Unity and multiplicity
Élisabeth Boyer: What I was struck by in Magnolia was the multiplicity of spaces, the multiplicity of characters, all of them main characters, and the multiplicity of performances, all very strong ones. There’s something really new about this aspect, but what seems very different and yet a lot like one of John Sayles’ first great films, City of Hope from 1991, is precisely this multiplicity of spaces, characters, even stories, all intertwined and interwoven. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, the montage is still very technical in terms of juxtaposition; it’s a classical montage that’s highly complexified yet still with relatively analogous sequences. What’s very different in Sayles’ work is that there’s this same multiplicity but with montages within shots, within space. That’s why it’s a thinking of the world today, of separate spaces, of their lack of connection. What’s your opinion of the coherence of such a montage in terms of the need today to think the coherence of the world despite all the different spaces and worlds?
Alain Badiou: I think there’s a tension between the desire for multiplicity and a counter-tendency toward unity in Magnolia. The multiplicity is very striking, of course, in terms of the stories, the characters, the characters’ acting style, and the way the stories are interwoven, but at the same time it seems to me that this multiplicity doesn’t really negatively affect the issue of shot composition. It’s a technical issue in effect, albeit an important one. Furthermore, in the final analysis, the multiplicity is subordinated to a principle of unity, only this principle of unity is always presented as a result rather than as a given, and as a partial result at that: every time you think you’ve got unity, it’s nevertheless a little undone or thwarted by something else. The most glaring example of this is that, just when the stories all intertwine and connect with one other, if only on a narrative level, the rain of frogs occurs like an element over-determining the narrative unity and making it ultimately a bit pointless, since it’s an element that could be called symbolic.
The film is contemporary in terms of its capture of multiplicity and disconnection, of the impossibility of holding on to an ideological or subjective narrative point that would encompass everything. But I think that the desire for unity is strong enough for an argument possibly to be made that it’s a neo-classical film. And that’s the case, it seems to me, for two reasons. First of all, because however many things there may be, we never lose sight of the fact that in the final analysis they do in fact constitute a story in the multiple sense of the term: a narrative but also a symbolic story. Second of all, and maybe more important, each of the stories ultimately constructs a familiar theme. It’s still, at bottom, a film about father and son, which is an absolutely basic organic feature of American cinema. If American cinema has a classic theme, it’s surely that one, even if there are others of a similar sort. The great intersubjective characters of American melodrama are all depicted in this film. None of them is the subject of the film in the usual sense, but that’s still what it’s all about.
Daniel Fischer: The tendency toward unity can effectively be seen in the father–son issue, but also in the community that the film creates. There’s an explicit operatic dimension: for example, when the characters sing the same song in unison – that’s very American, too. How does that differ from John Ford’s plot of a community created by the film?
Alain Badiou: You could say the same thing as a moment ago. The theme of the community’s creation by the film, or even the theme of the time of the film being the time of the community’s creation, is actually a bit fractured, a bit fragmented, but it can nevertheless be found in the film. Quite simply, it’s more abstract, because the community is not an epic, or narrative, one, in a very broad sense; it’s a community that shows that it’s been produced by the film: this is an element of modernity injected into the classicism. There’s never any attempt to make us think this community is a real construction. We’re shown very clearly that the film creates it. Nevertheless, the theme is also a classic theme. I simply believe that here, particularly because the film uses abstract means, the director’s idea is that this community is humanity itself. It’s not a specific narrative community involved in a story; rather, it’s allegorical of humanity as a whole. That’s why it can be stricken by something like a plague of Egypt.
The film is located on a really interesting plane, since just below it (that is, within it, as a potential plane) can be found certain traditional themes of American cinema. It could be an elaborate film, after all, but dealing with father–son relations or with the community. And just above it there could be something that would turn it into an abstract, symbolic film. In my opinion, the special genius of this film lies in its not being exactly one or the other. It floats around, with a varyingly emphasized possibility of, or potential for, shifting onto a plane of very substantial symbolic – or even completely unreal, fictional, in the strongest sense of the term – abstraction, when it comes to the business about the frogs or the chorus, or some of the connections between stories that are too implausible or artificial to really function narratively. It can be abstract like that, but it can also be really virtuosic in some scenes, or almost reminiscent of ordinary melodrama in one scene or another.
Still, the film won’t reveal much of what it is if you isolate just one of its scenes. In this regard, it’s a montage film, in an essential way, precisely because the shot isn’t really negatively affected by multiplicity: except in a few rare cases, certain scenes or parts of scenes can be regarded as being absolutely like classic cinema. One of them comes to mind at random: the scene where the son is crying at his father’s bedside. If you isolate it, it’ll seem like conventional melodrama. There are a lot of scenes like that.
Father and son
Slim Ben Cheikh: Would you say that that’s the key scene, this story of the son and his father?
Alain Badiou: It’s a very important one. It exerts a certain influence, which is why I stressed the father–son theme, because it’s not just present in that scene alone. There’s the story of the little boy, and so forth. As regards father and son, the counterpoint is very important. But the story of the wife of the father, the old man who’s dying, is not merely peripheral, or tangential, relative to an issue that’s central, nor is the incest story. These stories are in effect not exactly of equal weight. The father–son theme is still the central organizing theme. It predominates, but a certain balance is maintained; the rest is not just tangential. There are several different threads,2 even if that one is the main one. It’s all done with perfect awareness that the father–son theme is a basic theme in American cinema. (Magnolia is an exceptionally self-reflexive film, with a very powerful intellectuality.) Anderson is aware of this and provides an important, centrally organizing version of it, but one that you have to realize is also extremely condensed, bordering on abstraction. Not necessarily in individual scenes but overall. Take the big scene of the son’s macho lecture: if you isolate it, you get something that’s impossible to understand at the moment, even in terms of the father–son story.
Slim Ben Cheikh: But then there’s the interview with the reporter, which is very striking and works on several different levels. It lets us shift over to the son’s relationship with his father while it simultaneously expresses something else about contemporary America, the America of journalism and the media. Each sequence is linked to the others, and stands on its own.
Alain Badiou: That’s one of the great strengths of the film, whereby it remains involved in real multiplicity. What’s really interesting is that the scenes have an intensity of performance that’s particular to them; they can stand on their own, even with several different meanings at the very moment of the scene. Yet, at the same time, what I said before is still true: if you isolate them, in some cases they can seem like moments from masterfully directed great narrative cinema. I’m thinking of a very striking scene when the old man’s wife is in the pharmacy. The scene is very skillful in terms of its composition, the distancing play of the gazes, the way the camera remains half-way above and shows the face from a distance. You can admire this scene; it has an intrinsic intensity about it. But if it isn’t considered as part of the montage, connected with the whole constellation of the film, it will function as a neo-classical scene, that is, extremely brilliant, innovative, and so forth, but treating something that’s closed up on itself, that has its own narrative intensity.
Slim Ben Cheikh: In connection with the question of linking to the whole, do you think that the prologue acts as a sort of key, or that it stands on its own? It’s unclear: even if you consider it as a key, it’s not one that’s easy to grasp.
Denis Lévy: It’s a little like the abstraction of the whole.
Alain Badiou: The prologue warns us, it alerts us to the fact that the film is actually something other than its sequential literalness. I agree with Denis: it indicates abstraction. I have to stress this point: I think the film lies exactly between, on the one hand, a melodramatic mosaic that’s completely recognizable piece by piece, in terms of various themes, and, on the other, an abstraction resulting not only from the combining of the pieces (because they have to be put together, literally) but also from the fact that the community created is in actual fact humanity in general. Even the father–son theme tends toward allegory; it’s not just a family story.
Between neo-classical and baroque
Daniel Fischer: We might wonder about the title, Magnolia. Is there a connection between the abstract structure of the film and the shape of the flower?
Denis Lévy: There’s a magnolia flower in the credits, a flower that opens up and suggests the radiating form of the film.
Alain Badiou: It suggests the construction of a totality made out of complexity, something along those lines. As a tree, the magnolia is characterized by each of its leaves being very glossy and very independent of the others. There’s the organic unity of the tree, and the closing up of each leaf on itself, even in terms of its brilliant, glossy appearance. The director sees himself like that: each scene is very polished, very glossy, but the living thing is the tree.
Annick Fiolet: That’s the “flashy” aspect of the film that some of us had problems with …
Alain Badiou: But I think there’s a very deliberate, overdone glossiness, which I would attribute particularly to the fact that there’s a fairly systematic exaggerated quality about the intensity of the acting. That peculiarity, in terms of the actors’ performances, is a striking feature of the film. There are entire bits that are bits of actor intensity. In my opinion, Anderson is very well aware that he could be accused of piling on the affectation, and it is in fact possible to accuse him of that. There are moments when the actor is so naked that you could say he’s really getting off on it. For example, Julianne Moore’s half-hysterical scene in the pharmacy or Tom Cruise’s big sex lecture scene. Each of the actors has his own aria, as in an opera, a moment when he gets to show off what he can do. I think this is a sort of veneer applied to the scene, an almost excessive intensity that will ultimately have to be reincorporated into the life of the whole. That’s what the film is made up of, but it can’t be reduced to that. It’s true that, in this regard, we’re in a bind. We say that the film is neo-classical for a number of obvious reasons, but on another level we’re tempted to speak of baroque, really, in the “classical” sense of baroque. Baroque and classical are opposites, but the baroque also has a certain classical dimension. I get a sense of a baroque esthetic, that is, the whole is constructed on the basis of an intensification of the parts and not just on the basis of a subordination of the parts to the whole. Each part has to be intensified and it’s only on the basis of that intensification that it will find its principle of connection to the other parts. The more unique each story is, the greater the chance it has of being connected to the others, and not at all in terms of its having to be watered down in order to link up with the others. Anderson managed to carry that off, which is hard to do, because usually, in films with a lot of different interlocking stories (something he didn’t invent), in order for all the components to be connected to each other, each individual one has to be watered down. Here, on the contrary, they’re all connected by virtue of being intensified. Take the example of Tom Cruise’s interview, which will make it possible to transition to another node of the story: it’s accomplished violently, not at all by smoothing its edges.
Confession
Alain Badiou: There’s one feature that’s unusual. There’s something about the form that’s been preserved from melodrama, something that comes from the theater. A good many of melodrama’s plots come from Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams; they’re the original sources. There’s a trope that’s borrowed from O’Neill’s theater, the trope of confession. It’s a basic topos of American melodrama in terms of its theatrical reference: the moment when something is finally going to be able to be said, when, in a sort of nighttime group therapy session, something will be able to be revealed. This sort of confession figures prominently in the film: “I cheated on you,” and so forth, along with both the pain and the liberating function of confession. But what I’m struck by here is that confession is separate from the theme of reconciliation, whereas it’s usually always connected to it. I think that’s contemporary. Reconciliations are only apparent: the father and son make up with each other, the old man’s wife finally confesses, but it’s too late. The former whiz kid admits he’s gay, but it doesn’t change a thing. There’s a network of confessions that’s absolutely typical of this kind of cinema, but usually the confession is constitutive of the community’s reconciliation. The community was broken apart, divided by secrets that couldn’t be expressed, and the thing has to be expressed in order for the community to have a chance of coming back together. It can be the conjugal community, incidentally, the story of a couple.
In Magnolia, there are big scenes involving confession, but they take place within a community that never really comes together. That’s also why there are the frogs raining down: it’s all presented as a potential path for humanity but for a humanity that can’t be totalized, that won’t come together. The role of confession is severed from its ordinary purpose. A lot of features of traditional American melodrama, including ones that derive from its theatrical origins, function that way in the film. They’re there, but in the service of something a lot more abstract than usual. Ultimately, all these stories are stories of confession, but the confession has a sort of abstract value, a value of compassion, not of reconnection or reconciliation.
Élisabeth Boyer: There’s another trope, too: the sensitive cop’s and the young drug addict’s declaration of love, which is quite hystericized in terms of speech. They say “Let’s tell each other everything” so that they won’t have any confessions to make to each other, so that they can avoid having to make dangerous confessions. The pledge they make to each other is a pretty amazing declaration of love, in which one of them admits she’s an addict and the other that he’s lost his gun.
Annick Fiolet: The declaration could be seen as leading to a love process, but at the same time it remains abstract. The confession exceeds the object of the confession; it’s connected to the declaration itself. The declaration is moreover a little separate; it functions on another level, it opens something up.
Élisabeth Boyer: The film ends with them, it ends on the girl’s smile.
Humanity is love
Alain Badiou: We might ask, in keeping with our good old method, what the subject of this film is. We identified a whole series of tropes that function not as the film’s subject but as its materials. It’s not a film about the father–son relationship, or about the inadequacy of confessions, or about the conditions of the declaration and of love, even though all those things can be found in it and all of them are the basis on which we’ll say something about the film.
I think the question the film is asking is whether humanity exists or not. It has an abstract Christian thesis (which is why the registers are those of melodrama), namely that humanity is love. That’s how I understand it, even in terms of the film’s ending, in terms of its future. I call it “abstractly Christian,” which is what justifies there being allegorical moments in it, or quotations from the Bible, even if the film isn’t strictly speaking a Christian film. Insofar as humanity exists (which is an unresolved question, incidentally, because the film also says that there’s a big risk that it doesn’t), insofar as humanity exists, its only real figure is love. Ultimately, for the little boy, the main issue is that his father won’t have loved him; the woman’s despair derives from the fact that in her own eyes she won’t have really loved the old man as she should have. By contrast, an incredible difference between them notwithstanding, the police officer and the girl will have the chance to declare their love. But the father and son won’t have loved each other, and the TV show host will have wrecked his daughter’s love for him by incest. The cinematic thesis of the film, which dictates its montage, its hesitations, its complexity, is not just “Does something like humanity exist today (via the question of the multiple, of separation, and, at the same time, of unity)?” but is also a hypothesis: humanity is love. When there’s no love, then there’s no humanity, there’s only disconnection, in the strict sense of the term. There are stories that are in danger of having no relationship among themselves, that are in danger of coming apart amid a potentially riotous chaos, in which, in a way, the only thing that counts anymore is performance.
I think that one of the meanings of the use of the actors’ intensity is that it’s a metaphor for the question of performance. When you’re alone, all you can do is perform your own number. Numbers like that have a certain legitimacy in the film: they’re linked to the question of humanity. Anyone who’s alone – without love, in other words – can only affirm him or herself through performance, whether it’s a given character’s hysteria or the incestuous father’s TV performance. The father is revealed through the drama of that exhibition; his sickness is tantamount to his being totally trapped in performance, owing to the unspoken story. These are all people trapped in solitary exhibition. The kid is shown as someone who’s been trained from childhood for such a thing. It’s a harsh critique of the idea that humanity might be able to fulfill itself as a collection of performances. And performance is shown as the non-human form of man because the price of performance is non-love. It’s in that sense that the kid’s story is exemplary. Each of the stories is key because each contributes little by little to the key theme of the film. That’s what constitutes true equality among these stories: each story is really a typical example of the film’s subject, namely that if there is no love, we have a different conception of humanity, a defeated humanity given over to performance. This is shown even in the characters: to the extent that he doesn’t have love, the sensitive cop is trapped in performance. He’s absolutely not like the others, but he has no way of being represented other than by doing his job as a cop really well and thoroughly, by being a perfect cop, through and through. That’s why losing his gun will be a tragedy. With the male nurse, it’s compassion as performance; it’s the absolute of Tolstoyan goodness. And ultimately, insofar as it’s no more than that, it doesn’t lead to a way out of solitude. Some characters can be good guys, others bad guys, but the film says that that’s not the issue. There’s the incestuous character, the compassionate character, the kid, the hysterical woman, the excellent cop, the drug addict, and so on, and at any moment, from the standpoint of the image, you can say they’re good or bad, decent or not, putting up a horrible cynical front, and so forth, but that’s not the issue.
Élisabeth Boyer: The little black boy who asks the policeman a riddle at the beginning of the film has his own performance, too, his rap number, but the good cop can’t relate to it: he’s kind, but the two of them don’t relate.
Alain Badiou: Absolutely. But the film says that regardless of whether you have great inner goodness or you put up a big cynical front, regardless of whether you’re a character who’s very much in view or a socially very minor character, none of that constitutes a principle of judgment. It’s a humanistic film from that point of view. There’s no morality in terms of rules, the law, and so forth. “Say yes to love, or else be lonely”: that’s basically what the film is saying.
Emmanuel Dreux: The question of ineffectual confession, the fact that confession doesn’t lead to melodrama’s usual reconciliation, could be connected with the question of performance you were just talking about. Confession in classical melodrama, where everything is resolved in a somewhat artificial or forced way, might only function as performance today.
Alain Badiou: I quite agree with you because it could be argued that one tendency of classical melodrama is to turn the confession itself into a performance with therapeutic value. I have in mind those great confession scenes in Hitchcock, in Rebecca or Under Capricorn, those magnificent scenes where everything will be cleared up because the original secret will be revealed. And also the great confession scene in Mankiewicz’s Suddenly Last Summer or Huston’s Night of the Iguana. There’s a whole bunch of films you can think of, which are implicitly based on O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, in which there’s a great moment of solo performance by the actor, which is identified as such. In Rebecca, I’m thinking of the great camera movement revolving around Laurence Olivier. Those are virtuoso scenes in which the actor has to carry the story all by himself, sometimes for quite a few minutes. And that’s what has therapeutic value, whereas Anderson’s thesis, in my opinion, is exactly the opposite. Performance, in the fictional sense, will be shown as the moment of greatest alienation, not at all as that of the resolution of truth. The moment of that resolution is, on the contrary, the moment when someone stutters, or is shy, when speech is halting, or difficult. The great performance scenes are on the contrary scenes of solitude. There’s a down-playing, and it’s interesting because it’s not split between form and content. It’s really the actor’s performance as an index of emptiness.
Élisabeth Boyer: There’s a remarkable scene, the scene of the rain of frogs, which reconstructs the unity. The child, surrounded by his books, is the only one who’s not frightened. We get the feeling that someone who’s a thinker, someone who’s immersed in his books, possesses a certain superiority, and that’s not an ordinary perspective today. The cop isn’t very scared either. He’s surprised, but he just goes on doing his job, arresting the thief in a very realistic scene. When it comes to the child, the rain of frogs doesn’t have the same realistic aspect; there’s an aspect of someone who knows, who eludes the pure awareness of the game he’s involved in, which portrays the world in a sort of nihilistic way. Those games are a somewhat depressing view of humanity. He underscores that: there’s a fairy-tale dimension to the moment.
Annick Fiolet: There’s an element of the fantastic about the atmosphere: the light of the scene in the library contrasts with everything else.
Élisabeth Boyer: The film ends like a fairly classic film, with the hope that inheres in the love between the cop and the drug addict, with the difference between the two characters. It’s an open-ended ending: the smile of a woman who’s recovering from what the world is increasingly haunted by: drugs, a kind of self-destructiveness, loneliness, suffering. The child tells his father “You need to be nicer to me,” but the father can’t hear him. Yet his loneliness is made more bearable by books, by the fact that something else exists: that figure brightens the film up a little.
Alain Badiou: I agree. You have to take that into account along with the possibility of the opening afforded by love, something like the opening afforded by thought. It’s implicit in the film, but it’s there. The scene with the kid being coached for the game shows attempts to show that there’s a true kind of knowledge and a false kind, true thought and its simulacrum. The kid is presented as someone who’s not allowed the field of true thought and true knowledge because he’s being coached, in the name of that knowledge and thought, for something else. The kid is shown as having an ability to be really interested in the things he talks about; the coaching is on top of something that’s shown at the end of the film as the possibility of books, of reverie, of true thought.
Slim Ben Cheikh: But opening exists in most of the characters. The ones who’ve been hurt the most are not yet trapped in loneliness; they haven’t given up. For instance, the cop and the drug addict are both so eager to escape their loneliness that they practically throw themselves at each other, whereas they have nothing in common.
Alain Badiou: In that regard, the film’s hypothesis is nevertheless that humanity is possible, in every one of us.
Slim Ben Cheikh: But with a real sense of urgency. The film says we’re on the brink. Later, it will be too late.
Alain Badiou: It’s a film that serves as a warning of urgency and that says: “Make no mistake about it, what’s at stake is the question of humanity itself; it’s really under threat.” That’s also one of the meanings of the frogs: humanity is on the verge of the plagues of Egypt … It’s not saying that it’s a divine punishment. You can take it however you like. But as frogs are one of the plagues of Egypt, you can regard it as meaning quite simply that humanity is in danger. I regard it as a Paulinian film in a certain way, a film saying: “Careful, the question of love – love one other, and so forth – is a matter of humanity’s survival and fate. It’s not a matter of morality that’s just tacked on. I’m going to show you that the humanity of performative disconnection is a monstrous, endangered humanity, and that everyone is capable of something else.” That’s stated clearly. The film shows that capacity to different degrees and in different realms of possibility. This isn’t a film that discriminates. It takes a range of very different characters precisely in order to show that each one of them, whatever his or her own situation, possesses an opening, a capacity that he or she can take advantage of or not. But things are effectively urgent; it all risks ending badly and, to some extent, it all does end badly. You could say that the sensitive cop, at least, leaps at the chance: he encounters his chance for love and he grabs it. Anderson claims that that’s what humanity is, that humanity only exists under such conditions. Everything else is only a matter of ferocity, loneliness, absurd competitive performance, devastation.
Maybe the film is biased with respect to that issue, but it’s still something we’ll agree with overall. Its critique of the world of loneliness and performance is a very profound one because it’s not sociological or ideological. It’s not a general critique; it has its level of abstraction, but it does give subjects their chance. There are only subjects, of whom there are a pretty extensive network, but there’s only individuality. We see how the world of solitary performance destroys that individuality and, conversely, how something can happen, how there can be an encounter, some grace that allows it to be restored, together with a complicated dialectic concerning the role of confession; confession’s not everything. And ultimately – this is very Paulinian again, although not classically Christian – repentance is useless. That’s a very forceful, rather harsh idea. In the case of the incestuous father, or of the old man’s wife, repentance is not a virtue, as Spinoza would say.
Élisabeth Boyer: The incestuous father is loathsome when he confesses, not because he makes a confession of something loathsome but just because he makes it.
Daniel Fischer: He’s pathetic because he plays his last card and it’s no good.
Alain Badiou: That’s actually a very striking point. It’s very Paulinian yet again: what matters is not repentance, what matters is accepting grace and turning it into love. Confession and repentance, which are closely related things, are shown as not being a recourse for humanity. That’s a critique of traditional melodrama, internal to this melodrama, because traditionally, after confession or repentance, you can make a fresh start.
Élisabeth Boyer: Let’s talk about Cruise’s way of performing, about the seminars he’s giving at the beginning of the film to educate men about their relationship with women. The scene is tremendously unsettling. You can’t tell what it’s all about. You can take it as a macho scene, but there’s something else to it. When he takes out his brochures, you get the impression that there’s something other than sex involved, that you can think your relationship with someone, that you can be nice, that you need to have a plan of action and not rush things. It’s more than simple machismo.
Alain Badiou: It begins with the fact that the scene is way too macho. It’s such a blatant dramatization of machismo; he’s performing it and he shows that he’s performing it. What’s more, Cruise is absolutely terrific. Actors have moments of pure genius and there’s an element of true genius here. It’s overacted and to the extent that it’s overacted it can’t literally mean what it means. So what does it mean? We find out only gradually, but the figure of masculinity is confused, where this character is concerned, because the stamp the father put on it was twisted, screwed up. Cruise invented a fictitious biography for himself and later it will be reversed and we’ll see him crying at his father’s bedside. Each of these pieces, and this one in exemplary fashion, is conveyed with such intensity that its meaning is never its explicit nature. Here, you can understand it not as a macho speech but rather as a desperate one on the question of the possibility for love, the possibility for a relationship with women. It’s expressed as cynical self-confidence that’s actually just the opposite.
Slim Ben Cheikh: At the same time it’s about the war between the sexes. It’s certainly not a macho speech but a speech that intends to be liberating for men after the misdeeds of feminism. It goes no farther than war, its subject isn’t love. Basically, it’s despair, to come back to what you said. With Cruise’s character, the theme of the father–son relationship is key. There’s a certain Hollywood-type Freudianism about it …
Alain Badiou: Since his masculinity wasn’t developed in the classical Freudian way, shall we say, the result was a total breakdown in his relationship with women, which manifests as a kind of cynical, warlike, combative self-assurance, whereas in reality it’s desperate and screwed up. What’s so brilliant is how Cruise plays both of those things. The excess of affirmative performance reveals the flip side, so that, later on, when the interviewer throws him a curve, we get the impression that he’s doing an about-face and that we’re going to see that flip side we sensed, in his silence, in his reticence.
Anaïs Le Gaufey: In that scene you can immediately sense that there’s a power struggle going on between the two characters. Cruise calls the shots at first, then he seems a bit unnerved by the reporter’s accusations, right up to the very beautiful tracking shot over his face. The immobility of that face, its muteness, the insistence of the camera’s gaze all creates a “Kuleshov effect.” But the shot, which enables us to read Cruise’s inscrutable face, is composed of both the reporter’s voice-over and the viewer’s imagination, which has been activated by the very rapid pace of the introductory scenes. During the tracking shot, you have the impression that you’re taking a break from the story while at the same time you’re looking at, you’re getting the feeling of a distillation of the ambient violence of the scene and of the film in general, and that you’re being looked at. Cruise’s silence gradually strips the reporter of all credibility, and the interview turns into a revelation of the pettiness and arrogance of a certain voyeuristic brand of journalism.
Annick Fiolet: In connection with that scene again, in terms of the urgency we were talking about, the war theme seems to me to be related to that. You exit the macho speech through that aspect of urgency. Men are now in such desperate straits that something very affirmative is needed: fight back, get a grip on yourself, take your white brochure and your blue brochure and you’ll succeed. The idea of love passes through the scene completely unconnected to the question of sex, subtracted from it. The combativeness has more to do with love than sex, ultimately. You mentioned the montage as a whole, but in this scene there’s something of the multiple at work, in the montage, between Cruise and his audience, who all seem to be at a loss and offer a vision of that flip side you were talking about. The men are in Cruise and at the same time Cruise is in the men.
Alain Badiou: In the scene with the reporter, there’s also a subtle balance owing to the fact that Cruise is shown with all the appearance of an unlikeable guy, even if it’s overacted, and she’s the one who becomes unlikeable. Why? Because the filmmaker’s thesis, linked to the idea of confession, is that a confession shouldn’t be forced out of someone. It’s larger than the question of journalism; it’s the question of confession that’s important. Confession may have its role, but it’s not confession that constitutes love; it’s love that constitutes confession. Forcing a confession out of someone is about performance; it has no value. The critique is based on the idea of confession being forced. It has a general value; it’s not just a critique of sensationalist journalism, which the film is moreover shot through with. There are an unbelievable number of themes in this film. There’s also a whole take on the media in it.
Slim Ben Cheikh: The idea of performance is often associated with the idea of the media. The fact that he chose a black reporter is a little additional complication.
Annick Fiolet: She’s the symbol of the “positive” character that can’t be attacked.
Alain Badiou: That’s the whole aspect of the film that criticizes political correctness: just because you’re a woman or you’re black doesn’t make you right.
Annick Fiolet: There’s a certain mixture of tones in the film. Magnolia doesn’t completely repeat melodrama. There’s an alternation with comedy so that in the most melodramatic scenes there are some explosively funny moments. When Cruise goes to his father’s bedside there’s a comic interlude with the dogs that cuts into the melodrama. The dramatic tone is contradicted by comic moments, even in the scene of the rain of frogs.
Alain Badiou: Yes, it’s comic, symbolic, allegorical, and a bit of a gore film all at once. There’s a deliberate tonal indecision that’s bound up with the multiple.
Slim Ben Cheikh: There are even moments of downright anxiety. When the cop loses his gun and the delinquents are looming there like menacing shadows, it’s like a thriller. I wanted to discuss the film’s contemporaneity, but you already mentioned it: it’s what’s said about love in connection with the idea of performance.
Alain Badiou: I do think that’s what it is, and it’s in effect completely contemporary. It’s a thesis about today’s world, a partial thesis no doubt but one that has its force. A thesis that says that “true life is absent to the extent that love is withdrawn.” Its contemporaneity lies in showing that humanity cannot really exist in the figure of performance, and in showing such a thing cinematically, even within the actors’ performances, which is quite remarkable.
It’s an anti-individualistic film that says: “The individual today has been abandoned to his figure as an individual given over to performance. His life is a sham and the only means of gauging the extent of that sham is love.” That’s the film’s thesis, but without any moralism. Love is the encounter, a different way of seeing the world. It’s not political correctness, the respect for differences, and so on and so forth. The black reporter is no more than a cop. She’s all about performance, too, and that relationship doesn’t amount to anything that can involve humanity, so it only deserves the rain of frogs.
There’s some uncertainty in what Anderson is saying about the question of the father. There, too, in a certain way, the question of the father in classic melodrama is a long-established, fundamental question. The son has to acknowledge the father one way or another, and vice versa, whatever the potentially extremely dramatic vicissitudes of that acknowledgment may be. In keeping with one of contemporary psychoanalysts’ current theses, we might ask whether the film isn’t saying that this story of fathers and sons is over, that that’s not where we need to be looking. If you look at the three fathers, they’re all disasters. That’s quite a harsh accusation against fathers, and in this respect, too, I’d regard the film as Paulinian: the law of fathers is over, the world’s not based on that anymore. We’ve got to find something else. We’ll turn to random encounters, exactly the way Christianity said “It’s the world of the son now, not the world of the father any longer.” The father–son issue is a fundamental one, but it’s nevertheless very specific. If we wanted to complete the film’s subject we’d say: “What is it that makes humanity hold together as a world, given that it no longer seems to be respect for the law of the father?” It’s not that anymore but rather the chance nature of love. That’s what we’re reduced to, there’s nothing else, with all that entails in terms of riskiness and the absence of law.
Denis Lévy: Magnolia would seem to answer to the imperatives of “affirmationism” as you articulated them.3
Alain Badiou: Yes, the determining factor of Magnolia from that point of view is the relationship between idea and construction. It’s the conviction that if you want to bring about, in the world as it is today, something that takes a stand on a possible meaning of generic humanity, even if you’re using traditional materials, the path has to be that of construction, not deconstruction. I think Magnolia is faithful to this idea of mine. The key point is: to reveal the meanings of the world, is the path that of deconstructing established figures, critiquing and exposing them? That’s not what Magnolia’s all about. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t go about it locally by using, misusing, or deviating from traditional materials. We might see a melodramatic scene destabilized by some element or other, but the whole doesn’t consist in ironically deconstructing established forms. The whole is really a construction. Whatever the complexity, the performances, the overly intense character of the actors, and so on, might be, it’s a construction, a partly baroque one but still a construction. So, regardless, I would classify it as affirmationism.
Cinema is a harsher critic than is generally believed. The deconstructionist figure has had a lot of trouble becoming established in it and in the final analysis has hardly become established in it at all. Deconstructionism has remained avant-gardist to some extent. That doesn’t mean that everything that’s been positively affirmed has been good: kitsch has had quite a field day! But it’s true that cinema hasn’t been the privileged witness of what I’m describing as the flip side of kitsch, that is, post-modern deconstructionism. Avant-gardism was able to establish itself securely and even be hegemonic to a great extent in the visual arts, but that hasn’t been the case in cinema. Cinema’s special genius is more kitschy than avant-gardist.
L’Art du cinéma, Winter 2002–2003