Regarding Boarding Gate (2007), Gina Telaroli argues, "Assayas, like Fassbinder, has chosen to focus on a female protagonist who wields her sexuality as a weapon in order to explore the economic, aesthetic and political issues of his time" (172). It should come as no surprise then that the film's representation of sexuality shows both "icy distance" as well as the "intimate" and "vulnerable" - paradoxical characteristics of Assayas' films, as identified by Shaviro (39). Certainly, the film captures the act two people "making love" but it also frames this act in a colder, more transactional context. I'll analyze a few key moments that explore this idea.
For starters, it's almost immediately revealed that Miles (Michael Madsen) had Sandra (Asia Argento) seduce other businessmen. The act of being, in some sense, cuckolded is apparently a turn on for Miles. However, its goals aren't strictly sexual - they're also economic, intended to pry insider secrets from the other businessmen. When Sandra brings this up, Miles shouts at her that he didn't care about the business secrets. Perhaps he doesn't want to be seen as someone who simply used Sandra for economic gain, more prone to feigning romance than actually experiencing it. Regardless, he reaffirms the economic nature of their relationship in a different sense when he tells Sandra, "You liked being mine." Framing their relationship as a matter of ownership further suggests that, for Assayas, sexuality and romantic attraction are always transactional and property-oriented.
The intimacy/distance paradox Shaviro discusses is captured best in the film during the final scene between Sandra and Miles. The frame repeatedly shows Sandra in focus in the foreground - staring away from Miles - while Miles is out of focus in the background. They're frequently talking about intimate things, like whether any of their love remains, but the difference in lens focus between them, their placement in different planes of the image, and the fact that they aren't facing each other suggests that they are distant from one another. Intimacy, it seems, is a thing in the blurry past. It's literally behind Sandra in the frame. Even here, as in the first scene, the lines between desire and economic gain are blurred, as Miles is unsure whether Sandra came back for the money he owes her or to reignite their romance. He even held the money back as a bargaining chip, one he hoped would return their "spark."
This film, perhaps more than any other we've watched in the course, demonstrates the difficulty of loving without money. Love is always mediated by money in some respect, a depressing thought to think about.
As always, a nice post by you with smart observations. I like the quick cinematic analysis you offer as well as how you mobilize the readings. An important point Shaviro makes--and your comments align with it--is that the film depicts or reflects a society of "immaterial labor" and"cognitive capitalism" as one that "continually transforms affect into currency (and vice versa). At every point in the film, we are thrown back onto passion. But this passion is inseparable from financial calculation and business management." Desire and capital, money and love/passion are, in OA's view, no longer distinguishable but part of the same immanent circuit, are immanent to one another. Love is not the other to capital, not the "outside" to a system that has done away, precisely, with any outside. As Hardt and Negri, among others, argue, in the age of "Empire" there's only the plane of capital left. (In their hands that actually becomes the condition of possibility for revolution....)
As Eric discussed, this film, out of all that we have viewed, most directly addresses the relationship between love and money. The most general sentence in which I could describe the plot? A dynamic female protagonist attempts to make financial gains in two different relationships.
Shaviro best summarizes the paradox present in Boarding Gate when he states, “The space of transnational capital is at the same time extremely abstract, and yet suffocatingly close and intimate” (36). In simpler terms, global economy and competition affects the day-to-day in ways we might not even be cognizant of, and while this system is complicated and essentially incomprehensible, it is consistently touches our lives. Assyas, though, tends to focus on (well, at least in Demonlover and this film) the goings on of the system itself and those who intentionally attempt to reap the benefits. Like Diane in Demonlover, Sandra intentionally attempts to make it as a savvy businesswoman, involving herself in shady dealings in the hopes that she may one day open a nightclub in Beijing.
While Diane became slightly entangled with one man in her company, Sandra became deeply involved with two different men in the hopes of financial success. The first man, Miles, begged questions. I could not help but assume that she had dated him for money, but we later learn that she truly loved him – when he was rich. Once Miles has lost his fortune, however, Sandra no longer cares deeply for him: she tells him that her attraction for him now is purely sexual. It appears glaringly obvious that she only had feelings for his finances, but audiences may want to believe in Sandra more than that. Perhaps, however, that directly answers the question: No, you cannot love without money. Lester, on the other hand, ends the film with what I imagine is a fortune in a briefcase. He expresses interest in sending for Sandra someday, and Sandra fails to commit murder #2 when she sees the back of his head. Perhaps the back of her dead friend’s Lisa is burned in her brain at the moment, but it is more likely that she genuinely loves him.
The visual aspect I most noticed (aside from the wonderful use of jerky, quick camera motions while Sandra was escaping the murder scene, which made us feel as panicked and hurried as her) was the use of glass and windows throughout the film. I do not have a definitive idea of how or why it was used so frequently, but we first see it in Miles’ office. Essentially all of the walls are made of glass, which is even more noticeable when Sandra reveals and touches herself on Miles’ desk, surrounded by nothing but clear walls. No one, however, seems to notice. I guess it could visually represent the paradox Shaviro stated above.
What complicates matters further, perhaps, is that Sandra appears to have been raped (she claims that's when she stopped loving Miles, and it's unclear whether at that time his fortunes were already dwindling); and that Lester truly seems to care for Sandra (as he claims that he'll meet up with her not to HER but in her ABSENCE--thus, as viewers we should be inclined to read this as a truthful rather than deceptive statement).
As with everyone, any given use of color or props--such as windows or mirrors--doesn't INHERENTLY "mean" anything. But it surely always DOES something, if nothing else to our viewing experience. For example, windows "frame" and mirrors "reflect." They can expand our view of the filmic world or double them (intensify what we see), or, as the case may be, limit (a window frame can also cut us off from the world outside the frame). An occasional use of a window or mirror may not be noticeable and thus not "do" much; repeated, obsessive, use of it, in contrast, might very well raise this to level of consciousness for us, thus affecting how we make sense of the goings-on. One might also point out that this use of windows etc is pretty common for "postmodern" architecture. Think of bank buildings etc: glass everywhere, which is supposed to suggest transparency but really creates so much reflection that what we see is "us" rather than "inside": it's an illusion of transparency when what it really produces is opacity.
Looking back at the film Boarding Gate (2007), the cinematography moves in a fast pace action cut; that reveals Sandra (Asia Argento) in organized crime, seduction for power, and drug dealing atmosphere. The film opening shot uses an out-of-focus shot that grabs the attention of the viewers. The sounds impact the action and characters emotion; it builds thrilling scenes of tension between characters. The use of mirrors and reflections makes the viewer jump into action, following the sequence of the action through the rugged handheld, racing intra-cutting camera shots. Sandra plays the protagonist, the sensitive qualities the film distributes of her, in the beginning, dehumanize her character. It looks, as if, she is getting tossed around by her boss Miles Rennberg (Micheal Madsen). As the film carries on, the audience is informed of the manipulating intention for the power stricken influence, to move on with her life. Sandra is soon with another man Lester Wang (Carl Ng), and the organization of the crime she commits. He helps her get away from the city not to get caught, as he is thinking she love him. What "one can not live without money" is establish in believing Sandra was truly in love with Miles but ends up killing him for the happiness of starting a new. The contracts she makes for killing pay her great deal of money. Shaviro states “Prostitution both constitutes human intimacy as a commercial transaction and smooths the way for other sorts of commercial transaction.” (47) -Compares the sex driven society to new economic boundaries, even though it’s said to be the “oldest profession.” The film reveals money to be transferable into any exchange and how the universal quantities of crime drive the power of money. Sandra’s crimes go without question, but in the end not killing Lester brings up lots of loose ends. She shot the first ex-lover Miles but chose not to kill the other, why is that? Is it because Lester helped her out of the killing of Miles and decided not to shoot him out of sympathy? Or does it suggest that Lester has something more to offer that Sandra can take?
In Boarding Gate, Assayas once again explores the world’s global system and how connected but “unrepresentable” it is (Shaviro 36). Sandra is a character looking for a way out of her current life and has gone through many different lengths to make it happen. Assayas incorporates this aspect in how he describes globalization. He does this by showing the many different plans Sandra uses to escape. At first, she sells drugs to make her getaway and once that does not work, she then goes to Lester, and then Sue, and then finally Kay for help. Her plan is continuously changing, showing how liquid, as Bauman would put it, Sandra’s plans are. Just like how globalization is rootless and always changing, no one thing can represent it. Although Sandra’s plans are always changing, they are somehow still connected. After her drug deal gone wrong situation, Lester was there to help her. Lester had connections that led Sandra to Sue and Kay, who eventually helped her escape. According to the film, Sandra represents globalization and this is especially shown through the many places she ends up in. Each plan she goes through happens in a different city or country and many different languages are spoken has she switches from plan to plan. Each of the people helping her also takes her to these different countries. Overall, Assayas shows how globalization is continually changing but still intertwined through Sandra. Through Sandra’s continuous quest to finally escape her life, no place she ends up in is able to give her a home feeling (Shaviro 46). That is why the film always seems to be continuously moving without giving the audience a break, just like how Sandra never receives a break. Tensions continue to rise, as she interacts with Miles in his house, until the scene we all expect happens, Sandra killing Miles. This unending movement and Sandra’s inability to find a home also relates to money. During the scenes of Sandra traveling from country to country, she seemed as if she had little money. Others were the source of her getting some money to give her the potential to find a home, however due to her shift in help from person to person, she is unable to garner more wealth to establish herself in one place. Also, money is the one thing that is able to help her restart her life and without it, other characters repeatedly tell her how she will not be able to get anywhere. With money, she can buy her happiness, but without it, she cannot escape her likely prison time or even death.
Consider elaborating on the issue of the inability to represent globalization etc. HOW does the film communicate this and/or try to get us to see/understand?
In analyzing some of the films of Olivier Assayas, we’ve certainly established an ample body of evidence that Assayas is interested in the impacts of globalization. As in demonlover and Clean, Boarding Gate sees its characters move among countries and continents as if it were of little more cultural significance than crossing a city on an errand or to work (which is clearly Assayas’s view on the matter, given the quotation which opens Gina Telaroli’s essay “Anywhere and Everywhere”); the audience, too, is again confronted by a world in which people are living “in environments defined by capital and the greater world through which it flows” (172). The thematic elements of these three films even lend the idea that they could be characterized as trilogy, not only in respect to the fact that the action of each film is situated inside the phenomenon of globalization, but that each film makes its protagonist a woman (women having, of course, been marginalized and subjugated throughout history and across cultures—and the symptoms of globalization, making models of subjugation and marginalization anew, could very well be most usefully diagnosed through the perspectives of those who have been the historical victims of said social ills); finally, there is the fact that these films maintain a continuity in terms of their relation to the thriller genre, though in a subverted sense. Since we’ve already established some of these points, in this post I intend to simply dive into globalization as a phenomenon, and then perhaps a bit deeper in terms of content and form via Boarding Gate, and its relation to Assayas’s two preceding films. In terms of neoliberalism, there seems to be a point where desire and capital become conflated. From the get-go of civilization, we have used capital to satisfy our basic needs and desires (it probably is not mere coincidence that written language and accountancy seems to have developed in roughly the same era); but when the generation of capital develops primacy, more is never enough. The new economy which presently drives the world touches nearly everybody on the globe, codifying a set of values which places greater import (IMPORT—fortuitous meaning exchange, given that Boarding Gate briefly tracks the importation and exportation of goods, legal and illegal) upon the generation and acquisition of capital—more so than it does social bonds. The value of an individual is no longer something intrinsic. An individual’s value becomes synonymous with their usefulness in the project of money making; in turn, the devaluation of individuals as human beings necessarily erodes the quality of any given relationship that was traditionally determined to be based upon emotion or mutual respect.
"the symptoms of globalization, making models of subjugation and marginalization anew, could very well be most usefully diagnosed through the perspectives of those who have been the historical victims of said social ills" : good point.
2nd par is good. The question to ask, perhaps, is whether the film merely judges all of this negatively--a question one might ask since aesthetically speaking it seems to be fascinated by these processes and goes out of its way to get them "right" as it were....
The entirety of the film Boarding Gate, with its array of unfaithful lovers and betrayals among business colleagues, illustrates this point through numerous scenes and plot-twists. But there is a bit of dialogue which leaps to the forefront of my mind as doing a particularly wonderful job of emphasizing the collapse of what, hitherto, we’ve probably thought of as more-or-less stable social bonds, at least historically speaking. It takes place between Sandra (Asia Argento) and Sue (Kelly Lin). Essentially, Sue confuses sex or getting “turned on” with the deeper bond of love. Sandra immediately recognizes this category error, and doesn’t hesitate to tell Sue that love is not the same thing as getting turned on (2007). This small moment between them seems to characterize what Shaviro is speaking of when he describes “the space of transnational capital” being “suffocatingly close” on the one hand, while remaining “extremely abstract” (36). Now for the intriguing bit: the framing of skylines. Interspersed among some of the frenetic action scenes and moments of fraught dialogue among its characters, Assayas offers several shots of skylines in his film. While scene shots have commonly been used to orient the audience to the scene in which the action of a film takes place, it seems that Assayas has an entirely different intention. Assayas’s skyline never tells us definitively that this is Hong Kong; it is a scene merely choked by buildings which obscure the sky, the limit, a potentiality. Then, in one shot, we see a building with neon lights. The lights, as they flicker on and off, seem to build a structure, a diagram, but immediately collapse again. Is this Assayas’s critique? That all is ephemeral, subject to a decay, followed by a renewal—an onerous repetition? One might believe so, given the content of demonlover. But in fact, one might see something brighter; in this film there is a regaining of relational order. In the final scene, we see Sandra about to kill Lester as she follows him. But she halts. She knows what true affection is. She understands it in a way that, earlier, her explanation to Sue rings as a basic truth. The camera framing her goes out of focus. She may be lost geographically, but she has at least some compass point of her values.
Regarding Boarding Gate (2007), Gina Telaroli argues, "Assayas, like Fassbinder, has chosen to focus on a female protagonist who wields her sexuality as a weapon in order to explore the economic, aesthetic and political issues of his time" (172). It should come as no surprise then that the film's representation of sexuality shows both "icy distance" as well as the "intimate" and "vulnerable" - paradoxical characteristics of Assayas' films, as identified by Shaviro (39). Certainly, the film captures the act two people "making love" but it also frames this act in a colder, more transactional context. I'll analyze a few key moments that explore this idea.
ReplyDeleteFor starters, it's almost immediately revealed that Miles (Michael Madsen) had Sandra (Asia Argento) seduce other businessmen. The act of being, in some sense, cuckolded is apparently a turn on for Miles. However, its goals aren't strictly sexual - they're also economic, intended to pry insider secrets from the other businessmen. When Sandra brings this up, Miles shouts at her that he didn't care about the business secrets. Perhaps he doesn't want to be seen as someone who simply used Sandra for economic gain, more prone to feigning romance than actually experiencing it. Regardless, he reaffirms the economic nature of their relationship in a different sense when he tells Sandra, "You liked being mine." Framing their relationship as a matter of ownership further suggests that, for Assayas, sexuality and romantic attraction are always transactional and property-oriented.
The intimacy/distance paradox Shaviro discusses is captured best in the film during the final scene between Sandra and Miles. The frame repeatedly shows Sandra in focus in the foreground - staring away from Miles - while Miles is out of focus in the background. They're frequently talking about intimate things, like whether any of their love remains, but the difference in lens focus between them, their placement in different planes of the image, and the fact that they aren't facing each other suggests that they are distant from one another. Intimacy, it seems, is a thing in the blurry past. It's literally behind Sandra in the frame. Even here, as in the first scene, the lines between desire and economic gain are blurred, as Miles is unsure whether Sandra came back for the money he owes her or to reignite their romance. He even held the money back as a bargaining chip, one he hoped would return their "spark."
This film, perhaps more than any other we've watched in the course, demonstrates the difficulty of loving without money. Love is always mediated by money in some respect, a depressing thought to think about.
As always, a nice post by you with smart observations. I like the quick cinematic analysis you offer as well as how you mobilize the readings. An important point Shaviro makes--and your comments align with it--is that the film depicts or reflects a society of "immaterial labor" and"cognitive capitalism" as one that "continually transforms affect into currency (and vice versa). At every point in the film, we are thrown back onto passion. But this passion is inseparable from financial calculation and business management." Desire and capital, money and love/passion are, in OA's view, no longer distinguishable but part of the same immanent circuit, are immanent to one another. Love is not the other to capital, not the "outside" to a system that has done away, precisely, with any outside. As Hardt and Negri, among others, argue, in the age of "Empire" there's only the plane of capital left. (In their hands that actually becomes the condition of possibility for revolution....)
DeleteAs Eric discussed, this film, out of all that we have viewed, most directly addresses the relationship between love and money. The most general sentence in which I could describe the plot? A dynamic female protagonist attempts to make financial gains in two different relationships.
ReplyDeleteShaviro best summarizes the paradox present in Boarding Gate when he states, “The space of transnational capital is at the same time extremely abstract, and yet suffocatingly close and intimate” (36). In simpler terms, global economy and competition affects the day-to-day in ways we might not even be cognizant of, and while this system is complicated and essentially incomprehensible, it is consistently touches our lives. Assyas, though, tends to focus on (well, at least in Demonlover and this film) the goings on of the system itself and those who intentionally attempt to reap the benefits. Like Diane in Demonlover, Sandra intentionally attempts to make it as a savvy businesswoman, involving herself in shady dealings in the hopes that she may one day open a nightclub in Beijing.
While Diane became slightly entangled with one man in her company, Sandra became deeply involved with two different men in the hopes of financial success. The first man, Miles, begged questions. I could not help but assume that she had dated him for money, but we later learn that she truly loved him – when he was rich. Once Miles has lost his fortune, however, Sandra no longer cares deeply for him: she tells him that her attraction for him now is purely sexual. It appears glaringly obvious that she only had feelings for his finances, but audiences may want to believe in Sandra more than that. Perhaps, however, that directly answers the question: No, you cannot love without money. Lester, on the other hand, ends the film with what I imagine is a fortune in a briefcase. He expresses interest in sending for Sandra someday, and Sandra fails to commit murder #2 when she sees the back of his head. Perhaps the back of her dead friend’s Lisa is burned in her brain at the moment, but it is more likely that she genuinely loves him.
The visual aspect I most noticed (aside from the wonderful use of jerky, quick camera motions while Sandra was escaping the murder scene, which made us feel as panicked and hurried as her) was the use of glass and windows throughout the film. I do not have a definitive idea of how or why it was used so frequently, but we first see it in Miles’ office. Essentially all of the walls are made of glass, which is even more noticeable when Sandra reveals and touches herself on Miles’ desk, surrounded by nothing but clear walls. No one, however, seems to notice. I guess it could visually represent the paradox Shaviro stated above.
What complicates matters further, perhaps, is that Sandra appears to have been raped (she claims that's when she stopped loving Miles, and it's unclear whether at that time his fortunes were already dwindling); and that Lester truly seems to care for Sandra (as he claims that he'll meet up with her not to HER but in her ABSENCE--thus, as viewers we should be inclined to read this as a truthful rather than deceptive statement).
DeleteAs with everyone, any given use of color or props--such as windows or mirrors--doesn't INHERENTLY "mean" anything. But it surely always DOES something, if nothing else to our viewing experience. For example, windows "frame" and mirrors "reflect." They can expand our view of the filmic world or double them (intensify what we see), or, as the case may be, limit (a window frame can also cut us off from the world outside the frame). An occasional use of a window or mirror may not be noticeable and thus not "do" much; repeated, obsessive, use of it, in contrast, might very well raise this to level of consciousness for us, thus affecting how we make sense of the goings-on. One might also point out that this use of windows etc is pretty common for "postmodern" architecture. Think of bank buildings etc: glass everywhere, which is supposed to suggest transparency but really creates so much reflection that what we see is "us" rather than "inside": it's an illusion of transparency when what it really produces is opacity.
DeleteLooking back at the film Boarding Gate (2007), the cinematography moves in a fast pace action cut; that reveals Sandra (Asia Argento) in organized crime, seduction for power, and drug dealing atmosphere. The film opening shot uses an out-of-focus shot that grabs the attention of the viewers. The sounds impact the action and characters emotion; it builds thrilling scenes of tension between characters. The use of mirrors and reflections makes the viewer jump into action, following the sequence of the action through the rugged handheld, racing intra-cutting camera shots.
ReplyDeleteSandra plays the protagonist, the sensitive qualities the film distributes of her, in the beginning, dehumanize her character. It looks, as if, she is getting tossed around by her boss Miles Rennberg (Micheal Madsen). As the film carries on, the audience is informed of the manipulating intention for the power stricken influence, to move on with her life. Sandra is soon with another man Lester Wang (Carl Ng), and the organization of the crime she commits. He helps her get away from the city not to get caught, as he is thinking she love him. What "one can not live without money" is establish in believing Sandra was truly in love with Miles but ends up killing him for the happiness of starting a new. The contracts she makes for killing pay her great deal of money. Shaviro states “Prostitution both constitutes human intimacy as a commercial transaction and smooths the way for other sorts of commercial transaction.” (47) -Compares the sex driven society to new economic boundaries, even though it’s said to be the “oldest profession.” The film reveals money to be transferable into any exchange and how the universal quantities of crime drive the power of money.
Sandra’s crimes go without question, but in the end not killing Lester brings up lots of loose ends. She shot the first ex-lover Miles but chose not to kill the other, why is that? Is it because Lester helped her out of the killing of Miles and decided not to shoot him out of sympathy? Or does it suggest that Lester has something more to offer that Sandra can take?
In Boarding Gate, Assayas once again explores the world’s global system and how connected but “unrepresentable” it is (Shaviro 36). Sandra is a character looking for a way out of her current life and has gone through many different lengths to make it happen. Assayas incorporates this aspect in how he describes globalization. He does this by showing the many different plans Sandra uses to escape. At first, she sells drugs to make her getaway and once that does not work, she then goes to Lester, and then Sue, and then finally Kay for help. Her plan is continuously changing, showing how liquid, as Bauman would put it, Sandra’s plans are. Just like how globalization is rootless and always changing, no one thing can represent it. Although Sandra’s plans are always changing, they are somehow still connected. After her drug deal gone wrong situation, Lester was there to help her. Lester had connections that led Sandra to Sue and Kay, who eventually helped her escape. According to the film, Sandra represents globalization and this is especially shown through the many places she ends up in. Each plan she goes through happens in a different city or country and many different languages are spoken has she switches from plan to plan. Each of the people helping her also takes her to these different countries. Overall, Assayas shows how globalization is continually changing but still intertwined through Sandra.
ReplyDeleteThrough Sandra’s continuous quest to finally escape her life, no place she ends up in is able to give her a home feeling (Shaviro 46). That is why the film always seems to be continuously moving without giving the audience a break, just like how Sandra never receives a break. Tensions continue to rise, as she interacts with Miles in his house, until the scene we all expect happens, Sandra killing Miles. This unending movement and Sandra’s inability to find a home also relates to money. During the scenes of Sandra traveling from country to country, she seemed as if she had little money. Others were the source of her getting some money to give her the potential to find a home, however due to her shift in help from person to person, she is unable to garner more wealth to establish herself in one place. Also, money is the one thing that is able to help her restart her life and without it, other characters repeatedly tell her how she will not be able to get anywhere. With money, she can buy her happiness, but without it, she cannot escape her likely prison time or even death.
Consider elaborating on the issue of the inability to represent globalization etc. HOW does the film communicate this and/or try to get us to see/understand?
DeleteIn analyzing some of the films of Olivier Assayas, we’ve certainly established an ample body of evidence that Assayas is interested in the impacts of globalization. As in demonlover and Clean, Boarding Gate sees its characters move among countries and continents as if it were of little more cultural significance than crossing a city on an errand or to work (which is clearly Assayas’s view on the matter, given the quotation which opens Gina Telaroli’s essay “Anywhere and Everywhere”); the audience, too, is again confronted by a world in which people are living “in environments defined by capital and the greater world through which it flows” (172). The thematic elements of these three films even lend the idea that they could be characterized as trilogy, not only in respect to the fact that the action of each film is situated inside the phenomenon of globalization, but that each film makes its protagonist a woman (women having, of course, been marginalized and subjugated throughout history and across cultures—and the symptoms of globalization, making models of subjugation and marginalization anew, could very well be most usefully diagnosed through the perspectives of those who have been the historical victims of said social ills); finally, there is the fact that these films maintain a continuity in terms of their relation to the thriller genre, though in a subverted sense. Since we’ve already established some of these points, in this post I intend to simply dive into globalization as a phenomenon, and then perhaps a bit deeper in terms of content and form via Boarding Gate, and its relation to Assayas’s two preceding films.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of neoliberalism, there seems to be a point where desire and capital become conflated. From the get-go of civilization, we have used capital to satisfy our basic needs and desires (it probably is not mere coincidence that written language and accountancy seems to have developed in roughly the same era); but when the generation of capital develops primacy, more is never enough. The new economy which presently drives the world touches nearly everybody on the globe, codifying a set of values which places greater import (IMPORT—fortuitous meaning exchange, given that Boarding Gate briefly tracks the importation and exportation of goods, legal and illegal) upon the generation and acquisition of capital—more so than it does social bonds. The value of an individual is no longer something intrinsic. An individual’s value becomes synonymous with their usefulness in the project of money making; in turn, the devaluation of individuals as human beings necessarily erodes the quality of any given relationship that was traditionally determined to be based upon emotion or mutual respect.
"the symptoms of globalization, making models of subjugation and marginalization anew, could very well be most usefully diagnosed through the perspectives of those who have been the historical victims of said social ills" : good point.
Delete2nd par is good. The question to ask, perhaps, is whether the film merely judges all of this negatively--a question one might ask since aesthetically speaking it seems to be fascinated by these processes and goes out of its way to get them "right" as it were....
The entirety of the film Boarding Gate, with its array of unfaithful lovers and betrayals among business colleagues, illustrates this point through numerous scenes and plot-twists. But there is a bit of dialogue which leaps to the forefront of my mind as doing a particularly wonderful job of emphasizing the collapse of what, hitherto, we’ve probably thought of as more-or-less stable social bonds, at least historically speaking. It takes place between Sandra (Asia Argento) and Sue (Kelly Lin). Essentially, Sue confuses sex or getting “turned on” with the deeper bond of love. Sandra immediately recognizes this category error, and doesn’t hesitate to tell Sue that love is not the same thing as getting turned on (2007). This small moment between them seems to characterize what Shaviro is speaking of when he describes “the space of transnational capital” being “suffocatingly close” on the one hand, while remaining “extremely abstract” (36).
ReplyDeleteNow for the intriguing bit: the framing of skylines. Interspersed among some of the frenetic action scenes and moments of fraught dialogue among its characters, Assayas offers several shots of skylines in his film. While scene shots have commonly been used to orient the audience to the scene in which the action of a film takes place, it seems that Assayas has an entirely different intention. Assayas’s skyline never tells us definitively that this is Hong Kong; it is a scene merely choked by buildings which obscure the sky, the limit, a potentiality. Then, in one shot, we see a building with neon lights. The lights, as they flicker on and off, seem to build a structure, a diagram, but immediately collapse again. Is this Assayas’s critique? That all is ephemeral, subject to a decay, followed by a renewal—an onerous repetition? One might believe so, given the content of demonlover. But in fact, one might see something brighter; in this film there is a regaining of relational order. In the final scene, we see Sandra about to kill Lester as she follows him. But she halts. She knows what true affection is. She understands it in a way that, earlier, her explanation to Sue rings as a basic truth. The camera framing her goes out of focus. She may be lost geographically, but she has at least some compass point of her values.
Sorry, Folks; experienced the same problem as Kaitlin in her demonlover post. Had to split it up.
DeleteA nice reading....
Delete