-- By Tom Phillips
In 1960, Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s film ”The Virgin
Spring” shocked and outraged audiences
in Europe and America. The film
dramatizes a medieval Swedish ballad of rape, murder, and revenge – all shown
with brutal realism. It ends with a
scene of penitence and prayer, as a spring bursts forth from the shallow grave
of the young victim.
 |
| The Virgin Spring |
The rape scene was censored in the US, and I saw the film in
a truncated form in 1960. Still, it took
57 years until I dared to look again. “The
Virgin Spring” is 89 minutes of continuous tension, dread, shock, and only at the end, redemption.
Bergman, wounded by the violation of his work, put out a
brief letter defending its frankness. He
said the rape scene had an ethical significance. “It shows the crime in its naked atrocity,
forcing us, in shocked desperation, to leave aesthetic enjoyment of a work of
art for passionate involvement in a human drama of guilt and grace… We must not hesitate in our portrayal of
human degradation, even if, in our demand for truth, we must violate certain taboos.”
Ethics trumps Aesthetics.
In 2017, Laura Peterson will not be censored for her new
version of “Failure.” But in its way, it
is just as shocking a violation of our usual aesthetic standards. Refashioned in the wake of the 2016 election,
“Failure” is a picture of just the “American carnage” that our new leader
claimed would end with his inauguration.
In her program note, the choreographer calls it “a protest against the
elevation of materialism and thoughtless accumulation of wealth at any cost.”
It does this by showing the cost – i.e. the degradation of American lives, one by
one, into the slavish pursuit of an illusion.
A great chasm has opened between the rich and the rest of us in America,
and for the vast majority, there is no way to bridge it. Working three jobs will not do it for the
single mother. Teaching ten courses will
not do it for the PhD adjunct professor.
For-profit colleges with E-Z loan terms will not do it for the hopeful student. Unpaid internships will not do it for the
would-be young professional. The reality
for most is a new form of slavery.
Do I exaggerate? I
don’t think so. I knew we were in
trouble back in the 1980s, in the heady Reagan years, when I first heard the
phrase “maximizing profits.” At the time
I was working for CBS, and I recall the report of a conversation between our
CEO, Laurence Tisch, and Ted Turner, the inventor and boss of CNN. Turner boasted that he didn’t even pay a
third of his workers – that bright young people would work as interns for
nothing, simply in the hope that they would win favor and someday be rewarded
with gainful employment. Tisch licked his chops, and it wasn’t long before CBS began expanding its unpaid labor
force. At around the same time, CBS’s “60
Minutes” ran an expose of prison labor in China. A hidden camera caught a Chinese official telling Americans that China could produce cheap goods by turning
prisons into factories, with inmates as unpaid workers. Shocking!
And inspiring. Today a journalism
graduate in America can spend ten years working for free – reporting and even
editing – and wind up with nothing, just failure.
Peterson’s “Failure” ends with a marathon to nowhere. Four dancers exhaust themselves, hauling their
bodies through a repetitive series of steps, breathless, flagging, failing,
losing their technique, style, stage presence, and finally their will to
dance. An ugly scene. One offended spectator called it an “assault
on the audience.” But like “The Virgin
Spring” it ends with a redeeming tableau, even an apotheosis: four dancers, each a "failure," mount a platform and stand, with dignity, close together under the stained-glass upper window of Judson
Memorial Church.
Like Bergman, Peterson sacrifices aesthetic pleasure for an
ethical purpose—a portrayal of human degradation. The assault on the audience represents the
rape of the American people. What form
of vengeance will come is yet unknown. But
just as history did not end with the triumph of “Freedom” in the late 20thcentury, neither will it end here in the carnage.
n
Copyright
2017 by Tom Phillips
No comments:
Post a Comment