holy motors : a meditation

Holy Motors is, most obviously, a film about film and, perhaps less obviously, a film about human evolution toward the age of film and the state of human existence during the age of film, an evolution and state which the film suggests have transformed existence into a film, such that film is now not simply the dominant metaphor for life but that life has become indistinguishable from film, that even as humans have become indistinguishable from time as technological devices for measuring time have become more sophisticated and ubiquitous and ultimately internalized, so existence has become indistinguishable from film as we have created it, made it omnipresent, then effectively swallowed it, effected it as our diet and so become it:  we are what we eat may be true, but we also eat what we see and so are what we see.

Yet, in presenting this process of becoming our (technological) creation—a frequently tiresome theme:  Shelley’s Frankenstein itself becoming a Frankenstein spawning ten thousand monsters—the film avoids, even subverts and transcends, our utopian and dystopian clichés through a circumventional process of acceptance, at times buddhistic in detachment, daoist in comedy, by a capricious fatalism (no—a playful fate) that drains the modern swamps of freedom and will and leaves the viewer (if there is indeed a viewer left) feeling neither paranoid nor caged, but almost giddily alert, ready, perhaps like an early Monsieur Oscar, to assume the next role, whatever it might be, however absurd, dangerous, humiliating.

What does Holy Motors posit and accept?  A slight modification to Shakespeare, that is all—

All the world's a film,
And all the men and women merely actors:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts, ...

This metaphor—whether Elizabethan (stage) or modern (film)—is repeated relentlessly throughout by the transience and questioning of home:  at a micro scale (where an individual lives and finds stability, security, comfort) and a macro scale (the ground of humanity—the metaphysical, intellectual and emotional walls we build to protect ourselves from the elements of darkness).  These two scales are fused in the opening scene in which you have the actor-director in what seems to be a hotel room—odd, for it has cheap motel wallpaper covering a secret door and is curiously close to the runway of a major airport—against the backdrop of a sleeping audience, an audience of zombies or ghosts (mirroring the closing scene of The Crowd, but watching a naked man, looking very primate-like, running back and forth [an image which is briefly flashbacked near the film’s close and which foreshadows the gleeful horror of the ninth appointment]), followed by what appears to be the protagonist leaving his mansion for a day of work.

But where is home?  Monsieur Oscar plays a homeless woman, a testy father with a barely adolescent daughter (dropping her off at home), a dying uncle with niece, yet another husband and father; if he has a home at all, it is his limo (itself having a regular home, the film's namesake, though even the limos themselves question this stability at the end).  Céline, the chauffeur, says the last human words (though through a mask imitating that in Franju’s Les yeux sans visage) on a cellphone, I’m coming home, though by this point ‘home’ has lost much of its meaning, aside from the curious practical questions which linger: where is Céline going? how does she manage to survive on so little sleep?

However, the slipperiness of home is only the beginning; the entire movie slips—truth, love, beauty, identity, history.  The only solid things—hardly solid by nature—are time (day turns to night, weariness grows) and smoking (whether ‘in’ character or ‘out’ [these terms fade into one another as the film progresses], Monsieur Oscar is almost always lighting up).  The only work that seems to exist for humans (except for the zombie masses [the crowd] “watching” the “film” [The Crowd]) is assuming the required identity, performing the required role, donning the required mask, for the required time—for ... whom?  No one ... the only beholders are sleeping (in contrast to the audience at the end of The Crowd, who are robotically, convulsively, laughing) or busy performing their required roles, too involved in their own scripts to watch.  (Monsieur Oscar does get paid, but there seems little likelihood he’ll have any opportunity or need to spend the money.)

We are always on the cusp of the “real,” never reaching, identity perpetually subverted other than as that which perpetually subverts.  Are the two actors in the penultimate assignment scripted—in the present, when they were lovers?  But the film (not just the specific film, Holy Motors, but film itself) is devoted to showing the vacuity between the cliff of the question and the cliff of our desire for an answer, everything we pile on this cliff to attempt to compensate for the vacuity between.

Given enough distance, the scriptedness of everything appears behind our touching freedom.  Yet, surely, a real scene does occur—a metascene—between Monsieur Oscar and his director, in the limo, as Oscar is questioned about the authenticity of his acting, whether he still believes in the masks, the scriptedness, the ever-morphing roles.  And, perhaps, at the close of the death scene, when Oscar ‘breaks character’ with his ‘niece’ and they speak ‘off-set’ as ‘real people.’  Yet all these quotes are necessary.  There’s no escape from the acting behind the acting, the acting behind the acting behind the acting, in infinite regress to nothing ... all we’re left with is the film, all we're left with is film.

Yet, surely, there is the interlude, a glorious injection of modern purposeless cathedral joy, a testament to the raw ecstasy of what it is to be alive and know no solidity (a knowledge perhaps more terrifying than death, for it subsumes death as another mask):  buddhistic mind without the buddha, acceptance without the peace.

Yes, fine, the question of real disappears inside the film ... but outside the film, where we comfortably live, there surely still is safety; we still can cling to our elaborate self-constructed truths that we, outside, are real.  (As we are outside the film, but inside reality.)  Such elusive identity, such infinite masks, are for the stage, the film, for art and its haughtiness, for the academy and its abstracted abstruse explorations.  But Carax deconstructs these clingings, these illusions, these insides-outsides, at the outset:  he shows us asleep to the comprehensive virtualization of our root physicality.

He deconstructs these illusions, yet simultaneously acknowledges their persistent potent reality by means of their tenacious emotional resonance.  The problem is—if it is a problem—we still feel during the film ... despite the artifice, the wink, the knowledge of everything continuously collapsing.  We feel because of the gap between our condition and our knowledge of it; Carax continuously confronts us with the sight and so the feeling of the gap. During the scene with Oscar’s daughter, with Céline as they’re driving ‘home’ at night and Oscar becomes vulnerable, in La Samaritaine with his ex-lover, on his deathbed and, most peculiarly and comically and impossibly, as he goes home for the day and shares a tender moment with his strangely apt family of the night.

This unified duality that Carax pulls off—of distance and feeling, of divinity and humanity, of art and ape—is at the center of the film’s strength ... of art’s strength.  (Indeed, our emotional response crescendos as we become more aware of the artifice.)  Kaufman, though he attempts to perform such sleight of hand in films like Being John Malkovich and Synecdoche, New York, doesn’t quite achieve it.  One doesn’t care in the same way, his showing is simultaneously too obvious and not obvious enough; he doesn’t stretch the circle as far as Carax (to its veritable breaking point, and possibly past) and so leaves us too much with the idea of artifice and not enough with the melancholy and exuberance of its root.  A root that is, more than anything, the spiritual center of our existence and why Holy Motors is, transcendently, a deeply religious film.

The film ends with acceptance, the limos in their holy home uttering in scattered unity, amen, so be it.  But what are we—or we as machines, and as disappearing machines—accepting about what we are, what we have become and cannot become?  Simply a modification to Shakespeare, the tweak of a line?

Is there a difference between the world’s a stage and the world’s a film?  Other than the appearance of the text itself?  A shift in dimensions is the difference:  from three, on the stage, to two, on the screen.  Our masks are becoming virtual, as the machine is, as the beholder.  As nature—as human environment—has disappeared by our building and inhabiting the city (inevitably accompanied by our severe and stupid ignorance and hence sentimentalization of nature), so we (inevitably born of nature and, despite our denials and horrors, tethered to it) humans have begun to disappear.  The machines which house us (incarnated in the limos), like poets, adumbrate this disappearance and the entire film sings a playful dirge to human three-dimensionality, a melancholic aria to the emergence of the dimensionless—or at least unseen—eye.  A curious recursus:  from the unseen eye of god to the unseen eye of technology, fleshy conscious volitional free humanity a wee blink between.