Somnopolis

One of my favourite films is the quirky Jump Tomorrow, a multi-lingual road trip across America. It features a scene with a Frenchman and an Englishman (Gosford Park’s James Whilby) arguing over the relevance of the French language. All the great Gallic thinkers and writers are dead, whereas English thrives thanks to the dominance of America.

You can see a similar smugness with regard to Russian culture. All those tolstoys and dostoyevskys had been buried by fukuyamism, relics of a dead culture, historical artifacts of the conflict between ‘freedom’ and despotism.

Except of course that’s nonsense. Russian letters are alive and well. In fact they are thriving on the fallout from the same conflict that buried the Soviet Empire. In Sergei Lukyanenko’s Nightwatch series the protagonist is caught in a century’s old conflict between the forces of good and evil – but takes the time to list the songs on his walkman as he wanders down a street. Lukyanenko’s novel was adapted into a film, which annihilated the Russian box office, inevitably drawing the attention of Hollywood. Some weighty handshakes later and the Night Watch books have been translated into English and a second sequel to the film set in America is due soon. Headcrusher by Alexander Garros and Aleksi Evdokimov reads like a post-Soviet Fight Club, as a highly educated young Latvian becomes increasingly disillusioned by the free market, realizing he is just another corporate drone. The cathartic diversions of Western culture, violent video games and movies, provide him with the inspiration to escape his fate, with bloody results.

I find it appropriate that the plot of Wanted, directed by Nightwatch’s Timur Bakmambetov, is very similar to Headcrusher. Stripped of the excesses of Mark Millar’s comic, it embraces the decadence of Western cinema violence, while also exploding a bomb beneath the drudgery of corporate neo-feudalism that its audience is subject to.

All of this is prelude to the clown prince Victor Pelevin. Like Slavoj Zizek, I am left unsure after each of his books just where the margin between parody and insight lies. Babylon focuses on the psychological conditioning of modern-day advertising by having its main character entire a state of drug-induced free-association, with commercial logos becoming transformed into ever-present Jungian archetypes. The Helmet of Horror appears to be inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, though it also appears to be a satire on philosophical wankery.

Just last week I finished The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, which cites its primary source as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The main character is a boyish prostitute, although Pelevin mines Eastern mythology by having her also be a shapeshifting fox named A Hu-Li. After a series of events almost lead to her exposure as an immortal shapeshifter, she encounters an intelligence officer who is also a were-creature named Alexander. The FSB officer is based on yet another literary character from the Russian canon and himself acknowledges this when A Hu-Li mentions Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. The were-foxes it is revealed feed on human desire, whereas the were-wolves are in the service of the Russian government as oil-diviners.  The book is an attempt by A Hu-Li to describe her path to enlightenment, but as foxes are essentially imitative, she may only be imagining that she is experiencing such.

In the end the book is a satire on modern Russia and a pastiche of its literary and philosophical legacy. The fox A Hu-Li is tragic character frustrated that the long winter of the Cold War has not thawed enough, fondly reminiscing upon her former life in Asia. Alexander is plagued by loyalist fervour and machismo. He serves as Pelevin’s critique of Russian men and like the protagonist of Headcrusher finds himself out of place in a post-Communist world. The English translations of his books cannot come soon enough for me. I find it sad that the market sees fit to promote him as a ‘Russian Will Self’, whereas I find he shares little of the Englishman’s detached cynicism. He is to my mind a pop-literate tolstoyan, seeking the traces of the human condition among PSP games and blockbuster movies.

I never thought David Fincher’s entertaining little romp adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s MiseryLit got its due. Terrifying its distributor, bewildering film critics, it slowly creeped its way into cultdom via student posters and video rentals. The most enjoyable sequences involve Edward Furlong’s obsessively detailed pathetic little existence. ‘Ikea Boy’, is the moniker given him by the malevolent doppelganger Tyler Durden, following his taste for continually ordering catalogue furnishings. The climax of the film – personality split results in terrorist cell attacking capitalist society at large - sent critics into a hot and bothered frenzy, convincing them that Fincher was attempting to espouse fascism as a worthwhile ambition, successfully missing the point entirely.

I remember the pinched faces on BBC2’s Late Review ejaculating nonsense along those lines.

Some folk ‘got it’, though, ensuring Fight Club would be remembered and now we are experiencing the fallout. Namely…Wanted. Very loosely adapted from Mark Millar and J. G. Jones’ book for Top Cow comics (so loose you could scoop off the first twenty minutes like cream off a cappuchino and have an entirely different creature) the film focuses on Wesley Gibson, trapped in the very same office cubicle of frustrated machismo and desire as Keanu Reeves’ Thomas Anderson and Edward Furlong’s Narrator. A foul-mouthed, overweight female manager is the bane of our hero’s existence, as well as his cheating girlfriend, resulting in persistent panic attacks treated with compulsive pill-popping and repressed anger.

Hang on, I think I hear the Promise Keeper’s calling.

Possessing neither a thematic structure, nor underlying message, like Fight Club, Wanted exists solely as a vehicle for its director’s visual panache. This is Grand Theft Auto in a cinema, with Morgan Freeman cussing up a storm and a perfectly cast Angelina Jolie smirking her way through the film as Fox. Taking the role of Gibson’s inductor into the Tao of Destruction, Angie serves the very same function as her current husband Pitt in FC. Mocking the lead’s servility and feminine nature – and here to underline the point, the person is female. At every point Wesley’s life is navigated by the difficulties he experiences with women, leading inexorably to Jolie’s sphinx smile. So Fox is an updated combination of Tyler Durden and Marla Singer, contemptous of him and tempting him all at once. Burdened by the yolk of female oppression Wesley’s only salvation lies in imitating the man he never knew in life – his father.

Edward Furlong’s Narrator is also tormented by the lack of a father, his descent into violence an attempt to define himself as a man, giving his life meaning as a result. Wesley by contrast is seduced by the idea of being ‘Wanted’ – he jumps into Fox’s car delighted after having seen security camera photos of himself printed on newspapers. The purpose given to him by Morgan Freeman’s fraternity of assassins is to track down and kill his father’s murderer, though not before taking out strangers as determined by a secret code divined through a loom.

Hell even Tyler Durden had something approximating an ideology, cobbled together out of 7 parts anarchism, two parts marxism and 1 part Rousseaulian survivalism. Wesley Gibson discovers manhood and identity through random slayings.

Plot kicks in with a thud when he is handed the assignment to kill Cross, his father’s murderer. After scenes of slow-motion destruction and vehicular carnage it’s almost something of a disappointment to realize there is an actual plot. Exposition designed to justify the ‘code’, adhered to by the Fraternity is equally irritating. The absurdity of it sticks in the craw like the plot-pivotal peanut butter employed in the final scenes. Empty of meaning and vulgar in its grasping cynicism Wanted is just destruction on celluloid for it’s own sake. I can only defend it on two counts – Jolie’s smile; and when the moment comes for our hero to address the camera, pointing out how pathetic we are for sitting and watching the movie we’ve just seen, at least he’s not as offensive as his character was in the comic book.