On the other, they have the function of forming another space, another real space, as perfect, meticulous, and well-arranged as ours is disordered, ill-conceived, and in a sketchy state.

The shelves, always fully stocked, create the illusion of plenitude, endless supply awaiting demand from the members-only consumer. Images of this economy driven by apparent excess render the represented real spaces outside the aisles ancillary, except for their ability to foster consumption: the highway, a seedy bar, a depressing apartment, and a nearly empty parking lot are rendered illusory and fragmented. The aisles, a break room with a coffee machine, “Sibirien” (deep freezer), and the “Meer” (sea), tanks where the live fish and seafood await stock and purchase, assert an illusion of perfection, mimicking the environments for fresh meat in the food chain. The hybrid space of the wholesale market, the taxonomy of which divides into the realms “Food” and “Non-Food,” is both illusory and hyper-real in that all desires can be fulfilled, all needs met, all surfaces spotless. The cost of accessing the heterotopian space, regulated by membership—ostensibly open only to small businesses and suppliers—includes the barely perceptible humanity of the workers. The heterotopian space derives its considerable authority from its commentary on the fate of neoliberal workers. The figures in the story and screenplay assume generational traits that align with degrees of exposure to the camaraderie of workers in socialist collectives. The elder characters, among them Bruno, recall a time when their work had meaning, even if that significance differed from glorified socialist realist image of monumentality propagated by the state apparatus. In Deaths of Despair, Anne Case and Angus Deaton write about the experience of American workers who suffer from global devaluation of human labor identity: “We tell the story not only of death but of pain and addiction and of lives and have come apart and have lost their structure and significance.”15 While they focus on conditions in the United States, their conclusions resonate among the demographic in the former eastern states of the Federal Republic. Often connected with the rise of social movements such as the Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West, PEGIDA), with its epicenter in Dresden, or the voting demographic supporting the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD), the disgruntled (former East)

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German man of middle age, embodied in the now stereotyped Ostmann, suffers from diseases of despair but reasserts a vociferous hypermasculinity through identitarian, xenophobic, racist, and sexist postures and practices. The workers in the aisles of this heterotopia resist that alternative in ways that constitute arts of resistance to despair. They do not consistently succeed. In order to elaborate the aisles’ critical commentary on neoliberal capitalism and its depredations, it is necessary to establish the socialist parameters of the story and film. Residual ideologies of the exemplary worker as hero, though discredited and discarded in the aftermath of German unification in 1990, nonetheless shape the identity of the protagonist, Christian Gruvert. Moreover, these vestiges of worker solidarity motivate the crew—their interactions and acts of defiance preserve a sense of the GDR brigade—and inform their intersubjective relationships. Without the ideological infrastructure of state socialist valorization of work, the employees act out against corporate rules: they feast on dumpstered food that has neared or exceeded its expiration date, play chess on the job, and gleefully joy-ride on the forklifts. These antics play out against the backdrop of personal isolation. Bruno, for example, maintains a supportive and jovial manner on the job. When he invites Christian for a drink, he pretends to have a wife. After Bruno’s suicide, we see the core group of six workers who were hired by the store from their old Volkseigener Betrieb (VEB, worker’s collective): they commiserate about the loss of their colleague, his lonely life, and their despondence. In the aisles, they are far removed from the updraft of meaningful work. Still, a cadre of GDR writers and filmmakers wrestled with the state apparatus that generated and projected the image of a socialist paradise. On screen, Meyer and Stuber inscribe marginalized lives, driven by decency, some to despair, who engage in acts of mechanized labor they manage to humanize. The elaborations of the workers’ histories in the film and how they supplement the short story portray a struggle to survive under the harsh conditions of neoliberal capitalism that lead to incarceration, domestic violence, and addiction. Within the acts of labor, arts of resistance emerge to sustain the lives of those born beyond socialism.

Cinema of the Workplace The construction of space in the story and film reinvent the consumer experience for post-socialist globalization. Meyer and Stuber have cooperated before to occupy the post-proletariat milieu in the collapse of structured lives

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into precarity. In the 2015 collaboration, Herbert (A Heavy Heart), Peter Kurth, who plays Bruno in In the Aisles, stars as a former boxer in post-socialism, working in reduced, marginally criminalized circumstances as a debt collector and enforcer who succumbs to the disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The cinematic adaptation profiles the content of the story and protagonist’s excruciatingly undignified downfall. In this and the more recent film, Stuber’s directing stays within the realm of convention. Abel writes of many directors of the Berlin School that they “embrace thoroughly conventional film aesthetics and narrative strategies.”16 This unobtrusive aesthetic, and it is one, accents realism, intensifying the moments of grace and recourse to the unseen nonetheless extracted from the story. Not of the Berlin cohort, Stuber does not innovate as much as he effectively underlines visually some stylistic and existential elements of the literary prose in order to tell stories about bodies. When Christian dresses for work every day, equipped with a box cutter, he adjusts his coat collar and sleeves to hide tattoos that distinguish him from other bodies. In the story, his nametag has gone missing. In the film, Stuber repeats this sequence multiple times (18:00; 25:29; 41:55; 50:33; 56:30; 1:40:07) to indicate the grind of routine and the disappearance of the material body into the be-smocked stock boy. When Rudi, the boss, first fits Christian for a smock, he notices the inked skin and admonishes him to keep it covered (3:05). In a scene added to the screenplay, Christian examines himself while standing before a mirror with the written mantra: “So sieht Dich der Kunde” (56:43; this is how the customer sees you). From the workplace perspective, the viewer sees the customer gain importance as that of the worker diminishes. Anyone who ever shopped in a GDR-era “Kaufhalle 8. Mai,” with grim, no-frills interiors and empty shelves, will recognize a radical semantic shift in this Westernized “the customer is king” attitude. Another noteworthy formal strategy: the absence of establishing shots. As spectators, our vision is limited by the aisles. Nearly all shots are interior, except for brief glimpses of the tree-lined highway and the near-empty parking lot, shot at such a wide angle that such frames eschew any central reference. Brilliantly cast, the ensemble work transcends individual performances, though these, too, have been duly recognized. Frank Rogowski plays Christian with thickskinned vulnerability; the performance earned him a 2018 Deutscher Filmpreis. Sandra Hüller, also a Silver Bear winner and internationally familiar from her stunning performance in Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, brings a combination of toughness and innocence to Marion. Kurth, familiar to international viewers

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from other roles, such as Bruno Wolter in Babylon Berlin, is the understated number one man in the beverages department, Bruno (no last name), a seasoned worker who is admired by all but quietly longs for the open road and a sense of expansiveness, withheld by his diminished circumstances and underscored by the circumscribed cinematography, with its subtle challenges to mainstream filmmaking techniques. Formally and substantively, the film keeps the spectators in our lane. The cinematic interpretation of In the Aisles about diminished and diminishing existence relies for its considerable power on the supplementation of the characters’ stories, references to the local conditions of labor that exacerbate the challenges of adjustment to global trends.

Workers of the East Unite The socialist state on German soil organized itself on the premise of collective labor and ownership of the means of production. This founding principle, though it proved impossible to realize, enjoyed support and endorsement from the official culture of the GDR. The high points of the East German emphasis on the worker extend to the Bitterfelder Weg (Bitterfeld Path), a state-sponsored effort to inspire/require workers to write about their experiences that originated in the city of Bitterfeld in 1959; the region was dominated by chemical production. To further the advancing of a national culture devoted to the portrayal of real existing socialism, visual artists depicted workers in monumental, heroic postures in the genre of socialist realism. Writers embraced and were embraced by the political elite. Christa Wolf, in her novel Der geteilte Himmel (1963; They Divided the Sky, 2013), undertakes narrating a political love story fractured not only by the physical building of the Berlin Wall but by the commitment of the young female protagonist to the ideals of socialism and her workers’ collective. The 1964 film Spur der Steine (Traces of Stone), starring Manfred Krug, displays the camaraderie achievable within a workers’ team but also features their irreverent attitude toward authority. In order to meet their goals, in itself worthy and orthodox, they nick supplies from other teams. Caught swimming by a police officer, they end up pulling him into the water. The film was shelved. The regime change ushered in by Erich Honecker in 1971 bore witness to an ostensible relief from repressive cultural controls, leading to a period of “neue Subjektivität” or new subjectivity. In reality, throughout the 1970s, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) state expanded the network of “Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter”

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(IMs, unofficial collaborators) in all facets of GDR life. A generation “born into socialism” or hineingeboren, the title of Uwe Kolbe’s 1980 volume of poetry, thus rebelled against the political and cultural institutions that promised utopia but delivered a grim reality instead. The emergence of home-grown punk explicitly indicted the rhetoric of state socialism throughout the 1980s and was met with increased persecution from the Stasi. One refrain from a popularized song by the Skeptiker exemplifies this critique: “Glück und Ruh, alle Zeit, Arbeit und Sicherheit, Sicherheit, Glück und Ruh, woran zweifelst du?” (Happiness and peace for all time, work and security, security and work, what’s your problem?). The type of critique voiced by official and (repressed) popular culture alike culminates in Helke Misselwitz’s documentary Winter Adé (Goodbye, Winter), a series of interviews with women about their daily lives. Despite its welcoming reception at the 1988 Leipzig film festival and its official status as a DEFA production, the film was shelved. The reality of women workers’ lives in this documentary proved a melancholy commentary on the status of women and work in what would be final gasp of GDR socialism.

Acts of Labor The pride in accomplishment supposedly associated with fruitful labor eludes the neoliberal workplace. Yet a residual hunger for meaning in work motivates the protagonist of this fiction and film. In the story, Christian introduces himself as a shelf-stocker with previous work experience on a construction site. Lowest on the totem pole, he performed the demolition and heavy lifting. The contractor, we learn, hails from Bavaria and qualifies as an “Arschloch,” but the narrative voice of Christian adds that he knows other Bavarians who are explicitly not worthy of the epithet.17 A crew of Portuguese migrant workers lives in the boss’s basement, differently exploited by him, but protected from firing by their skilled labor and low wages, rounds out the team. The inciting incident (in the story) transpires during an attic demolition: Christian and presumably other German workers discover a pigeon graveyard, noting that two still survived among the feathers, bones, and decaying parts. Their status among the living was recognizable “nur an ihren Augen und den Köpfen, die sich ab und an ein wenig bewegten” (only their eyes and their heads that occasionally moved a bit), a sign that they were waiting.18 The Germans summon a Portuguese worker to kill them with the spade of a shovel. After this, they all take an early lunch and exceed their allotted

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time, with red wine flowing. Sitting and staring into space, Christian lingers as well. The boss upbraids him—worse, labels him a “faules Schwein” (lazy pig). The protagonist’s response: he whacks both sides of the boss’s head with his cement-encrusted glove. While the Portuguese workers congratulate Christian on his rebellion, they are otherwise unscathed by the events. Christian defends himself in the narrative: “Und ich war kein faules Schwein auch wenn ich die Mittagspause ein wenig überzogen hatte” (And I wasn’t a lazy pig, even if I had taken a longer lunch break than usual).19 He embarks on a mission to prove his work ethic. In the film, Christian has done time and acquired a group of exfriend/losers who taunt and tempt him (50:59), and he tends toward alcohol abuse, especially after he falls back into the bar scene with his unsavory friends who call him “Chrissi.” Amid these affronts and frailties, his masculinity remains predicated on the ability to perform the work he has been assigned. In the film, this moment of self-defense as worker with an ethic constitutes a bonding opportunity with Marion. A troubled marriage lurks in the private background to the workplace stories as they unfold and intersect. Marion, too, has assumed characteristics of real existing ex-East Germans. In both the story and the film, her husband is described as an “Arschloch.” When other workers notice that Christian is drawn to her, they intervene. The heavily smoking, constantly coughing Irina who works with Marion in sweets warns him against hurting her. Bruno, too, notices the attraction and cautions him. In the middle of a forklift-driving lesson, Bruno observes that Christian likes Marion (41:00). In the lavatory, sneaking a cigarette, Bruno again comments on the escalation of affection: you’re in love with her (47:58), conceding that she needs someone to treat her well. In the story, the older character mentions that he met the husband once at the company party. In the film, he supplies backstory: The husband lost his job, joined the ranks of the unemployed, and became embittered. We only catch a glimpse of a photograph depicting Marion and her husband (a cameo appearance by Clemens Meyer). When Bruno sees how greatly Christian is suffering—Marion has been out sick for three weeks—he confides further details in his young colleague while they observe unpurchased fish in the “Meer” department. Reluctantly, Bruno says: “Ihr Mann ist nicht gut zu ihr, habe ich gehört” (1:19:32; her husband doesn’t treat her well, so I’ve heard). The film sketches an abuser who beats his wife. The workplace relationship functions in a compensatory way, supplying emotional horizons as private bonds deteriorate. Work and private life, in defiance of all corporate regulations, leap their parallel tracks on occasion. The neoliberal workplace

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represses the individuality of the workers; regulates their bodies; puts in place reprisals for their indulgences and addictions; and monitors their thoughts and actions with motivational platitudes and security cameras. Still, the characters in the aisles integrate defiance into the routine.

Arts of Resistance Meyer and Stuber brilliantly incorporate the details of lives surviving on the scraps of the wholesale abundance in the aisles. All the behaviors that are strictly forbidden, such as smoking, stealing, drinking, and snacking on the expired goods, are both indulged and hidden. The aisles project, the story and collaborative work on the film, inventories the “diseases of despair” that afflict the global workforce in the twenty-first century. The most obvious among these is smoking. During Bruno’s “famous fifteen” (9:10)—he manages to extend breaks indefinitely—smoking is priority (6:16), as is nudging forward a longstanding chess game with the colleague who sells cartons of cigarettes. He and Christian smoke as if they were drawing their last breath. Irina’s chronic cough becomes part of the soundtrack. Within a limited frame, one lavatory scene is shot from above the stalls with puffs of smoke rising from one on the far end (20:20). We learn that even the manager smokes in the lavatory. In the revelatory scene about Marion’s husband, the dialogue takes place in the bathroom stall (48:58). This sequence shows the limits of everyday defiance. Christian and Bruno finish their smoke; they extinguish their cigarettes in the toilet. Then Bruno wraps the butts in toilet paper so they will flush, leaving no visible trace (50:18). On the dock, Bruno and Christian smoke during a break; the former gazes out through the fence that frames the shot of them looking out at the highway, and the cigarette brand prompts his story about the VEB that preceded the Großmarkt. The cigarettes, f6, was a brand that originated in the GDR, produced by VEB Dresdner Zigarettenfabriken.20 Bruno associates the cigarette brand with his work driving a truck and knowing he was near home. He shares this part of his personal history, also mentioning that his wife cared for their home, just a short drive from the present real estate. In this moment, he says that she still does, though this turns out to be a fabrication. Again, they finish the cigarettes and dialogue. Bruno puts out his cigarette on a container and takes away the butt; Christian follows suit (54:23). Though technically their smoking is insubordinate, they stop short of violating the rules in flagranti.

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In the story, the market divides into food and not-food; the film only depicts the crew in the food section. The workers carry out their stocking and sales tasks surrounded by consumables, yet eating the goods is prohibited. Still, the workers consume food they are responsible for removing from the shelves if the product has neared or exceeded its expiration dates. In one sequence, we see Christian, with his usual zeal, trashing cartons of expired goods at the dock lined with dumpsters. The manager Rudi approaches, sends him back to work with Bruno, and warns him not to get caught eating the stuff, or he would lose his smock, therefore his job (25:48). Casually, the boss takes a package of wurst from the dumpster, grabs one, takes a bite, and comments: “Gute Wurst” (26:25; good wurst). Conforming to the situational work ethic, Christian learns to decipher the mixed messages sent by management. Defying the ban signals his interest in “Süßwaren-Marion.” Again at the loading dock, he notices something while dumping the contents of a shopping cart. After a quick look around, he grabs cake and pockets it (42:32) and helps celebrate her birthday by nicking chocolate dessert from the garbage. He then finds her in the break room, asks her to close her eyes and hold out her hand, lights a single candle, and delicately places the piece in her palm. With his box cutter, he serves them. Christian asks what she would wish for: “Alles” (43:27; everything). As he clears these rites of employment passage, his nickname, “Frischling” (newbie), recedes. The moment of intimacy comes to an abrupt halt when the name “Herr Gruvert” blasts into the break room. He is needed in the aisles. Along with the actual nicking of food, it seems human proximity and emotional evidence in the workplace are equally prohibited. Dehumanizing the workers, a seemingly intended consequence of supermarket chain’s ethos, puts consumables and human labor on the same plane. With the goal of optimizing human efficiency with mechanical help, machinery extends the strength of the worker. In this film, the forklift and its operation enjoy a status. Like all aspects of the market’s functioning, access to the forklifts is regulated. Central to Christian’s integration into the worker’s collective identity is his ability to learn its navigation. Mentored by Bruno, the rookie undergoes a steep learning curve to drive the vehicle safely. Marion operates hers with ease, even a sense of adventure. Bruno brings his own sense of practiced casualness and skill to the task; he exercises extreme caution in lending the beast to less trustworthy workers. In coaching Christian, Bruno’s advice to remain relaxed, not be so hectic, hints at the older man’s life and work experience. Some alliance between the worker and vehicle is formed in the film that suggests possible moments of transcendence to defy the behaviors that enliven the monotony.

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The forklift itself takes center stage. The film opens with a wide-angle shot of streetlights, possibly either at dusk or dawn, and a few cars dot a parking lot as a few others speed past on the highway. With motor sounds audible (1:59), the viewer first hears the forklift with an interior shot of the operator’s back, privileging the machine over its driver. In this way, the film imbues the forklifts with nearly agentic power, as demonstrated in the crafting of the soundtrack. After the title In den Gängen appears (2:55), forklifts begin crossing paths. Stuber choreographs them in motion to strains of Johann Strauß’s “An der schönen Blauen Donau” (Blue Danube) waltz, itself a classical cliché. In this context, some viewers might recall the “Dance of the Cranes” from summer 1996, when Daniel Barenboim, equipped with hard hat and signaling flags, conducted nineteen cranes to sway in time to a taped recording of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony.21 The forklift choreography gestures at a similar grace, albeit on a modest, quotidian scale. Additionally, the sequence establishes the possibility of both diegetic and non-diegetic sound. Rudi, the night manager, plays classical music to soothe the stockers and set a separate tone for the nocturnal workplace. With the announcement, “Willkommen in die Nacht, Kollegen” (welcome to the night, colleagues), he plays Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Suite No 3 in D Major.”22 The edits, cut to align the vehicles with the 1-2-3 rhythm of the waltz, create the illusion of unrehearsed coordination. At the outset, this sequence reinforces an ethic of eighteenth-century functionality, epitomized in the German tradition by Friedrich Schiller’s observations about the English contra-dance: “Es ist dies das treffende Sinnbild der bewahrten eigenen Freiheit und der geschonten Freiheit des anderen” (It is this, the perfect symbol of preserved individual freedom and the protected freedom of the other). The film, however, proceeds to deconstruct that model of coordinated labor. Meyer and Stuber, in story and cinema, focus on the frictions that drive the machine. The formal cinematic strategies, exemplified by the edits from exterior to interior, the ambivalent relationship between the external and internal environments, and the ambiguity between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, reinforce not only the intensity of the workspace experience but also the occasionally ominous power of the machine. Insisting on human centrality in the neoliberal workplace hints at a possible transcendence as part of the work experience. Gravitational metaphors accrue meaning in the aisles, in alignment with the global marketplace with its shifting centers, connectors, peripheries, and networks. Meyer calls attention to the word Mittelpunkt (center, midpoint), as it occupies the nexus of the Christian’s

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philosophy of forklift operation. Accordingly, Stuber destabilizes that center of narrative gravity in the film by supplanting the worker with the consumer in the workplace mise-en-scène. The challenges of operating a forklift amid workers and shoppers demand attention and coordination. Beyond skill, a certain confidence enables the operator to navigate narrow passages with the lift extended and laden with wares. Christian does have a voice-over roll in the film, but his perspective in the narration reveals more about the mindset of forklifting. At first, he admits he wondered how it was possible that no horrific accidents occurred; how no palettes fell from above and crushed the lives of customers; how no feet were smashed beneath the iron wheels.23 Meyer writes: Aber später, als ich selber einen Staplerschein besaß und mit meinem gelben Stapler durch die Gänge des Marktes fuhr, Paletten mit Bier oder Milch oder Mehlsäcken aus den Regalen holte, wusste ich, dass das alles eine Frage der Lockerheit, der Vorsicht und der richtigen Augenmaßes und der Routine war. Aber am wichtigsten schien mir, dass man felsenfest davon überzeugt sein musste, dass man, während man Paletten nach oben oder nach unten beförderte, der Mittelpunkt des Marktes war.24 [But later, when I myself had a forklift operator’s license and drove through the aisles of the market with my yellow forklift, retrieving palettes with beer or milk or sacks of flour from the shelves, I knew that it was all a question of nonchalance, of caution and of proper vision and of routine. But most important, I believe that you had to be completely convinced that, while you were hauling palettes up or down, you were the center of the market.]

It takes Christian a while to achieve the proper mental posture, the balance of exacting skill, and practiced casualness. That task is made decidedly more difficult by the constant messages of the workers’ unimportance, the abnegation of their existence, from the invisible hand of management. In the film, the center of gravity of the market is the consumer. Everything revolves around those affluent enough to obtain access and gain entrance. The birthday-cake sequence, discussed above, is framed by a focus on the customer. When Christian enters the break room in the workers’ area and closes the door behind him, he stands parallel to a stock motivational sign: the list of directives focuses on the customer: “Ohne Kunde läuft nichts!” (43:10; Without the customer, nothing works). The camera lingers, ostensibly giving time for Christian to surprise Marion, who is occupied in getting coffee from the machine. The motivational “paths to success” are enumerated on the poster with attributes including thoughtfulness, friendliness, competence, cleanliness/order,

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freshness of product, and the availability of staff (42:47). With this declaration of the buyers’ rights prominent in the space reserved for the crew’s downtime, Stuber intrudes, dispelling any presumption of individual worker’s centrality. Nonetheless, the workers find ways to bond to regain their centrality. One occasion is their unofficial Christmas party. The consumer holiday par excellence, Christmas shopping prompts decoration—the viewer sees the top of the market with Bruno hanging artificial holly (58:04). Something of a feeding frenzy occurs, with Christian and Klaus, one of the old guard and generally law-abiding, eating directly from the dumpster (58:56); Klaus warns him not to get caught breaking the rules—eating expired food is strictly forbidden. At the party, Rudi is grilling presumably stolen sausages, offering beer, as other workers bring in heat lamps to warm the loading dock gathering. Klaus even strips down to his underwear and reclines on a lounge chair, pretending to be in Ibiza; the soundtrack plays Santa Lucia (1:04:09). When Marion joins the festivities, she claims to be partying on overtime and seeks out Christian. Their chairs face away from the partyers toward the highway. Without saying anything, he drapes a blanket around her shoulders (1:04:37). The workplace permits little to no intimacy between workers. At the coffee machine, they converse. At one point, Christian and Marion, stocking the same shelf from different sides, converse through gaps they are filling with goods. He seems about to ask her something personal, when an off-camera voice, presumably of a customer, interrupts the moment of potential intimacy to ask where the M&M’s can be found (39:45). During the party, they have a sanctioned moment. Christian shares his story about the time he spent as a construction worker—Rogowski infuses this narrative with an endearing yet unsentimental tenderness and vulnerability (1:05:23). The two pigeons remaindered in the story version become just one. Marion observes that it was waiting. Stuber shoots this dialogue, not in the more conventional shot-reverse-shot manner or close-ups; instead, he shoots from the side, with Marion in three-quarter profile, concentrating on Christian. The camera then shoots from behind them in an anti-conventional shot of the revealing dialogue—we cannot see his mouth, just hear the voice, confessing he could not bring himself to kill the bird, that he got fired and that he hit the boss, who called him a “faules Schwein” (1:08:51; lazy pig). Christian insists he is not; Marion shakes her head in agreement, and slowly they take hands and she leans against his shoulder. Significantly, they bond over his work ethic. The worker who suffers most acutely the consequences of despair shares the collective history of the GDR work ideal and the post-Wende capitalization of

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the market is Bruno. The segment (1:30:50). Though the voice-over is Christian’s and the love interest is Marion, the older worker emerges as the stalwart colleague with the most to lose, a victim of neoliberalism overcome with despair. He shows Christian the ropes at the market, oversees the forklift-driving, and supplies the clever—though never devastating—joke to deflect the sharpest barbs of truth. Though we never see him snacking on the goods, he extends breaks, plays chess, smokes, and gets the job done. The viewer’s attention trains on his frugality first when he and Christian unload crates of beer. Bruno takes the plastic ropes and wraps some around his hand: “Aufheben” (12:03; keep it). Christian learns this trick and he, too, holds on to any stray pieces that can later come in handy. Ultimately, the others look to him for approval. In the third and final “Bruno” segment, he sees Christian waiting at the bus stop and invites him for a ride; they go to Bruno’s for a beer. The car’s headlights illuminate a mise-en-scène with a dead houseplant and empty bottles everywhere (1:31:53). The dim kitchen, its clutter and waste illuminated by fluorescent light, hosts their shots, beers, and cigarettes. Bruno remarks that his wife is asleep; she get up early (1:34:17). After Christian shares his story of juvenile crimes and incarceration, Bruno tells him to be there for Marion: “Du bist ein guter Mann” (1:37:49; you are a good man). This is the ultimate validation for the younger colleague. Their dialogue turns to pre-unification work. While Bruno readily acknowledges that they are the losers, he concedes of his truck-driving days: “Mir fehlt die Strasse” (1:39:25; I miss the road). The significance of this intimacy, the confessing of past crimes and longing, is formally advanced in the sequence that follows the dialogue. At dawn, Christian walks home by the side of the highway. A few passenger vehicles move amid the long lines of trucks, transporting goods up and down the country. Their headlights and motors dominate the frame. The camera is locked down on a tripod as Rogowski walks toward. Though the sequence lasts several seconds, he seems motionless (1:39:25). Though he moves steadily forward, the figure seems stuck. The open road Bruno longs for and the life of meaning that accompanied it have been replaced by vehicles important only for their ability to traffic consumer goods. As the film moves toward some resolution, the arts of resistance embrace the human capacity of the workers to experience emotion in the workplace. Bruno commits suicide off-camera; he hangs himself with the plastic ties he had been collecting. Christian, devastated, overhears the six older colleagues talking about the loneliness that must have driven their comrade to death; one comments that Bruno did not have a wife (1:47:12). For the first time in the narrative, the image

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of a reliable, balanced character who served as the lynchpin seems destabilized. In final acts of defiance, Marion jumps onto Christian’s forklift. He has taken over beverages, gained the skilled nonchalance Bruno possessed, and calmly navigates the aisles. He smiles and reminds her that carrying passengers that way on a forklift is strictly forbidden (1:57:27). Marion tells him to stop and raise the fork as high as it can go, assures him that Bruno showed her this, and instructs him to lower it slowly (1:59:21). The fork rises above the frame; Rogowski and Hüller look up expectantly (see Figure 2.1). The moment, one of fleeting transcendence, produces a hydraulic sound that reminds the listener of the sea. The soundtrack adds what could be artificial eco-tone waves rushing ashore, but the rapt attention of the two workers conveys a feeling of hope. The voiceover glosses the scene: “Sie hatte recht” (159:21; she was right). It sounded like the sea, and he puzzles over his failure to have noticed it before. The camera backs up sufficiently to capture Hüller leaning on Rogowski’s sitting form while both still gaze upward. For the first time in this concluding frame, we see a skylight, the possibility of natural light in the interiority of the wholesale market. In a lecture about the commemoration of Prague Spring’s violently interrupted hope, Czech novelist Petra Hůlová speaks as a member of the generation who

Figure 2.1  Christian (Franz Rogowski) and Marion (Sandra Hüller) share a moment of wonder In den Gängen (2018).

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experienced not the headiness of national protest against injustice, but as one who is constantly coming to terms with the realities of the neoliberal aftermath for the Czech Republic and its eastern European neighbors. Published as a nonfiction essay in 1991, she writes: For years we somehow thought we were just living in “freedom.” Czechs. Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Eastern Germans—we all demonstrated for it in 1989 demonstrated, didn’t we? But what we got, for the most part, was actually capitalism, and few people were willing to speak about this until “the system” gradually wiped out social achievements of Communism and fostered an inequality that nobody was prepared of and nobody wanted. For three decades the “unlucky” ones, the people who lost their jobs whose factories closed and couldn’t care less about the freedom to travel, were told to shut up while they watched the new class of “entrepreneurs” stripping the assets of state companies, the rise of corruption in politics, and the overall worship of “the free market,” regardless of its practical impacts on their lives.25

The generational solidarity depicted in the “aisles” project of Meyer and Stuber comprises one historical element of the post-socialist accommodation to neoliberal capitalism and its eastward expansion. The issue of masculinity, particularly of the Ostmann, abandoned by female partner and diminished in his sense of bread-winning, ego-sustaining labor, finally is resolved in the emotional rehabilitation of a forklift operator who takes charge of the beverages and supplies support to a colleague whose precarious personal life makes her vulnerable. In the next chapter, we turn our attention further east: toward Russian cinema and specific works that portray stories of coping, through resourcefulness, with the economic “shock therapy” neoliberalism’s invasion of a planned economy demanded. Finding themselves in a post-socialist economy in ways that resemble the plight of workers in the former GDR, Russians are now caught “between differing conceptions of liberalism and democracy, persisting socialist ideals, and the lessons of everyday experience.”26

Notes 1 2

Carol J. Greenhouse, ed., Ethnographies of Neoliberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), “Introduction,” 3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), xxi.

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Marcel Fürstenau, “Germany Faces Old Problems after 30 Years of Unification,” Deutsche Welle online, October 3, 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/germanyreunification-2020/a-55131890. Thomas Stuber, In den Gängen (In the Aisles). EuroVideo Medien GmbH (2018). Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 52. His ten “flatteners” were widely popularized. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), see 160–2, for all five criteria. Patrick Hamm, David Stuckler, and Lawrence King, “The Governance Grenade: Mass Privatization, State Capacity, and Economic Growth in Post-Communist Countries,” Working Paper Series 222, Political Economy Research Institute (May 2010), 3. For the status of women and work in the decades following the building of the Berlin Wall, see Donna Harsch, “Between State Policy and Private Sphere: Women in the GDR in the 1960s and 1970s,” Clio. Women, Gender, History 1:41 (2015): 89–114. URL: https://www.cairn.info/revue-clio-women-gender-history-2015-1page-89.htm. The Unabhängiger Frauenverband (UFV), formed in 1989, elaborates this position in a series of statements and manifestoes, including “Ohne Frauen ist kein Staat zu machen.” https://www.ddr89.de/ufv/UFV16.html. Patricia Anne Simpson, “Gendered Identities and German Islamophobias,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 28:1 (2020): 57–69: DOI: 10.1080/14782804.2019.1679099. She explored this topic in relation to Marx’s primitive accumulation in Saskia Sassen, “A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation,” Globalizations 7 (2010): 23–50. DOI: 10.1080/14747731003593091. Sassen develops this concept more extensively in Expulsions. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). Marco Abel, “Intensifying Life,” The Cinema of the ‘Berlin School’,” Cineaste XXXIII: 4 (2008), no pagination. Frauke Matthes, “‘A Saxon Who’s Learnt a Lot from the Americans’: Clemens Meyer in a Transnational Literary Context,” Comparative Critical Studies 15: 1 (2018): 25–45, 25. She frames the argument with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s delineations of “singularity” and “universalizability,” 29. Anna Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Oxford and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 4.

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16 Abel. 17 Clemens Meyer, “In den Gängen,” in Die Nacht, die Lichter. Stories (Frankfurt a/M: Fischer, 2008), 187–212, 187. 18 Ibid., 188. 19 Ibid., 189. 20 It was taken over by Phillip Morris in 1990. 21 “Barenboim Conducts ‘Dance of Cranes’ on Berlin Square,” AP News, October 26, 1996, https://apnews.com/150d0b5543fa7ec94335cba52d3f2e21. 22 BMV 1068 Air on a G String. De Wolfe Music Library, Emi Music Germany GmbH. 23 Meyer, 190. 24 Ibid., 191. 25 Petra Hůlová, “Fifty Years on, Isn’t It Time We Rethought the Prague Spring?” Michigan Quarterly Review 58:4 (Fall 2019): 668–78, 673. Her original address can be viewed here: https://mediahub.unl.edu/media/9508. 26 Tomas Matza, Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Wellbeing in Post-Socialist Russia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 199.

3

Fevered Dreams of Neoliberalism in Films Made for the Russian Market Alexandar Mihailovic

At the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, Russian cinema continues to be stuck between the rock of an economic downturn—fueled by sanctions and plummeting oil prices—and the hard place of a commitment to narratives that seek to redefine nationalism. Twenty-three years have passed since the release of Aleksei Balabanov’s Brother (1997), a movie shot on pilfered unused film stock left over in St. Petersburg from a lackluster adaptation of Anna Karenina that starred Sophie Marceau. Balabanov’s movie now seems to have come from a completely different era, if not country, of Russian filmmaking. Brother was a statement of aesthetic and budgetary principle, as well as a film that was made as a desperate gamble. Brother turned out to be first blockbuster of Russian cinema after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a runaway hit that was more remarkable for having as its protagonist a violent nationalist army veteran whose socially tone-deaf behavior suggested either a history of PTSD or a positioning somewhere on the autism spectrum. The previous year, Balabanov was one of thirteen Russian films directors who signed a manifesto-sounding statement endorsing the production of small-budget films. Film historian John McKay summarizes the statement as “a set of rules for filmmakers who were intent on making small-budget films without state assistance (hardly forthcoming in those years in any case): a shooting schedule limited to two or three weeks; filming exclusively on streets, in courtyards and in the apartments of friends and relatives; crews working gratis, with payment contingent upon any profit the film might make.”1 The film’s considerable profits gave the Russian film industry a much-needed influx of cash. Brother also boosted the morale of the industry’s diverse infrastructure of workers, who took great satisfaction in the film’s demonstration that well-crafted and socially insightful filmmaking could

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indeed come together with something that generally did not concern them prior to 1991: the market factor of the bottom line. To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, a survey of Russian cinema in the second and third decades of this century reveals a stripped-down landscape, in which the practices of an old order have died out while new ones have yet to come into being to take their place.2 Older filmmakers, a few with Soviet-era resumes such as Nikita Mikhalkov, have largely become sidelined in spite of their attempts to tap into the present climate of patriotic fervor and the longue durée of the affective anti-globalist lessons offered up by Balabanov’s film. To say the least, this new phase is rather unexpected. Certainly, the current political climate in the Russian Federation, with its emphasis on the restoration of Russian territorial sovereignty from the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries in regard to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the Russian military’s involvement in eastern Ukraine, would seem to welcome the kind of patriotic swagger that Balabanov’s film appears to endorse. With its scenes of entitled Anglophone and Francophone tourists (some of them People of Color) using a decaying St. Petersburg as their clubland playground, Brother was largely misunderstood as, first and foremost, a reminder of Russian cultural superiority over the vapid consumerist values of the West. In point of fact, Balabanov was an unabashed moralist and not at all interested in discussions that hinged upon the desiderata of culture wars. As the Russian film critic Andrei Plakhov rightly observes, the director was by nature “a radical conservative, a contradictory but extremely productive combination [that] forces us to compare him to Dostoevsky or John Ford, since for Balabanov what is important is not the social universe of discourse but the moral one.”3 With its portrayal of a St. Petersburg that one homeless character calls a “horrific” power or force (strashnaia sila) in people’s hardscrabble lives, we see organized crime leveraging itself into the city as the de facto heir of local party functionaries. But the specter of neoliberalism also haunts Balabanov’s Brother. St. Petersburg of the “wild nineties” (likhie devianostye) chews and spits out the people who eke out a living in its overpriced outdoor markets, and in the shadow its macroeconomic asset-stripping by mayor Anatoly Sobchak and his deputy Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel and station head who had served in Dresden, East Germany. By the time Balabanov shot his film in little over a month early in 1997, Putin had already moved to Moscow. There, he was appointed as chairperson of the committee that President Boris Yeltsin had set up already prior to his cognitive decline, responsible for privatizing the frozen assets of the former Soviet Union. Putin and the committee accomplished this

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goal by transferring the assets to Russian Federation’s state treasury, which had already become firmly enmeshed with the ascendant oligarchy that had, in the words of the political commentator Andrei Piontkovsky, raged like a collective hurricane through the national marketplace.4 The artistic and commercial success of Brother serves as a reminder that the powerful reflections we see in that film—about the human consequences in the Russian Federation of the “shock therapy” policy of economic revitalization, formulated by Jeffrey Sachs during his tenure as director of the Institute for International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government—have been largely muted, if not absent, in Russian movies of the last two decades. In the next chapter, we will examine Andrei Zvyagintsev’s blistering critiques of a Russian variation upon neoliberalism, especially evident in the monetizing and professionalizing of intimate human relations that we see in his films. In this chapter, we will look at efforts of lesser-known and generally younger filmmakers who seek to gauge responses to what Tomas Matza, in his 2013 book Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Wellbeing in Post-Socialist Russia, identifies as the “discourses of individualism, responsibility, and self-sufficiency [that] were abundant in Russia as state socialism ended and as state capitalism began.” By referencing the sink or swim social Darwinism implicit in Jeffrey Sachs’s theory of macroeconomic “shock therapy” in the countries of the former East Bloc, Matza draws attention to the ways in which the “psychotherapy boom” of the 1990s and 2000s in Russia helped “disseminate [a practice of] neoliberal capitalism.”5 Matza takes particular note of the therapeutic ideas of selfacceptance and self-actualization that were in vogue in 2004, at the beginning of Putin’s second term: Psychotherapeutic advice was a form of care that seemed to provide a thoroughgoing model, including ideas about the interior of the citizen, his or her intimate relations, and the kinds of publics appropriate to postsocialist [sic] times. Nevertheless, [the influential psychologist Mikhail] Labkovsky’s psychotherapeutically inspired, egalitarian, liberal-progressive vision of a future Russia appeared to serve Putin’s call to sacrifice all for the economy. In a context in which the neoliberal economy is divorced from liberal-democratic politics, one is left with neoliberalism without liberals, a situation that may characterize contemporary capitalism more generally and that testifies to the flexible promiscuity and discursive power of austerity.6

The cognitive mode of “flexible promiscuity”—of desperate bids at resourcefulness in the face of the poverty and abjection that dogged citizens of the Russian Federation well into the new century—is at the center of the films

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we will examine here. These three films—Stanislav’s Govorukhin’s Weekend, Dmitri Tiurin’s Thirst, and Grigorii Konstantinopolskii’s Russian Psycho—are highly representative of the psychoanalytic and judgmentally introspective turn of post-Soviet cinema in its third decade. In their close affective identifications with their problematic protagonists, they are surprisingly inward looking, as if the rumbles of the shifts in global alliances barely impinge upon the lives of even well-heeled Russians. Zvyagintsev’s films, as well crafted as they are, do carry the marks of projects that were pitched to an international audience and to the film festivals in Berlin, Cannes, and the Best Foreign Film category of the Academy Awards. Not altogether surprisingly, those well-documented facts in their productions are firmly lodged in the minds of Zvyagintsev’s Russian audience, which has accused the filmmaker of indulging in Russophobic self-flagellation and concocting films that are little better than exercises in pornographic nihilism or chernukha.

An Old Lion Retires: Stanislav Govorukhin’s Weekend (2013) Oh, for the return of a cinema of effervescence, and for an updating of the nihilistic playfulness of the French New Wave! With its portrait of generally well-heeled, photogenic, and impeccably dressed narcissists stumbling through their misadventures like characters in a Feydeau farce, Stanislav Govorukhin’s latest film Weekend seems to fit the bill for a generous serving of screen candy, finished off with a dollop of amoral froth. Certainly, the possibilities of a postwar European cinematographic sensibility in Soviet film were fleetingly explored in the expansive and vertiginous opening scene of Kalatozov’s 1957 The Cranes are Flying, with its lovers skipping along the embankment of a Seine-like Moscow River dappled with sunlight, and to the jaunty rhythms of a score by Mоisei Vainberg that suggested a cross between 1920s Soviet Jazz and the film music of Michel Legrand. Stanislav Govorukhin’s Weekend, filmed in a luxuriant black-and-white reminiscent of the velvety texture of a Henri Cartier-Bresson gelatin print, is full of shrewd misdirections, feints, and skewed cinematic references that come full circle, ultimately drawing attention to the mechanics of a new Gilded Age. The action takes place in a limpidly sunlit Odesa, which is proverbially the most Mediterranean of cities from the former Soviet empire. The fact that the cast of characters is largely Russian, in a

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place located outside of the boundaries of the Russian Federation, only serves to throw into sharper relief the occasional entrance of non-Russian (and, for that matter, non-Ukrainian) individuals into accident-driven unfurling of the film’s action. We’ll have more to say later about the strategic foreign presence within the film in terms of both characters and cinematic influences. First, let’s take factual note of the film’s source material, which is Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, an adaptation of Noel Kalef ’s novel of the same name. The basic lineaments of the plot of Govorukhin’s film coincide with Malle’s and Kalef ’s story of a businessman who kills a colleague out of self-interest, and whose escape and eventual entrapment occur as the result of random events. Like the protagonist Julien Tavernier of Malle’s film version of Kalef ’s novel, in Govorukhin’s Weekend the businessman Igor Lebedev tells his secretary not to disturb him in his office and perilously climbs outside his window with murder on his mind. With his alibi in place, he shimmies along the outside ledge and reenters the building through another office. Once inside the building again, he makes his way to the office of the company auditor, who intends to launch an investigation into the embezzlement of corporate funds by both Lebedev and his brother-in-law. Lebedev confronts the accountant, an elderly and avowedly incorruptible man who contemptuously rejects Lebedev’s attempt to bribe him. Lebedev uses the auditor’s own pistol to murder him, makes off with the incriminating documents, and reenters his own office. Sitting in his car at the end of the day, and after committing what seems to be the perfect murder, he realizes that he left some of the documents in the building. As in Malle’s film, his attempt to retrieve damning evidence after the building closes results in him being trapped in a deactivated elevator for the rest of the night. In the meantime, Lebedev’s convertible is stolen by a joy-riding hooligan named Maksim, who picks up his girlfriend and uses Lebedev’s identification to book them into a posh hotel on the Black Sea. Maksim’s botched attempt to steal money from a kindly Russian-Swedish couple on the beach quickly escalates into shooting them with the gun that Lebedev already used. In the end, Lebedev is arrested and convicted on the basis of tightly circumstantial evidence surrounding the murder of the couple. Brought to his wit’s end by the rapid abandonment of him by his wife and her unscrupulous, social-climbing brother Ivan (who is also the Prefect of Police in the city), Igor breaks down into taking full responsibility for both the murders he didn’t commit and the one he did.

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Govorukhin somewhat obscures the highly stylized references to Malle’s film by leaving out any reference to it or Kalef ’s novel in the sparse opening credits of the film. The film begins with a list of the actors’ names that ascends an elevator shaft and a shot of the word “weekend” materializing inside an open elevator in both English and Cyrillic and disappearing as the doors slide shut. The title naturally recalls Jean-Luc Godard’s film of the same name. The highly kinetic manipulation of the opening credits also brings to mind certain formalist aspects of Godard, who has expressed admiration for the inventively distorted or reversed listing of credits in American noir films such as Robert Aldrich’s gleefully anarchistic 1955 Kiss Me Deadly. While the plot and occasional frame shot of Govorukhin’s film clearly draw on narrative details and visual tableaux from Malle’s, the preoccupation with the corrosive effect of embourgeoisement and the toxic confluence of new and old money—and the ways in which the combination of such factors brings about mortal violence, social breakdown, and general chaos—is distinctly of a piece with Godard’s Weekend. Here, however, the breakdown has already taken place and is not, as in Godard’s film, actualized and made allegorically dramatic over the course of an obnoxious bourgeois couple’s car trip. Here, there is no enactment of that Godardian spectacle of the cinematically enacted unspooling marriage. When he finds 120 thousand euros missing from his safe, Lebedev’s brotherin-law Ivan makes the immediate assumption that his wife took it. Later, while looking at his wife across the ballroom floor at a gauchely sumptuous birthday celebration for himself, he tells his sister that he has no doubt that his “dearest trusted spouse” [blagovernaya] is responsible (32:27). The Darwinian world of Govorukhin’s film is one in which bourgeois pieties about marriage, family, and trust among those of the same estate have been fatally compromised and in which one’s word has quite literally ceased to be one’s bond. Unlike Godard’s Weekend, what we are witnessing in Govorukhin’s film is not the unfolding of a moral cataclysm, but its aftermath. Govorukhin leaves tantalizingly open the question of culpability for that breakdown. As viewers, our first reflexive response might be that foreigners, or excessive Russian reliance on foreign business interests and cultural values, are to blame. The film’s first words are spoken by Lebedev’s secretary in a strong Baltic accent in an office filled with calendars, framed diplomas, and certificates printed in the Roman alphabet. The holding company in which Lebedev works as a mid-level executive has an unexplained non-Cyrillic acronym, and all of the business transactions in the film (both legitimate

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and sub rosa) are conducted with euros. Distinctly Russian cultural realia appear in relation only to Maksim’s girlfriend Sonya who, with her singing of a beautifully keening folk song on the beach, draws the ultimately fatal attention of a Russian expatriate woman and her Swedish photographer husband. But Sonya herself emerges as a tragic figure, an aspiring musician who was unable to gain admission to a conservatory and who is abused and abandoned by Maksim after she surmises that he was responsible for the murder of the couple. Her final gesture, after she turns up the gas in the oven of her mother’s house, is to blow out the oil candle in front of an icon of Jesus the Pantocrator (1:00:01). In contrast to the fate of the thieving young couple in Malle’s film, who recover from their attempt at suicide, here only the young woman attempts to kill herself, and she succeeds. The final scene of the film has a newly dapper Maksim sauntering carefree on a street teeming with signs in a mix of Cyrillic and Roman print, some of them advertisements for non-Russian franchises such as Wendy’s; others, notices in Russian for pawnbroking services (skupka). With a lushly updated version of Yves Montand’s interpretation of “C’est si bon” swelling on the soundtrack, Maksim removes his designer sunglasses to wink at the camera—a direct gaze of Godardian empowerment that no one else engages in over the course of the film, but which here (in contrast with Godard’s use of the gesture as a vehicle for democratization) emerges as a diabolical assertion of might makes right. It would seem that both morality and Russian economic sovereignty are under siege by the West or that the values of the West transform certain Russians into monstrous vectors of corruption. Certainly, Govorukhin’s own public statements—in support of the war with Ukraine, and against the predatory neoliberal aspirations of what the Eurasianist propagandist Aleksandr Dugin terms the “Atlanticist” or “thalassocratic” powers of the NATO alliance— coalesce quite easily with the film’s portrait of a poised, if spiritually vacuous, Western-gazing business elite. But something strange happens on the way to the end of this film. Like many of Quentin Tarantino’s films, Govorukhin’s Weekend is very much caught up in its cineaste’s passion for scattershot referencing to other films. In addition to Godard and Malle, Govorukhin’s Weekend is replete with references to scenes from films by Jean-Pierre Melville, Rohmer, Pasolini, Hitchcock (particularly Strangers on a Train and Vertigo), and his own 1978 policier for Soviet television Don’t Change the Meeting Place. Also like Tarantino, Govorukhin does not always succeed in finessing the message—whether it be, in the

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case of the American director, about racism, misogyny or anti-Semitism, or in the Russian’s, about the culturally imperialistic values of the West—with the generous synesthetic medium of what the American critic John Simon has called the most important art form. With its pastiche of elements from the movie soundtracks of Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, and Michel Legrand, Artem Vasiliev’s musical score (performed with sharpness, lyricism, and wit by both the Russian State Orchestra of Cinematography and the Odesa Jazz Orchestra) is exquisitely synchronized to the variations in lighting and camera placement in Yuri Klimenko’s luminous cinematography. The criminal activities of Igor Lebedev and Maksim are subjected to a gaze that is critical yet bemused. The entrance of law enforcement into the action of the movie is dominated by the great character actor Victor Sukhorukov, famous for his role as a foolishly glib gangster in Aleksei Balabanov 1997 Brother. Sukhorukov steals every scene of interrogation that he plays with Maksim Matveev’s Lebedev, and the viewer’s recollection of his earlier noteworthy performance as a thug contributes to a vivid composite impression in this film of the moral ambiguity of law enforcement. Sukhorukov’s casting as a police officer also echoes Govorukhin’s inspired, counterintuitive choice of Vladimir Vysotsky as a security forces captain in Don’t Change the Meeting Place, in which an actor famous for roles as a rough outsider plays against the grain and draws attention (through the subtext of his earlier films) to the nasty attitude of churlish unaccountability within many law enforcement organizations.7 In Weekend, Govorukhin’s open-ended treatment of the self-satisfied ostentation and frivolity of a capitalist elite also seems fitting in light of the involvement of the Russian petroleum behemoth Lukoil, which is listed in the opening credits as the film’s largest corporate sponsor. Govorukhin draws attention to connections and causes, to maladies and their etiologies, only to make light of them, giving us (like the thief Maksim at the end of the film) a wink that says that we shouldn’t take these things—or anything—too seriously. Govorukhin’s Weekend emerges as a relativistic sensorium. What can we do about the parlous fate of Russians outside the Russian Federation in the potentially blighting shadow of a West eager (as some argue) to consolidate its economic presence in Ukraine? And what about the inevitability of cronyism and malfeasance within a national economy that is propped up by the selling of energy resources? Concerns duly noted, and filed away for future reference. In the meantime—and to paraphrase Susan Sontag—let’s use the rapture of cinema as a solvent for the pesky demands of morality.

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The Game Theory of Masculinity: Dmitri Tiurin’s Thirst (2013) The film Thirst (Zhazhda) begins vertiginously, in mid-stride, with a young man climbing eight flights of a stairwell up to his apartment. The elevator is broken, many of the lights along the staircase are still out, and the echo of the man’s tromping footsteps joins the cacophony of complaints, cries, and retorts among the residents, and the grumpy remarks of the woman who is walking with him back to his apartment. Shouts, exclamations, and decontextualized snippets of comments ricochet within the space. We alternately see the climb from the man’s point of view—glimpses combined with his gasping breath and resonant voice—and the perspective of a separate hand-held camera either just a few steps ahead or behind him, and which distinctly records the sonic field outside of the character’s head. As he reaches his apartment door, he is badgered with a question from a neighbor whom he has never seen before, and which represents the first fully coherent sentence of the film: “Do you have any cartoons?” That trivial question—the first in the film, and asked by a woman who has a seven-year-old son suffering from insomnia—unexpectedly reverberates throughout the sound space and thematic landscape of Dmitri Tiurin’s film. The plot of Thirst provisionally rests on three veterans’ search for a friend who has disappeared and which they scuttle with barely a shrug by the end of the film. All four men—the missing Sergei, Gena, Pasha, and the protagonist Kostya— served together in Russia’s Chechen campaign and were decommissioned when an anti-tank rocket hit their armored personnel carrier (APC). Over the course of the film, Tiurin gives us progressively closer look into their civilian lives and military service, which operate to varying degrees of social maladjustment and anomie. Working together as brains and brawn, Pasha and Gena support themselves through a series of scams. In spite of a bond soldered by the heat of combat, both men distrust and often betray each other. Gena himself is a compulsive womanizer and brawler and at one point senselessly comes to blows with Pasha himself. It turns out that the ne’er-do-well Sergei had vanished not to hide from loan sharks, but as the result of a debt that he successfully liquidated: he was forced out into the street after signing over his apartment to the owner of the gaming arcade located in the neighboring building. Kostya is estranged from his parents (who have divorced and remarried) and works off the books as a contractor and renovator for wealthy and upwardly mobile clients. As the film progresses, we are made to understand that the opening scene of the

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film, which culminates with Kostya drinking himself into a stupor as a form of self-medication for PTSD, has been his evening routine—displacing his hobby of drawing—since returning to civilian life. Over the course of the film, his self-destructive rituals at the end of the day become increasingly offset by his storytelling, which calms Olga’s son Nikita into sleep. With one significant exception—which I will discuss shortly—the eye of Tiurin’s camera hovers, freely roves, and intrudes into the performative ambits of the characters. The general freedom of movement and varied stylistic execution of the Mark Zisel’son’s camera may suggest to some an extension into color cinematography of Dziga Vertov’s ideal of the “cine-eye” replacing the human eye. Certain jump cuts draw our attention to the range of different chromatic palettes that are calibrated for each scene, such as warm sandalwood shading of the insomniac boy Nikita’s room as Kostya tells him a story, the bleached primary colors of the ramshackle kiosks and metro stations of the men’s search for Sergei, and the flashbacks to Chechnya, whose harsh metallic greys and burnished shades of blue serve to highlight the appalling pinks and reds of wounded and seared flesh. At other times, the films stock suggests an emotional quality that in fact runs counter to the action playing out in the scene. Aside from his intermittent sketching, the only emotional fulfillment that Kostya derives is from telling Nikita stories at night. His tales are of trauma and yet help the boy fall asleep. As Kostya begins one of these, the camera suddenly switches to the recollection itself, from Kostya’s childhood. The rural summertime setting is idyllic, drenched in hues of sunflower and honey that to a Russian eye would synesthetically suggest the bucolic tableaux of Afanasii Fet’s poetry. Kostya, his parents, and a friend of the family are playing soccer in a field near the family dacha. Yet as the game turns nasty—with the father cheating at it, and punching his son after Kostya blurts out that he saw his father and the other woman kissing—we realize that this is no fond memory. Several scenes in Thirst operate in this internally contrarian manner, as if to underscore an ontological disjunction between setting and actor. In spite of the somewhat trite redemptive arc of the film’s narrative—which, as Larisa Maliukova points out in her review for Iskusstvo kino, the director may have inherited from his work on Russian television dramas8—in his mise-en-scène Tiurin vigorously rejects the mainstream cinematic use of pathetic fallacy. It is here, in Tiurin’s existential contemplation of agents who play within and push against arbitrarily set environments, that Thirst ceases to be exclusively yet another conventional realistic drama about the corroding social contract

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in Putin’s Russia and emerges as an esthetically rather peculiar film. Zisel’son’s camera is highly mobile except when it enters into the sphere of Kostya’s social isolation. We are afforded a full look at Kostya’s face only twenty-three minutes into the film, when he, Gena, and Pasha go to his father (now an assistant to the mayor of the city) to help them in their search for Sergei. What we—as well as Kostya’s father, who had severed contact with his son years before—now see for the first time is a gaunt man, with one half of his head fully covered with a web of pinkish burn scars. Up to this point, the binaural soundtrack of Tiurin’s film often takes us into the muffled kinescope chamber of Kostya’s head, with its loud breathing and restless eye movements framed by the jutting visor of his baseball cap and the edges of his sweatshirt’s raised hood. With this border of cloth—analogous to the lens hood of a professional video recorder—Kostya’s eye has indeed become something like Vertov’s “camera eye.” Yet the shuttling of viewpoint between the prison of Kostya’s body, anonymous cityscapes that are powerfully evocative of Rashmi Varma’s conception of neoliberalism’s “ever-expanding urban conurbations” (whose haphazard pattern emerges as a “palimpsest of a messy colonial history”),9 and the pictorially vivid scenes of Kostya’s florid word-painting to the boy Nikita raise the possibility of the film’s close relation to another, and more contemporary, medium: video gaming. The closely audible panting, and juddering and tentative loping gait, of “Kostya the camera” is certainly suggestive of a personal avatar, whose body movements are controlled through a gaming console. When Gena makes his first appearance in the film while visiting a badly hungover Kostya, he installs a new game onto his friend’s computer. “Kostya, look what I brought you—this will take you back to the war!” he cluelessly cheers (12:56). Although Gena does not name the game, to many Russian gamers, the images on the screen of Kostya’s PC would be recognizable as “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” Bearing over the course of its multiple versions an increasingly tangential relation to Tarkovsky’s film, “S.T.A.L.K.E.R” (which, in its most recent version, added the phrase “Clear Sky” [Chistoe nebo]) is an online game that, according to its website, has players from several countries.10 Each player battles their way through a territory laid waste by a Chernobyl-like nuclear catastrophe and populated by “monsters”—humans mutated by radiation—who manifest different categories of grotesque physical disfigurement.11 Much of Thirst is filmed with the sly suggestion that it, too, is a game with the audience entering into an environment populated by monsters that are either

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obvious—and therefore possibly harmless—or covert, and more dangerous. The challenge (or game objective) for both Kostya and the audience is to tell the one from the other. Halfway through the film, Nikita tells Kostya that storytelling itself doesn’t calm him down anymore. In response, Kostya picks up one of Nikita’s drawings of cartoon-style monsters and embellishes them. “Monsters should be funny,” he tells him (44:19). When Kostya meets his half-brother for the first time at his father’s spacious and luxurious apartment, the boy (who is the same age as Nikita) looks at his older brother’s disfigured face and thoughtfully asks, “[W]hat cartoon are you from [ty s kakogo mul’tika]” (38:34). Gena and Pasha use one of Kostya’s ballpoint sketches of Sergei in the search for their friend. At one point, Kostya shows them his entire notebook of drawings, which include both real and imagined scenes from the Chechen campaign. “Who’s this, our lieutenant?” Gena asks about one drawing. “But he died young, and didn’t have any children.” Kostya replies, “[T]hey could have been born later” (1:27:33). For Kostya, the act of drawing represents the full imaginative participation within a particular space, with the possibility of traducing or transforming it. The allusion to the gaming format in general, and to this particular game, also draws attention to the deeper parallels between Tiurin’s film and Tarkovsky’s Stalker with its own story of three men who embark upon a quest in which (as Vladimir Golstein insightfully points out) the process of the journey becomes more important than the result or purported destination.12 In the interest of drawing attention to process rather than confrontation and trauma as the lever for genuine transformation, Tiurin skillfully uses the undramatic encounters that take place over the course of the search—such as Kostya’s conversation in a hospital with a recently married man, whose pelvis was crushed in an accident, about the nature of masculinity—as catalysts for the gradual revelation of character among all the players. One of the insights that becomes valuable to both Kostya and Gena is that much of what passes for being a man in contemporary Russia represents little more than a game. Certainly, no Russian film since Zvyagintsev’s 2003 The Return has cast such a withering look at the cult of authoritarian masculinity—what Shelley, in an eloquent turn of phrase, called “the sneer of cold command”—and at its corollary of wounded male pride. It doesn’t take long for Kostya’s father to drop his mask of kindness and penitence and to abuse both his son and his second, much younger, wife. The kindly commander of Kostya’s platoon (who lost an arm in the attack on the APC) has the same patronymic (“Mikhailych”)

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as Kostya’s snide and homophobic stepfather, whom we see in a flashback wearing an officer’s green shirt and bullying a teenaged Kostya. In the mayor’s office, Kostya’s father works in the department of “patriotic education” and (in an absurd effort to impress Kostya and his fellow veterans) draws attention to the fact that he has the official status of “colonel” (polkovnik). Kostya comes to realize that, in both military and civil organizations, decency and cruelty are often flip sides of the same coin. As this knowledge comes to the fore, Tiurin gradually dispenses with the diegetic conventions of video gaming: the camera separates from the echo chamber of Kostya’s head, and the identity of the St. Petersburg metropolitan region—from the affluent if sterile apartment building of Kostya’s father, located in the Petrograd side of the city, to the poorer town of Pushkin where Kostya and Olga live—displaces his earlier mash-ups of disparate urban sites that are characteristic of gaming platforms such as Resident Evil and Grand Theft Auto 4. Like the men in Tarkovsky’s Stalker (which may be understood as a presciently anti-gaming film), Kostya and Gena are both disappointed and surprised by what they find when they achieve self-knowledge, reaching their “room” of granted unconscious wishes. Gena realizes that he never felt such satisfaction as when in Chechnya he drank straight from a can of condensed milk in the room of a bombed-out building, during a cease-fire on New Year’s Eve. “Where I can I get that condensed milk now!” he exclaims to Kostya as they walk through a high-end atrium mall on Vasiliev Island. “You can buy it downstairs,” Kostya sensibly replies. Gena scoffs: “That’s not the same thing!” (1:29:34). Kostya finds an equivalent space in Nikita’s room at the end of the film, where he draws a portrait of himself as a boy (free of scars) after pouring all of his vodka down the sink. “What happened to your thirst?” Olga asks. “It passed [proshla].” “And who is that boy [on the drawing]?” “That’s me.” Both Gena and Kostya come to see their real selves as occupying a state of boyhood, rather than manhood. As Manohla Dargis memorably puts it in her review of Michael Mann’s 2004 Collateral, “[the film is] about men and work, and about how being a man is itself a kind of job.”13 Tiurin’s film sees the real work of men as consisting of a questioning of assumptions about masculinity, of breaking out of the rules that have been imposed on them. Nonetheless, the contrived ease with which Kostya claims to have achieved sobriety—and the Dickensian mawkishness of his fulfillment, in drawing a portrait of himself as a boy, in the presence of a troubled family on the mend—suggests that he, in the end, may be playing games with himself.

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The Downsizing of Ego in Grigorii Konstantinopolsky’s Russian Psycho (2019) Early on in his film Russian Psycho (Russkii bes), director and screenwriter Grigorii Konstantinopolsky has his Faustian anti-hero Sviatoslav Ivanov state that he wants to live a spiritually full life (zhit’ odnoi dushoi). So begins Sviatoslav’s series of cackling confessions to the audience. Are we being flattered or insulted by this elfin wisp of a figure? Certainly, the actor Ivan Makarevich’s pencil-mustachio grimaces and unsubtle mugging don’t help us find the film’s center of gravity. Is Konstantinopolsky’s ham-fisted approach to febrile diabolism à la russe a genuine attempt to forge something contemporary and new from the warnings about the corrosive hegemonic pride and half-pint devilry (besovshchina), which were famously articulated by Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tiutchev, and Sologub? Or is the entire film an elaborate ruse that is very much not à la russe? Does it merely promise an uncompromising examination of national self-images, while actually delivering a spectacle of slow-motion ultraviolence and abasement of women that could come from exploitive cinema in any part of the globe? In other words, is Russian Psycho a film about literary texts, or is it a film about movies? Perhaps we can begin to answer these questions by considering Sviatoslav as a man who embarks, like his historical namesake Sviatoslav—the last resolutely pagan prince of Rus—upon an ambitious and risky expansion of his domain. In Moscow, our lumpen-proletarian protagonist, an art-and-architecture student, murders his way to material success and the embourgeoisement promised by his fiancée Asya’s wealthy family. Later on, we’ll circle back to consider the toxic status of Sviatoslav’s higher education and to his choice of a career path that radically diverges from it. His future father-in-law, the insufferably hale and hearty banker Piotr Aleksandrovich—played by the always reliable Vitaly Kishchenko, in a performance suggestive of a well-groomed Orc eying prey over his cappuccino—has extended Sviatoslav a hefty loan to open up a high-end Stalin-themed restaurant in a disused factory (1:12:38, Figure 3.1). No daughter of mine will marry a “down on his luck” student—no nameless nobody, or nishchii, for her! Or so we’re led to believe, from Sviatoslav’s expansive chattering and gesticulating to us viewers. In a manner that distinctly references Mary Harron’s feminist film adaptation (2000) of Brett Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho, we see that Sviatoslav is himself something of a film director, positioning his performers to speak lines that are in fact almost exclusively his own.

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Figure 3.1  Russian Psycho. Sviatoslav (Ivan Makarevich) shows off the space of his future restaurant to his fiancée’s wealthy father (Vitaly Kishchenko).

Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man—whom Ellis explicitly references in the epigraph to American Psycho—and Marcello Clerici from Bertolucci’s 1970 adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel The Conformist, Sviatoslav takes pleasure in abasing himself before the social betters whom he envies and perhaps even secretly aspires to become. Konstantinopolsky makes full use of the cinematic device of a charming rogue taking an audience into his confidence, used in Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie (1966) and John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). Russian cinema has generally avoided full-throated identification with problematic protagonists. One of the films that come closest to such morally compromised solipsism is Vladimir Vilner’s 1926 Benya Krik, whose full identification with its legendary gangster from Isaac Babel’s stories is however limited by the presence of intertitles that end up functioning as an estrangement device. And yet Russian Psycho is quite a different animal from its genre relatives at home or abroad. The deceptively affable “come here” patter of Michael Caine’s charming predator Alfie sounds positively cherubic next to Sviatoslav’s lurid verbalized fantasies of casual misogyny and class revenge. Sviatoslav yearns to experience a spiritually resonant life (odnoi dushoi), which for him means to live unburdened by the natterings of conscience. As he tells us at one point of the film, “[spiritual] truth is pleasure” (istina—naslazhdenie!). As it turns out—and as Sviatoslav explains to the priest Father Grigorii at the climax of the film, in a scene that is reminiscent of the nihilist Verkhovensky’s confession to Tikhon in Dostoevsky’s Demons—unbridled rapacity and lust are imbued with an experiential simplicity and purity that religious piety can never truly achieve. This is Pushkin’s “Demon” filtered through the Marquis de

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Sade’s Philosophy of the Bedroom, with acquisitiveness taking on the affective qualities of jeering misanthropy (neistoshchimoi klevetoiu) as well as lust. This is Verkhovensky grotesquely trading places with Dostoevsky’s Tikhon, as the figure of moral authority. Over the course of the film, this paradoxical synchronization of yearning for intimacy and closeness while despising one’s partners becomes an engine for the production of Sviatoslav’s doppelgängerin. As he tires of them, every friend or lover is replaced by another who closely resembles him, thereby offsetting his reflexive misanthropy: Asya by a wealthy married woman named Masha who mirrors Sviatoslav’s entitled and instrumentalist attitudes toward others; her nameless husband who, with his well-groomed beard and unctuous manner, seems likes a more successful hipster version of himself; and finally the Porfiry Petrovich-like police investigator who turns out to be as predatory and violent as Sviatoslav himself. By the end of the film, we see that this restless serial doubling of the unsympathetic protagonist is very much at the center of Russian Psycho. Konstantinopolsky seems to regard his project as a double itself, of any number of films and literary texts. In a highly Baudrillardian vein, the film would seem to suggest that there is no original identity and that we are all copies of something that exists only in “desert of the real.” Yet what saves Konstantinopolsky’s film from utter banality and derivativeness is its focus on the passing of a particular concrete reality of post-Soviet life, from the “wild nineties” (likhie devianostye) to the harsher employment realities of an increasingly neoliberal economy within the Russian Federation. Sviatoslav is a man out of time, a resourceful predator who would have been much more at home in the era of uncredentialed amateurs who make good—among the academics, dentists, and mid-level bureaucrats (among others) who became wildly successful speculators and oligarchs during the early nineties, and very much in spite of their original professional profiles. As this film presents things, the nineties were a glorious era of people enriching themselves outside of their normal career paths and of working ne po professii. During the second half of the film, we hear Sviatoslav increasingly pine for this particular style of unfettered capitalism in post-Soviet Russia. A callow twenty-something with the hint of peach fuzz on his face, Sviatoslav has of course scant living memory of the nineties. Like his historical namesake the pagan outlier Prince Sviatoslav, the protagonist of Russian Psycho stubbornly continues to hold onto cultural values that are on their way out. At the end of the film, Konstantinopolsky reinforces this doubling of the protagonist with

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the religiously recalcitrant tenth-century Sviatoslav during his confrontation with the police investigator. After catching a glimpse with the investigator, who now praises him for his righteous patriotic violence, of the abattoir filled with the naked and blood-spattered bodies of his victims—an extravagantly grand guignol moment, reminiscent of a Clive Barker movie (1:31:58)—Sviatoslav calls him un-Christian and vile (poganyi) (1:33:57). What are the Christian values in the social world of this film? As the Orthodox priest Father Grigorii explains to recently engaged couple Asya and Sviatoslav at the beginning of the film, forgiveness of others is only necessary among individuals. But, Sviatoslav asks him, if we can forgive this or that person, why can’t we do the same for the enemies of our country, whose economic sanctions are responsible for the weakening of the ruble (oslablenie rublya)? In a monologue that eerily anticipates the “Russian World” (russkii mir) ideology that the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian state used in 2022 to justify the country’s genocidal military campaign in Ukraine, the Grigorii explains that countries possess a unitary identity that a person never does, and that we must always bear in mind the solidarity of consciousness that exists among our enemies (edinstvo nashego vraga) in Europe who support heretical concepts such as same-sex marriage (10:00–11:26). Grigorii acknowledges the mercurial, if not serial, nature of personal identity as the quality that makes it easy for us to forgive. After all, perhaps you are no longer the same person now as the one who wronged me, but a copy of something else? This is a concept of forgiveness that is contingent on ease and the minimum of cognitive effort on the part of the injured party. Father Grigorii seems to say that professional and national identities are fundamentally separate from personal ones: by all means forgive an individual, but never forgive the injury they committed in their capacity as the member of a corporate entity such as a hostile nation or a market competitor. By the end of the film, Father Grigorii emerges as yet another double of the protagonist and a person who takes Sviatoslav’s values several steps further. In the dénouement of Russian Psycho, we see the film’s protagonist pushed into a realm of compartmentalized morality and unforgiving utilitarianism that he neither anticipated nor properly understood. The facts that the priest’s Christian name is the same as the director’s and that Konstantinopolsky himself plays the role of Sviatoslav’s hipster doppelgänger only serve to throw into sharper relief the film’s portrayal of what the Polish feminist Joanna Zylinska characterizes as “downsizing process of disruptive semiocapitalism,” which moves toward a

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self-referential “subjectivity that is pinned to a competitive, overachieving, and overreaching masculinity.”14 It is neither the world that this particular demon imagined nor one in which he is capable of surviving.

Conclusion: The Russian Style of Neoliberalism In order to properly enter into the rhetorically evasive world of these films, we need to address their coded visual vocabularies about the everyday erasure of the worker by their labor. The relation of Putin’s Russia to global neoliberalism has remained a puzzle. On the one hand, crony capitalism, its institutional cousin oligarchy, and the glorification of state power would seem in the aggregate to be so much oil to the refreshing spring water of economic liberty advocated by firebrands of the free market such as Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and the 1981 Nobel laureate for economics James McGill Buchanan. As it turns out, much of the difficulty in characterizing the nation’s economic policy in terms of neoliberalism stems from the sweeping power and near total monopoly of Gazprom, the state energy resources agency. While American libertarians are usually quick to distinguish economic liberty as real freedom, from the pseudo-freedom of civil rights that are “arbitrarily” dictated by the government, the ownership and management of energy resources by the state is not easily reconciled into monetarist understandings of the breathtaking dynamism of the unregulated marketplace. As Milton Friedman put it in 1951, in one of the earliest usages of the term, neoliberalism gives “high priority to real and efficient limitation of the state’s ability to, in detail, intervene in the activities of the individual.” In this sense, we understand Friedman’s use of the term as essentially a continuation of what is often called “classic” liberalism, as distinct from the values of redistributive justice of progressive liberalism articulated by John Rawls in his 1971 A Theory of Justice. Paradoxically, this neoliberalism is both old and new, an elaboration of the ideas from nineteenth-century economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, as well as a rebuttal to the “social engineering” impulse embedded in progressive liberalism. Mindful of this appearance of doing nothing more than pouring old wine into new bottles, Friedman makes an additional distinction about the specific character of his liberalism: “instead of the 19th c [sic] understanding that laissez-faire is the means to achieve this goal [of ensuring economic liberty for the individual], neoliberalism proposes that competition [author’s emphasis] will lead the way.”15

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As far as energy resource policies are concerned, Putin’s creation of Rosneft and other entities that are patently nothing more than branches of the same state entity cannot possibly fit into any notion of unregulated competition in the sense that Friedman describes. From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that his policies concerning the Federation’s gas and oil reserves are harshly criticized by journalists from both the free-market right, such as Yuliya Latynina and on the left from nonconformist firebrands such as Valeriia Novodvorskaya, and by political liberals such as Anastasiya Ovsyannikova of the human rights organization, the Sakharov Center in Moscow.16 Ovsayannikova herself has argued that the term “neoliberal” cannot be used to describe the Russian Federation’s economy, which is both inefficient and teeming with regulations. Latynina and Novodvorskaya (who passed away in 2014) have admitted to an admiration for Ayn Rand’s “objectivist” philosophy, with Novodvorskaya singling out the relevance of Rand’s contempt for the masses, who are all too willing to break bread with the state-supported political class. It is at this paradoxical juncture where we witness practices of libertarianism that worships a larcenous and hubristic administrative state—what many Russians still refer to in the aggregate as proizvol, а term coined during the reactionary reign of Nicholas I (1826–1856) that denotes the mercurial willfulness and cruelty of untrammeled administrative power—that we catch a glimpse of a Russian style of neoliberalism. Ordoliberalism, a postwar economic theory and practice that placed the administrative state in an essential dual capacity as both a guarantor of private property and an overseer of the mechanisms for market exchange that yield profits from contract-driven transactions, has distinct affinities with the current macroeconomic model in the Russian Federation.17 As Quinn Slobodian has argued, even the protoneoliberal economists of the Geneva School, who were more indebted than Ordoliberal theorists to Hayek’s ideas about market regulatory autonomy in a global setting, “perceived the world economy as an interdependent totality reliant on a series of institutional arrangements” that needed to be configured with the goal of facilitating “both competition and the international division of labor,” and freely drew on the founding principles of the League of Nations as their models.18 Striking a similar note of skepticism about the characterization of neoliberalism as a global-scale version of anarcho-capitalism, the global studies specialist Jeremy Morris (who has written extensively about the presentday Russian economy) cautions us against seeing neoliberalism as a faithful embodiment of Hayekian principles: “When conceptualizing/understanding

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neoliberalism, what we often miss sight of is the mutual benefit for states and corporations, including state-owned enterprises.” The contemporary example of the Russian Federation tells us that “[t]he control society brings further pressures to conform or internalize behaviours, practices and mindsets that entrench neoliberal thinking and allow the biopolitical to undermine any alternative” that could take the form of what Hardt and Negri describe as oppositional “mechanisms of accounting.” Morris goes on to note that the best sociological research into the Russian context “opens up this contradiction— we are supposed to internalize discipline, but this goes hand in hand with increased surveillance of work processes.”19 Bearing these useful distinctions in mind, we may think of Russian neoliberalism as either a version of Ordoliberalism updated to accommodate a multipolar rather than two-world (East and West) Cold War understanding of the global market, or as subvariety of Geneva School thinking that reconceptualizes the Russian Federation—together with its coveted “sphere of influence,” in the form of those countries that had formerly been Soviet republics—as the one true diversified labor market, instead of the global market. While differing in their emphases, both readings see neoliberal practice as being completely compatible with an autarchic and one-country model, rather than a globalist one. Among the films examined here, oligarchs appear as virile and oddly sympathetic monsters in Weekend and Russian Psycho, and exemplars of amoral managerialism in Thirst. In these films, such wielders of power insist on hierarchy and a rigid ecosystem of assigned roles with their hapless employees oscillating between subservience to their bosses and attempts to emulate the style of arbitrary power that they embody. In different ways, these men and their victims embody the supremacy of state authority. While speaking very much to a Russian, rather than global audience, in their fiercely localized settings these films corroborate Quinn Slobodian’s insight about preconceptions regarding neoliberalism: “it is sometimes claimed that the main sleight of hand for neoliberals is to hide the state, but even a cursory reading of the main theorists shows that a positive vision for the state is everywhere.”20 These films freely draw on global memes about predatory corporate authority and leisure practices of gaming subcultures, while clearly being made with an eye to the national market. As such, they fully exemplify Claudia Breger’s definition of transnational cinema as a genre that foregrounds “local scenarios and sociocultural contexts,” while also recontextualizing for their audiences the traumatic “post-Cold War moment

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of accelerated globalization” in such a way that the local and national frame of reference is never superseded.21 In many national film industries, it is often the movies that are made for the home audience and which for various reasons resist cultural translation into the diegetic conventions of the global marketplace, which can tell us the most about grassroots attempts at forging agency on the anvil of cultural autonomy. Such films are notable for entering into a dialogue with their local audiences, rather to lecture them or to enlighten a global spectatorship about glories or grand guignol aspects of their native cultures. Known for her stubbornly nonexportable work, the filmmaker Svetlana Baskova perhaps put it best in a 2012 interview, when she stated that she doesn’t care for the way that mainstream Russian filmmakers depict “the provinces, people, ‘spirituality’, history,” in the manner of portentously attempting to answer the question “What am I?”22 These films discussed in this chapter are a motley group, comprised of a deft exercise in cineaste passion (Weekend), a deceptively low-keyed examination of militarism and masculinity in contemporary Russian culture (Thirst), and a botched attempt at subverting controversial Hollywood films (Russian Psycho). Yet, to paraphrase Tomas Matza, what they all share is an aspiration to articulate a liberal-democratic politics that would serve as a rebuttal to neoliberalism’s demands for the perpetual retooling of the self. Well-known film directors who have written film criticism—among them, Lina Wertmüller, François Truffaut, Quentin Tarantino, Pedro Almodovar, and, in Russia, Aleksandr Sokurov— have often underscored the need to jettison snobbery in the search for pearls amidst the slurry of genre filmmaking and honorable cinematic failures. All film industries are what Baudrillard aptly termed “giant montage factories,” sites for the mass production and promulgation of collective imaginaries.23 While Russian Psycho may be regarded as a qualified failure at a political critique, all three films discussed in this chapter deserve our response, as meditations on the frenetic subjective experiences that triggered by what Matza calls the “discursive power of austerity.”24 In viewing these films, we may want to consider them as components or figures within the larger history of post-Soviet Russian cinema, regarding that history as a form of chain storytelling. As the Afro-British novelist Zadie Smith characterizes the genre of the novel, “the people we now cast into [the] place of non-interest were once the very people fiction was most curious about. The conflicted, the liars, the self-deceiving, the willfully blind, the abject, the unresolved, the imperfect,

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the evil, the unwell, the lost and divided. Those were once fiction’s people.”25 These films—all box-office flops in Russia—are like orphans that demand our attention. As financial losers and effective nonmembers of the club of globalized cinema, they also demand our attention as the refugees of the market that they critique. Seen from the merciless perspective of the market, the films may be regarded, like Balabanov’s two Brother films (1997 and 2000), as interpolations into a national cinema, pages rudely sewn into the omnibus of a Russian filmmaking after the collapse of the Soviet Union: because they jut out from the continuing serial narrative of the national cinema, the book naturally falls open at those places. As we shall see in the next chapter, the more explicitly anti-neoliberal films of Andrei Zvyaginstev operate in a distinctly transnational mode that dramatically contrasts with the ones examined here. By prompting viewers to solve mysteries that depict the threats of personal dispossession, Zvyaginstev compels us to take part in what Claudia Breger describes as a cinematic practice of “multisensory reading and reconfigurative critique.” A film that provokes “serious engagement with imagined worlds” will often, as she argues, encourage us to consider the possibility of a “larger transdisciplinary project of serious engagement with the real world(s) in which we live.”26

Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6

John McKay, “Brother: Cinema as Salvage Operation” (2015), 2, https://www. academia.edu/10246947/Balabanovs_BROTHER_1997_Cinema_as_salvage_ operation. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, tr. Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 275–6. Quoted in Douglas Martin’s obituary, “Aleksei Balabanov, 54, Russian Film Director, Dies,” New York Times, May 21, 2013: https://www.nytimes. com/2013/05/22/movies/aleksei-balabanov-russian-film-director-dies-at-54.html?s earchResultPosition=1. Andrei Piontkovskii, Iskushenie Vladimira Putina (Moscow: “Algoritm,” 2013), 94. Tomas Matza, Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Wellbeing in Post-Socialist Russia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 201, 4. Ibid., 200.

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For a discussion of Govorukhin’s casting of Vysotski as captain Zheglov in his 1978 film, see Novikov’s biography of the actor and singer (Vladimir Novikov, Vysotskii [Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiia, 2005], 295–9). 8 Larisa Maliukova, “Liubit’ cheloveka: Zhazhda, rezhisser Dmitri Tiurin,” Iskusstvo kino 8 (August 2013): http://kinoart.ru/ru/archive/2013/ru/archive/2013/08/lyubitcheloveka. 9 Rashmi Varma, The Postcolonial City and Its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay (London, UK: Routledge, 2012), 16. 10 “S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Chistoe nebo. Glavnaya”: http://cs.stalker-game.com/ ru/?page=home. 11 “S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Chistoe nebo. Monstry”: http://cs.stalker-game.com/ ru/?page=monsters. 12 Vladimir Golstein, “Energy of Anxiety,” in Tarkovsky, ed. Nathan Dunne (London: Black Dog, 2008), 193. 13 Manohla Dargis, “Collateral: A Killer in a Cab, Doing His Job,” August 6, 2004: http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9800E4DE123CF935A3575BC0A9629 C8B63. 14 Joanna Zylinska, A Feminist Counterapocalypse (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 59. 15 Quoted in Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013), 38. 16 “Voprosy i otvety Iulii Latyninoi,” Zhivoi zhurnal, May 26, 2011, https://latinina. livejournal.com/1366.html; Valeriia Novodvorskaia, “Ne terpet’ palachei v obshchestve!,” a 2012 interview with Ivan Tolstoy, Radio Svoboda, March 28, 2022, https://www.svoboda.org/a/ne-terpetj-palachey-v-obschestve-valeriyanovodvorskaya/31772150.html; Anastasiia Ovsyannikova, “Is Neoliberalism Applicable to Russia? A Response to Ilya Matveev,” Open Democracy, May 20, 2016, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/is-neoliberalism-applicable-to-russiaresponse-to-ilya-matveev/. 17 For a discussion of Ordoliberalism as a predecessor of present neoliberal practices, see Introduction of this volume. 18 Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 187. 19 Jeremy Morris, “Russia as Vanguard: Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Surveillance Capitalism,” LeftEast, November 26, 2021, https://lefteast.org/russia-vanguardauthoritarian-neoliberalism-surveillance-capitalism/. 20 Slobodian, 269. 21 Breger, Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 20.

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22 Quoted in Lars Kristensen, “Svetlana Baskova’s Response to Russian National Neoliberalism in For Marx …, ” in Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology, ed. Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen (London: Routledge, 2018), 78. 23 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, tr. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 76. 24 Matza, 200. 25 Zadie Smith, “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,” New York Review of Books, October 24, 2019, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/zadiesmith-in-defense-of-fiction/. 26 Breger, 18–19.

4

The Neoliberalization of Russia in the Films of Andrei Zvyagintsev Alexandar Mihailovic

Introduction: The Struggle for Personal Agency Let us begin this chapter with a counterintuitive assertion about Andrei Zvyagintsev’s work: his filmography to date traces the arc of a single narrative. From the beginning of his entry into the profession, was there a larger story that he wanted to tell? In the interviews with him, there is certainly no indication of such a goal. Yet the key to understanding Zvyagintsev’s work is as a genealogy of ideological tendencies that lay siege to the current social order, a series of chapters that begin with the tangled origins of the paradoxical concept of the state-sponsored or -regulated free market.1 In the interview for the DVD edition of Elena that was released in the West, he makes a statement about the title character of that film that could easily be applied to most of the characters in his films. The germ of the film, Zvyagintsev explains, came from Dostoevsky. In his delirium after finding out who murdered his father—and after acknowledging his own passive role in facilitating it—Ivan Karamazov imagines that he is visited by the Devil, who is foppishly kitted out in clothing suggestive of a serf-owning landowner from twenty years earlier, wearing checkered trousers and carrying a “soft, downy white hat.” “My dream,” the Devil wistfully explains to Ivan, “is to become incarnate, but so that it’s final, irrevocable, in some fat, two-hundredand-fifty-pound merchant’s wife [v semipudovuiu kupchikhu], and to believe everything she believes. My dream is to go into a church and light a candle with a pure heart—by God, it’s true.”2 Although Zvyagintsev does not identify the exact source and context of Dostoevsky’s statement—nor the significantly out-of-date attire of the Devil in Ivan’s dream—its provenance would be recognizable to most Russians. The murderess Elena in Zvyagintsev’s film is the

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logical development of a mind conditioned by relations of social bondage, of de facto slavery transferred into, and tweaked for, the cold budgetary calculus and infotainment-driven credulity of modernity. After all, the merchant’s wife of Dostoevsky’s telling will piously believe in (R. poverit) everything that she believes.3 She is nothing if not a monster of confirmation bias, writ large. With this useful point of purchase from Zvyagintsev’s interview, we come to a better understanding of the diegetic aspect of his films in their sequential relation to each other. Zvyagintsev is telling us the story of the convergence and eventual fusion of statist authoritarianism and Randian “rational self-interest” in Russia after the calamitous devaluation of the ruble in 1998. In Obscure, one of his first films from his journeyman days as a director for Russian television, Zvyagintsev submits for our attention a brutish oligarch whose wealth is protected by real estate from abroad, possibly in London or Cyprus.4 The man sexually abuses and stalks his wife, who exacts a carefully planned revenge by taking advantage of the particular forms of electronic surveillance that both he and her narcissistic lover use against her. As in Elena, we are simultaneously horrified by, yet sympathetic to, the choices that she makes. Obscure was one episode in a television series titled Black Room, аn omnibus of twelve half-hour episodes directed by various up-and-coming filmmakers that was shown from 2000 to 2001 on the then stillindependent NTV network, which would soon be dramatically bought out by the media arm of the state-owned energy conglomerate Gazprom. Black Room was devoted to experimental horror filmmaking in a way that seemed to betray an awareness of more rarefied movements in the Russian art world such as Necro-realism, which endeavored to unflinchingly portray and contemplate the moral wounds inflicted by the Soviet collapse and the 1998 national currency crisis. The entire series, and Zvyagintsev’s three short films in particular, seemed ahead of its time in imagining the interpersonal consequences of new media forms. Much like the recent UK-produced anthology Black Mirror, Black Room was suggestive of a non-American Twilight Zone with social media, popular culture, and the Internet taking the place of the supernatural and fantasy-driven storylines in Rod Serling’s original series. In these early efforts and in his featurelength films, Zvyagintsev explores the ways in which your life is no longer your own, and perhaps never was. Long gone are the days of the Soviet-era dissident subculture, with its resourceful work-arounds in social network maintenance, curated pathways of alternate bohemian-milieu intimacy, and unorthodox (and at times un-Orthodox) spirituality. What we as viewers experience even in Zvyagintsev’s trio of films from Black Room (consisting of Obscure, described

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above, and Busido and The Choice (Vybor), all three examining sexual politics and exploitive labor practices through the lens of trompe d’oeil visual effects) is a keen and outraged sense of personal lives that are harnessed to the profitmaking engine of a governmental state that makes itself intrusively known through television, the Internet, and text-messaging. Toward the end of our discussion of Zvyagintsev’s theatrical films, we will make a brief detour to his vignettes for Black Room, as a way of assessing how he in his later work recalls his professional beginnings. As we shall see, he is nothing if not an artist who is aware of the importance of personal stories, whether they be those of an individual, family, or community. Zvyagintsev’s post-television filmography is comprised of chapters that document shifting forms of sociality in an economy whose collapse in 1998 was triggered by the flight of 3.5 billion dollars to Russians who then lived abroad, and who were intent on having their money closer to hand and less vulnerable to the fluctuations of interest rates in banks within the Russian Federation.5 In the films themselves and in his responses to praise of them at festivals such as Cannes and Sundance, and to the cascade of patriotically inflected criticism of them in Russia itself, he is very mindful of the fraught relations between the Russian “here” and the “there” of abroad, the latter expressively articulated in Russian as po tu storonu (“on/from that [other] side”), with its implied understanding of economic globalism as a kind of frightening Otherworld that sluices, like an oil spill, into the spaces where people breath, live, and work. As the political scientist Peter Rutland correctly points out, we often forget that the Putin administration in the 2000s made a point of bringing the Russian Federation fully into global markets, by maintaining a convertible currency, allowing cross-border currency flows, and not raising tariff barriers. While this approach—arguably a continuation of the “Washington Consensus” free-market policies that marked the Yeltsin administration—worked well enough during a decade when world oil prices were robust, they were calamitous during the next one when the disadvantages of the country’s “resource curse”— its overreliance on energy resources—became vividly clear.6 It was during that second decade, of greater vulnerability at both the macroeconomic and local quotidian levels of Russian life, that Zvyagintsev made the three movies that will be the particular focus of our discussion: Elena, Leviathan, and Loveless. These films demonstrate to us how new forms of sociality function as a spurious source of solace from the relentless monetization that affects even family relations and the seemingly comforting protocols of religious devotion. With an exquisitely grotesque precision, those relations and practices

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now become calibrated to the “takeover of our lives and our global history” by a new type of neoliberal system, one that is abetted by the digital revolution and folded into the national security state.7 This last insight about the secret quotidian life of neoliberalism, from the work of the French sociologist François Cusset, nonetheless does not exhaust the insights of Zvyagintsev’s films themselves, which are relentless in their granular attention to the experience of having the ground shift and shake beneath your feet. Zvyagintsev strives to make us aware of those few individuals who are the discontents of neoliberalism, who push back, if not openly rebel, against the national state that is made rich by its virtual monopoly of energy resources, as it encroaches upon the self with its limited affective resources. In a sharp observation about the understanding of the current Russian leader as a charismatic business manager of titanic stature, the liberal pundit and blogger Andrei Piontkovsky has taken note of the perception of the president, among some of Putin’s supporters, as the nation’s “second oil resource,” as if he were more a force of nature than an actor on the political stage.8 From his first featurelength film The Return (2003) to Loveless (2017), Zvyagintsev draws increasing attention to the enigmatic interiority, if not pointed inexpressive opacity, of women and children. In other words, he devotes special attention to those who are most vulnerable to what one sociopathic character in The Choice (Vybor), Zvyagintsev’s third entry for Black Room, calls deciding matters effectively—that is to say, “man to man” (po-muzhski).9 These characters make a bid for autonomy from the values of the infotainment-driven Russian public square with its frequent insistence on the need to respect the “spiritual buttresses” (dukhovnye skrepy, literally, “spiritual clamps”) of traditional culture, as if the country’s religious identity is so feeble and fragile that it requires a surgical intervention that doubles as a form of bondage.10 From the way that Zvyagintsev films these characters, it is also quite clear that they are keen to maintain a separateness and independence from the ways that others, audience included, perceive and judge them. In more recent moments in his films, we come to realize that Zvyagintsev is turning away from the cinematic expressionism that was palpable in The Return and Banishment (2007). It is very hard to render a revelation of character, especially about someone who doesn’t want to be filmed or comprehended through the act of filming. Yet this borderline anti-cinematic inflection point is precisely where Zvyagintsev intensifies his polemical engagement with neoliberalism. The walling off of the self is central to all three films, in a way that it isn’t in his

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first two films The Return and Banishment. In his 1967 essay The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord sketched out a world in which entertainment and spectacle are continuously applied in an effort to achieve the illusion of an “augmented survival” that “gilds the lily of poverty.”11 Elena and Loveless address the next stage in this dismantling of the critical faculty by demonstrating in cinematic terms the ways in which an immersive sensorium of infotainment reinforces the interlocking panoply of a stringent if capricious legal system, exploitive labor practices, and a meretricious religiously inflected nationalism that imagines a resurgent Holy Russia as entering into the penultimate phase of its world-historical mission. What makes Zvyagintsev’s examination of “the ecosystem of interruption technologies” that kicks in every time a character turns on a mobile phone, television, or computer even more potent is the suggestion, within the films themselves, that cinema serves both as a crèche for the evolution of those technologies and as a medium that continues to interact with them in the manner of an unhealthy biofeedback loop.12 These are characters who strive—with varying degrees of self-understanding and principled boldness, and sometimes with breathtaking wrongheadedness in how they go about it—to retreat from a Russian version of the neoliberal conception of the optimized and efficient capitalist society as a shimmering ideal. This is filmmaking with the agenda of letting people and even physical environments speak for themselves, with the goal of drawing attention to the “intolerance toward the Other voice” (neterpimost’ k drugomu golosu) that Zvyagintsev has identified as the most glaring ideological problem in contemporary Russia.13 Zvyagintsev is intent upon detoxifying the medium, and on cleaning house.

Elena (2011) and the Home Economics of Escape Among other things, Elena is notable for having a cast of characters that is uniformly unemployed. Even more remarkably, this pattern of unemployment in the film cuts across class lines, effectively bringing together the affluent retired oligarch Vladimir and his cynical daughter Katya with Elena and her feckless son, grandson, and daughter-in-law. This sociological fact begs the question of whether the film can indeed be understood as a meditation on the proliferation within Russian society of the neoliberal models of ceaseless professional striving and self-optimization. With the somewhat murky exception of Vladimir, whose source of wealth remains completely unexplained and therefore, in the

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post-Soviet context, rather suspect in moral terms, every single character in the film is an underachiever if measured by the neoliberal principle that risk is the “primary method of changing your identity to live life to the fullest” and of becoming an “entrepreneur of the self.”14 As Zvyagintsev put it in one interview about the film, Elena’s husband Vladimir is “all-powerful, a symbol of corrupt and increasingly decrepit political power.”15 Elena is a film about anxiety and fear, the aversion to risk. One psychotherapist who runs a clinic in St. Petersburg explains such feelings as being, if anything, deeply opposed to the free-market cognitive boosterism about risk: [Our anxiety] can be explained by the fact that society is going through an ongoing state of change, and people still cannot assert or confirm that their situations are stable. They have no savings to help them in a moment of need, or property to sell to support them. They do not know what kind of political society exists, and they worry about their children. And so it is really anxiety, caused by uncertainty. But in the Russian language, fear and anxiety are often not differentiated. Fear is a response to something happening, for instance, a barking dog. With anxiety, nobody is barking.16

Seen from this perspective, all of the characters in the film would seem to be come from another era. Indeed, so much of the film’s basic conflict that pivots on Elena’s anxiety about her family in the light of her morganatic marriage to Vladimir is reminiscent of an Ibsen play, where the emphasis is primarily about the crisis resulting from the hardy vestiges of feudalism coming up against the nominally progressive ideals of bourgeois modernity. The concerns of this film seem grounded in immediate psychological, if not soberingly existential, concerns. Elena is, after all, anxious to save her grandson Sasha from conscription in a national army that may experience actual combat within the near future. Although the film takes place in 2010, during a time when the Russian Federation was largely uninvolved in geopolitical conflict, the shadow of the demographic and personal shock waves of the Second World War, and the two Chechen wars of the nineties and the Russian-Georgian conflict of 2008 would certainly be more than enough to give pause to a Russian woman in her sixties, not to mention the notorious and sometimes lethal practice of hazing (dedovshchina) that continues to be inflicted upon newer conscripts. Later, we will return to the matter of what particular consideration about army life worries Elena the most. There is almost nothing in Elena that has to do with that most essential of neoliberal concepts: the transformation of labor as a commodity that offsets the irrational territoriality of nation-states. In his recent

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revisionist study Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian argues that neoliberalism stipulates “the need for a set of institutional safeguards and legal constraints to prevent nation-states from transgressing their commitments to the world economic order.”17 While Elena lacks a detailed perspective on the ways in which the economic principles and values of the “Washington Consensus” economic globalism impinge upon the everyday lives of Russians, it nonetheless is a film that focuses its lens on the actual consequences of social Darwinism. First and foremost, Elena is a film that maps out its title character’s ascension to agency and power. The global perspective is simply nowhere to be seen. What perspective, then, does this film provide for its audience? As in all of Zvyagintsev’s films, the opening and ending sequences in Elena draw the viewer into a contemplation of a still image that recalls the conventions of photography. A little over halfway through the film, shortly after the title character poisons her husband, the camera lingers on the wall with the extensive photo gallery of Elena’s family, with particular attention paid to the relaxed and smiling photograph of her from the time that she married him ten years earlier (1:09). This showing of family pictures brings to mind the sociologist Olga Shevchenko’s characterization of post-Soviet personal narratives as gambits for individual autonomy and agency in a time of moral and social breakdown, as fraught representations of “kinship networks” that vanished during the multiple crises that rocked the identities and lifestyles of the Russian intelligentsia over the course of the nineties.18 The only photograph that we see among Vladimir’s belongings is one of his daughter on his desk. We are made to understand that Elena, unlike her husband, is a person with an actual past, someone who is well grounded because of her strong loyalty to her son, grandson, and daughter-in-law. The still-imaging of scenes in the film is comprised of edifices as well as people. In Zvyaginstev’s filmography, buildings are often presented as characters in their own right, whether they are the antiseptic and cool metallic structures of Vladimir’s building and the sports center where he experiences his heart attack, or the startling riot of gold and shades of brown that we see in the church where Elena lights a candle for his health. With its inert scenes of often taciturn and immobile human agents, and grotesque yet transfixing landscapes of decaying infrastructure tricked out in sharply etched shapes of bleached colors, Zvyagintsev’s 2003 The Return, his first feature film, emerges as something of a gloss, if not kinetic translation, of Boris Mikhailov’s tinted

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photographs from the seventies through the nineties, of bloated bodies posed against the stripped, de-varnished palette of once-pristine Soviet-era housing developments.19 The slideshow aspect of the intermittent sequences of architectural and infrastructural decay in the Russian countryside that we see in The Return and in Zvyagintsev’s next film Banishment (Izgnanie) (2007) also calls to mind Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1983). As Geoff Dyer points out in Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, Tarkovsky’s films are replete with exquisite images of dilapidation of former or abandoned industrial workspaces, bringing us into a renewed awareness of the ordinary. We now perceive these architectural relics with an “unprecedented attentiveness” that blurs the distinction between natural world and the manufactured.20 Never have the ruins of industrial-age modernity looked so good, as in those Soviet-era films. Like Tarkovsky, Zvyagintsev is shrewdly aware of the aesthetic tension between the still photograph and the moving image and is interested in the ways in which a movie may engage with a still image in a manner that opens up an otherwise unsympathetic audience’s affective response. His engagement with the photographic conventions of pictorialism as well as portraiture is present in Elena, a film in which people are inscrutable, and nearly unknowable, until they engage in an act that is demonstrably evil or good. In Elena, static distance shots often box people in, framing them with the quadrilaterals of architectural space. Elena’s entrance into the church to light a candle for her convalescing husband is an instance where the decorations within a bounded space serve as an additional amplifier, or thematic armature, for the representation of character. From her very entrance into the building, as from the apartment where she and Vladimir live, which conspicuously lacks a “red corner” or ceiling niche for an icon, it is clear that Elena is not a regular churchgoer. The woman at the kiosk sternly reminds her to wrap a scarf around her head, in accordance with the Orthodox custom that dictates women’s attire in houses of worship. Inquiring about practices for wishing better health for her husband, Elena is told that she should write his name down for the priest to mention at the next service and that she should light candles in front of the icons of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker and the Mother of God. In Orthodox tradition, the latter image consists of a representation of a presciently mournful Mary holding the baby Jesus. Interestingly, Elena ignores these recommendations and even the kiosk cashier’s direction about the location of the icons (46:42). Instead, she chooses an icon that is neither of those: the entrance of the Virgin Mary, at the

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age of twelve, into the temple. What is the significance of her bowing before this icon as opposed to either of the other ones? Before answering this question, we need to acknowledge Zvyaginstev’s pointed representation of Elena’s opacity to the gaze of others, our own included. All we can say for certain is that she seeks ritual and divine intervention as avenues for transcending her loss of agency. In Zvyagintsev’s and Oleg Negin’s published screenplay, the discrepancy between the cashier’s recommendation and Elena’s action is indicated by the stage direction that “[a]fter going up to an [or: the] icon, Elena places the candle before it.”21 In the film, she buys two candles—one for each icon—but only lights one in front of the icon she chose. As someone who is seemingly not particularly versed or steeped in the extensive hagiographical narratives of the Orthodox Church and its calendar, it is not clear if Elena is even aware of the story of what is often understood as the beginning of Mary’s ascension to her role as the Mother of God, the bat mitzvah in her life. What is clear from Zvyaginstev’s lingering shot of her contemplation of the icon is that she finds the image compelling (Figure 4.1). The composition of this particular icon is strongly configured with the reverse perspective that is traditional to much Russian Orthodox iconography, which means that the viewer is made to have the sensation of occupying the same physical space as the portrayed figures. Elena identifies with the childlike figure of Mary, who is being blessed by the chief rabbi of the temple. The image is, above all, one of empowerment, personal autonomy (Mary leaves her family for good), and ritualistic validation. As members of the audience, we realize that

Figure 4.1  Thinking of her convalescing husband, Elena (Nadezhda Markina) lights a candle in front of an icon.

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we have no real way of knowing what goes through her mind at this moment. Nonetheless, we vividly sense that this interlude of reflection is more about Elena than it is about Vladimir. The partially walled-off quality of Elena’s thought processes, which are quite pronounced in comparison with the narrative techniques of filmmakers who rely on a character’s garrulousness as a kind of surplus value or index for their core selves (such as Martin Scorsese or, in the context of Russian-language cinema, the Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova), is pronounced throughout the film and often stands in strong contrast to the representation of other characters. Above all, we have only a feeling or sensation of what makes Elena tick—as a mother, as someone protecting her brood in an almost deliberate invocation of the stolid and somewhat heavy-set Motherland figure shown in Soviet posters from the Second World War—rather than a series of statements that serve as a clear inventory for the repository of her Self. Her husband Vladimir and his daughter Katya stand in stark contrast to this parsimony of expressive statements or pungently affective utterances. Everything about those two people is completely transparent and possesses the exhaustive character of a financial statement, as well as the directness of a verbal one. “It’s always been about money [with you],” Katya states while visiting him in his private room in the hospital, hinting at her bitterness about his lack of involvement in her upbringing. “Are you tallying up all the things I did” [itogi ty mne podvodish’]?” he quips. “Don’t you understand what you’re paying for [za chto platish’]?” she asks. Turning thoughtful, he responds “or what I’m settling accounts for [rasplachivaius’].” “Now, don’t go into a crying fit [ne rasplach’sia]!” “Oh, you always loved word games,” Vladimir says, smiling. There is more playfulness in this two-minute real-time exchange—flawlessly performed by the actors Elena Lyadova and Andrei Smirnov, as a dance alternating between aggression and affection—than in any of the stiff and dour interactions that Elena has with Vladimir or with her doltish and taciturn son Sergei. In a film whose cool and sustained portrayal of human venality seems almost unbearable, the Russian ear is pleasantly surprised by the punning between words such as rasplachivat’sia (to pay or settle up) and rasplakat’sia (to have a crying or sobbing fit), and the puckish code-switching between slang and medical terminology: “Oh, you pest [iazva (lit., ‘ulcer’)], you!” (Vladimir); “And I thought it was a heart attack [infarkt]” (Katya). What we learn from this exchange is that a great deal of the relationship is indeed about money and that both father and daughter believe that money grants absolute privilege. Taking out a cigarette, Katya is sternly reminded by her

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father that she can’t smoke there. “It’s a hospital.” “Why not? After all, you’ve paid up [oplatil] for this luxury suite [apartmenty]. You can do whatever you want.”22 It is this lesson about the alignment of money and freedom—of what Friedrich Hayek, the godfather of neoliberalism, called the “freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us”23—that Elena takes away from her ten years of caring for Vladimir and her two years of marriage with him. The scene of Elena transfixed before the icon and her artfully arranged gallery of family photographs hint at the character’s keen visual sense. In the end, Elena’s observational acumen about the experience of her life with Vladimir and the model of behavior that he set override any concerns that served as the foundation for her conventional and laconic moralism. Like the twelve-year-old Mary touched by the rabbi in the icon from the church, she leverages her contact with a figure of institutional authority (in the case of Vladimir, someone affiliated with the interconnected worlds of business and politics) into a provisional autonomy for herself. The moments of anguish that Elena experiences after she gives him the overdose of Viagra that she claims is medicine for his heart condition—in what could be interpreted as a pointed revenge against the toxic masculinity of a national culture that is arguably still steeped in the patriarchal managerialism, as expressed in premodern texts such as the sixteenth-century treatise Domostroi [“Home Maintenance”]—comes and goes in two minutes of screen time (1:07– 9.00), with a possible flickering resurgence during the power blackout in the neighborhood where her son, daughter-in-law, and shiftless grandson Sasha live. Shrouded by darkness as it is, we can only guess what the pained grimace on Elena’s face could mean. Is she concerned that the money she purloined from Vladimir’s safe won’t be enough for the bribe to the administration of an institute or university to accept Sasha? Do feelings of guilt pursue her for the criminal act she committed? Is she despondent about the way her son turned out? Does she wonder if her murder of Vladimir was truly out of concern for her grandson’s possible drafting into military service? After all, her statement to Vladimir earlier in the film that “you know what they do in the army” (25:40) would seem to indicate that she was primarily concerned about Sasha becoming a target for hazing (dedovshchina). Yet, as the journalist Anna Politkovskaya has extensively documented, the most vulnerable targets of that practice in the Russian army have been People of Color—specifically, conscripts of Central Asian background.24 That racialist aspect of daily life in the Russian capital is referenced as Vladimir drives to his sports center, as he scowls at a group of

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Asian construction workers crossing the street, who may be undocumented laborers (32:57). As unpleasant or horrible as hazing or dedovshchina would have been for Sasha, it would hardly have threatened his life. As Zvyagintsev himself underscored in an interview, “it’s not as if anything irrevocable, extraordinary or inexorably disastrous would happen if her grandson Sasha were suddenly to end up in the army, would it?”25 The fact that we are unable to provide a clear answer to any of these questions reminds us that Elena is, in the end, her own person and that the source of her rebellion may not be clear even to herself. Elena was neither Vladimir’s property nor an employee, even though he treated her as such at different points of the film’s action.26 Perhaps no less importantly, she is also not an effigy for our own moralistic disapproval, as she preserves a realm of interiority that is inaccessible to our cinematic gaze and which keeps us guessing about her own complex motivations. She rebels against her husband’s cult of selfishness, minted in the “wild nineties” (likhie devianostye), even as she avails herself of the selfjustifications that had made it possible. The final question for us to consider is this: how is such a paradox made dramatically plausible within the film itself? In this regard, there is another aspect of Elena’s sensitivity to visual stimuli that we need to consider because of the ways that her autonomy might be compromised by her own surroundings. In certain sense, our access to her is indirect and conditioned by the social prompts that we witness within the world of the film. In a discussion of Crime and Punishment—another novel by Dostoevsky that Zvyagintsev references, through Elena’s troubled glimpse of a dead horse that may echo Raskolnikov’s nightmare about a horse being beaten to death27—Tolstoy famously wrote that Raskolnikov’s commission of murder was the result of an agglomeration of banal circumstances, rather than the culmination of high-flown principle: “one glass of beer, or one cigarette, may prevent the solution of the question, may postpone the decision, stifle the voice of conscience and prompt a decision of the question in favor of the lower, animal nature.”28 Elena and her family are, among other things, transfixed by television and corroded by it. After Vladimir’s body has been taken away, she sits down to watch a fatuous daytime program about people who “vote” for the best tasting sausage (1:21:18). We don’t see the screen ourselves and find ourselves assessing it in part from her face, which for the first time since his death has become relaxed. At other points of the film, we hear—but again, don’t see—snippets of broadcasts about people in search of their lost or disappeared children, how to lose weight by eating more salads, and the distinctive hysterical voice of Vladimir

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Zhirinovsky, a member of the Duma or Russian State Parliament who represents the authoritarian LDPR party. In the film’s final scene, we see Elena and her family sitting down to watch a show similar to The Bachelor, with her face fully returning to its characteristically unclenched and neutrally slack expression, so different from her agitation as the overdose of Viagra took effect, her glimpse of the dead horse outside her commuter train (1:30:11), and during the blackout in the apartment building where her family lives. Now, we find ourselves viewing with her and her family the kind of program she likes to watch, and find ourselves appalled by its tacky triviality in the wake of the crime she recently committed. If there is an opiate of the masses, this barrage of slyly politicized infotainment is it; if anything in the film corresponds to the shadows cast on the wall of Plato’s cave, whose chained prisoners mistake for reality, this is it. What we also feel, however, is a certain melancholy and empathy for her. Elena could not withstand the sustained, if deceptively undramatic, onslaught of the instrumentalist system of values that were deeply baked into her marriage, and which was amplified by the social Darwinism and amoral political relativism of the mass media that she and her husband routinely imbibed.

Whose Leviathan? Subjugation as Emancipation in Zvyagintsev’s 2014 Film In 2014, the reception of Leviathan in Russia contrasted starkly with that in the West. While it received accolades at international film festivals, Zvyaginstev’s film was widely accused in Russia of being Russopobic and of playing to global audience’s expectations of a self-abasing spectacle of backwardness and obscurantism (mrakobesie) in the countryside of the Russian Federation.29 The film certainly is a study in abjection. A hot-tempered man named Nikolai Sergeev lives with his family in the northwest corner of the country. In point of fact, Zvyagintsev filmed in Murmansk, not far from the country’s borders with Finland and Norway. Nikolai (“Kolya”) loses his battle against a local unscrupulous politician’s claims on his land for eminent domain. The corrupt local authorities, including the court system, frame him for the death of his wife, which resulted either from suicide or the accident of her slipping off a promontory overlooking the sea. Kolya is sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor and loses custody of his son Roma, who despises his stepmother and whose outburst against her late in the film indirectly brings about her death.

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Dima, the lawyer who comes from Moscow to help him with his counter suit, ends up sleeping with Kolya’s wife Liliya, who comes to him out of what seems to be desperation to flee her husband’s abusive behavior. Discovering their betrayal of him, Kolya communicates in the way that he knows best—with his fists. Yet, even before he uncovers the infidelity, he attempts to pull rank on Dima by reminding him that he was his commanding officer during their stint in the army twenty years before. Among other things, this timeline would place both men as serving during the time of the Chechen civil war and the IngushOssetian border conflict of the early nineties, which means that Kolya and Dima probably experienced combat. The entire narrative of Leviathan hangs on threats of violence and simulated violence—the waving of fists, the only semi-playful slap against the cheek of a child, the drunken marksmanship contest using yellowing portraits of Soviet leaders—if not actual manifestations of it. As Kolya reminds several people over the course of the film, he is a man who works with his hands: “I built this house with my own hands [svoimi rukami]!” he yells at Dima and Vadim, the thuggish mayor of the town who is intent on taking away his property. As he renovates his house, fixes cars for locals, and abuses those who are close to him, we come to see those hands as instruments of destruction and mayhem, as well as of construction and repair. His best friends in town, a phlegmatic policeman Pavel and his sharp-witted wife Anzhela, adopt Kolya’s son largely because of the state subsidy that they expect to receive, which will help them finish the renovations for another apartment that they own in their building. Our powerful cumulative impression of Leviathan is that it is both a portrait of a violent and abusive man who has no real friends, and a picture of a world where the human resource of friendship is fatally compromised by transactional caveats. The seaside location of Leviathan is both lovely and austere. The tracking shots at the beginning of the film linger on a rocky, pencil-colored landscape that is bereft of human presence, as if it belongs to a moon orbiting a planet other than this one. The cinematographer Mikhail Kichman, who has worked with Zvyagintsev since very beginning of the director’s career in Russian television, then moves his lens to the cliff from which Liliya eventually falls to her death, giving us a glimpse of the crashing waves beneath that is the same as her sightline later (1:35:58) in the film. Only gradually do we come to see scattered structures of human habitation and sites of labor, such as the local fish-processing plant where Liliya works. Yet in the moments before dawn, these are edifices that continue to lack evidence of actual human bodies. As an

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audience, we get the sense of humanity as an occupying and possibly temporary presence. The tone that Zvyagintsev sets at the beginning of the film suggests an attempt to decolonize the setting, or at least to remind us of our ambivalence with territory that we claim to have sovereignty over. In her 2012 book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes an explicit connection between post-colonialism, environmentalism, and economic globalization that resonates with the tableaux of images that follow the film’s opening credits. In the era of the “globe [being] on our computers” and us imagining that we can “control globality” by commandeering a medium where no one actually lives, the physical site that we inhabit—the planet—enters into a “species of alterity” or strangeness for us. And yet, Spivak concludes, at the end of the day we do indeed “inhabit” the notional globe of new media, and sadly “indeed are it,” or have become so.30 Many Russian viewers would also associate Zvyagintsev’s introductory filmic observations of the territory with Chekhov’s non-fiction travelogue Sakhalin Island (1891), in which the author compiled a series of often scathing observations of the country’s largest penal colony. In between the scenes of human degradation that Chekhov documents, there is also much natural beauty, expressing both a sense of the sublime that is made more potent by the occasional seeming evacuation of human presence, and an appreciation of humanity’s utter peripherality to a spectacular yet often inhospitable environment. Four years later, Chekhov reused those impressions of the landscape of Sakhalin (then still under the joint custodianship of Japan and the Russian empire) for his short story “Murder” [Ubiistvo] (1895). At the end of that story, the convict protagonist uneasily takes note that “the weather is liable to violent changes in the course of half an hour, and then the shores of Sakhalin are dangerous. And already it had turned fresh, and there was a considerable sea running.” In an ominous dénouement that some Soviet-era commentators understood as being prophetic of the Russian Revolution, the character hears “the hoisting of the anchor chain on the steamer” and feels “a strong piercing wind.” “Somewhere on the steep cliff overhead the trees were creaking. Most likely a storm was coming.” While not having the status of a colony in the same way that Sakhalin had during Chekhov’s visit, the location of Leviathan nonetheless synthesizes the sense of unease about the borderlands that is present in Chekhov’s understanding of the periphery of empire as a place of eschatological moral crisis and of eminent domain as a contravention, among other things, of the Russian Green Party’s economic principles of limiting humanity’s sphere of influence or footprint within the national space.31 The film’s

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portrayal of the precarity of habitation reverberates with Spivak’s characterization of human presence in a specific place as a “planetary accident,” as something that should not presuppose a sovereignty over the larger space in which one happens to live; it also dovetails with Alexander Etkind’s argument about the legacy of the prerevolutionary imperial experience, as marked by the treatment of Russians themselves as colonial subjects over the course of the country’s expansion of its borders during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.32 No wonder that the name of the fictional town in Zvyagintsev’s film is Pribrezhnyi (“Shoreline” or “Coastal” [settlement]). In Leviathan, we have the sense that everyone is on the edge, both territorially and in terms of the management of their own exhausted cognitive and emotional resources. In his next film Loveless (2017), Zvyagintsev would continue this contemplation of the disappearance of humanity with numerous pop-culture references to the end-times prognosticated by the Mayan calendar as happening in 2012, the year in which the events of that film take place. In Leviathan, there is a sense that no one truly possesses property rights and that the seizure of land by politically connected actors is simply a legalized fiction that looks real because of the charisma of violence that accompanies it. In retrospect, Leviathan represents the beginning of Zvyaginstev’s contemplation of the end of things as we know them, which he pursued in greater depth in Loveless. Here we witness the collapse of the social contract, and the loss of any shared understanding of values as embodied by obshchestvennost’, an evocative yet somewhat elusive Soviet-era term that includes notions as varied as public opinion, one’s sense of duty and responsibility to others, and even the very concept of “sociality.” All of these instincts for social connection become thoroughly denatured in the film. Yet within the framework of Leviathan, what is the dramatic catalyst for this falling apart? In order to answer this question, we need to consider the two subtexts of the film that are signaled by its title, from the Book of Job and Thomas Hobbes’s treatise Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (1651). In his despondent conversation with a kindly Orthodox priest after Liliya’s death, Kolya angrily asks about the point of devotion and piety. The priest Vasily responds by quoting verbatim a swath of God’s response to Job about the Leviathan, or whale, in the Church Slavonic-inflected text of the Russian translation of the Bible: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications

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unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? He beholdeth all high things: he is a king [Tsar’]” (41:13, 41:34). The stature and might of leviathan are qualities manifested by the Lord himself, who in the preceding chapter—not quoted by Father Vasily, but implicitly acknowledged by him—challenges Job with the question “[s]hall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him?” (Job 40:2). The Leviathan is a picture of limitless authority and power, for “[u]pon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear” (41:33). In an interview taking place after the international release of the film, Zvyagintsev made the point that he learned of Hobbes’s Leviathan, with its argument that the covenant of the state consists of the physical security of its citizenry in exchange for an unquestioning fealty to the sovereign, only well into the course of filming. From the finished film, we become aware of a synthesis of the original biblical passage (which Hobbes oddly avoids referencing in the course of his book) and a political treatise that was written shortly before the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell—a sovereign who was not a monarch—and in the shadow of the execution of Charles I several years earlier. How does one guarantee the citizenry’s allegiance to the state during a transfer of power, from one religious dispensation to another (a Church of England imbued with a quasi-Catholic ecclesiology, to one that would be open to Calvinist reforms) and from one system of government to another (monarchy to a parliamentarian Commonwealth)? Much of Hobbes’s framing of these questions has to do with the particular status of religion in England after Henry VIII, where the Church of England effectively lacked autonomy and was strictly subordinate to the will of the monarch. As Hobbes sees it, the important thing to bear in mind is that no religious body within the country can ever be understood as having its own sovereign or reigning subject, regardless of whether the state be monarchist or that of a commonwealth. Given the fact that the Church “be not one person,” then it has “no authority at all.” As a result, “it can neither command, not doe any action at all; nor is [it] capable of having any power, or right, to any thing [sic]; nor has [it] any Will, Reason, or Voice; for all these qualities are personal.”33 Hobbes’s understanding of religion was not so much that it rendered unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but rather that it render unto him—or rather it, the state—almost everything that it had, while scrupulously reserving the right to the few personal activities and devotional practices that fell into “the silence of the Law”—that is, those that did not openly conflict with the interests of the state.34 Hobbes’s understanding of the social contract is comprised of imperatives that would seem to be mutually exclusive. For him, the social contract is authoritarian

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yet individualistic. Hobbes is pedantically legalistic in his quest to carve out a refuge for volitional empowerment, whether it be that of the sovereign or of the citizen living in the state that the sovereign represents or embodies. Within the Aristotelian tradition, he is arguably the first grand political theorist of negative liberty. In the world of Zvyaginstev’s Leviathan, however, there is no room for even the most modest and apologetic understandings of negative liberty, of living as one would please without bothering either one’s neighbors or the behemoth of the state. As it turns out, the hide of the leviathan of the state is remarkably ticklish and irritable, for all its thickness. The state is completely sensible to the taunts and barbs against it: “Darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a spear” (Job 41:29). Jeering and mockery are invariably responses to resistance; they are reflexes of heightened receptiveness, rather than signs of indifference or stoic disregard. Halfway through the film, Kolya exclaims that every man should have, or be, the power on his own land (vlast’ na svoem uchastke), a statement that he makes shortly after hearing his friend Dmitri—yet another policeman friend, who also eventually betrays him—assert, during a game of inebriated target practice at a picnic, that every man (muzhchina) should have his own gun (1:01:06). The word “power” (vlast’) reverberates like a tuning fork throughout Leviathan, at intervals resetting the film’s thematic signature. When Kolya’s son Roma runs from the house after yelling at Liliya that he wishes she was dead, he comes across a whale skeleton on the beach (1:31:25). In his review of the film “Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Two Whales,” the émigré critic Boris Paramonov convincingly argues that this scene signals that it is precisely the social contract of Hobbes’s Leviathan that is dead within the world of the film. Instead, we see a Russian state that refuses to guarantee even the physical security of its subjects; it is an entity that is eaten from within by the law of the strong over the weak, of the complete and utter power or dominion of criminals (vsevlastie prestupnikov) over everybody else.35 The oily, morally repulsive mayor Vadim routinely consults with the Orthodox bishop who presides over the parish of Pribrezhnyi. The bishop emerges as a Mephistopheles figure to Vadim’s Faust, encouraging him to use the power that is already vouchsafed to him, as the local representative of a state that is friendly to the interests of the church. “All power comes from God [vsiakaia vlast’ ot Boga],” the bishop intones (22:49), in a phrase that Vadim repeats seven minutes later in the film when he drunkenly confronts Kolya outside his house. In the company of his bodyguard, Vadim yells at Kolya and

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his lawyer friend Vadim, calling them “insects” and “barrister scum [krysa advokatskaia, lit., ‘lawyer rat’].” Pointing to himself, he tells Kolya that he needs to know the face of power (literally, “to know power [by looking at it] in the face” [nado znat’ vlast’ v litso], 29:40). The turning point in the film’s tragic action occurs in the last consultation we witness between the mayor and the presiding bishop, in which the latter encourages him to engage in acts of strength (sila) against those who oppose their project of using Vadim’s land as the site for an extensive church complex and vacation destination for the devout. Reiterating that “[a]ll power comes from God,” the bishop goes on to say that “good deeds are done easily and joyfully” (blagie dela delaiutsia radostno i legko, 1:09:41). It is this counsel from a high-ranking representative of the church that decisively emboldens Vadim, who sheds his remaining inhibitions about engaging in open acts of violence and thuggery: he and his security team pick up a Dima who is already smarting and bruised from his scuffle with Kolya, and beat him senseless. Dima drops the countersuit against the mayor and returns humiliated to Moscow. In addition to representing a turning point in Kolya’s quixotic campaign against eminent domain, the bishop’s heeded advice highlights both the will to power and the sensation of disemburdened or easeful joy that accompanies its fulfillment. But who experiences this extravagant joy at the expense of others? Is it the bishop, the mayor, or both? The answer is that the experience of joy is not primarily weighted in any particular figure of authority or character. In the film, this exhilarating joy comes from what Tamsin Shaw calls the “freedom and exhilaration of moral insensibility”36 experienced by an administrative state that is reinforced by the principle of institutional consilience, with agents of both church and state striving for an indissoluble union that they have not possessed for over a hundred years in Russia. Yet does this fusion of political and spiritual credos actually come to fruition in Leviathan? The action of the film is strewn with structures that formerly impressed us with their scale and which are now stripped and flayed to their bare integuments of rafter and rib. We will shortly return to this question. In the meantime, suffice it to say that we do not have a vivid sense of any character identifying so thoroughly with the state’s evangelical dreams of dominion (passionarnost’, in the coinage of the Russian Eurasianist thinker Lev Gumilev),37 according to which they, as the poet Adrienne Rich memorably puts it, live “conspiring, breathing along / with history’s systole-diastole / twenty thousand leagues under the sea a mammal heartbeat / sheltering another heartbeat.”38

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In search of Roma after Liliya’s disappearance, Kolya wanders into the ruin of a church whose design and remaining frescoes indicate that it dates from the reign of Catherine the Great, during the apogee of the “Enlightened Despotism” that Denis Diderot, during his extended visit to her court in 1773, imagined her rule as embodying. In a haunting fire-lit tableau that anticipates the end credit sequence of still images of the skeletal hulls of ships “rotting sailorless on the sea”—as Byron famously put it in his apocalyptic poem “Darkness”39— half of the church’s nave is vertically shorn off, giving it the appearance of an eviscerated whale buried head-up to its midsection. As in Elena, the protagonist stares fixedly at a religious image, in this case a Raphaelite wall fresco portraying Salome proffering to King Herod the head of St. John the Baptist on a platter (1:42:41). At this juncture of the film’s action, Kolya knows quite well that his life is already proceeding apace on its downward slope. Who, for him, is King Herod, and to whom does Salome correspond? In what sense can Kolya understand himself as someone like the forerunner evangelist John the Baptist? As always in Zvyagintsev’s films, it is the tenor, rather than the substance or content, of religious images that resonates most deeply for his characters. Kolya sees himself as someone sacrificed for the voluptuous pleasure of the power, of both the administrative state and the church that rides in tandem with it. The leviathan here is a corporate entity, rather than a single person: as formulated by the early neoliberal theorist and Russian expatriate Wassily Leontieff, who in 1973 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, it is the national economy as a “gigantic, intricate machine.”40 This means that it is never quite human, and that we would do best to think of it in terms that are something other than anthropomorphic. The leviathan of the administrative state is alive in the film, albeit in a moribund or zombified condition. Writing in 2014, the same politically eventful year as the film’s release, the novelist Vladimir Sorokin argued that [t]he huge iceberg Russia, frozen by the Putin regime, cracked after the events in Crimea; it has split from the European world, and sailed off into the unknown. No one knows what will happen to the country now, into which seas or swamps it will drift. […] The state’s teeth are not what they were, and for that matter, its stomach doesn’t work as it once did.41

The institution of the Orthodox church, a notional place of moral refuge, becomes no less corrupt than the oligarch-driven state embodied by the odious mayor of the town. As tonally driven as such religious motifs are in the film, they take on a distinct biblical significance in the character of Anzhela, the wife of Kolya’s

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best friend who comes to assume the role of a treacherous Salome. In a world whose moral values are so utterly inverted, even an angel can become a devil. Yet the film does not tip over into misogyny in its representation of Anzhela. As in Elena, here Zvyagintsev scrupulously avoids rendering his characters into hobby horses for allegory. Like Elena, Anzhela is a woman who has taken lessons from the world of men in how to fight for herself. Translated into “man-speak,” however, this means something rather specific: how to become a predator. As she wearily yet smilingly tells Liliya about her completely unruly ten-year-old son who brandishes a toy machine gun, “they [boys and men] are all the same— at first they’re nice, then they’ll shoot” (40:32), a lesson of blunt power that she witnesses at the shooting party with the retired policeman Dmitri, whom Kolya earlier praises for having been a “tyrant” with an ex-wife (13:51). The neoliberalism of the film is expressed most vividly in the elimination of the self, made disturbingly palpable in the lives of Kolya and Liliya. The political scientist Corey Robin has examined the paradoxes of Hobbes’s thinking in the light of present-day fetishizations of the marketplace as having a mind and charisma of its own, as a leviathan of the bracingly real and true natural law. “We are free,” Robin explains, only to the extent that “the sovereign can guarantee the freedom of movement, the ability to go about our daily business without hindrance of other men.” We need to believe that “[s]ubmission to his power […] augments our freedom” and that “the more absolute our submission, the more powerful he is and the freer we are.” In other words, “subjugation is emancipation.” As Robin describes it, Hobbes’s understanding of the world of sovereigns and men is, in one respect, really quite simple. Both classes of people are possessed of desires and a will, which tend to specific goals. There is no sociality, inasmuch as every individual is naturally intent of the fulfillment of their will and desire. While people may imagine themselves as valorous performers on a stage or within a larger aspirational narrative, the affective simplicity of Hobbes’s world renders them into nothing more than deluded “actors without roles.”42 The drama of Leviathan is both about the realization of this ethically desiccated social (or asocial) vision, and of one character’s attempt to escape it. But is that person actually Kolya? The scene that serves as a gathering point for the answers to this and other questions occurs late in the film and well after Kolya and family and friends have vanished from the screen. A year has passed since the razing of Kolya’s house, and a beige-walled church, whose design recalls the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow, now stands in its place and a service is taking place. The

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bishop who advised the mayor is there, as well as the mayor himself and his family, the priest Vassily who attempted to console Kolya, the nuns from the local convent, and various other residents of Pribrezhnyi. The bishop’s sermon begins with a message of peace and pivots to a manifesto-like statement that oddly conflates a justification of preemptive self-defense with epistemological distinctions about different kinds of truth. “Some say that God is in strength [v sile; also, ‘in force’], but I tell you that He resides not in strength but in Truth [v pravde].” Yet factual truth, the bishop warns, is only vouchsafed by having the deeper, spiritual, truth (istina) firmly imbedded within oneself. Furthermore, factual truth is something that only God can fully comprehend, in both the sense of understanding and encompassing: “Truth is the property of God” [Pravda– eto dostaianie Bozhie] (2:05:00). Therefore, the only way that we fallen creatures may have even the most partial of access to that earthly truth is assimilating of the image of Jesus Christ into our souls. It is for that reason, the bishop thunders, that we need to be vigilant with ourselves and others, in fighting those who blasphemously defile our churches and icons, and who engage in brazen acts of disrespect both here and abroad against Holy Russia. Among other things, the bishop is telling us that even those who accept Christ should not think that they can completely believe the evidence of their senses—which is another way of saying that we should be willing to accept injustice as the wages of being human, if not Christian. The moral waffling of this homily serves as a key for understanding the ethical modalities of Pribrezhnyi, which conspire to blithely jettison the concerns articulated in Kolya’s countersuit. In the world of Leviathan, what does it mean to be an Orthodox Christian? As the bishop explains it, becoming a Christian involves a purging of ourselves, to make room for the image of Christ. While there is only one reference in Leviathan to mass media, it is a highly revealing one: in Liliya’s and Kolya’s house, we catch a glimpse of a news broadcast about Pussy Riot’s anti-Putin “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Church of Christ the Savior, which resulted in a notorious trial where three women were convicted for “insulting the feelings of believers.” The reference to the event establishes 2012 as the year of most of the film’s action and provides the basis for the militant segments of the bishop’s sermon. It is here that Zvyagintsev reminds us of the film’s preoccupation with the mythos of the giant mammals of the sea. Like the abandoned church, the interior of this one is reminiscent of a tubular vessel, a fact reinforced the mayor’s young son gazing upward at the domed ceiling. Nudging him, his father tells him to look at the large icon of Christ’s face that is directly in front of him, on one of the panels

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of the iconostasis (2:07:45). For a moment, we see the image as the boy sees it. The sight is creepy and not in the least comforting: Christ’s face immediately fills up the entire screen and seems to flutter in the candlelight. Several motifs merge together in this instant: Vadim’s profanity-laced taunt that Kolya needs to “look at power in the face,” the bishop’s stern injunction to make room within oneself for the image of Christ, and the Hobbesian imperative of yielding oneself fully to the unitarian will of the state, which notionally becomes a leviathan-like chamber or enclosure for the entire commonwealth. Translated into the moral vocabulary of neoliberalism, we can understand this moment in the following way: to become an Orthodox Christian, one must cease being oneself and essentially surrender to what one successor of Hayek at the so-called Freiburg school of economists characterized as the absolute “rule-making authority” that is insulated from the “short-term demands of day-to-day government.”43 In other words, people such as Kolya and Liliya need to submit to an elusive “higher” truth, at the tragic expense of the quotidian one (pravda) that they directly confront. Certainly, there can be no place in such a world for any form for basic fairness or social justice. As in all of Zvyagintsev’s films, there are characters here who are crafted to be of greater and lesser readability. Kolya and Vadim are mercurial individuals, whose passions and prejudices are quite clear in the emphatic yet skillfully modulated performances of Aleksei Sibiriakov and Roman Madianov. Kolya’s wife Liliya, played by the talented Elena Lyadova, is completely different in this regard. In Leviathan, she occupies the position or presence of resolute, if damaged, autonomy that we saw manifest in Nadezhda Markina’s remarkable interpretation of the title character in Elena, whose nuanced opacity emerges as a stark contrast to Lyadova’s own transparent performance of Vladimir’s daughter Katya in that film. As with Elena’s behavioral and life choices, a series of questions comes to mind while watching Leviathan. Does Liliya feel genuinely drawn to Dima, or is she using him exclusively as a way out of an abusive marriage? What goes through her mind as she sits silently and pensively (46:09, 49:35) or looks into the mirror and combs her hair around her bruised face (1:25:19)? Was she in fact suicidal, at the moment that she stood on the cliff and saw the whale cresting, the last time we see her alive (1:36:06, Figure 4.2)? Like Zvyagintsev’s next film Loveless, Leviathan is, in many ways, a failed mystery genre film, a riddle without a solution. Liliya is the genuine protagonist of Leviathan. She is the only individual who does not buy into the values of power embodied by every other major character—or, as Hobbes might put it, agent of

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Figure 4.2  Leviathan. Katya (Elena Liadova), shortly before her death.

will and desire—in the film. Like the members of Pussy Riot who the bishop excoriates in his sermon, she is also quite aware of her position as someone who opts out of the social Darwinism and fetishization of patriarchal authority that is embodied by many of the film’s other characters, women included.

Moscow, City on the Make: Selfie-ness in Loveless (2017) In Loveless, Zvyagintsev switches the action of his dramatic narrative away from the periphery of the Russian Federation and back to its capital. Like Elena, Loveless begins and ends with static shots that serve as embrasures or stretchers for the fateful personal choices portrayed on the film’s canvas. The Russian title of the movie, Neliubov’, suggests not so much the absence of love, as it does the impossibility or active renunciation of it, as in an ongoing conflict or a feud that has gone on for so long that its participants, like the Hatfields and the McCoys, have lost sight of its original cause. “Enmity” and “contempt” are closer, if less marketable, English equivalents. Above all, Loveless is a film about self-regard and living in a place that a person would like to see as being a reflection of their best self. In this film, Moscow is a city under ceaseless reconstruction, with a population that is caught up in similar projects of self-improvement. On its face, the plot is simple and would seem to bear little relation to people curating their self-images or that of the larger physical environment— aspirational projects that emerge as the spark plugs for the film’s engine. A twelveyear-old boy named Aleksei (“Alyosha”) disappears from his home in a far-flung residential district of the city. The boy’s family life is wretchedly unhappy. At a

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young age, his mother Zhenya married Boris when she discovered that she was pregnant. As with so many characters in Zvyagintsev’s films, her desire to escape from a difficult home environment overrides her good sense. When we meet Zhenya’s mother halfway through the film, we come to a jolting realization about her reasons for marrying at a young age. Alyosha’s grandmother is a monstrous person who combines viciousness and piety in equal measure in a manner that Zhenya’s drily characterizes as “tea and God in the same flask” (chai i Bog v odnom flakone). Not surprisingly, it turns out that the desire to escape does not, by itself, make for a good marriage. Zhenya is the chief administrator at an upscale health and beauty spa, and Boris works as a junior administrator for a philanthropic religious organization run by a prominent cleric in the Russian Orthodox Church. Zhenya and Boris loathe each other and engage in barrages of verbal abuse that often include their son, whom at one point we see silently convulsed with sobbing as he overhears his parents yelling about their desires to jettison him and to spend time with their lovers. After heedlessly spending a night away with their lovers and leaving Alyosha to fend for himself, Zhenya and Boris come to the realization that their son has vanished. From the local police, they encounter weary cynicism in the face of precinct resources that are already stretched thin. A volunteer organization of searchers engages in an extensive dragnet but is unable to find the boy. After a year has passed, we see an ill-tempered Boris living together with his girlfriend, her mother, and their one-year-old child, in an arrangement that seems to irritate everybody. Zhenya has moved into her boyfriend’s luxury minimalist apartment, which is similar in design to Vladimir and Elena’s apartment in Elena. The last frame of the film is of Zhenya running on a treadmill on the balcony, while looking directly at the camera with an inscrutable expression on her face. A breakdown of events in Loveless is useful for bringing our attention to one of the most important leitmotifs in Zvyagintsev’s filmography as a whole: the imminent prospect of the end of things as we have known them. The possibility of a violent and conflagrational apocalypse—stemming from, say, the accidental or deliberate use of nuclear technology or from pandemics and other forms of warfare—does not interest the director. The film is propelled by scenes that remind us about something that is far more frightening, if less dramatic: the extinction of the social instinct, whose dismantling we see all around us. The film takes place in the fall of 2012, shortly before the American presidential election, and at the tail end of a year foretold in Mayan calendar as signaling the end of the world. “So,” Boris asks a colleague sitting next to him in the company cafeteria,

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“will there be the end of the world [konets sveta]?” “Absolutely [obiazatel’no]!” his colleague breezily responds without looking him in the eye (23:08). In Elena, Katya jocularly tells her father to take comfort in the fact that “soon there’ll be the end of the world [konets sveta] anyway” (50:52), during a conversation in which the two exchange quips about him not “seeing” her, in the sense of not having her in his immediate sightline, as well as not seeing or meeting up with each other on a regular basis. When the lights go out in the council housing apartment block where Elena’s family lives, a person on the stairwell jokes that lights have gone out in “the whole world [vo vsem mire]” (1:33:00). In a world where intimate relations are already severely undermined, and where people are already cognitively challenged, the inability to truly see one other adds yet another barrier to human connection, which Zvyagintsev highlights in Loveless with the common yet telling surname of Alyosha’s dysfunctional family: Sleptsov (slepets, “blind person”). The epidemic of disdaining the vital physicality of direct eye contact, one of the chief instruments in the ensemble of gestures that comprise physical intimacy and most protest movements, turns out to be an especially foreboding sign of end-times. Boris and his colleague converse sitting next to each other with their eyes glued to their plates. Not even the jokey comments about the end of the world, or how to fool the cleric (mockingly called “The Beard” [Boroda]) who is head of the organization into thinking that you never got divorced, stir their heads from their trays. Boris’s entire workplace is, in fact, configured as a site of penitential self-isolation that discourages social connection, with the cafeteria in particular is reminiscent of a monastery refectory. In prominent Russian monasteries such as the one on the Solovetsky Islands, monks were enjoined to speak to each other in hushed tones, if at all, and not to look at each other across the table.44 Even when Boris cracks a lame joke to a female coworker later in the film as they stand in front of the coffee machine, they cannot bring themselves to fleetingly clap eyes on each other. Boris’s workplace combines the discipline of an ancient religious order with the regimens of a corporate workplace that demands an evacuation or elimination of one’s Self. Needless to say, management—corporate chieftains such as “The Beard”—are free from these strictures of personal austerity and can do whatever they want. As the economist Philip Mirowski explains, neoliberals “catechize prostration of the self before the awesome knowledge conveyed by the market” while issuing themselves “sweeping dispensations” from that same discipline.45

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Zhenya’s workplace at the beauty spa displays the same integrative credo of your job as your ultimate and true self that we witness in Boris’s work situation. In preparation for her night out with her businessman boyfriend Anton, Zhenya goes through a complete makeover at the spa that she runs (24:29–27:10), making snide remarks about her family as her legs are painfully exfoliated and her hair is cut. As in her recent study Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare, Angela McRobbie describes the serious business of women’s self-beatification in a way that eloquently addresses the anxieties that are on display in this segment of the film: The feminine-perfect is a dispositif of contemporary biopolitics, operating almost continually at the everyday level of social media and popular culture, inserting itself within the localized and privatized spaces of young women’s lives, making them from an early age such fretful creatures, worried about their bodies, worried about their exams […] Because they have been given a lift up, because they have become “subjects of attention”, these aspirational young women are encouraged to feel that they ought to be even better.46

Although McRobbie in her book is documenting consumer trends within the beauty industry in the UK, and the ways that they reinforce neoliberal company workplace policies in that country, her comments resonate with the almost masochist spectacle of Zhenya’s makeover, and with her interest is selfadvertisement. In a comment that sounds like a lede for a personal Facebook or Instagram page, she boasts to the hair stylist about Anton being both open-minded or progressive (prodvinutyi), and pursuing Tai Chi as a hobby, a capsule description of him that will soon stand in stark contrast with her and Boris’s tongue-tied inability to tell the search party leader much of anything about their son and his social life. In reply to his question about their son’s hobbies, she responds, “[N]o, he doesn’t have any,” and Boris remains silent (57:00). As we learn over the course of the film’s first half, she—like her own son Alyosha—was the result of an unwanted pregnancy, and she treats her son with the same disregard that her mother subjected her to. Zhenya’s mother made efforts at pushing her to academically succeed, to get her out of their home as quickly as possible, and to no longer see her. Zhenya’s mother is, by all indicators, someone who regards herself as a practicing Orthodox Christian. Yet we hear her swearing like a sailor and making the obscene “fig” hand gesture to Zhenya, whom she viciously tells that she won’t get a penny because she intends to leave her house and its acreage to the Church. “One shouldn’t

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have to live unloved,” Anton tells her during a heartfelt conversation after lovemaking (43:41). Zhenya is keen to be “a subject of attention,” which for her in part means being loved by being seen. What this might mean in the larger world of things is less clear, in affective terms. The final image of Loveless is of Zhenya on a treadmill wearing a sweatshirt with “Russia” printed on its front in Roman letters, a piece of merchandise that a year later was internationally for the Sochi Olympic games. Like Boris and his colleagues who clustered together in an elevator that is doorless for the purposes of filming (18:40), she stands looking directly, and with a hint of challenge, at the camera in what could be understood as a moving picture selfie. The intermittent appearance of cell phones in Loveless functions in very much the same way as the word “power” (vlast’) in Leviathan: it is a locational buoy that serves as a marker for audience’s pursuit of the actual, if buried, story of the film. Most of the characters in Loveless use the diminutive iPhone 5, which was released globally just a few weeks prior to the events of the film. Glances at the phone screen by various people occur at ten distinct points of the film’s action with only two of them not involving the taking and viewing of selfies (9:30, 16:09, 16:38, 34:28, 35:48, 37:38, 48:25, 1:04:48, 1:15:50, 1:21:55). As her hair is being done and she brags about Anton, Zhenya checks on photos of him on her phone. One especially startling moment has the filmmaker himself entering into the action of the film, with us following the lead of his gaze as a person stepping into the restaurant where Zhenya and Anton are having their dinner date. We hear Zvyaginstev’s voice as he asks an attractive woman on her way from the bathroom for her phone number. In what momentarily becomes the camera for the film we’re watching, he films her on his personal phone (37:00). Looking directly at him and us, she freely gives her number, as she moves to her table of girlfriends who, a few minutes later in the film, take a group selfie of themselves as a kind of nonalcoholic toast, “for love [za liubov’]!,” followed by an even more whimsical, and meta-McLuhanesque, selfie toast “for selfie [sel’fi za sel’fi]!” The entire sequence could be understood as both a film-school master class enactment of Laura Mulvey’s concept of the “male gaze”—the expression of an “ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject,” rather than the person being filmed47—and as an indictment of a global cell phone technology that provided a more integrative system for personal social media accounts and a greater appeal in the use of photo apps such as Instagram because of the devices’ newly crafted handheld size, and superior aspect ratio for images.

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In Zvyagintsev’s films, there is considerable power in the deluded and bowdlerized stories—the distorted or selective reflections of experience—that people tell themselves and each other. In Loveless, these stories curated for social media are amplified in their shambolic power by handheld devices which, as Nicholas Carr puts it, “promise emotional and social rewards” that are delivered to us in a bracingly “unpredictable fashion,” making it easier for us to elide difficult or painful personal or collective histories.48 After they make love, Boris’s pregnant girlfriend Masha asks him to bring her an apple, which she theatrically bites into as she looks at a dream interpretation app on her iPhone (34:28). As a filmmaker, Zvyaginstev has a particular fascination with these often mediadriven narrative forms of false consciousness, and with their quasi-cinematic forms of delivery. He seems to hold the same grudging respect for them that Marx had for late-stage capitalism: they are workers of wonders, albeit of grotesque ones. “Because,” Carr writes, smartphones “are always at hand—whether we’re at home, at work, at school, or walking down the street—they are always intruding on our thoughts.”49 Over the course of the film, Boris and Zhenya seem utterly incapable of prying themselves loose from their gadgets, and are unsurprisingly constantly unfocused even when they are with their lovers—the only people they seem to care about, aside from themselves. The intersection of the selfie culture and work policies encouraging ostentatious personal exemplarism (Zhenya, the body-image-conscious beauty salon administrator who gets a makeover at the place she manages) and cognitive austerity (Boris, the outwardly pious employee at a religious organization) has larger implications within the world of the film. As it turns out, one of the things that will go by the wayside, as things move toward the beginning of the end, is factual or true information. Boris’s attempt to lie about his imminent divorced status to his socially conservative boss points to a larger trajectory of distortion that results from what Chamath Palihaptiya, the outspoken former vice president of Facebook, calls the “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops” that emerge from the mutual hyperlinking of our workplaces, social media accounts, and news sources. What we see in Loveless is that this informational circuit board ultimately dictates our mental scripts for the general perception of things. As Palihaptiya puts it, “you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed.”50 The news report that we hear as Boris drives to work clearly comes from the state-owned radio service VGTRK—taken by Zvyagintsev from the original sound recordings of the archives—and teems with snarky comments about the supposed electoral malfeasance of opposition parties in Russia and

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upbeat comments about the Green Party Candidate Jill Stein’s criticism of Barack Obama’s control of the presidential debate format (55:57). Crucial here is the questionable assumption that heavily redacted information is always preferable because it meshes more effectively with limited cognitive resources that we need for other things, such as personal and professional improvement. This recognition of the variability among representations of reality is present in Leviathan as well. After all, in the sermon he delivers inside the new church built on the property appropriated from Kolya, the bishop states that “truth [pravda] is that which reflects reality without distorting it” (2:08:55). Yet we are also made to understand that face time through social media and cell phones do not provide an opportunity for truly communicating with your interlocutor, even if you do “see” them on the screen of your device. Loveless is relentless in reminding us that we are not reducible to our visual electronic reflections, which may render us into objects for the consumerist perusal for others, and that even the establishment of eye contact through such devices is experientially quite distinct from the embodied communication of immediate physical contiguity. Talking with his daughter who studies in Portugal via Skype, Zhenya’s boyfriend Anton asks her when she’ll come to visit again. “I  rarely see you!” he says, as she sips wine in a cafe. “But I see you just fine [a ia tebia i tak vizhu]!” she says chirpily, as she pays her bill and signs off (1:19:40). Zvyagintsev is a great believer in the networking of objects and people in actual space. In the Making of “Loveless” documentary, he states his belief in the socalled Kuleshov Effect, theorized by the early Soviet film director and critic Lev Kuleshov. Zvyagintsev explains that a good actor will respond to things that will not necessarily be visible to them on the set, but which the viewer will witness through the montage of the scene: an actor’s expression calibrated to a soup bowl in the next frame, communicating hunger, or followed by one of a child in a coffin, communicating sadness or mourning and despair. It’s all about getting the viewer’s eye to work more vigorously, through its synergy with the assemblage of the film’s editing or montage (montazhnaia skleika). “A bad actor,” Zvyaginstev adds, will fully “display what he feels on their face,” as if performing autonomously from the ensemble of frames that precede and follow their “moment.”51 The task of explaining to the actor that sequence of images—a distinctively mindful skill and a form of storytelling and face-to-face interaction in its own right—falls to the director. These comments are especially useful in the present context because they throw into sharp relief what exactly troubles Zvyagintsev about selfie culture: it represents a hollow and static kind of

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performativity, which is pointedly solipsistic and subliminally contemptuous of other people and physical environments. A person filming themselves is almost always a bad actor in moral as well as thespian terms. In this film, Zvyagintsev is especially keen on communicating a respect for the materialism and vulnerable physicality of people and things within the spaces that they share. The political theorist Jane Bennett has something very similar in mind when she writes about the need to recognize every person as “a heterogeneous compound of wonderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant matter.” As she explains, “if matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated.” The whole point is to acknowledge, in political terms, our attempt to put into practice a “vital materialism” that would set up “a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood.”52 Zhenya and Boris’s son Alyosha emerges as precisely that kind of person, who does not possess a utilitarian value for the social-media enhanced lives of his parents. He is not a person who is “seen” by them, and indeed Zhenya doesn’t even notice his absence until several hours after her return to the apartment. Boris’s own initial response to Alyosha’s disappearance is weirdly impassive. What we find out about Alyosha’s life offers interesting clues about the lives of children neglected by their parents, such as reflected by the basement clubhouse of the abandoned school building where he and his mates would meet (1:28– 33:00). As we watch Loveless, we get hints about a generation of young people who are pivoting toward a rejection of the ostentatious consumerism and plugged-in networking of their parents. Alyosha’s laptop and social media usage, thoroughly combed over by the volunteer search organization, yield nothing, and his cell phone has gone silent. His “silence” feels like the Luddite expression of switching off, of negating the value system of his parents. In the world of the film, electronic communication, religious fundamentalism, workplace surveillance, and a militant nationalism emerge as mutually reinforcing protocols. We see this convergence in the barred and plated metal gates of Zhenya’s mother’s house, the military installation in the forest where they search for Alyosha, the compulsive consultation of handheld devices that facilitate industries devoted to personal appearance, the repressive and cruel religiosity of Zhenya’s mother and Boris’s workplace, and in the jingoistic news broadcasts watched by Anton and Boris at the end of the film.

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In Loveless, we have a self-critical portrait—perhaps an anti-selfie—of Moscow. Zvyagintsev’s portrait of the city brings to mind the American novelist Nelson Algren’s scathing essay about postwar aspirational Chicago, as “a spiritual Sahara” where “the homes are so complacent, and the churches so smug” that their residents are insensible to “the forest behind its towers.”53 One of the most haunting images in the film, and which serves as a nodal point for many of these motifs, is that of the military installation in the forest near Zhenya’s and Boris’s apartment building. We see a cadmium-yellow satellite dish rise, like the inverted parasol of a gargantuan toxic mushroom, over the top of a reinforced gate whose design recalls the one surrounding the home of Zhenya’s reclusive mother (1:35:05). We hear a hum coming from the dish, and we know that it is doing its job of both listening to people communicating with one other and communicating directly to a select few of its own. The film serves as a vivid demonstration of a version of neoliberalism “whose core value,” as Quinn Slobodian puts it, “is not freedom of the individual but the interdependence of the whole.”54 While we never learn the solution to the mystery of Alyosha’s disappearance, we come to understand his reasons for disengagement, of not wanting to be a part of things as they are. Seen from that perspective, his last words in the film, spoken to his mother, take on the character of a statement of principle, if not a rallying cry: “I don’t want to anymore [ia bol’she ne khochu]” (16:10).

Conclusion: Zvyagintsev’s Narrative of Neoliberalism without Globalism Zvyagintsev’s filmography to date may be understood as a single narrative about two realms of contemporary Russian life, each with its own distinct set of experiences: the cities and the “provinces.” Among other things, in films such as Elena and Loveless we see that the urban life is not happier than the provinces, which have been stereotypically understood as a sump of frustrated lives and irredeemable spiritual and political backwardness. Although these negative perceptions were certainly strong among members of the urban intelligentsia during the last quarter century of the Soviet Union—and during a post-Soviet era that has witnessed the entire country’s asset-stripping and traumatic de-industrialization at the hands of the emergent oligarch class, a feckless leadership under Boris Yeltsin, and Western entities such as the World Bank and the IMF—Zvyagintsev is not interested in the taking of names that have already

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figured prominently in the list of suspects. He would rather disarticulate before our eyes a system that idolizes efficiency and entrepreneurial zeal and rebuild it before our eyes in a way that will make us more aware of how its operations of free-market branding, like the machine in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” do grievous damage to the human form. In the vignettes for the 1999 series Black Room, Zvyagintsev focuses on the lives of urban Russians who find their lives overdetermined by money. In the episode Busido, a manipulative oligarch plays a game of gaslighting upon his own bodyguard, whom he believes has effectively become his property. He tells the man that “[n]ow you’re working not for the agency, but for me [ne na kontory, a na menya],” as if hiring him from a security company was a mere detail and as if the fact of the bodyguard’s vigil within the oligarch’s condominium automatically rendered him into a piece of furniture within it.55 Almost no one fares well in those three Moscow-based three shorts, nor in his next two films The Return and Banishment, which take place in a countryside that perpetuates, in Zvyagintsev’s telling, institutional patterns of exploitation and glib cruelty that are evident, in fact, everywhere in the country. Women and children, both deemed as chattel at the perpetual disposal of others, fare especially badly, and his depiction of their insoluble situations brings to mind Claudia Breger’s description of world-making cinema as a mode that highlights the attenuated “non-sovereign agency” that is “the effect of the poverty and exclusion that call for revolution in the first place.”56 Yet none of this is distinctly, or specifically, Russian. The plots and situations of the Black Room films may be understood as transplants from television series from the West that turned a cold eye onto the daily inequities of late-stage capitalism in the West; The Return is arguably a variation on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, with the entire country of an immiserated post-Soviet Russia taking on the character of a fallow land with an ineffectual male authority figure or king; Banishment, an elaboration of any number of Coen Brother movies about the gravitational pull of bad ideas among people who lack empathy; Elena, a study in the algebra of survival and need that could have come from novels by Patricia Highsmith and Georges Perec. The social-media-besotted and upscale characters in the Moscow of Loveless tonally share a great deal with the fashionable and carefree, yet spiritually hollow, young things in Rome from Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), which furthermore hinges on the plot device of an unsolved disappearance that may have inspired Zvyagintsev. Leviathan itself was inspired by the 2004 story of a Colorado man who went on a rampage after the expropriation of his property.57

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None of this is to deny the director’s engagement with practices that he deems as corrosive within the country of his birth. Much of Zvyaginstev’s work is a pushback against the politically coopted cinema since the nineties and the aughts, perhaps best represented by Nikita Mikhalkov, who has emerged as an oily vizier of the national film industry. Mikhalkov and other prominent directors such as Karen Shakhnazarov have become hangers-on in the court of a president who cultivated a hybrid form of government, conjoining an unfettered market for monopolistic practices and disinhibited vertical power. Both Zvyagintsev’s films and his public demeanor represent a principled rejection of these values. One might think of his films as a critique of a cinema that fetishes the state in the manner that the dissident author Andrei Sinyavsky saw as highly characteristic of Soviet literature from Stalin to Brezhnev. In 1983, Sinyavsky argued that the idolatry of the Soviet state that was at the center of the artistic doctrine of socialist realism was much closer to the aesthetics of the Russian courts of Catherine the Great and other eighteenth-century monarchs than to the progressive legacy of the nineteenth-century radicals and populists that reputedly served as the policy template for the Soviet Union. Sinyavsky took particularly note of the bellicose lines from the court poet Gavrila Derzhavin’s poem “Perseus and Andromeda,” where he warns other nations to heed Russia, the “terrible Colossus” that sides with God. Furthermore, Sinyavsky underscored that Derzhavin’s vision, with its portrayals of hostile nations threatening the country’s western borders and “distant, barbaric” and sallow or dark-skinned peoples on its eastern ones, was racialist as well as imperialistic.58 In rhetorically framing Russia as a beacon for nations such as Orban’s Hungary and Duterte’s Philippines that avow a staunch resistance to economic and ideological globalism, Putin expresses a paradoxical understanding of the neoliberal state as an exporter of the ideal of national sovereignty; he also echoes what Ronald Reagan, in a moment from his 1989 final presidential address that was flush with smug triumphalism over the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the independence of Czechoslovakia that emerged from the Velvet Revolution, termed the notion of the United States as a “City on the Hill.”59 Yet for all that, what we witness in Elena, Leviathan, and Loveless is ultimately the fetishization of something decidedly less inspirational and not specifically Russian: of the national state as an employer, rather than a comforting mother lode of values or as a fearless resurgent empire. This is a neoliberalism of an inwardlooking state, rather than one that aspires to enmeshment in the global village.

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Zvyagintsev here draws our attention to a peculiar aspect of present-day national culture: in merging with neoliberal discourse, it has absorbed its rhetorical trick of claiming to be one thing, while actually communicating something else. In this regard, the nationalist boosterism that is sotto voce in Elena, and loud and brash at the ends of Leviathan and Loveless, strongly resembles the language of the Koch brothers’ organization “Americans for Prosperity,” whose project of advancing “economic liberty” perforce hinges on the diminishment of freedom and autonomy for employees at any number of workplaces. The notion of the United States as “the city of the hill” was both exceptionalist and internationalist, grounded in Calvinist notions of the country as the elect among nations and an example for them to follow and conceivably surpass. Some national self-images in Russian political history have hewed to a similar paradox, most conspicuously the understanding of Moscow as the “third Rome” and the 1924 announcement of the Soviet Union as embodying “socialism in one country,” a notion that counterintuitively played into the policy discussions for the country’s largely indirect involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Yet on their way to becoming memes, these topoi have lost their resonant affective core. It is likely that too much has been made of Putin’s references to advocates of illiberalism and fascism such as Ivan Ilyin, and Trump’s to various strongman leaders: what matters more for them is the notions of themselves as managers first, and firebrands of political faith second. The content of exceptionalism—the actual values that make a state exceptional—is less important to them than the state’s pretendership to moral authority, and the fact of its hubristic and presuppositional announcement of itself as exceptional. Long gone are the sonorous yet melodic cadences of Derzhavin’s patriotic poems, which bring to mind the image of a Horatian ode sung by a Russian Orthodox church choir, and the eloquent Jacobean turns of phrase in John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon about the Massachusetts Bay colony as “a city on the hill.” In Elena, Leviathan, and Loveless, we witness a world that is contracting, in which the profit motive fully merges with managerial authority: where the church built on Kolya’s land, in Leviathan, serves as a resonator for the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow; where prone bodies in Elena (of husband, teenage grandson, and infant) signal a non-functionality that is intolerable to the ethics of social Darwinism; and where abandoned buildings, in Loveless, represent havens for “useless” people in a relentlessly materialistic capital city that is caught up in the project of rebuilding and remaking itself.

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We have no dramaturgical or thespian clues to the motivations of Liliya in Leviathan for her suicide, if indeed that is what happened to her. Nor do we know from her gestures, demeanor, or interaction with others what Elena experienced or felt as she mentally walked herself through the unforgiving moral calculus that went into the poisoning of her odious husband Vladimir. In Loveless, the range of emotions that undoubtedly went into the unloved boy Alyosha’s hopes for escape from deeply selfish parents remain largely inaccessible to us, as does any solution to his disappearance. Commenting on the dramaturgy of Zvyagintsev’s movies, one Russian film critic takes note of their construction as invitations for breaching the fourth wall: “The events on the screen of his films are put together in such as a way as to place viewers in situations where they are confronted with a creative task, into whose resolution they are involuntarily drawn.”60 The story of these films is about those seek to oppose, or opt out of, the feedback loops of monetized, and informational, authority. As in the case of Elena, what we are left with from watching those two films is an overwhelming impression of an instrumentalist, and largely creedless, world of financialized power that does not fully see, or take note of, the people who live on its periphery. As the social scientist Shoshana Zuboff recently put it, the “transformation of the state into a project of total certainty” is “unimaginable outside the digital milieu, but also unimaginable outside the logic of accumulation that is surveillance capitalism.”61 Inasmuch as his films sabotage the aesthetic expectations called up by the clean lines and verisimilitude of digital filmmaking, Zvyagintsev attempts to bring us back to the scratches, pops, and “lost” reels—the scenes eaten by the projector, which would have solved the mystery about certain characters—that were a part of the analog film-viewing experience and which are irreconcilable with the informational fullness and certainty that Zuboff describes. No one wants to be overdetermined or “resolved” for the delectation of others’ viewing experience. Like Liliya in Leviathan and Alyosha in Loveless, we viewers find ourselves moving from the margins to a center of occluded ethical attention—in other words, to a place of imperfect, or sabotaged, surveillance. For us, as for them, this journey toward freedom and personal agency is as heady as it is frightening. Yet we never fully witness the journeys toward principled agency that Zvyagintsev’s protagonists take. In the instances of the physically disabled protagonists from the Germanlanguage films that are the focus of the next chapter, those journeys are made completely visible for us to contemplate.

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Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12

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14 15 16

I would like to thank Svetlana Evdokimova for offering valuable suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 635, 638–9. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brat’ia Karamazovy (Moscow: ACT, 2018), 815. Andrei Zvyagintsev, “Obscure,” Black Room, 2001–2 (Series 2), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8Tpg6fwMW8&list=PLnIIp6Ct5x98Tm_ ZcHltFmNkodj99F0BG&index=2. Sergei Aleksashenko, Bitva za rubl’ (Moscow: Vremya, 2009), 100. Peter Rutland, “Neoliberalism and the Russian Transition,” Review of International Political Economy 20:2 (2013): 352, 356. François Cusset, How the World Swung Right: Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions, tr. Noura Wendell (London: Semiotext(e), 2018), 80. Andrei Piontkovskii, Iskushenie Vladimira Putina (Moscow: “Algoritm,” 2013), 178. Andrei Zvyaginstev, “Vybor,” Black Room, 2001–2 (Series 16), https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Q3qYnXjAElA&list=PLnIIp6Ct5x98Tm_ZcHltFmNkodj99F0BG&in dex=16. As Dmitry Uzlaner points out, the term is a borrowing from architectural terminology. See his article “Perverse Conservatism: A Lacanian Interpretation of Russia’s Turn to Traditional Values,” Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society 22:2 (2016): 184. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 30–1. The phrase “ecosystem of interruption technologies” was first formulated by the science fiction writer and blogger Cory Doctorow in 2009. The particular use of it here, in regard to device activation, comes from Nicholas Carr’s application of Doctorow’s formulation in his book Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, updated edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Sons, 2020), 91. From the interview for the E TV network, recorded on December 5, 2018: “Andrei Zviagintsev: Blokada, Serial, Nasilie,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WLuT7sAVs. Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London and New York: Verso Books, 2013), 119. Kseniia Golubovich, ed., Elena: The Making of Andrei Zvyaginstev’s Film, tr. Katharine Judelson (London, UK: Cygnet, 2014), 54. Tomas Matza, Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Wellbeing in Post-Socialist Russia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 177.

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17 Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 15. 18 Olga Shevchenko, Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009). 19 Boris Mikhailov, A Retrospective / Eine Retrospektive (Zürich: Fotomuseum Winterthur, 2003). 20 Geoff Dyer, Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 58–9. 21 Golubovich, ed., 25. 22 Golubovich, ed., 28–9. For the sake of precision, I have made some changes to the English translation from this source. 23 Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 212. 24 Anna Politkovskaia, Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2007), 11–16. 25 Golubovich, ed., 183. 26 Vladimir tellingly refers to the handwritten note Elena left for him, in which she reminds him about his promise to rethink his position about providing money for Sasha’s avoidance of the draft as a “letter” (pis’mo), as if it were a memo petitioning him rather than a request from a spouse (24:00). Much of the language he uses with her reflects an overweening managerialism. 27 In their screenplay, Negin and Zvyagintsev emphasize the spectatorship around the dying horse in a way that complements the dream sequence in Dostoevsky’s novel: Elena sees a “bleeding horse” lying by the tracks, its legs “still shuddering” as “some people are looking at it, unable to do anything about it” (Golubovich, ed., 45). In one interview, Zvyagintsev underscored the relevance of Crime and Punishment for understanding the moral crisis he documents in the film: “I’m not sure that Dostoevsky, had he known what we know now, would have written about Raskolnikov’s repentance (quoted in Aleksei Zorin, ‘Analiz fil’ma Eleny’” July 2, 2018, http://az-film.com/ru/Publications/340Analiz-filma-emElenaem.html. 28 Leo Tolstoy, “Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?.” tr. Aylmer Maude New England Review 19:1 (Winter 1998): 150. 29 Masha Lipman, “The Campaign against ‘Leviathan’ in Russia,” The New Yorker, January 26, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/campaignleviathan-russia. 30 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 338. 31 “Chto takoe ‘Zelenaia’ ekonimika?” http://greenparty.ru/page/94/.

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32 Spivak, 339. Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge, UK: Polity Books, 2011). 33 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan ed. C. B. Macpherson (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 427. 34 Ibid., 271. 35 Andrei Paramonov, “Dva kita Andreia Zvyaginsteva,” Radio Svoboda, January 11, 2015, https://www.svoboda.org/a/26772531.html. 36 This formulation comes from Tamsin Shaw’s politically astute assessment of a 2016 production of Othello at the New York Theatre Workshop: “In this reading […] [Daniel] Craig’s Iago calls to mind above all the ‘honey badger’ that has become the mascot for the white-supremacist far right. A popular YouTube video, ‘The Crazy, Nastyass Honey Badger’, shows this small creature display a viciousness, fearlessness, and recklessness unparalleled in the animal kingdom, attacking a huge cobra, diving into a beehive to eat the larvae in spite of being stung all over. The video’s narrator coined the phrase that Steve Bannon and Breitbart news have taken for their motto: ‘Honey badger don’t give a shit’. This is a choice, this not giving a shit. It is the voluptuous enjoyment that Nietzsche described. It is the freedom and exhilaration of moral insensibility.” Tamsin Shaw, “The Iago Problem,” NYR Daily, December 14, 2016, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/14/iago-problemchoosing-evil-othello/. 37 For a discussion of this concept, see Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalisms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 3–17. 38 Adrienne Rich, “Midnight Salvage,” in Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2013), 294. 39 From Lord Byron’s post-apocalyptic poem “Darkness.” 40 Quoted in Slobodian, 222. 41 Vladimir Sorokin, “Let the Past Collapse on Time!” New York Review of Books, May 8, 2014, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/05/08/let-the-past-collapse-ontime/. 42 Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump 2nd Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 103, 97. 43 Slobodian, 12. 44 M. M. Loevskaia, “Trapeza v Solovetskom monastyre ot drevnostei do nashikh dnei [The Refectory in the Solovetsky Monastery from Ancient Times to the Present],” Vestnik moskovskogo universiteta: Lingvistika i mezhkul’turnaia kommunikatsiia 2 (2017): 169. 45 Mirowski, 98. 46 Angela McRobbie, Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare (London, UK: Polity Press, 2020), 52.

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47 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 843–4. 48 Carr, 228. 49 Ibid., 228. 50 Amy Wang, “Former Facebook VP Says Social Media Is Destroying Society with ‘Dopamine-Driven Feedback Loops’,” The Guardian, December 12, 2017, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12/former-facebook-vpsays-social-media-is-destroying-society-with-dopamine-driven-feedback-loops/. 51 The Making of “Leviathan” (31:00–33:30). Loveless [DVD] (Altitude Distribution, 2017), PAL format. 52 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 12–13. 53 Nelson Algren, Chicago, City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 26–7. 54 Slobodian, 24. 55 Andrei Zvyagintsev, “Busido,” Black Room, 2001–2 (Series 6), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC9V5_5BmH4&list=PLnIIp6Ct5x98Tm_ ZcHltFmNkodj99F0BG&index=7. 56 Claudia Breger, Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 52. 57 Catherine Shoard, “Leviathan: The Cannes Hit Which Absolutely Definitely Doesn’t Put the Boot in to Putin,” The Guardian, May 29, 2014, https://www.theguardian. com/film/2014/may/29/leviathan-russian-cannes-movie-putin-attack. 58 Andrei Sinyavsky [Abram Terts], Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm (Paris: Syntaxis, 1988), 43–4. The latter lines are from Derzhavin’s “The Portrait of Felice” [“Izobrazhenie Felitsy”], Derzhavin’s ode to Catherine the Great. 59 Daniel C. Rodgers, “What We Get Wrong about ‘A City on the Hill’,” The Guardian, November 13, 2008, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/13/whatwe-get-wrong-about-city-hill/. 60 Polina Dushatskaia, “Kinoiskusstvo terapii: analiz tvorcheskogo vremeni v fil’me ‘Vybor’,” in Dykhanie kamnia: mir fil’mov Andreia Zviaginsteva. Sbornik stat’ei i materialov (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2014), 44. 61 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2020), 382.

5

Becoming Other: Neoliberalism and “Suboptimal” Bodies Patricia Anne Simpson

Since the 1990s, interdisciplinary scholarship has been reframing a discourse about the “extraordinary body” (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson) from a range of perspectives, including queer studies, intersectional feminism, posthumanism, disability studies, ecocriticism, and critical race theory. Garland-Thomson’s pathbreaking work decisively shifted a medicalized discourse about nonconforming bodies, “marked” by a range of differences, to another register. Her intervention reverberated across academic disciplines and activist platforms alike. The body—erroneously presumed human—continues to organize inquiry into the limits of the human. In the context of our analyses, the represented cinematically human bodies perform in the regime of labor. This chapter focuses on Germanlanguage feature films that work against the hegemony of neoliberal ideologies by telling stories of everyday resistance against dehumanizing workplaces or intentional, strategic rebellion against an all-absorbing, deadening work unethic. In particular, the films under consideration feature the representation of the “suboptimal” body. This usage veers away from the medicalized meaning; instead, it articulates the dehumanizing function that the less-than-optimal performance of a worker within a neoliberal system assigns to human beings. Any variance from the norm—including the exhausted, the nonworking and thus “marginalized” body—determined by the hegemonic force of neoliberalism removes the sovereignty of the individual. The field of critical disability studies acknowledges the variety of human bodies, and their representation in film and other cultural products. Derived from René Descartes’s concept of individual bodies in motion and their ontology, the process of negation exposes the dualistic thinking involved in opposing any marked body to an normative ideal; all other bodies are less than optimal or suboptimal.

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This chapter argues that cinematic cultures both endorse and challenge a model of the integral or “whole” organic body, gendered heteronormatively and racialized as white. The systemic sexism in the production and consumption of films and actors came under scrutiny and attack with the rise of the #MeToo movement. Similarly, #OscarsSoWhite demanded attention to racial injustice on and off the screen. Contemporary German-language films challenge the normalization of race and ability in ways that decenter a dominant neoliberal alignment between European whiteness and the self-optimized body as performance. Some contemporary filmmakers challenge the inhumanity of the neoliberal paradigm with a reassertion of the possibility of human solidarity. In a coauthored monograph, Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber pose the question of “how to write about intimacy as a politically sustaining force while also acknowledging the fleetingness of intimate touch and the potential for violence in intimate encounters.”1 Their sustained answer revolves around the idea of precarious intimacies. This critical tool enables a solution to the dilemma of the potential for violence in gendered and racialized intimate spaces, as represented in contemporary European cinema first “by revealing aesthetic strategies that highlight moments of intimacy and the political possibilities they unfold, while also uncovering the structures of violence in which they are embedded; and second, by advocating a politics of interpretation that reads for the potential and possibility of intimacy.”2 Stehle and Weber embark on a study of contemporary European cinema with an eye toward ways that film can disrupt narratives of racism, thus exposing the market logic that structures our lives, gearing them toward self-optimization, hyper-individualism, and turbo-capitalist acquisitiveness. The notion of “precarious intimacies” is thus both “critical and generative,”3 with the capacity to expose exclusive politics of difference in representations of humanity in contested sites of contemporary Europe, among them queer desire, migration, religious identities, sex work and prostitution; and gendered and racialized identities. The notion of precarious intimacies facilitates a solidarity that is made possible through an acknowledgement of vulnerability and risk. With this insight, they have drawn attention to the central contribution of several films to critical race theory with applications beyond the European context. In Sheri Hagen’s Auf den zweiten Blick4 (At Second Glance, 2012), the Nigerian German actor and director brings stories to the screen to represent Black lives beyond their dominant portrayal in criminalized cinematic milieus. Her desire to tell “everyday stories” (Hagen 2020) aligns with an urgent need to

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bring Blackness and blindness to the screen. Hagen, who has played a variety of roles on the other side of the camera, uses “not being seen” in German society as a trope to bring together social issues of race and ability that ends in quiet tragedy. Asserting her agency as a woman and a Black German, Hagen portrays characters who carve out their lives at the economic margins of Berlin society.5 Without staging the spectacle of racism, the acts of violence that prompt headlines and isolate perpetrators as individual actors, this film unfolds in a series of lost opportunities. Hagen’s protagonist Kay (Anita Olatunji) is injured in a car accident; she loses her sight, and her fiancé Sebastian, who was driving, abandons her. Adjusted to her blindness, she resumes work in a Berlin broadcasting station but is plagued by the trauma of the crash. Her dependence on taxis leads to a moment of real connection with Falk (Michael Klammer), the single father, a widower, who overcomes her resistance to relationships. Hagen, who wrote the screenplay, began with Kay’s story as central; she proceeded to interweave a cast of supporting characters, intersecting their stories to forge human connections enabled largely by the loss of vision. Elena (Nele Rosetz), a therapist who is losing her sight, eventually connects with the blind Benjamin (Ingo Naujoks), who works as a taxi dispatcher; he loses his imaginary friends in favor of a partner. With its commitment to human connection, this film brings together the dual challenges of Blackness and blindness in twenty-first-century Berlin to challenge the hegemony of neoliberalism’s insistence on transactional relationships among Cartesian bodies for optimal profit. By contrast, director and producer Alireza Golafshan, who was born in Iran and emigrated to Germany, explicitly attacks the relentless pursuit of profit in his 2019 tragicomedy Die Goldfische.6 Golafshan, exploiting the comedic properties of the genre, trespasses on the territory of political correctness and the rhetoric of inclusion to undermine the hypocrisy of ableism. The protagonist, a portfolio manager Oliver (Tom Schilling), exemplifies the neurotic, exacting workaholic with a greater appreciation for the upholstery of his car than for his girlfriend; this seems reciprocal. He emerges from a car accident he caused paralyzed, and, forced into a rehabilitation facility and a wheelchair, he allies himself with a social worker and a group of physically and mentally disabled patients to retrieve ill-gotten cash from a bank in Zurich. With his business partner Julius (Klaas Heufer-Umlauf), Oliver has been stashing cash in a Swiss vault, but the German Finanzamt catches up with them. The former flees, leaving his business partner with more than a million euros in safety-deposit boxes under his name—and no way to get to the stash. To access the inaccessible money, Oliver needs a ride.

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He manipulates Laura, the social worker, and her troop, the “Goldfische,” by luring them to camel therapy across the border. With the help of Eddy (Kida Khodr Ramadan), Oliver pulls of the heist; hilarity ensues, and he ultimately finds himself confronted by actual fondness for his merry band of misfits, whom his greed instrumentalized, into unwitting, then willing, accomplices in crime. The film begins and ends with crashes, catastrophes needed to pry the neoliberal hero away from his ableism, then from his “cruel optimism,” to use Lauren Berlant’s term for the attachment to a structure that oppresses all who are part of it. In both films, the directors make disability visible in different ways, working in and through issues of racial and gender difference, to disrupt the neoliberal model of transactional human relationships. Examined together, these two films disrupt what Claudia Breger has called “collective closures,” which she defines as a general term for “the political phenomena of bodily, verbal, legal, and material gestures that close discursive as well as physical borders and for the pretense at resolution they provide.”7 Breger connects these acts of closure with exclusionary histories of anti-Black, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant racisms, among others. To critique neoliberalism, the films selected add ableism to the lexicon of negative affect that collectively closes the borders to protect the citizenship of the able-bodied. Beyond the context of cinema studies, disability studies focuses on the historical, theoretical, and activist structures and institutions that categorize ability and any departure from it as other. The consequences of disabling are inscribed differently across national cultures and contexts. In German-speaking Europe, the connections between the “racial hygiene” of National Socialism and the criminalization of disability set a horrific precedent. The 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases” sought to eliminate the “unfit.”8 In the postwar era, activism to secure the rights of the disabled emerged in the 1970s; it later fueled public campaigns. Anne Waldschmidt, a professor of sociology of disability, draws attention to the “Aktion Grundgesetz” (Equal rights campaign) of the late 1990s. Drawing from Foucault’s bio-politics and Link’s work on normalism, Waldschmidt surveys historical, feminist, and activist arguments toward normalization and inclusion across social institutions. She characterizes what we might call a mainstreaming movement in the early 2000s: Great efforts are being undertaken to increase general acceptance of disabled people, to make participation and self- determination possible for them and to build up an inclusive society. Normalization has become the decisive orientation

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in social and health policies, rehabilitation programs and special education concepts. At the same time, discrimination continues, and mechanisms of exclusion and segregation are still in force—especially in schools and the workplace, but also at the level of face-to-face interactions.9

The totalizing drives of neoliberalism homogenize racism and ableism by remaindering and marginalizing non-Cartesian bodies marked in any way by difference. Cinema has the capacity to make them visible. In one case, Hagen normalizes the representation of Blackness: in the other, Golafshan normalizes the disabled—though in the process, he makes them equally capable of neoliberal self-optimizing.

Casting the Crash Both directors, acutely conscious of the need to depict disability in film—and equally aware of the potential pitfalls and community outrage—trigger the transformation of their protagonists with an inciting incident: the respective car crashes. Olivia Landry notes the alignment between the perspective of the audience with that of Kay in her work on Hagen’s film. Informed by Paul Virilio’s The Original Accident, she takes his assertions about creation and/or collapse, about the accident as “‘an unconscious oeuvre, an invention in the sense of uncovering what was hidden, just waiting to happen’.” Her insistence that the viewer becomes witness further connects the diegetic and non-diegetic worlds, of cinema and of the viewer.10 The trauma, made conscious by the film, lingers in any mode of transportation. The audience views it in a flashback. In stark contrast, Golafshan opens with a close-up of Oliver’s blue eye that determines the perspective of the accident sequence. Stuck in vacation traffic and late for a meeting, Oliver speeds around the endless line of stuck cars into the lane for oncoming traffic and, in a last-minute attempt to avoid a head-on collision, swerves and flips the car. After awakening in the hospital, Oliver undergoes a series of adjustments, adventures, and mishaps that flirt with the subgenre of the road-trip film. Unlike Kay, the character Oliver seems emotionally unfazed by the need to take a van across the border to Switzerland. In this moment, his seemingly cavalier approach to his disability is grounded in the residual neoliberal personality and the profit motive—to protect his own stolen cash. So, with an autistic driver at the wheel, Rainer (“Rain Man,” Axel Stein), guided by a blind woman, the van veers into danger, accruing damage; eventually, it drives off

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the road and stops in a field, accompanied by a chorus of screams. Later, Magda (Birgit Minichmayr), the blind alcoholic, takes the wheel as she has retained her license, and Oliver plays a counselor at the border as he also serves as her eyes and co-pilot. Still, his character does not change until he observes all his precious 500 euro notes, taped to the autistic Michi (Jan Henrik Stahlberg), but untethered by the force of gravity on the carnival ride, floating down from the sky at the amusement park. In slow motion, Oliver watches the ensuing feeding frenzy for cash. It takes greater effort to pry Oliver from his identification with his neoliberal self. Driven by neoliberal totalization of the human body, nonhuman agencies, and global economic supplies and demands, becoming other ultimately pits aspects of intersectional identities against each other, though sometimes in transformative ways. Hagen’s project consciously aims at portraying “German reality.” Her experience as an actress and the typecasting of roles inspired her to tell other stories. In an interview with Ariana Cohen-Halberstam, Hagen said: “I wasn’t a prostitute. I wasn’t a drug addict. … I wanted to tell everyday stories in a complex way.”11 Evident in her screenplay and direction, her film explores multiple ways of seeing at the same time it attempts to include those not sighted. In particular, she went to great lengths to cast blind actors but indicated that ultimately she lacked sufficient budget. If she were to make the film in 2020, she said: “I wouldn’t shoot the film if I couldn’t find a blind actress.”12 Rethinking Auf den zweiten Blick, Hagen also confirms that she would have changed the screenplay to avoid casting decisions that involve the sighted playing the blind. That said, she conducted extensive research with the blind community. Actors worked with a blind coach who taught them to use a cane, to deal with stairs, and how to run. At screenings, she worked to have readers perform the roles for blind audiences, a better option than the audio descriptions, which can cost up to 8,000 euros, sometimes provided. Auf den zweiten Blick embraces cinematic and social activism, on screen and behind the scenes. The film further commits to everyday stories about making the unspectacular visible. “In my film,” she says, “it is always about support.”13 Among her characters are single father with a close male friend, a vision-impaired piano tuner who is looking for a committed relationship, not just sex (he is gay); prosperous, professional Black Germans, and a kind boss in a taxi company. In representing range, the film succeeds in connecting Blackness and blindness while subverting stereotypical projections of dominant culture.

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While Hagen worked with a modest budget and independent studio, Golafshan made his feature debut with Sony Pictures. Based on the strength of the screenplay, Golafshan was able to cast Tom Schilling, a highly recognizable and sought-after actor of film, stage, and television who has gained an international reputation and received numerous awards. His role as Niko in Jan-Ole Gerster’s Oh Boy! (A Coffee in Berlin, 2012) and the artist Kurt Barnert in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-nominated Werk ohne Autor (Never Look Away, 2018) earned him critical and popular acclaim. With a star cast for the project, Die Goldfische assembled a stellar ensemble. Luisa Wöllisch, a trained actress with Down’s Syndrome, plays Franzi; she is the only cast member with a disability. The film was released during the first half of 2019 and attracted 600,000 viewers, grossing 5.5 million. Working in the genre of German-language tragicomedy can be risky, even for an international audience accustomed to multiple series available through Netflix and other streaming services.14 It is a challenge to avoid the re-marginalization of the disabled in film, so commonly portrayed as sidekicks or indefatigable heroes overcoming all obstacles. For both directors, issues of inclusion and representation played a central role in their process. Ultimately, both films engage in the activist project of diversifying the German film industry, which, admittedly, is not a monolith; rather, film production and distribution, too, function as assemblages. Though financing, casting, and distribution are international and transnational processes, remaining companies have begun to acknowledge the need for greater representation. As Philipp Jedicke writes: “German film is white—as white as it gets.”15 Their respective films, however, aspire to different genres. Golafshan attended film school; after completing several short films, he made a conscious decision to realize his vision within mainstream cinema. Hagen works within independent cinema—with less funding. In response, she adapts. For example, Hagen revised her screenplay, originally intended to be shot during the summer, to winter in Berlin, in part because actors were available then and the sets were cheaper. The effect, however, of the snowy streets and gray sky, is stunning. In casting, Hagen sought actors whom she knew and wanted to work with. Two Hagen daughters appear in the film as well; one, the character Carla, was supposed to be a boy. To get the word out, she makes her work available through Vimeo upon request to those in attendance at a series of US (Zoom) workshops, webinars, and panels. For a reasonable fee, the film can be purchased via Vimeo. The exigencies of financing and casting these works inform their ultimate metrics of success. For Hagen, telling stories that create community and support is paramount.

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For Golafshan, the desire to make a diverting comedy “mit Thema” (with an important theme) motivated the screenplay, casting, and production. He gained personal experience with disability when his aging father needed a wheelchair. Golafshan’s short film Behinderte Ausländer (2015; Disabled Foreigners) portrays Emre, a German Turk in a wheelchair, with a love interest in Laura, a sociology student who wants to include him in her MA thesis research.16 This early work led to an invitation from Justyna Müsch, a writer and producer associated with the successful series Dark, to generate a screenplay. IMDb credits her with the idea;17 and she has appeared with Golafshan in an interview on Leidmedien to discuss all aspects of the film with an emphasis on the issues surrounding people with disabilities. In this confluence of support and talent, Golafshan’s explicit intent was to make a mainstream comedy about disability. He sought the support of Sozialhelden, an organization of disability. A “Goldfische” Mission Statement appears on the website about the cooperation with the film production company Wiedemann & Berg, committing to the common cause.18 Sozialhelden works to achieve Barrierefreiheit (freedom from barriers or limitation) for all.19 While both films converge around issues of race and ability, around visibility and normalizing otherness, Hagen remains keenly aware of her invisibility as a woman of color in Germany. With an awareness of the tensions between the margins and mainstream, Golafshan connects his Migrationshintergrund (migration background) to an understanding of marginalization and invisibility—or visibility for the wrong reasons. For these directors, visibility and mobility become related in their works. Both “crash” scenes set the potentially regenerative relationship between mobility and seeing/ being seen in motion.

Normalizing Blackness The energy of Black Lives Matter movements, so traumatically fueled by police violence in the United States, spread across continents. In the Federal Republic of Germany, urban epicenters emerged, especially Berlin. Increasingly voluble, Black German voices insist on the representation of lives that take a dominant white society beyond its firm denial of racism, derived from postwar guilt, and the need to examine anti-Semitism, in response to spectacularly violent acts; and into the turbulence of everyday racism and systemic de-privileging. The refocusing of attention on BLM and People of Color (PoCs, in colloquial German) through

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creative products and nonviolent representation casts the deficits in the film industry and media in stark, unflattering light. More generally, individual artists and writers call attention to the expectations of a white German audience that racial hatred can be confined to acts of spectacular violence. When writer and activist Sharon Dodua Otoo delivered the Klagenfurter Rede zur Literatur in acceptance of the prestigious Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis, she entitled it: “Dürfen Schwarze Blumen malen?” After the murder of George Floyd, she emphasized that anti-Black racism exists in Germany and that literature cannot ignore that reality. In the realm of auto-fiction, Olivia Wenzel’s debut novel Tausend Serpentinen Angst (2019; 1,000 Coils of Fear, 2022) features a young woman, the only Black person in the audience at a theater piece about the Wende, whose travels take her from a lake in Brandenburg to New York to North Carolina. As the story unfolds, Wenzel questions the multiple social roles and personae projected onto Blackness across cultures. Again, in the context of film, one documentary recounts the series of revelations about race, identity, and German-ness surrounding the existence of a Black child in East Berlin of the 1970s. The title of Ines Johnson-Spain’s autodocumentary Becoming Black (2019) tells the story of her East German upbringing, the abnegation of her skin color, and her personal journey to reconnect with her Togolese relatives. On a painful path, Johnson-Spain learns of her mother’s affair with a student from Togo, her early years in an orphanage, and the absence of any dialogue about her skin color once her mother brought her “home.” One interview with her stepfather foregrounds the matter-of-factness with which her difference was constructed. He describes her as a “Problem,” and she presses him to be specific: “Also meine Geburt, meine Existenz” (you mean my birth, my existence); he confirms. As a filmmaker, she travels to find her father’s family in Togo, compelled to discover more about her becoming Black. Allegedly allied with the socialist “brother countries” of the Third World, the GDR officially abdicated any responsibility for the atrocities of the Second World War, the racism of the capitalist West, and the white supremacist bond between capitalism and the First World. With an understated calm, Johnson-Spain’s documentary dismantles this myth. Though it differs markedly from that of her contemporary Hagen, this film began to attract international attention in the early 2020s as the spotlight shone on Black German artists. Both filmmakers, along with Black German studies scholars, activists, journalists, artists, and educators, reached wide audiences with their stories and work. As supportively as Hagen tells these visual stories, she also assures the breadth of their impact and audience. The complete naturalization of casting

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actors of color in a film about everyday life itself feels sensational, given the impact of the Hollywood blockbuster model and star culture that has dominated cinema for so long. What recedes even from the close, quiet look at making the marginalized and invisible lives of the Black and blind visible on screen is the economics of neoliberal hegemony. The working-class characters, though for the most part portrayed in communities of solidarity, nonetheless fall through the holes of the social welfare net. This turns the audience attention to racial and abled representation but also focuses on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder and the lack of mobility that governs strictly neoliberal subjects.

Spectacles: Subverting the Gaze Hagen’s film narrates the intersection of Black and blind lives in neoliberal Berlin, one in which the characters still are able to forge connections across barriers and stereotypes. In normalizing the portrayal of Black lives with range and depth, Hagen intentionally moves beyond stereotypes. In so doing, she overcomes what Priscilla Layne refers to as “banal racism,” that is, portraying the “everyday things that white Germans do to maintain their white supremacist society.”20 Additionally, Hagen thematizes the disruption of the white gaze in envisioning the experience of blindness. Hagen’s producing of the spectacle further displaces it from the white expectation of racism as spectacle of violence.21 Nonviolent racism persists, however, but that is not Hagen’s focus. Her characters all work within and across boundaries of visibility and invisibility. Yet the violent disruption of the crash scenes functions as a visual parabasis: in that moment of interruption, the neoliberal superstructure becomes visible. The crash scenes that frame the interwoven stories focus this analysis ultimately on the world of work and pursuit of enclaves of solidarity. High speed, adverse weather conditions, and economic necessity, though backgrounded, nonetheless mark the characters’ lifeworlds. Hagen films the accident with Kay from the perspective of the victim, with fading, ghostly imagery of winter weather and menacing trees. With muffled dialogue, her finance Sebastian takes his eyes off the road to gaze at her. The camera cuts to her bleeding temple, starkly contrasting with snow. An emergency medical worker asks Sebastian, “Sind Sie der Ehemann?” (Are you her husband?). She is driven off in the ambulance alone. In a moment of bitter recollection, once Kay has accepted Falk’s eager overtures to go out with her, he asks if he may kiss her. This request prompts Kay to rehearse the events that led

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to her blindness; that was the last question Sebastian had asked her before the crash. After a long period in the hospital, she had to accept that “dieses milchige Nichts war kein Alptraum” (This milky nothingness was not a nightmare). The crash forces her to pivot. Hagen sets the scene for second chances and glances deftly, normalizing the fact of Blackness while emphasizing the risk and courage needed to overcome ableism and stereotypes. Ulf, “Onkel Ulf ” as Carla calls him, encourages Falk to call Kay Herzsprung, who reads the news for Jazz Radio, and ask her out. She does take the call but refuses to go out with the stranger on the line who likes her voice. He bets Ulf that he will invite her to dinner that week. Hagen sketches glimpses of Kay’s life: she takes public transportation (and must rebuff offers of help and at least one date), avoids touch, and manages the frustration of her condition. Only when she oversleeps and has to take a taxi does her life intersect Falk’s in the world of his work. Of course, he recognizes the name when given the address and apartment number; he takes the fare. Though he flirts respectfully, she, in the back seat, grows increasingly anxious at his driving. When she tells him to slow down, he claims he has his vehicle, affectionately referred to as his “Esel” (beast) under control. Immediately thereafter, he slams on the brakes, skids, and curses. Kay loses control and gets out of the taxi, into traffic. The sequence evokes an assault: a woman screaming at a man in the street, in the middle of traffic, crawling away from the sound of his voice, with horns blaring and onlookers stopping. After a few moments, he manages to calm her enough to help her to the curb, entrusts her to a female pedestrian for further assistance, and returns to his vehicle. As the camera pans away from the scene, we hear Kay ask: “Wie sah der Mann aus?” (What did that man look like?). In the neoliberal city, access to public transportation and connectivity can govern economic outcomes and daily life for workers. In this sequence, however, it is Kay’s disability that leaves her dependent on a taxi. The incident, filmed as a series of triggers and extreme emotions, displays the vulnerability of the disabled while challenging the criminalization of Blackness. Hagen dismantles the stereotype of violent masculinity and shifts the burden of that (perhaps unconscious) image onto the spectators, including the audience. Falk gets another chance, though; Kay left her white cane (Blindenstock) in her panic, and he drives it to her place of work. There, he apologizes and invites her to dinner. The cane connects this thread of the screenplay to the encounter between Elena and Benjamin. She, a therapist losing her vision, is assigned to treat Benjamin, blind since birth. He works

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as a taxi dispatcher, always accompanied by his phantom friends. The wellmeaning supervisor insists he get help. Benjamin breaks through Elena’s fear of losing her vision; they enter a relationship based in part on his jovial, irreverent attitude toward blindness. They bond over this sign of acceptance and resignation to their shared disability—and the mutual affection that emerges from it. Benjamin tells a politically incorrect joke about the blind and white canes. The twist of fate that ends the film brings three of the four narratives to resolution. Ulf, exhausted from driving the night shift, does run over Benjamin. Falk hurries to support his friend, with Kay and Carla holding hands in the back seat of his taxi. Elena rushes to her new love, bloodied and joking about the white cane beneath the taxi. In the end, when the ambulance driver asks, “Sind Sie die Ehefrau?” (Are you his wife?) Elena lies and gets in the ambulance. Her affirmation of their relationship overturns the injustice that opened the film.

The Fast Lane Golafshan more directly thematizes mobility, disability, and the remaindering of disabled or otherwise extraordinary bodies in the neoliberal economic system. Consciously aiming for a cinematic aesthetic, he filmed the opening crash with spectacular effect. Oliver races against his self-imposed deadline in overtaking the line of cars in the traffic jam. His neurosis is underscored by a phone call to his girlfriend after he discovers a fleck of red nail polish on the glove compartment. That he reacts so explosively to a speck indicates his greater love for the car than the woman. Clearly, he considers himself to be as profitdriven and goal-oriented as possible—the successful businessman for whom nothing is enough. To find himself in a wheelchair, in a rehabilitation center, and without adequate internet galls him beyond reason. In other words, the becoming other, in disability, bumps him from the fast lane. Instead, he finds his identity homogenized into a less-than body. On a visit, his mother gifts him a book about having sex in a wheelchair. Exasperated by the role play required in a mobility practice session, he wheels away. The therapist pretends to be a bus driver; Oliver is supposed to board. Instead of playing along, he quips: “I’ll take a taxi.” At least in the early stages, he is unwilling to acknowledge any deterrent from his precipitously upwardly mobile path.

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The therapeutic context itself, the “Goldfish” group, elides all difference in degree of disability. From autism to blindness, Down’s Syndrome to paraplegic, the participants are not expected to heal, just to spend their time. In the goaloriented, profit-driven persona of Oliver, that stasis elicits initial repugnance. He only ventures into that part of the facility to find better Wi-Fi. Schilling, who trained in a wheelchair for two months prior to shooting, extends the reckless speed of Oliver’s driving to the use of the chair. Throughout the film, Schilling, under the direction of Golafshen, excels in performing the self-optimized incarnation of neoliberal disability—not in any clichéd sense of overcoming but to use disabled agency for criminal purposes. During the pivotal sequence in a supermarket, he observes the blind Magda shoplifting bottles of alcohol. As she triggers alarms on the way out, she calls out that she does not need the help offered by cashiers and staff. At that point, Oliver knows he can leverage that assumption that a disabled person, regardless of the disability, can play on stereotypes of helplessness to avoid liability. Much of the comedic potential in the script derives from facile assumptions about limitations and ability. The protagonist leverages the combined force of presumed innocence and fear of giving unintended offense. When Oliver succumbs to pressure and they stop for a shopping spree at a Zurich boutique—for Franzi, whose eye is caught by a shaggy pink coat (“Ich will Glamour” is her motto)—he reacts allergically to the salesman, who assumes money is a problem. At this, Oliver balks; he lectures the man on his penny loafers and breaks the awkwardness of encountering the presumption of innocence and privation. Immediately following the spree, the  camera focuses on the group in motion as they feel their bad-ass selves. The gang of Goldfish moves toward the lens, with and Oliver front and center in his throne on wheels: in his chair, which his entrepreneurial boss-man attitude transforms metaphorically into a throne on wheels, he pops a wheelie (see Figure 5.1). In other words, with his retrieved money, he indulges the acquisitive impulses of several members of the therapy group. Money conquers most, if not all, barriers. At a high point, Oliver declares: “Wir sind die geilste verfickte Behinderten-Truppe, die je existiert hat” (We are the hottest fucking disabled troop that ever lived). The crash and its consequences compel the character Oliver embodies to dismantle his neoliberal identity. Appalled to find himself in need of help while in Reha, he continues certain workaholic, goal-oriented behaviors that connect ability with privilege. As a Bio-Deutscher, he prospers though he lacks an ethical

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Figure 5.1  The “goldfish” take a road trip.

compass—and the viewer is led to believe that his success is predicated on the absence of an ethical lodestar. Along with white privilege, which the audience also realizes is ablest privilege, Oliver moves metaphorically through the world and virtually across time zones at such a pace that he proves too busy and important to pay attention to possible offense in his interpersonal interactions with non-clients. Resistant to the pressures of politically correct language, for example, he continually mispronounces the name of the Reha director (Frau Zschetzsche, played by Maria Happel). In other scenes, he stumbles over the appropriate term for disabled people, eventually catching himself when using the pejorative “Behinderte”; when advantageous, he manages to say, “Menschen mit Behinderung” (literally, human beings with a disability). Though he initially uses politically correct language as a new professional idiom, to persuade those around him to do his bidding, his romantic interest in Laura urges him to “walk the walk” as well as “talk the talk.” As the screenplay itself flirts between the comic and tragic, so does the protagonist toggle between playing the role of the wheel-chaired stereotype to elicit sympathy and feign innocence and accepting his limitations and those of his cohort. In his first encounter with Laura, he demonstrates a flirtatious, selfaware humor. In the cafeteria, in search of a place to eat, Oliver’s gaze finds her alone at a table. His come-on line is: “Darf ich mich setzen?” (May I sit down?)— but he has to point out that he was just kidding. In an attempt at first-date small talk, he asks her, “Bist du auch behindert?” (Are you also disabled?); she clarifies that she is there as a special education instructor and refers to “Menschen mit

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Behinderung.” As he presses her for information about her personal professional goals, Oliver asks about her dream job, assuming the one she has cannot be it. “Doch—ist mein Traumjob” (This really is my dream job). Later, the camel therapy escapade goes badly wrong; Laura loses her job (though we find out later that she actually resigned and began working at Burger King). Not until he loses everything does Oliver pivot away from using politically correct language to dupe and deceive others. Instead, he aligns himself with the Goldfish, at the behest of Frau Zschetzsche, to help rich people launder money for donations to the Reha center. Ultimately, he must demonstrate his sincerity to Laura and does so only after bonding with the Goldfish in her absence from the Reha center. The minivan stops at the Burger King drive-through. Visibly uncomfortable and tight-lipped, complete with uniform and cap, she limits the conversation to the order (large fries for all) but notes the sole orange Fanta. She asks: “Is that for Franzi?” In addition to her love of glamor, Franzi is a fan of Fanta. Oliver, though dejected and disappointed in his failure to persuade Laura to come back, sheepishly confirms and pays. In this small gesture of generosity, Oliver finally provides proof of his real affection for the members of the group, knowing what makes them happy. Though Oliver’s character repurposes his neoliberal skills for a greater good, his sidekick and erstwhile co-conspirator, Eddy (Ramadan), plays a more tragic role, albeit one with a good dose of joviality. The audience will recognize Ramadan from his starring as Toni “Ali” Hamady in the series 4 Blocks (2017–2019), in which he leads a Lebanese crime family involved in a drug cartel. An actor and director born in Lebanon and active in fundraising for social justice issues, Ramadan’s Eddy manages to embody both the menacing gangsta stereotype to which the character aspires and the comedically volatile yet ultimately harmless German Turk in search of true love that the actor portrayed as Sami Yildiz in 3 Türken und ein Baby (dir. Sinan Akkus, 2015). Marginalized among the Goldfish, Eddy is a male nurse (Pfleger) with a small scale of responsibilities and a gambling addiction. Unlike Laura, he hates his job. He drives for the group, cleans up, and sucks a lollipop with his belly exposed. It is whispered among the group that he and Magda had sex after a drunken party. As the driver of the minivan, Eddy serves as Oliver’s able-bodied accomplice—for a fee. When he sees how much cash Oliver actually has, he steals as much as he can and flees. Golafshan stages an action-filled chase scene like no other, with an out-of-shape Eddy scrambling through the sidewalks and streets of Zurich and Oliver racing behind him in a wheelchair—until Eddy runs out of breath and collapses on a

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flight of stairs. Oliver runs up against the physical barrier he cannot overcome. Eddy gets away. When the group overtakes Eddy later, he is decked out with new clothes and a thick gold chain, the proverbial gangsta. With no fanfare, Eddy ends up back at work, stuck in what is definitively not his Traumjob. The worker “mit Migrantenhintergrund” (migration background) stays stuck, while the prosperous, skilled, recovering neoliberal portfolio manager finds joy in his downward (lack of) mobility.

Conclusion In the introduction to her volume Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes: “The unexpected body fires rich, if anxious, narratives and practices that probe the contours and boundaries of what we take to be human.”22 The premise that undergirds the twenty-six essays in this volume is that the anomalous body constitutes radical “otherness” in a way that is trans-historical and universal. Many of the essays, which treat a range of topics, from the medieval English marketplace to contemporary science fiction, problematize the binary opposition between the “self ” as a “Cartesian body”23 and the “Other” of the nonstandard body. The essays take the reader through forms of otherness and how the representation of manifestations of difference in evolving “disciplines” such as teratology, anthropology, and medical science intersects with education and entertainment. The intent in this chapter is not to conflate the “otherness” of disability with the “otherness” of racial difference, but rather to demonstrate that any deviations from the “Cartesian body” as white, male, healthy, and able is an inevitable consequence of the neoliberal universal subject, dismantled and reassembled in both of these films—with insistence on visibility.

Notes 1

2 3

Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber, Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary Western European Cinema (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 5. Stehle and Weber, 5. Ibid., 5.

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Sheri Hagen, dir. and screenplay, Auf den zweiten Blick, sturmunddrangfilm GmbH, 2012. 5 Hagen has played a range of stage roles. Olivia Landry notes her performance in Schwarz tragen, as Vicki, one roommate in a consciously Black Wohngemeinschaft in Berlin. See Landry, “Schwarz tragen: Blackness, Performance, and the Utopian in Contemporary German Theater,” in Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990, ed. Ela Gezen, Priscilla Layne, and Jonathan Skolnik (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2022), 99–118, here 104. 6 Alireza Golafshan, Die Goldfische (The Goldfish), Seven Pictures Film, 2019. 7 Claudia Breger, Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 2. Emphasis in the original. 8 https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/special-focus/ nazi-persecution-of-the-disabled. 9 Anne Waldschmidt, “Normalcy, Bio-Politics, and Disability,” Disability Studies Quarterly 26:2 (2006): no pagination, https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/694/871. 10 Olivia Landry, “Color/Blindness in Sheri Hagen’s Auf dem zweiten Blick,” Black Camera: AnvInternational Film Journal 9:1 (2017): 62–79, 69. 11 Sheri Hagen, “‘At Second Glance’ by Sheri Hagen: A Q & A with the Director and Ariana Cohen-Halberstam,” Center for German and European Studies webinar, September 17, 2020, https://echo360.org/media/3bf6d56d-aaf7-4e3f-bc42fddbf61bd4c3/public#sortDirection=desc. 12 Hagen. 13 Ibid. 14 Immediately, series such as Babylon Berlin, Dark, Deutschland 83, Dogs of Berlin, and Criminal come to mind. 15 Philipp Jedicke, “More Diversity in the German Film Industry?” Deutsche Welle, November 27, 2020. Jedicke refers to the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter protests as “wakeup calls.” With a focus on Ufa’s commitment to rethinking the representation of modern societies, he focuses on more “women’s roles, more roles for actors with a migrant background and reflecting the LGBTQ+ community.” With further attention to “people with handicaps” as well, Ufa proposes quotas. Denise M’Baye echoes the words of Sheri Hagen about casting People of Color. Jedicke quotes M’Baye: “‘The mere fact that my hear leaps for joy when I am offered a role that is not clichéd is a clear sign of this sad state of affairs.’” 16 See Alireza Golafshan’s website, Behinderte Ausländer, accessed November 8, 2022. 17 See Justyna Müsch, Biography on IMDb. … accessed November 8, 2022. 18 See “Die Goldfische - Mission Statement,” https://sozialhelden.de/die-goldfische/. Accessed November 8, 2022. 19 See website, Sozialheld*Innen. … accessed November 8, 2022. 4

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20 Priscilla Layne, “Suspicious Spiral: Autofiction and Black German Subjectivity in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst,” Center for German and European Studies, Brandeis University, webinar, October 26, 2020, https://echo360.org/ media/5b9ceaef-5aac-4d91-acca-84d38927dbb8/public#sortDirection=desc. 21 Layne. 22 Rosemary Garland-Thomson, “From Wonder to Error: A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), 1–19, here 1. 23 David L. Clark and Catherine Myser, “Being Humaned: Medical Documentaries and the Hyperrealization of Conjoined Twins,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Garland-Thomson (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), 338–55, especially 338, 344, and 352.

6

Debased Black Masculinity as an Engine for Neoliberal Economies in African-American Cinema Helga Druxes

Two recent social thrillers, Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele, 2017) and Sorry to Bother You (dir. Boots Riley, 2018), satirize racial injustice and neoliberal narratives of advancement through constant work in the “post-racial” United States. The films’ African-American protagonists, the up-and-coming photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and the working-class Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), naively believe that they live a society that allows them to contribute as “post-Black” individuals.1 In contrast, the filmic narratives establish that racial bias still runs deep on a national level, leading to horrific acts of violence against Black bodies. Both films reveal the neoliberal paradigm of constant self-optimization as destructive to Black bodies and minds, which are either enslaved by imprisonment or pressed into whiteness in order to perform in the global workplace. The neoliberal imperative to be on 24/7 and, as Crary points out, virtually sleepless, counterintuitively allows Chris to discover the persistent racism of a seemingly liberal white family. Yet he can only evade victimization by pretending to fail as a neoliberal operative, thus feeding into their racist perceptions. Cassius must project whiteness to succeed but ultimately suffers racist violence. Both Black protagonists experience racism through direct physical debasement that extends the legacy of slavery. As legal activist Bryan Stevenson notes in “A Presumption of Guilt,” chattel slavery’s rationality relied on a “general debasement as a way of ordering society’s members in its own mind.”2 The Black sociologist Orlando Patterson, the historian Saidiya Hartman, Bryan Stevenson, and the African-American studies scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, among others, advance a perspective they call Afro-Pessimism to insist that to be Black “is to be fundamentally,

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ontologically, marked as a slave.”3 This description of antiblack racism in North America clashes with the narrative of social progress, which maintains that Blacks are either advancing educationally and materially or, regarding groups who are not, seek fault with their own moral failings. In public spaces, young Black men are often misapprehended (and detained) as dangerous with police routinely misjudging them to be five years older than they are, while young white suspects are typically thought to be one year younger.4 Studies among white university students show that from age ten forward, they attributed significantly less innocence to Black children, for example, the “perceived innocence of black children age 14–17 was equivalent to that of nonblack adults aged 18–21.”5 These and other implicit biases contribute to racial profiling by the police and sow general mistrust and alienation in everyday interactions between whites and Blacks. The films considered in this chapter illuminate these types of everyday and institutional racism and its ability to adapt the history of chattel slavery into contemporary neoliberal paradigms. There is still a paucity of Black-directed films about contemporary Black lives, but the films of Peele and Riley put the physical and psychological exploitation of Black males center stage. In the traditional thriller, Black males were either assigned as the sidekick of a white policeman or heroic detective, or they were cast as criminal perpetrators. In comedies as recently as the nineties, they played the buffoon.6 In Blaxploitation films of the seventies, they were often hypersexualized.7 Scant attention was paid to showing them in their ordinary everyday lives, without resorting to clichés. For example, the role of Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers), the grandfatherly hotel caretaker in The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980), was limited to rescuing the white boy Danny and his mother by bringing in heavy machinery. Jarringly, Dick displays soft porn kitsch on the wall of his bedroom. This detail gestures to his sexual vigor despite his advanced age, feeding into the antiblack stereotype of Black males as oversexed. In Enemy of the State (dir. Tony Scott, 1998), an innocent bystander, Robert Dean (Will Smith) has crucial information about state crime planted on him while lingerie shopping. His marriage and job as a labor lawyer are destroyed by evil National Security Agency operatives but is up to the white investigator Brill (Gene Hackman) to implement a plan to right these wrongs. In Panic Room (dir. David Fincher, 2002), a team of burglars led by a Black blue-collar worker Burnham (Forest Whitaker), who installs panic rooms for a living, breaks into an affluent New York City home, taking a white mother and daughter hostage. The thriller as a cinematic genre incorporated the Black male body with racial

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markers consistent with racist assumptions of a primarily white audience. The traditional horror film does not script Black men as central protagonists, but, as Wynter shows, “its terrain is again shifting, this time on the subject of race.”8 By contrast, in the new version of the horror film, Riley and Peele’s protagonists emerge from Black communities that can document a history of racist abuse. Wynter argues that the racist horror in Black everyday lives is so profound and pervasive that Black viewers will not find the cathartic possibilities typically associated with white audiences who watch monster films.9 For example, in Get Out, when Chris Washington sends a photo of Andre to his best friend, he recognizes who he is and proves his disappearance from the media record. In Us (dir. Peele, 2019), upper-class (predominantly white) and underclass families (predominantly Black) are tethered together by their mutual history, which confines the Blacks to shadowing white lives and material success until the day they rise up murderously to claim these privileges for themselves. In Us and Sorry to Bother You, there are glimmers of Black female agency, but we need to ask to what extent that might further emasculate their male partners. The characters Gabe (Winston Duke) and Cassius appear more reactive and bumbling compared to the defensive skills and political acumen of their women. Gendered identities can function differently in racialized neoliberal logic. My argument first delineates the dismantling of any progress narrative, then explores the spatial regulation/segregation/out-of-sight exploitation of the undercommons, and concludes with chronicling the 24/7 adverse health effects on Blacks—all of which indicate that neoliberal economics reinvent the narratives of racism while victimizing Black bodies.

Dismantling the Narrative of Progress in Sorry to Bother You The neoliberal ideal of frenetic adaptation to an ever-evolving market that functions as a sorting mechanism is shown up as absurd and ethically fraudulent through the Black man’s dehumanization. Poverty initially drives Cassius to accept low-status ghost work; by mimicking an upper-class white accent, he attains the status of “Power Caller.” Yet, as he finds out at a party at his boss’s house, affluent whites still refuse to acknowledge him as an individual, clamoring for a grossly distorted performance of Black masculinity, undermining his efforts to transcend race through upward mobility. In the mansion’s basement, Cash exposes a sinister biochemical experiment, in which Black workers are injected

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with horse DNA, creating a new slave species of high-endurance workers, the so-called Equisapiens. Sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, in his work on the political construction of debt and its defining of the neoliberal human condition, draws attention to the imbrication of a democratic state with a criminal economy that relies on political extortion.10 Both films engage in a critique of the criminal economy in democracies—Black men’s bodies are harvested both for their physical stamina and their creativity as image-makers or orators. Every talent they possess is racially marked as ripe for appropriation. The seemingly endless supply of exploitation in the neoliberal state perpetuates capital investment in a downtrodden working class, sustained with the narrative of a thriving economy and upwardly mobile opportunities. Gray and Suri (2019) trace wage stagnation for service workers combined with high rent costs in metropolitan areas as a source of control over a worker’s waking hours. A worker in Alabama, a state whose low cost of living is negated by a miserly minimum wage of $7.25, would have to work eighty-one hours a week to cover their rent. Sleepless toil results in less opportunity for those in the underclass, many of whom are People of Color. The neoliberal myth of self-optimization obscures the consequences of endless labor (or something). Moreover, the grotesque reduction of the Black male body to its sexual prowess harkens back to US American slavery’s sexual exploitation of Black men as studs to make more slave babies. In Sorry to Bother You, an evil white corporate magnate creates a new humanoid species, a cross between Black men and horses. Along with the sinister “chemical change” of Black men into physically “stronger, more obedient, more durable” (1:18:53), Equisapiens are enhanced with sexual prowess from “a big horse dick,” as corrupt owner Steve Lift promises Cash. As Cash rises to Power Caller, the gilded elevator projects a disembodied voice praising Cash: “You are in your sexual prime. You are at the top of the reproductive pile” (35:21). His white manager Diana De Bauchery (Kate Berlant) suddenly begins to flirt with him, sidling up to feel his muscles and flattering his choice of shirt. One of the first purchases Cash makes with his bigger salary is a tight-fitting silver metallic suit and abstract rainbow-colored tie, making him look spiffily alien like David Bowie’s character Space Oddity. Previously, his thrift store sweaters and shuffling gait style him into a nerdy if sympathetic underdog. His de-sexualized, old-mannish appearance in the workplace is an avoidance strategy against racist projections onto him as a young Black man. Boots Riley is highly cognizant of shifts in linguistic register between street vernacular and the fake, upbeat language of the white-dominated marketplace, using double entendres to highlight the shoddiness of capitalist promises for

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advancement through hard work. The racist claymation advertising video that promotes the new species Equisapiens asks: “[B]ut what are tools if not extensions of the appendages with which we were born?” (1:18:55). Obviously, Riley plays on the double meaning of tool as an instrument and as a sexual term for penis. Moreover, the worker who harnesses his labor power to exploitive production becomes a capitalist tool, sinking into deeper bondage as he eroticizes consumerism. Despite what the jingle claims, this is not a natural process, nor does it represent technical progress. Frequent scenes of mediatized violence, where Black people get hit in the head or dunked in excrement, aim to normalize a Darwinian worldview, in which a white master race controls the means of production and reaps all the benefits of indentured workers, whether they be Black, Asian, or white. The encapsulated claymation video serves as a synecdoche of white racism among the ownership class in the film as a whole. For this reason, it is important to discuss the physicality of the on-screen female promoter. We see a naked hominid with exaggerated lips and black hairs sprouting around her nipples, although her hairless face, pink lipstick, and skin tone allude to attributes of sanitized white femininity. The grotesque contrast between these incongruous physical characteristics and her perky white voice fascinates and repels, capturing viewer attention. The accent we hear is Australian, and the speaker’s chummy tone and girlish upspeak belie the eugenicist fascism of her assertions. Perhaps this particular audiovisual combination suggests an Aboriginal, but her huge lips and large pendulous breasts also suggest North American racist stereotypes such as the mammy figure. This video caricature of Black femininity gestures back to an earlier grotesque spectacle, at the gallery opening of Detroit (Tessa Thompson), Cash’s artist and activist girlfriend, who has just broken up with him for selling out. On stage, she transforms herself into an upscale caricature of whiteness by reciting lines from a British soap, slicking back her blonde-died curly hair into a tight cap and stripping naked except for a rubber bikini made of Black hands and translucent plastic high-heeled ankle boots. She then invites the audience, most of whom are white, to throw batteries, broken cell phones, or small rubber balloons filled with sheep’s blood at her body. In other words, she orchestrates and invites her own abjection. Detroit’s stated political intent is to expose the savage exploitation of Africans through the mining of toxic minerals needed for cell phones and batteries. Through her wall art of large African continent shapes made out of scrap, Detroit aligns herself as a daughter of Africa. Yet, to satisfy the racist bloodlust of the audience, she stages a sacrifice. The light-skinned

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body she puts on display is flawless, tall, and evenly proportioned. The rubber hands grasping its breasts and pudenda, however, remind us of contemporary racist far right poster campaigns that allude to white purity endangered by Black and refugee rapists. So, by defacing this immaculate and articulate performer, the white audience simulates a kind of rape. They are only too eager to comply. The only participant who intervenes to stop this savaging is Cash. Detroit sends him away with the ironic injunction to “stick to the script,” the slogan all Regal View telemarketers are taught to follow from day one on the job. Detroit intones: “Let’s begin again,” as the throws become more violent and her rehearsed lines rise in pitch. Through her performance, she suggests Black cultural creatives must pillory themselves to gain attention in the pursuit of (fleeting) fame in the white-dominated art market. She continues to stand tall throughout the assault. Her fortitude and strength in this scene contrast with Cash’s when he invites himself on a game show to access a wide viewership for his expository cell phone video of Steve Lift’s brutal interactions with the shackled Equisapiens in his basement. Cash perseveres, but first he must undergo ritual humiliation not of his own choosing. He is hit in the head; he is thrown into a vat of feces and then exhibited on stage dripping. These acts of violence once again graphically allude to the toxic legacy of American slavery in the white mainstream, affecting men’s and women’s bodies similarly, even though women seem to wield more power in shaping and exposing the racist narrative. Detroit’s deliberate repeat performance of her abjection makes viewers question the politics behind it, while Cash is ensnared in abjection scenarios he does not anticipate. Detroit juggles several jobs (activist, artist, telemarketer); Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) in Us glides between conflicting roles as a mother, revolutionary leader, killer. Black women are ultimately reinserted in a sexist frame as puzzles who possess sinister powers, and these are tied to their reproductive ability: they can switch places with their doppelgängers; as artists, they can stage and reproduce public scandals at will. Overall, these characters appear to have a more mysterious mobility than their male counterparts who end up trapped in bodies that implode. However, today, a Black man or woman can also seize the tools of media production to call the oppressed to arms and expose white racism for what it is. Cash’s revelatory video of Steve Lift threatening his Equisapiens prisoners has more political impact across the media landscape than Lift’s own saccharine Claymation promo, which, he claims, contains “a lot of production value” (1:17:32). Boots Riley believes that plain language still speaks Truth to Power, for example when he has Detroit comment on his promotion: “It’s not phat. It’s

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selling slave labor” (56:09), or when she mocks the big party at Lift’s mansion Cash is so excited to attend as a “slave auctioneer’s party” (1:01:43). The spirit of Martin Luther King’s civil rights marches is evoked in the last third of the film, as more racially different groups come together to organize protests and strikes. Working-class awareness that the Black cultural creative worker is no less vulnerable than the white or Asian gig worker can galvanize “collectives of resistance” (Poll 95) in the pursuit of social justice. This aspect is driven home by the alliance between Detroit, a Black female artist and radical activist for the group “Left Eye,” the Asian-American union organizer Squeeze, and the striking Regal View. Detroit then also begins working as a telemarketer for Regal View in order to help Cash’s uncle make mortgage payments and keep his home. An affordable rent, let alone a car to get to and from work are basic necessities that are out of reach for many working-class Americans. Economists Piketty, Saez and Zucman find: “the average post-tax income of the bottom 50% would have stagnated since the late 1970s at just below $20, 500. The bottom half of the US adult population has therefore been effectively shut off from pretax economic growth for over forty years.”11 If you examine the data for working-age adults by age group, the average pre-tax income has fallen “by 20% for adults aged 20–45 and by 8% for those between ages 45 and 65.”12 Any growth in posttax income consists of health care transfers by Medicare or Medicaid for the elderly, with rising health care costs for younger workers eating up any small pay increase they might receive. Financial need and the state of indebtedness that keep working-class Americans in precarity are also engines driving this film. Afro-pessimism promotes a critical view of a linear progress narrative for Blacks, while asserting a specific history of antiblackness that persists beyond the racial progress narratives of the Obama years into the Trump era, where white nationalism is resurgent. Riley’s depiction of impoverished working-class adults vulnerable to gross exploitation by the “Worry Free” corporation is not far off the mark, as it revolves around housing and food insecurity. In the film, there are so many workers who cannot afford rent or food that they trade their freedom for prison-style housing and bonded labor because this option seems better than being homeless. Southern sociologists Ray, Randolph, Underhill, and Luke point out that recent “measures of progress regarding Black male unemployment were inflated” because they did not include incarcerated Black populations.13 Black males in Sorry to Bother You suffer from underemployment and bad pay in a cross-generational line ranging from Langston, the elder co-worker in the

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neighboring cubicle, to Cash’s uncle Sergio, who cannot make the payments on his mortgage, to Cash’s own age cohort. He states that the people he went to high school with all play football at night and pump gas during the day. Before turning to telemarketing, Cash only has 40 cents to put gas in the tank of his junk car. The Worry Free corporation advertises on huge billboards in the streets of poverty-stricken Oakland: “If you worked here, you’d be home by now,” a parody of real estate ads for expensive apartment complexes close to urban centers. We repeatedly watch TV ads of Worry Free workers sleeping stacked like sardines in dorm rooms, eating, and working “in space-efficient facilities where production occurs. Lifetime contracts, so no wages needed” (40:53). This enslaved worker population is Riley’s sardonic comment on mass incarceration in the United States, except that the fake ads depict these inmates as happy white families, whereas the incarcerated population is predominantly Black males. The photo of Cash’s father next to a car that Cash brings to work contrasts with Cash’s own situation: his own father did better economically. As Cash’s income rises, he moves the photo to his new office, but the portrait becomes animate, making negative gestures to indicate his disapproval of his son selling out for upward mobility. Riley does more than document racist brutalism. Moreover, he manages to poke fun at its narrow-minded unimaginativeness, revealing it as fed by fascist herd mentality. The party crowd of Lift’s hangers on is all white. Lift reassures them the Black man is not a threat: “he’s friendly” (1:05:32). The whites urge Cash to perform his blackness from Oakland for them: he should tell them an anecdote about “his” gangster world. When he refuses, Lift asks him to rap. Rhyming lamely as he is put on the spot, Cash only becomes the darling of the crowd when he shouts “n—shit” and they chant it gleefully. Hate speech is what melds them from aimless bystanders into an energetic, happy crowd. To show off his colonialist heritage, Lift himself is attired in a postmodern medley of business jacket and sarong, ostentatiously carrying a riding crop. In the confidential chat with Cash, Lift trades the crop for a gun, prompting Cash’s nervous reaction: “I’ve got to get the fuck out of here” (1:17: 31). Similarly, we can read Lift’s previous compliment on meeting Cash face to face as racist: “You must be like a fucking genius. I’d like to pick your brain because we need people like you at Worry Free […] who analyze the gaps, the challenge like a cunning raccoon, like a snake” (1:06:35). The word “raccoon” contains a derogatory term for Black men from the days of Jim Crow, and even Lift’s praise “fucking genius” is doubleedged because Lift approaches Black men only in terms on their clichéd sexual

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prowess and supposed “animal” nature. Cash’s facial reaction is incredulous: he gets the racism and is dismayed how crude it is. Sexton (2016) reminds us that “antiblackness is the notion that the construction of blacks as nonhuman structures the status of all other racial groups.”14 Despite his willingness to humiliate himself as the price of inclusion, no such scene is forthcoming. The camera does a tracking shot down a dark corridor to Cash sitting alone in a large, dimly lit room next to a black piano, while drunk or drugged white people have sex in an alcove just outside the room. Mr. ___, the Black fixer of the Power Caller domain (and the only other Black “guest”), enters and admonishes Cash: “Don’t think about the shit that shouldn’t be. We thrive on what is. Opportunity. This could be big. Don’t do that thing. That thing, where you fuck it up” (1:12:12). This optimistic discourse conflicts with Cash’s repeated exposure to social dishonor, regardless of his work success. Mr. ___’s brotherly advice is exposed immediately as a lie because in the very next scene, Cash enters another room where an overhead TV screen replays to a crowd of white partygoers the scene of his attack as he crosses the picket line at Regal View. The aggressor who throws the coke can that hits Cash is a white contestant or employee on the popular game show “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me.” This unfunny joke, Cash’s head wound, is repeated by whites and ironically commented on by most Blacks throughout the film, even marketed as a Halloween costume for white children, who dress up in curly black wigs with an attached coke can as a type of Blackface. However, Riley turns the joke back on the racists when all the Regal View and Worry Free strikers camouflage themselves in this wig to remain anonymous and appear as a cohesive group as the TV cameras pan over them.

Spatial Legacies of Slavery While basements and subterranean spaces possess their own eerie haunted legacies in white narratives, for the Black men (and girls, in Us) who enter them, they become carceral realms of dehumanization and zombification. In Sorry to Bother You and Get Out, these basements are located in opulent suburban mansions located in ample park-like grounds, further referencing plantation life. In both these films, scheming whites set up laboratory spaces below ground where they perform eugenicist experiments on Black bodies. In Us, the basement space is accessed through an amusement park on the Santa Cruz beach, leading

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down into a kind of military encampment inside a shopping mall, from where a bloody insurrection of enslaved Blacks arises. These locations with their dim lighting suggest that here a nightmarish, violent logic rules. Uncaged white rabbits roam these subterranean tiled spaces while their cages stand empty, suggesting lab animals in an experiment gone awry. Of course, the white rabbit is also a key symbol of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, signifying a topsy-turvy world down the rabbit hole. Each upwardly mobile family, whether Black or white, is unknowingly tethered to shadow counterparts below, who are enslaved to mimic their actions without any of the material resources. This underclass lacks a spokesperson until Adelaide, a Black girl from above, is abducted to their realm, eventually becoming their leader. When the tethered first appear in the family’s summer house driveway at night to claim “our time now, our time up there” (1:41:05), their affluent, university-educated counterparts ask in outraged disbelief: “What are you people?” Their answer is telling: “We’re Americans” (48:03). They take over the mansions and toys of the upper middle class, looting, burning, and killing in a nationwide revolt. The film ends with an aerial panning shot of many red-uniformed rebels forming a human chain across the beaches and mountains of the United States, from sea to shining sea, in an ironic commentary on the patriotic hymn “America the Beautiful.” The tethered will have their day, rising up against the callousness of the “humans that built this place” (1:36:41). In Sorry to Bother You, the corrupt whites’ sinister science projects are pseudo-rationalized by prerecorded videos or advertisements to subscribers or shareholders. As Steve Lift intones, waving his gun in Cash’s face: “I just did not want you to think I was doing this for no reason, that I was crazy, because this isn’t irrational” (1:19:38). In each case, the Black individual is confined to a chair and drugged; in the case of Chris Washington, he is even shackled. Their conscious minds are lulled to acquiescence by rituals of psychological manipulation. After Steve Lift makes his indecent proposal that Cash become “our man on the inside, an Equisapiens MLK,” he asks him to “just go sleep on it” (1:24:37). Sleeping equates not using your intellect, or a regression to “the sunken place” in Get Out, subjected to a live burial of your agentive faculties. Both states evoke memories of chattel slavery. What reinforces this view is that the evil slave master operates within a whole system, in the case of Get Out’s Armitage family, over three generations, and with the enthusiastic financial support of their affluent white friends, all of whom eagerly bid at auction on talented Black victims for their youth, physical strength, sexual prowess, or

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Figure 6.1  Get Out. Chris finds cotton for plugging up his ears.

artistic vision. The only way for Chris to break out of bondage is to outwit and then kill his captors and run away. Similar to runaway slaves finding support on the underground railroad, he is rescued by close friends (see Figure 6.1). These feature films create a linkage between sleeping, loss of voice, and enslavement. Conversely, wakefulness, recording evidence of racism, and sharing this information among a group of Blacks with their common history as “exploited and expropriated people”15 show ways to collectively resist neoliberal mind games. Get Out juxtaposes the friendship between the photographer Chris Washington and his best friend, a TSA agent, as a life-saving antidote to the corrupt practices of white slave masters. To escape, and allow other previously enslaved characters an opening for mutiny, Chris documents their zombified appearance with his cell phone. He does this twice, one with Georgia, the family maid, and another time at the party, where he surreptitiously takes a photo of a young Black man he knows from high school, now married to a much older white woman, and who dresses and behaves in a way that is incongruous with his age. In Ryan Poll’s estimation “of all the slave movies produced in the past decade, Get Out is perhaps the most radical. It narrates how American slavery is not an institution confined to the past, nor one locatable in a particular region (such as the South), but a national institution, practice, and affect that continues to shape and structure the present.”16 This echoes Harney and Moten’s chronology of what they call Black “undercommon” living, in which an expanded sense of fascism is part of the lived experience. As they provocatively put it, “if fascism is back, when did it go away? In the 1950s, with Apartheid and Jim Crow? In the 1960s and 1970s? Not for Latin Americans. In the 1980s? Not for Indonesians

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and Congolese. In the 1990s? The decade of intensified carceral state violence against black people in the United States?”17 They go on to argue that there is a global exploited class exposed to expulsion, warehousing, incarceration, and other forms of state-authorized terror: [W]e are already shared and already sharing. Indeed, the condition of our ability to share is that we are shared. In other words, we are not individuals who decided to enter into relations through the commons. The commons cannot gather us. We are already gathered, as we are already dispersed and interspersed. The idea of the commons leads to the presumption of interpersonal relations, and therefore of the person as an independent, strategic agent. Such persons make not just commons, but states and nations, in this worldview. […] To be undercommon is to live incomplete in the service of a shared incompletion, which acknowledges and insists upon the inoperative condition of the individual and the nation—as these brutal and unsustainable fantasies and all of the material effects they generate oscillate in the ever-foreshortening interval between liberalism and fascism. These inoperative forms still try to operate through us.18

I quote them here at length because Harney and Moten explicate the lure of individual resilience to be nothing but a neoliberal snare for a people who were, and continue to be, systemically excluded from a progress narrative based on their dispossession. When Cassius complains to Detroit after waking from sleep that he has no vocation: “You got your calling, your art, but I am just out here, spinning around” (3:34), he expresses his need for a meaningful cause. He eventually discovers it to be labor organizing, but most of the drama revolves around the blandishments of “upscale elegance” and “social capital,” the unchanging passwords to activate the golden elevator to the penthouse, where the Power Caller elite make arms sales and broker deals for slave labor. At the neighborhood bar Cash and his friends frequent before his rise; there is a VIP room in the back. This room also requires a password, but when Cash gets in, he finds the socializing boring and pretentious. In the undercommon, power relations are less veiled than in the pleasure gardens of the white elite. Notably, elders like Langston also socialize at the bar to share their wisdom with the “young bloods.” Here a pivotal moment occurs as Langston opens his work shirt to show off an underlayer with the logo of the TV show playing overhead, “I got the Shit Kicked out of Me.” Blacks have been grossly exploited and publicly humiliated for generations; this is Riley’s ironic acknowledgment of that history.

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In Get Out, closets and basements are spaces where trophies of antiblack racism are kept for the secret delectation of its perpetrators. It is “the sunken place,” where Black bodies or body organs are savagely harvested. The basement is supposedly sealed off, Rose’s dad avers, because “there is some black mold” (17:37). Even after Black people are successfully enslaved, there is a residue, or as the blind gallery owner who buys Chris reveals, “a sliver of you will still be in there, limited consciousness” (1:23:22). In a bedroom closet, Chris discovers a trove of photographs of young Black men his girlfriend lured to their doom. In the mansion’s family room, he awakes from a drugged stupor, shackled to a leather armchair across from a hunting trophy, a mounted deer head with an imposing set of antlers. Chris can only free himself from the impending butchery by shutting out the psychic manipulation. The material detail of the cotton batting Chris unpicks from the armrest alludes to slave labor on the white plantation. Remembering this exploitive history, Chris recovers his alert mistrust to seize the moment for violent escape. The neoliberal ideology of the optimized white body has fascistic underpinnings. The grafting of white brains into Black bodies does not entirely extinguish the victims’ residual awareness of their personal history as free Black people. Chris uses his cell phone to document racist crimes, a disruptive flash that pierces the brainwashing and lets the victims speak out, however briefly. When Chris sends the enslaved Logan’s photo to his best friend Rod, he sets in motion a rescue operation for both these men. Evidence-based mistrust of post-racial America energizes resistance. To resist effectively, Black individuals must form alliances across class, the way the middle-class Chris and working-class Rod do.

“Get Some Rest”: Sleep as a Form of Stupefaction In the plantation logic of Get Out, white masters repeatedly cajole Black people to “go lay down, get some rest.” In moments of crisis, when the residual Black self asserts its presence, the well-oiled performance of compliance with whiteness is jammed. Peele ratchets up these racialized confrontations with increasing violence: from the maid Georgina pouring iced tea robotically until it spills on Chris, to Logan’s lunge toward Chris yelling “get out,” to Walter’s turning the rifle he was meant to use against Chris on Rose and shooting her in the stomach. Lulling Blacks into oblivion of their own condition as slaves is key to maintaining dominance, and this is achieved through creating a false history

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about their lack of agentive power as a personal failing. When Missy Armitage, the evil psychiatrist and matriarch, solicits Chris’s memories about the day his mother died in a hit-and-run, she emphasizes that he waited at home and “did nothing” (35:15). The fact that eleven-year-old Chris did not know to call for help in a crisis is not a surefire predictor for Chris as an adult. The adult Chris attempts to extricate himself several times from the uncomfortable white family dynamic, either by calling Rod or by telling his girlfriend Rose that he wants to leave. Since the white predators consistently infantilize Chris regarding his body hygiene, his smoking as a dirty habit, or his lack of interest in endurance sports, they fail to consider that he is an intelligent individual with unique interests and talents. They all try to shame him and objectify him as a Black stud, which he resents and complains about. When Walter rebels by shooting Rose in the stomach, this attack terminates her career as a sexual temptress of young Black men. However, as the pessimistic alternate ending shows, the presence of a Black man at a murder scene near a dying white woman who calls out to the officers for help leads to his immediate arrest and imprisonment. The fictive Black-and-white images Chris captures, “so brutal, so melancholic” (47:20), gesture toward real Black experience in urban America, where Black men still have the police called on them in Detroit for “gardening while black,”19 get fatally shot by a white police officer for walking in the middle of the street in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis,20 or strangled in a police chokehold on Staten Island for selling untaxed cigarettes on the corner.21 But who labels Chris’s vision “melancholic”? These are Jim Hudson’s words, the blind white gallery owner who expects to make Chris’s artistic talent his own by gouging out his eyes. By suggesting that Chris is merely melancholic, Jim attempts to defuse his righteous anger over ongoing acts of antiblack racism; moreover, the moniker “black melancholy” distances Chris’s trauma to the remote past, despite its continuing unfolding in the present. Another lure to stupefy Black men into compliance are materialist consumption and the promise of social mobility through interracial dating. Rose is the daughter of a wealthy family of doctors. To marry Rose, as Walter suggests to Chris, would be getting the “top of the line.” The Armitages own a vast tract of land; the nearest neighbors live across the lake. Dean Armitage ominously calls his backyard “the field of play,” suggesting that a confrontation, or a sports competition, is about to unfold. Later, as the drugged Chris is dragged into the basement, the camera pans along a group photograph of white soldiers, presumably of the Civil War era. Thus, the racism of the contemporary

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ownership class has historic underpinnings that go back to slavery. The character Andre Hayworth echoes this malaise when he mutters under his breath that he is “sticking out like a sore thumb” in the white suburb just before Jeremy Armitage assaults and kidnaps him. The Black man’s mere presence on the street causes a moral panic in an affluent white neighborhood. Similarly, Chris’s presence at the “auction” party occasions scandalous titillation over his imagined sexual prowess and racist appraisal of his muscular arms. For Chris to survive in this racist stratum of society, he has to abjure any Black cultural habits, such as the fist bump, or calling other Black men “brother.” Peele’s critique of pervasive antiblack racism is identical to Riley’s ploy in Sorry to Bother You, to “use your white voice.” Cassius’s financial success as a Power Caller becomes concretized in his move from his uncle’s garage in Oakland to a swanky apartment on a higher floor with a corner view in San Francisco. We see Cash waking up in a big bed with expensive linens, surrounded by pristine white walls and Balinese art. However, from the altercation as he was crossing the picket line, he sports a head wound that continues to bleed through the bandage and stains the pillows. Similar to Mr. ___, whose left eye is covered by a patch, Black individuals who rise to the top in a corrupt enterprise bear signs of injury on the face they show the world. Given that the film’s radical activists call themselves Left Eye, being blind in that eye or being concussed, signifies these characters’ inability to embrace leftist, pro-worker politics. In The Making of Indebted Man, Lazzarato discusses the intimate linkage between capitalist production and destruction or anti-production. Every technical or productivity advance is tied to catastrophic effects, for example: Industry multiplies the production of consumer goods while at the same time multiplying water, air, and soil pollution, and degrading the climate. Agricultural production poisons us at the same time as it provides us with food; cognitive capitalism destroys the “public” education system at every level; cultural capitalism produces historically unprecedented conformism; the image society kills imagination, and so on.22

For Lazzarato, modern-day capitalism perpetuates “conditions of exploitation and domination, that is, conditions of ‘lack’ … The ‘weak’ growth of the last thirty years has doubled the GDP of Western countries, while deepening social, economic, and political inequality.”23 The apparatus becomes entrenched in society by the concurrent flow of stupidity, a crucial feature already recognized by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. Riley and Peele lambaste the

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stupidity, even degeneracy of the affluent classes, while showing the insidious allure of material wealth for a minority whose elders were never able to take material comforts for granted. Chris’s mother gets killed in a hit-and-run on her walk back from work because she does not have a car, Cash’s uncle Sergio is about to lose his modest house because he cannot make mortgage payments. The elapsed time between these two fictitious milestones spans twenty years, during which, in the real world, Black homeownership has not risen. The 2007– 2010 crisis was triggered by a raft of interest-only loans defaulting as house values declined. As the journalist Nathalie Baptiste shows, these subprime mortgages disproportionately targeted Black first-time homeowners, who could not afford to pay down the principal and then held no collateral as their house values collapsed.24 Baptiste provides some shocking numbers: “In 2010, the median wealth for white families was $124,000; for black families it was a mere $16,000, according to the Urban Institute.” Racist bank practices such as redlining insured that no lending would flow to Black neighborhoods. In East Oakland, the setting of Sorry to Bother You, foreclosures on Black-owned homes rose dramatically between 2006 and 2012. Against this backdrop of structural racism, where money is often tenuous, feature films depicting Black men attaining a level of material ease have a utopian quality. When Chris is introduced in his urban apartment, its furnishings and ubiquitous artwork suggest that he is a successful photographer. In a later flashback, we see young Chris sitting in a modest apartment waiting for his mother to return. This shot establishes his roots as working class and helps explain why his best friend Rod is a working-class man whose interpretation of events in Chris’s life may seem fantastical but proves to be entirely accurate. Sorry to Bother You’s protagonist Cash is excited about the opportunity for promotion to Power Caller. In a conversation with Langston, he naively asks: “Power callers, right? They make a shit ton of money, man. I’m talkin’ about, like, Benz, and expensive house payment type of money. How the fuck is that even possible?” (28:33). Langston quips that compared to regular telemarketers, what they sell is “more like apples to the Holocaust” (28:41). As we see with Rod, Langston’s jokey analysis is spot on. Rejecting corporate criminality is a learning process for Cash. “We don’t talk enough about how, especially for people who come from immigrant backgrounds, from poor backgrounds, from impoverished families, that money is a source of emotional comfort. … It’s not just money,”25 states Chinese American novelist C. Pam Zhang, describing how her family had moved ten

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times by the time she was eighteen in search of “better job opportunities or school systems for her and her younger sister.” While critiquing the neoliberal tunnel vision of humans reduced to Darwinian competitors in the marketplace, we must pay heed to “the conditions that make black economic immobility distinct.”26 In Us, Peele gestures to a bloody revolution against a white elite so vapid and obtuse that we are not sorry to see them massacred, while Riley champions left populist engagements that could be realistically embraced: activism, a return to unionizing, and labor strikes. These are forms of collective autonomy that “could not be further from the neoliberal ideologization of the autarkic, entrepreneurial self.”27 Peele invokes the Black family unit and an extended family of friends as sources of resistance against racial exploitation. Although his “uprising” solution is politically more sweeping, his alternate ending for Get Out suggests that its successful outcome remains a compensatory fantasy for everyday antiblack racism.

Black Hypervigilance and Weathering Crary argues that “sleep is one of the few remaining experiences where, knowingly or not, we abandon ourselves to the care of others.”28 At the same time, he emphasizes that sleep is “porous, suffused with the flows of waking activity.”29 In a racially divisive society, there is no benevolent care extended toward Black people. In fact, daily microaggressions, job insecurity, even for Black college graduates—whose 12 percent unemployment rate out of college is double that of white—policing on streets, even in their homes (as the 2009 arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates for breaking and entering showed), can combine to create psychological distress, leading to “weathering,” a form of accelerated aging.30 Arline Geronimus, a public health expert who studies this process since 1992 and coined the term, finds: “the stressors that impact people of color are chronic and repeated through their whole life course, and in fact may even be at their height in the young adult-through-middle-adult ages rather than in early life.” The three films under discussion focus on this age group. In Get Out, Chris wakes up in late at night in Rose’s bedroom and decides to get up and smoke outside. He is accosted twice, once by Walter who runs full tilt at him out of the dark, and shortly afterward, by Missy, who proceeds to hypnotize him. This scene is an instance of restorative sleep being invaded by neoliberal rituals for self-optimization. Chris smokes, nor is he a runner. The tacit collective agenda

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is to optimize Chis so that the white man in line to purchase his body gets it in optimal condition. The so-called Coagula Project grafts aging white brains into Black bodies, creating a type of augmented cognition. The resultant zombified characters do not need sleep. We see both Georgina and Walter up all night, roaming the house and grounds, moving as if remote-controlled. The writer Norman Ohler did research into German Nazi scientists’ use of the drug Pervitin, a methamphetamine, to keep cohorts of their invading soldiers awake and on the move.31 While Ohler dramatically overstated the saturation of the Nazi army with this drug, Crary concurs that twentieth-century warfare relied on scientific manipulation “to reduce the body’s need for sleep.”32 The Western military-industrial complex deploys Crary’s “machinic model of duration and efficiency” in the broader social sphere. From truck drivers to college students, sleepless work is touted in the neoliberal workplace. A globalized gig economy allows for the uninterrupted operation of markets, network systems, law offices, and the micro tasks that shape algorithms. However, lack of sleep incurs serious health costs. Crary mentions that “the average North American adult now sleeps approximately six and half hours a night, an erosion from eight hours a generation ago, and (hard as it is to believe) down from ten hours in the early twentieth century.”33 Chronic disrupted sleep leads, among others, to obesity, cardiovascular disease, and cognitive impairment.34 “Relative to non-Hispanic Whites, African Americans/Blacks are 43% more likely to develop hypertension, 95% more likely to have a stroke, and 30% more likely to die from CVD,” concludes the 2011 national health survey for adults.35 These dire statistics combine with other social ills, such as food insecurity, lack of health insurance, evictions, and exposure to other lifethreatening infections: “65 percent of all new AIDS diagnoses are among Black women.”36 In the aftermath of the Ferguson shooting, protestors and journalists exposed an arrangement between the Mayor’s office and city council allowing the police department to target Blacks as cash cows for the town, by inundating them with a torrent of fines, tickets, citations and fees, and arrests.37 The spring 2020 Covid crisis in New York City shows a significant disparity in fatality rates (more than double) between the city and densely settled Black and Hispanic areas in the Bronx and Queens.38 The rising poverty rates of Blacks (65 percent) as well as working-class whites (43 percent) belie the notion that the 2008 election of Barack Obama to president rang in a post-racial society; instead, these groups face rampant

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capitalist profiteering.39 Taylor calls for an end to white supremacy because this ideology of white exceptionalism obscures the potential for whites, Blacks, and Latinx to make common cause over their miserable living standards. Taylor argues: Just because white workers… may at times fully accept reactionary ideas about African Americans does not change the objective fact that the majority of the US poor are white, the majority of people without health insurance are white, and the majority of the homeless are white. It is true that Blacks and Latino/as are disproportionately affected by the country’s harsh economic order, but this is a reality they share with the majority of white workers. […] Political unity, including winning white works to the centrality of racism in shaping the lived experiences of Black and Latino/a workers, is key to their own liberation.40

Taylor is fully cognizant of the many objective facts that would justify an Afropessimistic interpretation of where race relations in the United States are going; even so she endorses leftist solidarity making as the way forward. As they create politicized, strong Black female leads, such as Detroit in Sorry to Bother You, and Adelaide’s doppelgänger Red in Us, Riley and Peele indicate that working-class women are capable of rallying support for issues of race, class, and gender. Finally, these films are not as deeply Afro-pessimist as they may appear because these proactive female characters energetically engage in the fight for racial justice. Yet the energy that drives their presence on the public stage is portrayed as somewhat uncanny. This is especially evident in the sinister conclusion to Us, where Red organizes a vast chain of revolutionaries, like so many paper dolls come to life, that divide the entire United States beyond where the viewer can see. One Black family may have won their battle against the Tethered, but the American nation will descend into carnage unless antiblack racism’s legacies are fully acknowledged and remedied. The next chapter investigates the reduced options available to American workers who cannot afford to retire. Taking to the open road and living in a van lure them into a sense of resilient belonging to an American national narrative centered on social mobility achieved by self-discipline and thriftiness. The directors discussed here accommodate neoliberal paradigms far more than they satirize them, advocating for stoic endurance rather than coming together to agitate for improvements in social entitlements for elders, in Medicare, and in the treatment of veterans.

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Notes 1 2

3 4

5 6

7

8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15

16 17 18

Ryan Poll, “Can One ‘Get Out?’ The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 51:2 (Fall 2018): 69–102, 80–1. Stevenson, Bryan, “A Presumption of Guilt: The Legacy of America’s History of Racial Injustice,” in Policing the Black Man, ed. Angela Y. Davis (New York: Pantheon, 2017), 3–30, 27. Poll, 71. Kristin Henning, “Boys to Men: The Role of Policing in the Socialization of Black Boys,” in Policing the Black Man, ed. Angela J. Davis (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017), 57–94, 61–2. Henning, 62. See for example Houseparty (1990, dir. Reginald Hudlin) and its two sequels. The two central characters are teenage men trying to have a good time at a party and chat up women, while also still living at home and being grounded. See the paradigmatic Blaxploitation film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song (1971, dir. Melvin van Peebles), which thematizes police racism against poor Black men, while graphically depicting the central character, played by the director’s son Mario Van Peebles, to be a sexually potent stud, but otherwise an underdog. Kevin Wynter, Critical Race Theory and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 3. Ibid., 3–4. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man [12011] (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 160. Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Income Inequality in the United States,” in World Inequality Report 2018, ed. Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), 83–99, 89. Ibid., 89. Victor Erik Ray, Antonia Randolph, Megan Underhill and David Luke, “Critical Race Theory, Afro-Pessimism, and Racial Progress Narratives,” in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (London: Sage, 2017), 147–58, 2. Jared Sexton, in Ray, 1–2, 3. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Plantocracy or Communism,” in Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019), 51–64, s 52. Poll, 72. Harney and Moten, 52. Ibid., 52–3.

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19 Tom Perkins, “Judge Tosses ‘Gardening While Black’ Case Brought by Three White Women,” Detroit Metro Times, October 18, 2018, https://www.metrotimes.com/ table-and-bar/archives/2018/10/18/detroit-judge-tosses-gardening-while-blackcase-brought-by-three-white-women. 20 “Timeline of Events in Shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson,” AP News, August 8, 2019, https://apnews.com/9aa32033692547699a3b61da8fd1fc62. 21 J. Al Baker, David Goodman and Benjamin Mueller, “Beyond the Chokehold: The Path to Eric Garner’s Death,” The New York Times, June 13, 2015, https://www. nytimes.com/2015/06/14/nyregion/eric-garner-police-chokehold-staten-island. html. 22 Lazzarato, 152. 23 Ibid., 154. 24 Nathalie Baptiste, “Staggering Loss of Black Wealth Due to Subprime Scandal Continues Unabated,” The American Prospect, October 13, 2014, https://prospect. org/justice/staggering-loss-black-wealth-due-subprime-scandal-continuesunabated/. 25 Concepción De Léon, “An Immigrant Tale That Often Goes Untold,” April 7, 2020, The New York Times, C4. 26 Ray, 7. 27 Lütticken, Sven. “Abdicating Sovereignty,” in Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, ed. Hlavajova, Maria, and Maas, Wietske (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 81–95, 85. 28 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2014), 125. 29 Crary, 126. 30 Gene Demby and Arline Geronimus, “Making the Case that Discrimination Is Bad for Your Health,” National Public Radio, January 14, 2018, https://www.npr.org/ sections/codeswitch/2018/01/14/577664626/making-the-case-that-discriminationis-bad-for-your-health. 31 Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, tr. Shaun Whiteside (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). 32 Crary, 2. 33 Ibid., 11. 34 Harvey R. Colten and Bruce M. Altevogt, eds., Sleep Disorders and Sleep Deprivation: An Unmet Public Health Problem (Washington: National Academies Press, 2006), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19958/. 35 Cited in John H. Kingsbury, Orfeu M. Buxton, Karen M. Emmons, “Sleep and Its Relationship to Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease,” Bethesda: National Institutes of Health, 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC3824366/.

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36 Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 11. 37 See Taylor, 155. 38 Yoav Gonen, Ann Choi and Josefa Velasquez, “NYC Blacks and Hispanics Dying of COVID-19 at Twice the Rate of Whites, Asians,” The City, April 8, 2020, https:// thecity.nyc/2020/04/nyc-blacks-and-hispanics-dying-of-covid-19-at-twice-the-rate. html. 39 See Taylor, 211–12. 40 Taylor, 214.

7

Aging Out of the American Workplace: Intentional Communities and the Lure of the Open Road Helga Druxes

Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-winning film Nomadland is based on journalist Jessica Bruder’s three years of research trips for her book-length study Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (2017). Zhao softens Bruder’s biting critique of America underserving its working-class seniors, a demographic who, despite working hard all their lives, cannot afford to retire. Similarly, the road movie Nebraska (dir. Alexander Payne) places an aged father figure at its center whose dementia and relative poverty prod him to claim an imaginary sweepstakes win by traveling from his home in Helena, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska. His younger son accompanies the old man on the quest to restore his dignity and facilitates a moment of triumph for him. Themes I discuss are the depoliticizing effects of reshaping neoliberal austerity cuts to social entitlements into a praise-song of ascetic living and thrift and the shift away from the federal government’s obligation in provisioning those at the bottom of the economy to altruistic individuals among the vulnerable to perform acts of charity. I go on to delineate how Calvinist assumptions undergird American exceptionalism and persist despite the dream of progress having stalled. Homeownership was a lynchpin of the American Dream, luring poor families into debt with the promise of wealth-building through this asset. Other themes we will explore are the vast landscapes of the American West as visual reminders of white settler colonialism and Manifest Destiny, the fantasy of the Big Win, changing notions of traditional gender roles, and finally, ways in which protagonists embody or flout neoliberalism’s hold. The road movie as a genre thematizes a family or couple in crisis seeking redemption through immersion in the unfamiliar. The mythic healing powers

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of car travel across American landscapes are deeply linked to a heroic narrative of struggle and change. Such narratives of reinvention are easily harnessed to neoliberal ideologies of resilience and risk taking. Often, a prize or ceremony beckons to motivate setting out on the journey. For example, the comedy drama Little Miss Sunshine (dir. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006) uses a family trip from Arizona to enter their daughter into a beauty pageant in California as a vehicle for recalibrating tensions between various family members. Lady Bird (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2017) thematizes a poor California high school student’s longing for social mobility and artistic self-expression via travel to a New York City arts college. Sideways (dir. Alexander Payne, 2004) is a middle-aged buddy comedy drama about a weeklong trip through Northern California wine country, where two former college roommates attempt to run away from an impending wedding by going on a bender and sleeping with random strangers. Progressive comedy dramas like Payne’s Nebraska expose fantasies of mastery as toxic narratives for white working-class men, whose vulnerability needs to be rediscovered. By contrast, Zhao’s elegy for a drifting population of retiree workers too poor to retire carries Malthusian overtones. They work as long as their bodies allow them, only to vanish from the screen. Her discussion of loss and death in the last third of life is linked to fictions of American ingenuity and self-sufficiency on rugged terrain. Experiences of intentional community appear to temporarily mitigate the bleak prospects for these ageing nomads. Outsourcing of blue-collar work to Asian and Mexican factories led to the downward mobility of a whole class of manual workers and a concomitant shift away from domestic production to the service sector. Ageing workers are still in demand for low-wage jobs but as rents are constantly rising across America, and affordable new public housing is not being built near urban areas, these jobs do not pay enough for a roof over their heads. To combat endemic housing insecurity, some economically squeezed elders take to living in their cars or vans. One of the irreversible effects of the 2008 financial crisis happened to aging blue-collar and lower middle-class workers: their status suddenly shifted from employed homeowner or renter to losing their jobs and being on the verge of bankruptcy. Alternatively, a family member’s severe health problems or a costly divorce might quickly lead to mounting bills and inability to pay. A small town’s only factory might close down, and as a result, a whole community would be devastated. In 2013, “nearly 7.7 million Americans 65 and older were still employed […], up 60 percent from a decade earlier […] only 17 percent anticipate that they won’t work at all in their later years.”1 These troubling economic trends,

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caused by older workers not having enough savings to afford retirement, were dramatically exacerbated by layoffs among older workers once the Covid-19 pandemic hit. During the year 2020, record numbers of workers ages sixty-five and older lost their jobs (7.5 percent), and a total of 5.7 million workers ages fifty-five or older lost their jobs in the first two months of the pandemic, March and April 2020, which is equal to 15 percent “in an age demographic that has also experienced the vast majority of Covid-19 deaths.”2 The journalist Jessica Bruder seeks out temporary intentional communities of downwardly mobile Americans as they migrate across the southwest and northwest in search of seasonal work. Bruder states: “Workampers are plugand-play labor, the epitome for convenience for employers in search of seasonal staffing. They appear where and when they are needed. They bring their own homes, transforming trailer parks into ephemeral company towns that empty out once the jobs are gone. They aren’t around long enough to unionize.”3 While Bruder digs deep into the economics of life on the road for this disposable flexible labor force and highlights the structural causes for their distress, the opposite is true for Zhao’s filmic adaptation. It emphasizes a neoliberal trajectory where poverty and personal crisis lead to ingenuity and overcoming. Neoliberal subjectivity is “built on denial of vulnerability, which is deemed shameful, and on a disidentification with dependence, need, and other kinds of vulnerability.”4 The poorest people are disproportionally mandated to exhibit self-sufficiency in the service of a “fantasy of mastery […] when climate change, the War on Terror, and economic crises […] increasingly affect livelihoods around the world.”5 Zhao’s film reuses several of the key subjects in Bruder’s study: nonactors who, for the script, play a more idealized and, for some, more emotionally charged version of their real-life selves. Generally, we can say that Zhao romanticizes their nomadic lifestyle as a prod to ingenuity. She depoliticizes the older workers’ economic plight by resurrecting American myths about rugged individualism, Manifest Destiny (shown in Linda May’s roaming to the shores of the Pacific, and Swankie’s hankering for the wilds of Alaska), and New Age spirituality (exemplified by Bob Wells, who hosts annual winter “Rubber Tramp Rendezvous” where he teaches campers survival skills and creates intentional community). Zhao’s canny choice to star Fern (Frances McDormand), a famous character actor and producer, who previously won three Oscars as well as many other prestigious awards for her acting (and who, as co-producer, would go on to win another Oscar for this film) ensured Hollywood’s interest in this material about indigent elders, which might otherwise have not received positive interest

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from the mainstream film industry. With a budget of 5 million, the film went on to gross $39.5 million worldwide. At the 2021 Academy Awards, the film won Best Picture, best Director, and Best Actress for McDormand, from a total of six nominations; Zhao became the first Asian woman and only the second woman ever to win Best Director, while McDormand became the first woman and fourth person ever to win Academy Awards for both acting and producing, as well as becoming the first person ever to win Academy Awards as both producer and performer for the same film.6

In her acceptance speech for Best Picture at the Oscars, Zhao uses a term which carries neoliberal overtones: resilience. “We want to show our deepest gratitude to Linda May, Swankie, Bob Wells, and nomadic community […]. Thank you for teaching us the power of resilience and hope.”7 The word “resilience” responsibilizes an individual for their own success after failure; it originated with business school primers to teach better organization and selfmanagement. The implicit moral code that undergirds resilience calls for what one cultural critic describes as the formation of oneself as an ethical subject, and becoming an ethical subject takes place through modes of subjectivation that are supported by practices of the self. With an eye to Foucault’s categories, we could say that the resilient subject comes into being when an individual, directly or indirectly, feels or is made to feel that the moral code of resilience applies to her, and acts accordingly.8

How then might an individual train herself to become resilient? In America, many turn to self-help books, TED talks or YouTube videos that teach the disciplinary regimes of resilience. We learn from Bruder’s interviews with the blue-collar semi-retiree Linda May that she carries two books in her van. One is Scott Belsky’s primer, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles between Vision and Reality (2012). Belsky is a former Goldman Sachs employee, who attended Harvard Business School to obtain an MBA. His introduction asserts: Regardless of your industry, your professional life is becoming more nomadic, digital, and flexible. But as a wise sage once said—and what every small business owner knows all too well—“total freedom means total responsibility.” As where and how you work become more flexible, the onus of organization shifts increasingly onto the individual, […] your productivity is really about how well you are able to make an impact in what matters most to you.9

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My intention here is not to disparage Linda May as a person, but rather point out the ironies of a vulnerable elder living precariously hand to mouth in a van, looking for validation from a business school guru. This deliberate ideological swerve to the world of business as a supreme template for reshaping one’s life after or during a crisis—rather than, for instance, seeking inspiration in religion, philosophy or poetry—is a particularly American fallacy. It is a toxic brew of contemporary neoliberal mantras about entrepreneurship, and the mythical legacy of “rugged individualism.” This term, originally coined by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, describes white settler colonialism on the Western Frontier in the United States. What it omits is the settlers’ and the US government’s brutal expropriation of First Nation tribes from their lands and their decimation by European diseases such as measles, smallpox, and alcoholism, to which they had no immunity. In Turner’s revisionist history, these lands were empty and virtually begging to be cultivated, harnessed to agricultural expansionism and eventual industrial modernization. Interestingly, Zhao is not an outlier by claiming that the frontier experience lives on today. The contemporary Boston University economists Bazzi, Fiszbein, and Gebresilasse study how the long-run experience of what they call “total frontier experience (TFE)” in specific Western counties left a lasting political imprint: for instance, opposition to government intervention in the form of higher property taxes or other state mechanisms for redistribution. The authors trace an upward trend in voter support for the Republican Party throughout the 2000s with a particular uptick for the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency in these American heartland counties, along with a polarization over divisive issues such as “the Affordable Care Act, increases in the minimum wage, the ban on assault rifles, and the regulation of CO2 emissions.”10 However, revelatory of the authors’ own right-skewing politics is their entirely uncritical reliance on Turner’s characterization of the American West as “free lands,” a rugged environment that “produces antipathy to control.”11 They argue with false naiveté that these lands simply attracted “people with distinctive characteristics, both in terms of demographics and the prevalence of individualism.” Failing to understand the frontier myth as an ideology that subtends white racist exceptionalism, the authors ignore the community-based cultures of First Nation people who lived on these lands before the European settlers arrived to displace them. Similarly, the authors study only white fathers’ naming preferences for individualistic name choices, for example from Census reports

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1870–1880, extrapolating from this (racially and gender limited) data set that white frontiersmen demonstrated greater individualism. The nonactor characters are assigned first names based on their actual names: for example, Charlene Swankie becomes “Swankie.” Analogously, the female lead, actor Frances McDormand, becomes “Fern,” her romantic interest David Strathairn “Dave,” his real-life son Tay Strathairn plays fictional Dave’s fictional son “Tay.” This deceptive practice of blurring the very real income and status differentials between the nomadic poor and highly paid actors also gestures back to the Frontier myth that the West was a “level playing field,” where opportunity would depend on personal effort rather than being born into a given class. Zhao’s intentional blurring of the naming in Nomadland conveniently obscures the political reasons for real-life home loss. As the financial crisis of 2008 revealed, the American dream of homeownership for low-income people quickly turned toxic: many lost their jobs, their homes went underwater, and often their last resort was to declare bankruptcy. The neoliberal economic backdrop for this disastrous outcome was subprime mortgage bundling, financially risky maneuvers between banks “too big to fail” and the insurance industry, and neoliberal de-regulation of the business sector we discussed in our introductory chapter. Slightly more affluent whites might end up financing a van; poorer whites either bought used vans with high mileage or converted their cars into living spaces. By omitting Latinoa/s, African Americans, and Native Americans from visible inclusion in the working poor, the film plays to white disgruntlement, see-sawing between that emotion and a sense of entitlement that has, as its obverse, an understanding of the suffering of the white working class as being especially poignant or unique. White viewers may fantasize themselves as contemporary reincarnations of historical nineteenth-century white pioneers traveling westward in search of independence. As a critic of both Bruder’s and Zhao’s blindness to racial factors in poverty points out: “As of 2019 in Los Angeles alone, where most unhoused people are Black or Latino, more than 16,000 people were living out of their automobiles.”12 Of course, cities may have a racially more diverse demographic than some rural areas but it is still problematic that virtually no people of color appear to live and work in any of the regions depicted by Zhao. Far right populists and conspiracy theorists already skillfully instrumentalize these “patriotic” upwellings to advance their own autocratic political agendas. As the sole screen writer Zhao reshapes Bruder’s research to her own ends: to seduce white viewers into believing the myth of the Open Road and mutual aid

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might compensate for the acute misery and bare subsistence living of a displaced band of senior citizens and others relegated to a transient underclass. In the last third of the film, viewers encounter “Tay” as the owner of an idyllic yellow clapboard home on a farm with various kinds of appealing livestock. The home is large enough to offer ample space for Tay’s young family, his father David, who at this point in the filmic narrative has tired of the van life, and the fiercely independent but bedraggled Fern, whom they invite for a visit and to whom they extend a (briefly) tempting offer to stay.

Resilience in Nature and the Plight of Aging White Bodies as White Phenomenon Long takes meditatively pan the vast desert landscapes of the Southwest, the Badlands, the mountain ranges of the Rockies, and the California seashore, implying that so much natural beauty might offset the dire poverty, scandalous work exploitation, and loneliness these nomads experience. The neoliberal mantra “be resilient” is internalized by all the elders portrayed here. Sentimentality and a certain measure of Christian rhetoric in equal parts underpin the film’s neoliberal ideology of self-sufficiency and self-exploitation. Aging workers with minimal to no health insurance routinely lift heavily pallets injuring their back or suffer repetitive strain injuries due to scanning merchandise in twelve-hour shifts. Despite its visible savage sorting into haves and have-nots, and its paean to human grit, Nomadland focuses exclusively on white plight. Showing exclusively white workers—toiling at campgrounds near National Parks across the Southwest, slinging hash at Wall’s diner in South Dakota, or scanning merchandise at a giant Amazon fulfillment center in Fernley, Nevada—is a conscious choice on the part of the director—One that belies the presence of Latinx and First Nations people on these lands and in the workforce. People of Color (POC) are not even part of the customer base or crowd scenes or to be discerned only so deep in the background to pass almost unnoticed. Bruder herself comments on the absence of POC in the recreational vehicle (RV) community that the cost of buying an RV is simply prohibitive and that “plenty of folks don’t own their RVs free and clear.”13 Moreover, all van dwellers must avoid the police when they park overnight in towns. Due to racial profiling and the activities of vigilante white neighborhood watches that report squatters or even non-white pedestrians to the police, camouflage becomes

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much more difficult for non-whites to achieve.14 Since 2010, more US cities have passed ordinances against “sitting on the sidewalk” and loitering, even as rents skyrocket, wages stagnate, and the homeless community grows. Out West, by contrast, there are states that charge no income tax15 and allow van dwellers to stay rent-free for two weeks on public lands. However, higher sales taxes on groceries and small luxuries like alcohol and cigarettes still jack up everyday expenses for low-income transients like these van dwellers. The narrative of Zhao’s film cannily perverts state-sponsored structural austerity cuts to welfare and pensions into a personal philosophy of austere living—stalwart self-reliance, leavened by occasional experiences of bonding and temporary community-making. Shedding material possessions is necessary for van dwellers because of the limited space they have. Handyman skills like tire repair, basic plumbing, paint jobs, or repurposing mementoes like one’s deceased spouse’s tackle box into a storage device are endorsed as both practical and necessary for survival on the open road. The film emphasizes that van dweller’s hands are never idle, for instance, by honing in on Fern crocheting potholders or showing her carefully heating up chicken noodle soup from a can to help male camper Dave get over a fever. This is a legacy of Puritanism. Fern’s houseless situation at the outset denotes the fragility classically attributed to white femininity. However, as a postfeminist subject, she is supposed to embody “a new ideal geared toward overcoming this traditional logic of femininity by turning her ‘gendered damage’ into human capital.”16 Zhao’s general impression of this itinerant community is of strong characters in the pioneer mold, portrayed mainly as rugged individualists who prefer autonomy over reintegration in a settled community. These travelers reach out to their peers in kindness and solidarity more than the average home dweller. Fern, for example, signals her concern for others through her active listening. She befriends a young drifter, Derek, who is on the road with a small group of young dreadlocked rock hounds who make jewelry. Fern, who at this point works a temporary job setting up stalls, tries to help these young campers by talking up their product to the manager of the Quartzsite mineral outdoor market. Several months later, she comes across Derek again, camping out by himself and miserable. She ascertains that his family is waiting for him back in Wyoming and encourages him to return. Fern also gifts him a love poem, a Shakespeare sonnet, that she knows by heart to woo a girl back home. There is an educator side to Fern. We witness her eliciting a Hamlet quote from a former after-school tutee she meets in a hardware store near Empire (9:38–9:57). Assigning Fern

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these traditional feminine qualities (care labor, teaching) means to render her more palatable for a centrist to right-skewing public across America and Europe. Praising her pioneer spirit dovetails neatly with American neoliberal ideology and its adaptations back in Europe. Fern’s mentor on van life is Linda May with whom she will be shown working a stint during the pre-Christmas rush at Amazon. Fern gets a prepaid place to park her van in the desert, miles away from the warehouse, because as she proudly informs the RV manager, she signed up for the “Amazon Camper Force.” As a rite of initiation, naming your van seems significant. It is a tell how you see yourself (which in itself is part of neoliberal ideology; you never age out of having to reinvent yourself). Fern proudly tells Linda May that she christened her vehicle “Vanguard”; Linda replies: “Aww, that’s very strong.” Fern answers: “Yeah. She is” (7:45). This little snippet of dialogue establishes the van as a metonymy for Fern herself. Ironically though, the US company “Vanguard” is also known to viewers as the second largest investment company in the world with over 7 billion in assets. A large share of their investments is in employer pension plans—exactly the kind of safety net Fern and other van dwellers lost or never had access to. I suggest that viewers are tricked by such details into a romanticized vision that Fern embodies resilience and that she will move forward in her life, no matter how poor she is. This peculiar American fallacy consists in confusing an individual’s will and intent with structural obstacles that were created by companies precisely to entrap low-wage older workers in a disposable labor pool. The filmic “reality” is that once the Amazon job ends, Fern fails to find other temporary work in the area (15:05). Fern’s subsequent interview at an unemployment office quickly turns sour. The employee claims: “It’s a tough time right now. You may want to consider registering for early retirement.” Upon Fern’s comeback: “I don’t think I can get by on the benefits, and um [smiles, hesitates] … I need work. [hesitates] I like work,” the government employee dismisses her with: “I’m not sure what exactly you’d be eligible for” (16:01). The poignancy of aging out of work without being able to stop working is brought home by Linda May’s passionate monologue about insufficient social security: “I went online and looked at my Social Security benefit, and it said $550 [pause]. Fern, I had worked my whole [emphasis in original] life. I’d worked since I was twelve years old. I raised two daughters. I could not believe it” (11:39). In fact, every year, aging US workers must work longer and longer to earn the maximum benefit of $2,000 a month. For those born in 1959 and later, it will take until age sixty-seven or older to achieve. By no later than 2037 (other sources forecast

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2034), Social Security will run out, as the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration projects: As a result of changes to Social Security enacted in 1983, benefits are now expected to be payable in full on a timely basis until 2037, when the trust fund reserves are projected to become exhausted. At the point where the reserves are used up, continuing taxes are expected to be enough to pay 76 percent of scheduled benefits. Thus, the Congress will need to make changes to the scheduled benefits and revenue sources for the program in the future. The Social Security Board of Trustees project that changes equivalent to an immediate reduction in benefits of about 13 percent, or an immediate increase in the combined payroll tax rate from 12.4 percent to 14.4 percent, or some combination of these changes, would be sufficient to allow full payment of the scheduled benefits for the next 75 years.17

Several of the key characters in Nomadland are below that age threshold, for instance, Linda May (62) and Fern (61). Others, like the real-life Bob Wells (66), Bruder reveals in her book, went through a financially onerous divorce and could not pay rent, coming to van living that way. The film’s male lead, Dave, is in his early seventies but still works in the gig economy for familial reasons that are a bit murky. Apparently, he left his family long ago and became estranged from them. However, his now adult son Tay seems to know Daves’s work patterns and has no trouble locating him to “rescue” him by offering him shelter. Nor does Tay seem to hold a big grudge against his absent father. This is usually not how family dynamics play out in real life. Charlene Swankie, for instance, is alienated from the two sons she raised as a single mother and they are not on speaking terms, a fact that is not mentioned in the film.18 A work “opportunity” that is not shown in the film is the grotesque exploitation of elders as underpaid attendants at kiddie theme parks. Bruder describes such a scene at Adventureland in Altoona, Iowa: [T]he staff seemed evenly split between local high school students and the elderly. […] a sixty-one-year-old clerk spoke excitedly about a recent wage increase. […] They were now getting $8.50 an hour. She and her coworkers speculated that it came from peer pressure, since Walmart had just started paying $9 an hour. […] Another clerk, seventy-seven, said she used to be an Adventureland recruiter. She was proud of her advanced years and age-related disabilities didn’t seem to hold back her fellow employees, adding that she currently had a close coworker who was eighty. “I had someone who was eighty-six in my department at one time,” she said. “We had a man in a wheelchair, who was capable of counting

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using the clicker. […] We had a one-armed man who was a supervisor of all the rides.” Over at the Tornado rollercoaster, the ride operator wore wire-rimmed bifocals and a broad-brimmed straw hat. He told me he was eighty-one.19

That working-class elders, or those who lost their money in the mortgage crisis, are forced to work forever to afford basics, relies on Calvinist assumptions. These feed into American exceptionalism and into a particularly American brand of neoliberal ideology.20 God’s favor is visible in his Chosen People whose providential role is to redeem the world. Even the conservative Damon Linker comments that “in more recent years, the cadences of the Calvinist consensus could be heard in Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical evocations of America as a ‘city on a hill’ and George W. Bush’s frequent assurances that history moves in a ‘visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of liberty’.”21 God had determined who the elect were, so there was nothing one could do to change his predestined plan. But there were some outward signs of one’s eventual fate. This anxiety over wanting signs motivates capitalist striving, as Max Weber shows in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Some of the poor who eke out a living in the American West today attempt to raise their status by considering themselves as spiritual descendants of the pioneers who traveled West guided by Manifest Destiny. Or as Bob Wells puts it in Bruder’s study: “In many ways we modern vandwellers are just like the Mountain Men of old: We need to be alone and on the move, but we equally need to occasionally gather together and make connections with like-minded people who understand us.”22 Yet, in spite of the indebtedness of such thinking to Calvinism, Bob’s minimalism and free communitarianism conform to significant elements of anti-capitalism. In the film, his character Bob chastises the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous crowd: “We gladly throw the yoke of the tyranny of the dollar on and live by it our whole lives” (19:25). Bob makes a moral virtue out of poverty. Right-skewing bluecollar pride sometimes spurns government benefits as “handouts,” rather than entitlements workers deserve for having worked for so long and so hard, risking their health in unsafe conditions or polluted environments. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild identifies what she calls “the deep story” for “white, Christian, older right-leaning Louisianians” she began to interview in 2011.23 Hochschild ventriloquizes their disgruntlement: [T]he national ideal and promise at the brow of the hill was the American Dream—which is to say progress. On the other hand, it had become hard to progress. […] The Great Recession of 2008 in which people lost homes, savings

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and jobs had come and gone, but it had shaken people up. Meanwhile, for the bottom 90 percent of Americans, the Dream Machine […] had stopped due to automation, offshoring, and the growing power of multinationals vis-à-vis their workforces. At the same time, for that 90 percent, competition between white men and everyone else had increased—for jobs, for recognition, and for government funds.24

Hochschild usefully groups the divergent responses of left and right to class conflict into a left theater of protest that focuses on exorbitant pay for the top 1 percent in the private sector versus the other 99 percent of Americans. This disparity could be addressed by tax policies that would increase taxes on business, CEOs, and shareholders. Hochschild notes: The [right] heater of conflict—at the heart of the deep story—is the local welfare office and the mailbox where the undeserved disability checks and SNAP stamps arrive. Government checks for the listless and idle—this seems most unfair. If unfairness in Occupy [Occupy Wall Street, a protest group on the left] is expressed in the moral vocabulary of a “fair share” of resources and properly proportioned society, unfairness in the right’s deep story is found in the language of “makers” and “takers.”25

Where along this divide do we find the film’s featured protagonists? The evidence points to the right, and this deep story runs counter to the left-leaning one Bruder’s book tells. The nomads’ ceaseless repairs and improvements to their homes identify them as “makers” in right discourse. They work uncomplainingly whenever and wherever they are wanted to supplement their insufficient incomes, traveling great distances in search of seasonal work. None are “idle”; if anything, their poverty forces them to become docile bodies in the Foucauldian sense. Counterfactually, Fern tells her well-off sister Dolly that the pay at Amazon is good, for which the director received negative press. It seems like quid pro quo for Amazon allowing Zhao to film several short scenes in their Fernley, Nev. Fulfilment Center.26 The scholar of neoliberalism Michelle Fawcett asserts: “[T]he producers ‘made it clear’ to the trillion-dollar corporation that Zhao’s ​‘never going in with her films with an agenda’.” Fawcett continues: “Zhao omits the realistic portrayal of Amazon in Bruder’s book, of injuries incurred, anti-union lectures from management, and ‘Orwellian slogans, including ‘Problems Are Treasures,’ plastered on walls. Gone is the Linda May of the book, who excoriates Amazon as ‘probably the biggest slave owner in the world’ and declares, ‘I hate this fucking job.’”27 Currently, some affluent Americans grossly

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overestimate the average salary of a working-Froad survival tips from spiriclass employee, as a professor’s survey taken among MBA students at the elite Wharton School of Business shows: 25 percent estimated that these folks make six-figure salaries.28 The average annual salary of a white employee is $70,000, while African Americans earn between $47,000 and 50,000.29 As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor notes in her recent “Friends of Princeton” webinar, “class is absolutely at the center of everything that is wrong in the United States; but there are other factors that intersect with it […] In light of wealth inequality overall, we should not be overly fixated on the Black/White income gap.” They also mention how “collective bargaining during the 1940s and 50s assured that the needs of these workers were met,” while the federal government since then “relies on private sector entities to carry out public policies (health insurance is a good example).” The Bill of Rights only enshrines the right to work, she states, unlike in welfare democracies like Germany, the Scandinavian countries, or Canada, where there are rights to universal health care, and a free college education (or its equivalent at the BA level). Taylor demands these rights for all American citizens, including “the right to a decent retirement because then the value of a house would not determine so much and lead to so much racial discrimination.”30 Rather than organize a protest in front of a federal building, or join the international political organization Gray Panthers, whose goal it is to “explore the human rights of older persons and combatting ageism and discrimination through intergenerational advocacy,”31 the film version’s Linda May and its lead Fern commiserate in private. As the film insinuates, they empower themselves by learning road survival tips from spiritual guru Bob Wells, once more in Linda’s words: “I could live in an RV, travel, and not have to work for the rest of my life” (14:19). Moments of gallows humor, such as when the two friends sing out: “We be the bitches of the Badlands” (48:13) as they wipe down foul bathrooms at the campground, where they now work, or their comedic send-up of upper-class pampering at their improvised “Badlands Spa” does little to disguise the pinch of poverty. Zhao’s photography of their lives in deserts and on bare ground is suffused with melancholy; she picked elegiac piano and orchestral music by the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi that he created as he was walking in the Italian Alps. Zhao notes: “I felt like he and Fern were walking in parallel; their shared love of nature connects them […] I wanted the music to feel like the inner dialogue that Fern has with herself. In this silent moment as she’s going through all these different landscapes, it’s as if she’s talking to us, making us

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understand how she has changed.”32 Zhao feminizes and emotionalizes white plight, thereby making it more palatable to mainstream viewers skewing traditional. They might well reject an affective investment in an older male grieving loss and wandering about aimlessly as too disruptive to their own value systems. The vast mountain ranges, deserts, and open spaces of the American West are showcased by meditative panning shots. The land becomes a stand-alone character in the film, similar in style to Cather’s novel My Ántonia (1918), a paean to a heroic Bohemian immigrant on the Nebraska Prairie.33 Fern endures, often craving solitude; she grieves death; she processes loss; and she experiences healing most profoundly either in bucolic or majestic natural settings. Two of these stand out: floating naked in a forest pool (46:20), and in the final third of the film, walking the rugged Pacific Coastline of northern California right above the surf ’s edge (1:21:59). This scene is marked as climactic with swelling orchestral music. Here we see once more that Zhao deliberately deploys the history of Manifest Destiny: the Pacific was the end point of westward movement to create one nation from Atlantic to Pacific. Fern visits her friend Dave nearby, who gave up life on the open road to be a grandfather, now shown living with his son’s family on an almost unbearably welcoming gorgeous farm. The family and Fern celebrate Thanksgiving together, a further feel-good reference to American tradition. Dave asks Fern, who was never a mother, to hold the baby. Zhao shows Fern’s face changing from apprehension to amused acceptance. Tempting as inclusion this peaceful family might be, Fern would have to stop roaming around in her van. In the end, as in many previous scenes, Fern steals away at daybreak to safeguard her independence. We might read this refusal as a feminist message, but it is one tinged with regret and melancholy, lest outright feminism might register as too strident with some viewers. The American Dream of the traditional home with the white picket fence is not for Fern, especially after the 2008 crash it seems like an unattainable mirage for all but white-collar workers. KeeangaYamahtta Taylor draws attention to “the commitment to private property and the centrality of homeownership to the American economy.” She asserts: “Today, homeownership, even for low-income and poor people, is reflexively advised as a way to emerge from poverty, develop assets, and build wealth more generally. […] And the greatest assumption of all is that homeownership is the superior way to live in the United States.”34 Even though the film counters this myth by advocating for an ascetic itinerant lifestyle, an undercurrent of nostalgic regret for the American Dream surfaces toward the end of the film

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that pits Tay’s multigenerational family home against the low-income tract home that Fern was forced to abandon. In Empire, now a desolate ghost town, Fern walks down the middle of her former street, visiting the defunct factory on her way to her old house. A banner hung on the fence around the storage units reads “Freedom is Not Free,” a popular slogan associated with Memorial Day, meant to honor military service. It is also inscribed on the Washington, DC, Memorial to Korean War veterans. This is the war of the 1950s generation, and we will return to its failed resonance in American popular memory compared to the Great War when we discuss the male lead’s unrewarded sacrifice for his country in Nebraska. In this context, the phrase alludes to the sacrifice of blue-collar workers risking their health in the gypsum mine. Fern’s husband Bo died of cancer (which may result from prolonged inhalation of gypsum). Again, the camera, substituting for Fern’s gaze, lingers briefly on two dusty relics of vanished workaday reality: a hard hat with the logo USG visible and a mug with the inscription “Happy Birthday from USG” (1:39:47). Possibly, this last detail suggests a vanished warm relationship between management and blue-collar workers, a perfunctory ethic of concern for workers’ well-being expressed by trinkets. The overwhelming visual impression is that a whitish dust shrouds every surface in the town, inside buildings and outside as well. Viewers may read this as a re-creation of the sinister romance of former oil and gold boomtowns that lie abandoned all over the American South and West, more than 3,800 of them in the entire Unites States, according to a recent survey.35 Zhao honors the factory worker’s lives by elegizing emptiness after the jobs are gone. Her interpretation of death depoliticizes the fact that labor competes in neoliberal global markets. China is where today’s gypsum plants have migrated to meet increased building demand.36 Zhao closes with Fern contemplating the back view behind her company tract house. As Fern reminisces to Tay’s empathetic young wife in a scene on the porch of their idyllic farmhouse: “We were right at the edge of town. Our backyard, it looks out at this huge open space. It was just desert, desert, desert all the way to the mountains. There was nothin’ in our way. It was nothing special. Yes, it was special” (1:28:10). Seeing for themselves what Fern had described in words allows for a certain level of viewer gratification; it is a way of melding the camera gaze with the viewer’s gaze, as Fern walks off to the left out of the frame. The closing shot is a bird’s eye panorama of Fern’s white van driving diagonally on a long, open highway (1:42:44). Focusing on speed and propulsion by switching from Fern

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walking away from the viewer to the (invisible) Fern in the driver’s seat on her way we know not where on the open road, the van becomes enshrined as the last vestige of the American Dream of mobility and discovery.

Loss and Bereavement as Fulcrum for White Misery The film’s emotional trajectory is punctuated by various characters dying offscreen: first, Bo, Fern’s husband, dies of cancer (and their company town closes down) to motivate her initiation to the van life; next, Swankie, a gruff, but charismatic van dweller, confesses to Fern that she suffers from brain cancer and has only a few months left to live (36:40); and finally, Bob opens up to Fern about his son’s suicide several years earlier (1:36:14). Lesser moments of tension revolve around money to pay costly bills. Dave develops a high fever and is diagnosed with diverticulitis in a hospital. Ultimately, his fragility forces him to rethink his lifestyle and accept his son’s invitation to live with him. Fern’s used van breaks down beyond anything she can fix herself (1:10:13), needing a costly repair of roughly half its resale value. These crises express the director’s overarching messaging about life’s precariousness. The high cost of health care is not problematized politically, nor is American overreliance on private transportation instead of good infrastructure, nor is the rising price of used cars which puts owning a car out of reach for many low-wage workers. The film’s tone shifts between the dominant mood of melancholy and an embrace of almost festive communitarianism: stalwart, laconic endurance of the travails of aging, health setbacks, and loneliness, versus rituals of intentional community-making on the open road. One such ritual is Swankie’s memorial service (1:34:27). Several months after her (off-screen fictive) passing, Swankie’s friends gather again in Quartzsite, Arizona, for their winter meeting with Bob, who through his blog and in person acts as a benign guru for his changing flock of van dwellers. Fern is part of a large circle sitting around a campfire. Each member of the circle throws in a rock to commemorate Swankie “because she loved rocks.” As Bob eloquently reveals in a big monologue to Fern a few minutes later: I rarely ever talk about my son. Today would be his thirty-third birthday and five years ago, he took his [sobs] life. [shakes head] and I can still barely say that in a sentence. And the question was: how can I be alive when he’s not? […] Put here,

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there’s a lot of people our age and a lot of grief and loss. And a lot of ‘em don’t get over it either. And that’s okay … that’s okay. One of the things I love most about this life is that there’s no final good-bye […] I always just say, “I’ll see you down the road” [pause]. And I do. And whether it’s a month, or a year, or sometimes years, I see them again. And I can look down the road and be certain in my heart that I’ll see my son again. You’ll see Bo again. And you can remember your lives together then.” (1:36:14–1:38:39)

As Bob speaks, the camera switches over from a zoom shot of his face to Fern’s own thoughtful mien. She takes Bob’s consoling words in, and then we see her gaze out at the distant desert view; a beautiful, rare smile dawns on her face. A pensive Einaudi piano score sounds as the dolly shot recedes, now showing Fern silhouetted in the distance against the waning sunset. Here the camera work signals Fern’s need for privacy. Zhao deploys Malthusian tropes of superfluous people dying off and vanishing from the land, which she alludes to now and then with visual references to dinosaurs as an extinct species that once roamed these very spaces. With her deliberate shying away from complex causes of despair and death to endorsing a heartfelt homily about sharing and hope, Zhao glosses over the economic factors that create solidarity within this immiserated group. People help each other out on the road by bartering their meager material possessions and survival tips because that is all they have. Choosing your own moment to die is seen as self-empowerment; you refuse to become a burden. This belief is the logical outcome of neoliberal brainwashing and further fits in with rugged individualism. Or we might read it as a sad effect of social Darwinist ideology; if you are too sick to work, you commit suicide. In a previous scene about one-third into the film, Swankie reveals her end-of-life plans to Fern. Fern listens empathetically. I’m going to take my trip. Go back to Alaska again because of some good memories […]. I have this book called Final Exit by Dr. Kevorkian. Some people call him Dr. Death. And it’s, like, various ways that you can end your life if you need to. And, um, it’s kind of like a recipe [chuckles] I have it, if I have to fall back on it for some ideas. (38:17)

Swankie’s pragmatism runs counter to Christian belief, which forbids suicide as an act of arrogance against divine will. Functioning as a rebuttal to Swankie’s statement, Bob’s monologue is significantly longer than hers and expresses

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more than the character’s personal philosophy; its authoritative placement is characteristic of the traditionalism of Hollywood endings. Moreover, the constant deferral of a horizon of expectation is part of neoliberalism. The successful van dweller cyclically pares down their belongings and rigs up folding storage units or other inventions to make van life more efficient. Jettisoning material mementoes, for instance a whole box of thrifted matched dishes Fern was given by her father for graduating high school, unfetters the individual to be nimble (53:55). The father’s labor to obtain a set of matched dishes at yard sales over a long period of time is destroyed in an instant when Fern’s suitor Dave picks up her box wrong and breaks them all. This angers Fern. She rescues one broken plate and glues it back together at night inside her van. Economic exigency requires constant labor, constant self-optimization, and reskilling, contrary to the myth of the open road as pure adventure and discovery. Viewers see these mantras operating in Fern’s, Linda and Dave’s wide variety of low-wage jobs they seek to pay for food and gas. At one point, Fern joins a seasonal work crew who harvest sugar beets in Nebraska, a physically grueling job (1:08:39). The camera lingers on an exhausted Fern leaning back against a gigantic mound of beets (1:09:09), but the overall harvesting sequence implies that Fern has worked hard to earn her moment of rest. She also seems to be the only women working there. The arresting image of the dark mountain of beets that dwarfs her visually imagines her labor as on a Sisyphean scale. This scene more strikingly mirrors a very early scene in the film where Fern naps in the middle of a Big Box store. She climbs into the seat of an exercise machine and rests. Fern is surrounded by all kinds of hardware for building or camping projects, and her exhausted presence among these items that emphasize activity and physical exertion would seem incongruous (8:23), except that her long shifts at the Amazon Warehouse preface it. The film underscores that retirement-age Americans must still labor. Any rest they get is brief and usually interrupted. This portrait counters the capitalist Malthusian view that older people are mere burdens on the young and prime working-age members of society, using up resources. Fern herself has never had children of her own but she tutored a welloff white mother’s children, as we see in that same scene. The dialogue between tutor and student allows Zhao to insert a quote from Macbeth (coincidentally McDormand’s subsequent starring role in a remake of the play in 2021): Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow […] And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! (10:03)

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One effect of these lines is, I suppose, to suggest that it was ever so: “Death is the Great Leveller. All our striving “won’t […] spare me over for another year,” as the Southern folk O Death song goes”.37 Shakespeare’s poetry lends gravitas to Fern’s existential plight, characterizing her as an educated woman who has fallen on hard times. This move counters the classism of affluent Americans who dismiss the working class as intellectually inferior, school dropouts or “welfare queens.” This misleading moniker dates back to Ronald Reagan (as well as Republican Presidents like George W. Bush and as recently as Donald Trump) fomenting the myth that welfare cheats are Black mothers who live high off the hog on benefits paid for by “your” taxes. Perhaps this gendering of underclass stereotypes explains why Zhao puts such feisty women center stage in her film, all of whom live minimally supported by the state, if at all. Certainly, characters like Swankie, Linda May, or Fern cannot or will not fall back on their families. Even though van life is lauded as superior to settled life, the film manages at two points to briefly rekindle a nostalgia for stable, well-appointed homes. After viewers become used to the trials and satisfactions of van life, at about midpoint in the narrative, Fern visits her estranged sister Dolly, who lives with her husband George, a realtor, in a suburban wealthy enclave (1:11:48). The pristine white stucco facade hides a materialistic hard-heartedness within. Dolly manipulates Fern into a reunion by, so it is implied, withholding the cash loan to fix the van until Fern comes to collect it in person. Almost every remark Dolly makes to Fern is marred by passive-aggressive undertones. The couple invites a male work colleague over for a BBQ: he is a realtor perhaps one generation younger. Food and liquor are abundant; Fern eagerly claims two burgers with double cheese. The men’s conversation drifts to real estate investments, full of the capitalist talk of the rentier class: “Things are looking up right now; and 2012 was a winner. You know, I mean, I wish I would have had the money in 2008 to buy everything so I could sell it now. Seems like real estate always ends up on the upside” (1:13:55). This is the single moment of straight political confrontation in the entire film. Fern combatively rebuts George: “It’s strange that you encourage people to invest their whole life savings, go into debt, just to buy a house they can’t afford.” George in turn chastises Ferns’ view as “rather limited” and hectors her: “I mean, we’re not all in a position to just chuck everything and hit the road.” To challenge him, Fern sarcastically repeats his words as questions with empathic pauses. Just then Dolly steps in as peace maker with somewhat contrived admiration: “I think that what the nomads are doing is not that different than what the Pioneers did. I think Fern’s part of an American tradition. I think it’s great!” (1:13:20). In a

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tête à tête between the sisters, Dolly proffers a thick envelope of cash and then emotionally blackmails Fern into staying, reminiscing that in their youth, age mates perceived her sister as “eccentric” and “weird,” but Dolly now realizes: “[I]t was just because you were braver and more honest than everybody else […] You left a big hole by leaving” (1:15:28). In other words, Dolly needs Fern in her life to ground herself. To the side, Fern remarks quietly: “Now it’s on me.” Her insight into the family dynamics of instrumentalized shame and guilt prefaces Fern’s stealthy but relieved departure from Dolly and George’s home at sunrise the next morning (1:15:47).

Androgynous Women on the Road By presenting female nomads who either have a lot of missing teeth or are old and/or androgynous, these women are desexualized. Perhaps the only way they can be left alone to be agentive is to look visibly old and act gruff in a culture that tends to oversexualize the young. It is interesting how androgynous Fern presents throughout: in the introductory scene, she pees in a field out in the open like a man would; she wears her hair very short for convenience and no makeup. She is taciturn and decisive. Her demeanor is not submissive, especially the more experienced she becomes in her new life in the van. By contrast, the two female characters who lead settled lives (Dolly and Tay’s wife Emily) present as wheedling or girlishly innocent. Fern, Linda, and Swankie are more authentic by comparison. If both the real and the fictional Swankie do not feel like socializing, they hoist a Jolly Roger pirate flag on their van.38 Nonetheless, Swankie’s empowerment happens only within male parameters; she hews to a proud independence doing what she pleases right until her death. While the film presents personal choice as freeing, in real life, the decision to live in a van is prompted by severe issues with unemployment, family violence, mounting health bills, no savings and no other assets. Bruder also mentions how many van dwellers are desperate to exit the van life and move into a home, a decision the film rejects as soft. If you commit to roughing it, you ought not to “be a quitter”—as of 2021, this is a repoliticized term used against older people in the pandemic, those who retired from their jobs early. As Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson concludes: The pandemic economy—with its health risk of in-person work for the elderly, its economic shocks, and maybe even its rise in asset prices and savings rates—has

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produced a large number of early retirees. […] The Great Resignation is mostly a dynamic “free agency” period for low-income workers switching jobs to make more money, plus a moderate surge of early retirements in a pandemic.39

This option is foreclosed to elders without assets in a neoliberal economy where, as Taylor remarks: “Most people in this country have no savings and are one or two paychecks away from financial ruin”40—they must continue to labor.

Birds, Mountains, Desert, Rocks A pivotal scene for the neoliberal messaging about resilience, softened by nature symbolism, is embodied in a wordless video clip: swallows dive in and out of the frame, their mud nests clustered tightly together into the cliff; a discarded, fragile eggshell is gathered up and held, as a kayaker rests their paddle for a moment and just floats. Viewers are primed to understand the function of these images in the plot by Swankie’s enthusiastic narration of a similar experience she once had in Alaska. Fern happily exclaims: “You made it, Swankie. You made it!” Before she dies, Swankie gets to fulfill one of her ambitions, which was to return and relive that experience. The bird symbolism romantically equates the van dwellers with nesting swallows, who fly and soar on the wind currents. Of course, this symbol revisits biblical imagery: “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” (Matthew 6:26, King James Bible). Swankie is gathered in by the Lord even if she never professed to believe. Her pantheism represents another form of spirituality, so the sad cause of her off-screen demise (brain cancer) is veiled by quasi-religious sentiment. Swankie is presented throughout as a good person and a charismatic mentor who shares freely. Viewers connect empathically to her because she appears crusty and selfsufficient but not jaded. Fern succeeds her in the van dweller community as a crotchety female mentor with a heart of gold. (Thanks to the genius of Frances McDormand’s understated acting, this transfer does not register as corny.) Fern heals from her grief over Bo, whom she will never forget, although she states near the end that she spent “too much time remembering Bo” (1:11:00). She will move on to further adventures in hand-to-mouth-living, maintaining her cherished independence. Her willing embrace of risk casts her as a neoliberal individual, even if she rejects the profit motive that is so integral to the corporate version of American neoliberal ideology.

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The Toxic Fantasy of the “Big Win” in Nebraska Filmed on black-and-white stock, Nebraska native Alexander Payne’s eponymous feature slowly unfolds images of the economic crisis that ravages America’s agricultural heartland post-2008 global financial crisis. The plot revolves around a father-son road trip from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, with an eventful pitstop in the dad’s birthplace, the now depressed township of Hawthorne, surrounded by wide-open Nebraska farmland. The overall mood is elegiac until a feel-good reversal affirms the value of family loyalty, showcasing the bedraggled underdog Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) proudly parading his “winnings” on Main Street, that is, a gleaming truck and the brand-new compressor sitting in its flatbed. Woody, a taciturn geriatric alcoholic haunted by failure, fixates on a big win he hopes to realize by presenting himself at the offices of a mail-away sweepstakes in Lincoln, Nebraska. Payne compellingly illustrates an oft-practiced real-life scam: gullible elders, especially those suffering from dementia onset, are misled by this industry into spending money they cannot afford on magazine subscriptions and trinkets they do not need. A computerized form letter will shortly arrive in their mailbox, trumpeting an imminent Big Win, in Woody’s case a cool million, so long as the victims keep sending in more money. Juxtaposing the encouraging way Dave (Will Forte) greets his dejected dad at the police station by expressing fake delight: “There’s the Man of the Hour” (03:28), versus the horrible insults his wife Kate (June Squibb) spouts: “You dumb cluck, you pretty damn near gave me a heart attack” (04:55). Payne effectively creates viewer empathy with Woody as a henpecked husband whose desire to run away from his awful home life we instinctively share. Kate complains to Dave, speaking insultingly about her husband as if he were not there: “I never knew the Son of a Bitch even wanted to be a millionaire. He should have thought about that years ago, and worked for it” (5:09–5:14). Her remark is imbued with bitter resentment that Woody did not provide the material comforts she hoped for. Indeed, their tiny ranch home appears extremely modest on a street of similar houses, its screen porch amateurishly winterized with a thin layer of plastic against the severe temperatures Montanans experience. Despite Kate’s cutting criticism of Woody’s lack of ambition to succeed, we can’t help but notice that Woody is fully dressed and departed on a stubborn mission to claim his million dollars on foot, while Kate lounges about in a nightdress or housecoat in the middle of the

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day. Woody displays dogged persistence as he pursues his admittedly addled dream of traveling to Lincoln, Nebraska, for his prize money. What Lauren Berlant terms “cruel optimism,” a strong emotional investment in a noxious, often capitalist fantasy, serves as the moral impetus for Dave, the younger and kinder son, to humor his dad’s foolish hope. Dave has an uninteresting sales job at an electronics store. Besides, his unprepossessing, humorless girlfriend has just moved out because he refuses to marry her. Dave is in a rut, too, and his hangdog expression betrays it. These two characters whose lives seem to run on parallel tracks might at least escape their humdrum lives for a final adventure together. Hochschild’s interviews with southern white men in the senior age bracket perfectly mirror the poignancy of the stalled American Dream, as Payne depicts it for this paradigmatic down-at-heel family. She notes: This stalled American Dream hits many on the right at a particularly vulnerable season of life—in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. It is a time during which people often check their bucket list, take stock, and are sometimes forced to give up certain dreams of youth. It’s a season of life in which a person says to him- or herself, “So this is it.” […] As with other men I spoke with, the repeated term “millionaire” floated around conversations like a ghost.41

Similar to Nomadland, old-age poverty and the lack of well-paid jobs are shown myopically as white plight, although the tone in Payne’s film is gently satirical as opposed to Zhao’s sentimentality toward her subjects. For the character Dave, his dad’s problem is not primarily lack of money. While Kate crustily references the steep cost of memory care42 by saying she would use her fantasy million dollars to “put him in a home” (06:26), Dave contradicts his judgmental brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk): “He does not need a nursing home. He just needs something to live for” (08:50). To shift gears, Dave once again acts kindly toward a family member, flattering Ross for his promotion to local news anchor, then calling him “Tom Brokaw. Tom Brokaw of Billings” (9:38). Ross mentions that he came by his success accidentally because the regular news anchor was out sick, so he was asked to fill in. Clearly pleased at Dave’s praise, Ross says he paid his dues on the job and that the regular anchor-woman is quite sick. The discourse of precarious health is a through line in the film’s narrative, as it was throughout Bruder’s interviews for her study. In an ever-changing neoliberal economy, success and good health are difficult to hold on to as competitors already wait in the wings. Young lower-middle- to middle-class couples also lack buying power, and the biggest factor is the unaffordable cost of rent all over the country. Bruder writes:

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[T]here are only a dozen counties and one metro area in America where a fulltime minimum wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. You’d have to make at least $16.35 an hour—more than twice the federal minimum wage—to rent such an apartment without spending more than the recommended 30 percent of income on housing. The consequences are dire, especially for the one in six American households that have been putting more than half of what they make into shelter. For many low-income families, that means little or nothing left over to buy food, medication, and other essentials.43

A young white couple considers an expensive BOSE stereo-system but they leave the store moments after Dave plays them a rock song from the seventies about moving from the country to the city. They clearly do not have the money to afford such an expensive purchase. Payne sends up the relentless optimism of typical local news shows by inserting a scene where Dave watches at home as Ross is on the air. Ross first reads an item about an expensive council plan “that will cost taxpayers more than it’s worth” and then follows up with: “and, after break, the story of a snowmobiler who may have lost his legs but not his will to compete” (10:17). Payne derides the costs of neoliberal competition by spoofing a TV media machine that wildly careens between unfounded censoriousness and chipper optimism, neither of which constitute good reporting. By implication, Payne suggests that his fictionalized report on everyday life in economically depressed towns and rural backwaters of the American West promises to deliver a more accurate portrayal. Dave insists they stop off to visit Mt. Rushmore with Woody protesting: “We don’t have time for that! It’s just a bunch of rocks” (17:40). He also crankily remarks that the sculptors “aren’t finished,” with the exception of George Washington, a comment that points to a self-contradicting mix of patriotic nostalgia and sense of the American project as something that may still deliver its promises. Woody’s insistence that getting to Lincoln is far more urgent than any sightseeing on the way, even if it is an iconic tourist site, shows how deeply the neoliberal fantasy of the Big Win has penetrated his mind. Payne’s choice of a looping harmonica melody domesticates the vast landscapes that unroll seamlessly outside the car window. They are empty and majestic but are marred by frequent evidence of human advertising, a fact that Zhao’s depiction of colorful deserts and snow-capped mountain ranges glosses over. In Payne’s film, large road signs dot the breakdown lane, for instance, “Welcome to South Dakota: Run with the Pack” or “Pure Energy,” an advertisement for perhaps an energy plant, belching smoke. These signs try to create a kind of herd mentality

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that Woody resists, even though he is interested in the sights out his window. At one point he rolls down the window to see better. He begins to recover his interest in life. The Mt. Rushmore scene suggests the Silent Generation’s disenchantment with a national monument to America’s presidents and by extension Big Government, which failed to reward their service. In Woody’s words: “I served my country. I pay my taxes. I deserve to drink” (36:07). Some capers ensue after Woody sneaks off to a bar in the night, tripping on the railroad tracks and losing his dentures, and then bangs his head on the dresser as he stumbles around drunkenly in the dark motel room. Dave gets his dad’s head wound stitched up at an emergency room, which leads to more sardonic jokes about the high cost of hospital stays, as Woody unspools his saga about his Big Win. Together, Dave and Woody then scour the tracks for the missing teeth, and Dave finds them. Since the accidents delayed them, father and son make a detour to Hawthorne, Nebraska, Woody’s birthplace. As usual, Woody is not keen on this new idea that will further stand between him and his Big Win. Their visit allows Payne to depict the plight of white working-class people in small town America. On the plot level, reconnecting with family members and former friends brings to light Woody’s unhappy childhood in an abusive household, where beatings were the norm for small infractions. The young man experienced war trauma in the Korean War; after coming home, he is coerced into marriage by the (even then) insufferably bitchy Kate, a Catholic, who insists they marry because they had sex. His attempt to get divorced once he finds true love in an affair with a Native American woman from the Reservation is foiled by his duplicitous friend Ed (Stacy Keach). Ed browbeats Woody into staying with his unsuitable wife with whom he has only one son, Ross, at that point. From family conversations, Dave finds out he owes his existence to make up sex between his parents. He also discovers that earlier his dad dated an intelligent, sweet local girl, Peg Bender, whom Kate replaced in his affections by her aggressive tactics. Woody’s life has mostly been a tragic struggle, personally and economically. Dave gradually matures from exasperation at Woody’s alcohol abuse and demented wanderings to a compassionate understanding of his father’s life story. Woody’s crusty personality developed as a kind of armor, so he can keep people at bay. He begins to respect his Old Man for his laconic persistence in the face of failure. By centering his plot on a failed family romance with a well-known actor (Dern) as the charismatic lead, Payne personalizes his trenchant visual record of economic devastation and job loss. What does he show viewers about

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working lives in Hawthorne? One of the first items at the roadside is a large wooden American flag sign, patriotism is nominally there, but this community has no money for the traditional flagpole with a cloth flag. On Main Street, a dilapidated neon sign advertises “See us fo your Home Loan” (29:45–29:54). The name of the bank is barely legible on the reverse. The duration of this take is longer than those of other signs, so it obviously has greater significance, giving viewers the time to ponder the dire economic straits in this town where prosperity is a mirage. Small downtowns like the fictional “Hawthorne, NE” (a composite of outdoor shots of Plainview and interiors in the communities of Hooper, as well as farms and barns in Stanton, Elgin, Tilden, Osmond, Lyons) are desolate: shuttered storefronts alternate with a few dive bars, a “Monster Tan” store, and a dusty storefront. Remaining residents are either eking out an invisible living or seem to be marooned in their homes, retired on social security like Aunt Martha and Ray, Woody’s older brother. While these fictional elders held on to single family homes (unlike the nonactors of Zhao’s Nomadland who go bankrupt and are forced to downsize to cars and vans) those homes need repairs, coats of paint, or structural updates their occupants cannot afford. Jobs for young people are scarce. Drug consumption and alcoholism among this group are rampant. Dave’s oddly competitive twin cousins, Bart and Cole, sit on the couch in their undershirts watching TV. They have no jobs. Despite or because of this, Bart repeatedly spars with Dave over the time he took driving from Billings to Hawthorne. Bart ridicules him for taking two days, even calling him a sissy. Despite their evident torpor, the cousins boast about a time in the past when one of them drove a greater distance in less time, which, if accurate, would have involved going 100 miles an hour for eight hours straight. A standard work shift is eight hours. It is ironic how these chunky layabouts who seem to be sponging off their aged parents internalize neoliberal slogans about mobility and speed. Because there is no open employment for younger denizens of Hawthorne, fast cars and reckless driving as stand-ins for upward mobility rule these men’s imaginations; they circle back to this topic whenever they have some alone time with the out-of-towner Dave. Like their fathers’, their unswerving loyalty is to American-made cars. After quizzing Dave over whether he owns a second car besides the Subaru, and what brand of car his brother and his sister-in-law drive (KIA and Toyota), Bart asks accusingly: “So you all got Jap cars?” Dave replies diplomatically, “Actually, KIA is Korean” (50:07). A similar conversation arises once the four other surviving Grant brothers, of whom two served in the

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Korean War along with Woody, show up for the family reunion. They all sit on couches silently watching sports on TV until one brother asks another whether he still drives his Buick. Its erstwhile owner states: “Yeah, ’79, those were good cars. Those cars will run forever.” But he has to admit that his stopped working (1:05:05). At about that moment, Ross arrives from Billings. Dave asks his brother deadpan: “How long did it take you to drive?” (1:06:00), repeating in jest the only conversational gambit Bart and Cole are capable of. A similar obsessive talking point to cars is Woody’s desire to retrieve the old compressor he lent to Ed decades ago or, failing that, buy himself a new one. One of the brothers asks: “Why do you need a compressor?” “I need it to paint,” replies Woody. “You still working?” asks another brother with interest. This dialogue indicates that within the hard-up retiree group it is not unthinkable that their peers need to keep working. Whether Kate still works as a hairdresser up in Billings is also a question her former neighbors, the Westendorfs, ask with interest as if she were still working age. Time has collapsed in on itself. Elderly men experience a zombified, wordless stasis; they are almost aphasic. Woody, however, ancient as he is, wanders off to drink beers at the two town watering holes and still has a bone to pick with Ed. While Woody is quite taciturn, his demeanor conceals a great deal of familial trauma and shame. His long-ago girlfriend Peg, who owns the local newspaper, informs the stunned Dave that his dad got shot down being transferred as a mechanic during the Korean War. “You knew that, right? […] Woody wasn’t much of a talker. After he returned, he hardly talked at all” (54:34). In a family trip down memory lane to Woody’s parents’ farmhouse, which now stands empty, more personal trauma is revealed. “This was my parents’ room. I’d get whipped if I came in here. Guess nobody is going to whip me now,” Woody remembers (1:15:42). Dave finds out he is named for Woody’s toddler brother who died of scarlet fever at age two, and with whom Woody had to share a bed, even during the boy’s last illness. Woody’s gruff exterior thus conceals his damage from various violent disciplinary regimes, meted out first by his parents, and later on, the government that sent him to war. Dave asks after the wishes that Woody had as a young man. As the two of them now stand side by side looking out over the fertile fields: “Did you want to farm like your dad?” Dave asks. There is a pregnant pause. “I don’t remember,” Woody answers flatly (1:16:99). This short dialogue is heartbreaking; viewers now understand better why Woody is so obsessed with achieving some kind of exceptional public recognition to compensate for all these past humiliations.

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A comparison between Woody and Kate’s tiny box house in Billings versus Ray and Martha’s ample Victorian in “Hawthorne” indicates that Woody’s trajectory is downwardly mobile. He left home but did not make good. The American Dream of upward mobility did not deliver for this army vet or his wife, both of whom owned small businesses (garage and hair salon) and worked hard. The small auto repair shop Woody once co-owned with his partner Ed Pierson (Stacey Keach) changed hands: now two Latinos work on the cars. The older man, perhaps in his fifties, owns the shop. These men are unfamiliar with Ed, and of course, they see no reason to kowtow to Woody, who presents as angry and unkempt. To Dave’s dismay, his dad is a casual racist, calling the men idiots as he walks away, supposedly for using the wrong wrench on a transmission repair. This is the only scene with non-whites on screen in the entire film. At least it shows some awareness that migration is not just white out-migration but that Latinx people also exercise their right to pursue opportunity. They are the only individuals shown fixing something aside from the nurse practitioner in the hospital who stitches up Woody’s head wound. In the earlier scene at Woody’s home when he attempts to get his truck running again, he cannot because Ross has removed a key part. Ross does not want his demented father driving around and getting lost or crashing his truck. In Zhao’s van dweller universe, having wheels is a precondition for independence. Characters like Derek who cannot afford wheels are failed nomads who should give up and return home. In Payne’s feature, Woody’s independent spirit is admirable even though all he can do on his own is walk around, and unsteadily at that. Woody is filled with rage over his losses and erupts in sarcastic outbursts, while Fern grieves her losses in a contemplative manner mostly devoid of anger. In other words, the film debunks the white settler colonialist dream of pursuing Manifest Destiny through westward expansion, but it does so ironically, whereas Zhao reanimates it as a meaningful narrative. The Declaration of Independence holds out “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” as lofty goals for white strivers, yet the fictional “Grant Boys” fail to find anything beyond “Life.” Woody especially does not find happiness in his life, so he craves the belated public recognition a big cash award would bring. Tired of waiting for the realization of his dream, Woody spills the good news to a bar full of Hawthornites, mostly to irritate his frenemy Ed Pegrim and contravene Dave who expressly asked his dad not to say anything about the money. Returning from the restroom, Dave hears loud cheering and hollering, and his face freezes in dismayed resignation (39:29). Ed sings out: “God damn, Woody Grant’s a millionaire, who would have thought? God damn!” (39:30).

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His extended family and all his former friends now get wind of the possibility of Big Money, so they all want a piece of it. No matter how often Dave, his brother Ross, and their mother Kate, who join them for a family reunion, argue that the win is just Woody’s demented fantasy with no basis in reality. Some, like former friend Ed even threaten and lie to get what they believe to be their due. The whole family toasts Woody for his Big Win (1:06:43). They call Dave a “damn liar” when he objects, “Woody didn’t win anything” (1:10:07). The fantasy Big Win is so seductive that it takes on a life of its own. Woody’s nephews Bart and Cole, Ray and Martha’s moronic offspring, wrestle down father and son as they drunkenly exit the dive bar “Blinker’s.” They steal the award letter and plan to drive to Lincoln to cash in. Ross shouts to Dave: “They’re after dad’s winnings” (1:10:38), even though both are well aware of the plain truth: there is no pot of gold forthcoming. To some degree all the Grant brothers’ sons occupy a classic fetishist role, vacillating between acknowledging their own lack of phallic power—their real downfall in a United States where jobs like theirs are outsourced, and consumer goods don’t sell the way they did before 2008—and denying this absence by focusing on an eroticized surrogate, namely the cruel optimist fantasy of “free” money. A Big Win for which you did not have to work, it just rains down on you like Manna from heaven. This fantasy fits lockstep into another toxic white American myth: that of the amateur whose very lack of training allows him to “think outside the box”; therefore, he will just waltz into a crisis (or a challenging public role normally demanding years of professional expertise) and emerge victorious. The plot wavers between exposing Woody when everyone in the bar laughs as Ed waves the sweepstake flier around and meanly mocks his old friend to his face (1:33:06) and the pretense of Woody returning victorious to Hawthorne one last time to stun the doubters and haters. Dave makes this triumph possible by simply buying his dad the two status symbols that connote vigorous masculinity in his book: the truck and the compressor. Woody drives proudly and slowly down Main Street, sporting his baseball cap “PRIZE WINNER” in the shiny big truck his son went into debt to buy. Woody simultaneously knows and does not wish to know that his son sacrificed for him. Dave lies: “I hope you don’t mind, but I put your name on the title. But you’re gonna have to let me drive it.” Woody queries with a crooked grin: “Oh, you worked out something with the Prize people?” Dave replies: “Yeah, they were willing to go as far as the truck” (1:43:20). On arrival in downtown Hawthorne, they switch seats so that Woody can be seen at the wheel. Dave encourages his dad who gets butterflies that he does still

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know how to drive and that it is just a short way down the street with no traffic. Woody gingerly goes through the motions of driving. As some locals come out on the sidewalk, he tells Dave to duck so that it appears he is in control all by himself. We follow Dave’s gaze from below at his dad’s delighted face breaking out in a crooked grin. The one reminder of real costs that briefly appears on the right of the frame just before Woody’s triumphal parade is a gas price sign; it costs a “$3.44 gal” (1:46:11). A full tank of gas for a big pickup truck equals 40 gallons, coming to a whopping $137.60. But these reality effects do not lessen viewers’ momentous glee as all of Woody’s detractors witness his ride. Ed exits the dive bar sporting a big ugly shiner Dave gave him for insulting his dad, mouth agape as he takes in Woody’s pleased grin and his shiny truck. Woody passes in slow motion as others react equally stunned. The camera zooms in on Peg’s face gazing wistfully at Woody’s profile, her “Man Who Got Away” (1:47:44). This segment is quite long (1:47:56–1:48:17), expressing the female character’s wistfulness over paths not taken. A way past the town center, viewers see the truck stop in the middle distance on the road back to Montana stretching to infinity—both doors open, then driver and passenger change seats once more. Woody performed authority and independence for his spectators, but mission accomplished; he is happy to let his son take the wheel again. Unlike the aging van dwellers in Nomadland, who demonstrate their self-sufficiency living off the grid, Dern’s patriarch is too infirm to pilot his truck for long.

Gender Norms: Stoic Silence versus Feeling and Questioning The 1950s traditional models of masculinity and femininity have not worked well for those who tried to live up to them unquestioningly. We saw how Nomadland champions androgynous women over traditional gender norms because of the harsh necessities of living on the road. In Nebraska, the character Dave also represents an androgynous solution in his own experiential quest to take charge of his own life. He is sensitive and asks probing questions about how his father feels, performing patient care labor for Woody who is too enfeebled mentally and physically to look after himself. Woody swallows so much disappointment and the model of taciturn masculinity he cleaves to is so burdensome that he becomes a raging alcoholic. After returning from the

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Korean War, he barely talks. The boys remember his violent outbursts as a time of great family strain with Dave regularly removing his hidden stash of liquor to pour it away. In contrast to all these bad memories, their father-son road trip becomes a healing journey that exposes both to new insights about each other. Kate’s own disappointment in life expresses itself in a stream of foul-mouthed tirades and narcissistic reminiscences about her market value as a sexy young woman. She even mocks the dead. In a hilariously outrageous graveyard scene in Hawthorne, Kate gossips maliciously about the people who predeceased her. If there were not persistent economic deprivation fueling her rage, she would embody a stereotypical harridan, given that her name derives from Shakespeare’s eponymous protagonist of The Taming of the Shrew. At the outset of the family drama, there is no solidarity left between the couple. Toward the end, Kate kisses her ailing husband with real affection and strokes his face. Kate develops some compassion, even stating something positive about the travails of the Westendorf couple. We might say that she becomes humanized by understanding that her disappointment in life is not unique. The whole town of Hawthorne is devastated by the absence of good jobs. Its fate is emblematic of other farming towns across Nebraska. Young people moved away looking for opportunity elsewhere just as she and Woody left. Their work in low-wage jobs does not translate into a comfortable retirement. This is a salient parallel with the elders who cannot afford to stop working in Nomadland. In Nebraska, director Alexander Payne looks to family loyalty as the one thing that might compensate on an emotional level for the dire economic outlook and severe health issues that older, working-class Americans face. Many do so with no buffer in the form of a good company pension plan or healthy personal savings, forced to fall back on Social Security payments that are based in your average salary during all your years in work. For low-wage workers or the self-employed, this calculus results in grimly insufficient monthly payouts, which are further slashed by mandatory Medicaid payments. If a family member helps out financially, that just increases their own debt load. Average American consumer debt reached an all-time high in 2020: $92,727, mostly accrued in the areas of mortgage debt, auto loans and personal loans, and for the college age bracket, in student loans.44 In the exposition, Dave is presented as passive and gets no respect. He fails to make a sale in the store, the female customer corrects his pronunciation of her name as she exits. His girlfriend of two years has moved out, and he fails to make a case for himself. His older brother Ross is annoyed at Dave because he takes

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his father’s side rather than go along with Kate and Ross’s idea to institutionalize Woody. Many comments by others describe Dave as a feminine and pretty child: “lot of ’em thought you were a girl” (57:32), his mother reminisces; “Davey, you were such a beautiful boy, like a little prince made out of porcelain” (1:01:30), gushes a woman from Hawthorne. Ed still calls Dave “Davey” and tells him he used to give him sweets down at the garage. For Dave, the road trip represents his maturation into a compassionate, decisive adult. Dave is a careful observer of his family and the small community of Hawthorne; he is not quick to dismiss anyone. He asks sensitive questions, and his unflinching loyalty boosts his dad’s morale. The two men share several “adventures” on the road, such as getting wounded and patched up, or losing and finding teeth, which lead to a closer relationship between them. These plot elements derive straight out of the playbook of slapstick and screwball comedies during the Depression era. The dramatic vehicle for social commentary back then consisted of bringing together two characters from divergent social classes.45 In Nebraska, a family learns to love their ailing patriarch and restore some of his authority to him. He would like to take care of his sons financially and finally confesses this to Dave: “The money is for you boys. I want to leave you something” (1:34:00). After this, he collapses and is rehospitalized for exhaustion. True to form, as soon as he recovers, Woody sets off once more on foot to claim his prize, his hospital gown flapping under his down jacket. Woody becomes a carnivalesque figure in his craziness and involves his family, but especially Dave, in a joyful flouting of rules and hierarchies. Woody’s legacy is his assertive joie de vivre. It is more valuable than money, even though the fantasy of free money was the catalyst for all the mayhem. The other inspiration for Nebraska is the novel Don Quixote. Woody is an addled mind like the Knight of la Mancha, fighting unseen ogres from his past and following an imaginary quest. Moreover, Woody and his sideman Dave suffer a few pratfalls in the mold of typical picaresque protagonists, learning to question social hierarchies by being knocked about. For instance, Dave learns to stand up to the evil Ed and dishes out a glancing blow at his head. After both sons demonstrate their loyalty to their dad, however demented his project of the Big Win may be, even his most acerbic critic Kate defends him. Kate effectively silences the assembled spongers and lowlifes of the extended family by asserting she knows the score because she “kept records”: “you were always having him work on your cars and you’d get free gas. You got more than he owed” (1:10:58). She wins the confrontation by insulting the group with a crude epithet that the

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proper women of Hawthorne would blanch at. Then she rallies the family: “Boys, get your dad” (1:12:12). This paves the way for the entire family traveling in one car together for the first time. A comedic segment of the narrative ensues: on the spur of the moment, Dave and Ross team up to steal a compressor from a barn their mother misidentifies as belonging to Ed Pegrim. Woody says nothing, but this clue is easily missed, since he often gives others the silent treatment. Nonetheless, both parents are intrigued by their sons’ sudden criminal zeal; they smile slightly and seem revived by the unexpected prank. Once the compressor sits in the back and they drive off, Woody reveals that they got the wrong house. This is the Westendorf farm. Ed’s house is further down the road. Even though Kate’s memories seemed so sharp, she is fallible, while her impaired husband gets it right. This reversal restores some of his pride and serves to domesticate Kate. Suddenly, the Westendorfs come home. Kate strategically improvises some polite small talk, the opposite of her previous comportment as a foul-mouthed shrew. Then she drives off at a good clip as the befuddled Westendorfs turn their backs. Kate seems to have forgotten about her sons, intent on making her getaway. Ross and Dave sprint comically after the car, seen in the rearview mirror where viewers notice them before Kate does. This power reversal and their communal attempt to redress an insult Woody suffered put the whole family on a new footing. They all rib each other over the caper with Woody having the last word (not Kate, as before). The overarching goal of the film is to restore family harmony in a seriously dysfunctional group. They relearn to stand up for each other by flouting the gender norms they internalized or that were forced on them by disciplinary regimes such as beatings or shaming. Instead, each of them adopts some traits stereotypically ascribed to the other sex. Bad seeds and envious bastards get their comeuppance, which satisfies a Hollywood preference for a happy ending. The father-son bond is cemented; now off they go toward their not-so-pleasant futures: expected mental decline for Woody, more hectoring from Kate, and steep car loan payments for their son Dave. The film thus depoliticizes its own message by choosing the reinvigoration of family loyalty over making solidarity with strangers. Woody’s return to his past is commemorative and restorative: pater familias for the first time becomes a source of happiness for him, facilitated by his two sons joining forces to redress the material and symbolic damage that was done to their father. All is now relatively well with the Grant family. They overcome challenges to their manhood and perform classic screwball comedy maneuvers, like stealing back

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dad’s old compressor from the wrong house and then stealthily returning it. This caper is a genuine belly laugh, while the rest of the film’s comedy rests on the male lead Bruce Dern’s subtle facial shiftings, as well as supporting actor Will Forte’s slack-mouthed disbelief.

Fern Embodies and Woody Flouts Neoliberalism’s Hold For Zhao, the harshness of Western landscapes ennobles the mutual support the van dwellers show each other. The final (unrealistic) emphasis is on mobility and persistence on a narrative of overcoming. Fern heals from her grief and moves on. By contrast, the Nebraska farmland and its small towns look to be in no better shape than its aging population. Viewers get a sense of impending tragedy; what is shown is mostly the stasis of communities on the brink of dying. While Zhao invokes the romance of frontier life and the open road, Payne realistically describes the economic decline of America’s Heartland. However, his protest against neoliberal ideology focuses on an old man’s wish for redemption, whom the neoliberal system would rather shunt off to die as his market value as a worker is long expired. Grit, loafing and eccentricity appear as valuable counter articulations against a normative economy of overwork and political apathy. Even though the previously alienated family members bond in support of the old man’s resistance to what is and what the future holds, they do not create a public protest that draws strangers to their cause. As a veteran of the Silent Generation, Woody gets a belated public acknowledgment for his endurance by parading down Main St., but it is difficult to parse who admires him for himself, versus who admires him for his unexpected material possessions. The camera lingers the longest on Peg Bender’s attentive, wistful expression. Since she is the owner of the town newspaper, viewers may expect that her appreciative stare would soon translate into a news item. Woody has beaten his lifelong invisibility and his feelings of disempowerment, but the visible tokens of his struggle for recognition become manifest as consumer goods. His triumph is presented as ambiguous; it enacts the fantasy of the Big Win as a theatrical performance. Viewers never lose sight of the fact that its engineer, Dave, crouches under the dashboard. Or that society’s dance around the false idol of materialism—represented by Dave’s job of selling expensive audio equipment to some who could barely afford it—is delusional, a capitalist logic that creates a docile citizen consumer rather than a subject that subscribes to a democratic, resistant imaginary. Payne’s political

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strategy is to offset the overt cynicism of the operations of neoliberal power, “their very transparency, their presence on the surface,” by parodying them.46 By contrast, the mood of Nomadland is melancholic and moralistic. Grieving personal loss transforms into an affirmation of the solidarity be found in intentional community on the road. Loafing about and sponging are abhorred in Nomadland; Fern’s hands are always busy. The onus of material support is cynically placed on an already severely under-resourced group, not on the government or other social institutions. Within that group, women are disproportionally tasked with care labor and outreach to strangers. Through Facebook support groups and their periodic meetups, the nomads constitute a mutual aid community. They give their surplus possessions away and live an ascetic lifestyle by necessity. Zhao romanticizes it as a choice, a spiritual practice that resonates with the austere beauty of landscapes in the American West. In implicit agreement with neoliberal paradigms that favor flexibility and discontinuous work, Zhao avers her female protagonists “have become resilient and able to turn damage into opportunity.”47 Our discussion of these two films has shown how the directors accommodate US American neoliberal ideology to varying degrees, as they blend it with white grievance and patriotism. However, Payne satirizes these affects while Zhao skirts the political outrage of elders forced to live in poverty.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6 7 8

Jessica Bruder, “The End of Retirement: When You Can’t Afford to Stop Working,” New York Harper’s Magazine, August 3, 2014, https://harpers.org/archive/2014/08/ the-end-of-retirement/. Michael Sainato, “Too Young to Retire but at Risk for Covid, Older American Struggle to Find Work,” The Guardian, January 25, 2022, https://www.theguardian. com/society/2022/jan/25/older-americans-struggle-find-work-covid-retirement. Bruder, 4. Sarah Bracke, “Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 52–75, 59. Bracke, 59. https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/2021. Chloé Zhao, “Onstage Acceptance Speech for Best Picture,” March 15, 2021, https:// www.oscars.org/press/93rd-oscars-onstage-speech-transcript-best-picture. Bracke, 62.

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13 14

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Screening Solidarity Scott Belsky, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles between Vision and Reality (New York: Portfolio, 2012), https://www.amazon.com/Making-IdeasHappen-Overcoming-Obstacles/dp/1591844118/ref=asc_df_1591844118/?tag= hyprod20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312025907421&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvran d=15586633115483477464&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcm dl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1027355&hvtargid=pla450484554624&psc=1&asin= B003NX75W2&revisionId=d7512d&format=1&depth=1. See also Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Norton, 2017), 258 n18. Samuel Bassi, Martin Fiszbein, and Mesay Gebresilasse, “Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of ‘Rugged Individualism’ in the United States,” Boston University Economics Department, November 2017, https://www.bu.edu/econ/ files/2018/08/BFG_Frontier.pdf, 1–77, 2. See Bassi, 6. A further indicator of their political preferences is that they approvingly reference David Brooks, a neo-conservative journalist, economics commentator, and regular Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, who appears to endorse their findings strategically via a round robin of mutual citation. Arun Gupta and Michelle Fawcett, “The Neoliberal Fantasy at the Heart of ‘Nomadland,’” In These Times, April 20, 2021, https://inthesetimes.com/article/ nomadland-chloe-zhao-oscars-film-culture-amazon-workers. Bruder, 117. Oralandar Brand-Williams, “Detroit ‘Gardening While Black’ Lawsuit Settled,” The Detroit News, April 29, 2019, https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/ local/wayne-county/2019/04/29/detroit-gardening-while-black-lawsuitsettled/3621006002/. See Joan Walsh, “Birding While Black: Just the Latest Bad Reason for White People to Call Police,” The Nation, May 26, 2020, https://www. thenation.com/article/society/amy-cooper-birding-police/. See Mitchell S. Jackson, “Twelve Minutes and a Life: Ahmaud Arbery Went out for a Jog and Was Gunned down in the Street. How Running Fails Black America,” Runners’ World, June 18, 2020, https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a32883923/ahmaud-arberydeath-running-and-racism/. Alaska, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming do not levy state income taxes. Montana, Oregon, and Alaska also have no sales tax. Also note that “Nevada relies heavily on revenue from high sales taxes on everything from groceries to clothes, sin taxes on alcohol and gambling, and taxes on casinos and hotels. […] Like many no-income-tax states, South Dakota rakes in revenue through other forms of taxation, including on cigarettes and alcohol.” See https:// www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0210/7-states-with-no-income-tax.aspx. Bracke, 67.

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17 Stephen C. Goss, “The Future Financial Status of the Social Security Program,” https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html#:~:text=Introduction &text=As%20a%20result%20of%20changes,are%20projected%20to%20become%20 exhausted. 18 Rashika Jaipuriar, “‘Once-in-a-Lifetime Experience’: Indianapolis Native Part of Oscar-Winning ‘Nomadland’ Team,” Indy Star, April 26, 2021, https://www. indystar.com/story/entertainment/movies/2021/04/26/nomadland-oscarscharlene-swankie-indianapolis-indiana/7386745002/. The article also mentions that “Swankie” “attended Indiana University, studying Park and Recreation Administration/Natural Resource Management, graduating in 1980. In 1993, she graduated from Ball State with a master’s degree in archaeology.” These biographical details suggests that single mothers may wind up impoverished despite high educational attainment, which both the film and Bruder’s book studiously avoid analyzing. 19 Bruder, 153–4. 20 Damon Linker, “Calvin and American Exceptionalism,” The New Republic, July 9, 2009, https://newrepublic.com/article/50754/calvin-and-americanexceptionalism. 21 See Linker. 22 Bruder, 136. 23 Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land (New York, NY: The New Press, 2016), 140. 24 Hochschild, 140–1. 25 Hochschild, 149. 26 See Gupta and Fawcett. See also Wilfred Chan, “What Nomadland Gets Wrong about Gig Labor,” Vulture Magazine, April 22, 2021, https://www.vulture.com/ article/nomadland-amazon-warehouse-chloe-zhao.html. 27 Bruder, 98–112. 28 Timothy Bella, “A Professor Said Her Students Think Americans Make Six Figures on Average. That’s a Long Way Off,” The Washington Post, January 20, 2002, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/01/20/wharton-students-wages-salarytwitter-strohminger/. 29 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, webinar for Friends of Princeton, January 23, 2002, https://www.princeton.edu/events/2021/race-profit-how-banks-and-real-estateindustry-undermined-black-homeownership-professor. 30 Taylor makes similar arguments in Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 260–2. 31 https://www.graypanthersnyc.org/.

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32 Maddy Shaw Roberts, “Nomadland Soundtrack: Every Einaudi Track Used in the Chloé Zhao Film,” May 13, 2021, https://www.classicfm.com/composers/einaudi/ nomadland-soundtrack-music-in-chloe-zhao-film/. 33 For example, see Willa Cather, “There Was Nothing but Land; Not a Country at All, but the Material out of Which Countries Are Made.” My Ántonia, (1917) Book One, Ch.1, 1.11, https://cather.unl.edu/writings/books/0003#bk1. 34 Taylor, 258. 35 See Sixt Magazine, “Top 8 Spooky Ghost Towns in the American West,” https:// www.sixt.com/magazine/travel/top-ghost-towns-us/. 36 Zhong Nan, “Saint-Gobain Opens 54th Plant in China,” China Daily, May 18, 2021, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202105/18/WS60a35ef5a31024ad0babfc19. html#:~:text=Saint%2DGobain%20SA%2C%20the%20French,for%20the%20 local%20construction%20market. 37 Contemporary artist Rhiannon Giddens performs a gripping version of this folk song, inspired by Black singer Bessie Jones’s 1959 performance in Georgia, on They’re Calling me Home (2021). The Ralph Stanley version, popularized by the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), is also well known. See Matt Hendrickson, “Listen Now: Rhiannon Giddens Sings ‘O Death’,” Garden and Gun Magazine, May 6, 2021, https://gardenandgun.com/articles/listen-now-rhiannon-giddens-sings-odeath/. 38 Bruder, 173. 39 Derek Thompson, “Three Myths of the Great Resignation,” The Atlantic Magazine, December 8, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/greatresignation-myths-quitting-jobs/620927/. 40 Taylor, Friends of Princeton Webinar, January 23, 2022. 41 Hochschild, 141, 143. 42 On average, monthly cost ranges from $11,000 to 17,000 per patient in a single room in a memory care facility. These figures vary by state but these are the 2021 figures for Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont. Many care homes do not accept Medicaid patients because their care is not profitable. Medicaid is only accepted in payment after the patient’s family pay out of pocket for two years. These facts mean that only wealthy families can afford professional care for their elders with most families struggling to provide these services on their own. 43 Bruder, 7. 44 Stefan Lembo-Stolba, “Average U.S. Consumer Debt Reaches New Record in 2020,” Experian.com, April 6, 2021, https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/ research/consumer-debt-study/. 45 For instance, in It Happened One Night (dir. Frank Capra, 1934), a rich heiress meets a poor man on a bus, the bus breaks down, and they fall in love. In My Man

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Godfrey (dir. Gregory la Cava, 1936) two badly behaved New York City heiresses meet a suave poor man who possess the manners they lack. In Bringing Up Baby (dir. Howard Hawks, 1938), an eccentric paleontologist encounters an assertive rich woman, the niece of a major museum donor. They become involved in delivering “Baby,” a tame leopard, to the aunt’s house, and through various identity confusions, the professor regains his virility. 46 Leticia Sabsay, “Permeable Bodies: Vulnerability, Affective Powers, Hegemony,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 278–302, 294. 47 Bracke, 67.

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Epilogue Helga Druxes, Alexandar Mihailovic, and Patricia Anne Simpson

As Taylor reminds us “[s]olidarity is standing in unity with people even when you have not personally experienced their particular oppression.”1 Throughout this study, we have featured anti-neoliberal cinemas that seek to overcome the alienation of the neoliberal workplaces from the European Union and United States to Russia. They include real-life sites, fictional narratives, comedic and tragic resolutions, or failures at closure. The principle of solidarity, predicated on standing with others, is facilitated by a cinema that promotes understanding. The filmmakers in our study, intentionally or not, transform the spectator into a potential activist. Across the genres, the multicultural and polylingual films we present, the cinematography confronts the viewer with critical tableaux. Cinema has world-making potential—but that world-making does not necessarily have any impact on the world. The films of anti-neoliberal cinemas ask the reviewer to reimagine collective action. These films transfer political agency to the viewer; in this way, anti-neoliberal cinemas are performative. Aesthetically and politically, they demand we work against an increasingly polarized society that demeans some groups as abject and irresponsible in order to justify their ongoing immiseration. This effort of coaxing an audience into a consideration of solidarity with disempowered workforce within neoliberal practices is the goal of the films we examine in this volume. As strange as it may seem, representations of work, including successful union organizing and refusals to obey absurd workplace requirements, also belong to this effort of suasion. Other grammars of cinematic subversion depict attempts to recover the dignity of labor. These films present the viewer with a series of cognitive and agentive choices. Additionally, films that accommodate, even mimic neoliberal tenets, can be subsumed into the genre of anti-neoliberal cinemas; these challenge the viewer to shift their position as subject from spectator to critical engagement. The burden of

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interpretation becomes a call to political action. No single film can document the triumph of a single worker in the new workplace. Because of the incursion of neoliberal ideologies and a turn to the right in the countries we discuss, current progressive films can no longer rely on a widely shared leftist discourse, as Martin O’Shaughnessy argues: “[contemporary political film] must seek to exist productively in the difficult space between the politics that was and an emergent new politics.”2 Its mission, states O’Shaughnessy, is to “bring disagreement over the order of things to the surface, defining the dominated not by their subordination but by their capacity to challenge it while pushing its audience back towards a politics.”3 O’Shaughnessy persuasively argues that such films are made with an awareness of belonging to a continuum of cinematic products that address worker alienation. The challenges of cinematically representing collective action, and of engaging in what Marx characterized as an ongoing project of changing, rather than simply interpreting the world, call for an understanding of filmmaking as a series of practices that unveil religious and political illusions, rather than products that serve as jewelled settings for success stories from the present or the past. The feminist Angela McRobbie recognizes such efforts as having an unequivocally utopian aspect because they are undertaken with the goal of arriving at a horizon of worker empowerment that always seems to recede. As she describes it, the neoliberal workplace is perpetually caught up in the project of buttressing “a simplified and unified sense of self,” encouraging “adjustment to and accommodation with a status quo” rather than calling into question “the sovereign notion of the individual in possession of [a] mastery” that signals a constant willingness to submit to “prescribed actions.”4 Fostering a critical awareness of local racial and class logics may engender transnational solidarity with groups similarly oppressed in other places, in ways that make such empowerment seem more attainable. As Claudia Breger puts it, “the forceful productivity of cinematic processes” can reshuffle “the sensible to counterhegemonic reevaluations—and the more egalitarian worlds that they allow us to imagine.”5 Anti-neoliberal cinemas can open up a space for debate with viewers through plural, sometimes subversive, distribution models. Screenings in smaller theaters, streaming services, crowdsourcing, online film festivals, provide dialogue between the audience and the filmmakers that create spaces for exchange beyond the multiplex.6 The filmmakers seek out viewer engagement by showing us positive images of collective struggle, sometimes followed by unsatisfactory or open endings. Such a strategy leaves viewers asking how society

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needs to change to overcome current oppressions. Breger writes that cinematic worlds are “rich assemblages, rather than unified wholes”; they are “open worlds with porous boundaries.”7 Elsewhere, Breger engages the idea of the “cinematic solidarity”8 as an event that runs against the grain of hegemonic narratives. In our interpretation, viewers are challenged to understand the struggle of characters designated useless, marginal, and/or unproductive because their plights are made visible and audible through their cinematic portrayal. Writing in 2009 in the wake of a global financial crisis caused by the flooding of housing loans categorized as commodities stocks, the music critic and cultural historian Mark Fisher argued that a “turn from engagement to spectatorship” first became the hallmark of the Thatcher and Reagan era. Fisher saw this inflection point as an expression of “capitalist realism,” a cognitive mode that rendered ideas themselves into commodities, thereby stripping them of their belief-based potency. Further, in her writing as a labor journalist, Kelly brings to our attention the importance of engagement, rather than mere concerned or empathetic spectatorship. The act of passive looking has its origins in a bourgeois aesthetics in the forms of theater and cinema that discourage us, in Breger’s words, from “draw[ing] our own analytic conclusions regarding the interplay of patriarchy and religion, tradition and contemporary politics.”9 Kelly reminds us that the withholding of labor is “one of the worker’s greatest weapons.”10 In the films we examine, many scenes involve characters who opt out, with varying level of success, from completely unacceptable life and work conditions, possibly as the result of what Ewa Mazierska identifies as the dynamic interaction between “affective labor and work on one’s own self.”11 Such cinematic representations of generalized noncompliance become more comprehensible once we see them as expressions of the classic reflex of refusing to submit to the exploitive demands of the workplace. What does a cinema of anti-neoliberalism actually look like? The filmmaking and viewing are after all steeped in the practices of non-dialogic engagement and global marketing protocols. Here, Fisher’s work from the time of the 2008 crisis offers up some possibilities, cloaking them (as the films examined in this volume often do) in an examination of the operation of exploitation. Fisher writes that “capitalist realism” strips subversion of its potentialities by subjecting it to “precorporation” (author’s emphasis), a practice of “pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations, and hopes.”12 By marketing its claims to authenticity about the “uncompromising” character of “late capitalist economic instability,” capitalist realism takes on the character of an “anti-mythical myth.” Only by rejecting the lure of passive spectatorship can a new political anti-neoliberal

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cinema provoke critical political insights. Viewers are prodded to question their own positioning toward the narrative: who surveils, who is assigned invisibility, who refuses the scripted gaze to take subversive collective action? While film is an important ally in providing visions for representation and voice, it alone cannot change reality. Real-world political programs are needed to effect change. As Colin Barker asserts in Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age, “recent decades have seen the whole environment of movement struggles alter quite dramatically […] there is a very different rhythm of struggle in core countries (Britain, France, Canada, U.S. etc.) than in the ‘semi-peripheries’ (or newly industrializing) countries.”13 After decades of decline in unions, in the US young college-educated workers are now helping organize Amazon distribution centers, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s. Unionization outcomes are more vibrant in France than in Germany. Moreover, the two nation’s laws diverge in terms of the right to strike. In France, the state is a guarantor for some worker’s rights. This is not the case in Germany, or in the United States or Russia. In France, the Constitution sees it as an individual right that must be exercised collectively to achieve work-related demands or within the framework of a national strike, while the German constitution outlaws general or political strikes, only allowing for industrial action organized by unions with a view to collective bargaining. Consequently, in the period 2006–2015, the French private sector lost on average more than six times as many working days per 1,000 employees to strike action than German employers did.14 There are anti-neoliberal thinkers who perceive an opposition between identity politics and class politics. Furthermore, they believe that identity politics are used by advocates of neoliberalism as a means for disempowering the proletariat. Yet intersectional alliances between People of Color, LGBTQ, and differently abled people and the working class are indeed viable, not least because many people already belong to more than one of these communities.15 Populist nationalists would have us believe that today, identity politics associated with leftist discourses fragment the oppressed into camps that show no interest in making common cause. Historically, we have numerous examples of transnational movements organized around global emergencies. These range from the Civil Rights Movement, to 1968, to international feminism, and contemporary climate activism and Black Lives Matter. The American activist Tarana Burke founded #MeToo to end sexual violence and harm perpetrated against communities of color, combining feminist and anti-racist work. Antineoliberal cinemas join forces with activists such as these, working toward the common good and pluralistic democracies.

Epilogue

225

For some of our rebellious protagonists, those politically aware of the dehumanizing effects of the workplace, there is a refusal to accept the given architecture and function within it, embracing instead collective action to open up more equitable possibilities. Yet the filmic critiques we assemble articulate their agendas across a range of genres and complex story-telling techniques. Drawing on cross-cultural, transnational, and multilingual sources, Screening Solidarity has attempted to highlight films that range from politically progressive to commercial forms of cinema. The films capture on screen a spectrum of feature and documentary narratives about the quotidian—the living of everyday life that reflects the social histories of their respective national, economic, and political contexts. Some are stories of failure or of a solidarity so elusive or transient that it feels like failure. We have structured the analyses to capture cinematic moments in which the resurgent hegemony of a hydra-like neoliberalism increasingly eclipses the possibilities of income equality, ideally accompanied by a movement from precarity to security. The critical analytic category of intersectionality, coined in the 1980s, insists on the multiple subject positions that exist simultaneously in persons who experience discrimination.16 Kimberlé Crenshaw’s goal is to make visible the multidimensional experiences of discrimination, importantly those of Black women. Since then, intersectionality as a critical tool has become indispensable for any understanding of the impact of systemic racism, sexism, and patriarchal hegemony. Central to our inquiry into anti-neoliberal cinema, however, is the way in which intersectional identity attributes of race, class, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, and age may create bonds and durable alliances. Yet the experience of intersectionality may also provoke responses that undercut its anti-neoliberal potential as a bridge-building between categories of identity and class. There is the risk that belonging to multiple communities may encourage a consumerist sense of oneself, in which one can easily pick and choose aspects of one’s identity in favor of the ones (or one) with the greatest social capital. For this reason, our readings encompass films that articulate resistance, but which may also render visible this ambivalence, and succumb to the neoliberal agenda yet again.

Notes 1 2

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 215. Martin O’Shaughnessy, The New Face of Political Cinema: Commitment in French Film since 1995 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 2.

226 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14

15

16

Screening Solidarity Ibid., 4. Angela McRobbie, Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare (London, UK: Polity Press, 2020), 67, 70. Claudia Breger, Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 211. See O’Shaughnessy, 15–16. Breger, 11. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 210. Kim Kelly, Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor (New York: One Signal Publishers, 2022), 285. Ewa Mazierska, “Introduction: Work, Labor, and Cinema,” in Work in Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition, ed. Ewa Mazierska (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 2. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 9. Colin Barker, “Social Movements and the Possibility of Socialist Revolution,” in Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age, ed. Colin Barker, Gareth Dale, and Neil Davidson (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 27–68, 57. Lucia Granelli, Balázs Pálvölgyi, and Johannes Ziemendorff, “Income and Labour Market Developments and Social Outcomes in Germany and France,” in Europe’s Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality, ed. Georg Fischer and Robert Strauss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 104–50, 119. See, for example, Barker, 362. Barker states: The feminist strike movement started in Poland in October 2006, spread across the Americas and southern Europe, and became a global phenomenon on March 8, 2017. As Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser argue: “This new feminist militancy thus has the potential to overcome the stubborn and divisive opposition between ‘identity politics’ and ‘class politics’.” But overcoming this division will not only depend on the oppressed adopting “class struggle” methods but on working-class organizations making themselves central to overcoming oppression. We make this reference to illustrate far-reaching examples of transnational organizing. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Chicago: University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8.

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239

Index affective labor 3, 223 African-American cinema Black-directed films 160 interracial dating 172 mediatized violence 162–3 “post-Black” individuals 159 white racism, ownership class 163 working-class awareness 165 Worry Free workers 165–6 Afro-Pessimism 159, 165 Agenda 2010 5 Akerman, Chantal 47 Alfie (Gilbert) 91 Algren, Nelson 132 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) 168 alienated visibility 3–4 Almodóvar, Pedro 97 Als wir träumten (While We Were Dreaming, Meyer’s novel) 60 Alternative for Germany (AfD) 12, 61 American Dream 181, 186, 191, 194, 196, 203, 208 American exceptionalism 181, 191 American Psycho (Ellis’s novel) 90–1 American workplace Black/White income gap 193 changing gender roles 181, 210–14 miseries of aging White bodies 187–200 neoliberal ideology 184, 201, 214–15 Social Security 8 Anglophone 78 Anna Karenina 77 anti-neoliberal cinema 3–4, 24, 49, 55 ARTE film channel 57 Babylon Berlin (series) 64 Baden-Württemberg 57 Balagov, Kantemir 10 Bannon, Steve 12 Baptiste, Nathalie 174

Barker, Clive 93 Barnert, Kurt 147 Baskova, Svetlana 97 Becoming Black (Johnson-Spain) 149 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth 16 Bennett, Jane 131 Benya Krik (Vilner) 91 Berlant, Lauren 33, 144, 162, 203 Berlin School of cinema 7, 9, 60 Berlin Wall, fall of 6, 10, 56–7, 64, 134 Biden, Joe 13 biopolitics 11, 96 biopower 11 Black bodies acts of violence 159 Black children-white children comparison 160 Coagula Project 176 eugenicist experiments 167 hypervigilance and weathering 175–7 imagined sexual prowess 173 racial markers 160–1 undercommon living 169 Black Lives Matter movements 148, 224 Black Mirror 102 Black Room (series) 102, 133 Brandenburg, Mark 57 Brandt, Willy 5 Breger, Claudia 1–2, 96, 98, 133, 144, 222–3 Brezhnev, Leonid 134 Brizé, Stéphane 16, 31–7, 39–41, 44, 47, 51 At War (En Guerre) 31–6, 39–41, 47 Brother (Balabanov) 77–8, 84, 98 Brown, Wendy 11–12, 15 Bruder, Jessica 183, 203–4 Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century 181 Buchanan, James McGill 94

Index Burke, Tarana, #MeToo 224 Bush, George H. 8 capitalism 2, 4, 6, 16–17, 19, 23, 51, 55, 57, 62, 74, 79, 92–5, 129, 133, 136, 149, 173, 191 Carter administration 8 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 80 Case, Ann, Deaths of Despair 61 Catherine the Great 120, 134 Charles I 117 Chechen War, second 4, 106 Church of England 117 cinematic cultures. See specific countries Civil Rights Movement 224 Clark, Petula 48 class struggle 2, 6, 9, 11, 29, 33, 37–8. See also working-class Clinton, Bill 8 Cold War 10–11, 96 Collateral (Mann) 89 communism, collapse of 10, 57 The Conformist (Moravia’s novel) 91 Covid-19 pandemic 30, 183 The Cranes are Flying (Kalatozov) 80 Crimea, annexation 78 Cromwell, Oliver 117 Crothers, Scatman 160 Crow, Jim 166, 169 Cusset, François 104 Dardenne brothers 16, 23, 31–3, 44–5, 50–1 Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) 16, 30–2, 34 Dark (series) 148 Dayton, Jonathan, Little Miss Sunshine 182 Deaton, Angus, Deaths of Despair 61 Deleuze, Gilles 49–50 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 173 Depression 212 Der geteilte Himmel (They Divided the Sky, Wolf) 64 Descartes, René 141 Deutscher Filmpreis 63 disability studies 141, 144 Domostroi, sixteenth-century treatise 111

241

Don Quixote 212 Dresen, Andreas 60 Duke, Winston 161 Enemy of the State (Scott) 160 Eucken, Walter 4 European cinema 80 “precarious intimacies” (Weber and Stehle) 142 European Union 10, 56, 221 extraordinary body 141, 156 Faris, Valerie, Little Miss Sunshine 182 Federal Republic of Germany 56, 148 Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare (McRobbie) 127 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Hughes) 91 Fet, Afanasii 86 Filmmakers 4, 10, 18–19, 23, 30, 62, 77–9, 97, 102, 110, 142, 149, 221–2 neoliberal conditions 56–7 Floyd, George 149 Foucault, Michel 11, 60, 144, 184 4 Blocks (series) 155 France. See also Franco-Belgian factory films income inequality 30–1 mass protests 30 national strike 224 Nazi invasion 47 police brutality 36 workforce retention policy 9 Franco-Belgian factory films neoliberal market ideology 36 nostalgic genre 29 structural racism 45 transnational conglomerate 31 typical themes 30 working class exploitation 35–8 Francophone 78 Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (GarlandThomson) 156 free-market policies 4, 15–16, 38, 95, 103, 106, 133 Friedman, Milton 94 Friedman, Thomas L. 6, 57, 95

242

Index

game theory 85–9 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 55, 58, 62 interventionist policy 5 Kohl government 7 official culture 64 political economy 59–62 writers and filmmakers 62 German-language films 142 criminalization of Blackness 151 disabled agency 145, 151–3 neoliberal paradigm 142–4 tragicomedy genre 147 white German audience 149 German society 19, 148, 150, 159 dominant culture 146 Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases 144 social issues 143 German unification in 1990 6, 57, 59, 62 Germany 38, 55–6, 58, 60, 148–9, 193, 224. See also German-language films collective bargaining 6 Nazi defeat 4 response to the 2008 crisis 9 global investors 56 Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Slobodian) 107 globalization 1–2, 6, 14, 51, 57–8, 60, 62, 97, 115 German victims 59–60 homogenizing effects 2 Global North and West 14, 58 Global South and East 14, 56, 58 Godard, Jean-Luc 82 Golafshan, Alireza 20, 143, 145, 147–8, 152, 155 Behinderte Ausländer 148 Die Goldfische 143 interview with Leidmedien 148 Good Bye, Lenin! 7 Govorukhin, Stanislav 17–18, 80–4 Don’t Change the Meeting Place 83–4 policier 83 Gramsci, Antonio 78 Großmarkt 17, 56, 59, 67 Gruvert, Christian 17, 57, 62, 68

Guattari, Félix 49–50 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 173 Gumilev, Lev 119 Hackman, Gene 160 Hagen, Sheri 19, 142–3, 145–51 Auf den zweiten Blick (At Second Glance) 19, 142, 146 Happel, Maria 154 Happy End (Haneke) 57 Hartman, Saidiya 159 Harvey, David 57 Hayek, Friedrich 4, 95, 111, 123 Heitmeyer, Wilhelm 8 Henry VIII 117 Herrmann, Bernard 84 heterotopian space 60–1 Highsmith, Patricia 133 Hiroshima (Resnais) 47 Hitchcock, Alfred 83 Hochschild, Arlie 191–2, 203 Hollande, François 5 Hüller, Sandra 57, 63 human relationships/solidarity 2, 142 neoliberal model of transaction 144, 146 hypermasculinity 62 Ilyin, Ivan 135 industrialization 14, 21, 45, 55, 132 Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IM) 64–5 “In the Penal Colony” (Kafka) 133 Italy, workforce retention policy 9 Jeunes Insoumis*es protest 30 Kalef, Noel 81–2 Kaluuya, Daniel 159 Kant, Immanuel 131 Kichman, Mikhail 114 King, Martin Luther 165 Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich) 82 Klimenko, Yuri 84 Kolbe, Uwe (Hineingeboren poetry) 65 Konstaninopolskii, Grigorii 18, 90–4 Kotz, David 4–5, 8 Krug, Manfred 64

Index Kuleshov, Lev 130 Kurth, Peter 63 Lady Bird (Gerwig) 182 La Manif pour Tous 30 Lammert, Christian 14 Lanskikh, Elena 10 Latynina, Yuliya 95 L’Avventura (Antonioni) 133 Layne, Priscilla 150 Lazzarato, Maurizio 162 Legrand, Michel 84 Le Pen, Marine 12 Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (Hobbes) 116–17 Lowenhaupt-Tsing, Anna 13 Macron, Emmanuel 13, 30, 36, 45 Makarevich, Ivan 90 The Making of Indebted Man (Lazzarato) 173 Maliukova, Larisa 86 Malle, Louis 81–3 Ascenseur pour l’échafaud 81 Mancini, Henry 84 Manifest Destiny 9, 21, 181, 183, 191, 194, 208 Marceau, Sophie 77 Marx, Karl 129 masculinity 13, 20, 22, 46, 58, 66, 74, 85–9 Matza, Tomas, Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Wellbeing in PostSocialist Russia (book) 77, 79 McDormand, Frances 183, 186 McKay, John 77 McRobbie, Angela 222 The Measure of a Man (La Loi du Marché) 30–2, 39–41, 51 Melville, Jean-Pierre 83 Merkel, Angela 13 Meyer, Clemens Die Nacht, die Lichter 56 Herbert (A Heavy Heart) 63 Im Stein (novel) 60 In den Gängen 17, 56, 69, 73 In the Aisles 56, 61–4, 67–70, 73–4

243

Mikhailov, Boris 107–8 Mikhalkov, Nikita 78, 134 Minichmayr, Birgit 146 Mises, Ludwig Von 94 Misselwitz, Helke (Winter Adé Goodbye, Winter, documentary) 65 Morris, Jeremy 95–6 Müller-Armack, Alfred 4 Muratova, Kira 110 My Ántonia (Cather) 194 national film industry 10, 55, 97, 113, 134 NATO alliance 83 Negin, Oleg 109 neoliberalism 1–4 definition 3 disruptive model 20 exploit aspects 17–18 film production 10–11 films opposing 35 as a form of capitalism 57 Franco-Belgian factory films 35, 42–3, 46–9, 51 global marketplace 29 managerial class 31 market ideology 36, 38, 41 modes of resistance 12–15 pharmaceutical self-management 32 post-socialist workplace resistance 55–62, 65–9, 72, 74 racism and ableism 143–5 second micro-effect 7 uncanny cycle of self-transformation 21 western 4–10 workers as critics 15–16 neo-Marxism 2 New World Order 56 Nicholas I 95 nonconforming bodies 141 North America Afropessimistic interpretation 177 antiblack racism 160, 167, 173, 177 class exposed to expulsion 170 racist bank practices 174 slavery’s sexual exploitation 162 working-class Americans 165 Novodvorskaya, Valeriia 95 Nyong’o, Lupita 164

244 Obama, Barack 130, 176 Occupy Wall Street 192 Oh Boy! (Gerster) 147 Ohler, Norman 176 oligarch class 132–3 ordoliberalism 4, 95 The Original Accident (Virilio) 145 Ostmann 58, 62, 74 Otoo, Sharon Dodua 149 Ovsyannikova, Anastasiya 95 Palihaptiya, Chamath 129 Panic Room (Fincher) 160 Paramonov, Boris 118 Pasolini 83 Patterson, Orlando 159 Payne, Alexander Nebraska 181–2, 202, 211 Sideways 182 Peele, Jordan 20, 23, 160–1, 171, 173, 175, 177 Get Out 159, 161, 167–9, 171, 175 Us 161, 167, 175 People of Color (PoCs) 148, 162, 187 Perec, Georges 133 Perseus and Andromeda (Derzhavin’s poem) 134 Philosophy of the Bedroom (Sade) 92 Plakhov, Andrei 78 political cinema 29 “A Presumption of Guilt” (Stevenson) 159 privatization 6, 19, 31, 57–8 Putin, Vladimir 78–9, 94, 135 racial profiling, police 160 Ramadan, Kida Khodr 144, 155 Rand, Ayn 95 Reagan, Ronald 8, 134, 191 Reaganomics 7 Resident Evil and Grand Theft Auto 4 (game) 89 Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age (Barker) 224 Riley, Boots 159–67, 170, 173, 175, 177 Sorry to Bother You 3, 159, 161–8, 173–4, 177 Rogowski, Franz 57

Index Rohmer 83 Rothbard, Murray 94 Russian cinema 77 anti-globalism 78 civilian and military life 85–6 cultural realia 83 masculinity 88 neoliberalism 87, 94–8, 132–6 patriotic education 89 poverty and abjection 79–80 present-day national culture 135 relativistic sensorium 84 technological interruption 105 unfettered capitalism 92 workplace policies 127, 129 Russian Federation 11, 18, 78–9, 81, 84, 92, 95–6, 103, 106, 113, 124 Russian Green Party 115, 130 Russian neorealist cinema 10 Russian Orthodox Church 125 Russian Psycho (Konstantinopolskii) 80, 90–4 Russian Revolution 115 Rutland, Peter 103 Sachs, Jeffrey 57, 79 Sanders, Bernie 9 Sassen, Saskia 14 Schiller, Friedrich 69 Schiller, Karl 5 Schilling, Tom 20, 143, 147, 153 Schroeder, Gerhard 5 science fiction 17, 55, 60, 156 Scorsese, Martin 110 Second World War 106, 110, 149 self-optimization 17, 19–20, 55, 105, 142, 159, 162, 175, 198 Serling, Rod 102 The Shining (Kubrick) 160 shock therapy policy 55, 74, 79 macroeconomics 79 Simon, John 84 Sinyavsky, Andrei 134 slavery contemporary ownership class 172–3 spatial legacies 167–71 Smith, Will 160

Index Smith, Zadie 97 social Darwinism 79, 107, 113, 124 Socialist Unity Party (SED) 64 social justice 12, 15, 19, 23, 123, 155, 165 social market economy 4–5 social movements 61 “The Society of the Spectacle” (Debord’s essay) 105 Sokurov, Aleksandr 97 solidarity neoliberal consequences 22–4 female commodification 43–4 tax 56 worker’s ideology 6 Sontag, Susan 84 Sorokin, Vladimir 120 Soviet Union, breaking of 6, 57, 77 Spanish Civil War 135 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 116 Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization 115 Spur der Steine (Traces of Stone) 64 Stahlberg, Jan Henrik 146 Stalin, Joseph 134 Stanfield, Lakeith 159 state-sponsored or -regulated free market 101 Stein, Jill 130 Steyerl, Hito 29 strikes 14 Stuber, Thomas Herbert (A Heavy Heart) 63 In den Gängen 17, 56, 69, 73 In the Aisles 56, 61–4, 67–70, 73–4 Sukhorukov, Victor 84 Tarantino, Quentin 83, 97 Tarkovsky Mirror 108 Stalker 88–9 Tausend Serpentinen Angst (1,000 Coils of Fear (Wenzel’s novel)) 149 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta 159 A Theory of Justice (Rawl) 94 Thirst (Tiurin) 4, 80, 85–9 Thompson, Derek 200 Thompson, Tessa 163

245

3 Türken und ein Baby (Akkus) 155 Toni Erdmann (Ade) 57, 63 total frontier experience (TFE) 185 Transit (Petzold) 57 transnational corporatization 17, 56 Truffaut, François 97 Trump, Donald 9, 12, 135, 185 Turner, Frederick Jackson 185 Twilight Zone 102 2008 economic crisis 6, 9 UK (United Kingdom) 38, 102, 127 workforce retention policy 9 United States 159, 166, 168, 170, 177, 185, 193–4, 209, 221, 224. See also North America Black Welfare Queen 8 Vainberg, Mоisei 80 Varma, Rashmi 87 Vasiliev, Artem 84 Velvet Revolution 57 Vertov, Dziga 86–7 Volkseigener Betrieb (VEB, worker’s collective) 62 Vormann, Boris 14 Waldschmidt, Anne 144 Wark, McKenzie 13, 29 Warsaw Pact states 57 Washington Consensus 103, 107 The Waste Land (Eliot, T. S.) 133 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 191 Weekend (Govorukhin) 80–4 Werk ohne Autor (Never Look Away, Donnersmarck) 147 Wertmüller, Lina 97 West German 6–7 policies, neoliberal capitalism 55 Whitaker, Forest 160 white privileges 2, 154, 172 Wöllisch, Luisa 147 women labor force 11, 58–9, 65 workforce 3, 58, 67, 187, 192, 221 human dimension and hermeneutics 55

246

Index

nonunion 9 socialist ethics 6 working-class 16, 20, 23, 42, 49, 150, 181–2, 191, 205, 211 eastern phenomenon 7 exploitation 2 gig economy 21 white 9, 21 workplace 14, 16–17, 19–21, 23, 29, 33, 39, 45, 51, 141, 145, 159, 162 acts of resistance 59–60 African-American cinema 159, 165, 171, 174, 176–7 gendered attributes 58–9 pro-socialism 59–60, 62–4, 69–72 Russian movies 126–7, 129, 131, 135 socialist system 58 xenophobia 62 Yellow Vests 30 Yeltsin, Boris 103, 132

Zhang, C. Pam 174 Zhao, Chloé 21–2, 181, 183–6, 192–5, 197–9, 208, 214–15 Nomadland 181, 186–7, 190, 206, 211 Zisel’son, Mark 86–7 Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room (Dyer) 108 Zvyagintsev, Andrei 10, 79–80, 98 Banishment 105, 108, 133 Black Room (TV series) 102–4, 133 Busido 103 The Choice (Vybor) 103–4 Elena 103, 105–13, 121, 124–6, 136 Leviathan 103, 113–24, 128, 130, 133–6 Loveless 103–5, 116, 123–36 Obscure 102 Pribrezhnyi (“Shoreline” or “Coastal”) 116 The Return 88, 104–5, 133 Two Whales 118

247

248