Symbol and Metaphor

Jeff Alworth

In the final shot of the Hungarian film Kontroll, a man begins to ascend toward the light, accompanied by an angel.  True, he's ascending an escalator from the Budapest subway, and the angel is just a woman in costume.  Yet the reality of the image does not conceal its transcendent symbolism: the character is ascending toward heaven even while he rides an ordinary escalator.  The director, Nimrod Antal, has placed the film exactly between the realms of actuality and possibility.  We leave the theater in an altered state, shaking our heads.  But even though we're not sure where the real world ends and the symbolic one begins, we understand the meaning Antal is communicating.

I can think of no better epigraph for this year's Portland International Film Festival than that it should conclude on the same day Hollywood's pretties gather to celebrate themselves.  (In fact, they'll begin strutting the red carpet outside the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles just minutes after Portlanders exit PIFF's final screening at the Guild downtown.)  Although Hollywood has always done movies different than the rest of the world, never before has the difference been so stark.  And as anyone who attended screenings at this year's PIFF will tell you, never before has Hollywood compared so unfavorably.

With rare exceptions, Hollywood's products seem no less formulaic than the advertisements Regal shows on its ghastly 2wenty.  Where has the metaphor gone?  Where is the symbol?  Looking through the span of films I saw at this year's PIFF (11 in two weekends), the one thing they had in common--perhaps the only thing--was a commitment to communicate meaning.  Hollywood, where the product is just a product, only communicates meaning rarely, and seemingly by accident.

Have a look at the Oscars, for example--purportedly the best films America produced over the past year.  We have five biopics (27 nominations), a film about a recent current event (3 nominations), and a Christ story in which transcendence and soteriology is exchanged for blood and masochism (3 nominations).

The nuance of art is slowly trickling out of the American consciousness.  More and more, we have become a literal society.  It's not just the exchange of one art form for the other, it's the disappearance of art altogether.  Even in the turbulent process of evolving art forms, where the theater replaced verse, and then the novel replaced the theater, and then movies replaced novels, we never abandoned art itself.  Art, that discipline where the nonliteral and the intuitive were the method, was the one place we could ask questions without racing to an answer.  In art, truth is not an either/or proposition, it is something you had to seek out in the shadows. 

The best film of the year, far and away, was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, garnering a paltry 2 Oscar nominations--the same as Harry Potter 3.  It presented a startling original structure and genuine questions for the viewer: is the bond that connects humans governed by simple caprice, or is there something more profound that draws us together?  When I saw Spotless Mind last March, I thought it might augur a renaissance in the form; sadly, the lack of any movie of similar content made it stand out all the more.

I don't even mean to blame Hollywood exclusively; the trend is evident throughout American culture.  Movies, as the last great art form, are slowly dying.  Ticket sales, as compared to mid-century are way, way down.  At PIFF, I was surprised to see the majority of each audience were in the AARP demographic--there were only small clumps of twenty-something viewers.  Instead, we're replacing art with entertainment.   People have replaced movies with non-art, "consuming" Jackass or Survivor or the Red Sox or they play X-Box.  It's not surprising that we've lost our sense of the nonliteral.

And of course, this literal-mindedness is no more evident than in the political realm, where merely offering an opinion is a proxy for fact.  In a world where the President goes on a whistle-stop tour to convince citizens of a lie, truth is nowhere to be considered. 

There is a silver lining, evident to those of us who indulged in the bounty of PIFF: this literalism is an American symptom, not an international one.  Nuance is alive and well beyond the borders of our Texas nationalism.  We might even imagine that our own paradoxical literalism--which allows us to ignore world opinion and invade countries in the name of "democracy--is one of the central metaphors others around the world use to animate their own art. 

By Jeff Alworth Feb. 27, 2005