1. With
eight features to his credit, Britain’s David Mackenzie (
Asylum, Hallam Foe) is somehow still below the radar of popular
discourse, which may change with two of his recent works having shown at the 20
th
Annual Philadelphia Film Festival, one of which (Perfect Sense) will be
distributed theatrically in January. In his 2004 treatment of Alexander
Trocci’s
Young Adam, Mackenzie masterfully
exploits the sensuality of cinema, devises drama through structure, and accesses
the disclosive potential of sexuality in an ongoing investigation of human
impulse as a microcosm of social impulse.
2. A
rippling skin of water fills the first frames of Young Adam and cuts to a solitary swan floating in the chop. The
camera holds this icon for but a moment before delving beneath the water,
revealing its dark rugged legs aflutter in the translucent blue/green. We sink
lower to riverbed debris. In its rise back to the surface, the camera closes in
on the silhouette of a woman’s body, lifeless, non-descript, floating up to the
ripples. Like the opening sequence of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet - which, after a montage of idyllic and then suddenly
violent suburbia, burrows beneath the grass to reveal writhing insects - the
murky underbelly will be Young Adam’s stage.
3. Scotland,
after the war. Joe Taylor (Ewan McGregor) works on an old fuel barge with Leslie
(Peter Mullan) and Ella Gault (Tilda Swinton) and their young son Jim (Jack
McElhone), carting fuel cargo up and down the rivers and canals between Glasgow
and Edinburgh. Les and Joe discover the unknown woman’s body floating in the river
and fish her out. This grim catalyst precipitates a degradation of morality the
length of the film that slips between timeframes of Joe’s past with a woman named
Cathie Dimley (Emily Mortimer) and his present on the barge, as subtly as it
lists between the tone of a dream and bleak reality. Eventually a wending
portrait draws the span of time and souls together.
4. From
the start, Director/writer Mackenzie ensconces in a dour and dense mood, yet is
somehow electric in that regard. He paints a portrait of constriction. The
canals are scarcely wider than the barge that is used to traverse them, and the
tunnels are even tighter. The bowels of the barge haven’t a single opportunity
for privacy; small cabinet sized quarters sectioned off by thin walls or
curtains, a ceiling just tall enough for someone to stand, a tight and steep
staircase, dark. The outdoors, overcast. A cool muted palate and the pervasive
cold physically accentuate a sense of contraction, of shrinking space,
ambition, expectation, and the massing of disappointment. The inside of the
barge is first shown warmly, with the faintest suggestion of isolation as form
of freedom. That irony soon collapses. The slow crawl of barge life,
emblematized by the camera’s glide, weighs everything like the riverbed debris.
A flashback expresses Joe’s stifled creativity as a writer. Even the structural
non-linearity of Young Adam confines
the viewer to an unpredictable clarification of the dramatic elements.
5. We
learn that Joe is adrift, at times like the floating corpse; silent yet teeming
with a history concealed. He drifts, and deposits, and when he perceives Amontillado’s
cask 6. being mortared around him by complacency, stagnation, or expectation,
he drifts once more, always a trail of eviscerated souls behind him. He purports
to be the architect of his waywardness – an objection to commitment,
sentimentality and normalcy - but he sometimes seems the victim of its
inherency. A shot of Joe walking from bow to stern as viewed from above, gives
the impression he is standing still as the barge moves beneath him.
6. Though
much the observer, Joe learns best through touch.
“I was struck by the fact that sight is hypnotized by the surfaces of
things; more than that, it can only know surfaces at a distance, meager depths
at close range. But the wetness of water felt on the hand and on the wrist is
more intimate and more convincing than its colour or even than any flat expanse
of sea. The eye, I thought, could never go to the center of things.”
(Trocci, p.29) Joe’s mistrust of sight
leads him to acts of physical penetration as a primary mode of research and
experience. One of the first things we see him do is touch, from which we continually
appraise his corporeality, as does he. After plucking the woman’s body from the
water, he looks at her intently, draws her translucent petticoat over her
buttocks, and as if wanting to leave a trace of himself, places his palm gently
on the pallid skin between her shoulder blades (shown in close-up). The film too
is obsessed with surfaces; wood, water, gravel, iron, coal, skin, cobblestone,
and hypnotizes through clean gliding movements that read like caresses. Presiding
over this is the fact that a film too is bound to a surface (the screen),
therefore confinement resounds even in the medium itself.
7. Though
the draft of the narrative is slow, its dramatic movement is a powerful
undertow, and wastes no time in the commencing. Ella ties the laundry on the
line as Joe, framed by the wide river, watches the body being taken away. Through
memory-like incisions that Trocci describes as a “brainwave;” Joe’s hand
against the wet skin, a close-up of Ella’s equally corpselike lips, the dead woman’s
leg sliding off the gurney and her heel dragging in the gravel, Mackenzie draws
together death and a spark of erotic awareness between Joe and Ella.
8. That
very night, Joe undertakes the first proactive steps in an affair with Ella, right
under Les’s nose. At dinner he grazes Ella’s calf with his own, testing her,
studying her microscopic reactions. He runs his hand gradually up her thigh and
under her panties, testing further until Ella removes his grasp. They remain
almost unflinchingly placid above the table, where below, like the swan and the
murk, something unclean transpires.
9. Later
that night Joe breaks away from Les at the pub, knowing Ella will be alone on
the barge. Seizing the moment they consummate their curiosity. Thereafter, Ella
becomes increasingly driven in their affair. A sense of abandon sparks life and
softness in her where there was none. Joe’s
abandonment is like a political act, a political philosophy. He’s a libertine.
She [Ella] is going on some weird instinct about mortal spirit. So the erotic
charge is essentially mutual but is coming from a very different place. A
strange sort of eden, like being a child again.” (Tilda Swinton, actress) Hers
is antidotal against marginalization, where his is an act towards it. Characteristic
of Mackenzie, the sexual exchanges are rugged and earthy, without the sheen or
idealism of more commercial fare. 11. These scenes increasingly ascribe to
personal meaning. For example, after Jim is sent off to boarding school she
says to Joe, “Every time I see him go….it
breaks my heart. He needs an education.” Presumably she wants Jim to have options
other than working on the barge his entire life. As such, the demands of an
increasingly educated society alienate her from her own son and create a gulf
of loneliness that she navigates by busy work and by the diversion of a primal
enterprise with Joe. In the scene in which she expresses these feelings to Joe,
Ella bears her breasts and he kisses them in the midst of her mournful maternal
sway.
10.
These scenes increasingly ascribe to personal meaning. For example, after Jim
is sent off to boarding school she says to Joe, “Every time I see him go….it breaks my heart. He needs an education.”
Presumably she wants Jim to have options other than working on the barge his
entire life. As such, the demands of an increasingly educated society alienate
her from her own son and create a gulf of loneliness that she navigates by busy
work and by the diversion of a primal enterprise with Joe. In the scene in
which she expresses these feelings to Joe, Ella bears her breasts and he kisses
them in the midst of her mournful maternal sway.
11. Past and present, everything Joe does is an
analysis of his own loneliness,
an
antidote, but of a confirmation that that loneliness isn’t exceptional. What
sparks his passion is any confrontation with a soul as electrically lonely as
his own, which is as affixed to that loneliness as he is. In a strangely Zen
exercise, he probes into these individuals – literally through sex - as a way
to understand himself through them as a reflection. On this point Joe Taylor
finds a conceptual kinship with William James (Jeremy Renner) of
The Hurt Locker (2008), a film that also
favors personal storytelling over explicit socio-politics. Like Joe he
relegates himself from society as a deliberate mode of actualization. As with
Joe’s pattern of sexuality, James, part of a US bomb-squad in the Middle-East, only
sparks when in the field, faced with perilous but empirical matters,
situational analysis and survival. He is equally tactile, equally stilled on
the surface, equally spare on words, equally at odds with expectation and
normalcy. Much like James’s reaction to banal domesticity, what diffuses Joe’s passion
most is when those lonely souls he courts become comfortable and expectant,
shattering the mutual veneer of a dismal worldview and eliminating their
viability as a test subject. Ella does this by anticipating their marriage and future.
In the course of his exteriorized self-study, Like James’s reckless decisions
in the field, Joe is astounded by what acts he is willing to partake of in
anticipation of a consequence which never befalls him; citing the sexual hazing
scene with Cathie that undulates between rape and play. Her unspoken unblinking
forgiveness afterward signals her invalidity as a mirror and is his queue to
move on.
12. As
attained easily on a barge, the peripheral world remains so for most of the film.
The viewer has only passing revelations on which to hinge a socio-political subtext,
as do the characters, which follow the dead woman’s story through newspaper
articles. After Les discovers the affair, seemingly by Ella’s machination, he
leaves and Joe finds himself assuming his post. In a conversation with Joe,
Ella puts forward Les’s fear that “Once
fuel rationing stops, the trucks’ll take over.” Just after this remark, the
barge is shown easing through a dense fog. So dense that Ella must direct from
the bow with shouts. Joe spies prisoners paving a road. The infrastructure that
will eventually supercede the canals is being built-up before Joe’s eyes. This
moment resounds with notes of entrapment; that of Joe having inherited a scraping
conventional life, that of a systemic uncertainty about his navigating a
changing world, that of guilt.
13. At
this point of the film Ella’s brother-in-law dies, having fallen off his Lorrie
and then run over by a bus; an off-screen event coupling even the industry of
roads with death. As if inviting full collapse, Ella asks her grieving yet
brazen sister Gwen (Therese Bradley) to stay on the barge. In a transparent scheme
of “going to the pictures,” Gwen and Joe have sex in an alleyway in town; an
unsavory means to an end for Gwen to spite her sister’s seeming happiness, and
for Joe to incite a way out. Joe moves into a shared flat in the city and
becomes infectiously drawn to the trial of one David Gordon, a plumber and
family man convicted of murdering the woman found by Joe and Les with whom Mr.
Gordon was having casual relations. Joe’s intimate knowledge of the circumstances
of the woman’s death; that she is in fact Cathie Dimley, that she cannot swim,
that she slipped into the river after telling Joe she was pregnant with his
child, that he did nothing to save her, that he covered up the evidence of
their clandestine sexual contract that night (revealed in bits of savage
dramatic irony) is Mr. Gordon’s only salvation, yet the guilt does not impel
Joe to speak out in other than an ineffectual unsigned letter which he drops at
the court
. Joe writes his confession
in a phone booth, where even the airing of the truth is conditional, confined
and anonymous.
14. Young
Adam is in a sense a post war
story. Not just WWII. Post any war. That story about a society that’s so
traumatized by so much violence for so many years and trying to get itself
together and trying to construct all sorts of boundaries, and intellectuals
feeling alienated and not wanting to join in… Unable to relate to his
generation’s status quo optimism - the gulf of which is sealed in the image of
three university students walking past him with utter levity - Joe unmoors from
trappings of monogamy, career, possession, morality; the very buoy of his
alienation. But Joe tangentially participates with society; allowing the cogs
of industry to turn by carting fuel on the barge, and allowing the machinations
of justice to churn by bystanding the wrongful sentencing of Daniel Gordon.
15. The
story is partly an indictment of the death penalty and the ease of factual
distortion. The seeking of a conviction is as much a feverish means-to-an-end modality
as Joe’s own sexual exploits. The halls, corridors, and arches of justice are as
narrow as the tunnels, canals, locks, and the barge. In the courtroom where
“truth” is excised in short parentheticals and strung together to paint
portraits of extremes, Joe plays with his pocket mirror and watches himself
watching with the detachment he affords all his tests of fate.
16. By
trial’s end Joe is more intense than ever. He steps to the river’s edge framed
again by the ripples. We look down upon him from behind almost as though his were
now the body floating dead. He looks at himself in the pocket mirror, the last
time he will do so seeking glimmers of humanity or reason to think lightly of
life. And Joe’s great nightmare, that it
is indeed possible to live a life without leaving fingerprints, to drift
through without responsibility…that seemed some kind of liberal dream… it’s
actually a nightmare.” (Swinton)
17. Where
at the end of the novel Trocci writes, “…the
disintegration had already begun,” Mackenzie masterfully interprets; From
above and behind, the camera swoops into a ¾ close-up of Joe looking at the
river. Joe’s absence-of-presence is a weight where it should be a
weightlessness. He holds and then walks off, the weighty pack on his back, into
the deep blurred disintegration of the background. The film is merely a
preamble to Joe’s ultimate course of immorality and marginalization in a world
where justice is subjective and guilt is livable.
“As for my vague
anxiety about my future I think I analyzed it all in A Fool’s Life (1927), except for a social factor, namely the
shadow of feudalism cast over my life. This I omitted purposely, not at all certain
that I could really clarify the social context in which I lived.” -Akutagawa (1927, in his suicide note)
Akutagawa’s later autobiographical works, such as A Fool’s Life and Cogwheels were dedicated to a character (himself) ill-at-ease in the
purposeless patterns of daily life, whose obsessive dejection is the playground
for revelation, no matter how pained. The
diary chronicle Cogwheels charts
Akutagawa’s rise to a hallucinatory tipping point, steeped in the anxieties of
one afeared of losing their mind. A Fool’s Life is a poetic volume of
epigrams (numbered 1-51) that express “moral and philosophical reflections,
parables and metaphors” as Akutagawa collides pure fiction, autobiography, and
sheer musing seamlessly. It is this particular
focus that inducts Akutagawa into the Occupy
Nowhere conversation. The character
of his self undergoes existential upheaval while exiled-in-plain-sight by the
tides of expectation and the mundane. 
To celebrate Akutagawa’s consequential contribution to
cinema, and the undeniable cinema of his language, I have included several excerpts
from A Fool’s Life. Consider how
each, in their brevity, resonates with Occupy
Nowhere’s emotional core, and how Akutagawa interprets so many shades of escape
or disenfranchisement – physical, emotional, psychological - which are dismaying
but ultimately revealing. He observes
that which can only be expressed by one inhabiting that disenfranchisement, and
also that which escapes them – as reflected in the opening quote above. That sentiment of not knowing how to clarify
his own social context is reminiscent of the same incapacity held by the first
Occupy Wallstreet protestors. 
