I have charted how the feeling soma comes into view in global cultural texts in every medium, from literature to publicity to the politics of human and planetary futurity. Of dimensions equally capacious as imprecise, this flexible body is predicated on an organicity that posits a fundamental indistinction of scale, thus allowing the same model of protagonism to be applied to the individual organism or all of humanity or life in all its kingdoms or the planet itself. This notion of protagonism channels democracy in its most perfect and idealized form: the smallest part is interchangeable with the whole; any and every representative of the body is qualitatively equal and significant. There is fluid conceptual movement between the individual and the grand collective of life, all embraced within this model of nonrational sentience.
At this juncture I would like to turn my attention to the organizational dynamics of this body, focusing on the persistence with which it is represented as being governed by the logic of its own feelings as a model of order. This model diverges sharply from the traditional model of rational subjectivity. In the classic Cartesian framework, the subject constitutes itself through the engagement of reason to affirm the existence of the self, establishing a critical self-reflexive distance in which there is a doubling of the self between the rational observer and the nonrational observed—the mind and body, respectively. It is the rational mind, as distinct from the body, that analyzes, makes plans for action, and executes those plans, guiding the nonrational body down the path laid out by the advance strategy of the reasoning mind. In the epistemically affective model, this dualism disappears. All analysis, plans, and execution of action are nonrationally performed. This does not mean—to evoke Ruth Leys’s concerns about the same (see note 12 of the introduction)—that we may not speak of self-awareness, cognition, analysis, or deliberate action, but we must entertain the possibility of rediscovering—and redefining—those concepts so strongly associated with Cartesian rationalism in the context of the “affectivism” of the feeling soma.
Leys establishes a kind of conceptual lobby on behalf of affect in order to safeguard against what she views as an overdetermined separation between reason and affect in which affect is therefore circumscribed from the Cartesian attributes of reason. Leys protects what I would call the epistemological potential of affect insofar as she defends the possibility of understanding affect as being capable of doing all that reason does, with a particular emphasis on cognition.
Whereas Leys approaches this issue empirically, shouldering the burden of ontology and sifting through physiological evidence, I approach the same issue representationally. I identify how the feeling soma is portrayed as a conceptual model in any kind of text, placing science on a par with film in my discursive analysis of cultural storytelling. Rather than argue for any kind of scientifically verifiable status of affect in the cognitive, decision-making, and action-taking processes, I look at how these processes are narrated. In the aggregate these diverse cultural texts reveal a recurrent formulation of what we would traditionally consider the purview of reason—cognition, judgment, principled action—at the level of affect. That is, cognition, judgment, and principled action become nonrationally informed.
Analysis of the representation of the feeling soma, I argue, points to homeostasis as the mechanism for the accomplishment of these erstwhile rational tasks. Terminologically, I employ
homeostasis to denote the body’s automatic self-regulatory tendency toward well-being measured in somatic and emotional terms. In originary free-market tracts, as in the most current of arguments espousing a radically laissez-faire view, capital traverses the global body politic without the slightest need for rational intervention, following its own wisdom, which inevitably brings happiness to each and all the world over in its all-encompassing flow. It is the homeostatic principle that underwrites this view, which evinces a belief in the capacity of the feeling soma to guide itself toward healthful and happy equilibrium on the strength of its nonrational internal operations. In the texts I will examine as evidence of this belief, the nonrational internal operations of the feeling soma assume the logic of an emotionally coded flow. Health—the net balance between ease and disease, happiness and unhappiness—becomes a central metaphor for the state of affairs within the feeling soma. The cognitive powers of the feeling soma are rooted in the ability to self-diagnose, with discernment between well-being and ill-being constituting the fundamental analytical operation in determining action needed in response to the net disposition of the feeling soma along the continuum of health, from the positive pole of well-being at one end to the negative pole of ill-being at the other. In this chapter I will consider the persistent cultural concern over and representation of health and I will analyze the homeostatic dynamics of the feeling soma in cultural texts that posit the balance of health as an index of cultural politics. In a back-and-forth alternation between U.S. and Latin American texts, I will consider how cultural ill-being is denounced as a function of capitalist consumerism and materialism and how a distancing from that capitalist culture is posited as a curative remedy for the restoration of well-being on both the individual and cultural levels.
Health on the Cultural Horizon
Health has become a persistent media issue over the past decade—not because ours, collectively, is perceived to be good, but because of fears that it may be under cultural assault, in jeopardy of decline. Reports of the increasingly global affliction of obesity, expanding in tandem with the influence of Western culture and diet, are perhaps the most salient example, hence inspiring Michelle Obama’s national campaign to end childhood obesity in the United States. Therapy of all kinds, including self-help literature, yoga, and alternative medicine, have become booming industries (the National Institutes of Health expanded in 1991 to include complementary and alternative medicine). Healthcare has been a heated political issue in the United States, which resulted in the passage of so-called Obamacare; premiere and ever controversial U.S. documentary filmmaker Michael Moore’s
Sicko (2007) anticipates this debate, framing the lack of socialized medicine as a symptom of greater cultural ills in the United States. Third Cinema ideologue and preeminent Argentine director Fernando “Pino” Solanas,
1 likewise, foregrounds sickness and the even more widespread lack of healthcare in Argentina in
Memoria del saqueo (Social Genocide, 2004) and
La dignidad de los nadies (The Dignity of the Nobodies, 2005) as a symptom of economic neoliberalism.
Television is replete with doctors—to name only a metonym of the many shows staged around hospitals,
ER (1994–2009) is the second-longest-running serial drama in U.S. television history. Doctor figures are also a recurrent motif of recent film. Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film
Batman Begins (2005), updating the canonical WWII superhero for the global age, places emphasis on the vocation of Batman’s father not as a businessman, but as a doctor; though the family’s mansion burns to the ground, Batman pulls his father’s scorched stethoscope from the ruins, a symbolic reminder of the notion that corporations are meant to serve the well-being of their communities rather than spawning poverty, disease, and death. In the same way that the primacy of medicine makes business secondary in
Batman Begins, the primacy of medicine makes social revolution secondary in not one but two portraits of the legendary revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara: Walter Salles’s
Diarios de motocicleta (
Motorcycle Diaries, 2004) and Steven Soderbergh’s
Che (2008) both cast Guevara’s revolutionary identity as derivative of his foundational commitment to being a doctor and a healer. Prominent Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’s
Blindness (2008), adapted from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago’s eponymous 1995 novel, makes an ophthalmologist and his wife the central protagonists of the eponymous plague that is at once physiological and moral; the ophthalmologist’s wife leads her husband and their diverse microsociety back to health by forging a new community based on love and the equal distribution of resources across all lines of social division. These filmic examples, all of which enjoy high—and global—visibility because of the prominence of their directors, the cultural cachet of their subject matter, particularly in the instances of Batman and Che Guevara, and their broad distribution, all manifest a significant coincidence in locating their leading doctors at the epicenter of a crisis of social health of dimensions that tend toward the universal. Well-being and ill-being represent broad social models in conflict; in the aforementioned filmic examples, ill-being constitutes the undesirable status quo associated with capitalist culture—either explicitly or as a culture of greed—that the doctor works to remedy as the architect of cultural well-being, designing a social model that ranges from a “kinder, gentler” corporate capitalism in
Batman Begins to informal socialism in
Blindness to declared anticapitalist revolution in the Che Guevara films.
Contemporary narrative diagnoses the cultural landscape as though it were a soma. It no longer comprehends long-winded rational discourse about rights, justice, equality, exploitation. It does comprehend those concepts—it understands what rights, justice, equality, and exploitation are; they just don’t resonate in their old packaging. An example of such affective repackaging of rational political discourse is to be had in Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s film
The Take (2004), in which the young antineoliberal-globalization-activist Canadian couple travel to Argentina in search of an economic alternative to profit-driven neoliberalism. Since its disastrous economic and political collapse of December 2001—including an IMF default and the seizure of national bank deposits—Argentina has been attractive to the postneoliberal gaze not only because the collapse marked the end of Argentina’s decades-long neoliberal experiment but also because it unexpectedly revived the political left in a continental domino effect. Even beyond this revival, Argentina has, in the aftermath of its crisis, produced what Klein and Lewis view as a radical break with the neoliberal model in the form of the hundreds of factories abandoned in the massive flight of capital that have since been reoccupied and returned to operational productivity not by their owners but by their former workers.
The Take chronicles the struggle of one such group of workers—in this case, of the steel plant Forja—to organize in solidarity as a collective in order to take over the abandoned means of capitalist production and to participate in the capitalist market as a quasi-socialist producer of goods. The film’s express intent—as manifested in an interview between a free-market apologist and Klein, whom the former accuses of having no viable alternative—is precisely to find such an alternative to neoliberalism. Yet the film does not produce analytical language describing that alternative—i.e., not in the way that I have provisionally attempted. Instead, the film lets the workers’ emotions bear the brunt of the storytelling. A central scene in this regard is one in which a small group of Forja representatives are waiting outside a judge’s chambers to learn her decision about whether they will be made to evacuate the premises or permitted to continue their operations. When they hear that the judge has decided in their favor, the emotion is overwhelming. One middle-aged man calls his father to tell him the news and breaks down in tears on the phone. The camera stays unabashedly trained on that expression of sentimentality, those tears of joy and relief, because therein lies the story of rights, justice, equality, and exploitation. The film speaks in the language of that explicit political metanarrative only to the extent that is necessary to frame the story; the rest is told in the affective terms of a collective feeling soma whose joyful release of sadness marks the turning of a political tide away from serving as the supports of neoliberal exploitation and toward serving as the supports of the heretofore exploited.
Like Mel Gibson’s hyperbolically bloody Christ, Rodrigo Bellott’s collective vomit, or McDonald’s love-as-hamburger, The Take adopts a narrative strategy that places more faith in the power of a visceral, rather than rational, presentation of information. And this visceral narrative is not simply telling a story about the body, but is using the body to tell a story about the world, a story that should be understood as a fully articulated social critique. It is in the language of the emotions and the soma that feels them that this critique is articulated, yielding what, in effect, we might with some poetic license call an epidemiological optic in the sense that it is principally attuned to the question of (dis)ease. Diagnostics of health are affective analogues for the political in which well-being represents the positive pole of analysis and ill-being a negative critique.
Epidemiological Narrative: Diagnosing Ill-Being
In public health initiatives, as in the cinematic examples explored in the previous section, the feeling soma undergirds an understanding of the social; in the case of the nonprofit organization U.S. Healthiest, dedicated to making the United States—as it claims on its website—the “world’s healthiest nation” by promoting “healthy communities,” “healthy workplaces,” and a “healthy you,” there is also an explicit homology between the emotional and economic homeostasis of the U.S. public. With a board of directors composed largely of corporate executives from retail, healthcare, and investment companies, as well as governmental functionaries, it is not surprising that the homepage mission statement should read: “We understand that health is the key to not only physical, emotional, and intellectual well-being
but also to economic strength. Our members are committed to making health and well-being a priority
in industry and government, but also for individuals, families, and communities” (emphasis added). As though reviving eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utilitarian philosophy—which prescribed the calculation of social good in “utils” of benefits and detriments—and recasting it in the language of health, U.S. Healthiest posits health as the basis of a robust social order in which there is a seamless interconnection between individuals and economy.
In an audiovisual declaration of intent, a video short entitled
Healthiest Nation, U.S. Healthiest takes as its point of departure the assertion that the United States is not in good health (“1 in 2 children is likely to develop type 2 diabetes/ by 2025 chronic disease will affect half the population/for the first time our children will have shorter life expectancies than ours/ … healthcare[:] / our nation is more interested / in the ‘care’ part/ than in the ‘health’ part”) and tries to convince its audience to join its movement to remedy that infirmity. The way in which the video short frames that remedy reveals the homeostatic principle at work: well-being is a phenomenon of dynamism (“let’s create a movement / that creates movement”) that is all-encompassing, reaching into every aspect of life, from transit to shelter to inner life (“walking / carpooling / demanding bike lanes / smoke free public places / supporting local farmers / and farm to school programs / building LEED certified structures and community gardens around them / turning off the T.V./ (so we can rest)/ (so we can dream)” and across all social sectors, in the spirit of democracy (“a movement that connects / cities states businesses neighborhoods human beings / a movement that gives the people the power / to change how they: eat / commute / shop / play / feel”). In this “power-to-the-people” list the rights of old are replaced by the simple operations of a work- and consumption-based culture—eating, commuting, shopping, playing, and, underscored by the largest font and screen size of all these items, as though its conceptual apotheosis,
feeling—are advanced as the territory of democratic intervention (for the people, by the people). Like the tears in
The Take, the theme of health in
Healthiest Nation video is politically charged; it is a call to well-being that is inseparable from the context of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism not only because of the overt references to their foundational principles, but because the entire vision of the meaning of health evokes the model of homeostatic affect, from its premise of the interconnectedness between individual and globe (“your health and global health are connected” being the key realization to launching the “movement”), the dynamic movement that organizes the parts of that collective whole, and the definition of those parts as “not just being well / but becoming well beings / physically / emotionally / environmentally / healthy healthy healthy.” It is worth noting here that this last definition of health as that which is proper to the individual—physical and emotional—and to the planet—environmental—expands the collective subject to all of nature itself. What the health of this collective subject ensures is an organic structure through which capital may find easy transit, producing profit in the capitalist model of well-being. Placed in the context of the mission statement of U.S. Healthiest, which stresses economic health as its furthest-reaching concern, the video suddenly seems less about well-being for its own sake and more for the sake of preparing a collective organism sufficiently fit on a structural level to accommodate the fact of the economy. Yet, even as it makes upbeat and cheery recommendations for achieving greater well-being on a national scale, it also cannot help but signal a marked anxiety over the diagnosis of U.S. ill-being that has prompted the intervention in the first place.
Mad Men: Capitalism as Ill-Being Masked by Well-Being
If the United States is sick, then we find an attempt to diagnose that illness in
Mad Men (2007–2015), an original AMC cable television series with a viewership in the range of several million, consistently ranked in the American Film Institute’s top ten television shows and boasted a litany of other award nominations and wins to its credit.
Mad Men reads as an extended epidemiological narrative—that is, a narrative focused on the diagnosis of (dis)ease, which is figured as a net balance between well- and ill-being. This period series about the Madison Avenue advertising world of the early 1960s goes back in time to the moment when the United States was heady with postwar affluence and global influence, the moment when this new capitalist superpower in the bipolar cold war was establishing its hegemony through the aggressive birth of consumer culture. Indeed, citing the
New York Times’s introduction to
Mad Men as historiography,
2 Goodlad, Kaganovsky, and Rushing paraphrase this reception of the series: “Don Draper [i]s not fiction but biography;
Mad Men [i]s not television but a repository of the past” (1). Indeed, the preponderance of
Mad Men scholarship takes this historiographical tack, approaching the series first and foremost as a period piece and plumbing its content largely for issues of gender, sexuality, class, and race in the 1960s.
3I would argue, however, contrary to what the period aesthetic of Mad Men most immediately invites us to contemplate in the preterit, that this biographical repository of the past is most deeply about the cultural present; as Gary R. Edgerton avers, Mad Men “capture[s] and express[es] the [current] zeitgeist” (xxi). An interpretive optic that focuses on the show’s content in the context of capitalism and advertising come closest to its deepest pulse and relevance for our cultural present. If Mad Men puts its finger on any cultural wound, it is the consumerism that has come preponderantly and unapologetically to define our lives. Michael Bérubé expresses this to a tee in a poetic meditation on the way Mad Men interpellates us as consumers: Mad Men, Bérubé muses, “is a good series about good advertising that advertises itself well while calling advertising into question. Structural irony, Mad Men style. You’ll love, and at the same time you won’t love, the way it makes you feel” (359). It is precisely in this capacity to make us feel both good and bad that Mad Men is most relentlessly about the twenty-first century and most urgently begging interpretation. The reason for being of this analysis—of this entire study as a whole—is to argue that our zeitgeist turns on the precarious balance between well-being and ill-being, between ease and disease, between joylessness and happiness, between love and its lack, all against the social fabric that vacillates between consumerism and consumption, between freedom and unfreedom, and the understanding of consumerism as that which promises freedom only to yield unfreedom as the ineluctable consequence of consumption.
Mad Men is notoriously lush in its aesthetic, representing the opulent excess of Madison Avenue and the unapologetic materialism of the suburbs that were emerging in complementary fashion at the same moment. But beneath this lavish mid-century surface of well-being, the characters of Mad Men are mired in a social and interior landscape of malaise—enveloped by clouds of cigarette smoke, plagued by chronic illness, wracked with bouts of nausea, tormented by deep-seated emotional damage. These motifs of ill-being—dirty undershirts, uncontrollable spasms of muscular atrophy, violent vomiting—lying just below the surface of glamour, high-powered competence, and success constitutes a representation of affluence and malaise that it is not one or the other, but both.
Mad Men portrays a system in which affluent well-being is only a surface-level phenomenon of appearances, existing only in the upper levels of the chrome-and-glass high-rise buildings that house advertising firms whose executives script social “happiness”—which the show’s protagonist Don Draper says was “invented by guys like me”—while the reality underneath it all is one of supreme and physical unhappiness.
Mad Men’s characters smoke, drink, and fornicate their way into momentary bliss, a bliss that is not only always fleeting, but, moreover, only works to aggravate their underlying ill-being. In this sense,
Mad Men presents an unflinching portrait of consumerism as toxic addiction.
4
As a series,
Mad Men is predicated on the tension between Don Draper’s outward charisma and impossible success, on the one hand, and his internal instability and emotional emptiness, on the other, with the effect of positing that the subject of consumer culture bears a relationship of analogy to the product it consumes—that is, dressed in an illusion of well-being that hides a reality of inner ill-being. The opening credits show the prototypical “Madman” (a play on the “adman” of Madison Avenue) falling down, down, down into the seated black silhouette of a suited businessman whose outline conceptually resolves into the opening shot of the series in which we see Don Draper from behind in an after-hours club as smoky as it is swanky.
5 We learn that the circumstance of this silhouette—that is, what is engrossing Don Draper as the first shot of the series captures him in thought—is a profound anxiety about how to market cigarettes now that research links cigarettes to cancer. Draper has a meeting the next morning with the entire Lucky Strike family, and he’s “got nothing,” as he confesses to his lover, to whom he pays an impromptu late-night visit following his unsatisfying brainstorming on the proverbial cocktail napkin. “Next time you see me,” he tells her, “there’ll be a bunch of young executives picking meat off my ribs.” Don Draper’s elegant dress and confident mien suggest that this is a man of infinite success, but it is significant that we should meet him precisely in this moment of self-professed creative flatline. In spite of his robust exterior, we see that, internally, he is a subject in crisis. His is a constant vertigo, a constant fear of falling. Normally, we intuit, he is able to save himself with his signature savoir faire. The fact that we meet him under threat, at the precipice of failure—whose irreversibility we infer from the scale of his anxiety—with nothing in his head, filled with quiet panic and dread, yet performing—to himself, to others—as though absolutely nothing were wrong, epitomizes his existential landscape: outward well-being, inward ill-being.
If we think about Don Draper’s past and present on the level of social metaphor, we can appreciate how he might be seen to represent the derivation of U.S. affluence from the tragedy of war and depression. A decorated war veteran (or so the purple heart medal in his office drawer would lead us to believe), Don Draper is nevertheless reticent about his past. His junior executives joke that no one knows anything about Don Draper (“He could be Batman, for all we know,” one quips), a sentiment that his own wife shares with far less mirth, breaking the ice with his new secretary with the plaintive remark that Peggy probably knows him better than she. Slowly, we find out that Don Draper is trying to hide another identity. Even his name—the name we see embossed on his purple heart medal—is not his own. He has a different name, Dick Whitman, one that emerges in shadowy association with a childhood of rural poverty, an emotionally gray history dominated by emasculating ridicule and the lack of love: a prostitute mother dead in childbirth, a blood father who died some years later after remarrying a callous stepmother who deprived him of a mother’s love, an “uncle” (the husband of the unloving stepmother) who ribbed him for being “soft.” One by one these characters have died, we learn; his younger half-brother is Draper’s only remaining connection to his past—and he commits suicide midway through the first season. It is as though the agricultural, prewar past of the nation dies away in the figure of these estranged relatives who disappear into oblivion, leaving nothing to contradict the ascendant—but false—reality of Madison Avenue.
6Draper’s service, we eventually learn, was during the Korean War. But the biographical uncertainty of the initial episodes has the effect of casting mid-century war simply as a point of contrast, a circumstantial foil, for the gleaming Madison Avenue offices to which Draper has risen. The sudden catapulting of the United States into global hegemony on the heels of World War II constituted a sharp turn up and out of the lingering aftershock of the Great Depression. Market values finally returned to their precrash levels in the mid-fifties and then began to surpass them on the strength of a new economy based on consumerism. Along with the astronaut—and, indeed, a stranger at a bar asks a sleepless Don Draper if that’s what he is (“The Doorway,” season 6, episode 1)—the adman is an archetypal character of these times, populating the U.S. national imaginary in the form of Darrin Stephens (Dick York, Dick Sargent), the advertising executive who marries a witch on the 1964–1972 television series Bewitched, for example.
Draper refuses to honor his past—he leaves his long-lost half-brother at the table of their anticlimactic reunion, saying on his way out the door that their meeting “never happened”—in the same way that the U.S. also began anew in the wake of war. If we may take Draper as an avatar of the postwar U.S. culture of affluence, then this postwar identity is profoundly amnesiac and disconnected from its prewar history. The baby boom begins U.S. history anew with the U.S. at the arrogant helm of world domination. Superheroes were born for the new superpower—Draper might well be considered Batman in the sense that he represents the pinnacle of this new U.S. powerhouse. But the comparison also suggests that superhero status may only belie an equally great hidden trauma: Draper’s outward character embodies an unbridled power and disdain for any authority other than his own, but his lost self, his disavowed name and past signal that this success is built upon the precarious foundation of willful social amnesia. Just as Draper spins slogans out of thin air—generating “happiness” and prosperity out of nothing—so does the rise of Madison Avenue constitute the birth of affluence from a cultural void. On the surface, Draper is the picture of success, wealth, and happiness. The underbelly of his hidden past is the negative image of failure, destitution, and depression.
Draper’s first female client and budding love interest shakes Draper visibly by suggesting that he may well know what it means to be “disconnected” from the world, to reside in a chronic state of alienation—a perfect countermodel to homeostatic well-being. As the episodes progress, we learn that Rachel Menken’s mother died giving birth to her. Likewise, Don Draper’s past is characterized by the absence of a mother; we soon learn that he had a stepmother who “never let him forget” that he was not her son, and later the deaths of his biological parents is confirmed. If the attraction between Rachel Menken and Don Draper represents the union of the corporation and its public face, the composite picture and basis of a new era of wealth, then it is clear that this new era has come into being with neither history nor love. This generation has to create both for itself; it has to fabricate the well-being that is foundationally absent in its being born motherless and without the name of the father. For just as Don Draper is orphaned by his father, Rachel Menken effects a self-orphaning by supplanting her out-of-touch father as the new head of their business. She introduces herself as the steward picking up the reins of her store following its “worst sales year ever,” asserting that it is her opinion, and not her father’s, that now matters. American consumer culture is, the series suggests, the orphaned—and therefore utterly brazen—love child of economic and cultural rock bottom. From the ashes of prewar U.S. depression, Don Draper and Rachel Menken rise up on the wings of postwar affluence to define a new era of economic prosperity based on capitalist consumerism.
But their depression and underlying ill-being only seem to grow in the same measure that their success and putative well-being grows. At-large consumer culture critic Annie Leonard posits the same in her online exposition of the materials economy in “The Story of Stuff,” where she argues that our consumerism functions on the basis of a negative desire: on the basis of feeling bad about ourselves, we rush out to make ourselves feel better with a purchase, only to have the negativity renewed by the news that now we need a new thing to feel good. This is a pursuit of happiness that has no finality and no true catharsis; it is simply a chase of what cannot ever be attained because the well-being that is pursued is always already—and ever—an illusion. What Mad Men adds to this model of consumption is the notion of ill-being as a fundamental underlying condition, a reality in the sense of the Lacanian dimension of the real—the unrepresentable horrors that our ego tries to cover over with a patchwork of imaginary narrative. Advertising—the symbolic language of consumption—is the narrative through which our poor beleaguered ego tries to reconstitute itself in the imaginary terrain of idealized well-being, to cure its primordial subterranean state of abjection, misery, ill-being.
Mad Men is born of cigarettes: the pilot episode situates itself in the advertising crisis provoked by the Surgeon General’s report linking tobacco to cancer. At Sterling Cooper, the firm where creative director and rising star Draper is making a name for himself, tobacco is not just one product of many; Lucky Strike is the bread-and-butter account that brings in more than half its annual revenue. In the same way, we might interpret the episode’s foregrounding of tobacco as anything but arbitrary. The choice of tobacco as the signal product to begin a series that is, in turn, about the birth of consumer culture suggests that, in its genesis, that culture is fundamentally rooted in ill-being, promoting an addiction that leads inexorably toward death.
7
Yet, when confronted with such scientific evidence, Draper’s response is to throw the surgeon general’s report in the trash, not only obscuring but also rendering abject—that is, making what should be edifying an undesirable knowledge—the fatal truth of addiction and, in its place, creating a slogan for Lucky Strike that reassures, comforts, gives the appearance of stability, denotes nature and nurture at once: “It’s toasted,” he proposes to say of the erstwhile carcinogenic cigarette. (Draper’s “brainchild” slogan dates back to 1917, making the show’s commentary on the perverse advertising strategy of Lucky Strike—and consumer capitalism in general—all the more profound.) The consumer does not want to be reminded of ill-being, says Draper; the consumer wants only positive affirmation:
Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is OK. You are OK.
Advertising thus creates the patently false illusion of well-being, an illusion that is, nonetheless, entirely credible on the strength of desire, a desire for pleasure, freedom, and happiness.
The consumer engages in addiction but maintains the illusion of autonomy, self-determination, freedom of choice, prosperity of purchasing power, wealth in happiness stemming from the pleasure that comes from consumption. All the while, the product that confers an intentionally ephemeral pleasure—in order to encourage addiction and a permanence of consumption—only increases a subterranean reality of ill-being that can only be alleviated by consuming more of the same in a pattern of escape that is short-lived and noxious, digging the consumer deeper and deeper into ill-being with every cycle of consumption, every desperate bid—gambling, risking one’s life—in the quest for refuge. Thus health—not only the health of the planet robbed of its resources and equilibrium but the health of the individual—becomes the Achilles’ heel of consumer culture: health is not linear and infinite; eventually the ill-being resulting from a lifestyle predicated on unhealthy addiction will reach a point of terminal unsustainability, bursting asunder the illusion of happiness.
When Draper arrives at his office for his big Lucky Strike meeting unshowered, underslept, and unkempt, he pulls from his drawer a brand-new white button-down shirt still in its wrappings and puts it on over his dirty undershirt. This is the operative image and metaphor for U.S. consumerism as an infinite cycle of a reality of dirty ill-being underlying the illusory appearance of well-being. The button-down shirt is an opaque cover-up of bravado, charm, narrative brilliance—this top shirt is the one associated with Draper’s coup in the world of illusion: the simple tagline “It’s toasted” to cast Lucky Strike cigarettes as the epitome of natural growth, home cooking, health, comfort, happiness—well-being in a package. The undershirt constitutes the repressed memory of the anxiety of the abyss of creative death, the general precipice over which the entire world of affluence hovers, built, as it is, without foundation; it is the secret depression and malaise of the suburban world that has not yet admitted to itself that its happiness is illusory, sheer image and no substance. The undershirt is also the memory of the medical report linking smoking to cancer that Draper has relegated to the trash can—the suppressed knowledge that cigarettes are, in truth, death for sale in a well-advertised box.
This first and foundational episode of Mad Men thus invites us to view cigarettes as a synecdoche for the entire market of consumer products, the ultimate symbol of consumption as a cultural phenomenon. The episode not only talks about cigarettes; it contextualizes them in use—a heavy and self-medicated use. The opening shot of the pilot episode, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” begins with Draper’s silhouette, establishing him as the prototypical Mad Man, and then travels through a Manhattan bar where Draper and his elite advertising colleagues let off steam from the workday. The bar is clouded with smoke—as the camera pans, we see that everyone, without exception, is laughing, talking, drinking, with a lit cigarette in hand. Draper initiates an impromptu conversation with his black waiter—a conversation proscribed by the racist norms of the era, which circumstance makes the conversation all the more truthful for its universality of sentiment across the deepest of social divides—in which the two men effectively define cigarettes as the true love of every man, an affective relationship underscored by the background song about a “band of gold” that plays upon the name of the waiter’s favorite cigarettes, Old Gold, to suggest a marital relationship between man and cigarette. Draper—along with everyone else, but especially Draper, as the epitome of both master and subject of consumer culture—smokes his way through the episode. A master of consumer culture, Draper reveals the fabrication of the illusion of well-being by throwing out the medical report and promoting a false sense of pleasurable security in its place; as its subject, he reveals how the pursuit of happiness is a flight from unhappiness whose aftereffects only serve to exacerbate this fundamental ill-being. The cycle of consumption digs its subject further and further into the trenches of ill-being with every attempt to consume a happiness that is not only illusory, but noxious, to the consumer’s health. Consumption promises health and well-being, but delivers sickness and ill-being.
Draper’s Madison Avenue office is the domain of illusion: “Who could not be happy with all this?” Draper asks with a broad smile, sweeping his arm around the bright luxury executive accommodations that surround him. Yet, when left to his own devices beyond those reassuring confines, Draper’s deeper unhappiness leads him to pass out, drunk at the wheel, under a dark bridge. Acutely aware of his own malaise, and trapped in the social structure corresponding to capitalist consumption (urban desk job; suburban home, wife, and two kids), the fantasy of a liaison with Rachel Menken obsesses Draper to the point of self-medicating his way into the quick fix of happiness he is craving with can after can of beer. This use of alcohol is analogous to cigarettes, one more aspect of the same cycle of consumption.
Draper’s boss lectures him about the way he handles his “daily friendship with [the] bottle”:
ROGER STERLING: You don’t know how to drink. Your whole generation, you drink for the wrong reasons. My generation, we drink because it’s good, because it feels better than unbuttoning your collar, because we deserve it. We drink because it’s what men do…. Your kind with your gloomy thoughts and your worries, you’re all busy licking some imaginary wound.
DON DRAPER: Not all imaginary.
ROGER STERLING: Yeah, boo hoo.
DON DRAPER: Maybe I’m not as comfortable being powerless as you are. (“New Amsterdam” 1.4)
Draper’s accusation of a collective “powerlessness” seems at odds with the prestige of their circumstance as successful admen. But this is a moment when the underbelly of the real is rearing its head, a reminder that, from below, the real is always conditioning the imaginary on high. The specific reminder that Draper’s real is bringing to bear on his world of imaginary well-being is the foundationlessness of this well-being, a reminder of the sickly feeling of free fall that visually characterizes the entire series in the introductory sequence in which an adman in black silhouette (a generic Draper—Draper rendered as cultural structure) falls from the heights of a Manhattan skyscraper, passing billboard after billboard on the way toward a demise that miraculously never comes to pass because of the cushion—toxic though it may be—of self-medication, from the false happiness of advertising and wealth to the fleeting highs of cigarettes and alcohol. Toward the end of the first episode, Don Draper himself recognizes advertising as a mask of well-being for a profound and bottomless ill-being: “The reason you haven’t felt [love] is because it doesn’t exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons. You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one” (1.1).
Spanish poet Federico García Lorca saw in the New York of 1929–1930 a dichotomous world divided between the culture of finance on high, which Lorca represents in the depersonalized abstract mode of offices and ciphers (“multiplicaciones,” “divisiones,” “sumas” [“multiplications,” “divisions,” “sums”]), and “la otra mitad” (“the other half”), which Lorca characterizes as “un río de sangre tierna” (“a river of tender blood”) that flows sacrificially below the numbers (240). The world of financial success and power, Lorca argues, is a cold abstraction at a vertical remove from the masses below whose constant sacrifice—death in blood and abjection—is the unsung price that has to be paid to keep this affluence afloat. Lorca made this argument at the moment that the Roaring Twenties came abruptly to an end; Mad Men likewise came into being just before the 2008 credit crisis, at the moment that neoliberalism, having produced spikes in wealth not experienced since the 1920s, was on the verge of crashing down on itself into what analysts will characterize as the worst recession since the Great Depression. Whereas Lorca posits a separation between the illusory world on high and its abject real down below in this hierarchical social landscape—in other worlds, two worlds that are systemically interconnected but don’t touch each other—Mad Men internalizes this divide within the somatic landscape of the individual. The world on high, Mad Men suggests, always already contains its own river of grease and blood.
Consumption as a cultural way of life is an internalized schizoid state. But, it must be emphasized, not an arbitrarily schizoid state; on the contrary, a programmatically cyclical schizoid state continually revolves in a loop of consumption that seeks well-being and begets ill-being, a cycle that is designed to awaken, harness, channel, and exploit desire without ever fulfilling it, so that desire, even when disappointed—
especially when disappointed—comes back full circle, time and again, for more, in an unadulterated addiction to the process. This cycle is not just about consumer products; it is about emotions. Because consumption is coded affectively, defining positive emotional states in illusory terms (happiness is a pair of pantyhose, love a diamond ring), homeostasis itself is thrown out of balance by being realigned along an axis of false emotional definition. If homeostasis constitutes the body’s autonomic self-regulation in the direction of wellness—well-being being the objective of every body—then the capturing of that basic, primordial, homeostatic category by consumerism confuses the body. According to the three thousand commercials we see daily, well-being is what we buy: things and more things we don’t need (many of which remake our natural environment in artificial simulacrum just to sell it back to us with a profit, from bottled water to human breast milk now being produced through genetically modified cows), clothes we can’t fit into, cars we can’t afford, fast food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (in
Super Size Me [2004], Morgan Spurlock’s doctors were warning him he was putting his life at risk after some twenty-odd days of eating exclusively at McDonald’s, still nearly ten days shy of fulfilling his thirty-day commitment to a fast-food-only diet).
In The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite (2009), former Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler examines how, since the eighties—the onset of the neoliberal years—the advertising and food industries have exploited the body’s desire-based and pleasure-seeking reward system, overloading the body’s cravings and drowning out the homeostatic drive to maintain an energy equilibrium, creating a nation of overweight eaters addicted to sugar, fat, and salt. An interview with Kessler is worth quoting at length for his succinct discussion of the physiological mechanisms of addiction associated with consumption—we can view this as an explanation of the obesity aboard the spaceship Axiom in WALL·E, where the passengers spend all day gorging themselves on reward-center foods, as well as a conceptual tie-in to our contemplation of cigarette advertising in Mad Men as a synecdoche for consumer culture itself:
Fifty years ago, the tobacco industry, confronted with the evidence that smoking causes cancer, decided to deny the science and deceive the American public. Now, we know that highly palatable foods—sugar, fat, salt—are highly reinforcing and can activate the reward center of the brain. For many people, that activation is sustained when they’re cued. They have such a hard time controlling their eating because they’re constantly being bombarded—their brain is constantly being activated….
For one gentleman I spoke with, the hardest thing for him every day is to get home past the newsstand at the train station because of the Kit Kats. For him, it was Kit Kats, for someone else, it’s chocolate chip cookies, but one of the key core features is sugar, fat, salt. Once your behavior becomes conditioned and driven, you get into this cycle and you get cued. When the neural circuits get activated, it focuses your attention. There’s a bit of an arousal as you have increased attentional focus, and then the only way to get it out of working memory is to consume the product. The next time you’re cued, you eat again, and you’re in this cycle. Every time you do it you strengthen it….
Not only is there amplified neural activation in the anticipatory phase with people with conditioned hypereating, but as they’re eating, the stimulation stays sustained so it’s very hard to stop. It isn’t until the food’s gone—considerably later—do you feel full because the reward circuits are overriding the homeostatic circuits….
Putting sugar, fat and salt on every corner, that’s been the business plan. You make it not only accessible, but you make it socially acceptable, you create the social norms, you add the advertising, the emotional gloss.
(McCready)
The wisdom of what has happened in the food industry—creating (and deriving massive profits from) foods that are, Kessler says, analogous to addictive drugs—gives us our operative model for consumerism in general, a concept further supported by recent research on compulsive buying disorder linking shopping to other addictive behaviors like gambling that are governed by the reward center and its dopamine release.
(Black)
Kessler’s view of consumerism as addiction further elucidates the central premise of Mad Men: we should think of consumer culture as having rewired the body at the homeostatic level, hooking us on the addictive releases of the reward center (whether eating, shopping, or smoking), rendering us viscerally insensitive—somatically blind, so to speak—to our own well-being and responsive only to those emotional prompts that promise happiness in a package, plenitude through the use of a credit card, which behavior only mires us in ill-being. The cyclical lure of false well-being as a short-term high from consumption that only exacerbates real long-term ill-being would prompt the reconceptualization of Visa’s slogan, for example—“Life takes Visa”—as its inverse: “Visa takes life.”
Blindness: Implosion of the Reward System and Return to Communal Homeostasis
Fernando Meirelles’s
Blindness (2008),
8 adapted from Nobel laureate José Saramago’s eponymous novel (1997 English translation; original
Ensaio sobre a cegueira, 1995), brings the world of
Mad Men—of idealized consumption compensating for underlying ills—to the brink of social apocalypse. The plot is simple: an urban center—filmed in São Paolo, but meant to be any global city—is afflicted with a pandemic of blindness. For a time, the afflicted are quarantined; later, once the pandemic reaches universal proportions, the quarantine no longer has surveillance and the inmates take to the streets only to discover that the social fabric has been decimated by the pandemic. Within this broad narrative frame, the film maintains a smaller focus on a core group that moves from affliction to quarantine to postapocalyptic social existence. The real story lies in the shifting quality of life of this group whose contours are defined by the first man both to lose and to regain his sight, for it is this interpersonal experience of the pandemic that helps us to understand its significance as a somatic metaphor for the journey from ill-being to health in which physiology is a mirror for morality.
The film begins with close-up shots of red and green lights that alternate with blurry images of cars in motion at short range. This visual constriction gives way to medium-length shots that allow us to comprehend that we are seeing a grid of rush-hour traffic obeying stop-and-go traffic-light signals. It is at the corner of one such intersection that we see the first man go blind (Yûsuke Iseya); a volley of car horns and a small throng of onlookers marks the aberration from the normal flow of transit. From here, taking the first blind man as a point of departure, the story follows in a contiguous manner a constellation of characters with whom he comes into proximate contact: a good Samaritan (Don McKellar) who drives him home, his wife (Yoshino Kimura) who finds him there, the ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) in his office and later at home with his wife (Julianne Moore), a woman wearing sunglasses (Alice Braga) whom we have earlier seen consulting with the ophthalmologist turning a trick in a hotel. In quick succession, each of these characters—and those with whom they have come into contact—go blind in the same mysterious way that the first man has lost his sight in his car.
These introductory scenes seem to serve little purpose other than that of presenting the major characters at the juncture of the blindness outbreak. Their settings—the street, domestic interiors (living room, kitchen, study), doctor’s office (waiting room, examination room, office), pharmacy, and hotel—are completely average, and their behavior cleaves to a predictable routine in an urban context. At first glance there is nothing exceptional or noteworthy about this introductory sequence or the portrait of urban life that it presents.
What is significant in this social portrait becomes clear only by way of eventual contrast, as we see the order of normal life disintegrate. It is in this context of an extended exercise in contrast—particularly in the arena of interpersonal dynamics—that the set-up sequence becomes so important. When we revisit this sequence, we appreciate the extent to which low-grade negativity, isolation, and even violence predominate in every interaction, from the public to the private. As the film opens, the sounds of cars screeching to a halt and honking establish the qualitative tenor of urban life; one of the first medium shots shows cars and pedestrians each trying to beat the other out at a light, the cars lurching forward in premature motion before the light changes, but having to jerk to a halt as pedestrians strike out from the pavement in a mad dash to cross before the traffic resumes. This brief shot encapsulates the urban pathos as that of an unempathic and literally breakneck competition over resources—here, of time and public space—in an attempt to assert the self over the other. Self and other coexist in a dynamic of constant and unrelenting antagonism and separation no matter how numerically abundant or intimate the contact.
The quality of interaction in every scene of the introductory sequence builds a composite picture of distance, tension, and conflict as the default way of life. Once the good Samaritan has gotten the blind man home, a remark about the upscale interior is enough to make the blind man instantly and visibly nervous about the presence of his visitor, whom he ushers out abruptly. When the blind man’s wife comes home to find a broken vase on the floor, she complains about the loss and reproaches her husband that she is not his “maid.” Once the couple realize that the good Samaritan has in fact stolen their car, the blind man lashes out in recrimination: “What kind of man steals from a blind man? He should go blind.” At the doctor’s office, the mother (Fabiana Guglielmetti) of a young boy (Mitchell Nye) vents her frustration that the blind man is admitted ahead of her son. The subsequent conversation between the blind man and the ophthalmologist is charged with tension, including the careless expression of doubt by the doctor as to the veracity of his patient’s claim of blindness and the blind man’s angry retort in self-defense. Later, when the woman from the ophthalmologist’s office who has been granted orders to wear her sunglasses except when bathing or sleeping is playfully asked by a flirtatious store cashier (Mpho Koaho) what she is “hiding from,” she coldly replies, “Jerks like you,” causing his face to freeze up with the pain of insult. It has been clear from the woman’s earlier exchange with the ophthalmologist that she desires, more than needs, permission to wear her sunglasses—we don’t know what medical reason motivates their use. Her ensuing disposition of icy distance and hostility—in a store ironically called Harmonia—and the emotional disengagement with which we then see her inform her sex-work client that she will turn her trick with her sunglasses on (“doctor’s orders”) embody the emotional status quo as one of chronic detachment from the other in which only self-interested absorption—in one’s own needs, in one’s own affairs, in one’s own feelings and experiences, in one’s own best interests—is possible.
Yet this self-absorption does not stem from a positive feeling of self-love, but rather from a negative feeling of insecurity that must be mitigated by unbridled narcissism. Indeed, Christopher Lasch’s 1979 diagnosis of narcissism as the central affliction of Western bourgeois capitalism describes the social state of affairs that Blindness depicts as the dominant paradigm: “the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self” (xv). Lasch regards unfettered narcissism as the swan song of this “culture of competitive individualism”; as though to render that prediction of demise in narrative form, Blindness stages social apocalypse in the form of pandemic illness. The body politic is afflicted as though—again—it were a single organism whose ill-being had reached a tipping point toward terminal unsustainability. Both Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism and Blindness diagnose capitalist culture’s moral condition in the language of the feeling soma.
The moral character of the physiological affliction in Blindness comes into view during a conversation between the ophthalmologist and his wife, whom we meet for the first time following her husband’s examination of the first blind man. As the doctor muses aloud about a possible diagnosis of his patient’s inexplicable blindness, it is his wife who proposes the true nature of the pandemic, though the codependent pattern of his condescension and her self-deprecation prevent them both from appreciating the import of her hypothesis:
OPHTHALMOLOGIST: It could be something neurological, like something we call agnosia, which is an inability to recognize familiar objects.
WIFE: Agnosia?
OPHTHALMOLOGIST: That’s right. It’s as if a man sees, I don’t know, a fork; he looks at it and says, “What is this? I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
WIFE: Is that related to agnosticism?
OPHTHALMOLOGIST: In what way?
WIFE: You know, agnosia, agnosticism …
OPHTHALMOLOGIST: Etymologically speaking?
WIFE: Yeah, didn’t you take Latin?
OPHTHALMOLOGIST: It’s actually Greek, dear.
WIFE: Well, I bet it has something to do with ignorance or lack of belief. There’s a lot of judgment in that word. Oh, never mind. Never mind. You want some more wine?
OPHTHALMOLOGIST: No, but are you sure you do?
In an extended excerpt of Lasch’s
Culture of Narcissism reprinted in its May-June 2011 issue, the alternative press
Utne Reader calls narcissism a pandemic—describing Lasch’s text as “so spot-on and even prophetic that it could have been written this year” (“Enough About You”)—in a characterization that resonates strongly with
Blindness’s premise. The ophthalmalogist’s wife gestures toward the understanding of what her husband, once afflicted, will call the “contagious” nature of the blindness as a moral, rather than physiological, contagion. Indeed, all the characters we first meet are afflicted in the same order in which they come into contact. The introductory sequence concludes with a quick montage of newly blind characters that signifies the inevitably universal character of the affliction—as though one collective soma, the entire body politic will fall victim to the blindness. But, contrary to what the ophthalmologist assumes, the spectator is given no cause to surmise that that contact must be physical, because several of the characters in the montage of successive blindness have had only proximate contact; they have been in each other’s presence, but have not touched onscreen. This ambiguity of contagion only further develops the idea of blindness as moral affliction, as an illness derived more from a common way of life than from a physiological transmission—although the fact that the film never resolves the limits between the moral and the physiological creates a conceptual collapse of any difference between the two that is important to note, for, once again, there is no epistemological transcendence of the somatic. The morality of social systems is represented as an emotional-physiological state of health—more precisely, at the outset of
Blindness, a lack thereof.
If the film’s insistence on the normalcy of its depiction of capitalist city life gives its representation of the associated narcissistic malaise a subtle quality at the outset of the story, then that subtlety quickly gives way to hyperbole once the initial cast of characters finds itself confined by the government to a crude quarantine shelter that is “staffed” only by armed guards in sentry boxes outside the building who shoot down anyone attempting to leave. As the afflicted arrive in greater numbers at the quarantine, access to resources becomes contentious. One group—Ward 3—tyrannizes the other inmates under the leadership of a self-proclaimed “king” (Gael García Bernal). This exclusively male ward replicates the logic of the urban city we have seen in the introduction in a perverse magnification that renders the patterns of its ill-being explicit and unmistakable. In the hands of Ward 3, a single gun and the building’s public address system are sufficient to impose a reign of violent coercion over the entire quarantine. The “king” and his henchmen commandeer all the boxed rations that the government delivers to the quarantine and make their distribution contingent upon payment. The exaction of valuables becomes the first method of payment; we see the sacrifice of such prize possessions as wedding rings, crucifix pendant necklaces, and watches in exchange for food. A man blind long before the epidemic (Maury Chaykin) and versed in Braille mathematics keeps a tally of goods and foodstuffs, becoming the accountant of greed. Once the glorified theft of valuables is exhausted, Ward 3 extorts a new form of payment: female prostitution. Desperate to survive, the other wards reluctantly acquiesce. In keeping with the pattern of escalating demands, bartered rape becomes increasingly violent. The inevitable comes to pass: a woman dies while performing this brutal sex work in Ward 3. Once the line of respecting life has been crossed, the ophthalmologist’s wife leads a principled mutiny by stabbing the “king” to death, inciting a chaotic stampede toward the outside only to discover that the sentry posts have been abandoned; the interns are free to go.
All the while that the reign of terror by Ward 3 has intensified capitalist cultural logic—with its contextually nonsensical but unshakable faith in the eternal exchange value of luxury items that are also markers of social status, with its self-arrogated function of hoarding and “selling” resources needed even for the most basic survival, with its disregard for others so radical as to exploit to the points of rape and death—the ophthalmologist’s wife has represented an alternative model of social organization. If in “normal” life she neutralized herself with wine and self-doubt, the outbreak of the epidemic forces her to find her strength. With the sole and brief exception of a black man with an eye patch (Danny Glover) who counsels empathic generosity to the mother frustrated when the first blind man is seen before her son in the ophthalmologist’s waiting room (“Miss, let him go; he’s worse off than we are”), the ophthalmologist’s wife is the only character who demonstrates compassionate affection and care. Whereas other victims have been treated with skepticism and abuse, the doctor’s wife embraces her husband when he discovers he can’t see, comforts him, kisses his eyelids, pretends to be afflicted in order to accompany him into quarantine. For a time, she manages to instill a regimen of equity and respect among the interns. When the rule of Ward 3 takes shape in stark contrast to her paradigm of kindness and reciprocity, it becomes clear that the quarantine is a kind of social crucible in which normal life on the outside is distilled to a contest between its elements of well-being and ill-being, with the latter reified to the point of implosion. Yet the ophthalmologist’s wife does not give up; once having reclaimed freedom, she leads her small group to safety, first procuring food for everyone—in contrast to the hordes who only pillage the remains of grocery stores to satiate their own hunger—and leading them to the safety of her home.
This final extended scene of the film represents the realization of the alternative social order modeled by the ophthalmologist’s wife. First, the rigid compartmentalizations by race and professional hierarchy operative in the normal society of the introductory sequence—and also into the experience of quarantine, where individuals are identified by profession and race—completely disappear. In addition to her husband, the ophthalmologist’s wife shelters the black man with the eye patch, the prostitute, the first blind man and his wife, the son of the woman in the waiting room, and a dog: the classic sociological differences of class, race, and gender are (with the curious exception of homosexuality) fully represented and resolved within this utopic group. As soon as they enter the house, the opthalmologist’s wife offers clean clothes; when the opthalmologist asks if she is talking to him, she clarifies that she is addressing “everyone.” These first words in the house underscore her vision of the group as a collective—as a de facto family—where only the plural way of thinking makes any sense. “I want you to feel at home here, because this is your home now too,” she announces. The entire group sheds its dirty clothes and bathes, with the camera focusing on the mirth of communal cleansing and lingering on the shimmering contours of wet flesh in a symbolic act of rebirth that is joyous. No longer are there sharp words or gestures exchanged as at the outset of the film, but rather gentle words and caresses. The rebirth is followed by what we might consider a “first supper” in which all share equitably the bounty that the ophthalmologist’s wife has managed to secure for them. It is in this context that the first man to lose his sight is also the first to regain it; as he marvels amid the smiles and excited laughter of the others, he exclaims, “I love you guys, you guys are so beautiful!” Overcome with emotion, the ophthalmologist’s wife walks onto her balcony and looks upward. The screen shows a sky of pure white. A shot of the wife’s face registers her fear: perhaps she, too, now has finally succumbed to the epidemic. But a traveling perspective shot of what she sees as she lowers her head immediately counters this fear with the contrary emotion of hope: the white resolves into a colorful city skyline standing tall and proud behind a swath of trees. This final shot of the film contrasts profoundly with the first shots of green and red lights in disorienting close-up. Where those lights were rigidly and mechanically segregated, obeying a logic of isolated compartmentalization and emotional indifference toward others, here, in the final vision of the ophthalmologist’s wife, the cityscape has become reintegrated into a single collective whole, colorful and verdant. Once everyone regains their sight in the reverse sequence of how they lost it, this ending implies, they will not only have recuperated the faculty of vision but also the well-being that comes from the inner vision of mutual empathy—having come to “know,” as the eye-patch man remarks while falling in love with the prostitute en route to final refuge, “that part inside us that has no name.”
The meaning of the film’s extended trope of knowledge and ignorance thus finally comes into view as a function of the relationship to objects of love. If agnosia is the inability to recognize familiar objects, and agnosticism the lack of belief, then the blindness epidemic is the physiological manifestation of a moral condition of narcissistic and ruthlessly acquisitive capitalist culture. This is so, the film’s conclusion shows, because the familiar objects that the capitalist “blind” cannot recognize are their loved ones—others, understood as a broad moral and affective category—and the lack of belief is in the power of love to bind self to other in a bond that is not any less powerful for its namelessness. The sight and faith that are regained on the strength of the collective journey through blindness are firmly rooted in the fact of loving companionship, of antimaterialistic and interconnected togetherness.
9In Blindness, then, the faculty of sight exercised by people in a society visually described as compartmentalized along class-race-gender lines, profoundly unempathic, and frozen in a grid of hierarchical institutions that perpetuate acquisitional greed, is tantamount to blindness. This physiological symptom acts as a somatic manifestation of the fundamental condition of ill-being in a collective soma whose homeostasis is off-kilter, interrupted by the false divides of hierarchy—based on race, class, gender—but also, and most significantly, on the endemic and reified inability to bridge the veritable chasm that isolates self from other. As in Mad Men, the principle of homeostasis has been overpowered by that of the reward system; self-interest, self-absorption, and acquisitiveness have suppressed the balance that comes from moderate consumption and the modest satiation of appetites in a model of sufficiency rather than greed. This ill health represented by the synecdoche of blindness contrasts sharply with the inner capacity for true vision that the inhabitants of this rat-racing modern cityscape develop once they lose their sight in a pandemic of moral overtones. In proposing a remedy for the toxicity of the capitalist lifestyle, Blindness rejects the contemporary iteration of capitalism but embraces its epistemological principle of homeostasis. The inner—and profoundly emotional—vision that the small group of pioneers led by the ophthalmologist’s wife develops as an affective form of knowledge of self and world serves as the basis for the moral cure of learning to live in a loving and collectivist community that works against excess and toward the communal harmony of common needs and shared goods. The paradise-as-commonwealth of this new social order is predicated on the power of love to overcome myopic capitalist vision and to inspire an existential condition of deeper collective insight that guides all component beings in a perfectly equitable relationship governed by empathy and love as the drivers and safeguards of resource allocation by necessity rather than greed.
Portraiture of the Homeostatic Principle: Neoliberalism as Ill-Being (No Country for Old Men), Revolution as Well-Being (Diarios de motocicleta)
This struggle between ill-being and well-being—the critics of neoliberalism denouncing neoliberalism’s noxious effects, neoliberalism countering with the assertion of its salutary effects—revolves around the fundamental conceptual framework of homeostasis. The body’s self-regulating mechanism takes place on the autonomic level and embraces sensory perception, sensation, emotion, and feeling. This autonomic sequence has become the aesthetic—and, indeed, epistemological—language in which to represent social and political meaning, a sequence organized, more precisely, into the cycle of addiction defended by neoliberal symbology as one that gives well-being and life and assailed by its critics as one that yields ill-being and death.
If Mad Men and Blindness represent, respectively, the genesis and apocalypse of capitalist addiction—fundamental ill-being masked by an illusory well-being provided by addictive consumption—then the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) and Walter Salles’s Diarios de motocicleta interrogate in narrative form the homeostatic principle of capital flow. Echoing Mad Men, No Country for Old Men posits a pathological iteration of that flow as one that takes, rather than supports, life. Motorcycle Diaries, on the other hand, resonates with Blindness in that it reasserts the vitality of the homeostatic principle in an economy based on love rather than capital.
No Country for Old Men: “I got here the same way the quarter did”
Made by Joel and Ethan Coen, a team of brothers at the forefront of U.S. auteur and independent filmmaking, No Country for Old Men is among the most highly celebrated of their long list of films, nominated in 2007 for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and for eight Academy Awards, winning four for best film, best director(s), best screenplay adaptation, and best supporting actor for the Spanish cinematic wunderkind Javier Bardem. The film constitutes a slow and painful pathologization of contemporary culture for its addictions to violence and money. In the end, the title suggests, the only futurity in this vicious cycle is death, a death meted out in a flow of ill-being that goes against nature in turning homeostatic logic back on itself.
No Country for Old Men stages the lengthy and fruitless attempt by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) to capture psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) while simultaneously protecting Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) from the killer. Moss has come into Chigurh’s deadly sights when, on a hunting trip in the desert, he makes off with a briefcase full of money that he lifts from the body-strewn scene of an illicit hand-off gone awry; this act of monetary possession makes Moss Chigurh’s target in an unrelenting hunt. It is key to note that Bell and Moss are presented as takers of life alongside Chigurh, in a landscape of total death. The narrative begins with a voice-over recollection by Bell of a young man whom he has sent to the electric chair; we meet the war veteran Moss looking at gazelles through the crosshatching of his rifle. Although the film ostensibly posits Chigurh as the villain in opposition to the civic morality represented by Moss and Bell, the reality is that together they constitute a triumvirate of killers. Father, son, and holy ghost of a common cultural logic: Bell is bent on affording Moss fatherly protection, but his imaginary son inevitably falls prey to the merciless and almost supernaturally omnipresent and omnipotent Chigurh.
Chigurh is relentless, but not unprincipled; even Bell concedes, with a certain tone of respect for his nemesis, that Chigurh operates according to a certain moral code. The terms of this moral code are most explicitly articulated in the conversation that Chigurh sustains with a middle-aged gas station proprietor (Gene Jones), in whom Chirgurh incites a terse retrospective reflection on his life’s path. This scene in a forlorn Texas town is framed by a long camera shot that foregrounds the Texaco sign marking the station, in which the logo is disproportionately large in comparison to the surrounding dusty wasteland, calling attention to the status of gas as a commodity to be bought and sold. Inside the store, Chigurh asks the sunken man behind the cash register how he came to operate the gas station and nearly chokes on a peanut in dismay when he finds out that the attendant has willingly and knowingly married into this life, inheriting his dismal and barren line of work from his wife’s father. In what is a non sequitur for the proprietor, Chigurh then offers him a choice of heads or tails; the latter protests that he “didn’t put nothin’ up [as a bet].” Suddenly possessed of an animated but quiet indignation, Chigurh sternly corrects him: “Yes, you did. You’ve been putting it up your whole life; you just didn’t know it.” The still unwitting gas station owner is saved by the toss; Chigurh tells him to keep his lucky quarter separate from the others, as though the fact of setting money in circulation would cause its luck to sour.
The meaning of this scene becomes clear in a second discussion of a coin toss later in the film, this time between Chigurh and Moss’s widow Carla Jean (Kate Macdonald). After Moss has met his demise with an inexorability that we now begin to surmise is related to the inevitable and inescapable ill effects of trafficking in money, and after her mother has succumbed to what she calls “the cancer,” Chigurh comes for Carla Jean. When Chirgurh offers to attenuate the certainty of her death by substituting the coin as arbiter of her fate, she plaintively asks him to act autonomously from the luck of the toss—to separate his morality from that of chance: “The coin don’t have no say; it’s just you,” she asserts. Chigurh responds, with a roll of his eyes at once exasperated and mournful, “I got here the same way the coin did.” Carla Jean assumes that Chigurh possesses an autonomy independent of the quarter; she presumes, in a word, his possession of a free will that he deliberately elects—and immorally so—not to exercise. But what Chigurh attempts to convey in this otherwise nonsensical statement—“I got here the same way the coin did”—is that he has no freedom apart from the quarter, and, consequently, no logic he can obey other than that which it dictates: the certainty of homicide attenuated only by the chance of dumb luck.
At no time does No Country for Old Men explicitly define what Chigurh means when he unequivocally affirms that the gas station proprietor—as a capitalist everyman—has been “betting [his] whole life” or that he himself “got here the same way the quarter did”; these concepts hover in abstraction. The epigraph of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005 [1999]), taken from French essayist Charles Péguy’s L’Argent (Money, 1912), resonates uncannily with the theme of chance and life-long betting so central to No Country for Old Men:
We have known, we have had contact with a world (as children we partook of it), where a man condemned to poverty was at least secure in poverty. It was a kind of unspoken contract between man and fate, and before the onset of modern times fate had never reneged on this contract. It was understood that those who indulged in extravagance, in caprice, those who gambled, those who wished to escape poverty, risked everything. Since they gambled, they could lose. But those who did not gamble could not lose. They could not have suspected that a time would come, that it was already here—and this, precisely, is modern times—when those who do not gamble lose all the time, even more assuredly than those who do.
(xxx)
Like Ulrich Beck, who calls modernity a “risk society,” Boltanski and Chiapello signal from the very outset of their tome on contemporary capitalism, with this single quotation, that gambling—risk taking, betting, riding on chance—may be understood as the single most emblematic characteristic of capitalist culture. For his part, Beck calls “chance and danger” the “two faces of risk” in a culture that depends upon decision making—not coincidentally the reason for being of a new interdisciplinary field of investigation called neuroeconomics—“decisions which play off positive and negative aspects against one another, which connect progress and decline and which, like all things human, are bearers of error, ignorance, hubris, the promise of control and, ultimately, even the seed of possible self-destruction” (
World at Risk, 4).
In the figure of Chigurh, No Country for Old Men creates a cinematic poetics of capitalist gambling, understanding risk society only in the negative register, taking the “seed of possible self-destruction” to its full-blown aspect of a self-destruction that is assured and imminent as an existential state of capitalist affairs. In this sense we might consider Chigurh the perverse holy spirit of capitalist risk culture in which the foundational practice of risk taking is distilled to its starkest terms as a wager between life and death. This wager, furthermore, is predicated upon the pursuit of money—inscribed within money in its material aspect, we might even interpret the film as suggesting, since the path of the quarter is the path of chance, chance being understood no longer in its old valence of disinterested luck, but now in its new valence of dangerous—almost invariably fatal—risk. No Country for Old Men anthropomorphizes the cultural pathos of risk culture in the form of Chigurh, thus creating a villain for the age of global capitalism who embodies chance as a wager against death, a wager expressed as a function of the lethal transit of capital.
More of a grim reaper than a holy spirit, Chigurh’s morality consists of bringing his victims—all participants in risk culture—face-to-face with the ultimate consequences of their lifestyle of get-rich-quick schemes and Walmart consumerism: all die or are marked for death. Chigurh, meanwhile, is the only real survivor. He is also the only character able to therapeutically regenerate himself—we see Chigurh perform a minor surgery on himself at one point after elaborately robbing a drug store for supplies with sophistication and knowledge, whereas an injured Moss must pay for a doctor’s services. Chigurh is indestructible. At the end of the film, we see Chigurh walk away from what should have been a fatal car crash; the driver of the other car expires on impact. “The crime you see now, it’s hard to take its measure,” says Bell in voice-over as Chigurh first comes into view in the opening scene of the film; Chigurh represents the measureless, the infinite. And yet it is not, as Bell would hope, an aberration that Chigurh represents, but rather the central and reigning logic of capitalist culture.
Chigurh’s weapon of choice is an air gun used to kill cattle, as Bell describes to Carla Jean in a seemingly disconnected musing about how vulnerable her husband Llewelyn is to Chigurh. The point is that Llewelyn is hunted down like an animal by Chigurh, but we should also take away the idea that the air gun is a metaphor for capitalist culture, whose operational logic has become one of murder by means of the very elements that should give life. Air does not give life; it kills.
10 As Chigurh limps away from the scene of the car crash, he bribes two young boys into silence about his whereabouts—“you didn’t see me,” he instructs them as he hands one of them a hundred-dollar bill. Immediately, the boys, who just before have offered to help the wounded Chigurh out of altruistic compassion, now lean down toward the bill—seeing only the bill and nothing else; having eyes, so to speak, only for the money—and literally don’t see Chigurh exit the frame. The youngest generation is thus ushered into the logic of capitalist risk culture: they have earned easy money on the gamble that it is better to accept the grim reaper’s terms than to follow their moral compass—in fact, the hundred-dollar bill substitutes itself instantly for that moral compass. The boys’ initiation into the logic of capitalism demonstrates that there is no longer any choice; there is only chance: chance that they will stay alive even though they have given themselves over to the permanent risk of death for the sake of accumulating wealth. The hundred-dollar bill that Chigurh gives the boys comes from the case stolen by Llewelyn and recuperated by Chigurh, as though it were simply returned to the hands of its rightful owner: death. Indeed, Chigurh earlier asserts that he knows “to a certainty” where the satchel of stolen money “[is] going to be”: “It will be brought to me and placed at my feet,” he says, claiming perfect omniscience in matters of money. Chigurh is the spirit of money—the perverse holy spirit of the trinity formed with Bell as god the lawman and Moss as the sacrificial son martyred by his innocent faith in the virtue of chasing the dollar in his own failed pursuit of happiness.
Bell calls Chigurh a “phantom,” and, in fact, he is literally represented as such in a sequence at the film’s conceptual climax that exploits cinematographic discontinuity to metaphoric effect when the expectation of Chigurh’s presence is followed by his inexplicable absence. After Moss is killed by the drug runners whose money he has stolen—in a death sentence dictated by Chigurh though executed by others—Bell returns to the scene of the crime to confront his nemesis, whose presence he expects with certainty. As Bell crosses the police tape to approach the motel room door, we see that it has in fact been blown out, as predicted, by Chigurh’s signature air gun blast. Indeed, the camera cuts to a shot of Chigurh pressed up against the wall behind the door holding his air gun; we see two perspective shots of the empty lock cylinder in which we can make out distorted wavering reflections, one from inside the motel room (as though Chigurh were looking at Bell in the reflective metal) and one from outside (as though Bell were looking at Chigurh), but when Bell finally throws open the door, it hits an incontrovertibly bare wall. As Bell registers the room, there is evidence that Chigurh has entered and taken the money from its hiding place; however, contrary to our expectations, there is no Chigurh. A shot of the closed and locked bathroom window—which at first glance might seem gratuitous—along with the other shots of Bell registering the room, confirms the impossibility that Chigurh might have found a quick escape route before Bell threw open the door. Where there should be two men, there is only a double shadow of Bell against the wall.
Chigurh is Bell’s conflicted internal twin, his force of ugly anagnorisis: Bell not only recognizes in Chigurh something that he calls a moral code; he seems to understand and even to admire Chigurh’s morality. The spectator is given the opportunity to comprehend this moral affinity, for example, in the fact that Bell is repulsed by a news report of the base avarice and cruelty of a couple who tortures and kills the elderly to collect their social security checks, in the same way that Chigurh is disgusted by the wheedling attempts of bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) to bribe his way out of death (“You should admit your situation; there would be more dignity in it”). Bell seems to understand that Chigurh is a pure and unadulterated force of moral justice over whose path he is absolutely powerless: Chigurh brings the world to summary trial and execution for its participation in the capitalist culture of constantly risking death; Bell is part of that world. Bell is, by his own admission, “overwhelmed” by what he perceives to be a new kind of crime in which ordinary people—kids—are driven to kill with pleasure and no remorse. Speaking of a young man he sent to the electric chair, Bell says in the voice-over that opens the film and defines its central theme of death: “He killed a fourteen-year-old girl. Paper said it was a crime of passion, but he told me there wasn’t any passion to it. Told me he’d been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember; said if they turned him out, he’d do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. Be there in about fifteen minutes. I don’t know what to make of that.” And yet Bell’s final lesson is also the impromptu family history delivered by his reclusive brother—who has rejected the human world for a family of felines—that the criminal order Bell faces is no different than what his predecessors faced and that to live by the sword is to die by the sword. In this sense, Bell is complicit in the same violence he seeks to quell, part of the same homicidal logic that drives capitalism.
What is so disturbing about Chigurh is that he destabilizes all complacency and myths of sovereign moral exception that Bell might cherish: anyone complicit in the logic of capitalist homicide—epitomized by money, which is always already blood money, the film suggests—must face the consequences of their own choices, which are always gambles. There are no decisions that do not involve wagers; everyone participates in immoral risk culture. Even Bell goes out on a limb of uncertain chance in falsely, at it turns out, claiming to be able to protect Llewelyn from Chigurh. Llewelyn may be likable, but he is not innocent, and it is the knowledge of the unsparing and unforgiving nature of Chigurh’s mortal judgment that gets under Bell’s skin and leaves him nervous and unsettled. Though Bell retires from duty after Llewelyn’s murder, his final dream connotes riding to his death in a repetition of family—and, more broadly, capitalist—history. There is no innocence, only luck—the only way out from neoliberal immanence is on its own terms of risk. The flip of the coin, Chigurh urges Carla Jean to understand, “is the best [he] can do” to mitigate her hour of reckoning. Chigurh is the pathos of risk culture, the psychic internalization of its spirit of death that underwrites all possibility of prosperity and plenitude. Set in 1980, just before the onset of the Reagan years, and released in 2007, just before global economic recession, No Country for Old Men leaves us with the image of Chigurh limping off toward the horizon of imminent full-blown neoliberalism to collect gambling souls in abundance: he is the unyielding grim reaper of neoliberalism, a pure social mirror that reflects the capitalist social order as a constant wager with death, an implacable killing field.
Like capital is its purist theorizations, Chigurh is unsusceptible to borders and boundaries of any kind. As though possessed of divine powers, he seems to have unfettered access to any point in the collective soma he traverses. Chigurh assumes metaphysical dimensions of impossible ubiquity and circulation within the bounds of the social—he is anywhere and everywhere, in endless flux, never fixed or static, never ruled by the laws of inertia, but rather in constant movement throughout the social order that holds the characters together as though he were the perverse embodiment of homeostatic capital flow within it. Chigurh’s is the logic of the luck-riddled quarter, whose path he travels to collect the souls condemned to death by its transit, as though tracing the path of a love for—or at least an addiction to—money that always proves fatal because its pursuit can never be more than an act of hubris, setting in motion a wager against death that can never be won except by dumb luck.
Diarios de motocicleta: An Economy of Love for the Open Veins of Latin America
Diarios de motocicleta (
The Motorcycle Diaries), directed by Walter Salles, preeminent in Brazilian cinema and nominated for dozens of awards the world over, counters the fatalistic resignation of
No Country for Old Men with the rejuvenation of revolution. Whereas
No Country for Old Men presents a social portrait of ineluctable addiction to the deadly logic of capital flow,
Diarios de motocicleta methodically dismantles the supports of this portrait, and, like
Blindness, posits another in its place. If
Mad Men travels back in time to identify the origins of contemporary cultural ills, then
Diarios de motocicleta revisits the same time period in order to recuperate a model for their correction—a correction that is framed, significantly, as healing.
11
The agent of this cultural therapy is none other than the young Argentine medical student and future revolutionary icon Ernesto Guevara (Gael García Bernal). Adapting Guevara’s travelogue to the screen, Diarios de motocicleta recreates the well-known journey that he and his friend Alberto Granado made across continental Latin America in the early 1950s, during which Guevara’s political conscience was progressively awakened. Like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Diarios de motocicleta retells the story of a towering cultural icon, arguably the greatest in twentieth-century Latin America, who since his death has even become popularly canonized as “San Ernesto de la Higuera” in the Bolivian region of his execution. What is significant about this particular Che story is its emphasis on a personal journey from sickness to health as a narrative through line that we might say runs parallel to the story of his political awakening, but even more accurate would be to say that the film represents this movement from sickness to health as what underwrites his political awakening—what makes his revolutionary metamorphosis possible. In other words, politics are physiological disposition. Strongly echoing Gibson’s treatment of Christ, Guevara’s story under Salles’s direction becomes a function of the feeling soma.
The very first shot of the film is a close-up of Ernesto’s inhaler as he packs his bags for the famously transformative trip. During the establishing sequences, we see him using his inhaler while playing rugby, a sport inherited from British neocolonialism that signals Ernesto’s well-to-do social status. Even in the blush of health, the film suggests, Ernesto is fundamentally unwell. As he leaves for his journey, his mother (Mercedes Morán) wraps a scarf around his neck with an anxious brow and tells him that as long as he uses his inhaler he will be fine. The film’s chronicling of Ernesto’s metamorphosis into the revolutionary Che will, in fact, adopt the same definitional axis of Ernesto as an asthmatic, and, as though his asthma were a marker of his bourgeois background, he will fight to overcome his asthma in the same measure that he struggles to reject bourgeois culture. Every time Ernesto confronts a major juncture in the development of his social conscience and principles, the film makes the challenge somatically manifest in relation to his asthmatic condition.
Ernesto thus begins his journey as a subject of illusory well-being who is really sick inside—in an echo of the blindness pandemic, his asthma represents the social sickness of privilege that is blind to the suffering of others. The bourgeoisie is ill, rotting from the inside out (a concept affirmed in floridly gothic style for the global age by Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga), though it clings hard and fast to the ultimately false appearance of well-being. This is also a cycle of dependency: Ernesto is addicted to the crutch of the inhaler just as he is emotionally addicted to his bourgeois lifestyle, most patently in the form of his ultrarich girlfriend Chichina (Mía Maestro), who entrusts him with what becomes, for the two travelers, a small fortune of fifteen dollars for the indulgence of buying her a bathing suit once he reaches the United States.
Ernesto’s first challenge comes when he and his companion Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna) seek food and shelter from a provincial couple of means living comfortably in the countryside. The man of the house (Fernando Llosa) assents to host the pair for the night and, when he finds out they are medical students, asks that they examine a large protrusion on his neck. Ever the opportunist, Alberto says with a smile and a shrug that it is nothing but a harmless cyst; Ernesto more soberly tells his would-be host that it is most definitely a tumor and that he ought to seek proper medical treatment immediately. Stunned with disbelief and fear, the man angrily turns the pair away: he is the film’s maximum example of the sick bourgeoisie that refuses to acknowledge its own cancerous condition. Grumpy and ill-humored, Alberto chides Ernesto for having cost them their food and shelter. Self-possessed and unwavering in his convictions, Ernesto replies, in his first exposition of principle, that every person has the right to know the truth in order to have the best foundation for action. Alberto rewards Ernesto for this first step toward political consciousness with the task of procuring their dinner; Ernesto must brave the cold waters of a pond to retrieve a fallen duck. In the next sequence, Ernesto suffers his first onscreen asthma attack. The contiguity of the scenes suggests a relationship between the development of his conscience and the relative strength of his body: the categorical privileging of truth over comforts is his first moral test; the ensuing asthma attack demonstrates that his body is not yet strong enough to shoulder the consequences of his emergent value system.
In spite of this serious episode, and in spite of the letter that Ernesto receives from Chichina ending their relationship, the companions continue on to enjoy a light-hearted and even mischievous trip until they cross paths with an indigenous couple (Brandon Cruz and Vilma M. Verdejo) in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile whose dependence on travel for work and survival—the man is an itinerant miner—sets into sharp relief, particularly for Ernesto, the luxury of travel for the sake of travel. Both he and Alberto are clearly chastened by the contrast between the couple’s dire necessity and their own comparative frivolity. As they sit talking late into the night around a fire about the difficulties of finding work, the loss of a home, and political persecution, the change that this self-proclaimed Communist couple works in Ernesto is written in the empathic gravitas of his face. But it will not be until later on in the film—significantly, on the heels of his second and even more extreme asthma attack—that we learn that Ernesto has secretly given Chichina’s fifteen dollars to this couple. In reallocating these resources, Ernesto accomplishes the realignment of his affections from the bourgeois elite to the masses of Latin America; the currency of bourgeois capital is, in the process, redefined as a currency of affective solidarity. This symbolic redistribution of wealth inaugurates an economy of love as the currency of revolution.
The desert encounter with the mining couple has been made possible by the final demise of “La Poderosa” (The Powerful One), Alberto’s motorcycle, which, like the tumor-addled provincial landowner and possibly the asthmatic Ernesto himself, turns out to suffer from a debilitating—and finally terminal—illness. The loss of this vehicle has forced the travelers to move through the body of Latin America on foot, abandoning the remove of bourgeois status and entering into an intimacy of unrestrainedly democratic encounter that has led them to the couple that changes Ernesto’s heart.
This friendship leads Ernesto to witness the couple’s exploitation—and the exploitation of a continent—at the hand of a foreign-owned mining company (Anaconda Mining Company) whose abusive Latin American overseer refuses to give the miners water, much less fair pay. Ernesto hurls a rock at the side of the truck as it pulls away with its selection of dayworkers, including his newfound friend; Ernesto’s gesture seems small and purely symbolic in contrast to the metal casing of the truck, which represents the long reach and nearly invincible grip of foreign companies—echoing Glauber Rocha’s Explint (Company of International Exploitation)—on the Latin American people and resources. At Machu Picchu, when Alberto gives voice to hedonistic fantasies of realizing political change by marrying into Inca nobility and spearheading a pacific revival of the Tupac Amaru revolutions of centuries before, Ernesto bluntly and laconically replies that a revolution sin tiros (“without gunshots”) will have no effect. These few words constitute Ernesto’s sole explicit meditation on the theme of revolution, but they indicate that the experience with the mining couple has irrevocably altered his political outlook. Within the film’s economy of meaning, however, Ernesto must ready his body for revolution before he is able to shoulder the truths that his heart and mind are learning; it is thus that we must see Ernesto undergo hand-to-hand combat with his own internal ill-being and emerge victorious before he can openly reveal himself to have become the righteous lover of all of Latin America.
At this juncture, the film enters into its only explicitly pedagogical cycle: a sojourn at the house of liberal Peruvian doctor Hugo Pesce (Gustavo Bueno), who exposes Ernesto to José Carlos Mariátegui’s
Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 1928). Mariátegui was the founder of the Peruvian Communist Party and argues in his
Siete ensayos that the indigenous way of life is fundamentally Communist and should be looked to as a model for a more just society. In keeping with the minimalist treatment of political metadiscourse—its rendering instead in affective terms—none of this background information is explicitly communicated in the film. The way that the spectator sees this important text take shape in Ernesto’s consciousness is simply through a series of living stills that seem to interpellate him. That is, we see Ernesto absorbed in his reading, and as he turns the pages the onscreen image cuts from one full-body tableau vivant to the next with a powerful percussive beat, each frame featuring an indigenous figure gazing steadfastly at the camera—at Ernesto, we understand, calling him to social conscience through the simple act of eye-to-eye recognition.
12Armed with his two guiding principles of speaking only the truth and helping others, Ernesto arrives with Alberto at the Peruvian San Pablo Leper Colony, a visit the film figures as the apotheosis of Ernesto’s revolutionary tutelage and transformation—the narrative climax in which Ernesto will finally embody his nascent political principles. From the outset, Ernesto refuses to be an accomplice to any of the supports of the hierarchical division between the lepers, on one side of the Amazon River, and the doctors and nuns who live on the other. First, he refuses the “purely symbolic” gloves that are required of the doctors by the nuns. Observing that leprosy under treatment is not communicable through skin-to-skin contact, Ernesto breaks with this institutionally imposed hierarchy of division, instead extending his hand in greeting to the first leper he meets on the “other” bank, a patient who can scarcely contain his surprise.
Although Ernesto and Alberto give the lepers medical attention, the bulk of the screen time in San Pablo is spent showing how their most significant “medicine” is the fortification of community and vitality: they build houses alongside the lepers, organize soccer matches fully integrated between the lepers and the medical staff, and break bread at the same tables. When Ernesto and Alberto refuse to attend mass, and therefore forfeit their right to be served food according to the nuns’ dictates, the affectionate solidarity they have inspired in their patients leads the lepers to defy institutional repression by secretly preparing and serving two plates of food to their new friends, thus committing their first act of principled—protorevolutionary—insubordination. In a sequence that recalls the “first supper” of Blindness, this nutritional seed of revolution is figured as an act of affective communal care.
As the young students’ stay comes to a close, a final celebration is organized on the “high” side of the river on the occasion of Ernesto’s birthday. It is here that Ernesto delivers his only political sermon of the entire film in the form of a terse toast to his friends and to the mestizo Latin America that he has realized they all, together, form:
Creemos—y después de este viaje más firmemente que antes—que la división de América en nacionalidades inciertas e ilusorias es completamente ficticia. Constituimos una sola raza mestiza desde México hasta el Estrecho de Magallanes. Así que tratando de librarme de cualquier carga de provincialismo, ¡brindo por Perú y por América unida!
[We believe—and this journey has only confirmed this belief—that the division of America into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction. We are one single mestizo race from Mexico to the Magellan Straits. And so, in an attempt to free ourselves from narrow-minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a united America!]
Leaving the doctors and nuns, Ernesto wanders down—in symbolic descent—to the river’s edge in search of a way to cross in order to continue the celebration of his birthday on the other side, with the lepers. It is nighttime and he can’t find the rowboat, so Ernesto launches into the water, swimming with strong and determined strokes. This, we understand, is the somatic equivalent, and, in fact, the very foundation, of the words he has just uttered. This attempt to cross the river on the strength of his bare life puts the exorcism of his bourgeois ill-being to the ultimate challenge in favor of a classless well-being.
As he swims, Alberto and the doctors and nuns cry out to him from their bank of institutional privilege that he is crazy, that he will kill himself, that he can’t make it, to come back. Simultaneously, the lepers begin to gather on the other side of the bank and encourage him from the very seat of abjection with great smiles and cheers of encouragement—he can do it, they shout. This is the coming alive of the interpellative stills we have seen—the tableaux vivants that have gazed on him in wordless expectancy. The lepers represent the vital awakening of the downtrodden that Ernesto is meant to help. We realize that the truly ill are the doctors and nuns who live in their unhealthy and static world of vertical institutional normativity, like the other bourgeois symbols of profound ill-being under the illusion of well-being we have seen in the film (and recalling Don Draper’s dirty undershirt beneath the whitewashing appearance of the brand new button-down), whereas the putatively ill are, in truth, emotionally and spiritually robust, full of hope and faith in this miraculous feat of self-renewal that represents the potential of revolution to heal an entire continent. The lepers’ illness is the scourge the bourgeois world has assigned them, within which it confines them as an abject support for the comparative power and authority and ostensible well-being of the bourgeois order itself—in other words, leprosy is figured as nothing more or less than a bourgeois narrative. This dangerous and physically grueling swim should have occasioned a third—and, perhaps, fatal—asthma attack, yet it does not take place. This time Ernesto’s body does not give out. As he uses this new strength to cross the river, Ernesto simultaneously crosses into well-being and revolution—not only for himself, but for the entire colony as a microcosm of Latin America.
13 In the act of purging himself definitively of the limiting and debilitating stranglehold of his asthma, Ernesto liberates the entire community—high and low—from this cycle of foundational ill-being. It should be emphasized that Guevara’s journals and biography show that he suffered from asthma to the end of his life. The contrast of this biographical fact with his filmic “cure” only underscores the intensely politicized symbolism ascribed to the well-being associated with the well body.
In the sequence that immediately follows Ernesto’s triumphant arrival on the lepers’ bank, the entire colony bids him and Alberto farewell. This scene affirms in its visual composition the revolutionary principles that Ernesto has spelled out with his symbolic swim: the nuns, doctors, and lepers stand together in admixture on the “low” bank, all waving goodbye to the pair of travelers in an unrestrained display of love and enthusiasm—even touching his clothing as though he were a Christ figure. This shot serves as the synthesis of Ernesto’s emergent revolutionary activities: adhering to his moral principles, which have coalesced in his vision of a single mestizo Latin America free from division, he has bridged the social divide, eliminating hierarchies predicated on ill-being and establishing an egalitarian community held together by mutual respect and affection in place of the petrifying and asymmetrical rules of old. The integrity of Ernesto’s body affirms his definitive shedding of bourgeois ill-being and the capacity to embody, finally, his new ideal of unified continental well-being.
In the closing scene of the film, Ernesto reflects—again, in terse simplicity—on all that he has seen: “Tanta injusticia” (“Such injustice”), he remarks to Alberto, with a brow furrowed in the pain of empathy that speaks volumes more than his words, before boarding a plane home to assimilate what he has experienced. The film thus brings us to the very edge of Ernesto’s transition into Che, the last moments of Ernesto as Ernesto before he becomes the guerrillero that history remembers. The tagline of the film urges, “Let the world change you, and you can change the world”; this return to the revolutionary before he is a revolutionary exhorts the spectator to return to the time before the armed struggle in which he participated in Cuba, Angola, and Bolivia. Yet his is a story of struggle that history has since condemned to failure: the Bolivian military captured and executed Guevara with the clandestine training and assistance of the United States government, Africa has fallen into cycle after cycle of genocidal civil war, Cuba has slowly shriveled up into a shell of its former revolutionary self under four decades of economic embargo and extreme material privation, and Bolivia remains the poorest and most malnourished country in all of Latin America. Yet Salles’s presentation of Che as Ernesto encourages us to wipe clean the otherwise fated slate of history, to begin anew, to take his transformational journey as a starting point for the initiation of a new revolutionary campaign for the global age. Salles brings us to the edge of this transformation and stops short: we are invited to fill in the blank page of revolution that he leaves pending as an off-screen promise. The representation of Ernesto’s metamorphic travels in the era of full-blown global neoliberalism invites the revival of a revolutionary antidote for the ill-being of the twenty-first century.
In Salles’s rendition the budding Che is not a fighter, but a healer. He does not take life; he gives life. The revolutionary for the global age is not a violent fighter, but a healer and a lover, a figure who makes the world better with the body rather than with a gun. This is not simply a return to the likes of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “love-in” hotel room protests, for current cultural production emphasizes a full physiological engagement with the politics of love—with politics of all stripes—in an epistemic terrain that, in the intervening era of increasingly hegemonic capitalism, has borne the articulation of social interventions steadily toward an extreme of somatic expression. In Diarios de motocicleta the contestation of that capitalist hegemony of alleged ill-being is figured in the same conceptual terminology as a struggle to achieve well-being through a process of healing. As in Blindness, there is little distinction between the curative healing of self and other—the process of healing categorically breaks down those very divisions as mechanisms of unhealthy separation associated with capitalist hierarchy. Social health becomes the extension of individual health as Ernesto’s self-healing positions itself as the first in an outward wave of propagations that will extend that therapy of the self outward to all of society as though in an organic ripple effect.
Moreover, this internal healing and movement toward well-being finds its outward analogue in Ernesto’s movement through the “soma” of continental Latin America. Significantly, this is not a portrait of the elitist revolutionary “vanguard” that Guevara himself posited in his writings, but rather that of a revolutionary in no way at a vertical remove from the people. In
Diarios de motocicleta the future Che emerges as one with the people in a horizontal model of revolution that resonates with the homeostatic principle of democracy and free-market capitalism—of the people and by the people. Ernesto circulates through the soma, meeting an eclectic diversity of nonprofessional actors who are meant to represent Latin America as a
mestizo amalgam, achieving a ubiquity and omnipresence that recalls
No Country for Old Men’s Chigurh, for whom we might think of Ernesto as an antidote. Whereas Chigurh travels through the moribund body politic as a grim reaper of capitalism, Ernesto restores that body to vitality as an anticapitalist agent of revolutionary solidarity. Ernesto’s journey through the open veins of Latin America establishes an economy based on love rather than capital in which interconnectedness derives from affective rather than exploitative bonds and resources obey the flow of horizontal solidarity instead of vertical profit.
Although Ernesto and Chigurh are narrative antidotes, they are nevertheless built on the same underlying conceptual model: both are figured as a kind of “blood” or vital energy that travels as though by superconduction through the body politic as a collective feeling organism—Ernesto giving life in love, Chigurh taking life in sorrowful resignation.
Homeostatic Subjectivity
A simple and recurrent pattern emerges across continents, across media: cultural subjectivity—the cultural body politic—is figured as a feeling soma, and the political agency of that feeling soma is figured in terms of its health as a struggle between ill-being and well-being. This struggle represents the contest between competing cultural models—a contest rooted principally in their relationship to material resources—and the balance between ill-being and well-being signals the status of that contest on the spectrum between the respective poles of failure and success.
The cultural narrative considered here ranges from the critical identification of the pattern of capitalist ill-being (
Mad Men,
No Country for Old Men) to its dissident—or even revolutionary—contestation (
Blindness,
Diarios de motocicleta).
14 In the narrative critical of U.S.-driven capitalist culture from within the United States, that culture is epitomized by consumption, which is represented as a loop of addiction—or, alternately, narcissism—in which a fundamental state of ill-being is only aggravated by the effects of ever increasing dependence on consumption as a drug that provides a well-being as illusory as it is fleeting, activating the reward center to override the body’s natural equilibrium and causing the body to consume more in pursuit of a temporary surge that feels like wellness but only leaves an aftermath of toxicity. In the narrative contestatory of U.S.-driven capitalist culture originating within Latin America, that culture is represented as an asymmetrical and unjust—neocolonial—force of exploitation in which the exploitative asymmetry creates a somatic imbalance in the cultural subject where ill-being predominates over well-being; the dissident cultural subject rejects that ill-being on the level of the feeling soma and strives toward well-being with the health of the individual being represented as the health of the whole, as though there were a perfectly interconnected communicativity between the individual and the collective soma.
Underlying every representational iteration of the health of the feeling soma is the same basic principle of affective homeostasis—that is, an automatic self-regulation of the organism toward the maximization of well-being, with the results of that self-regulation being visible in the net balance of emotion. The affirmation of happiness constitutes a status quo; the accusation of unhappiness requires remediation. This homeostatic principle is epistemologically hegemonic, serving as the blueprint for how we assess—whether affirmatively or critically, whether elegizing or disavowing—our range of possible social structures and as the basis of the imaginary from which we derive the parameters of our possible social intervention.