Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance
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to make achievements we can detect and applaud: a transformation of the social arrangements that imprison the powerless, a transformation of space according to a new aesthetic, a transformation of the self. A film, then, about a personality who meanders and turns in circles, who stares out the window, whose encounters are systematically, repeatedly, emphatically fruitless? No. A man should be looking for a love partner, and find one. He should be solving a mystery. He should be erecting a pyramid. But Camus put it best: “Everyone wants the man who is still searching to have already reached his conclusions. A thousand voices are already telling him what he has found, and yet he knows that he hasn’t found any thing” (155). Niccolò has not reached his conclusions, and his search, which we must accompany, is exhausting, overwhelming. “You have found me,” says Mavi, in effect, and Ida echoes; as we presume the wife echoed, too, earlier, in another life. But he never finds Mavi, we only want him to. Never finds Ida. This film is not about the result or motive of a search, but about the search itself, its vertigo, sloppiness, unpredictability, passionate yet hopeless intensity. Given the incessant movement and complexity of the world in and through which Niccolò searches, it is perhaps obvious to say that he is bored. He experiences, that is to say, boredom in the most exquisite and high-minded sense of the term, a “nagging desire for something, the nature of which is forever hidden” (Healy 48; qtd. in Winter 28).
It is not that Niccolò feels a yearning but does not know what it is that he yearns for. It is that he experiences desire, but cannot know its object. “In an instant,” he knows, with Vladimir and Estragon, “all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.” This is what it is to be searching for form, reaching into the ether in every posture one assumes, combating that gravity, straining against convention and history, trying through the unilluminated void to see shape, not any shape but the singular shape that will give to one’s sensibility and memory, placement and purpose and potentiality. As Tennessee Williams’s poet Nonno writes in The Night of the Iguana:
Sometime while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence. (123)
Niccolò is like this poet, but his mutterings are gazes; and the tone of his voice is in the way he stretches out his arm, the way he enters a room. The opposite of this boredom, this relentless but evenhanded search, is commonplace action: the partygoers, for example, carrying on trivial little conversations at the soirée as though it mattered what one said, as though one were actually being informative in adjoining oneself genealogically to the inventor of the double-bass; or a shopgirl fiddling with a male mannequin in her vitrine, as though to give a signal, as though to embody a daydream; or an actress giving a performance, or circling an enclosure on her steed; or a woman giggling with excitement because she has to find a place to pee; or the noxious mundanity of trying to get into one’s apartment through the burglar alarm one has forgotten to disable; all these and a myriad more commonplaces, the stuff of daily life but poison to the soul (poison like the ice cream the thug is slurping in the café while he tells Niccolò that he should give Mavi up), poison because the soul is looking for the phrase to complete the line, the line through which to move the object through space.
… The parabolic line that Niccolò’s filmic space-asteroid takes as it moves off toward the sun (the same as the parabolic line of David Locke’s Land Rover hurtling off into the desert in The Passenger and the parabolic line of the Jeep curving away into the park with the shouting revelers in Blow-Up). In the universe, there are no straight lines.
The soul is breathing and cannot tolerate that obstructive garbage, matter, clogging every passageway to every horizon. To be bored with the commonplace is to strive to outlast and outdistance it, to work at escape. Boredom is the true vitality. Continually and everlastingly, in its commonplace fashion, the earth orbits around the sun. To break with this, Niccolò strikes up the idea of voyaging to the sun, coming to know it. We have used the sun only as a vehicle for knowing ourselves, and we have come to the end of the line. A “Charlie Bubbles-ish ending” is what John Powers deprecatingly calls this snippet of science fiction footage, which is so challenging and exciting to watch. The color of deep space is not only green but a vivid and forestial green, chlorophyll green, and there is nothing but a superfluity of optimism in the passage of the platinum colored asteroid, which wobbles a little insecurely with the perils of its voyage and thus attracts our sympathy.
IMPOSSIBLE EXPERIENCE
The art of storytelling is coming to an end.
—Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”
“The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling,” writes Benjamin, “is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times” (“Storyteller” 87): the novel, we might add, that has so often become the film. The novel, dependent upon the form of the book, abjures the storyteller’s idiosyncratic speech, tactile experience, direct unmediated relation to his nature and his world. For a man to be able to find and tell a story, he must relax, withdraw himself from the mechanical pressure and rhythm of the modern world; and, Benjamin sadly observes, such a state of relaxation “is becoming rarer and rarer” (91). Niccolò is in search of a story, very like his creator, who felt himself to be searching for “a new kind of story” (Samuels 92). He believes in storytelling. Perhaps, as Benjamin says of the storyteller, “he has borrowed his authority from death … it is natural history to which his stories refer back” (94), but at any rate there is something morbid about his gaze, his flaccidity, his patience.
Although Benjamin does not put it this way, for him boredom is a thoroughly appropriate response to modernism, one that symptomatizes the healthy spirit at war with a condition in which we prefer to validate information over intelligence. Information “lays claim to prompt verifiability,” and the “dissemination of information has had a decisive share” in a state of affairs that has seen storytelling decline (89). We may consider the distinction that Patricia Meyer Spacks makes between two usages of the word “interesting” in the history of the novel. The word can apply to the spirits and tastes of the individual: bored, one declines to find things “interesting,” appealing to the self; or it can apply to a social and cultural importance “inherent in the old meaning of interesting” and involving “reliance on communal values” (115). One usage of “interesting” applies to the public realm, then, and the other to “private tastes” (117). For Spacks, a reader can be bored by privileging the private, indeed by denying that public interest might adhere to certain texts or situations. Niccolò is appropriately bored with the quotidian trivia of the world in which he moves with Mavi, and the slow turning of the film and of its protagonist’s movements in searching for her depths is itself a calculated statement about the boredom he experiences in his life. As the modern world of mercantile, journalistic, superficially social, and professional experience seems to tumble by, his boredom is a way of withdrawing in order to be attuned to the voice of an “artisan form of communication” of an earlier, and richer, day (Benjamin, “Storyteller” 91). And the fact that he experiences boredom—a sense of the undifferentiated equality of events and contingencies, a flatness of affect, a constant hunger and readiness for something richer—may lead us to expect that Niccolò will find his story in the end. “Boredom,” says Benjamin, “is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” (91).
But Adam Phillips more neatly strikes the chord when he reflects, “Boredom, I think, protects the individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be. So the paradox of the waiting that goes on in boredom is that the individual does not know what he was waiting for until he finds it, and that often he does not know that he is waiting” (77–78; my emphasis). We must understand that Niccolò himself is the central character of the science fiction film he eventually makes: he is floating through space on an exploration, slowly approximating himself to the brilliant center of things. What he can know about himself is his own hunger to travel and search, but not precisely what he is searching for, and often—because the search is relentless and occupies every aspect of his existence—not even that he searches. He experiences a “determination of the present by the future,