Popular Tropes of Identity in Contemporary Russian Television and Film

Irina Souch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501329043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

This book is an exploration of the changes in Russian cultural identity in the twenty years after the fall of the Soviet state. Through close readings of a select number of contemporary Russian films and television series, Irina Souch investigates how a variety of popular cultural tropes ranging from the patriarchal family to the country idyll survived the demise of Communism and maintained their power to inform the Russian people's self-image. She shows how these tropes continue to define attitudes towards political authority, economic disparity, ethnic and cultural difference, generational relations and gender. The author also introduces theories of identity developed in Russia at the same time, enabling these works to act as sites of productive dialogue with the more familiar discourses of Western scholarship.

1

From paternal authority to brotherhood: Soviet identity myths in transition

Introduction

As I noted in the general Introduction to this study, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the short-lived political euphoria in the newly formed post-communist Russia was followed by a transitional decade plagued by economic malaise, social turmoil, and a deeply felt insecurity about how to define Russianness. The rapid dissolution of old formative institutions and collective modes of existence intensified the urge for a coherent (national) identity and corresponding social relations and forms of collectivity. In this chapter, I examine how the quest for a new Russian identity proceeded along the lines of a reassessment and adjustment of traditional Soviet myths of family and paternal authority, without, however, leading to their complete obliteration. Through my analysis of Alexei Balabanov’s film Brother (Brat, 1997) I identify the notion of brotherhood as an assumed condition for democratic societal organization and as one of the important models helping individuals acquire a sense of security and belonging. To expose the impossibility of a direct transposition of Western models to the Russian context, I conduct a brief comparative reading of Brother and one of its American counterparts, The Bourne Identity (dir. Doug Liman, 2002), which, besides some similarities, unveils significant differences between the conceptualization of identity in contemporary Russian and Western popular representations.

Brother offers a valuable critical insight into the problematic of Russianness as it manifested itself in the cultural discourse of the 1990s. Upon its release the film had enormous commercial success in Russia, giving it the status of a new aesthetic manifesto and turning the leading actor into a cult figure (Dondurei 1998: n. pag.).¹ Brother features an unconventional protagonist who appears to provide an answer to the appeal made in 1992 by the chief editor of the Russian film journal Iskusstvo kino, Daniil Dondurei, to regenerate the weakened post-Soviet cinema by creating a “national mythology” and a present-day “national hero” (qtd. in Hashamova 2007: 296). The film’s main character, Danila (Sergei Bodrov Jr), combines the disarming naivety and awkwardness of a candid child with the physical strength and calculating abilities of a professional killer. He returns to his provincial hometown after military service and, shortly after, is sent by his mother to St Petersburg to visit his elder brother, Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov). Viktor turns out to be an accomplished hitman who enlists Danila to shoot a Chechen mafia boss on assignment for a mobster called Krugly (Sergei Muzin). Danila carries out the job believing that he is killing a “terrorist” who presents a real danger to Viktor and other Russian people. What he does not realize is that Krugly’s intention was to eliminate Viktor, who had started to behave irreverently towards his employers. As a consequence, Krugly’s henchmen, who believe they are following Viktor, injure Danila. While his own brother lets him down, an unknown tram driver, Sveta (Svetlana Pis’michenko), helps him. They subsequently have an affair but Sveta ultimately chooses to stay with her husband, despite the fact that he beats her. During his rambles through the city, Danila also defends a homeless German man named Hoffman (Yurii Kuznetsov) against a racketeer and befriends a drug-addicted young girl called Kat (Maria Zhukova). Although Viktor is supposed to function as a father substitute for Danila, at the end of the film it is Danila who protects and admonishes his sibling before sending him back to the province “to look after mom.” Having cleaned the streets of St Petersburg from criminals, Danila leaves for Moscow.

Balabanov departs from the Soviet tradition of portraying an ideal male protagonist as a morally superior individual committed to serving his country and family. Instead, he introduces a young hitman without any coherent moral principles, who, at the same time, operates as a lonely knight dispensing justice for the sake of the weak and the disadvantaged. In explanation of the film’s unprecedented popularity, Yana Hashamova writes: “Balabanov’s type of hero—physically average but morally superior—no doubt assuages anxieties provoked by Russia’s complex economic and political conditions and by difficulties in the development of the Russian collective identity during the period of transition” (2007: 300).²

Partly inspired by this contention, my choice to read Danila Bagrov’s personal history as having a bearing on the predicaments of the Russian socius as a whole is also motivated by my engagement with Fredric Jameson’s assertion that, in periods of societal upheaval, “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public … culture and society” (1986: 69, emphasis in text).³ Although post-Soviet Russia does not directly fall within the scope of Jameson’s literary-critical investigation, the way national allegory is elaborated opens up an opportunity to employ it as a mode of interpretation in my current analysis. Given Russian society’s so-called literature-centrism (a disposition, in times of uncertainty, to turn to literary works in search of viable programs and modes of social being), literary texts in Russia never revolve around private matters only, but are always related to the public concerns and political dynamics of the given historical moment.⁴ Moreover, from the Soviet epoch on, cinema too, as a highly ideologically charged mode of mass cultural mediation, can be seen to play a role similar to literature in guiding citizens’ vital decisions and choices. This allows me to further extend the theoretical reach of Jameson’s text.⁵

Jameson does not conceive of the allegorical mode as the simple production of morality tales about public situations. He writes:

[o]ur traditional concept of allegory … is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalence: this is, so to speak, a one-dimensional view of this signifying process, which might only be set in motion and complexified were we willing to entertain the more alarming notion that such equivalencies are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text.

1986: 73

Taking my cue from this assertion, I argue that the sociopolitical change in Russia not only augmented the individual and collective preoccupation with (national) identity, and intensified the yearning for social relations and forms of collectivity adequate to the new situation, but equally caused a discontinuity in “allegorical spirit” and prompted a complex process of transformation of existing cultural signifiers and allegorical patterns (Jameson 1986: 73).

Illuminating the effects of the ingrained cultural signifiers the constitution of identity in Brother is made strongly reliant on the patrilineal family astutely diagnosed by Katerina Clark as a “master trope of Soviet rhetoric” (2000: 129).⁶ It is after all Danila’s mother’s belief in the importance of familial ties, together with her conviction that the older brother can replace the dead father that serves as a starting point for the hero’s quest for self-definition. At the same time, the film provides a space for the critical interrogation of the trope rooted in the collective Russian consciousness as a powerful framework of meaning attribution and as something of an anchor amidst the turbulent waters of the long-term operation of post-communist societal development. The absence of dependable fathers, be it real or mythological, effectively allegorizes the Russian nation’s contemporary crisis of identification which, as the film’s title already suggests, can be ostensibly resolved through substituting the bonds of brotherhood for the paternal ties. Brotherhood here is put forward as a sound benchmark for realigning disoriented subjects, feeding feelings of community and defining the scope of social obligation. Tracing the emerging mechanisms of identification, the film, however, questions their alleged capacity to overwrite the past, to erase the traces of Soviet ideology and to reconfigure the beliefs that had been collectively internalized. The protagonist’s past continuously defines his present so that the idea of an identity as a tabula rasa is ultimately proved to be an illusion.

The subject’s (self-)recognition and the role of the affirmative look

The film features Danila Bagrov as a baby-faced young man with a slightly puzzled expression, a disarming smile, and a puppyish gait, wearing a long, outmoded beige knitted sweater, a black jacket, and army boots. The ambiguity of the hero’s character is conveyed already in the opening scene though the perceptible dissonance of his behavior with the social environment. The scene presents an autumnal landscape with a thinning birch wood at the edge of a large pond with stagnant waters. A dilapidated stone wall and a small tower form the backdrop for the shooting of a video clip. The obvious artificiality of the setting, juxtaposed with the suggested sadness of the landscape, functions allegorically to reflect the malcontent of post-Soviet Russia, torn between the rapid advance of the capitalist order and the nostalgic longing for traditional values. “You remove your evening gown/standing face to the wall,” a mournful male voice sings, “I can see fresh scars on your back/soft as velvet/I want to cry with pain /or forget myself in a dream/Where are your wings/that I loved so much?” A slender blonde girl in a long black dress with a low-cut back spreads her arms at the ruined tower wall in a gesture of despair. Accompanied by the repeating refrain, Danila then emerges from the side of the pond, climbs over the wall and stumbles onto the set. Unaware of the proceedings around him, he approaches one of the technicians with a question about the song. The outraged director demands his immediate removal, at which point the screen darkens. In the next shot, we see the hero with a beat-up face answering questions at the police station.

The immediate succession of these two incongruous locations,—the site of the video shoot and the police station—as it were, presents the different modes of identification to which the young man ostensibly can turn at the point of his life when he is introduced to the viewer as a blank slate. Accordingly, in early discussions of the film this suggestion is brought forward as the film’s central idea. Mark Lipovetskii, for one, calls Danila an “amazing young man” with an “amorphous” personality, “delightfully undefined and therefore able to become anybody; his soul and consciousness—a tabula rasa” (2000: n. pag.). Analogously, Andrei Shigolev sees the film as “an attempt to create the ‘hero of our time’ who has no past, no complexes, no social status [and] who has no idea how to lead his life. This is a hero who is clean, a tabula rasa” (2001: n. pag.). Danila’s first experiences indeed seem to point in the direction of such a possibility.

Thus, his chance discovery of Nautilus Pompilius, whose song “Wings” (Kryl’ia) catches his attention at the shoot, inaugurates his transformation into a fervent fan of the band, known to be particularly favored by the late Soviet cultural elite.⁷ From this moment on, Danila’s solitary actions are accompanied by the group’s songs played on his personal CD player. Initially perceived by the viewer as an extradiegetic sound track, it turns out that he constantly listens to their music while going about his business. The lyrics of the songs, lamenting the damaging impact of the horrible material world and advocating daydreams, stand in a stark contrast with the plot, where the absence of the “wings” that would enable a flight from the violent and degrading social reality is emphasized by Danila’s repeated, unsuccessful efforts to get his hands on the album featuring the song.

While the hero’s infatuation with Nautilus’ music can be interpreted as expressing his unconscious need for identifying elements that would surmount the defining frame imposed by his social background, his intercourse with the poli...