The International (2009)
Monday, May 10, 2010
7:55 AM
1
Marxian Rating:
Escaping through the roofs of constituted corruption
By Gabriel Tupinambá and Martín López
The title of this movie is reminiscent of the name of the anthem of international socialism (L'Internationale). But don't get it wrong: there's no final struggle here, no human race grouping together; only the good guys fighting for justice against one of the world's most powerful banks. The film opened in February 2009, right after the 2008 financial meltdown. However, the event that inspired the story is the Bank of Credit and Commerce International banking scandal in the early 90's. Although this movie comes out exactly in the moment when capitalism faces one of its biggest crises ever, we barely get the chance to question the order of things. Instead, we have a moralistic stance against corrupted bankers.
We should first have in mind Alain Badiou's distinction between empirical corruption and systemic corruption. Empirical corruption in this movie is embodied in big financial institutions uncovering illegal activities such as arms trading, mafia deals, and intentional destabilization of third world governments in order to control their external debt. Systemic corruption (that of the capitalism and constitutional democracy per se) is only seen through the Looking-Glass, as an unexpected reflection. There is a reflected tension between moral corruption and structural corruption. What the bad guy says at the end of the movie is true: you kill a banker, some other banker takes his place.
Freud always said the unconscious material is indestructible: the only possible thing to do is to face it and overcome it. Isn't capitalism indestructible in the same way? The International seems to play a very funny game with regards to that question. You get to see the big picture, but only through scattered traces. Ultimately the message is: No matter how far you go outside the law; there will always be someone stronger and more corrupt than you. It's like there were different levels of empirical corruption. But we never get to the systemic corruption! So here's the unwritten moral lesson of this story: That point is unreachable.
The story inside the story (the one that keeps the plot together) is quite simple: There's a veiled attraction between Interpol Agent Louis Salinger (our hero) and his Assistant Eleanor Whitman. Her only purpose in the film is to look at him, sometimes as a son, sometimes voyeuristically as a forbidden object of desire. The hero needs someone to tell his story. That's the Clive Owen thing though...the hero that is so heroic that no one will tell his story. He always plays the modern saint...specially in Cuarón's Children of Men - the guy who is willing to sacrifice himself for the cause on the brink of not believing in it himself.
Wilhelm Wexler (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) is an ex communist who joined the dark side of the force. He is one of the bad guys working for the bank, providing instructions to professional killers hired to eliminate selected targets. There's a central scene in the movie in which he chooses an art museum as the place to run a massacre. Is that what Hollywood thinks of ex-communists? Educated and refined tyrants? Good guys who made wrong decisions, wrong "choices"? If we look at the covers of newspapers at the time this movie opened, we can see a fashionable distorted parallelism between “socialism” and the bailout payed by tax payers. “Socialism” meant socialization... of losses.
When Salinger catches Wexler, there's a wonderful dialogue de sourds between them:
The dumb moralistic turn of the bad guy looking for redemption should not deceive us: It does not make less true what he says about truth. On a side note: They always make Armin Mueller-Stahl be the vehicle of the moral basis of the films he makes. He played a similar role in Eastern Promises (2007). Rarely he is not the character who transits between the amoral violent side and the moral righteous fidelity to a cause. Every time there is a character like that, be it a father, a governor, a spy, there is always a fetish actor called to play it. By the way, Wexler sounds a lot like Wechsel-er, which means "to switch" in German, Mueller-Stahl’s language. The bad guy certainly knows about switching; take for example the following quotes:
In the scene where Salinger interrogates Wexler, for a moment it seems like he is going to be tortured. The girl is watching through an eyehole while they are having a moralistic conversation. But when things get messy, she is not able to look anymore. And neither are we! What's going on in there? Why are we are sided with Naomi Watts in that scene? Why aren't we allowed to witness they making their plan? Here's where things change for good, where we get to the point of no return. The girl disappears from the film from then on, and we move on to another register - the “i want justice” line the hero says in the end, showing that he believes justice, but not the jurisdiction... Again comparing to Children of Men, we also get a point of no return there, when Clive Owen goes into the concentration camp, from where there’s no turning back. In the Cuarón's film this happens when Julianne Moore dies; In The International, it happens when Naomi Watts can’t tag along anymore. This points towards the modern saint figure - since "the woman is one of the names-of-the-father", in a point in history where the father function (supposedly) lost its efficacy, it is "beyond the desire of the mother", beyond a desire attached to one’s significant other that the true realm of ethics seems to extend itself. Clive Owen really fits this role... even in that 2004 film, Closer.
But what happened after the interrogation? Wexler joined the good cause looking for his final redemption. He dies, of course. And Salinger, our true hero, embarks on an odyssey through the stormy seas of empirical corruption. However, before Wexler died, he opened an unexplored space by saying truth doesn't have to make sense. The true heroic act would have been the salto mortale to this unknown world of truth without sense. Too bad sense beats truth (as it usually happens).
However, the bankers learned this lesson very well. There's a scene when the chairman of the international corporation attends a meeting with the directory. He is working from home, talking to senior management through a web conference while his son is playing around. The chairman is informed that some compromising information leaked, and might undermine their plans. So he suddenly asks to his son, somehow trying to give him a lesson: “What do we do when there's no way out?” And the little boy replies: “We get in even deeper”.
Throughout the film we find a series of overlapping structures. There's a thing with roofs in this story. For example, the bankers hire two snipers. The first one is the scapegoat the police needed to clear the evidence. The second one is placed right above the first: in the roof (above the law, where things truly happen). Both have timers. If one of them fails, the other one gets a clean shoot. The Carabinieri were also hired to kill the first sniper so the second one can escape. Read between the lines: important things go on at the top of the structure, and not underneath, were we all live and die following instructions. This is perfectly clear in the movie's motto: They control your money. They control your government. They control your life... and everybody pays.
The whole film has this double-store structure, and maybe that answers why the museum. It is structured exactly as a one-store pavement that transits between the two layers (no wonder than that it is a comfortable place for the ex-communist to wander) and the scene before the massacre, Salinger is at the roof of the place in Italy, discovering that there are two levels. Then, after a sudden cut, he is at the top of the museum, coming from the upper level to the lower one without any breaks (stratified in a way), and at the end of that movement, he is faced with the man who embodies that in the film: the ex-communist. At the end, he goes back up. It's not a coincidence: the movie ends in a scene at the roofs of Istanbul.
The bankers thought the sons of the Italian politician were more open minded than his father. They preferred to negotiate with them because they were supposed to be more flexible with regards with lobby, speculation and illegal activity. So they killed the politician in order to do business with his sons. As for the Interpol, they thought the open-minded politician sons are the ultimate guarantors of truth. And who are they in the end? Well, not other than the mafia looking for vendetta. In a typical Hollywood story, anyone who embodies the least of honest paternal function (meaning: love that is not blood-tied, love for a cause, be it creating a family, communism etc) ends up dead. It's always done by pointing out how “artificial” it was, in contrast to the “natural” state of being together that we feel within the “real” order of things. Mafiosi avenging the death of a valued representative of democracy... Isn't it ironic?
The whole Italian theme in the film plays the part normally assigned to us under-developed “still tribal” countries, where the herd-father is still alive or agonizing, so the Italians actually show the passage from the barbaric order of the capricious father that held everything together to the sons who don't have the same authority and obedience, but still keep a thread of unity around a cause. The Italian brothers are very aware that there is a space where the law doesn't reach...the simple comparison between the father and the sons shows that: the authoritarian father who had to be killed, he who embodies the law (even if a criminal one), and the sons who are ready to work there where the paternal law doesn't seem to extend itself. The question that we need to ask then (very fitting with the passage from the herd father of totem and tabu to the “god is dead” of micropolitics) is which is a more encompassing Law: the one embodied (and thus locatable) in the old Italian father or the one that is nowhere, but has its effects, like the Italian sons, open minded people, who deal with the criminals and kill them when needed? The bad bankers preferred to deal with the new Italian yuppies than with the old Italian father. No wonder Don Corleone became such a famous anti-hero. He is too much of a father figure for the pretense “free market” to deal with him.
After a long chase through the roofs of Istanbul, Salinger corners the villain. That's when our hero hesitates and the mafia guy pulls the trigger for him. When the moment of truth comes, Salinger is not brave enough to “get in even deeper”. He should have been the one to shoot the bank chairman. Pure heroes always get the “other guy” - the Italian brothers in this case - to do the dirty work and be responsible. If he had gone on with it, it would have been too evident the structural problem: even the good guy has a function in the “evil” capitalist system: taking out the capitalists that are not discreet and enjoy too much of the constituted empirical corruption. If he killed the guy he would be indistinguishable from a killer that could have come from the bank itself, trying to prevent that the big boss there made a even worse mess.
So who has just been saved? The Law, of course: The Italian liberal berlusconian politician whose sons had to take the wrong path (vendetta) to honor his death. So Interpol, the Italian father, and of course our hero are the true beautiful souls in this story. The ex communist has to die in order to reach redemption. The mafia guys had to dirty their hands (and souls) to get justice. Everything is reduced to bad guys vs. bad guys. Beautiful souls remain pure. The usual crap. But there's a wonderful true moment before the shooting, the true “shot”: The hero realizes the banker is right, so it's not people who is corrupted, but the very system we rely on.
As Brecht said, what is robbing a bank compared to founding one? Well, the newspaper covers at the movie credits are the answer.
We should first have in mind Alain Badiou's distinction between empirical corruption and systemic corruption. Empirical corruption in this movie is embodied in big financial institutions uncovering illegal activities such as arms trading, mafia deals, and intentional destabilization of third world governments in order to control their external debt. Systemic corruption (that of the capitalism and constitutional democracy per se) is only seen through the Looking-Glass, as an unexpected reflection. There is a reflected tension between moral corruption and structural corruption. What the bad guy says at the end of the movie is true: you kill a banker, some other banker takes his place.
Freud always said the unconscious material is indestructible: the only possible thing to do is to face it and overcome it. Isn't capitalism indestructible in the same way? The International seems to play a very funny game with regards to that question. You get to see the big picture, but only through scattered traces. Ultimately the message is: No matter how far you go outside the law; there will always be someone stronger and more corrupt than you. It's like there were different levels of empirical corruption. But we never get to the systemic corruption! So here's the unwritten moral lesson of this story: That point is unreachable.
The story inside the story (the one that keeps the plot together) is quite simple: There's a veiled attraction between Interpol Agent Louis Salinger (our hero) and his Assistant Eleanor Whitman. Her only purpose in the film is to look at him, sometimes as a son, sometimes voyeuristically as a forbidden object of desire. The hero needs someone to tell his story. That's the Clive Owen thing though...the hero that is so heroic that no one will tell his story. He always plays the modern saint...specially in Cuarón's Children of Men - the guy who is willing to sacrifice himself for the cause on the brink of not believing in it himself.
Wilhelm Wexler (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) is an ex communist who joined the dark side of the force. He is one of the bad guys working for the bank, providing instructions to professional killers hired to eliminate selected targets. There's a central scene in the movie in which he chooses an art museum as the place to run a massacre. Is that what Hollywood thinks of ex-communists? Educated and refined tyrants? Good guys who made wrong decisions, wrong "choices"? If we look at the covers of newspapers at the time this movie opened, we can see a fashionable distorted parallelism between “socialism” and the bailout payed by tax payers. “Socialism” meant socialization... of losses.
When Salinger catches Wexler, there's a wonderful dialogue de sourds between them:
Salinger: Based on everything I've read about you, you seem like the kind of man who aspired to die for something more than this.
Wexler: Well, this is the difference between truth and fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
The dumb moralistic turn of the bad guy looking for redemption should not deceive us: It does not make less true what he says about truth. On a side note: They always make Armin Mueller-Stahl be the vehicle of the moral basis of the films he makes. He played a similar role in Eastern Promises (2007). Rarely he is not the character who transits between the amoral violent side and the moral righteous fidelity to a cause. Every time there is a character like that, be it a father, a governor, a spy, there is always a fetish actor called to play it. By the way, Wexler sounds a lot like Wechsel-er, which means "to switch" in German, Mueller-Stahl’s language. The bad guy certainly knows about switching; take for example the following quotes:
Wexler: We cannot control the things life does to us. They are done before you know it, and once they are done, they make you do other things. Until at last everything comes between you and the man you wanted to be.
Wexler: Character is easier kept than recovered.
In the scene where Salinger interrogates Wexler, for a moment it seems like he is going to be tortured. The girl is watching through an eyehole while they are having a moralistic conversation. But when things get messy, she is not able to look anymore. And neither are we! What's going on in there? Why are we are sided with Naomi Watts in that scene? Why aren't we allowed to witness they making their plan? Here's where things change for good, where we get to the point of no return. The girl disappears from the film from then on, and we move on to another register - the “i want justice” line the hero says in the end, showing that he believes justice, but not the jurisdiction... Again comparing to Children of Men, we also get a point of no return there, when Clive Owen goes into the concentration camp, from where there’s no turning back. In the Cuarón's film this happens when Julianne Moore dies; In The International, it happens when Naomi Watts can’t tag along anymore. This points towards the modern saint figure - since "the woman is one of the names-of-the-father", in a point in history where the father function (supposedly) lost its efficacy, it is "beyond the desire of the mother", beyond a desire attached to one’s significant other that the true realm of ethics seems to extend itself. Clive Owen really fits this role... even in that 2004 film, Closer.
But what happened after the interrogation? Wexler joined the good cause looking for his final redemption. He dies, of course. And Salinger, our true hero, embarks on an odyssey through the stormy seas of empirical corruption. However, before Wexler died, he opened an unexplored space by saying truth doesn't have to make sense. The true heroic act would have been the salto mortale to this unknown world of truth without sense. Too bad sense beats truth (as it usually happens).
However, the bankers learned this lesson very well. There's a scene when the chairman of the international corporation attends a meeting with the directory. He is working from home, talking to senior management through a web conference while his son is playing around. The chairman is informed that some compromising information leaked, and might undermine their plans. So he suddenly asks to his son, somehow trying to give him a lesson: “What do we do when there's no way out?” And the little boy replies: “We get in even deeper”.
Throughout the film we find a series of overlapping structures. There's a thing with roofs in this story. For example, the bankers hire two snipers. The first one is the scapegoat the police needed to clear the evidence. The second one is placed right above the first: in the roof (above the law, where things truly happen). Both have timers. If one of them fails, the other one gets a clean shoot. The Carabinieri were also hired to kill the first sniper so the second one can escape. Read between the lines: important things go on at the top of the structure, and not underneath, were we all live and die following instructions. This is perfectly clear in the movie's motto: They control your money. They control your government. They control your life... and everybody pays.
The whole film has this double-store structure, and maybe that answers why the museum. It is structured exactly as a one-store pavement that transits between the two layers (no wonder than that it is a comfortable place for the ex-communist to wander) and the scene before the massacre, Salinger is at the roof of the place in Italy, discovering that there are two levels. Then, after a sudden cut, he is at the top of the museum, coming from the upper level to the lower one without any breaks (stratified in a way), and at the end of that movement, he is faced with the man who embodies that in the film: the ex-communist. At the end, he goes back up. It's not a coincidence: the movie ends in a scene at the roofs of Istanbul.
The bankers thought the sons of the Italian politician were more open minded than his father. They preferred to negotiate with them because they were supposed to be more flexible with regards with lobby, speculation and illegal activity. So they killed the politician in order to do business with his sons. As for the Interpol, they thought the open-minded politician sons are the ultimate guarantors of truth. And who are they in the end? Well, not other than the mafia looking for vendetta. In a typical Hollywood story, anyone who embodies the least of honest paternal function (meaning: love that is not blood-tied, love for a cause, be it creating a family, communism etc) ends up dead. It's always done by pointing out how “artificial” it was, in contrast to the “natural” state of being together that we feel within the “real” order of things. Mafiosi avenging the death of a valued representative of democracy... Isn't it ironic?
The whole Italian theme in the film plays the part normally assigned to us under-developed “still tribal” countries, where the herd-father is still alive or agonizing, so the Italians actually show the passage from the barbaric order of the capricious father that held everything together to the sons who don't have the same authority and obedience, but still keep a thread of unity around a cause. The Italian brothers are very aware that there is a space where the law doesn't reach...the simple comparison between the father and the sons shows that: the authoritarian father who had to be killed, he who embodies the law (even if a criminal one), and the sons who are ready to work there where the paternal law doesn't seem to extend itself. The question that we need to ask then (very fitting with the passage from the herd father of totem and tabu to the “god is dead” of micropolitics) is which is a more encompassing Law: the one embodied (and thus locatable) in the old Italian father or the one that is nowhere, but has its effects, like the Italian sons, open minded people, who deal with the criminals and kill them when needed? The bad bankers preferred to deal with the new Italian yuppies than with the old Italian father. No wonder Don Corleone became such a famous anti-hero. He is too much of a father figure for the pretense “free market” to deal with him.
After a long chase through the roofs of Istanbul, Salinger corners the villain. That's when our hero hesitates and the mafia guy pulls the trigger for him. When the moment of truth comes, Salinger is not brave enough to “get in even deeper”. He should have been the one to shoot the bank chairman. Pure heroes always get the “other guy” - the Italian brothers in this case - to do the dirty work and be responsible. If he had gone on with it, it would have been too evident the structural problem: even the good guy has a function in the “evil” capitalist system: taking out the capitalists that are not discreet and enjoy too much of the constituted empirical corruption. If he killed the guy he would be indistinguishable from a killer that could have come from the bank itself, trying to prevent that the big boss there made a even worse mess.
So who has just been saved? The Law, of course: The Italian liberal berlusconian politician whose sons had to take the wrong path (vendetta) to honor his death. So Interpol, the Italian father, and of course our hero are the true beautiful souls in this story. The ex communist has to die in order to reach redemption. The mafia guys had to dirty their hands (and souls) to get justice. Everything is reduced to bad guys vs. bad guys. Beautiful souls remain pure. The usual crap. But there's a wonderful true moment before the shooting, the true “shot”: The hero realizes the banker is right, so it's not people who is corrupted, but the very system we rely on.
As Brecht said, what is robbing a bank compared to founding one? Well, the newspaper covers at the movie credits are the answer.
Who killed Wilhelm Wexler and why?