EXAMPLE OF ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY

A world of clichés: absurdist theories and satire in Eduard Campbell’s Art Movie

As a social experiment, my self-written film called Art Movie attempts to create a text made almost entirely out of clichés where two 20-something individuals experience a surreal and awkward post-quarrel moment that leads to a brutal murder.  With the contribution of numerous members of the public, the text has been built around these clichéd lines from films and popular songs which have been replaced at a later stage by sentences made up entirely by random individuals.  Through this participation by the general public, I manage to create a satire containing a heightened sense of irony.  In order to explain and analyse the film, this essay will first compare the film with the absurdist theories of Ionesco, Sartre, and Beckett, specifically focusing on its similarities and dissimilarities with Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros.  The focus will mostly fall on its use of ‘a world of clichés’ and the effort of the characters to break free from that world and engage with reality, if any such effort exists.  In order to further explain the ‘lighter’ qualities of the film, its placement within the genre of parody and satire will be discussed comparing the film to Tom Ford’s A Single Man and other recent films.  The film’s comment on the vast impact of the cultural industry on both society and its products will lastly be highlighted.  This essay will thus, through application of various theories and critical analysis, prove the films placement within the absurdist and satirical genres.

In an interview conducted by Richard Schechner, Eugene Ionesco is asked to comment on many of the aspects regarding his plays, which have been labelled as part of the Absurdist movement of the 20^th Century.  Ionesco is asked to comment on the use of stereotypes in his plays and Ionesco replies that a stereotype is part of a routine whereby man separates himself from reality and from truth (Schechner et al. 164).  When focusing on the character Berenger from the play Rhinoceros, Ionesco claims that “Berenger destroys his own clichés as he speaks.  And so, he sees beyond them.  His questions no longer have easy answers” (Schechner et al. 164).  After a long process where the presumably ‘weak’ Berenger is defeated and oppressed by characters like Jean, Dudard, and even Daisy, Berenger, realising that he is the only human left, states the cliché that people “who try to hang on to their individuality always come to a bad end” (Ionesco 124).  This refers to the old cliché of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’.  Just after he recognises this cliché he immediately retaliates by saying “Oh well, too bad” (Ionesco 124) and then proceeds into reclaiming his argument that he will stand up against the crowd (and thus also the cliché), ultimately making him the victorious hero of the play.    

Similarly, by using clichés from films and popular music, Kate and Eric in Art Movie only speak in clichés (Campbell 3).  However, the entirety of the three scenes where the characters are hanging and removing laundry indicates another cliché: the ‘awkward break-up scene’.  Whether the lines uttered relate to the exact dialogue spoken by Kate and Eric in their reality is improbable, for it becomes clear that the scene, in its humorous exaggeration, altered colour, melodrama and novelty indicates Eric’s daydreaming as he is indulging in his clichéd fantasy.  Eric has to break away from reality (the possibility of him brutally murdering Kate) by returning to the clichéd scene over and over.  Even when the clichéd dialogue has been replaced by nonsensical gibberish (which does manage to render the space less comfortable and familiar), the scene essentially is still that of a cliché (Campbell 9-11).  The scene where he is seen lying blissfully next to Kate in the final shot (Campbell 11) reiterates his refusal to return to reality by holding on to a comforting memory and ultimately yet another clichéd image of ‘the loving couple in bed’.  This false reality of him and Kate in bed that he creates coincides with Ionesco’s ‘false answers’ that are created through the ready-made answers, made by others, often associated with clichés (Schechner et al. 164).  Eric thus does not recognise the cliché entirely like the victorious Berenger does, but rather whimsically uses it to escape his impending fait as a murderer.

Ionesco mentions that his plays often contain a world of clichés where the characters are lost within their clichés (Schechner et al. 165).  In the interview, Ionesco is indeed referring to his play The Maid to Marry, but the idea of being lost in a world of clichés and stereotypes seems to be the main theme of Rhinoceros.  All the ‘nameless’ characters (The Waitress, the Grocer, the Grocer’s Wife, the Old Gentleman) seem to be the embodiment of the stereotype after which they have been named.  The Old Gentleman, for example, is specifically attired with hat and suit, and he offers to help the housewife to pick up her things (Ionesco 16), exactly as we expect the gentleman stereotype to do.  Of course, all the characters (even the ‘named’ ones), with exception of Berenger, are so settled in their various stereotypes which they portray that they ironically become one entity: a magnanimous herd of rhinoceroses.  They thus all have one thing in common: they all conform to culturally created stereotypes, and within this unity of conformity, they have all become the same creature – identical in every aspect.   

Whereas the characters in Rhinoceros still experience brief moments of non-conformance to their stereotype in the beginning of the play, like the Grocer remarking that tradesmen are not supposed to know everything (Ionesco 38), the characters in Art Movie are all tragically lost in their stereotypes and clichés from the commencement of the film.  Kate, being already dead, cannot escape the world of clichés as fantasised by Eric – she is entrapped by his mind and thus unlikely to ever recognise the world of clichés and hopefully rebel against it.  The other characters, consisting of celebrities, have all been successfully stereotyped, by the media in the past or even if just within the list of characters, and because their existence in the play is limited to one specific moment in time where they have been filmed in the past they cannot ever escape their stereotype.  Where Kate is thus trapped within Eric’s fantasy, the other characters are hopelessly trapped within his fantasy and within film itself and within a meticulously specified timeframe.  All the characters in the film are thus rhinoceroses except for one…

The only enlightened character in the film is the Unknown Voice.  Deceivingly, the Unknown Voice, in its stereotypically ‘evil’-sounding fashion, creates the misperception that the voice is luring Eric back to his clichéd fantasy, whereas the contrary is true.  The brief moments during which the screen turns black denotes the journey of Eric’s mind back to his fantasy (Campbell 5, 8, 11).  The Unknown Voice, which should at no given point be over-simplified to ‘Eric’s conscience’, sees that Eric is trying to escape the harshness of reality every time, and thus angrily instructs him to return to reality at the exact time when his mind wanders during the black screen.  The Unknown Voice thus providently wants Eric to deal with the avoided, but palpable truth and escape the world of clichés, turning him into the hero that Berenger is.  However, the Unknown Voice is ironically only a faceless, bodiless, fear-provoking non-entity that futilely attempts to convince his Daisy not to turn into one of the beasts.

Ionesco, despite the fact that he openly admits that he does not think much of Sartre (Schechner et al. 163), shares numerous views with the philosopher and playwright.  These shared views coincide at the exact point where their plays are conforming to the now defined genre of absurd theatre.  For instance, Sartre holds that an impossibility of “establishing an authentic relationship between the individual and the exterior world” exists (Goldmann and MacDonald 103).  This coincides, however loosely, with Ionesco’s statement that his characters are lost in a world of clichés, which makes it impossible for them to identify with the real, external world.  Sartre describes the realisation of the true nature of the relationship between the individual and his external world as ‘nauseating’ (Goldmann and MacDonald 103).  Similarly, Ionesco talks about the depression he experiences when he is not astonished at the very moment where a connection is made between awareness and existence, and how this lack of astonishment seems to be the norm (Schechner et al. 163, 164).  However, whereas Ionesco still admits to the ‘joy’ that he experiences when a successful connection is made between the individual and his external environment (Schechner et al. 163), Sartre holds that “human reality… is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state” (Goldman and MacDonald 104).  It is within this antithesis between possibility, no matter how slim, and impossibility of happiness that the greatest difference between Rhinoceros and Art Movie can be found.  This incongruence, however, still does not banish Art Movie from the absurd theatre realm, for Satre still remains an absurdist playwright.

For Berenger, there exists the possibility to rid himself from the barriers which keep him from truly experiencing the truth of reality.  After deciding to conform and become a rhinoceros (Ionesco 123), he finds himself incapable of turning into one of the beasts.  He mentions thereafter that it is too late for him to become a rhinoceros (Ionesco 124).  Berenger, who has clearly proven previously in the play that he often changes his mind, is thus incapable of changing his mind again because of the incapability to turn into a rhinoceros.  His transformation into an enlightened being, free from worldly influences that prevent him from experiencing reality, is thus complete and he can victoriously stay within this ‘joyful’ or ‘astonished’ state (as Ionesco describes it) for eternity.  The possibility of reaching this permanently enlightened and blissful state is not seen as possible by Sartre though as mentioned above. 

Art Movie shares the same fatalistic outlook as Sartre.  In Lacanian terms, Eric experiences trauma, and thus experiences ‘the real’.  Eric’s traumatic encounter with ‘the real’ while murdering Kate, provides anything but a ‘joyful’ experience and catapults him into a world where the barriers of clichés and stereotypes have an unnaturally immense impact on his perception of reality.  The hope of a break from his fantasy is given in his replacement of some of the clichés with nonsense, but he nonetheless returns to an overtly blissful fantasy even further removed from reality, for the image of a clean Kate blissfully in his arms now directly contradicts the reality of her lying bloody and alone in his bed (Campbell 8, 11).  The attempt at a movement from the alternative world of clichés is thus not only unsuccessful, but to the detriment of the process of recognition and enlightenment as a whole.  Even further, if Eric manages to escape his fantasy world and succeeds in admitting to the reality, the truth remains that he murdered Kate which would lead to everything but the experience of Ionesco’s ‘joy’.  In this manner the film is ultimately fatalistic to a point where it exceeds Sartre’s fatalism for unhappiness exists even within Ionesco’s slight possibility of establishing a meaningful connection with the external world. 

Whereas the fatalistic views of Sartre can be juxtaposed with the slightly more positive view of Ionesco almost twenty years later, it is important to briefly discuss the contribution of Samuel Beckett to see where Ionesco’s less fatalistic view could have originated from in order to complete the picture.  Although the example given here is slightly less applicable to Rhinoceros and Art Movie, there are still stark similarities between the themes of the plays.  In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the characters are also trapped within a meaningless and absurd world where all action seems to be futile and a strong sense of timelessness is experienced (Friedman 280), a timelessness that can be noticed in Art Movie as well.  The main characters, Estragon and Vladimir, are waiting for Godot:  this seems to be their only goal throughout the play - not the fact that Godot might just arrive, but the fact that they are waiting for him.  In a world devoid of meaning, but filled with deceiving clichés, one truth, as pointless and mundane as it may seem, still remains: they are both waiting for Godot (Friedman 280).  Thus, where the earlier Sartre discards the notion of reality, happiness and truth ever to be experienced, and Art Movie shares this idea, Beckett plants the seed of hope in creating the possibility that at least one truth could be experienced so that Ionesco’s Berenger could experience the full enlightenment of escape from the world of clichés seven years later.

From an absurdist point of view, Art Movie can be viewed as a dreary, fatalistic film which is meant to depress its viewers and remind them of the futileness of life.  However, this is not entirely what the film is supposed to provoke from the audience and hence the fatalistic undertones of the film being balanced out by its strong satiric and often humorous elements.  It is within the recognition of its strong satiric motives and its tongue-in-cheek comment on the impact of the cultural industry that the audience can find salvation from its deeply rooted fatalistic themes. 

The movie as a whole, on its most superficial level, is a parody on the art film genre.  The basis of the argument against what has been called art movies in recent years stems from the statement that the familiarity with the cultural codes present in any form of art by the general public leads to its demise as form of high art (Barnett and Allen 148).  The repetition of the same conventions, it being in film, music, or the visual arts or whichever art form, will lead to its acceptance into a larger portion of society (the ‘mainstream’), thus obliterating its impact on the smaller portion forming ‘the elite’.  Coincidentally, Ionesco makes a similar statement saying that “acceptance of an art form outmodes it” (Schechner et al. 167).  The moment ‘a convention’ is thus recognised within an art film, which is supposed to be fundamentally opposed against convention, it weakens the film to a point where it is forced to loose its label as an art film.  This is sadly true even if those conventions mimic the conventions of other art movies.  It is indeed within this mimicry that the essence of Art Movie’s satiric qualities can be found.

Parody is meant to “cast ridicule on… [particular] stylistic mannerisms” (Goodman 51).  One way of achieving this kind of ridicule is to distort reality by inserting over-simplifications (Goodman 45).  Art Movie specifically targets the Tom Ford movie A Single Man to show how the film over-uses recognisable ‘art film conventions’ in order to ironically construct an art film.  Art Movie over-simplifies these conventions by inserting them visually and thematically without much motivation and relevance to the film (although it could be argued that Ford does exactly the same).  The rapid, successive use of many of these conventions, especially visually, provides for a distorted reality that ends up being rather humorous.  Visual examples of this mimicry of Ford’s film can usually be found in Art Movie just before one of the characters utters a line that is in bold text (meaning that it is a clichéd line from a film or a popular song) (Campbell 3-11).  The intense close-up on Kate’s eye is an important example for it seems to be the most prominent visual cue that Ford exploits for seemingly no reason (Ford 2010).  Most of the visual cues within Art Movie consist of awkward and unnatural close-ups, like smoke blowing slowly from faceless lips, all resembling warn out images that might have possessed punching power when they have been first used in the 1940’s, but not anymore.

Thematically, Art Movie randomly mimics A Single Man by the completely unmotivated insertion of a queer aspect.  A Single Man deals with a man who looses his male partner after a car accident (Ford 2010).  This follows a trend where it is assumed these days that, in order to produce an art film, one has to excessively rely on a predominantly queer theme.  Other recent examples of this phenomenon are films like Angels in America, Brokeback Mountain, and Short Bus to mention only a few.  Art Movie, as a parody of the above tendency, inserts the ‘queer element’ in Part 3 where all the nonsensical bold lines have been formulated by homosexuals, whether male or female, from cities all over the world (Campbell 9-11).  This theme is thus applied to Art Movie in a less overt way than the films it is commenting on, but its insertion supplies humour.  The technique of parody here is however very subtle and does not comply with the technique of over-simplification mentioned above.  The film’s subtitle “It was all fine until it became queer” (Campbell 1) is thus exposed as humorous and relevant to the film.    

Parody’s target is described by Hutcheon as “intramural”, whereas satire’s target is seen as “extramural” (Goodman 53).  This implies that parody deals with “already existing texts and its frame of reference is limited by the texts it chooses to parody”, whereas satire’s main concern is “the world outside the text, since it sets out to address specific historical and cultural… issues and works them into the text for examination or comment” (Goodman 53).  The parody present in Art Movie deals exclusively with A Single Man, whereas the satire present within the text reflects the cultural industry in general.  In such a way the film is in touch with the world outside the text.  By taking clichéd lines from other films and popular songs, it deliberately overstates the presence of the cultural industry outside the film’s boundaries.  It comments on the great extent to which films influence one another and also how they are influenced by popular culture.  It further comments on how the audience of films are often conditioned to sheepishly accept the clichéd texts thrown at them, while being bombarded by visuals and music (Cameron’s Avatar comes to mind) in order to keep them from questioning the lack of attention paid to the content of these texts.  Where the audience may not immediately notice the use of these clichéd lines in Part 1 of Art Movie, their ignorance is exposed in Part 2 where the original footage from various films and music videos is inserted in the place of Kate and Eric’s dialogue (Campbell 3-8).  This provides humour and allows the audience to laugh at their own folly.

A lot more can be said regarding the intentions and goals of Art Movie.  More in-depth attention can be paid to the satirical aspects of the film by applying Adorno’s theories on the influences of the cultural industry on society. Derrida’s theory on the removal of the signifier from the signified can be looked at when specifically scrutinising the effects of the word association game that has been played in order to provide new words for the clichéd lines (Campbell 9).  Lacan’s theory on ‘the mirror phase’, ‘the real’, and ‘the imaginary’ can also be applied to Eric’s motivation for entering his fantasy world.  The fragmentary nature of the text in general can be discussed from a post-modern point of view, while Zizek’s ‘frame of desire’ can also be applied.  All of the above-mentioned possibilities are outside the scope of this essay though.

In conclusion, Art Movie shares many similarities with absurdist theories by Sartre, Ionesco and Beckett.  Eric and Berenger both share in the danger of being trapped within their worlds of clichés.  Whereas Berenger manages to escape this fait and successfully engages with the external world by not becoming a rhinoceros, Eric is bound to stay trapped in his fantasy-world forever.  Whereas the fait of Berenger reflects Ionesco and also Beckett’s beliefs that escape from the world of clichés is possible, Eric’s fait coincides with the more fatalistic view of Sartre that happiness and the successful integration into reality does not exist.  By mimicking the conventions used in recent years in order to create art films, Art Movie uses over-simplification to distort reality and to inevitably create a parody of films like A Single Man and Brokeback Mountain.  This is done both visually, and by inserting a queer theme into the text.  In a satirical fashion, Art Movie comments on the impact of the cultural industry on society by using lines out of other films and popular music, and by allowing the general public to vigorously take part in the creation of the text.  It is thus proven that Art Movie can be placed within the genres of absurdism and satire.

(Word count +/- 3600 words)

Bibliography

Primary sources:

Campbell, E.G. Art Movie. South Africa: SAMRO, 2010.

A Single Man. Dir Tom Ford. Screenplay Tom Ford, based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood.  Perf. Colin Firth, Julianne Moore.  Artina Films, 2009.

Ionesco, E. Rhinoceros. London: Penguin Group, 1959.

Secondary sources:

Barnett, L.A. and Alleen, M.P. Social Class, Cultural Repertoires, and Popular Culture: The Case of Film. New York: Springer, 2000.

Friedman, M.J. The Achievement of Samuel Beckett. Oklahoma: The University of Oklahoma, 1959.

Goldmann, L and MacDonald, S. The Theatre of Sartre. London: The MIT Press, 1970.

Schechner, R, Ionesco, E and Pronko, L.C. An Interview with Ionesco. London: The MIT Press, 1963.