Then I'll Dig A Tunnel From My Window To Yours
I tend to be pretty inconsistent with my touchstones. The longest I’ve ever had a “favorite”
movie was probably the five years I spent supporting Pulp Fiction (which, along with my copy of the Stop Making Sense soundtrack held over from eighth grade, still stands as one of the two objects I can cite on to assure myself that I had some taste before I went off to college), but it’s easy to be loyal when you don’t know any better; by my first college Christmas break, that title had changed hands dozens of times. “Best”, too, never really settled down, even once I was able to divorce “best” from “favorite”. It really only gets worse as you get more specific – “funniest”, “best written”, “coolest”, and such are all just a disc change away from revolution – to the point where now I really don’t bother to keep track, except in good fun.
The exception to this is “most interesting”; I have yet to see anything come close to being as interesting as Jacques Tati’s 1967 masterpiece Playtime, and in spite of the fact that I never anticipated seeing a movie like Playtime before actually seeing it, I still can’t imagine anything else being as completely engrossing as it. The caveat, of course, is that this is only true because I am a sad little dork of a person who reads film theory and nonfiction for fun, and there is a wide gulf of opinion between me and people for whom those damned Lord of the Rings movies are the ideal cinematic experience. This is fine; this is democracy in action, and I am no longer an (avowed) socialist. But I have yet to come across a cinematic category of interest into which I can’t find a way to shoehorn Playtime, and it has a nasty long-standing habit of crushing all contenders.
Playtime is a visual movie, a phrase which, if you don’t think “cinema” has any self-sustaining appeal all by itself, generally means “boring as all fuck”. This is not an unfair way to describe Playtime, I guess; the film basically follows Tati’s iconic character Monsieur Hulot around for a day in a big city as he tries to get a job, meets an old army friend, goes to a club, blah blah blah. The fact that it’s a comedy doesn’t really help anything in this case; Tati’s brand of comedy is descended straight from the silent tradition, so it’s less Uproarious Laughter and more Humorous Little Things. There really isn’t any possible way to make it sound cool.
And then you start watching it and you forget all of that. The essence of what Playtime actually is is basically “Here’s how the modern world works” rendered as a comedy, and the essence of what makes it so mindfuckingly interesting is how literally what I just said plays out. Playtime is all about showing you components of modern life and how they actually look when you pay attention to them apart from their actual use; if you’ve seen Crumb (and get to the video store right the fuck now if you haven’t) and remember the photos he drove around the city taking and then worked them into his drawings ever after when he’d forget what telephone poles looked like – okay, imagine if someone made an entire fictional film with that attitude. “This stuff isn’t put here to be visually pleasing”, Crumb points out; it’s there to fill a function, and we tend to ignore it when we’re not engaging with that function. Like Crumb’s art, Playtime is all about confronting this stuff at a distance from its functionality; if it has a point, it’s pretty much just that the modern world is a crazy, disorganized place where ridiculous stuff happens all around you all the time and you just don’t notice it.
And I do mean “all around” and “all the time”. What defines the character of Playtime’s greatness is how absurdly busy every shot is: shots will contain dozens of sight gags, all happening simultaneously, and all you can do as a viewer is dart your eyes around the frame trying to keep up. You can sit there awed by the giant scope of the cavernous rooms, but you’re going to miss the nuns’ headdresses flapping like birds’ wings’, and you’re not going to be able to try to discern which figures up against the windows are real and which are cardboard cutouts, and there’s even a pretty good chance that you’ll miss out on the central character’s introduction in the film (which I did until I saw the film for a third time), not to mention about fifty other equally minor things which are just fun to notice. And this is all within the first three minutes of the film.
Playtime is a very, very, very, very, very big movie. It’s shot in 70mm, so basically you can see twice as much stuff going on as you normally could, and Tati’s sets were so gigantic that they were actually referred to by the film press as “Tati-town” since basically he had to build a fake city (it’s worth mentioning that Tati went broke making Playtime, both financially and in terms of critical reputation). But the end result is something huge and unique; you’ll never see a movie try to force you to sort through more stuff at once – it actually pretty much sets you up to fail. I’ve seen Playtime close to ten times now (only once in the theater), but every time I watch it, I notice new sight gags which make the timeline of the film’s events just a little bit clearer.
If there is a pro
blem with this method of filmmaking, it is that it makes for some intensely frustrating struggles trying to describe why this is worthwhile. The easiest way would just be to suggest that you click on the picture to the left and imagine everything moving –all those little elements distinctly operating on their own, each a potential site for something cool and wonderful. Thankfully, however, this is 2004; we live in a hypertextual world, and I can safely assume that my readers know about the Arcade Fire.
When the Arcade Fire’s debut album Funeral came out last year, the critical community was split into two camps: the overwhelming majority who claimed that Funeral was one of the most vibrant, compelling albums to come down the pipe in a long, long time (true), and the tiny (yet very vocal) minority indignantly pointing out that the Arcade Fire weren’t necessarily doing anything new or interesting or particularly significant (also true). But even the haters couldn’t deny the power of the Arcade Fire’s live show, where all eight thousand members of the band would be switching instruments several times per song, and you’d have to deal with all these people singing at the top of their lungs right at the audience, and periodically a guy who looks like Napoleon Dynamite runs around and wails on the walls with some drumsticks. My friend David went to go see their first show in Los Angeles and said people were just staggering out of the club, clearly unable to process the tidal wave of stimuli they’d just been brought to face; I saw them live last month and I can absolutely vouch for this.
The difference, of course, is that with the CD, you the audience retain a certain degree of control over the experience – the experience of their songs is pretty self-evident, and you can pretty much get it without mining every second of every song to figure out which instruments come in where and why. But the live show is just a tornado; the organs of perception have their limits, and you can’t focus on Napoleon Dynamite over by the walls and the girl playing violin with the most passionate intensity you’ve ever seen at the same time. It just takes you over, and the fun lies in keeping up – or, if you’re lucky, being totally unable to keep up with the parts and just giving yourself over to appreciating the sum. Because you’re in charge of how you receive the experience, the quality of the time you spend in the band’s company is entirely up to you.
Okay, Playtime is that. You can’t possibly keep up with it; the challenge and the fun lies in noticing things, little elements that flesh out the logic of the world, and this is a completely independent exercise. Playtime’s reward for You The Viewer is a genuine sense of an individual experience, which is rare enough in any medium but especially in the medium of film. Film is all about the shared experience, which is completely interesting on one level and insanely frustrating on another; I can’t tell you how dispiriting it is to argue with clods who’ve seen a movie you find meaningful but got something random and completely idiotic from it, because unless you’re enough of an asshole to say that they’re wrong for not having your catalog of life experiences, then their position is wholly supportable by the text. (You have no idea how many skulls I wanted to thump after Fahrenheit 9/11 on both sides of the political divide. Jesus.) But with Playtime, theoretically you could have someone make a chronological list of every single thing they noticed in the film and still get an entirely different experience from it simply because your eyes wandered at a certain point. Compare that to Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (an insanely interesting film in its own right, but absolutely one which guides you along a path to a point), and, well, there you go.
Consequently, I don’t really want to get into any of the reasons why I continually find Playtime to be such a fascinating viewing experience, although I will anyway: I can find stuff in it about the relationship between modernity and the individual, or I can find stuff in it about how you can organize a movie, or I can relate the viewing experience to the experience of walking around in the world, or I can find stuff in it about the ongoing dialogue between the medium of cinema and our notions of “reality”, or I can just sit back and enjoy some masterfully-crafted physical comedy, or god only knows what else. The point which Playtime alone seems to be able to convey cinematically is that finding the point isn’t the point; the point is to look in the first place, and even if you find something, the point is to keep looking. I’d pretty much describe life as having the same point, but of course that’s hardly the point.
