(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In Pax publishing's series on the study of power and globalization, seven to some very different releases have so far appeared. The focus has shifted from rhetorical power (Iver B. Neumanns Norway – a critique) to military power (Ståle Ulriksens The Norwegian defense tradition). In the latest release of the series, Kissing and fighting, Christian Refsum and Eivind Røssaak are chasing the popular cultural power in the seams. And that's the cinematic expression, or rather, the power i the film, which in particular is the starting point for their study.
The book is divided into four chapters, which essayistically deals with a variety of films, but with the main emphasis on a few: David Lynches Mulholland Drive, Lars von Triers Idiots, Christopher Nolans Memento, David Finchers Fight Club and Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. These films each show different aspects of violence and / or eroticism and how the body respond to these types of stimuli (ie actor body – the authors deliberately skip analyzes related to the spectator's reception). The body, like physical size, is in other words the clearest focus for the book's four chapters. What the above films have in common is an insistence that the body (s) often function as a code, or an expression, to understand the power struggle in the film. IN Memento this is done literally, by the main character, Lenny, tattooing on his name, appearance with more belonging to his enemies. Idiots og Fight Club however, are the most interesting films in this context. Refsum's analyzes of these are also very good.
Lars von Triers Idiots is a so-called mockumentary, a “like-documentary”. It is about a group of people who play out their crazy (idiotic) sides. However, the group's members claim that they only provide outlets for internal, repressed and childish – and therefore universal – human activities. Within this group, it thus becomes normal to be "crazy". When, on the other hand, they act in the same way outside, in the vicinity of others who do not belong to the group, they only face negative sanctions (except for one person – who then also joins the gang). Refsum asks, so to speak, at the request of the director himself: Who in this film is crazy? And, in this case: What is wrong, and what is really normal? The author further refers to a scene where the group – who this time pretend to be mentally retarded – are on a tour of a Rockwool factory where one of the employees has been somewhat condescending. Stoffer, the group's charismatic leader, comments on this, from a “civilization-critical position that is in no way unknown in the history of ideas: The mad are the normal“. Later in the chapter, Refsum uses Michel Foucaults The history of madness, to compare its theme with von Trier's film. The French philosopher's appeal to Western civilization in The history of madness, was that "we" have made an illusory distinction between madness and reason. He traces this dichotomy back to the 1700th century, when the aristocracy and the court's behavior and values, that is, their sense, served as a role model for the ever-growing bourgeoisie. During this time, a strong notion arose that a healthy society would survive if the sick and the abject were kept down – and as invisible as possible. The alleged lunatics were thus stowed away and silenced to death, according to Foucault.
Refsum writes: "It is a film that portrays Scandinavian normality as repressive, and in some cases unbearable". But the so-called ideology of normality (about the normal), which quickly becomes a "habit", and which in turn leads to passivity and indifference, is rather something that has ridden the whole of Western civilization – since the 1700th century. It gained prominence as a (more or less) official principle for structuring society, so that some were squeezed out – abnormalisert. According to Nietzsche (among others For the Genealogy of Morality) is not tragic in the fact that some people are oppressed, but that they are (too) led by the seemingly normal, that they often accept an obvious injustice. Admittedly, this is not such a situation Idiots – in that "the crazy" choose to be just that – but the film shows that the ideology of normality has reached so far in the western world that the communication, understanding and empathy with the object is highly deficient. Such a shortcoming must be justified by the fact that it has become normal to act condescendingly or degradingly towards the idiots. The "normal" thus acts from the outside habits in the face of the "crazy". And it is precisely such a destructive habitual thinking that Nietzsche wants to bring to life, whether it concerns high or low. Refsum then also emphasizes this in his reading of Idiots, for example, how the guests in a restaurant react similarly to Stoffer, who they think is mentally retarded: “… the restaurant guests he has approached have avoided meeting his gaze, they have rejected him using body language, without asking him directly about to go ”.
The refsum also makes a brief comparison of the Danish film with Finchers Fight Club, where a group of young men form an underground club for fighting in protest against the emotionless and so-called normal life "up there": "Also in Fight Club themed the possibilities for an individual and existential liberation project within a group that defines its own norms in conflict with the rest of society ”. This is a good observation.
Both Røssaak and Refsum are good and precise communicators. Their eclectic essays – in terms of various films, film genres, theories, artistic expressions and more – are scholarly, but do not exclude the average reader. That Kissing and fighting is a contribution to the series on power – and globalization, may seem a bit out of place. On the other hand, the analyzes show – especially off Idiots og Fight Club – that even modern films can say something important in a discourse about different types of power.
