The Square (Film Essay)

　







　

The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.

　
1.

Ruben Ostlund is a Swedish director born in 1976. His film The Square (2016) was awarded the the Palm d’Or prize at Cannes in 2017. If he continues at his present pace, he will be one of the world’s foremost, and most interesting, directors.

2.

Ostlund spells his name with an umlaut over the "o". I can’t reproduce that effect in this note.

3.

Ostlund parents were card-carrying members of the Swedish Communist party. He was born and raised on the island of Styrso, near Gothenburg, Sweden.

4.

Once, Ostlund traveled with his parents to Ireland. He was ten or eleven. In the city of Cork, he saw children his age who were homeless and beggars. – How could this be? He thought. At that time, there were no homeless people or beggars in Sweden.

5.

Ostlund is an excellent skier. He began making films to document his exploits, and those of his friends, on the ski slopes. These were "extreme sport films." The films were successful and Ostlund gradually became interested in other kinds of movies.

6.

The two films that Ostlund claims to have influenced him most powerfully are Harmony Korinne’s Gummo and Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown. Both films follow the adventures of misfits – in Gummo (1997), Korinne shows us outsiders and marginalized people in Xenia, Ohio, a town destroyed by a great tornado (the catastrophe hovers in the background of the film). Code Unknown (2000) involves interactions between French Parisians and refugees – Ostlund has claimed to film the be one of the greatest movies ever made in a poll conducted by Sight and Sound. Korinne’s movie is shapeless, improvised, and haphazardly shot; Code Unknown is shot with icy, carefully orchestrated precision.

7.

The Guitar Mongoloid (2004) is Ostlund’s first feature. It involves outsiders interacting with one another in a Swedish town – from reviews, it seems to be closely related to Korinne’s Gummo. Ostlund next directed Involuntary (2008) – the film tells five interconnected stories. Play (2011) is a disturbing film about Black kids bullying White kids – the movie ignited an enormous controversy in Sweden about racism. All of Ostlund’s films have been intensely controversial in Sweden.

8.

Force Majeur (2014) is Ostlund’s "break-out" picture, the movie that first brought him extensive fame outside of Sweden. Force Majeur is a study of embattled Swedish masculinity. At a ski resort, an avalanche suddenly roars down a mountain side threatening a the chalet at the foot of the ski-slope. The protagonist, who is married with two children, instinctively flees from terrace café engulphed by the avalanche, abandoning his wife and kids. Later, he claims he didn’t abandon them but, instead, got lost in the haze of powdery snow enveloping the café. Of course, it’s the 21^st century and women have long outgrown the notion that men are their protectors. So why should the protagonist’s momentary loss of nerve, his cowardice, matter to anyone? But, of course, it does. The film is laugh-out loud funny in spots but, also, disturbing. At the beginning of the movie, there’s a shot of the entire Swedish family, all of them healthy, slender, and well-groomed, carefully polishing their teeth with matching Sonicare toothbrushes – the shot perfectly establishes the film’s themes. Life is supposed to be within our control. If we brush conscientiously ("a conscientiously applied program of dental hygiene") and floss, we won’t lose our teeth. And, then, someone punches you in the mouth.

9.

Some critics believe Ostlund’s films Force Majeur and The Square are best considered as "cringe comedy." This is comedy of the kind shown on HBO’s Curb your Enthusiasm and the network TV show The Good Place.

10.

In 2015, Ostlund worked with Kalle Boman to install a glowing square in a museum in Varnamo, Sweden, the Vandalorum Museum. A plaque posted in the square stated the words with which I have begun these notes. People immediately began using the square for protests, impromptu musical performances, and marriage proposals. The square was, then, relocated to a public park in Varnamo. Teenagers repeatedly stole the plaque and protestors appropriated the square for their protests. Buskers performed there and people got married within the square.

11.

For The Square, Ostlund planned to stage a public concert with an actor portraying conduct modeled on GG. Allin. Allin was a punk ("murder") rock performer, who ripped his flesh open on stage, defecated, and threw the excrement into the audience after tasting it. (Allin, needless to say, is not with us today – he died of a heroin overdose in 1993). Ostlund viewed video tapes of Allin’s stage shows, most of which resulted in his arrest and imprisonment, and determined that these kinds of antics were too extreme. So he looked for an alternative.

12.

Oleg Kullik is a Moscow-born Russian conceptual artist. He says that his art works disregard "the animal-human horizon" – that is, he acts like a dog. In one of his installations, Kullik stood in a museum, chained to the wall, with a sign next to him warning people to stay away. When someone got too close, Kullik lunged at the man and bit him – then, he tore free from his chain and destroyed several art works also in the room. An enormous controversy ensued.

13.

Ostlund’s The Square contains a scene already infamous – this is the episode, based on Kullik’s conceptual piece, in which the American actor, Terry Notary, pretends to be an ape and terrorizes a black-tie gathering. To prepare for this scene, Ostlund spend several days at a zoo in a cage with Bonobo apes learning how to interact with them.

14.

The Square was on everyone’s ten-best list in 2017 when the picture had its international premiere at Cannes. It was the most highly reviewed film (in polls by international critics) in that year. The picture won the Palm d’Or in Cannes and just about every other award available. It was nominated for, but did not win, an Oscar.

15.

Terry Notary, the muscular fellow who plays the ape man, was born in southern California and very early in his life diagnosed with extreme hyperactivity. Notary, however, was a superb gymnast and went to UCLA where he competed in that sport and took theater classes. Later, he was hired by Tim Burton as a motion coach to work with actors simulating apes in that director’s remake of Planet of the Apes (2001). He has appeared in motion capture animation in The Hobbit trilogy, Avatar, and many other films.

16.

"Monkey see, monkey do." Ostlund is interested in the so-called "Bystander Effect" – this is where a violent act is committed but the people watching do nothing, presumably because no one else is intervening.

17.

"Monkey see, monkey do." Ostlund says: "Human beings are imitating creatures." For this reason, Ostlund will not read, let alone direct, any film involving murder or killing. He believe such films are inducements to murder. But, paradoxically, I would argue that Ostlund’s films are terrifically violent in some ways – witness the infamous scene with the monkey man.

18.

"Monkey see, monkey do." Ostlund says that people who watch romantic comedies are more likely to jettison their wives or husbands in pursuit of some other relationship. He claims there are statistics showing this.

19

In Tarantino’s films, thugs always hold their pistols sideways. "Monkey see, monkey do." Since these films were released, hospitals have noted a large influx of people wounded in gun battles by morons who fire their pistols turned sideways. You can’t hit anything that way and so gun battles are more violent, requiring many more shots to kill or badly wound anyone.

20.

What are the limits of liberalism? Seamus Heaney once said that the violence in Northern Ireland was probably correlated to the Viking origins of that society. His book of poems, North, seems to develop this thesis – the IRA gangsters are placed in the context of Viking raids and mutilated bog bodies. But a critic applied common sense to Heaney’s fanciful argument – if we took him seriously, then, Norway and Sweden (and Denmark) should be the most violent societies on the face of the earth. They are, of course, among the most pacific.

　

21.

So what are the limits of liberalism? The Square is an experiment that tests this question. A neighborhood in Connecticut was very liberal and tolerant. The people in that place voted for the Democrats in every election, were opposed to all forms of bigotry, and vehemently supported immigration into this country. A researcher hired 80 Hispanic men and women for a study. The Latino people were covertly bused to the suburb and, then, paid to ride the train from the Connecticut station to Manhattan on a daily basis. Within a week, the people living in the neighborhood began to express strong anti-immigrant bias. The phenomenon is called NIMB – Not in my backyard.

22.

Cringe comedy – The Square contains several instances of "cringe comedy", most notably the post-coital squabble between the hero and the American journalist over a used condom. Cringe comedy was pioneered in the United States by the TV show The Office (2005 - 2013). Other notable examples are Larry David’s Curb your Enthusiasm and Da Ali G Show (as well as all of Sacha Baron Cohen’s films). In Da Ali G Show, Cohen’s character Ali G interviewed the well-known feminist Naomi Wolf. She was not in on the joke. Ali G asks Wolf: "Do you think women should have equal rights in the workplace." Wolf says yes and asks: "Do you?" "Well the problem with that," he responds, "is that they might start asking for that at home." (Naomi Wolf sued Cohen to keep the episode from airing in the United States and said he was "racist" for mimicking a Black man on his show. Cohen responded by saying that she was "quite a good rapper" – he had his guest do a rap with him at the end of their interviews – and that it was a shame that people couldn’t see that performance.)

23.

Are we really as tolerant and kind and generous as we think we are?