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Slouching toward Dystopia
(también disponible en Español)
BRAINTRUSTdv interviews Carlos Atanes
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In FAQ, writer-director Carlos Atanes envisions a Europe dominated by a hygiene-obsessed matriarchy. Digital video and the Internet have become the tools of the resistance; criminals are forced to choose their own grisly punishments. A Spanish production shot in Paris in order to increase its alienation effect, FAQ belongs to an older tradition of cerebral science fiction which tends to shun visual effects in favor of provocative ideas.
In the following interview, Atanes discusses the political implications of FAQ and examines its inevitable relationship to the dystopias of 1984, Brazil, Fahrenheit 451, and "Minority Report."
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BRAINTRUSTdv: You're Spanish, and this is a Spanish production, so why did you decide to shoot in Paris with mostly French actors and dialogue?
Carlos Atanes: If a totalitarian government were to take control of the United States, the decisions would be made from the same place as now: Washington, D.C. There would be other viable options, of course, but why make life difficult? The state structure is conceived so that the power flows from the capitals. During the Spanish Civil War, Franco established a provisional rebel government at Burgos, but as soon as the Republic fell, he moved to Madrid. Nowadays Europe is politically decentralized, but France and Germany are the economic driving forces of the Union. FAQ describes a very plausible geopolitical future: Southern Europe is turned into a desert, and the decisions are still made from the usual places. I could have chosen Berlin, too, but Paris offered several advantages: some icons that would be very useful to me (Nôtre Dame and the Eiffel Tower); the nearness to Spain; a language more accessible to Spanish actors. On the other hand, I was very interested in using a foreign language which would be unfamiliar to an audience in Spain but also to the French-speaking audience, because the non-French actors who have roles in the movie exaggerate their strange pronunciation. It generates an alienation effect which greatly enriches the movie's atmosphere, I think. It's also very suggestive of the contradiction born in the use of a language as sensual as French (used for writing the best erotic literature of the last three hundred years) to describe the society of FAQ, which is so cold and de-eroticized.
Anyway, it's a frequently asked question. That FAQ was not shot in Castilian or Catalán surprises people, and here in Barcelona some logomaniacs even interpret it as a little "betrayal"—which reaffirms my decision! But there are always people who, after seeing it, and after the initial surprise, understand it's a good choice.
BTdv: You've made the point that in dystopian works of fiction, the rebel-hero doesn't need to succeed. He is there to guide us as Virgil guides Dante through the Inferno. That's a nice analogy. But at the end of FAQ, the protagonist Nono does succeed by entering into another reality where he can be with Angeline, his dead lover. It reminded me of Sam Lowry's fantasy sequence at the end of Brazil.
CA: It's an open ending, it's a closed ending, and it's a meta-ending about movie endings.
I understand why you see a likeness to Brazil's ending, because they're both misleading, locating the spectator in a twilight zone between the story's "objective" reality and the protagonist's "subjective" reality. However, I think (with all due respect to Brazil, a movie that I love, that I consider a total masterpiece, and that I think we have to be kneeling in order contemplate) that FAQ tries to go beyond that in its ending because it also implicates the spectator's "objective" reality into its twilight zone.
As with many other things in FAQ, the ending confuses part of the audience. And it's very odd seeing that frequently the confusion changes into discomfort. It happens because the denouement introduces a catastrophic fracture in the narrative, but also in the movie itself. It jumps out of genre, and people who demand orthodox narrative conventions find it extremely annoying.
BTdv: You've eloquently stated, "The protagonists of [dystopian stories] are always faced with a duality of escape. One is exterior, physical, spatial, and geographic. The other, interior, where they are plagued with doubt about the reality in which they live, the degree of reality in that reality..." Do you think this duality is present in contemporary life?
CA: Of course it's present in our contemporary life, and the leisure-time industry pretends to completely manage the two modes of escape, both exterior and interior. In terms of exterior escape, the truth is it's already bad enough, and it's getting worse. The earth's surface is a limited area, and it gets more and more difficult to find a place that isn't hopelessly besmirched by tourist hordes. Beyond that is outer space, but I'm afraid that, at this rate, the first man who steps on Ganymede will be welcomed by the parking attendant of a hotel chain. We still have the possibility of an interior escape, which we have to defend against the culture industry's desire to colonize.
BTdv: Which works of dystopian fiction present the two modes of escape most successfully?
CA: Some dystopian fantasies can, in principle, show only one way of escape. In Logan's Run or THX1138, for example, the main characters physically escape from their confinement. But the really strong dystopias always show us both modes, the dual flight, as two sides of the same coin, but what's really important is what happens "inside." What happens "outside" is a reflection of the interior conflict which supplies action (a very important thing in a movie, as well). Guy Montag, Winston Smith or Sam Lowry (the protagonists in Fahrenheit 451, 1984 and Brazil) take refuge in books, a diary and dreams respectively, before deciding to join the insurrection. More exactly, it is in that inward process where the rebellion forms and is carried out. So in these three works I'm using as examples, the totalitarian pressure and repression is mainly exerted over the rebel's psyche (and in each of these cases there is nowhere else to go). The plots, the conflicts and the endings occur more inside their heads than outside of them. Montag flees to a "human book" community (readers who memorize forbidden books), Smith is forced to reset his mind, and Lowry is absorbed by his fantasies.
Putting Fahrenheit 451 aside, because I think it doesn't measure up to the other two, let's look at something: 1984 and Brazil's main characters, in spite of their "objective" failure to flee, are liberated from the nightmare in some sense. In Smith's mind, Big Brother transforms from the object of his hatred to the object of his love. In Lowry's mind, dream prevails over reality. Nevertheless they are tragic endings because we would need these "liberations" as objective triumphs too. But they are meaningful because they show us that both methods of escape are complementary, and it's impossible to find true liberation through only one method. This is the reason that Logan's Run is fallacious.
BTdv: You made an adaptation of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" in 1993. Kafka was also subject to dystopian visions.
CA: With respect to Kafka, it is difficult to escape his shadow, but I didn't consciously feel his work as an influence in the making of FAQ.
We can't avoid being equally influenced by our likes and dislikes. While shooting FAQ I was more aware than ever of these influences, maybe because I had them in front of me, and it seemed natural to use them to my advantage rather than pretend they didn't exist. "Conscious" influences were the science fiction films of the seventies and several dystopian models, but none in particular, since there seems to be a pattern common to all of them. I obviously have certain preferences, and the aforementioned works are among them. I should add that the gloomy tone that shaped movies in the seventies, so vividly captured in movies like The Omega Man, Silent Running or Soylent Green, was a compelling influence.
BTdv: Most dystopian works focus on an exaggeration of a contemporary trend—recently portrayed dystopias seem to have a lot to do with the ethics of cloning. Your movie doesn't seem to be an overt attack on anything, yet you've said it's about the ultimate triumph of political correctness. Somehow that seems too obvious or basic a reading of what's onscreen.
CA: It's difficult to answer this question because every country has its own version of political correctness. For example, in Barcelona the term civismo has lately acquired a very peculiar meaning, close to fascivismo, but it's very difficult to explain it to a non-Barcelonan.
If FAQ doesn't attack in an obvious way it's because in today's politics nothing is very obvious. The "bad" cop of political incorrectness has been replaced by the "good" cop of political correctness. But it's a mistake to forget that the first, although not personally involved in the interrogation, stands behind the two-way mirror, club in hand, waiting to enter. And without a doubt he will burst in when we tell the "good" cop that, despite his pleasant rhetoric, we disagree with him.
The concept of political correctness is a lie, a manipulation of language. When we're not allowed to call something by its name, at the risk of being reprimanded, we lose control of our language, and our thoughts are controlled. Our grand ideals have become dangerously immersed in the terrain of "prevention." Philip K. Dick illustrates this very well in his "Minority Report." To beat up a delinquent is incorrect, but to stop him before he commits the crime, and try him for the crime that has not been committed, is correct. It's enough to know that his intentions were bad. To delay the broadcast of a television gala by six seconds in order to censor inconveniences is correct. The preventative war is correct (and is thus no longer War) and positive discrimination is correct (and is thus no longer Discrimination). All of this is correct because it's done for Good. But the good little angels of politics are following Machiavelli's maxim, for which he was so criticized: the end justifies the means. The logical conclusion of this would be the persecution of thought crimes. When the things 1984 warned us about seemed to be surpassed, the result was that they came into vogue.
And how is this shaped in FAQ? Well, carrying to the extreme some actual "correct" slogans: for example the one that says the world would be better (and not equal) if all of the presidential seats were occupied by women (as if power would corrupt them less); the one that understands that Common Good cooks in the pot of hypernormativization; the one that condemns all pornography as a degradation of the person (for the moralist, sex itself is degrading); the one that wants to pasteurize everything, label everything, to snatch our authority over our own bodies and health, to defend us against ourselves; the one that equates virility to male chauvinism or fascism; really, the one that condemns the natural (the "abominable") in favor of the artificial (the "civilized").
FAQ is a critique of the masked stupidity of progress, which promises liberation and only castrates. I believe that in FAQ the excess of political correctness manifests itself in the judgment sequence in which criminals are asked to choose their own punishment (can we imagine a greater triumph of Civilization?). That amiability hides a macabre and perverse cruelty, doesn't it? If you don't pay attention to the signs, you will only see the dark side when you watch the cop with the club behind the mirror. Then you will know what awaits you.
BTdv: The acronym "F.A.Q." has come to represent a certain manifestation of bureaucracy, but in a successful totalitarian state, one imagines there would be no tolerance for any kind of questioning. Which makes the title ironic, even funny. What inspired the title?
CA: Oh, nothing. The title arrives or doesn't arrive, but it's very hard for me to look for one. The acronym suddenly turned up without much thought. It's not the product of irony. It's simpler: F.A.Q. (Frequently Asked Questions) served some important functions. It's an "international" term, so it avoids the nuisance of translation. It refers to the Internet, so it's linked to the subversive Web that appears in the movie. It also refers to the pressing questions that we all consider at some time in our lives (these are the questions that the character Angeline thinks about). Phonetically it resembles "fuck," and that's very funny, above all because sex is conspicuous by its absence in the film. And somehow it's a homological term, because it has very frequently provoked questions about why the title is FAQ. So it's also a meta-title, a title about the title.
But I really like your comment about the intolerance of questioning in a totalitarian state, and I'll incorporate it into my list of reasons, if you don't mind.
BTdv: THX1138 is also set in a hygiene-obsessed future where sex is forbidden. It also resembles FAQ in its spare use of visual effects, its resourceful set design, and its taut intellectual edifice. Do you think lower budgets encourage science fiction filmmakers to be more inventive?
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CA: Xavier Tort, the actor who plays Nono in FAQ and is also the composer, says that people who confront the challenge of shooting an independent movie, without money, with everything against them, do it because they really have something to say. I'm not sure it always happens this way, but it's certainly more common than in the big-budget movies, where the reasons you're encouraged to shoot something are usually limited to a monetary payoff. On the other hand, a lack of resources inspires the imagination. Not only when filming, but when doing anything. If a child has only clothes to play with, he will |
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inevitably be more inventive than a child who has all the toys he wants. He must make his own doll, or he must imagine he has one. If he doesn't, he won't be able to play. It's almost a question of survival.
I often go to the cinema with my friends and, usually, if the movie disappoints us, someone comments that maybe it would have been better with a larger budget. Nevertheless, I often see films that certainly would have been more interesting without their large budgets. If I prefer seventies science fiction, it's because the special effects were at the service of a story. Someday I hope to shoot with a larger budget, but when that day comes I'll try to avoid the seductive song of the computer animation sirens. Nowadays it's possible. Shyamalan does it!
BTdv: Nono uses a modified version of the Internet which is outlawed. He watches a fairly chaste version of "pornography," which mainly depicts people touching one another. When he comes across a production of one of these videos out in the desert, the actors are accusing the director of "objectifying" them. But there doesn't seem to be an overbearing message about the Internet or pornography—in fact, it feels more funny than serious. Do you have concerns about the future of the Internet or the impact of pornography?
CA: For me, the future of the Internet inspires more hope than worry.
The impact of pornography doesn't worry me. I have always been a defender of pornography, and I will continue to defend it. I don't see what harm it can do. Pornography is the least responsible for the sexual repression we are all under. It's a logical and necessary escape route. It seems hypocritical to equate sex with violence or even to condemn sex more harshly. For example, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a video game (ultraviolent!), has been taken off the market because a secret sex scene was discovered! To me this is a moral aberration.
That sequence you're talking about in FAQ is a joke, of course. The tolerance level is so low in the world described in the film that the scandalous thing is not what we know as pornography but innocent human touch. The same logic that sees objectification and indignity in pornography must also see it in innocent touching. From this arises the protest of two "conscientious" actors—two actors who will soon reveal themselves as traitors.
BTdv: FAQ depicts digital video technology as the voice of The Cause, a revolutionary movement which illegally broadcasts video images—such as the innocent touching you describe—in order to challenge the laws of the matriarchy. Andres Tapia-Urzua has talked about having used video technology as a tool of revolt in Chile. Do you think DV has a subversive role in contemporary Europe?
CA: No, not at this time, I'm sorry to say. Analog video didn't have its day, and digital video isn't having it now. The fault is not video's but Europeans'. Subversion in Europe only occurs in two ways these days: in self-concerned and paranoid marginal positions that don't take a side; or in fleeting celebration, when people go to the streets exchanging mobile phone messages with the intention of taking down the government, as happened recently in Spain. The next day everything returns to normal.
If there's anything that looks like Romero's zombies, it's Europe. It's the deadest part of The Land of the Dead. It has no pulse. It walks, but it's not alive. Everyone makes digital movies in Europe, but there's no subversion in it, just complacency. It doesn't try to change anything, just sell a product to television. European culture, European thought, European art have thrown in the towel. There are exceptions, of course. There always are. But I don't believe digital technology can take us out of this miasma. Does it seem that I've lost faith in Europe? I hope I'm wrong, but I'm pessimistic. That's why I made FAQ: for me it's a critique. For Europeans with a European mentality, it's a tantrum.
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