Ashes and Snow

Recently I was thinking about how few celebrities I have seen recently in New York. It has been a dry stretch. Then this afternoon as I was walking along the West Side Highway, I passed this guy and thought hmm, that looks like Chris Martin. Then I noticed the baby carriage. Then I heard him arguing with this guy, who had apparently been following them for quite some time. It was loud enough for me to hear over my headphones. I kept walking like I see rock stars and their babies arguing with potential papparazi all the time. Sadly my nonchalence kept me from seeing either Apple or the resolution of the argument. When I finally turned around after walking another 30 feet, they were gone.

The reason for my being on the West Side Highway was to go see the Ashes and Snow, an exhibition on Pier 54 by Canadian artist Gregory Colbert. It was a beautiful meditation on human communion with nature. The photographs and the film had this amazing sepia-toned timeless quality to them. The film was particularly unearthly. It was live action but the only soundtrack was instrumental music and a voiceover. It reminded me a little of Un Chien Andalous, but with amazingly beautiful images instead of disturbing ones. They both used montage to conjure emotions without plot or even dialogue. It also reminded me of those 19th Century photographs of "primitive" people, the humans in the photographs were just incredibly self-possesed, but that could be because they were mostly children. I just left with this incredibly peaceful feeling.

Which was probably good, because last night I watched Full Metal Jacket. I'd gotten it from netflix weeks ago, but I had been put off by how potentially gory and violent it was going to be. It was gory and violent, but I think that I've become inured to movie violence. I was expecting to be really freaked out by City of God too, and while the violence was horrific, I could deal with it. I find it much less objectionable when a movie is supposed to be violent, and the audience is meant to be taken aback by it rather than liking it. Both COG and FMJ are violent so that the audience can feel as closely as possible the tragedy of violence. Yet, I still feel like so many people watch both movies as if they are violence-porn; they can't see beyond the images. Both supporters of the armed forces and pacifists like Full Metal Jacket because Kubric told the story with a kind of ambivalence. The realism of the story does not allow for heros and villians.

Kubric is not saying that war is either good or bad; there is no good or evil in this movie. It's about nihilism in all senses of the word. In one sense, the government and by extension the army is supporting nihilism by trying to destroy the Communists who they view as a threat to American society. Of course it is our fear in the face of change, that is the true threat to our society. In a second sense it rejects our Western morality, which is based on the Judeo-Christian tradition. From the dehumanizing training in the first half of the movie to the killing in the second part, the differentiation between right and wrong is slowly worn away. It is this replacement of our social mores by a reliance on the self and the sole goal of destructive service in the name of our country that makes the army so attractive to recruits. In the war zone, morality as we know it ceases to exist; no longer enforced, it is not even practicable. But withouth these strictures, what is left of ourselves? This is the final way in which the movie deals with nihilism. Arguably our souls do not exist without the boundaries that make us human. Much like in the real war, there are no winners or losers; there are only those who are alive and those who are dead.