An Elephant Sitting Still and Ecology

A three hour and fifty minute film set in a gray industrial mining city somewhere in Northeast China, Bo Hu’s first film (he died before the final cut of the film was released) focuses on the lives of four characters who ultimately share the same horrific space and ecology, similar to what Krzystof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue did in 2000. To highlight both characters and their connection to this eco-disaster, Hu throws in the dynamic use of the long take via Steadicam that PT Anderson displayed in Boogie Nights and deep focus exploitation of space that is clearly influenced by Citizen Kane, sometimes showing us four or five planes of action at the same time. The film’s plot lines ultimately converge, and we and the characters are left in a limbo of a very long take late at night. The possible influence of Robert Altman’s vision jumps out at this end point.

The clearest and most depressing aspect of this film is not the characters’ dilemmas, nor the potential solutions that may unfold (well after the story is completed), but their situation and environment. Each character is having a horrible day. A grandfather is being told by his son and daughter-in-law that they want him to leave his own apartment for a nursing home, so they can have more space, and his beloved dog dies in a very distasteful way. Two high school students find themselves on the run (right out of Rebel Without a Cause). One because he has violently defended a friend who lied to him about stealing a phone, and the other because she was outed on social media for her affair with the high school Vice Dean. All three have miserable home lives.

Added to the mix is a local gangster whose affair with his best friend’s wife leads to her husband’s suicide, right out the bedroom window they just occupied. One could walk away trying to keep this hyper melodramatic set of storylines in some kind of logical order and actually succeeding in doing just that. Bo Hu weaves these lives together in spaces that are more depressing than their personal problems.

From an eco-perspective, this city is also a nightmare: Gray streets, blue gray barely illuminated interiors, endless mining trains pulling across a flat landscape that has been sucked dry by industrialization. The need to run away is dramatically structured by the plot of the film, but escaping this grim landscape would be reason enough. The air is clearly thick with pollution, and living conditions are cramped and soulless. The grandfather’s (a pensioner) trip to the nursing home his family want to stow him is a descent into purgatory. Every time a character turns, their stories get worse—but not as bad as the physical world they inhabit. An Elephant Sitting Still offers only a dark promise of change in a night-time shot outside a bus, and we’re left wondering whether or not the elephant’s cries accompanying our characters’ dimly lit soccer game mean this dire eco-disaster will end. 

Thank you, Joe!

Denis's Trouble Every Day and the Wendigo Cycle, continued

In the second brutal cannibal scene in the film, Shane confronts hotel maid Christelle in the hotel employee locker room to (the film suggests) avoid having sex with his wife and devouring her. After the multiple images of Christelle as both maid and human, however, the camera pulls away instead of veering in on her body as landscape. 

What begins as a stolen sexual moment shown in medium long shot, however, becomes a violent rape scene amplified by Christelle’s unanswered screams. Unlike the vivid cannibal sequence with Coré, however, the horror is revealed visually primarily after the attack, with shots of Christelle’s now-motionless body and Shane’s bloodied face. Tears run through his blood, as well, matching the lines of blood on the curtain during his post-murder shower.

He and June are reunited with a puppy to provide the warmth he cannot. But the suggestion that Shane’s one attack might have satiated him becomes less reliable when juxtaposed with June’s frightened and distrustful eyes when he hugs her and asks her to take him home. 

Although Trouble Every Day complicates a frontier myth that constructs a land as female to justify the exploitation of its resources, its conclusion offers no solution to the destructive results of the metaphor. Instead, Shane’s seeming ability to contain his desires by satisfying them through the literal cannibalizing of the native “other” continues the wetiko/Wendigo cycle Forbes describes.

Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, continued

In Denis’s Trouble Every Day, the metaphor of the land as woman is complicated in two ways: Coré becomes both cannibal and cannibalized because her Wendigo disease was forced upon her by Leo and Shane’s experiments with exploited South American resources. And even though he leaves Paris unscathed, Shane too contracts the infection from their post-colonial research. 

Defying the frontier myth, both male and female bodies become landscapes in Trouble Every Day, especially in the film’s two key horrific cannibal scenes. In the first, Coré seduces a neighbor, who breaks into her house and pulls down the boards Leo has hammered across her bedroom door. She teases him first, climbing on top and kissing him. But then her kisses turn into bites, continuing even when he yelps for her to stop. 

The extreme close-ups suggest the intruder’s body is a landscape, with a camera hovering over body parts while she bites and pulls off his flesh. She kisses him as he struggles to breath but pokes his wounds with her fingers and laughs. The approach, as Ian Murphy states, is “anthropological,” with “copulating human bodies registered in an unusual manner: not as clear figurations or distinct forms, but as dislocated swatches that took several moments for a viewer to recognize and identify as muscle, hair, or skin.” The result is a transformation of body into a landscape on which, as Laura U. Marks puts it, Coré, “grazes” (162).

Trouble Every Day (2001), Continued

In Trouble Every Day, the connection between Western intruders and post-colonial indigenous populations is complicated only by June’s interaction with a French-African porter (Bakary Sangare) outside her Paris hotel where she desperately looks for Shane in the pouring rain. In a more positive connection between colonized and colonizer, he offers her an umbrella while she stands drenched and frozen in doubt in the darkness asking her, “Wouldn’t you prefer to wait inside? It is warm.” According to Andrew Asibong, “these moments constitute a radically post-colonial break from the status quo” (158-9). Shane’s interaction with Christelle, however, perpetuates this status quo, reaffirming the exploitation of natives and their resources he and Leo began in Guyana. He seems to render Christelle invisible when she and June make their hotel bed, literally stepping out of the frame. But he gazes at her neck as she walks down a hall, metaphorically colonizing her by fragmenting her body into parts.

The most exploitative consumption in Trouble Every Day, however, is the literal ingestion of human flesh that results from Shane and Leo’s misuse of Guyana’s resources. In visual compositions, the film “gender[s] the land as feminine” (Kolodny, Lay of the Land 8), a gendering that reveals the two sides to a mythology that constructs women and the nature with which they are compared as both nurturing mothers and whores. Both cases, however, suggest women and nature are meant to be exploited, with or without their consent. An opening close-up of a heterosexual couple kissing reinforces the latter construct, for example, especially when it cuts to a setting sun over water and an extreme close-up of Coré’s face that reveals fecund lips and piercing eyes. She retains her role as sexual temptress even after devouring a truck driver. When her husband Leo finds her, he merely hugs her, kisses her forehead, and buries the driver.