Post-Crisis European Cinema

White Men in Off-Modern Landscapes

György Kalmár

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030450342
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030450359
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book explores the cinematic representations of the pervasive socio-cultural change that the 21st century brought to Europe and the world. Discussing films such as I, Daniel Blake, Cold War and Jupiter's Moon, it puts distinctively "post-crisis", gendered representations in a complex, theoretically informed and socially committed interdisciplinary perspective that maps the newly emerging formations of masculinity at a time of rapid socio-economic transition. Kalmar argues that the series of crises that started with the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed some of our fundamental expectations about history, debunked many of our grand narratives, and thus changed the cultural logic of our (thoroughly globalized) civilization. The book focuses on the ways cinema reflects, interprets and shapes a rapidly changing world: the hot issues of the times, the new formations of identity, and the shifts in cinematic representation. This is an interdisciplinary research that isequally interested in what new the 21st century brought about, most specifically to Europe and to its white men, as in film and its responses to these socio-cultural changes.

© The Author(s) 2020

G. KalmárPost-Crisis European Cinemahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45035-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Post-Crisis Europe, White Masculinity and Art Cinema

György Kalmár¹

(1)

Inst English & American Studies, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary

György Kalmár

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

This book explores the cinematic representations of the pervasive socio-cultural change that the twenty-first century brought to Europe and the world. Its main assumption is that the series of crises that started with the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 changed some of our fundamental expectations about history, debunked some of our grand narratives, and thus changed the cultural logic of our (thoroughly globalised) civilisation. Thus, the book focuses on the ways cinema reflects (and interprets and shapes) a rapidly changing world: the hot new issues of the times, the new formations of identity and the shifts in cinematic representation. The book mostly focuses on films featuring white heterosexual men, mostly because I tend to agree with the statistics suggesting that the recent changes in (typically less privileged) white male communities lie at the heart of the new century’s most dramatic ideological and political changes. The book’s main goal is to put these markedly gendered representations in a complex, theoretically informed and socially committed interdisciplinary perspective that is capable of mapping the newly emerging formations of masculinity at a time of rapid socio-economic transitions reshaping the continent. Thus, this is an interdisciplinary research that combines the perspectives and results provided by such academic fields as sociology, film studies, masculinity studies and white studies. I am equally interested in what new the twenty-first century brought about, most specifically to Europe and to its white men, as in film and the cinematic responses to these socio-cultural changes. The book is also clearly defined by its historicity, that is, by its locatedness at a very specific moment in time: through its discussion of motifs and themes running through the European art cinema of the new millennium, it explores the most burning issues of post-crisis Europe at a time when we are still very much affected by that crisis.

In this chapter I am going to lay out some of the basic socio-cultural conditions, key concepts and academic interests informing this book. This will effectively contextualise the studies of films and social phenomena of the later chapters.

Let us start with time.

The Post-Crisis and the Off-Modern

One does not need to be a social scientist to note that since the beginning of the new millennium the developed societies of the so-called Western World have been going through dramatic changes. These are usually attributed to a set of crises that these societies have recently gone through. The sweet dream of “the end of history” and the victory of global neoliberal capitalism seems to be over. Today it may be painfully awkward to recall to what extent public and academic thinking as well as public policies in the 1990s were defined by Francis Fukuyama’s vision of a united, happy global human community. In his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man (which was an elaboration of an 1989 article), Fukuyama contended that with the fall of the Eastern European communist regimes, “liberal democracy as a system of government … conquered rival ideologies” and therefore it “may constitute the endpoint of humankind’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government” and as such brings about “the end of history” (xi). He claimed that “the twin principles of liberty and equality” are flawless, and thus “the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on” (xi). In The End of History and his few following books, Fukuyama envisioned a future in which stable political formations, thriving liberal democracies, uninterrupted economic and technological progress would lead to a “posthuman future” where most traditional causes of human suffering would be eventually overcome. According to Fukuyama’s vision, liberal democracies are close to the materialisation of a global utopia, in which people live for centuries, artificial intelligence and robots provide for all needs, a self-regulating neoliberal economy runs perfectly, everybody agrees on human rights and core democratic principles, and in the ever more integrated, happy and rich global village there is simply no reason for war anymore.

In defence of Fukuyama, one must note that the 1990s produced several “best years ever” of human history: not only did the Eastern European communist dictatorships collapse, bringing about the end of the cold war and its continuous nuclear threat, but neoliberal capitalism coupled with a postmodern ethos seemed to produce unprecedented material and cultural affluence. Such outstanding works of the decade as Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), Zygmunt Bauman’s Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998) and his Liquid Modernity (1999) or Jean Baudrillard’s writing from the 1980s and 1990s all try to make sense of this rapidly growing and globalising world where the spread of democracy, financial affluence, technological development, dropping violence statistics and growing social justice were almost unquestionable elements of any vision about the future. As the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek once noted, we were all Fukuyamaists for a decade. The end of the twentieth century apparently made (a considerable part of) humankind intoxicated by the fruits and promises of late modernity. It seemed that for the first time in history, we were on the brink of transcending the human condition.

This utopian tone was much in line with the general spirit of modernity. By modernity, I refer to that long historical period which started sometime in the Renaissance, and is characterised by a secular, rational, scientific world-view; a future-oriented, anti-traditionalist approach; the constant seek for the new; the pursuit of worldly happiness and material wealth; individualism; the belief in freedom, human agency and progress; the idea that human beings and human societies can be improved with the help of rationality and science; and the values of Enlightenment humanism. As this brief list may also imply, the utopian idea of transcending the present condition (of our society or humanity in general) is a logical part of the cultural logic of modernity as such. As the industrial revolution, the French revolution or the communist revolutions have shown, modernity has a weak spot for both utopia (that it regards as the natural result of progress) and the revolutions necessary to take us there. Unfortunately, modernity likes to imagine one clear path towards its progressive goal, and it has little patience with those who stand in its way, thus (in spite of its fondness of democracy and egalitarianism) it has a distinctively dogmatic and totalitarian potential (Foucault 1977; Bauman 1989, 2000). As I will argue through several socially contextualised film analyses of this book, this dogmatic aspect of modernity, which has regularly distorted the social implementation of its own core principles, may have to do with its often unacknowledged eschatological underside: that in spite of all the rational, enlightened and pragmatic principles, modernity can still be (and is) practiced as a secular faith-religion.

Today, of course, Fukuyama’s 1990s vision seems as utopian and naïve (and potentially dangerous) as that of Robespierre or Marx. As Fukuyama himself also recounts with unparalleled clarity in his 2018 book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, a whole series of previously unrecognised negative processes came to fruition in the new century, which brought about a dramatic change of the tide. The terrorist attacks of 9/11, the ensuing wars in the Middle East and North Africa, the 2008 economic crisis, the subsequent destabilisation of political life, or the disastrous events of 2016 enlisted in the Preface, have waken us up to the fact that the historical causes of human suffering, which are responsible for all the nightmares of history, cannot be erased by simply feeding people more food, drinks, drugs and internet. To such Eastern European intellectuals as Svetlana Boym (and myself), who experienced the false promises and eventual downfall of the communist version of the “end of history” narrative, the fact that history did not have a sublime end-point (contrary to Hegel, Marx and the early Fukuyama) did not come as much of a surprise. Instead of Fukuyama’s markedly modern notion of a “coherent development of modern societies” to “liberal democracies and technologically driven capitalism” (Fukuyama 2003, xii), Boym recognised the utopian wishful thinking underlying the project of modernity, the inevitable instability of the modern world, as well as the ways the human thrive towards progress is regularly compromised by our longing for (the fantasy of) a home outside (or before) the time of history. A key point that Boym understood is that this phenomenon of longing (and home-sickness and nostalgia) is inextricably intertwined with the very idea of progress: in her view, “the sentiment (of nostalgia) … is at the very core of the modern condition” (2001, xvi), and “nostalgic manifestations are side-effects of the teleology of progress” (10).

Reading Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001) alongside with Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future (2003) in the early years of the new century, one could have the impression that in spite of all the well-informed, data-based intellectual power of Fukuyama’s predictions, as well as the intoxicating possibility of a super-human future, Boym’s analysis of human beings’ relation to historical time “feels” more right: it is more sensitive and observant, and it works with a more complex, less head-heavy view of the human being. Thus, today we can safely state that after all, it was not surprising that Boym had more predictive power too: for once, an analysis based on cultural and art history proved better at seeing the future than clear intellectual analysis based on discoveries from the hard sciences. At the time of Trump’s nostalgic glorification of American industrial past and Britain’s saying no to what, at least on paper, is supposed to be the most progressive supra-national political formation of the planet, Boym’s analysis of modern nostalgia and its consequences is as timely as ever:

Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space: before entry into history. (Boym 2001, 8)

Clearly, this nostalgic longing tends to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Post-Crisis Europe, White Masculinity and Art Cinema
• 2. Rites of Retreat and the Cinematic Resignification of European Cultural Geography
• 3. Unprocessed Pasts
• 4. Addiction and Escapism
• 5. Narratives of Migration
• 6. The Lads of the New Right
• 7. Angry Old Men
• 8. Conclusions
• Back Matter