Motiffs in Cinema - Disappointment and Disillusionment

Andrew Kendall asked me to contribute to Motifs in Cinema is a discourse across film blogs, assessing the way in which various thematic elements have been used in the 2012 cinematic landscape. How does a common theme vary in use from a comedy to a drama? Are filmmakers working from a similar canvas when they assess the issue of death or the dynamics of revenge? Like most things, a film begins with an idea - Motifs in Cinema assesses how the use of a common theme across various films changes when utilised by different artists.

“Mile 3.25 tidal inlet was erased from the map.”

This line passed me by on the first viewing of Moonrise Kingdom but on repeat viewings it strikes me as the saddest in the film. In the film’s closing moments Bob Balaban’s narrator relays without fanfare that Sam and Suzy’s beachfront getaway has been wiped off the map. It now exists only in memory and in the painting we see at the film’s end.

I suppose some part of me wants to believe that this young couple’s period of idyllic perfection lasts, but having their “Moonrise Kingdom” literally destroyed at the film’s end makes the implications unavoidable.

Throughout the film Sam and Suzy are an oasis of certainty surrounded by a sea of adult disillusionment. “We’re in love. We just want to be together. What’s wrong with that?” Suzy says to her mother as her mother looks on with a sad smile. Her mother knows what she doesn’t. Certainty doesn’t last. Simplicity gets complicated. And when the storm of adolescence hits their paradise will be washed away. They will join the adult world where Suzy’s father resides with a marriage he can’t fix and a daughter he can’t help, laying in bed staring at the ceiling hoping the roof flies off and the wind sucks him up into space. 

That storm that Wes Anderson conjured that portends the end of youthful innocence took other forms in other films throughout 2012. Frankenweenie took on one of the most elemental of disillusioning experiences: the death of a pet. Tim Burton used this as an opportunity for a comic fantasy where Victor can suspend the rules of nature and his best friend is returned to him. I can’t have been alone in wishing that Sparky should’ve been allowed to die at the film's end. It would've have been much resonant if Victor was allowed to come to grips with a difficult truth about life. But I suppose Burton was only after cosmetic darkness not real existential darkness, so the disillusion of Victor is postponed indefinitely and beloved pets never have to die.

In Soderbergh’s Magic Mike the disappointment that comes with casting off childish things is postponed for as long as possible as the lead character believes he can party his way through adult life and still somehow end up with his own furniture business and a strong relationship when the sun comes up. It’s no accident that the lead character is shown taking a dramatic plunge off a bridge into the water in the film’s opening act since Soderbergh stages the lead character’s confrontations with reality as a increasing series of cold splashes of water to the face. His stack of stripper cash isn’t going to get him anywhere with a bank, the good time girls aren’t going to be there in the morning, the boss doesn’t have your best interest at heart. The idea that you can strip and womanize your way to success, security, and happiness is revealed to be sad fantasy.

More painful than the disappointment of Channing Tatum’s Mike Lane at the disintegration of his dreams was the image of Dean Moriarty at the end of On the Road. The romantic road trip long since over, Dean finds himself alone and shivering on the street, his friend Sal having moved on, no longer able to relate to his one time adventure companion. Dean was at the center of an entire movement based around being disillusioned with the values of mainstream America, but living free of rules can be its own burden. In the film’s final scene life on the road has proved disappointing. Sal is content having moved beyond it while Dean’s inability to do so has left him isolated and empty. Like Magic Mike he thought he could live life by his own rules, but hit reality hard when it didn’t work out.

Without questions the most brutal representation of disappointment and disillusionment on screens in 2012 was Haneke’s Amour. Look, the film tells us, maybe you will find the love of your life, and you will get married and live together in comfort and happiness for your entire lives. But even that rosiest of scenarios must end in heartbreak. 

Yet somehow this ultimate disappointment goes beyond the sad into the beautiful. Disappointment isn't a bad turn of events or an unfortunate outcome, Haneke is telling us, it's the only outcome. Nothing lasts. In the face of that realization all Amour can do is look on with unblinking honesty. By devoting an entire film to the the detailed chronicling of that final disillusionment the filmmaker is giving it its weight as an equal part of life.