"Detachment" by Tony Kaye (2011)
“Assimilate ubiquitously. Doublethink. To deliberately believe in lies, while knowing they’re false. Examples of this in everyday life: “oh, I need to be pretty to be happy. I need surgery to be pretty. I need to be thin, famous, fashionable.” Our young men today are being told that women are whores, bitches, things to be screwed, beaten, shit on, and shamed. This is a marketing holocaust. Twenty-fours hours a day for the rest of our lives, the powers that be are hard at work dumbing us to death. So to defend ourselves, and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes, we must learn to read. To stimulate our own imagination, to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief systems. We all need skills to defend, to preserve, our own minds.”
It had been a significant time since I found a film that I found meaningful in all of its helplessness and honest expression. When watching Detachment I found it difficult to believe that I was watching a film at all, that I felt that I was already inside a dark place without the clarity that emerges in most linear cinema narratives. It tells the story of a substitute teacher who begins to take a class in a school where the walls are crumbling around it, where the students are failing their classes and the teachers are being failed by a system. The film does not pretend to evoke the wider picture but rather draws the lines of single characters in focus which sometimes lapses. The story is in part the retelling of Edgar Allen Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, in which a haunted place remains forever haunted, but in that condition finds itself.
The way in which people are perched upon the brink of chaos, but what this is is a description of life itself; expectation leads to disappointment, because the truth is that beyond the veil there is more of the unexpected. The only possibility is that we maintain a balance within ourselves, and that is more the reason why we have memory, why we have selective realities: as protection from the outside. Detachment is a portrait of a person which significantly is drawn into black and white relief, smeared with the illusions we present other people with of emptiness, of a certain mystery to which we must draw ourselves in to another person's world. The truth that is not always quite represented in cinema is found in this existence of memory and layers of personality and experience; something that is an impossibility to show, except perhaps in that way that language or culture is learned; by making the viewer think about it. That initial quote which is a reference to George Orwell's 1984 refers to how each of us "doublethinks"; that is, we author our own containment for survival, yet we claim an interest in the other. In this way, with our own memories and safety mechanisms, we establish this other. We create the individual, and of course the individual maintains, and becomes a sense of immanence.
In this way Adrien Brody is phenomenal, in a way that is literal and meaningful; he portrays a man who has cultivated a strong identity, but only as an exterior. Inside, there are vague and blurred edges to which he cannot find consolation, a perpetual solitude and interior House of Usher which he knows is desolate and emptied out of youth and wonder, and rather seeks a certain preservation which is darkened by realities and the force of time. His world outside has been a prolonged appearance of control and of humoured balance, and his work with children is so dramatically different to teachers who are permanent because he is not weighed down with the concerns of responsibility, which slowly reach into him over the course of the film. His encounters with prostitution and his initial apathy towards a young girl he meets soliciting sex on the street slowly efface as he begins to lose his need to be responsible for his dying father, whose memory itself is failing him. The emptiness that is felt in a character who gradually finds that painful experience can find not comfort except by being purged from time is of course painful and immensely solitary. His portrayal of a character whose world is controlled yet anhedonic and without love, is one that is not encountered often in cinema, and relies on a truthful performance.
These issues that are dealt with in this film, such as the cruelty but the healing power of time, and how that makes life seem irrational, the possibility of living alongside hate and the lack of empowerment for women, the cruelty of memories that are left unresolved, and carry a weight that is physical and denies life, are going to hurt people and remind me of the emptiness that reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace left me with. That unconventional kindness that is realistic and denies reason, because reason itself is an illusion of structure and permanence. Imagination extends further than our reason will permit, and it is impossible to get closer to reality without a certain pragmatics, which is rooted in internal suffering and a gradual realisation that we are all crumbling on the inside because of the effects of age, and of the fading memories of the people we have left on the outside. That gasp that releases vague recollections and memories into redeeming dust towards the close of the film, replaced with silence in the case of Brody's father, and with the release of authored containment within Brody's character, is what makes life a miracle, yet it does not seem to be.
The decline of reason and the collapse of schooling in America, the onset of prostitution and darkness and the overwhelming nature of a bureaucracy which forgets people and situations are reasons why one would watch this film: it does not offer an answer but it strangely offers an escape from isolation.
The way in which people are perched upon the brink of chaos, but what this is is a description of life itself; expectation leads to disappointment, because the truth is that beyond the veil there is more of the unexpected. The only possibility is that we maintain a balance within ourselves, and that is more the reason why we have memory, why we have selective realities: as protection from the outside. Detachment is a portrait of a person which significantly is drawn into black and white relief, smeared with the illusions we present other people with of emptiness, of a certain mystery to which we must draw ourselves in to another person's world. The truth that is not always quite represented in cinema is found in this existence of memory and layers of personality and experience; something that is an impossibility to show, except perhaps in that way that language or culture is learned; by making the viewer think about it. That initial quote which is a reference to George Orwell's 1984 refers to how each of us "doublethinks"; that is, we author our own containment for survival, yet we claim an interest in the other. In this way, with our own memories and safety mechanisms, we establish this other. We create the individual, and of course the individual maintains, and becomes a sense of immanence.
In this way Adrien Brody is phenomenal, in a way that is literal and meaningful; he portrays a man who has cultivated a strong identity, but only as an exterior. Inside, there are vague and blurred edges to which he cannot find consolation, a perpetual solitude and interior House of Usher which he knows is desolate and emptied out of youth and wonder, and rather seeks a certain preservation which is darkened by realities and the force of time. His world outside has been a prolonged appearance of control and of humoured balance, and his work with children is so dramatically different to teachers who are permanent because he is not weighed down with the concerns of responsibility, which slowly reach into him over the course of the film. His encounters with prostitution and his initial apathy towards a young girl he meets soliciting sex on the street slowly efface as he begins to lose his need to be responsible for his dying father, whose memory itself is failing him. The emptiness that is felt in a character who gradually finds that painful experience can find not comfort except by being purged from time is of course painful and immensely solitary. His portrayal of a character whose world is controlled yet anhedonic and without love, is one that is not encountered often in cinema, and relies on a truthful performance.
These issues that are dealt with in this film, such as the cruelty but the healing power of time, and how that makes life seem irrational, the possibility of living alongside hate and the lack of empowerment for women, the cruelty of memories that are left unresolved, and carry a weight that is physical and denies life, are going to hurt people and remind me of the emptiness that reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace left me with. That unconventional kindness that is realistic and denies reason, because reason itself is an illusion of structure and permanence. Imagination extends further than our reason will permit, and it is impossible to get closer to reality without a certain pragmatics, which is rooted in internal suffering and a gradual realisation that we are all crumbling on the inside because of the effects of age, and of the fading memories of the people we have left on the outside. That gasp that releases vague recollections and memories into redeeming dust towards the close of the film, replaced with silence in the case of Brody's father, and with the release of authored containment within Brody's character, is what makes life a miracle, yet it does not seem to be.
The decline of reason and the collapse of schooling in America, the onset of prostitution and darkness and the overwhelming nature of a bureaucracy which forgets people and situations are reasons why one would watch this film: it does not offer an answer but it strangely offers an escape from isolation.
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