Unhappy End Cinema
Squid Game (2021), Parasite (2019), Factory (2018) & New Order (2020) as «Subversive Pessimism»
David Leupold
The essay explores recent works of subversive cinema from Russia, Mexico and South Korea. What does Michel Franco’s New Order (2020), Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite (2019) or Yuri Bykov’s Factory (2018) tell us about the human condition in the first half of the 21st century? An essay on the subversive and radical potential of sad endings.
In recent years, a new trend has emerged beyond California’s Hollywood, which is characterized by two seemingly contradictory tendencies: a radical re-politicization of film content while simultaneously turning away from old promises of redemption. These are films without heroes. Where once stood the self-conscious protagonist-patriarch that imposes his sovereign will on the world — we now face an apparent void which however turns out to be not a void in the actual sense but the negation of the individual which is, in fact, the very substance of this societal structure. While the archetype of the old hero — with his inner core intact — looks into the abysses of society with reassurance and distance, the new non-heroes (who are not anti-heroes in the strict sense) carry these abysses at their very heart. Not only in their actions but even in their desires and fantasies, they are deeply trapped in social structures. The subversive cinema of the present no longer fixates our gaze on the heroes on the screen — instead, it forces us to look through them deep into the abysses of our own world. Or as Adorno put it succintly in his essay on Lukács:
“Art does not provide knowledge of reality by reflecting it photographically or ‘from a particular perspective’ but by revealing whatever is veiled by the empirical form assumed by reality …”
It seems that there is an implicit way how the dystopian film of Michel Franco’s New Order (Nuevo orden) and Bong Joon-Ho’s black comedy thriller Parasite (Gisaengchung) speak to each other. Both films visualize the ultimate nightmare of the privileged: their own servants turn against them and in a brutal carnage indulge in their lowest desires for revenge. Here the key to this appears to be the carnivalesque scene of the family gathering which like a bond ties both films together, or more explicitly speaking: New Order begins where Parasite ends. And in some sense both movies show the same yet from distinctly different perspectives. In the case of Parasite we see the story unfolding from the perspective of the disposed family whereas in New Order it is through the perspective of an elite family subjected to violence by the dispossessed. What both films also have in common is the lack of clear moralizing attributes. Neither the elites appear as particularly vicious nor the disempowered as heroic. At the same time, the violence of the disempowered is not demonized and the elites do not arouse particular pity. It is clear that instead of self-righteous blaming, polemical simplifications and paternalizing moralizations, the directors are concerned with something else and much more decisive: exposing the acute structures of injustice and the imminent danger they harbour.
“The subversive cinema of the present no longer fixates our gaze on the heroes on the screen — instead, it forces us to look through them deep into the abysses of our own world.”
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Both film echo the warning enunciated by the urban researcher Cihan Uzunçarşılı Baysal in the Turkish documentary Ecumenopolis: City Without Limits (Ekümenopolis — Uçu olmayan şehir) on the fatal menace posed by the increasing spatial disparity of different social strata:
“If those who live in gated communities have no interaction whatsoever with the middle and lower classes, if they are even scared of their maid at home — that means they see them as a different breed. That’s very risky. But the reverse is also possible and even riskier: the poor may see the wealthy as a different breed [yoksullar zenginleri başka bir cins görebilirler]”[1]
The dire scenario painted by Baysal brings to mind the lyrics and video of the rap track The dead will steal from those who are alive[2] (Ölüleler dirilerden çalacak) by the Izmir-based rapper Anıl Murat Acar, known by his stage name Gazapizm. In a visual story plot that in its bare brutality alone is clearly reminiscent of Joon-Ho’s Parasite the marginalized toilers — encompassing sex workers, butlers and chauffeurs — turn against their hosts. With a glee of satisfaction on their faces and Kalashnikovs, hand grenades and kitchen knives in their hands they hunt them down in a killing frenzy. The salvos from the run of Ak-47s and pools of blood reveal not only the desire for revenge of the oppressed (who, similar to New Order and Parasite, are by no means transfigured into selflessly acting saviors). They reveal a terrible and hard-to-digest truth that lies in the unconscious of today’s societies (matter of fact, Gazapizm’s rap track was released a year before Parasite): it is only through the act of killing and destruction that the dispossessed even become visible in the eyes of the privileged.
Similar to the depictions in New Order and Parasite — behind the mask of courtesy and politeness the inability of the privileged to even notice the other (let alone recognizing them as an equal counterpart) betray their true attitude towards them. After all they see in their employed inanimate devices (“the dead”) trained to serve them as a means to their own end — and are reduced to their bare mechanical function like the two sex workers in Gazapizm’s video: not even prostitutes (after all a human category) but mere blowjob-giver (saksocu). And this is also precisely why the revenge of the same hits the self-conscious elites (“the alive”) so unexpectedly. It is ironically only at the moment the dispossessed turn the tables that elites with shock and utter amazement come to the belated realization that the precariate has formed a will of its own. It is the bewilderment of the Shto?! (“What?”) that reads on the puzzled face of Czar Nicholas II the moment the Bolshevik Yakov Yurovsky announces to him that the Ural Soviet of Workers’ Deputies had just decided to execute them.
“They reveal a terrible and hard-to-digest truth that lies in the unconsciousness of today’s societies (…) it is only through the act of killing and destruction that the dispossessed even become visible in the eyes of the privileged.”
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Yet this interabang is far from innocent. It is the surprise of a tsar whose fortune, in today’s terms, was around $300 billion — making him one of the richest persons of history — yet ruled over an empire wracked by feudal poverty. The evocative interabang of his “What!?” lays open the festering wound, the unbridgeable fission between the exploited majority’s unbearable reality of life and the privileged minority’ self-congratulating misconception of this reality. And is precisely where the elite family in Franco’s New Order is at fault — in their clumsy and half-hearted attempts to engage in charity they reveal not so much evil intent but, instead, their utter incapability to comprehend the extent and graveness of the situation. Both New Order and Parasite portrays elite families living their lives of luxury in utter denial of the reality that surrounds them.
And as such they also serve as a powerful metaphor for the refusal of the privileged to come to terms with what the reality of the invisible other already is. For is it not the very same fission between reality of the (dispossessed) many and perception of (privileged) few that is revealed in memory politics at the heart of Europe? Politicians in Germany obviously see not much contradiction in castigating in memorial speeches the construction of a wall built 60 years ago that had killed 140 Germans over the duration of its existence, while turning a blind eye to the 1,530 (and counting) refugees which have been killed at EU’s external borders in the year 2021 alone)? — not to mention those who have perished along the new border walls of Eastern Europe. The mauertote (refugees from the GDR killed at the Berlin Wall) are ceremoniously embraced as the martyrs of one’s own “we-group”.
“Only under the guise of a dehumanized threat — rape, Islamization, terror — do they enter the light of our public perception from time to time. Poverty not as an unacceptable human condition but as a security problem that can be partialized, contained and managed.”
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The nameless bodies of drowned refugees on the Mediterranean, instead, remain forever “the other”. And their deaths remain to the gaze of the privileged as invisible as the lives that brought them to their fatal end. Only under the guise of a dehumanized threat — rape, Islamization, terror — do they enter the light of our public perception from time to time. Poverty not as an unacceptable human condition but as a security problem that can be partialized, contained and managed. The enticing fantasy of a self-absorbed elite guided by the principle encapsulated in the Turkish proverb: “may the snake that does not bite me live for a thousand years” (bana dokunmayan yılan bin yaşasın).
But what if it does? Accordingly, the haunting question that underlies both Parasite and New Order is not so much “Why do we end being the target of heinous violence by the dispossessed other?” but rather shall by: “Why does it catches us so off guard?”
Michel Franco offers here no narrative of redemption. It is not the reds that come to power. The new order brought about by the angry masses not only soon escalates in violence and terror — even worse, it is swiftly co-opted by the military of the ancien régime. I think it is also this dire scenario, this ostensible lack of hope which accounts for why some viewers sympathetic of the left were dismayed by the plot and/or even imputed to Franco reactionary and anti-class motives. For what its worth nothing could be farther from the truth. Instead, in the best socio-realist fashion, he merely sketches the probable trajectory of such a revolution of rage from our point of the present into the near future. Franco’s cold soberness echoes here the words of Frederic Jameson:
“[I]ndeed, there is some question whether … the final dialectical subversion of the now automatized conventions of an aesthetics of perceptual revolution, might not simply be … realism itself!”
In the light of a present in which a large part of the disempowered do not identify with socialist but with ultranationalist ideas, the hope for a leftist world revolution ex nihilo lacks any basis. Franco shows how fragile and vulnerable today’s world order has become — at the same time, however, he also makes clear that in the absence of organic solidarity across social classes, a socio-economic collapse of our system can only end in the destruction of all progressive forces. Here lies his ultimate revolutionary message. Echoing Ferdinand Lasalle’s famous dictum “to speak the truth is revolutionary” — it is precisely the pure negation of revolutionary success — the coming to power of right-wing totalitarianism — on the screen that should encourage us to question the credibility of the wish images we project on the present.
“Echoing Ferdinand Lasalle’s famous dictum “to speak the truth is revolutionary” — it is precisely the pure negation of revolutionary success — the coming to power of right-wing totalitarianism — on the screen that should encourage us to question the credibility of the wish images we project on the present.”
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Whether on the Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Hanrapetutyun Square in Yerevan, the Taksim Square in Istanbul, Bolotnaya Square in Moscow, the Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan or in the shade of the Azadi Tower in Teheran. Whenever masses of people stood up in furious agitation against “those in power” — whether it is the Bankers down Wall Street, the aging theocrats around the Ayatollah or despotic leaders in the Middle East — we were quick to see in them the coming of a new, better and just world order. Yet, the years that heralded the dawn of a new form of bottom-up politics left the world more disenchanted then before, roaming further in the darkness of a crisis-ridden eternal present. The subversive momentum of the Arab Spring was stifled either by pro-government militias or was consumed by violence as it bled into full-fledged civil war. The already forgotten “green movement” (junbash-e sabz) and the sacrifice of Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran have not ended the theocracy of the Ayatollah any more than Occupy Wall Street has ended the dictatorship of global capital.
What all of these movements (and beyond) had in common were clearly-defined negative goals that allowed them to powerfully express what they stood against — and in the case of Egypt, Tunisia or Armenia actually allowed them to oust their governments out of power. Yet as the enthusiasm of the first days ebbed away — witnessing either how the old leadership regained power or the new leadership had turned into a mirror image of the old — the movements revealed another shared characteristic: the significant lack of positive goals, that is the lack of a vision that hints at a feasible roadmap towards another future. Yes, brutally crashing ways of popular dissent, but no torrential streams of contemplative imagination that could lead us towards a new horizon. Or as Slavoj Žižek put it already in 2012:
“Don’t get caught in this pseudo-activist pressure. ‘Let’s do something. We have to do something’ and so on. No. The time is to think. […] Maybe today we should say: In the 20th century we maybe tried to change the world too quickly. The time is to interpret it again.”
And I think that’s exactly where these new works of subversive world cinema come in. In contrast to the reactionary cinema with a built-in feel-good effect, they do not offer us neither transcendental redemption nor refuge from everyday reality. On the contrary, they abduct us into the illusionary world of the film only to throw us back with all their might into the unbearable existence of this world.
“In contrast to the reactionary cinema with a built-in feel-good effect, they do not offer us neither transcendental redemption nor refuge from everyday reality. On the contrary, they abduct us into the illusionary world of the film only to throw us back with all their might into the unbearable existence of this world.”
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A masterpiece of this is undoubtedly the second episode “Hell” (Ji-Ok) of the series Squid Games by Korean director Hwang Dong-hyuk. The series revolves around a group of 456 people in high debt from all straits of life who agree in playing a series of fatal children’s games in the hope of winning a prize of ₩45.6 billion. After dozens of participants have been massacred in the first round of the game, the remaining players exercise their right to end the game by a majority vote. Having seemingly escaped the hell of the game, the indebted participants return to their old lives only to come to realize that the actual hell is life in everyday capitalism itself. This is where the real horror of Squid Game is revealed — the brutal games to the death are not a mere undesired deviation from our social reality. Instead, it is the real despair of our social reality that makes possible and sustains the horror world of Squid Game in the first place. And at the end of the episode, the players decide by virtue of their own free will to prefer the world of Squid Game to the desperation of their own social reality in Seoul.
“This is where the real horror of Squid Games is revealed — the brutal games to the death are not a mere undesired deviation from our social reality. Instead, it is the real despair of our social reality that makes possible and sustains the horror world of Squid Game in the first place.”
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Instead of false hopes, kitschy love pathos and cheap revolutionary polemics this wave of unabashed story-tellers raise hard questions about the present state we are caught in. Another great piece of subversive cinema is in my opinion Yuriy Bykov’s Factory (Zavod) from 2019. Even if the story at first glance hardly promises hope, I think there is much reason to read it as a trilogy together with his previous works The Fool (2014) and The Major (2013).
The Major tells the story of a police officer who, due to excessive speed, runs over a boy and initially abuses his official position to cover his guilt. The plot becomes complicated, however, when, driven by his guilt, he decides to confess. This, however, brings him into conflict with his own police authorities, who, in light of the upcoming elections, have their own reasons to silence the affair and rid themselves of undesired witnesses — ultimately prompting them to kill both the father and the mother of the killed boy. Blackmailed by his own colleagues, the police officer finally executes the boy’s mother with a shot to the head — to safe his own skin and the life of his family.
Contrast this with the protagonist in Bykov’s film “The Fool”, Dima Nikitin, head of a municipal repair-crew and student of construction engineering — similar to the Major in Bykov’s first film, he is driven by his conscience, which brings him into direct conflict with corrupt local authorities and criminal oligarch networks. In the case of “The Fool,” it’s about Nikitin realizing while working in an apartment building that the dilapidated structure poses a direct threat to the lives of the residents — and could collapse at any time. The state authorities are aware of the threat, but fear that any intervention would lead to media attention and reveal years of embezzlement. Despite hostility and death threats, the protagonist remains undeterred in his cause and believes in the need to shake up society:
“We live like animals and we die like animals because we are nobodies to each other”
Unlike the “Major”, who bows to the state-criminal forces, the “Fool” insists on his ideals and pays for his selfless actions with his life — ironically beaten to death alongside with his father by the very inhabitants whose lives he was trying to protect. It is against this background that The Factory tells us something profoundly different and, I think, more hope-inspiring. The film tells the story of a group of factory workers around the veteran Sedoy who, after six months without pay, are facing the end of their work — the factory in which they work no longer makes enough profit and is to be closed by Kalugin, a local oligarch.
But the factory workers fight back, kidnap their old boss and barricade themselves in the factory building. The workers engage in heavy combat with the company’s hired security forces and though they are finally liquidated by the special task force of the Russian police — something strange happens. At the moment Sedoy is to be killed by the special task force, Tuman, a mercenary and henchman of the company boss, suddenly tries to get into the factory. Being held back by policemen, he calls out to Sedoy in a desperate attempt to save him from his certain death.
“Unlike the “Major”, who bows to the state-criminal forces, the “Fool” insists on his ideals and pays for his selfless actions with his life — ironically beaten to death alongside with his father by the very inhabitants whose lives he was trying to protect.”
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How can Tuman’s sudden change of heart be explained? A short scene before gives a clue: at the moment when the boss calls Sedoy a “fool” (durachok) — just as he used to call Tuman before — he realizes that in fact he and the worker are the same in the eyes of the boss. It is a constellation not of their own choosing that pitted him, as a security worker, and Sedoy, as a factory worker, against each other. The film shows in the final scene Tuman leaving the factory on foot on the way Sedoy came at the beginning of the film. This is maybe the closest a film can get to revolutionary optimism at this moment of history. The workers’ uprising around Sedoy does not have a happy ending. But it is in the moment of his failure that Tuman recognizes in him his own image and through this gains an understanding of his own class consciousness and, ultimately, his own political struggle.
“The workers’ uprising around Sedoy does not have a happy ending. But it is in the moment of his failure that Tuman recognizes in him his own image and through this gains an understanding of his own class consciousness and, ultimately, his own political struggle.”
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Unlike kitschy revolutionary romance, which in its essence is exactly the opposite — namely reactionary inertia — the film deprives the viewer of the longed-for catharsis. And it is precisely this thwarted catharsis, this unfulfilled phantasy of another world on the screen that throws us from cinematic phantasmagoria back into reality. It is hard reminder that there is no other world than our own world of injustice, brutality and imperfection. And it is precisely for this reason that we there is no other refuge left to us than our own firm negation of its ostensible permanence. Our fundamental and painful dissonance with the world as it is is already pointing to its inevitable change — though as a yet unfinished potential. This potential evades conceptualization for it can only be realized and then thought of in retrospect. Subversive cinema can lay the foundations for activating this collective potential and construe new forms of solidarity. But the struggles must be won beyond the screen.
