(Due to IMDb word limits, Part 1 of this essay can be found in my review of "Eastern Promises")
Even when Viggo enters the low tech world of the East, he is astoundingly high tech. In a world of knives, Viggo is a cyborg, our post "Existenz" society already producing biotechnological entities. Think the film's cunning ending: Naomi Watts - already identified as a butch lesbian by David Lynch - becomes not the simulation of heterosexual domesticity seen at the end of "A History of Violence", but a husband-less, (she lives with uncle, mother and child) poster-girl for the androgynous, fragmented future of digital capitalism.
By inter-cutting Naomi's goofy simulacrum with a scene of Viggo sitting mournfully at a table, the following question arises: at what price does Viggo establish his neutral status? Does he lose humanity in the process? Is this loss negative? The film's ending, in which Viggo is revealed to be both criminal and cop, good and evil, but neither gangster nor cop, neither good nor evil, suggests a profound loss of humanity. Motionless and seemingly on the verge of tears, Viggo now resembles Verhoeven's "Robocop", reminiscing about what it once was like to be human. In other words, in accepting his neutral status, Viggo removes himself from Naomi, resulting in a kind of further androgynous disassociation. By living in the network society of the West, you're already atomised and mechanised. When you buy cola from the dispenser, you're servicing the Machine, you are its corporeal extension, just as Viggo is now the limb of two warring, nationalist machines. Between one socio-technological agency dominating the other, between DNA programming and competing sociocultural and economic structures that build on this biological instinctive substrate, the film says, there's no place for human subjective agency. As Viggo mourns, "I am neither alive nor dead. I've been living in the zone since I was fifteen."
In a scene in which rival football hooligans macho-stomp through a cemetery, we sense the film's repressed xenophobia and nationalist passions. What "Eastern Promises" promises is a new Cold War: America and the Eastern World in civilisational clinch, in which the West will righteously and bravely undergo a little barbarism, a little queerness, in order to protect its children. And propping up this noble fantasy will be a legion of little Viggo's, socially and psychologically fragmented but better off than the dirty few who are seduced by the false promises of the West only to end up as property at best, dead or sex workers at worst.
What Cronenberg unintentionally captures is the shift away from Michel Foucault's "disciplinary society" (the film's East) and towards a new sort of social formation, which Gilles Deleuze calls the "control society" (the film's West). Whilst the "disciplinary society" operates by organising major sites of confinement (family, school, hospital, factory, prison etc) in which individuals are always going from one closed site to another, each with its own laws etc, the "control society" breaks down all sites of confinement such that ultra rapid forms of apparently free-floating control take over.
The differences between these two forms of social organisation, between Viggo and the film's Mafia Chief, are numerous. Where the disciplinary society was analogical, the control society is digital. Where the disciplinary society was traditional and focused on stability, the control society stresses movement, fragmentation and capital. Where the disciplinary society is closed, traditional and hierarchical, the control society is open, fluid, schizophrenic and rhizomatic. Where the disciplinary society applied rigid molds as forms of confinement, the control society is always in a state of flux, always destroying and rebuilding. Likewise, while the disciplinary society molds the individuality of each person, the control society addresses us instead as what Deleuze calls "dividuals", identities constantly multiplied, decomposed and recomposed on various levels (medical records, credit cards, internet, email, passwords replacing signatures, each identity used for different purposes etc).
This is best seen in the way the film's Mafia Chief mourns the way London "infects his macho son", "breaks him down" and "rebuilds him queer" and the way the Mafia relies on codes, tattoos and rituals to "rigidly build" its own people. In contrast, Viggo not only belongs to the control society, but has mastered it absolutely. He is able to ride the flux, precisely because he's supremely disassociated; alienated from mind and body.
Everyone is subject to the master signifier. To stay alive in the game one has to renounce a measure of pleasure and power; to be castrated, whether male or female. So though "Promises" start out with the feminization motif - the knife slice, the bleeding vagina, the whorification of Viggo, the queering of the son – it, along with Cronenberg's entire filmography, gradually moves to outright impotence. The son is a voyeur, can only watch, can't do anything for himself, can't even kill a baby, while the mother (Naomi Watts) is barren and Viggo has been neutered by the Big Other, his body inscribed with tattoos which attest to a false history, false "tags" of ownership etc. Supremely divided, Watts and Viggo are the new "sucessful" mother and father, "parenting" a child that doesn't belong to them, without being married, living worlds apart, without even knowing one another. In this way castration is redefined in terms of territorialization. Territory is incessantly "deterritorialized" by the unspoken logic of global capitalism, everything is broken down and fragmented, but always allowing for the free flow of desires toward creation/procreation and production/reproduction, which we see in the last scene. The family is nobly destroyed, and what remains is only enough to keep it productive.
9/10 – Though one of Cronenberg's best, "Promises" is too tightly packed, lacking any critical distance or space for a Western audience (whom the film primarily critiques) to reflect properly on its fantasies.
(For Part 3 of my Cronenberg quest, see my review of Cronenberg's "Crash")
Even when Viggo enters the low tech world of the East, he is astoundingly high tech. In a world of knives, Viggo is a cyborg, our post "Existenz" society already producing biotechnological entities. Think the film's cunning ending: Naomi Watts - already identified as a butch lesbian by David Lynch - becomes not the simulation of heterosexual domesticity seen at the end of "A History of Violence", but a husband-less, (she lives with uncle, mother and child) poster-girl for the androgynous, fragmented future of digital capitalism.
By inter-cutting Naomi's goofy simulacrum with a scene of Viggo sitting mournfully at a table, the following question arises: at what price does Viggo establish his neutral status? Does he lose humanity in the process? Is this loss negative? The film's ending, in which Viggo is revealed to be both criminal and cop, good and evil, but neither gangster nor cop, neither good nor evil, suggests a profound loss of humanity. Motionless and seemingly on the verge of tears, Viggo now resembles Verhoeven's "Robocop", reminiscing about what it once was like to be human. In other words, in accepting his neutral status, Viggo removes himself from Naomi, resulting in a kind of further androgynous disassociation. By living in the network society of the West, you're already atomised and mechanised. When you buy cola from the dispenser, you're servicing the Machine, you are its corporeal extension, just as Viggo is now the limb of two warring, nationalist machines. Between one socio-technological agency dominating the other, between DNA programming and competing sociocultural and economic structures that build on this biological instinctive substrate, the film says, there's no place for human subjective agency. As Viggo mourns, "I am neither alive nor dead. I've been living in the zone since I was fifteen."
In a scene in which rival football hooligans macho-stomp through a cemetery, we sense the film's repressed xenophobia and nationalist passions. What "Eastern Promises" promises is a new Cold War: America and the Eastern World in civilisational clinch, in which the West will righteously and bravely undergo a little barbarism, a little queerness, in order to protect its children. And propping up this noble fantasy will be a legion of little Viggo's, socially and psychologically fragmented but better off than the dirty few who are seduced by the false promises of the West only to end up as property at best, dead or sex workers at worst.
What Cronenberg unintentionally captures is the shift away from Michel Foucault's "disciplinary society" (the film's East) and towards a new sort of social formation, which Gilles Deleuze calls the "control society" (the film's West). Whilst the "disciplinary society" operates by organising major sites of confinement (family, school, hospital, factory, prison etc) in which individuals are always going from one closed site to another, each with its own laws etc, the "control society" breaks down all sites of confinement such that ultra rapid forms of apparently free-floating control take over.
The differences between these two forms of social organisation, between Viggo and the film's Mafia Chief, are numerous. Where the disciplinary society was analogical, the control society is digital. Where the disciplinary society was traditional and focused on stability, the control society stresses movement, fragmentation and capital. Where the disciplinary society is closed, traditional and hierarchical, the control society is open, fluid, schizophrenic and rhizomatic. Where the disciplinary society applied rigid molds as forms of confinement, the control society is always in a state of flux, always destroying and rebuilding. Likewise, while the disciplinary society molds the individuality of each person, the control society addresses us instead as what Deleuze calls "dividuals", identities constantly multiplied, decomposed and recomposed on various levels (medical records, credit cards, internet, email, passwords replacing signatures, each identity used for different purposes etc).
This is best seen in the way the film's Mafia Chief mourns the way London "infects his macho son", "breaks him down" and "rebuilds him queer" and the way the Mafia relies on codes, tattoos and rituals to "rigidly build" its own people. In contrast, Viggo not only belongs to the control society, but has mastered it absolutely. He is able to ride the flux, precisely because he's supremely disassociated; alienated from mind and body.
Everyone is subject to the master signifier. To stay alive in the game one has to renounce a measure of pleasure and power; to be castrated, whether male or female. So though "Promises" start out with the feminization motif - the knife slice, the bleeding vagina, the whorification of Viggo, the queering of the son – it, along with Cronenberg's entire filmography, gradually moves to outright impotence. The son is a voyeur, can only watch, can't do anything for himself, can't even kill a baby, while the mother (Naomi Watts) is barren and Viggo has been neutered by the Big Other, his body inscribed with tattoos which attest to a false history, false "tags" of ownership etc. Supremely divided, Watts and Viggo are the new "sucessful" mother and father, "parenting" a child that doesn't belong to them, without being married, living worlds apart, without even knowing one another. In this way castration is redefined in terms of territorialization. Territory is incessantly "deterritorialized" by the unspoken logic of global capitalism, everything is broken down and fragmented, but always allowing for the free flow of desires toward creation/procreation and production/reproduction, which we see in the last scene. The family is nobly destroyed, and what remains is only enough to keep it productive.
9/10 – Though one of Cronenberg's best, "Promises" is too tightly packed, lacking any critical distance or space for a Western audience (whom the film primarily critiques) to reflect properly on its fantasies.
(For Part 3 of my Cronenberg quest, see my review of Cronenberg's "Crash")