The hit film gracing cinema screens in Rio de Janeiro is Denys Arcand's
The Barbarian Invasions (As Invasões
Bárbaras). It's a satirical drama, told in the comic style most familiar to Woody Allen's great oeuvre. Set in our troubled
contemporary times, the film has charmed Carioca audiences with its blistering self-criticism and emotional character development.
Cultural events in Rio often mimic the most recent word on where the best beach is and where the beautiful people
wine and dine. A slew of dailies, weeklies and weekend magazines steer the thirsty herd to drink from celebrity fountain.
Leading the pack of degradable magazines is Veja.
(This may be boring news to Californians, but there still are
some serious East-coast cinephiles around to wring out the movie buffs.)
To its unfortunate credit, this 90-page magazine, in which an entire two are newsworthy, has had readers
transforming its film picks into word-of-mouth hits. Such is the case for
Invasions, featured prominently in a rave review last
October. Thus is a film hit born in Rio de Janeiro—Hollywood mega-production or international art film.
What are Rio's culture vultures getting out of Arcand's follow up to the
Decline of the American Empire? Within an
arm's length, some firsthand views on the current Northern national paradise, Canada. In this case, they get some French
Canada in as well. Especially, tropical audiences are graced with a kind of northern humanity, in contrast and contestation to the
way things are. These are moods American films have forgotten how to deliver.
Nothing befits a paradise in the current Age of Lying more than some solid self-criticism.
The Barbarian Invasions offers a vast array of that for thirsting Cariocas. First world hospital hallways filled to claustrophobic horror; under-the-table
corruption in a nation culturally distinct, one would imagine, from "third world countries"; stupendous free use of drugs (recall that
Brazilian drug policy is no different in repressive severity than Uncle Sam's); and all this mixed in with Canada's delightful
autumn feast of colors in the most sardonic put downs a North American people can still dream of saying about themselves
within the confines of a National Security State.
Under a 40-degree centigrade sun, what's not all that clear is how much Cariocas draw from the film's double
narrative and soul-searching title. Recall that in Rio most intellectual discussions have to end with a laugh. Then again, when
checking Quebec's off-again on-again wish to be considered a `Latin American' nation, chuckling under the direst of
circumstances tends to back up its claim.
There might be no literary trope more Latin than irony. By settling on the title of
The Barbarian Invasions Denys Arcand chose to play that card in his strongest hand. Few directors can do so with as much intelligence. Yet as a sequel to his
international hit, The Decline of the American
Empire, irony risks being resolved into communal sentimentality.
From 1986, the Decline had leaned heavily on the same trope. The film seemed to conquer in its gambit of depicting
the cynicism tucked behind the mores and moods of a thriving North American middle class university culture. This was no
longer Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf,
a tale in which oedipal conflict backfires into marital breakdown through
professional resentment, rivalry and jealousy.
Decline portrayed a world of guiltless, unabashed affirmation. Ideological `isms' ended up falling by the wayside
into meaningless trends. Intellectual and professional pursuits, the task of creating an egalitarian, just society, or the
nostalgic lament of a failed and bygone civilization, grew increasingly disparate as the mixture of humors parted into circulatory paths.
On all levels, Decline had sex spelling redemption. Blood stayed in the veins, or left the body only in transfigured
heat. This redemption revealed the inner secret that pleasure has no limit to its intensity, leaving many of us ill-prepared to
deal with our very finite lifetime. In a key scene, sexual pressure is relieved within a minute's massage. Intellectual triumph
looks as wasted as the semen staining a towel. Irony carried the truth of Arcand's message. It steered the view toward truth's
capsizing against a common ode to variations on post-coital resignation.
THE NEXT STROKE IN ROMAN HISTORY
In Arcand's latest film, the title leads the viewer on toward the next step in Roman history. How appreciate a step it
is. As with the television pundit whose words are seemingly broadcast only to a dumbstruck hospital attendant's ears, for
many fans of Roman civilization, the September
11th attacks immediately took on the allure of the great historical periods
when empires go down shaking.
The barbarians had struck! Or as the pundit puts it: "September
11th will be remembered for marking the beginning
of the great barbarian invasions"—but not, mind you, for the fall of the empire itself. As with Rome, the pundit sees the
American Empire continuing into centuries of eventual insignificance and a despotism foretold by the founding fathers.
The two-step historical reference in the films' respective titles may follow the story line told by Edward Gibbon in
the 19th century The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.
But there is a fair bit of Gore Vidal hovering
about. The specifics about when the declining period of Rome began gathers little consensus among scholars.
If decline refers to the changing seat of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople after the shift from Paganism to
Christianity, then it actually refers to rising power. Even so, with Rome in the projector, decline inevitably mixes meanings
with decadence. This is something one finds well before Caligula in the third century, in fact as early as Nero who was close
enough to Christ's Era to have allegedly sent the apostle Peter to his crucifixion. If instead decline points to the loss of
administrative control over the borders, then it means nothing less than the "barbarian invasions" evoked by the film's sequel.
The work of irony is best loved for being inherently critical. It rarely misses a moment to estrange or distance. Irony
strives to break truth's false pretenses in order to realign it with respect to what's real. This is not exactly what Arcand has
done. In his film, he releases the bonds of social indifference in contemporary Quebec, which are already loose enough.
Then he lets them edge toward discriminating against those excluded, for various reasons, from the community. The
film's perceived barbarian invasions only end up tightening society around family and communal poles so as to protect what
we have in the way we are. Panic triggered by this perception goes on to provide the smooth continuity by which increased
security and surveillance may be implemented on the political scale.
In film form, Arcand has found no better way to illustrate this tightening up around security concerns than by
bringing the original cast of the Decline back together again under some rather unfortunate circumstances. Fifteen years later,
the characters are older, naturally. Their children are now working adults—or at least some of are in some fashion. The
terminal fate of a protagonist, Remy, the university professor of history and general bon vivant, has literally provoked an
invasion of the circle's lives. For Remy is dying quickly from a brain tumor.
Death, in Arcand's view, is rarely individual and always literal. Remy has to struggle with a reality succinctly, if
gauchely, put by his best friend's bimbo opportunist of a wife as: "all sickness begins in the head and ends in the head". As his
old-time friends and family gather, the tumorless heads take the law into their own hands, slowly substituting heroin as
Remy's pain killer to finally wheel in a final fix by film's end. Remy understands his organic state is elapsing when the pleasure
of a dégustation of wine and truffles vanishes in an anticipatory paean to insignificance. That's when euthanasia becomes
the sole substitute for a life devoid of pleasure.
As part of Quebec's post-1968 generation, Remy was and is a committed social-democrat. In the course of the 1980s
his idealism never flew as high as when it was expressed over a fine glass of Bourgogne and
foie gras. At the peak of culinary ecstasy, he might have even called himself a Communist. Now ill, his first ideological test, like Anthony hallucinating
on Mount Colzim, is Quebec's hospitals. Faced with soaring medical industry costs, Canada's universal health care system
faces a crisis in many provinces. Impassible, Remy declaims how he still stands firm in his vote for "nationalizing the hospital
system" in Quebec. He has no choice but to intone. In these times declaring oneself in favor of social reform is quite akin to
acting on it.
The fact remains that egalitarian values in times of provincial and federal government belt-tightening has ended up
filling hospital emergency wards in Canada as far as into the hallways. In a long forward pan, the sick and ailing unfold as if in
parting sheets. The unaffordable cost of high-tech laboratory analysis equipment forces those who can afford it to head south of
the border into Vermont's private clinics. That's where Remy's social-democratic body is whisked off to get a PET scan,
thanks to his son's abundant funds. In the meantime, the middle class
proles back home have to put their tumors on ice as they
bide time on waiting lists.
Remy's son, Sebastien, is a golden boy. He's a venture capitalist specializing in risk and employed by the Lloyds of
London. Despite deeply harbored resentment in an inversion of the sixties generation gap, that is, a socialist father disowning his
capitalist son, Sebastien returns to Montreal from his home in London to help his father in the latter's twilight. Their relationship
fares far better than others.
His wife, for instance, hysterically seeks emotional support from Remy's mistresses. As for his daughter, she
remains an oceanographer at sea. Unable or unwilling to return for the fatal occasion, she does insist on relaying bits and bites of
computer video messages to her ailing Dad.
With his good capitalist credentials, Sebastien performs a paradigm shift: his father now lies in a comfortably
renovated, formerly abandoned private hospital room. Then, he manages to find access to a supply of heroin so as to bypass inept
institutional painkillers, a.k.a. watered-down morphine. With the self-assurance wealth can bring, Sebastien initially tries accessing
junk through the narcs themselves. When morality bends in submission to money, all values stand equal.
Never one to over-extend a proposal, Sebastien smells the narcs' suspicion and decides to swerve his BMW into the
streets to find his treasure trove by other means. Even with the narcs on his tail, a shared university education and designer
suits will have them enlist as Sebastien's team of guardian angels.
Canadian society is tolerant and wealthy. It has allowed some wealth redistribution to actually take place. But it's
been an upper middle class affair all along. We can find a world in which a drug needs no pseudonym provided that like
minds only think alike.
The Barbarian Invasions ends with Remy-the-father's beautiful death at his friend's luxury cottage on the shores of
Lake Memphramagog, in Quebec's Estrie region. In the fall season, the leaves of Quebec's trees turn into a vivid celebration
of color as Remy symphonically fests a dual narrative on the evolution of world events and personal relationships. These
lines begin in parallel, but disturbance twists them into intertwining complexity.
The moment finally arrives for those who once proclaimed the US to be Rome's reincarnation. They can now find
themselves bemused with history's repetition in the film' title. After all, how many of our educated class dubbed the 9/11
attacks in similar terms? By the film's climax, though, irony will have ceased deflecting any denial that the title is little else than
a literal statement on our times.
Suddenly at the crescendo of the world's evolution, as spicily recounted by Remy
et al. in typically Quebecois sallies of wit, from center stage left enters the barbarian himself. Neither the leader of the Ashishin nor of some terror group,
he emerges merely as an individual capitalist, almost innocent, veiled only beneath the son's silhouette. "The Prince of
the Barbarians", his father proclaims.
SEARCHING FOR THE BARBARIANS
If Arcand's death semantics are indeed rarely individual in extension, and always literal, it is fair to ask whether the
title really and only refers to the cynical capitalist. Would the `barbarian' reference be aiming at the son who proved his
father's values to be groundless and illusory in their failure to get their share of the monetary equivalent? Or does the title point
to a revelation? Does it aim at describing anything foreign as barbarian, while acts committed in our name which provoke
death and destruction are matters for sentimental sorrow?
One path by which to answer these doubts is by checking up how the film portrays what's foreign. Upon being
interned, Remy has to share a room with other patients, most notably an Indo-Pakistani Muslim man. In close communion the
Muslim patient's family is silently omnipresent at his bedside. In daily Canadian reality Muslims share public space with Jews
and Christians with hopefully a lower degree of fear of being pariahs. They are apparently subject to less police harassment,
controls and deportation than is common practice nowadays in Patriot Act USA.
Quebec society has proved to be a particularly tolerant one regarding immigrants—provided they speak French. The
film emits fuzzy signals, though. The Islamic family lingers in the background indistinct, even indifferent in its foreign
tongue, welcomed as it may be. Yet their members fall short of being portrayed as fully partaking in a communicational and
social partnership.
Neither Remy nor the Pakistani patient reaches out to discuss the world events referred to in the title. Nor do they
have anything else to say to each other. Both may be dying. What's more evident is that the film's title ends up contextualized
by the North American Muslim citizen's silent presence.
Later in the countryside, the community of Remy's friends discusses what makes up intelligence on the world
historical scale. A metadiscourse on world political history is something Arcand at times feverishly strives to turn inside out, as if
in a palimpsest. The professors willing admit that intelligence does not always exist, or rather seldom does. It is certainly
nothing specific to our culture, if our culture can at all be said to exhibit intelligence in these terms. These intellectuals recall
how during the European Middle Ages, i.e. the so-called Western Christian Dark Ages, intelligence had shifted its abode to
the Arab civilization. But the space they open to offset the barbarian taint with which many media pundits try to paint
modern day Arabs and Muslims is just as soon shut.
When dealing with the Greeks, we hear of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, to say nothing of the philosophers.
Rome spawns some philosophers, too, but especially statesmen, political commentators and poets. Yet with the unusual
self-certainty of trained skeptics, the professors provide no characters of the great past Arab mind, no Ibn-Rushd, no al-Kindi,
no Akbar the Great. In the reference's silent wake, they provide little assurance as to whether their analysis of intelligence
is itself salient. When facts are borne to disprove misconceptions, it isn't only sloppy debate to not refer to them. It simply
changes nothing in the clichés that dominate much of our talk in the first place.
With the Muslim family held to silence in the film, one could hardly take Arcand's irony at its suggestive value.
Consequently, he glides dangerously close to what many Rome lovers have held on their lips ever since 9/11. These history
buffs are convinced the barbarians have started attacking the new Empire's seat. Yet with Arab civilization and history held to
muted ignorance, Arcand's irony crumbles into communitarian self-certainty. In the end, irony does little service to the director
in his sequel to the Decline. Despite the cultural difference Remy declaims as making him a non-American, it is still
American values and its economic system that, though it fails to save his life, at least redeems the beauty of his death.
Both the meta-text and personal relations portrayed in the film fall short of irony's power to deliver on truth. If it's
truth that the film is aiming for, then there's no need for "barbarians" to come aground to spur on the decline. That's because
in historical terms, any analogy between Rome and the US is simplistic at best. Even Middle East scholar, Bernard Lewis,
not one to belittle America's grandeur, emphasizes how the US has never single-handedly colonized an entire geopolitical
space like Rome, let alone Great Britain, had—and nor will it under the present circumstances.
The term `barbarian' was coined by the Greeks to refer to all non-Greeks. The Greeks may have thought of the latter
as `uncivilized', though only in their wildest hubris. For the Persians and Egyptians were anything but that. Later, just as
Rome happened to be invaded by `barbarians', so also did Baghdad at the height of Arab civilization. By 1258, the city that
had been the greatest center of culture, science and administrative control for 300 years was overrun by Hulagu, Genghis
Khan's grandson. This fact was not missed by several American scholars prior to the Iraq invasion. Nor for that matter was the
fact that the infamous "Assassins" were Arabs apparently resisting the Mongol and Turkic invasions: so many other barbarians.
It almost seems as though ever since the growing American debacle in Iraq, pundits have grown silent about history
and barbarians. The way American forces overran the city may have occurred at a time when Baghdad was no longer the
world's capital. Their attack and subsequent failure to protect the city's cultural heritage still wrought more destruction than
even the Mongol warriors had when killing the last Abbasid caliph. As for the invasions suffered by the British Empire, the
attacks at home during the blitz were wielded by the hands of an altogether different kind of `barbarian', namely the most
advanced national civilization of the time: Germany.
From the Brazilian and Latin American perspective, the term lost its innocence long ago when Las Casas
accompanied the Spanish Conquistadores on their civilizing missions in the 16th century. His report to the Spanish crown is literature
steeped in blood. It provides descriptions of massacres he personally witnessed. Indian nation after Indian nation fell before
the Conquistadores' brutality as Indians were either forced into slavery or massacred when resisting. Prior to the Africans,
the slave economy involved Indians. It was one of the European's initial plans for the land, a gift from the civilized. When
Indian peoples survived, their populations were soon decimated by disease. Las Casas convincingly argued that faced with
such brutality, the Indians were anything but barbarians, while the Spanish were nothing but their own projection.
A DEEP DESIRE TO ACCUSE
Las Casas drew his conclusions by self-critically accusing his own society—something that neither
Invasions nor much of North American art has done persuasively of late. The bottom line is not so much to press the point that attacks and
invasions may be committed by those who are not `barbarians'. Nor is it to claim that the decline and fall of civilizations do not
necessarily occur through the means suggested by the film's title. Nor even is it really to question the nature of the 9/11
attacks—with the US administration withholding information regarding the suspected role of some sectors of its Saudi Arabian
allies, how can political media analysts expect to get their hands on objective data?
The point is only to draw the following minor literary observation. When irony collapses a community sentimentally
begins folding inward. Comfort may have made our populations intellectual cowards—but the true test is yet to come. In the
film, the capitalist son makes up with the socialist father, even when the latter proclaims the former the real prince of the
barbarian order. In fact, never have they been closer.
Death may be the great unifier of divergent ideologies. But Arcand's film only settles on the most sentimental of
personal struggles through which to point to difficult times in the Empire.
If on Quebecois soil, one can share their hospital space with a Muslim family without considering them as different
to any other immigrant minority, the `indifference' remains mute to any communication and conversation. Remy, the
historian, has nothing to say to his neighbors. He has nothing to ask or inquire about despite the obvious and ponderous post 9/11
tone—solemnly carried through the film by Arvo Part's sonic sibylline wafts. In light of this portrayal it's still wise to consider
Aristotle's critical observation on how those who are without speech in a community are no better than vegetables.
So Barbarian Invasions is a film about North American society as obsessively seeking communal reinforcement.
The slight difference and `cultural distinction' that may be voiced by the Quebec minority is simply irrelevant in the end
when patterns do nothing but overlap.
Since at least the sixties, the pop cultural world has assumed an overwhelmingly critical role in social culture, and in
ripe times, politics. Ours, among the most troubling of times by both the manifest and latent decisions we are making as a
culture, seem to fall out from the earshot of our musicians and, especially, our filmmakers. Writing, namely prose and poetry
alike, is the art now taking back a critical edge from what the mass information/visual media had euphorically wrenched from
its grasp for two decades. As Amiri Baraka wrote in
Somebody Blew up America: "Who/Who/Who"?
Political statements like the ambivalent pathos of Radiohead's
Hail to the Thief, or Springsteen's reaching out or
Madonna's twist and shout are little else than marketing deferrals. Neil Young lost ground to Dylan in his recent `political
commentary', which simply proved he just didn't read enough to oppose the aerial attack on Afghanistan. Those who have yet to
record their protest, just like the internet scribes, are meeting deception in an information society reluctant to let their words
enter the public domain. Only the collective film,
September 11, had its moments—especially when bred by the grace of
Samira Makhmalbaf, who far too may North Americans take as belonging to the `other side'.
Denys Arcand's film is nowhere near as ambitious as a political comedy can be. At times the film may even seek to
take on too much, too fast—such as the religious history of Quebec, or even the young junky's unlikely mood and energy
swings while on a fix. But Arcand's fullest statement occurs when casting himself as the bought trade unionist who returns
Sebastien's mysteriously lost laptop to the tune of: "What? It just turned up? _ Yeah, that's what happened. Someone found it.
That's what happened."
By doing so, Arcand merely shows us the hitches and glitches of a society in which money can buy everything. But
when it comes to taking apart society's structures, he confirms how the cinematic art has also been bought—unwilling, or even
unable, to instruct, inform and guide viewers regarding the perennial question: What now? What next?
Beneath the false pretence of the inefficiencies of socialist or social-democratic planning, explicitly set to neoliberal
fiscal constraints, citizens as rightful political plaintiffs are vanishing in a roll of bills. Is that it? Yes, that's how it happened.
Not everyone is softly corrupt, but you'd have to be a thickskulled bureaucrat, like the hospital president, to resist. For the
other `normal' folk, like the trade unionist himself, money doesn't corrupt—it just gets you things,
necessary things.
So it seems that just as it was worth it for some Christian atheists to remain Catholic in order to guarantee burial and
a smooth glide to heaven, so also is it worth bidding on the capitalist game to make your dying days at least feel more
human—or godly.
If Arcand had really meant to designate Sebastien as a Western Osama, a.k.a. the "prince of the barbarians", very
little in his film and especially its beautiful death resolution would suggest so. For the reconciliation between the "leftist"
history professor and the "neoliberal" golden boy is done not so much at the system's expense than at ordinary people's. In this
category, no one should hesitate to include the elements of
Barbarian Invasions that lead some viewers to associate the film's
title negatively with things Muslim.
As for Brazilians, they have had to swallow representations of themselves as "anti-American" due to their
president's adamant refusal to support the American invasion on Iraq. In fact, from Syria President Lula recently called for the
immediate withdrawal of American troops from the occupied country. By making a hit of Arcand's film, though, Brazilians are not
oblivious to the fact that their minds may be made up by others.
Drawn unaware by its title, the Cariocas, like other international viewers, are connecting with a story that Arcand, by
having lost control over irony, should have told otherwise. Because in the way he has, the communal sentimentalism is merely a
cover-up for faith in a free market ideology that last year finally proved its corrupt undertow and savage yearning for class privileges.
Freed from any barbarian subtext, Quebec would have remained a truly different place, then. In the flesh it would
have proved its difference from shareholder capitalist economies. It would have shown how right the struggle is to resist
against having Medicare, among other elements of its social capital, be evaluated only according to the small print of profit
and arbitrariness of the lines splitting assets from liabilities. If streamlined privatization is our collective paradigm to be,
then a system that was once available to all—even to our recently arrived Muslim and Brazilian immigrants—will finally be lost.
Canadian philosopher, Norman Madarasz, teaches and writes on philosophy and international relations in Rio de
Janeiro. His most recent philosophical study is on Jean-Paul Sartre, appearing in the autumn 2003 issue of
The European Legacy. He welcomes comments at
nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca
