Examining Olivier Assayas' Clean (2004), I'd first like to describe a useful way to frame our course concepts of love and money as they relate to the film. For our purposes, money should be more broadly conceived as stability in finances, careers, and life circumstances. Love can be best understood not in the romantic sense, but rather, as familial or parental love. These conceptions are important in that Emily's (Maggie Cheung) lack of stability in finances (initially only having a few week's worth of money in a joint account), careers (fired from her restaurant job; merely tolerating her unglamorous department store job), and life circumstances (continuing addiction problems), bars her from playing a loving and active role in her son Jay's (James Dennis) life. Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary (Martha Henry) simply won't let Emily even see Jay until she becomes economically viable, with a stable, well-paying job and sobriety to boot. Thus, Emily can't properly love her son without the aid of "money," broadly conceived.
On the other hand, money crops up in place of love on several occasions throughout the film. As Nick Pinkerton notes, "The business end of things is frequently spoken of and seen to" (158). For example, after Lee's (James Johnston) death, a business associate visits Emily in prison and tells her of Lee's posthumous record deal. He adds, rather cynically, "He's obviously way more interesting dead than alive." This moment brings up many questions about the commodification and economic opportunism that comes with the death of an icon. Is Lee really being honored by a posthumous album release? Is it an act of love to put his voice out there one final time? Or is it just an easy grab? The business associate frames it as a money grab first and foremost, saying that "of course" he took the "lucrative deal" on Lee's record. That said, he also seems to care about Lee on some level, as we can tell from his anger towards Emily. He says he never wants to see her again, perhaps because he perceives that she took the life of someone close to him. So, perhaps there is some love, however tiny, present in the scene.
Later on, this theme of commodifying a celebrity's death is further explored when the record label plans to rerelease multiple of Lee's old records with new artwork and new liner notes. Rosemary points out that the liner notes make it seem like Lee's entire life was about drugs, which she sees as inaccurate. Perhaps these liner notes seek to further capitalize on Lee's death by mythologizing his struggles and satisfying listener's morbid curiosity about the man's "dark side." In any case, these moments all remind me of iTunes' money grab following the death of Michael Jackson. They released several new collections of his music at elevated prices almost as soon as he died. I remember this commodification of death sickening me at the time, and seeing a similar scenario played out in Clean brought on a similar sick feeling. It again brings up the question of whether these posthumous tributes are really done out of love or if, again, they are simply an easy opportunity to make some serious cash.
In the film "Clean" director Olivier Assyas chose to follow another different kind of love that we have yet to analyze in this class, the love between a mother and a child. The question we know is "can love exist without money" but in this film "money" takes on a unique form. Up to this point we have been looking at money in a literal sense, monetary value. But in this case I do not believe that we should look at it so literally. In Clean, money really means stability. Can love exist without stability? There are a few different phases in the movie that answer this question. At the beginning of the movie, when Lee is still alive we learn that the two are on a destructive path, and incredibly unstable. We also learn that they have a child that they basically ditched and handed off to the grandparents. We do not get the slightest sense that either Emily or Lee really care about Jay. I believe this is because they are in an incredibly unstable point in their life. They do not have the stability needed to feel love for anybody. Moving on, we come to find out that Jay's grandparents love him very much. Again they are able to feel this love for Jay because of the stability in their lives. Before Rosemary gets sick, they are good providers and capable of love. Moving back to Emily now, we see her kick heroine, but move on to other drugs. She claims to want to see Jay, but we know that she is still not stable enough to do so. She realizes this and knows that she must get clean and get a job if she ever wants to be involved in Jay's life. She comes to the realization that if she is going to be able to love Jay, she herself must first find stability. By the end of the film, we are not yet sold that she is completely stable, which is why Jay goes back with his grandfather, but we can feel that Emily is on her way to becoming clean and therefor able to love her child.
"Clean" has been my favorite film so far in this class, mostly due to the dreamy aesthetic that goes with it. Directed by Olivier Assayas, "Clean" tells the story of the struggle with drugs, with recovery, and with family. Emily (Maggie Cheung) has lost her partner Lee (James Johnston) to a heroin overdose, and after facing 6 months prison and the horrors of recovery, she wishes to see her son Jay (James Dennis) once more.
Jay, for the entire movie, is living with Lee's parents Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary (Martha Henry). The two grandparents, especially Rosemary, are against Emily even seeing Jay until she has recovered from her drug addiction and has a job/financial stability. This sets up something of a "monetary hoop" that Emily must jump through in order to be with her son.
This directly ties in with the theme of "Can love exist without money?" in our class. Much like Lane says above, Emily realizes by the end of the film that she must get clean and must hold a steady job in order to be involved in Jay's life. By equating stability (emotional, mental, physical, and financial stability) to our theme of "money", it can be said that Emily really **can't** love her son without "money". In order to have the opportunity to love Jay, Emily must prove that she is stable enough to see her own child. Even by the end of the film, audience members still aren't entirely sure if Emily is stable enough to love her son. However, the film's final shot of the San Francisco skyline with the uplifting music gives a sense of hope that Emily is heading for the stability necessary to love Jay.
In general, avoid plot summary. Remember that your audience--your peers and I--have seen the film, so we don't need to be told what happens in the film. Since you start the post by calling attention to the film's aesthetic, your reader is bound to expect to read more about how the aesthetic works, to what end, etc, w/r/t what the film is about.
In Olivier Assayas’s Clean, music takes on a larger than life role, almost becoming the “movie’s heartbeat” (Jones 158). This is evident because music was able to give Emily a solution, while also causing the problem; as Jones puts it, music is her destruction and her recovery. When Emily and Lee joined the music industry, they both started doing drugs together to be happy and get through the problems they had at the time. But, this ended up giving them more problems, leading Emily to go to jail and return to the outside world with no one by her side while she picks up the pieces. In this instance, music aided in her destruction, where she lost her son and now has many more problems to deal with. As she tries to recover from her addiction, we can see how unhappy she is. During this time of the film she doesn’t have music and her self-destructive behavior causes her to lose jobs, further keeping her from seeing her son. Once we start to see her get more involved in music, Emily’s life starts to pick up again, showing her recovery. She ends her methadone addiction, sees her son again, and is given another opportunity to create music. With the reintroduction of music in her life, Emily can finally obtain what she has desired throughout the film, to see her son. She is also given the chance to fulfill her dream of a career in music. There was also one scene where Emily describes to Elena how creating music helped her get through her time in prison. It was also interesting to see how Assayas used Jay in the film. Instead of acting like a child, Jay seemed more like an adult as he interacted with the other characters. On a topic few kids his age would be able to comprehend, Jay appeared as if he understood the explanation his mother gave him about her drug problem. Albrecht even points this out in his conversation with Rosemary: “Kids intimidate me, because they understand everything” (Jones 159). According to Jones, this quote is inspired by Assayas’s opinion. Through Jay, Assayas is trying to show the ambivalent nature between generations. Even though we may believe there are certain “gains and losses that occur in the passing between generations,” in actuality, there may be very little if any changes. In relation to the question of “can love exist without money”, we see that some sort of wealth is needed for love to be made within the film. In this case money is shown to be her will and determination to get her life back and stay sober. With these components, Emily was able to get a job and show Albrecht that she can still be a mother for Jay. This allows her to finally be able to see Jay and receive some love from him, who at first hates her for her addiction. Right out of prison, she had switched into a new addiction and was not able to hold a job. This led to Emily having no one in her life, and Assayas shows this through her rejection from Tricky. This shows that in the absence of wealth, she is not able to receive any love, even one in the form of friendship. However, once she decides to give up this methadone addiction and get her life back on track, she ends up being able to follow her music career dream and see her son again.
A nicely focused post on the role music plays in the film. Here we probably ought to discuss the final scene and also connect it to the final shot, as Cambria suggests above.
The environment in the film Clean (2004) seems to be mechanical and industrialize. It compares the neorealism times of Italian filmmaking of Antonioni. The use of rust and machinery in the film for an establishing shot sets the scene for the area. Olivier Assayas lets the audience know where the scenes are taking place. The characters reference the places they are going. The Rock ‘N’ Roll scenery of Lee and Emily takes love into a different aspect. Their use of drugs can take account on the love for one another. They’re married and have a child Jay, but fail to show the care for the child because of the drugs. The social outcast (Lee) who does not believe he’s worth anything but his failing music is sad. It is not until the Lee’s death is he able to show his accomplishments, for his music. It's tragic, right after Lee dies is he able to obtain some success he wished for, in his career. Emily's consumption of drugs is bluntly illustrated in the film and shows how the addicting qualities take over her actions to care for herself. The habit doesn’t go away; even the death of her husband doesn’t cure her. As the film progresses, she moves to Paris but when she gets involved with the scene of drugs it consumes her feelings. She falls right back into the habit, not even the death she witnesses seems the faze her. It’s not until Emily realizes she wants to be a better mother to Jay that she finally considers getting healthier. Emily seeks help for a new job and comes across a fan, working with her friend. Emily feels great hearing the influence this woman has for the things she did in the previous years. The power of drugs has an effect on her; she connects with drugs continuously throughout the film. Emily does admit to being a screw-up and can’t do anything right. While Emily tries to keep getting better the film never actually reveals whether or not she is going to go back to drug use, or get better to take care of her son.
One striking feature of Olivier Assayas’s film Clean (2004) is its portrayal of otherness throughout the duration of the film. In the text Liquid times, Zygmunt Bauman describes the plight of refugees: “They are expelled by force or frightened into fleeing their native countries, but refused entry to any other” (44). The plight of refugees may at first glance seem to have very little to do with Assayas’s film, but when the surface is scratched, striking similarities in the situations of recovering addicts and those of refugees become apparent—one could argue the two share deep connections in “otherness” due to what Bauman identifies as “liminal drift” (38). It occurs to me that recovering addicts share an experience that is very similar to refugees, at least in this vein.
One certainly does not want to minimize the predicaments of war refugees; these individuals face incredible hardships, and many of them have witnessed heinous acts simply beyond the pale of our conceptions as citizens of the US. But the fact of the matter is, the addict in recovery is cast in an analogously liminal territory to the refugee, and the protagonist of the Assayas’s film is a clear example of the recovering addict as refugee. The character Emily in the film illustrates the brief quote by Bauman above with an uncanny precision. In the film, Emily (Maggie Cheung) is a heroin addict married to failing rock musician and fellow addict Lee Hauser (James Johnston). In an essay collected in Olivier Assayas, edited by Kent Jones, Nick Pinkerton astutely points out that Clean is not a party movie—but rather a “morning after movie, a movie about what happens when everyone’s gone and you have to start picking up, alone” (154). In Emily’s case, this “alone” is deeply felt with Lee’s death from an overdose. She is immediately ejected from the territory she has staked out for herself when she is incarcerated due to drug possession related to Lee’s death. From there, she must stake out a new home since her artificial one (made of opioids in Emily’s case) has been destroyed.
Like a refugee, Emily faces a less than agreeable social situation. She is distrusted and ostracized as she scrabbles to build a new life without heroin or a substitute opioid. She is refused entry to the figurative country she knew before addiction, and is unable to find meaningful work. It is also useful to note that the film hops from country to country (beginning in Canada and moving on to France and Britain before ending, finally, the United States), which lends the sense of lingering transience that certainly must color the experience of being a refugee. In this way Clean, through telling Emily’s story of rebuilding her life after addiction, also offers a unique perspective of what it is to be a refugee in a society which one should by all rights feel at home.
Examining Olivier Assayas' Clean (2004), I'd first like to describe a useful way to frame our course concepts of love and money as they relate to the film. For our purposes, money should be more broadly conceived as stability in finances, careers, and life circumstances. Love can be best understood not in the romantic sense, but rather, as familial or parental love. These conceptions are important in that Emily's (Maggie Cheung) lack of stability in finances (initially only having a few week's worth of money in a joint account), careers (fired from her restaurant job; merely tolerating her unglamorous department store job), and life circumstances (continuing addiction problems), bars her from playing a loving and active role in her son Jay's (James Dennis) life. Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary (Martha Henry) simply won't let Emily even see Jay until she becomes economically viable, with a stable, well-paying job and sobriety to boot. Thus, Emily can't properly love her son without the aid of "money," broadly conceived.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, money crops up in place of love on several occasions throughout the film. As Nick Pinkerton notes, "The business end of things is frequently spoken of and seen to" (158). For example, after Lee's (James Johnston) death, a business associate visits Emily in prison and tells her of Lee's posthumous record deal. He adds, rather cynically, "He's obviously way more interesting dead than alive." This moment brings up many questions about the commodification and economic opportunism that comes with the death of an icon. Is Lee really being honored by a posthumous album release? Is it an act of love to put his voice out there one final time? Or is it just an easy grab? The business associate frames it as a money grab first and foremost, saying that "of course" he took the "lucrative deal" on Lee's record. That said, he also seems to care about Lee on some level, as we can tell from his anger towards Emily. He says he never wants to see her again, perhaps because he perceives that she took the life of someone close to him. So, perhaps there is some love, however tiny, present in the scene.
Later on, this theme of commodifying a celebrity's death is further explored when the record label plans to rerelease multiple of Lee's old records with new artwork and new liner notes. Rosemary points out that the liner notes make it seem like Lee's entire life was about drugs, which she sees as inaccurate. Perhaps these liner notes seek to further capitalize on Lee's death by mythologizing his struggles and satisfying listener's morbid curiosity about the man's "dark side." In any case, these moments all remind me of iTunes' money grab following the death of Michael Jackson. They released several new collections of his music at elevated prices almost as soon as he died. I remember this commodification of death sickening me at the time, and seeing a similar scenario played out in Clean brought on a similar sick feeling. It again brings up the question of whether these posthumous tributes are really done out of love or if, again, they are simply an easy opportunity to make some serious cash.
In the film "Clean" director Olivier Assyas chose to follow another different kind of love that we have yet to analyze in this class, the love between a mother and a child. The question we know is "can love exist without money" but in this film "money" takes on a unique form. Up to this point we have been looking at money in a literal sense, monetary value. But in this case I do not believe that we should look at it so literally. In Clean, money really means stability. Can love exist without stability? There are a few different phases in the movie that answer this question. At the beginning of the movie, when Lee is still alive we learn that the two are on a destructive path, and incredibly unstable. We also learn that they have a child that they basically ditched and handed off to the grandparents. We do not get the slightest sense that either Emily or Lee really care about Jay. I believe this is because they are in an incredibly unstable point in their life. They do not have the stability needed to feel love for anybody. Moving on, we come to find out that Jay's grandparents love him very much. Again they are able to feel this love for Jay because of the stability in their lives. Before Rosemary gets sick, they are good providers and capable of love. Moving back to Emily now, we see her kick heroine, but move on to other drugs. She claims to want to see Jay, but we know that she is still not stable enough to do so. She realizes this and knows that she must get clean and get a job if she ever wants to be involved in Jay's life. She comes to the realization that if she is going to be able to love Jay, she herself must first find stability. By the end of the film, we are not yet sold that she is completely stable, which is why Jay goes back with his grandfather, but we can feel that Emily is on her way to becoming clean and therefor able to love her child.
ReplyDeleteSo, how does the film AS film come into play here? In terms of its form, cinematography, genre, etc.?
Delete"Clean" has been my favorite film so far in this class, mostly due to the dreamy aesthetic that goes with it. Directed by Olivier Assayas, "Clean" tells the story of the struggle with drugs, with recovery, and with family. Emily (Maggie Cheung) has lost her partner Lee (James Johnston) to a heroin overdose, and after facing 6 months prison and the horrors of recovery, she wishes to see her son Jay (James Dennis) once more.
ReplyDeleteJay, for the entire movie, is living with Lee's parents Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary (Martha Henry). The two grandparents, especially Rosemary, are against Emily even seeing Jay until she has recovered from her drug addiction and has a job/financial stability. This sets up something of a "monetary hoop" that Emily must jump through in order to be with her son.
This directly ties in with the theme of "Can love exist without money?" in our class. Much like Lane says above, Emily realizes by the end of the film that she must get clean and must hold a steady job in order to be involved in Jay's life. By equating stability (emotional, mental, physical, and financial stability) to our theme of "money", it can be said that Emily really **can't** love her son without "money". In order to have the opportunity to love Jay, Emily must prove that she is stable enough to see her own child. Even by the end of the film, audience members still aren't entirely sure if Emily is stable enough to love her son. However, the film's final shot of the San Francisco skyline with the uplifting music gives a sense of hope that Emily is heading for the stability necessary to love Jay.
In general, avoid plot summary. Remember that your audience--your peers and I--have seen the film, so we don't need to be told what happens in the film. Since you start the post by calling attention to the film's aesthetic, your reader is bound to expect to read more about how the aesthetic works, to what end, etc, w/r/t what the film is about.
DeleteIn Olivier Assayas’s Clean, music takes on a larger than life role, almost becoming the “movie’s heartbeat” (Jones 158). This is evident because music was able to give Emily a solution, while also causing the problem; as Jones puts it, music is her destruction and her recovery. When Emily and Lee joined the music industry, they both started doing drugs together to be happy and get through the problems they had at the time. But, this ended up giving them more problems, leading Emily to go to jail and return to the outside world with no one by her side while she picks up the pieces. In this instance, music aided in her destruction, where she lost her son and now has many more problems to deal with. As she tries to recover from her addiction, we can see how unhappy she is. During this time of the film she doesn’t have music and her self-destructive behavior causes her to lose jobs, further keeping her from seeing her son. Once we start to see her get more involved in music, Emily’s life starts to pick up again, showing her recovery. She ends her methadone addiction, sees her son again, and is given another opportunity to create music. With the reintroduction of music in her life, Emily can finally obtain what she has desired throughout the film, to see her son. She is also given the chance to fulfill her dream of a career in music. There was also one scene where Emily describes to Elena how creating music helped her get through her time in prison.
ReplyDeleteIt was also interesting to see how Assayas used Jay in the film. Instead of acting like a child, Jay seemed more like an adult as he interacted with the other characters. On a topic few kids his age would be able to comprehend, Jay appeared as if he understood the explanation his mother gave him about her drug problem. Albrecht even points this out in his conversation with Rosemary: “Kids intimidate me, because they understand everything” (Jones 159). According to Jones, this quote is inspired by Assayas’s opinion. Through Jay, Assayas is trying to show the ambivalent nature between generations. Even though we may believe there are certain “gains and losses that occur in the passing between generations,” in actuality, there may be very little if any changes.
In relation to the question of “can love exist without money”, we see that some sort of wealth is needed for love to be made within the film. In this case money is shown to be her will and determination to get her life back and stay sober. With these components, Emily was able to get a job and show Albrecht that she can still be a mother for Jay. This allows her to finally be able to see Jay and receive some love from him, who at first hates her for her addiction. Right out of prison, she had switched into a new addiction and was not able to hold a job. This led to Emily having no one in her life, and Assayas shows this through her rejection from Tricky. This shows that in the absence of wealth, she is not able to receive any love, even one in the form of friendship. However, once she decides to give up this methadone addiction and get her life back on track, she ends up being able to follow her music career dream and see her son again.
A nicely focused post on the role music plays in the film. Here we probably ought to discuss the final scene and also connect it to the final shot, as Cambria suggests above.
DeleteThe environment in the film Clean (2004) seems to be mechanical and industrialize. It compares the neorealism times of Italian filmmaking of Antonioni. The use of rust and machinery in the film for an establishing shot sets the scene for the area. Olivier Assayas lets the audience know where the scenes are taking place. The characters reference the places they are going. The Rock ‘N’ Roll scenery of Lee and Emily takes love into a different aspect. Their use of drugs can take account on the love for one another. They’re married and have a child Jay, but fail to show the care for the child because of the drugs. The social outcast (Lee) who does not believe he’s worth anything but his failing music is sad. It is not until the Lee’s death is he able to show his accomplishments, for his music. It's tragic, right after Lee dies is he able to obtain some success he wished for, in his career. Emily's consumption of drugs is bluntly illustrated in the film and shows how the addicting qualities take over her actions to care for herself. The habit doesn’t go away; even the death of her husband doesn’t cure her. As the film progresses, she moves to Paris but when she gets involved with the scene of drugs it consumes her feelings. She falls right back into the habit, not even the death she witnesses seems the faze her. It’s not until Emily realizes she wants to be a better mother to Jay that she finally considers getting healthier. Emily seeks help for a new job and comes across a fan, working with her friend. Emily feels great hearing the influence this woman has for the things she did in the previous years. The power of drugs has an effect on her; she connects with drugs continuously throughout the film. Emily does admit to being a screw-up and can’t do anything right. While Emily tries to keep getting better the film never actually reveals whether or not she is going to go back to drug use, or get better to take care of her son.
ReplyDeleteOne striking feature of Olivier Assayas’s film Clean (2004) is its portrayal of otherness throughout the duration of the film. In the text Liquid times, Zygmunt Bauman describes the plight of refugees: “They are expelled by force or frightened into fleeing their native countries, but refused entry to any other” (44). The plight of refugees may at first glance seem to have very little to do with Assayas’s film, but when the surface is scratched, striking similarities in the situations of recovering addicts and those of refugees become apparent—one could argue the two share deep connections in “otherness” due to what Bauman identifies as “liminal drift” (38). It occurs to me that recovering addicts share an experience that is very similar to refugees, at least in this vein.
ReplyDeleteOne certainly does not want to minimize the predicaments of war refugees; these individuals face incredible hardships, and many of them have witnessed heinous acts simply beyond the pale of our conceptions as citizens of the US. But the fact of the matter is, the addict in recovery is cast in an analogously liminal territory to the refugee, and the protagonist of the Assayas’s film is a clear example of the recovering addict as refugee.
The character Emily in the film illustrates the brief quote by Bauman above with an uncanny precision. In the film, Emily (Maggie Cheung) is a heroin addict married to failing rock musician and fellow addict Lee Hauser (James Johnston). In an essay collected in Olivier Assayas, edited by Kent Jones, Nick Pinkerton astutely points out that Clean is not a party movie—but rather a “morning after movie, a movie about what happens when everyone’s gone and you have to start picking up, alone” (154). In Emily’s case, this “alone” is deeply felt with Lee’s death from an overdose. She is immediately ejected from the territory she has staked out for herself when she is incarcerated due to drug possession related to Lee’s death. From there, she must stake out a new home since her artificial one (made of opioids in Emily’s case) has been destroyed.
Like a refugee, Emily faces a less than agreeable social situation. She is distrusted and ostracized as she scrabbles to build a new life without heroin or a substitute opioid. She is refused entry to the figurative country she knew before addiction, and is unable to find meaningful work. It is also useful to note that the film hops from country to country (beginning in Canada and moving on to France and Britain before ending, finally, the United States), which lends the sense of lingering transience that certainly must color the experience of being a refugee. In this way Clean, through telling Emily’s story of rebuilding her life after addiction, also offers a unique perspective of what it is to be a refugee in a society which one should by all rights feel at home.
An interesting take on the film via a smart use of the assigned reading.
Delete