The Girl From Monday, this Saturday night's relaxing evening at home, suffers from a crushing literalism, from knowing too exactly what the problem is, from thinking that it can enlighten, from thinking about the world in terms of morality.
(Yes, Kat, it's sinking in...)
Just so nobody else has to see it:
A huge advertising company takes over the world (advertising revolution?) by making sex a transaction that increases personal value, or buying power. Rogues without barcodes on their wrists, who have no credit rating, who don't have enough sex or worse, who have sex without registering with a credit machine to increase personal value, are going to get carted away to teach high school, a dead zone in which students all check their guns and are given enormous quantities of ritilin just past the metal detector.
The protagonist, the guy who stars in *every* Hal Hartley movie, is from a far-off star but became human and cannot walk out into the sea and dematerialize on his star with all his star-pals, with whom he is One. Instead, he works at the Evil Ad Agency, where he is the one who came up with the whole sex=value idea. This provides excellent cover for both his tortured despondency (what a downer, what an enemy of the consumer) and his counterrevolutionary activities (which seem mostly to consist of teenagers having sex for pleasure and interrupting broadcasts).
A girl who looks like a model steps out of the ocean just as Tortured Protagonist is about to kill himself and of course she is from his old star and is out to find him. She knows nothing of having a body, and seems to function as comic relief. She pees! She has sex! She drinks vodka! It makes her drunk!
There is no big climax. Rather, a bunch of people get in big trouble and are shot or have to teach high school or get sent to the moon, TP agonizes, and drives Star Girl to Montauk to drop her back in the ocean, and hopes she makes it back to her star.
The message is clear. We are fucked--not even being from a faraway star will help anybody. And I cannot help marveling at how *unhelpful* this straightforward assesment is. Okay, Mr. Filmmaker, we are living in an ugly world. Bad things are happening. High school is awful. Are you just being timid, or has art become no more than a straightforward cataloguing project?
I'm not saying that art has to be rosy, or beautiful, or point to a solution or even *be useful* at all. But wouldn't the world be a better place if art did something aside from literal listing exercises? Breakfast of Champions and Catch-22 dealt with exactly these issues--the world is evil in these books, and the evil is intractable, and the reason these novels resonated was because they were imaginings of how bad it could get. They are dynamic inventions, full of hyperbole.
The effect is one of generosity. By taking WWII to an utterly absurd extreme, Heller provided an opportunity to look at war and power in a new way--he reimagined. Milo Minderbender works as a device because he could not actually exist. Comparatively, TGFM is weak satire, and I don't think this is because Hartley lacks imagination. Rather, his goals seem to be literal. He is content to point to the evil for us, but what good does that do? Does it help us to see it better? To imagine a world without it? To laugh and understand that at least it's not as bad as all that? Does it give strength to point to the (admittedly strange) reality? Does it empower?
What's the point of all this? As reality gets stranger, do artists need to work harder to wrestle it? Are art and reality changing places?
