The State of Things

For about fifteen years, between his films Alice in the Cities (1974) and Wings of Desire (1987), Wim Wenders was the most interesting and consistently brilliant film maker in the world.  (Sadly, we know these this only in retrospect, after the "winning streak," as it were, has ended.)  Wenders made The State of Things in 1981 and 1982 under bizarre circumstances and this parable about the relationship between Hollywood and the European art cinema, superficially an unpromising subject, is one of the German directors greatest films.  Wenders' finest work always focuses on unrequited desire -- and there is no greater example of this phenomenon than the strained love affair between European intellectuals migrated from criticism into film making and their Hollywood counterparts.  The Europeans long to make films as simple and iconic as John Ford's The Searchers --they want to please the public and make a movie for the masses.  For their part, Hollywood directors often aspire to make films like Antonioni or Godard -- but the funding isn't available and, in this country, there are precious few interested in movies as art.  And, so, despite mutual longing, ne'er the twain shall meet.  Wenders experienced the agonies of this paradoxical relationship when he was recruited by the quixotic Francis Ford Coppola at Zoetrope Studios to make Hammett, a film noir backed by the big money and sweetened by being helmed by a prestige European art-house director.  Of course, the experience was a catastrophe for all involved.  Wenders knew how to make quirky film noir pictures -- his wonderful The American Friend (1977 with Dennis Hopper) demonstrated his proficiency in that genre.  And, yet, the pacing and idiosyncrasies of that film were very much European.  In effect, Coppola recruited Wenders for qualities that couldn't effectively be translated into an American-produced genre film; Wenders may have wanted to make a quick and dirty B-movie noir, but he was working for Coppola, at that time the King of Hollwood and the very incentives that lured him to Los Angeles -- the big budget, the high-gloss Hollywood technicians, and the big movie stars -- ultimately defeated the project:  Hammett is a nearly unwatchable mess and, sadly, presages later botched pictures that Wenders directed with American money, including Until the End of the World.  The State of Things is an allegory about the failure of Hammett and, although the theme may seem parochial and hyper-specialized, Wenders' picture is moving and exceptionally intelligent.

In The State of Things, everyone has a mania for representation.  The little girls on the set film everything with 8 millimeter cameras.  People incessantly take polaroids.  The actress who is the mother of the little girls sketches the other cast and crew around her.  Wenders shows us that people obsessively try to capture their reality in images.  But images, the film reminds us, aren't enough -- the images must be construed as narrative.  "Life isn't worth living without stories," someone says.  So the film documents a curious tension between the desire to simply chronicle existence in images and the need to frame those images by a plot.  Stories are always generic.  The reason we can have surprises in stories or twist endings is because tales all follow certain rules and comply with certain expectations.  Stories necessarily cite other stories.  And, for this reason, Wenders' film, about the need to draft pictures into the service of a plot, is densely allusive -- the characters refer to a dozen Hollywood Westerns, the hero dresses like Gary Cooper in Friendly Persuasion or High Noon, and, at the film's climax, there's a shoot-out in which the protagonist wields his camera like a six-shooter.  The most fundamental and classically beautiful stories told in cinema are Westerns -- and, throughout, the film The State of Things yearns romantically for the purity of the B-movie studio Western.  It is the clash between Wenders' philosophical deployment of theoretical issues about representation and images with his desire to make a Hollywood genre film that gives The State of Things it's special magic.

There is a plot that emerges tentatively from the curious becalmed stasis in the first two-thirds of The State of Things.  A film crew is shooting a movie near Lisbon.  The movie is a Hollywood science fiction production, a remake of Allen Dwan's The Last Man Alive, a low-budget post-apocalyptic survival tale made in 1961,  The director on the shoot, a German, Friedrich Munro (Patrick Bauchau) runs out of film and money.  After languishing for a few days during which the cast and crew flirt with one another, get drunk, and simply sit around in the hotel bar, Munro goes to LA to shake-down the producer and money-man Gordon for some dough.  It turns out that Gordon has used money laundered by the mob as the budget for the film and he's on the lam, moving from place to place in a Winnebago to avoid his murderous creditors.  (In one of the funniest plot points in all film, the mob decides to kill Gordon for misusing their money when the gangsters discover to their utter chagrin that the movie that they are financing has been shot in black and white and is, therefore, unmarketable in the United States.)  The unseen gangsters, metonymically represented by the shark-like chrome fins of a big, old Cadillac or Lincoln Continental prowling the Hollywood streets, finally catch up with Gordon and Friedrich and there's a climactic shoot-out.  Wenders shows the naïve German director, obviously a surrogate for himself, destroyed when caught in this cross-fire between commerce (the mob) and art.  Henri Alekhan, one of the greatest of all European cinematographers, shot most of the film and it is remarkably beautiful:  stark landscapes of the abandoned hotel and the ruins used as sets for the sci-fi film, barren interiors, and confrontations between characters in which the figures stand like statues within the armature of their own velvety shadows.  The Hollywood sequences, showing a strangely empty LA (it's the weekend but the empty parking lots give the place a post-apocalyptic ambience in keeping with the opening film within the film), are similarly atmospheric and pictorially stunning.  Wenders can't direct English-speaking actors and his cast is bizarre -- the Hollywood maverick director, Sam Fuller, plays himself, a cigar-chomping DP, and he's probably the best thing in the film, but its a caricature.  Viva here credited as Viva Auder, plays the glamorous movie star who has the lead role in the Sci-Fi film -- she can't act to save her soul and seems most effective in the film's one sex scene (she became famous for unsimulated sex scenes in Warhol's 1969 Blue Movie).  John Paul Getty III plays Dennis, the screenwriter who has sunk his own money in the film and will be ruined if the picture isn't produced.  (Getty's character is kinky and anxiety-ridden in keeping with the actor who was renowned for getting his ear cut-off when he was kidnapped by Maoist terrorists in 1973.)  None of these people can really act and just woodenly play themselves with the exception of Gordon (Alan Goorwitz aka Alan Garfield), the terrified but smarmy, money-man hiding in the Winnebago with his loyal factotum, Lou -- he's very good but seems a refugee from a Cassavetes film. The film is so strong that the bad acting actually seems to make sense -- at all points, we are conscious that we are watching a movie and, also, conscious that the movie is sliding into the conventions of bad genre film-making, one aspect of which is poor acting.  The movie is classically structured in three acts.  The first ten minutes shot in sepia is a film within a film -- it features masked characters wandering around a desert and sacrificing one of their members, a child, to their own survival.  This sequence is surprisingly scary and effective and, in fact, looks nothing like a Hollywood film -- it's more like some kind of meditation on Antonioni, the great Italian director whose movies always seem to take place in desolate locations after the end of the world.  The middle sequence, both funny and melancholy, involves the plight of the cast and crew, unpaid, and trapped in the decaying beach-front hotel near Lisbon -- in this hour-long sequence nothing occurs, but the film-making is extraordinarily evocative and poetic.  The final half-hour involves the film's narrative -- Friedrich's hunt for Gordon through the deserted streets of LA, all of this occurring under the aegis of John Ford's The Searchers showing at the NuArt cinema in Santa Monica. 

The film's backstory is remarkable.  Wenders was disgusted with the trap that Hammett had become and so he went to Lisbon to console himself with his girlfriend.  She was acting in a post-apocalyptic cannibalism film directed by the great Chilean exile-director Raul Ruiz --that film is called The Territory, was made with a financing package assembled by the redoubtable King of Exploitation films, Roger Corman (who has a wonderful cameo in The State of Things), and, in fact, had run out of money and film stock.  Wenders intervened in some way, possibly hostile, and, perhaps, diverted money and available film stock away from Ruiz' picture to improvise The State of Things, a movie that, in fact, documents the plight of the cast and crew on The Territory.  It's whispered that there was mob money in The Territory and that the situation became "hair-raising."  Wenders features music by the Del-Byzanteens, a punk group formed by Jim Jarmusch, in his movie.  When he was done with the film,Wenders donated the so-called "short ends" of unexposed film to Jarmusch who used them to make his first credit, 1984's Stranger than Paradise, an anecdote that explains why Jarmusch's picture is composed of one-take sequence-shots all about a minute to two minutes long -- these sequences were shot on the short ends left over from The State of Things. 

I should use this review to pay my respects to my life-long friend Kimball Lockhart (1953 - 2018), a film critic of some note himself and the author of several important essays on Michelangelo Antonioni.  Lockhart died in the end of July 2018.  One of his fondest memories was hosting Wim Wenders for lunch in Ithaca, New York around 1984 -- Wenders was in town for a retrospective at Cornell where Lockhart was in graduate school.  Wenders and Lockhart had cheeseburgers.  Someone made an unkind comment about Wenders' fellow German director, Werner Herzog, and Lockhart told me the film maker became angry and threatened to punch the commentator in the nose.  Rest in peace, my old friend.