Final Paper - Simmel and the Bee in the City

Georg Simmel’s essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” was written in 1903, but remains largely relevant today, analyzing the effects of the city environment upon the individual[1].  Exploring Simmel’s findings in a more modern and technologically connected context, in this case an ad campaign for the Bugaboo Bee stroller, reveals that his theory of the modern metropolis and its effect on man’s social consciousness and identity is both enforced by current metropolitan and online environments, and inadequate for them.  The often highly intimate nature of social media content does not fit neatly into Simmel’s paradigm.  The presence and behavior of children in urban spaces tends not to correspond with Simmel’s descriptions of an inevitable lack of social consciousness.  The nature and concept of social capital obfuscates his principle of objective reckoning, and the way corporations capitalize on the individuality and online activity of social media participants blurs the line between objective and subjective behavior and judgment.  Ultimately, as the spectrum of stimulations leans toward the intimate, and user-content-saturated realms available in social media, objective reckoning is less likely to be based on tangible features, though more likely to be entrenched in social capital, and social consciousness seems less likely to experience the dearth that Simmel described.

Simmel: The Metropolis and Mental Life

Simmel’s essay claims that his inquiry into the meaning of specifically modern or metropolitan life answers “the question of how the personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces.”[2] The essay largely explores the psychological coping of individuals to the high level of stimulus in urban settings.  Simmel claims that the big city is dominated by fiscal objectivism (as opposed to individual/emotive centered subjectivism) and that human interactions in cities become short, impersonal, rational, and instrumental, lacking the sense of community found in a small town. “The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life.”[3] Thus he claims that the inner life of city dwellers is more intellectual than emotional.  People value time and money, and the easily measured.  Thus more qualitative values are reduced to what can be “reckoned” and this leads to what Simmel calls the “blasé attitude” of many city dwellers, a defense mechanism against overstimulation that potentially alienates them from meaningful interactions through their own indifference and discrimination.

Simmel also emphasizes that, paradoxically, metropolitan dwellers have an elevated need for a sense of unique, noticeable, recognized and valued identity.  “The carrier of man’s value is no longer the “general human being” in every individual, but rather man’s qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability.”[4] Their sense of identity will increase in importance to them as the level of stimulation rises, and that in city environments the need to feel incomparable or unmistakable will lead to distinct behaviors far less common in more rural communities.

Navigating the Bee Campaign

Interestingly, each of these points made by Simmel are illustrated in the Bugaboo Bee online ad campaign.  Bugaboo is a Dutch mobility company primarily manufacturing high-end strollers. Founded in 1999, the company has placed a high priority on their online presence and online marketing.  In January of 2003, 100 years after Simmel’s essay was published, Bugaboo released the Bee, touted as a “complete urban stroller.”  The company followed up with the “Bee in the City” campaign platform[5] which was released in June of 2012 and which allegedly demonstrates the ways in which the Bee’s design is well suited for navigating cities.  But city living is never clearly defined in any of Bugaboo’s campaign materials, and the implications of what differentiates a city environment are only inferred.  The metropolitan focus and assumptions of Bugaboo’s Bee campaign mirror and challenge Georg Simmel’s essay.

            In analyzing the content of the Bugaboo Bee campaign, it is helpful to introduce a further concept, outside of the scope of Simmel’s essay but directly related to points in it.  This is the idea of “social capital.”   The term was introduced by Alexis de Tocqueville as early as 1890, but was not widely used until the 1990s.  Robert Putnam’s definition of social capital is “the collective value of all social networks and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other.”[6]   Pierre Bourdieu also wrote extensively about the relation of social capital to upward mobility through socially recognized class distinctions.

            This idea becomes relevant relative to Simmel’s exploration of intellectualism and objectivity, as individuals are making decisions and “reckoning” value not only in terms of money capital, but in terms of social capital as well. It is also very relevant in exploration of the metropolitan need for incomparable identity.  Choices, objects, and actions that are perceived to increase the concrete particularity or uniqueness of one’s identity might be given reckoning weight in terms of social capital.  The ability of a product to imply a certain economic, social, or cultural status becomes in itself a feature of that product, and an image-conscious consumer is likely to take that feature into consideration as they valuate potential purchases.

            Bugaboo’s campaign for this “total urban stroller” can be considered in three separate parts.  First is the product website for the Bugaboo Bee[7] where the main, traditional, video advertisement can be viewed and product specifications and features are explorable.  Second is the ancillary website and home base of the social media campaign “Bee in the City”[8].  This website has instructions for participating in the social media campaign, allows access to content created by other users, and primarily houses six 2-3 minute videos, produced by Bugaboo, exploring individual families using the Bugaboo Bee stroller in six different large cities around the world.  The final part of the campaign is the social media campaign and its invitation for users to “create their own [searchable] gallery” of bugaboo bee images and tweets by using the hashtag #beeinthecity.  For users that are following the company blog[9] or twitter feed[10] there are also games and contests with bugaboo strollers and stroller accessories as prizes.

Analyzing the Bee Campaign

            These three distinct components of the campaign form a spectrum of material determined by several factors.  At the product website end of the spectrum the company has complete control of the content.  There are minimal representations of human beings, and the emphasis is on features of the stroller.  At the social media end of the spectrum, the company has no direct control over content, and humans, their personalities, their implied social status, and their faces become a stronger point of focus than the stroller itself. 

            The product Website[11] has as its foremost and most prevalent feature the 44 second advertisement video[12]. The ad begins by showing the empty Bee stroller rolling out in front of a blank video screen.  Then, in sync with very electric, percussive music the stroller appears to move in stop-motion, its movement is relative to stop-motion images played out on the screen of navigating city sidewalks.  The effect is that the stroller appears to be navigating the city environment, but with the filter of the screen in place.   While there are clear manifestations of crowds of people, none of them are in focus and very few of them are fully embodied.  We see most of them from the waist down, presumably the perspective of the stroller.  There are three other strollers present in the video, all of them the Bugaboo Bee in different colors.  The seemingly self-animated stroller in quick succession demonstrates all the features unique to the Bee.  The video ends with a shot of a paved path in a wooded area, the first green space shown in this ad. There is also only one other person, a jogger, within the frame at that point.   After this scene is introduced, there is a jump-cut and the stroller is (suddenly) no longer in front of the screen, but rather on the screen, rolling toward the horizon.

        
        The extremely fast-paced, stylized editing of the content of this video is very demonstrative of the level of stimulation that Simmel claims will require filtering. “The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli.”[13] It also demonstrates an accommodation of reckoning by removing elements of the personal or human from the scene.  There is no human interacting with the stroller in any way, despite the fact that the purpose of a stroller is to facilitate human mobility needs.  This streamlining acts as a filter, allowing focus to remain on the product’s features and design, and is present in other static elements of the product website, such as diagrams showing different configurations of the stroller next to simple graphics indicative of the age and size of children that each configuration could service. The decrease in consciousness of the human elements allows an increase in objectivity and reckoning described by Simmel. “[Money] hollows out the core of things: their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability.”[14] 

  
What this ad does less effectively, perhaps, is to capitalize on social capital or incomparable identity, and that void appears to have led to the creation of the Bee in the City campaign.

            The Bee in the City Profiles[15] still contain many elements of decreased consciousness and intellectualism, but by moving the content creation into real spaces with real families, a far more organic and human effect is achieved. Despite the still-tightly edited and highly controlled nature of the visual content, a very different aesthetic experience occurs.  There are profiles from 6 cities: Berlin, Tokyo, New York, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles.  The subjects of these short films were arguably chosen to be representative of the ideal consumer for this company.  A product as expensive as a bugaboo stroller (the basic model of the Bugaboo Bee starts at $650), usually involves selling an idea as well as a product.  When a low-end umbrella stroller can be purchased for under $30, it can be assumed that someone who spends more than 21 times that amount is buying more than a stroller, they are buying social capital – and a contribution to their sense of identity of self.   The value of the product then becomes doubly quantifiable.  A consumer can reckon the value of the product based on it’s tangible features relative to its price, but also by the social capital of the implied perceived social status of the product within the public, and the value of that status symbol to the consumer relative to its price.

            Even the user-content end of the campaign spectrum is devoid of any of the aesthetic blights inevitably present in real cities.  Consumers appear to be willing to play along with Bugaboo’s brand-centric filter, creating an idealized picture of city living even in the content they create.  All things unattractive are filtered or edited out of this virtual existence. 

            There appears to be a very curated identity Bugaboo wants associated with this product.  Palpable evidence of a very specific cool-factor and clear parameters of an elite target audience run throughout the campaign. The proscribed consumer is very design-conscious, economically stable, has plentiful discretionary time, is paid or consulted for their unique sense of taste, is part of a dual-income household, and is comfortable with a visibly unique self-identity evidenced in dress and grooming.  This is distinctively not a product being marketed toward cookie-cutter soccer moms.  A consumer wishing to distinguish herself may feel that this product would communicate that she is not one of the crowd, but belongs rather to an elite class of design-savvy hipsters.  The existence and highlighting of stroller accessories from the brand’s Andy Warhol collection make this correlation unmistakable.

Bugaboo has very carefully chosen the subjects for these profiles then, to be in keeping with the “identity of self” that they want their customers to believe that they are buying.  They are all involved in design or social media careers (or both).  They all visit museums or art galleries within their short profiles.  They are also solidly selected from within a niche of art and design centered living.  None of them appear to be single parents, or show any inclination toward making decisions based on economic restrictions.  These are, as curated, people who are maximizing their urban experience.  They are maximizing benefits of city living (access to culture and design) while seemingly impervious to its challenges (cost of living or tight quarters).  They also appear to be maximizing benefits and minimizing inconveniences of parenting.  There is no indication that they’ve had to make accommodations in their adult-centric lives by introducing children into their families.

            As we observe these individuals, there are invariably mixed patterns of the degree of interpersonal consciousness displayed in the adults. We do not see the all-inclusive blasé attitude Simmel described, but there are elements of it. Jarno (profile #5, Amsterdam) actively avoids other pedestrians in one shot, but is also seen congenially chatting with his shopkeeper friend Nielleke.  He appears to be utterly alone with his son inside the Stedelijk museum, but is then seen chatting with the barista while ordering a coffee afterward.  It is possible that blasé is too incompatible with the vibrancy of unique identity the brand is seeking to establish.

            The profiles that include ambulatory children are even more mixed in the consciousness portrayed.  Joy’s family (profile #6, Los Angeles) actively engages with farmer’s market musicians and a vendor playing hopscotch. And the baby-wearing that occurs in profile #2 (Nyoro and Rinko, Tokyo) introduces and heightens interpersonal consciousness, as do scenes in that profile where children are apparently oblivious to the personal space of others.  Indeed, once children and their own volition are introduced, it becomes complicated for the films to keep the focus on the adults’ experience with the stroller, which is really what they are trying to sell.  The children’s greater engagement with their environments becomes a secondary, more ephemeral focus of the films and a more difficult, though not altogether impossible, factor to brand and sell.  Likely for this reason footage of the children is kept to a minimum in each of the City Profiles.

            Simmel’s description of the metropolitan man simply doesn’t ring true for the metropolitan baby, “The metropolitan type of man…exists in a thousand individual variants- develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him.  He reacts with his head instead of his heart.”[16] These children are, at best, still developing that protective organ. Their response to their environment is far more conscious and sensitive than that of their adult counterparts.   Their unpredictable interactions with their environment are likely why we see so little of them in these profiles.  (Phoenix, profile 5, appears to do nothing but sleep in his stroller). It is far more difficult for behavior with such a high level of consciousness to be converted into a marketable, relatable identity directly corresponding with the product.

            Simmel’s assumption that the metropolitan man has already developed callousness toward the quantity of humanity he encounters is oddly silent about just how and when he becomes that way.  It appears that metropolitan kids, despite having only known the city environment, do not conform to Simmel’s expectations for urban behavior.  Callousness is, then potentially as much an adult tendency as a city-dweller’s tendency.

            There is a strong theme of incomparability, reminiscent of the paradoxical need described by Simmel, running throughout these profile videos, as each profiled parent appears to be firmly in control of their own destiny and the design of their environment.  Based on what is presented it appears that discretionary time is a limitless resource for these people, and that they use it to enrich their incomparable, unique, value-laden lives with culturally rich, rather adult-centric activities.  In short, they are the kind of chic that a consumer might be willing to spend nearly $700 to self-inculcate.

            This imbuing of the product with implied social capital is likely to be an effective marketing tool when considered relative to an audience fitting Simmel’s description of a metropolitan man. “Life is composed more and more of these impersonal contents and offerings which tend to displace the genuine personal colorations and incomparabilities.  This results in the individual’s summoning the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to preserve his most personal core.  He has to exaggerate this personal element in order to remain audible even to himself.”[17] Bugaboo seems to believe Simmel’s claim that urban men (and women) are exceptionally desperate to define their identity with exaggerated, even exorbitant elements.  The company recognizes a willingness in its customers to invest in an otherwise rote product if they can purposefully absorb it into their constructed identity. They cater to this impulse.

Conclusions and directions for future analysis

            As selling the consumer on the social capital (or “cool-factor”) of this product becomes as important as demonstrating its tangible features, the extension of the Bugaboo Bee advertising campaign into more user-content based social media seems enormously effectual.  The invitation to consumers to essentially become a part of the brand, and ingrain it into their own personal branding certainly reinforces the idea that this product has the power to positively alter the identity of its owner.  But the social media platform created by Bugaboo also creates an augmented sense of control and particularity for those who use it.  Each participant who uses the hashtag #beeinthecity on either of the larger social media platforms Twitter or Instagram automatically has created for them their own gallery on the Bee in the City website.[18] This empowering invitation to consumers to cultivate and curate an identity for themselves, tied to this product, is likely to touch a powerful chord with an urban dweller wrestling with the kind of insecurity Simmel describes.

            These social media platforms, and the potential they create for interacting with a larger group of prospective peers than the pace of physical city life may facilitate, also enlarges the sense of identity for users, for “Man does not end with the limits of his body or the area comprising his immediate activity. Rather it is the range of the person constituted by the sum of effects emanating from him temporally and spatially.”[19] The sum of those effects can certainly seem amplified when they are instantly shared with a receptive virtual audience.  In fact, participation in such a platform seems to simultaneously intensify and circumvent different factors of Simmel’s metropolitan inner-life.  On the one hand, online social mediums dramatically increase both the pace and intensity of stimulation available to users, and very likely affect the level of sensitivity and consciousness in comparable ways.  But conversely, in a campaign like this there is an increase in the types of affirming, personal interactions that seem poised to fill the need for “intimate emotional relations between persons…founded in their individuality.”[20] The potential to have an increase in human interaction that is disproportionately steeped in affirmation, like-mindedness, and intimacy (relative to interpersonal experiences in a public urban area) creates an environment of stimulation that does not foster a proportionate decrease in social consciousness.

            So while the Bugaboo Bee campaigns seem to be about facilitating the needs of families, they are more effectively fulfilling a goal of creating an illusion, or possibly even a reality of social capital for the adults considering this purchase.  The material in the campaign is ultimately only nominally about meeting physical, practical needs of the children using the products, and far more about meeting emotional, social, and psychological needs of the adults pushing them around.  While children are mildly present in most of the Bee in the City portion of the campaign, they are primarily tropes, and their wills, interests, or volition are invisible compared to that of their parents.  The adult need for an incomparable sense of self in urban environments becomes the ultimate driving force and selling point of the ad campaign.

            As one looks across the spectrum of the entire product campaign, the trend is that the less direct control the company had over the production of content, the more the campaign becomes about lifestyle and identity and less about product features.  Once fully immersed in the social media end of that spectrum, it no longer matters that the Bee is a “complete urban stroller,” it matters that is a “chic stroller” poised to positively affect the identity of the consumer.  Bugaboo seems to be eager to subversively embrace the cool-factor while purportedly focusing on more tangible features.

            This same spectrum also demonstrates a marked change in the appearance of identifiable embodied persons. As the product information website and video have a notable lack of human bodies, at the social media end of the spectrum, the twitter feed is bursting with faces and their personalities.  It appears that as social media platforms are used to fulfill the need for establishing unique, unmistakable identity, then the increase in stimulation available there may not result in a proportional decrease in consciousness. 

            Based on this example, many of Simmel’s observations about urban life still ring true, but had he been able to observe the hyper-connectedness of the Internet and social media, he may not have restricted his concern about overstimulation to the city dweller.  His principles of filtering and reckoning are relevant for any person attempting to discriminate and filter the quantity of content available online, regardless of location. The intensely social and personal nature of many social media platforms may also have given him pause.  There seems to be a gap in his 1903 theory when the content of the stimulation is deeply personal and entrenched in social capital rather than the impersonality of a money economy, as is evident in social media in the early 21^st century.  Applying Simmel’s own theories to cover this gap, we find a tension of overstimulation and fiscal reckoning versus intimacy and unique identity that can be applied beyond the Bugaboo Bee campaign to the evolving world of online social and commercial media.

Works Cited

Putnam, Robert. (2000), “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” (Simon and Schuster).

Simmel, Georg. (1903, Copyright 1950), “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (The Free Press, New York) Copyright 1950.

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[1] Simmel, Georg. (1903, Copyright 1950), “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (The Free Press, New York) Copyright 1950

[2] Ibid page 409

[3] Ibid page 410

[4] Ibid page 423

[5]  http://beeinthecity.bugaboo.com/

[6] Putnam, Robert. (2000), “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” (Simon and Schuster).
[7] http://www.bugaboo.com/learn/bugaboo-bee

[8] http://beeinthecity.bugaboo.com/

[9] http://360.bugaboo.com/

[10] https://twitter.com/Bugaboo

[11] http://www.bugaboo.com/learn/bugaboo-bee

[12] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbzRk5Stj_Q

[13] Simmel, Georg. (1903, Copyright 1950), “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (The Free Press, New York) Copyright 1950 (page 410)

[14] Ibid page 414

[15] http://beeinthecity.bugaboo.com/#/profiles

[16] Simmel, Georg. (1903, Copyright 1950), “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (The Free Press, New York) Copyright 1950 (page 410)

[17] Ibid page 422

[18] (For example, see http://beeinthecity.bugaboo.com/#/user/tw/370594541)

[19] Simmel, Georg. (1903, Copyright 1950), “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (The Free Press, New York) Copyright 1950 (page 419)

[20] Ibid page 411

Ace in the Hole (1951); the circus and the truth

“Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.” 
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

By definition, an “Ace in the Hole” is a hidden, or unfair advantage, kept back until the perfect opportunity presents itself (referring to a face-down Ace in stud poker).  In the 1951 Billy Wilder Film, loosely informed by the true story of Floyd Collins, Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) is a thwarted, ambitious journalist who is unabashedly on the prowl for an opportunity to regain his big city career.  Before he even stumbles upon the story he is able to use toward that end, it has already become relatively evident how he is scheming for events to pan out.

While Chuck Tatum claims that he “doesn’t make things happen, [he] just writes about them,” the film makes it very clear that Tatum’s actions intentionally and unintentionally alter every conceivable course of events in the story of Leo Minosa.  Dewey claimed that “what actually happens (action) is dependent on the presence or absence of perception and communication.”  Tatum appears utterly anomic as his drive to craft a “perfect story” overpowers any morality, honesty, civility or integrity that his character may have had claim to.  He willfully crafts a distorted perception of reality, knowing full-well how it would affect public opinion, all while creating such a loathsome actual reality (at least as perceived by the apparent omniscience of the camera), that his “ace in the hole” devolves into an albatross around his neck.  

As Dewey also purported that “the ultimate harm is that the understanding by man of his own affairs and his ability to direct them are sapped at their root when knowledge of nature is disconnected from its human function.”  Tatum grasps hold of and maximizes that disconnect toward what he believes is his own advantage.  He capitalizes on corrupt individuals, bargaining with them to keep Leo Minosa trapped in a cave longer, thus allowing him to craft a more elaborate, more profitable story.  When Leo ultimately dies of pneumonia, Tatum’s perfect story crumbles beneath him.  He must deal with having murdered a man he had exploited unconscionably, who had genuinely believed in his friendship.  This complicated grief, coupled with a probably punctured spleen, lead to his collapse at the end of the film, as he is finally, frantically, trying to “tell the truth.”

Describing the public’s habit of hero worship, Walter Lippmann pointed out that in times of security “symbols of public opinion are subject to check, comparison, argument…” and that a fluidity of inquiry helps to maintain a certain objectivity of truth.  But that in less certain times (emergencies, wars) there are a greater range of feelings aroused, and that men are more likely to respond emotionally than objectively.   Since, as Lippmann also maintained “men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities,” and fictions are not necessarily equivalent to lies, but “rather a representation of the environment made by man himself.”  It is not surprising that the public and the press ate up Tatum’s constructed story just as he had hoped.  It was based enough in reality to be a fiction, and not a lie.  (As Tatum points out to the newspapermen, he did make sure there was a man trapped down there, even if everything else was altered or constructed).

Around the few concrete facts Tatum did use, he also constructed an elaborate, rather deceptive pseudo-environment.  He mediated for the public their relationship with the reality of Leo Minosa’s situation.  He lied abjectly about the nature of Leo’s relationship with his wife, but had no need to embellish the grief of Leo’s parents.  He artificially painted the sheriff and himself as protagonists, but Leo’s own background as a soldier was factual and easily used to increase “human interest.” The most devastating altering of reality, however, occurs in Tatum manipulating the rescue operation, encouraging blackmail of the contractors to make them choose a longer option for the rescue, in hopes of having time to build his story to a nationwide fever pitch.  Ultimately, is appears that Tatum’s interference altered everything about this “story.”  And as we watch Leo’s bereft father, facing the mountain that held his dead son, with acres of litter from “the public” before him, we are led to infer that everything could and should have transpired much differently without the interference of “journalism.”

Lippmann, admitting to flaws in journalism, listed factors that inhibit access to “facts.”  Several of these are painfully present in Tatum’s interference.  He constructs artificial censorships and limits social contact, primarily through his corrupt pact with the Sheriff and with Lorraine Minosa.  Nobody but Tatum is allowed to speak directly to Leo, and Lorraine is threatened when she speaks to other reporters.  Tatum also takes advantage of the distortion created “when events are compressed into short messages.”  His intense interest in the commercial success of his story not only destroys the integrity of his journalism, but is alters action, choices, and events with varying degrees of devastation for different people.

The treatment of “the public” or the masses in this piece is more in keeping with Lippman’s assertions than with Dewey’s, though the concerns of both writers about how the public deals with misinformation are realized.  The public, especially as embodied by “Mr. and Mrs. America,” the Federbers, are terribly gullible, and their interest and perceived investment in the story of Leo Minosa are easily crafted and led by Tatum.  Despite the artificial nature of their “relationship” with Leo, their grief at his passing is viable, even if it is neither immediate nor over a real relationship or even the "real" Leo.  It appears that this “public” is inevitably led by the crafting of public opinion, and so in keeping with Lippmann’s argument, what is needed is better, more inquisitive journalism by an elect breed of incorruptible journalists.  This type of integrity is represented in the film by Mr. Boot, the owner of the Albuquerque newspaper, with multiple needlepointed “Tell the Truth”s adorning his office.

At some point between when Leo innocently asks Tatum, “You wouldn’t be lying to me now, would you Chuck?” and when Tatum disgustedly proclaims over the loudspeaker to the crowd, “The circus is over.” Tatum appears to have internalized the gravity of what he has done.  Before his character collapses, possibly dead, back in the Albuquerque newspaper office, he has a short-lived new directive of voicing the story of what actually happened, and how a crazed reporter could string so many people along to such a devastating end.  Whether the exposé of this corruption ever surfaced in the reality of the film is unresolved, but the film itself is the actual exposé, and invites viewers to examine the critical thinking that goes into their own news consumption, and to recognize that their relationship with reality is always mediated, and often mediated imperfectly. 

Nearly integral Realism – Hirokazu Koreeda’s Still Walking

Plot summaries of Hirokazu Koreeda’s Still Walking are invariably misleading.  By nature a plot summary implies that the narrative it sums up has a skeletal, reductive plot arc, and that every other technical or narrative element serves to further the plot’s impetus.  Many films accommodate such an Aristotelian form, but Still Walking is not one of them. 

Rather than plot, Koreeda’s quiet film is about characters and relationships.  It is not even a character study, but an observation of complex relationships.  Despite being ultimately constructed and fictional, the film mirrors as closely as a subjective construction can an objective observation of a family dynamic.  Unlike more traditional narratives, it does not accommodate quick categorization of characters.  None of these family members can be succinctly summarized any more than the film as a whole can.  No member of this family an be encapsulated in a single scene, rather the complexity and weight of the entire family’s history and imperfect communication becomes more apparent with each passing scene. Passing judgment on any character becomes difficult and rather irrelevant.

Brecht declared that Realism was determined by how, when, and for what class a narrative was made.  Koreeda is said to have made this film to voice his sentiments after the death of his mother.  Such an exploration of the pedantic side of grief, blunted but not extinguished by time, creates a very universally applicable mirror, a very democratic tool for any viewer to look into and see shadows of themselves and people they know.  Other than a brief epilogue, the entire film takes place within 24 hours, with no overtly important events occurring within that span.  The most definitive event relative to what we see is the death of the Yokoyama family’s oldest son, Shunpei 12 years prior.  By temporally removing this observation of life from the event that defines it, and by temporally restricting us to one day’s interactions, the film forces us to focus on the nuances of the interactions of the living family members in order to find meaning or understanding in what we see.

Interestingly, Koreeda includes the cinematically neglected demographic of the elderly, another element making this film more reflective of reality. Certainly the aging parents Kyohei,, the reluctantly retired doctor, and Toshiko, the powerhouse of domesticity, are the center of the relational dynamics in the film.  Their quirks of old age are perpetually counterpointed by moments of unexpected passion or softness. Their grief at losing their son is still palpable, but their very lived-in home is visually filled with ghosts of all three of their children as well as their younger selves.

The film embraces prosaic moments and never hurries them along.  There is a distinct lack of editing-out or pacing.  Many things are allowed to occur in real-time with a minimum of cuts or angles. We see people talking with their mouths full, and we listen to complete conversations that do not arrive directly at their destination, if they arrive at all.

In this sense the film is very Brechtian in its purpose and its relationship with its audience.  But it also embodies the preservation of life by a representation of life discussed by Bazin.  Especially in the many prosaic details of Toshiko’s food preparation, the film captures a copy of real living, in a way even more immediate than a still photograph.  Despite it’s inevitably subjective, constructed nature, the film attempts in earnest to look at a high-fidelity version of reality from the outside, establishing and revealing relationships through the observation of physical interactions within the frame.  We begin to see how these people spend their time, how they choose to self-edit in different company, and what worries they carry around with them.

Bazin said that true realism recognized the need to give a significant expression to the world both concretely and in its essence. So many of the minute, concrete details captured in this film accomplish both ends.  They both serve as a near-perfect mimesis of the actual events that occurred in front of the camera, representative of a billion domestic chores accomplished quietly around the world, and they serve to capture the essence of the reality Koreeda is attempting to represent: the complex organic microcosm that is a home, filled with dynamic memories and complicated by countless previous interactions. The moments when that essence is most effectively captured are electrifying forays into the potential of realism. 

There is one very Renoir-esque shot when Ryota, Yukari, and Atsushi arrive at the Family home.  The shot begins after we have seen Toshiko head to answer the door.  In a long, deep focus, static shot we see her answer the door, see the bustle of everyone removing their shoes, and then eventually see everyone leave the frame to continue further into the house.  The shot itself is remarkably like-life.  If we, a viewer, were standing in that spot watching those events transpire we'd have a very parallel image to ingest.  There is no expositional dialogue in this scene, but by viewing it in this less-altered way we are able to identify the nervous energy in the interactions, the nuances in the fronts put on by different individuals in front of certain others, and a terrific sense of the space this is all transpiring in.

At one point Ryota, the surviving son complains, ""Normal," everyone keeps using that word." As much as anything singular, this may well represent the essence of the film.  There is no attempt to draw out the extraordinary, or to create or resolve conflict in this film.  It is largely an observation of “normal” that allows us to contemplate how loaded, complicated and fragile “normal” can be.  Brecht talked of how realism changes the hunter into the quarry.  Rather than hunting for a satisfactory catharsis, the viewer is invited to engage with this film as a quarry.  To dig and sift and hold on to what resonates.  This exploration of characters without an agenda of how the audience should judge or interpret them was especially evident in Kyohei and Toshiko.  Their characters seemed to become more rich and complicated as scenes passed.  Kyohei started off seeming rather broodish, but as he somewhat helplessly watches his neighbor taken away in an ambulance his sense of contradiction and fallibility is palpable.  Toshiko seems initially to be a power-nurturer, but when she admits to wishing she had someone to hate for her son’s death, and to intentionally causing anguish for the awkward young man who was saved at the expense of her son’s life, she becomes remarkably human.  She, and the entire Yokoyama family, become so very real.  The film is about real life, real grief, real death, real aging, real disappointment, and real relationships. 

Semiotic Tricks in 500 Days of Summer

500 Days of Summer opens with a standard disclaimer, “Author’s Note: The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblances to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.”  But then follows with, “Especially you Jenny Beckman.”  And then “Bitch.”  The initial statement is rote, expected, and part of the established expectation for works of cinematic fiction.  The latter two parts take what is a standard film procedure that slips by most film viewers almost unconsciously, and makes it a pronounced, formalistic, self-aware statement. 

Following this, there is an aural cue for the film opening, a whistle, it begins wildly reminiscent of “Moon River” from Breakfast atTiffany's. (Almost identical to the Andy Williams version), but after just the first 2 notes whistled, the melody turns to a minor key, and sound effects accompanying a visual sketch of a city skyline are creeping over it.  (A lot of things about the film are set up to make the two films seem parallel.  But then they run amok.)  The film immediately introduces its device for helping the viewer navigate its nonlinearity – a day counter.  It spins and lands us anywhere within the 500 days of the title.  We begin at day 488, and with no orientation of what has come before, we are unable to tell in this scene, taking place on the park bench overlooking downtown L.A., what the status of the relationship between the two main characters is.  We see them sitting next to each other on the bench, we see Summer’s character smiling, (match cut) Tom’s character smile back weakly, and we see her be-ringed hand on top of his.  With no context for these images, a viewer is likely to draw from similar visual cues in previously experienced films and assume these two are romantically involved in this scene.  But we immediately get an omniscient voiceover stating, “This is a story of boy meets girl,”  which proceeds to introduce the two characters by pointing out their fundamental differences over the point of love.  Then tells the viewer, “This is a story of boy meets girl.  But you should know up front, this is not a love story.”

Thus the film has immediately begun by using conventions and codes of the romantic comedy genre, and also “abused” them or “played with” them by relying on the viewer’s misreading of the text as a romantic comedy.  Interestingly enough, the film actually is a love story in that it is a story about a romantic relationship, but it is not a love story with a concise, anticipated resolution, which is to say it does not conform to IMR or the viewer’s expectation based on experience with films that do conform to IMR practices, but rather takes a post-structuralist approach.

(500) Days of Summer Video Shot Analysis from Heather Frymark on Vimeo.

The film consistently plays with the viewer’s tendency to cognize, as described by David Bordwell, and to hypothesize about what will happen.  Despite having told the viewer at the offset that this is “not a love story,” the film proceeds to use conventions and norms of film language to indicate otherwise, creating a tension within the viewer between what is known and what is expected.

The film essentially tells us in the opening sequence that Tom’s paradigm for romance is based on IMR.  He “grew up knowing that he would never truly be happy until the day he met “the one.” This belief stemmed from early exposure to sad British pop music and a total misreading of the movie, “The Graduate.””  Thus as the film proceeds to use IMR methods, they are perceived as being congruent with Tom’s own experience and perception of his relationships. 

The way that poststructuralist methods shake up the experience of an IMR accustomed viewer can be seen as representative of how Summer’s non-conformity with Tom’s romantic ideal and expectation shake up his reality, or even in the differences between their compatibility-as-perceived by Tom and their actual incompatibility.

Tom’s perception of their compatibility is displayed as being identical to cues used in IMR to signify compatibility.  Their similar taste in music, their willingness to display quirky behavior in public together, and consistent uses of “the gaze” in matching reverse shots.  However, as the film progresses cyclically and disenchantment sets in, we see less and less of this blatant “compatibility.”  In fact, after the scene wherein Tom’s younger sister asks him to try to remember things less infatuatedly and to remember the warning signs, we see an altogether discontented, disconnected, and ennui Summer.  We experience David Bordwell’s forgetting and remembering as we see the same scene or same shot in a newly framed context over and over. 

By the time we arrive at the end of the 500 days, we are back at day 488, back at the park bench, and we have forgotten and remembered that this was how the film opened.  We now know that Summer has married someone else, that Tom is still attached to the cinematic ideal of her that he’s created in his mind, but that never actually existed embodied in the world of the text.  Tom was in love with the idea of Summer, but never actually with Summer, though the two initially looked identical according to IMR conventions, especially the use of music over montage.  And depending on the viewer’s attachment to conventional genre norms, they too may

Have been fooled into thinking that Summer was “the one” for Tom.   But by ending the film with Summer happily in love with and married to someone else, the lack of reality in IMR, and the lack of closure in reality.

Spellbound, the divided eye, and Baudry's dream screen.

Spellbound was released in 1945, only 6 years after the death of Sigmund Freud.  At the outset, it portends to offer some type of earnest exploration of psychoanalysis, as it opens with the statement, “Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear ... and the evils of unreason are driven from the human soul.“

However, the film proceeds to treat psychoanalysis somewhat flippantly, and there are no remotely realistic representations of the practice within the film.  As Hitchcock insisted when these incongruities were objected by the advising psychoanalysts, “My dear, it's only a movie.”  If the film does not, in fact, explore psychoanalysis with any depth, it does at length plumb the depths of the Oedipal fantasy and Oedipal guilt complex.

But with rather clumsily constructed characters, how does this Oedipal exploration work?  It would appear that this narrative relies heavily upon the division between reality and perception, as much in the viewer’s phenomenological experience as in the experiences of characters within the plot. The idea of division is rife in the film, with overt binaries between old and new practices, between youth and old age, parents and children, conflicting identities, conflicting female roles, agency and fate, material reality and psychical reality, and the conscious and the subconscious.  Ultimately all of this division points to the division between the desire within the text, and the desire of the text, and how the film ultimately becomes about the latter rather than the former.

Spellbound came to be made largely out of producer DavidSelznick’s own experience with psychoanalysis and his desire to make a movie about it.  Psychoanalysis went on to become a popular plot device in suspense films later in the 1940s, but in this case its use was innovative.  He purchased rights to the novel, The Houseof Dr. Edwardes, and hired his own psychoanalyst, May Romm, to advise Hitchcock.  Hitchcock and Selznick appear to have had fairly incompatible visions for the film though, and their dissonance over this film irreparably damaged their working relationship.  Selznick (and film censors) appears to have insisted on the removal of the bulk of the dream sequence designed by surrealist Salvador Dali, leaving only what was necessarily for plot propulsion.  The images of multiple eyes, and of the pair of scissors cutting through an eye are the only strong surrealist images that remained, and they are appreciably symbolic of the duality inherent in the film. The film, or rather it’s score by MiklósRózsa also pioneered the use of the Theremin in the score. (See: Spellbound Concerto, approx 4:22-7:55) The instrument is played without actually touching the device, and the pitch alters based on the proximity of the instrumentalist’s hands to it.  By adding this unfamiliar instrument to scenes involving dreams or repressed memories, an uncanny effect is evoked, as what had seemed familiar in the score (always repeating motifs previously introduced) becomes unfamiliar when played on the theremin.

The film plays with Baudry’s idea of double space of the subject.  Both the conscious and unconscious are explored in the character first introduced as Dr. Edwardes, but who later turns out to be an amnesiac John Ballantine.  The film is also, more subversively, playing with the conscious and unconscious of the viewer, providing them with the “desire of desire” by fulfilling Ballantine’s Oedipal fantasy.

The film opens with the pretense that Dr. Edwardes is arriving to take the helm at Green Manors, a psychiatric inpatient hospital.  The current director, Dr. Murchison, is being forced into retirement by his own mental breakdown, from which he appears to have recovered.  Dr. Constance Peterson, the only female psychoanalysis on staff, is firmly platonic and professional (even cold) in her interactions until the supposed Dr. Edwardes (John Ballantine) rather abruptly sweeps her off of her feet.  She immediately abandons any semblance of professionalism and spends the rest of the film trying to cure his amnesia through psychotherapy and prove his innocence in the death of the real Dr. Edwardes.   

In keeping with Freud’s criteria for “the uncanny” the viewer is left in uncertainty about whether Ballantine is guilty of the murder.  (Freud referred to uncertainty whether an object or character is familiar or “other”, such as dead/alive, animate/inanimate) Freud said this should be “done in such a way that attention is not focused directly upon this uncertainty, so the matter is not cleared up directly.”

This was the first of Hitchcock’s films to question visual perspective, displacement, and guilt.  He went on to explore these devices (arguably with more finesse) in Rear Window and Vertigo, both as cinematic devices and as subject matter within the films.  Seeing him toy with it here is revealing.

The plot sets up John Ballantine with an overt, unmistakeable Oedipal conflict. Constance is a blatant mother figure, and the role of a father figure is divided amongst male characters in the film. There is guilt for the death of one father figure, Dr. Edwardes, who was Ballantine’s psychoanalysis prior to his death.  Fear of a punishing father (both in Dr. Murcheson and in the law), and ultimate identification with a good father (Dr. Brulov, Constance’s mentor who says “any husband of Constance is a husband of mine.”)

Constance’s maternal nature is referred to repeatedly.  One other doctor says that he can “detect the outcroppings of a mother instinct” in her relations with Balantine/impostor Dr. Edwardes.  Brulov reprimands her “You are not his mama.”  Yet Brulov and Constance both hover over Ballantine like concerned parents, despite his alarming behavior, and Brulov even says to him “I am going to be your father figure.” 

Despite the uncanny themes of Ballantines involuntary repetition of psychotic episodes whenever confronted with parallel lines or the color white, the film seems overwhelmingly designed to accommodate pleasure, rather than fear in the viewer.

Baudry claimed that by it’s very nature cinema puts viewer into regressive, passive, oral, narcissistic state and that films are dream screens, like a mother’s breast for an infant after nursing.  That cinema is inherently Oedipal, leaning toward a state of complete satisfaction parallel to the oral phase in infant development.  By its repeated, overt oedipal references, this film seems rather self-aware of its function as a fantasy for its audience. 

Ultimately, it is not Ballantine, but rather the fantasy constructed for him that becomes the motivating force behind the action in the film. Ballantine himself is a rather passive character.  He is more acted upon than active.  This allows a viewer to split the vision of the film (as perhaps alluded to by Dali’s scissors?) and appropriate himself in the fantasy created for Ballantine.  In this context, the bizarre behavior of Constance makes more sense.  For a film that claims to be about psychoanalysis to portray a psychoanalysis behaving so contrary to her profession only makes sense if her character exists not to illustrate psychoanalysis accurately, but to satisfy the viewer’s oedipal fantasy completely.  Her transition from a mother/caretaker to a romantic trope is inevitable in this context.

Ultimately, and none-too-subtly, the film changes from being about the Oedipal issues of John Ballantine to being about the Oedipal fantasy of the viewer.  There is a shift from desire as represented in the film to the desire of the film by the viewer.  This is most clearly evidenced by Ballantine’s absence for nearly all of the sequences involving exposition or conflict resolution.  After his arrest, Ballantine disappears from the film entirely, but the fantasy constructed for him remains and continues of its own volition for the viewer’s pleasure. 

This seems like an easy example of Baudry’s  “Desire of Desire.”  The viewer’s desire to see Ballantine’s fantasy completed becomes more important to the film than Ballantine’s own presence.   “Symbol becomes merged with what it represents,” and Ballantine seems to represent the viewer’s fantasies.   The film invites “transference of identification” from Ballantine’s experience within his cinematic world to the viewer’s own interaction with the entire fantasy.