Itinerary to Self-awareness
Two movies provided an unexpected link for me in their reliance on hotels and hotel rooms.
Michelangelo Antonionis’s The Passenger, released at a downtown Toronto movie theatre, tells the story of a documentary filmmaker who stole the identity of a dead man in a hotel room.
A black and white classic Separate Tables shown on TV, describes the confined movements and restrained emotions of several characters staying at a small resort hotel.
The underlying theme in both movies is, as the titles suggest, lack of connections. The passenger is never still enough to find people or places he can bond with. He is always moving in rented cars from one rented hotel room to another. And separate tables wedge a persistent gap between a group of vacationing people.
Yet, Antonioni’s 1975 film constantly lies in the realm of nihilism and fantasy. People try to find meaning in dead-ends. The young woman in The Passenger, realizing that her travel mate has taken on the identity of a dead man, unquestioningly accepts this identity. True dead man walking here. It is as though all the characters in Antonioni’s film have given up on the real, and would rather submerge themselves in a shifting fantasy. “I might be a waiter in Gibraltar, or a writer in Cairo” says the main character. His new-found freedom hard to pin down.
In the 1958 film Separate Tables, we are sharply grounded in reality. We know the faults of the characters, and why they’ve ended up in this little resort hotel, on separate tables. They know it too. We are even forced to accept the happy/sardonic ending, since it is the best that the characters could come up with. Somehow, they manage to narrow the gaps between their tables.
I have to conclude that there is something about pre-1960s (American) films that encourages filmmakers to avoid nihilism and its subsequent reliance on the unreal. Something about life, culture, love and many other grounding qualities seem worth living for, and roots them in reality.
It is as though filmmakers like Antonioni have given up on their characters, and ultimately their film. A meaningless film surely translates to a meaningless life.
Now, the questions, which I will try to answer in subsequent blogs and essays are: Where did this nihilism come from? And how did it affect art in general? The short answer to the first question is: with loss of morals. The short answer to the second question is: with more fantasy.