Until the End of the World

Working in about ten different countries, between 1990 and 1991, the German director Wim Wenders produced Until the End of the World.  Wenders had gained international fame with his thrilled The American Friend based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith.  On the strength of this film, he was invited to Hollywood where he failed on a colossal scale -- his picture Hammett, made for Francis Coppola, was re-edited by the studio, repudiated by Wenders, and lost vast sums of money.  Wenders went back to making lower budget European films, including the wonderful The State of Things (1982) about a film crew near Lisbon that runs out of money while shooting a science fiction saga.  After a few years, Wenders was again "bankable" and had sufficient money (20 million dollars) to make the elaborate, globe-trotting Until the End of the World.  The film's final cut was something like five-and-a-half hours and, of course, the studios who had financed the picture were appalled.  They demanded cuts.  Ultimately, the film was released in 1994 in a three-hour version that was derided as completely incoherent, solipsistic, and self-indulgent.  Wenders had failed again, once more on a huge scale.  He returned to making much lower budget films and remains active today -- his documentary about Pina Bausch and her Wuppertal Tanz Theater was an international hit a few years ago.  (Wenders who is intensely interested in the technology of film shot that movie in 3D.)  Thought to be a lost film for almost thirty years, Wenders was able to restore the picture in 2015 and it has been released in four-and-a-half hour version by Criterion.  At its full length, the movie is an eccentric, frustrating, and, often astonishing, revelation.

Until the End of the World is nominally science fiction, set in "the future" -- that is, 1999.  The last scenes in the picture take place around the turn of the millennium, New Year's 2000. The picture has been released on two discs and, in fact, the film divides neatly into two diametrically opposed halves.  Everything in the first half is effectively repudiated by the second half.  Wenders has a superb eye for landscapes, both urban and wild, and the picture is extremely beautiful.  The acting is, often, laughably bad -- but there is a method to Wenders' madness.  The "bad" acting highlights the unreal nature of "images" and, ultimately, the picture is about a world threatened with destruction through a torrential flood of images.  Wenders has a complex, and sometimes not fully coherent, relationship with American pop (and pulp) culture.  To an American, popular culture is simply the sea in which we swim -- comic books, rock and roll, bad movies, bad TV are all taken for granted.  Wenders', despite his bad boy antics in the late sixties and early seventies, is a cultured European, a German who has made films based on novels by Goethe (his picture 1975's Wrong Movement -- Falsche Bewegung  is based on Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre).  To Wenders, American pop culture isn't self-evident -- rather, it is a strange, anarchic intrusion into the civilized, if moribund, world of European culture. In films like Alice in the Cities (1974), American pop tunes have a hypnotic, but alienating, effect.  Wenders' problematic, overly cerebral approach to the artifacts of American pop culture is on display in the extremely chaotic and rebarbative first couple hours of the film -- Wenders is adapting film noir acting and style in a particularly frantic and allusive manner.  To an American, film noir is normative -- it's something that we grew up with both in the movies and on TV.  To a European, the situation is more complex.  To immerse one's self in film noir for Wenders is like a Norwegian singing African-American blues -- there is an aspect of problematic cultural appropriation combined with an element that seems like parody but which is actually much more complicated.  (This is not to say that Wenders can't make a perfectly serviceable film noir -- his American Friend, in fact, is a classic of the genre.)  The effect of the first half of Until the End of the World is that of a pastiche imitating a parody imitating a comic parody, like something broadcast on Saturday Night Live -- the film's narrative is so distant from reality that it seems wholly contrived.  But, as we shall see, this is part of Wenders' strategy.

Wenders' 1999 is a dystopian fantasy, equal parts 1984 and Blade Runner -- people tool around in sleek torpedo-shaped vehicles that are actually just motorcycles in a metal shell shaped like a snow peapod.  Both men and women wear absurd crescent-shaped hats and dress in blouses and tunics made of shiny bangles that look like chainmail.  The sinister characters seem to have sauntered into the picture from The Maltese Falcon -- they all wear boxy suits and Sam Spade hats.  The city streets are lurid with graffiti and there are always people fighting or grappling in the background.  Everyone uses pay video-phone booths to talk to one another and people also carry valise-sized phones with screens.  In some cities, you have to pay a vehicle tax to enter the downtown area and, in Berlin, you have to rent a bicycle since cars are not allowed in the crumbling urban center.  Instead of an EU,  all countries maintain their own currency and, despite the characters rambling about the whole world, the cities all seem, more or less, the same.  As with all science fiction, some of this is prescient, some of it silly and stupid, some scenes convincing and others not so much.

The plot concerns a beautiful young woman named Claire (Solveig Dommartin) who has been sleeping around too much under the influence of too many "designer drugs" with too much Euro-trash in Venice.  (Venice's canals are afflicted by crowds of assholes on jet-skis).  Claire literally wakes up as the film begins, sprawled on a bed at some wild party.  She wanders away from the party, finds her car (which is guided by proto-GPS) and decides to travel to Rome.  Along the way, she contacts her boyfriend, Gene (Sam Neill) who lives in Paris and is writing a novel -- he narratives the film.  After passing through some picturesque tunnels, she finds the road blocked.  Everyone is fearful that a space satellite is going to crash to the earth at some random location and cause chain reactions that will destroy the planet.  When the road is closed due to fear the satellite will fall nearby, Claire literally goes off the map, driving over a high mountain pass and crossing a desolate plateau that looks like Tibet.  She gets into a car crash with the only other vehicle on the road for fifty miles -- the other car happens to be operated by a cheerful thug named Chico and his badly wounded boss, shot through the belly.  These guys have robbed a bank and are fleeing to Paris.  The gangster's car isn't drive-able and so Claire and the crooks make the next desolate hamlet in her vehicle and there decide the young woman will carry the money to Paris in exchange for 30%.  The money exists in about forty different currencies.  Around St. Etienne, Claire picks up a hitchiker who calls himself McFee; his real name is Sam Farber (William Hurt).  Farber has a strange camera that he uses to record events.  His eyes also seem to be wounded somehow and failing.  Claire has a boyfriend played by the long-suffering Sam Neill (he apparently is willing to put up with Claire's affairs and drug use).  In Paris, Claire reunites with her boyfriend.  But the hitchhiker, Sam Farber, with the peculiar camera steals her satchel full of money.  She, then, hires a gumshoe, Mr. Winter, played by Ruediger  Vogeler, in a very mannered performance -- he is playing a parody of a parody of a Dashiell Hammet character, perhaps, in revenge for Wenders' calamitous effort at making an  American film noir, the picture he directed for Francis Coppola's American Zoetrope, Hammeit.  Winter is supposed to find Farber in exchange for a commission from the stolen money.  Claire notices that Farber is being  pursued by a black man, possibly an aborigine, and we learn that Farber, in fact, stole a precious opal from a mine at Coober Peedy in Australia.and may be on the run for that reason.  Meanwhile, the cheerful thug, Chico, one of the bank robbers, picks up the scent and starts chasing Claire as well.  The story, then, ricochets around Europe with various permutations of people chasing one another -- Claire and Winter are chasing Farber, Farber is also pursued by the black detective, Gene, the Paris-based novelist (and Chico) pursue Claire and  Gene catches up to her from time-to-time, only to be abandoned when she takes the Transiberian Express to Beijing.  In the course of these adventures, Claire falls in love with Farber after having sex with him in Lisbon.  They end up traveling together in China and, then, Japan where Farber goes blind.  The couple on the lam flee to a remote mountain village where Farber's vision is restored by a Japanese herbal healer played by Chisu Ryu (now an old man, about 90 when the film was made, he is most famous for appearing in many Ozu films -- Wenders reveres Ozu.)  The couple then travel to San Francisco where Farber uses his odd camera to record an encounter with his sister.  We learn that the camera somehow records the biochemical transaction in the brain that constitutes seeing and can be used to help the blind actual regain some semblance of vision -- Farber is making recordings of everything in the world for his mother who is blind.  (Thus the gorgeous Vermeer-lighting in the interview with his sister.)  The camera for the blind has one bad side-effect, which seems vehemently symbolic -- it causes blindness in the person who uses it.  In the first half of the film, sequences have been set in Venice, Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Tokyo, a mountainous resort in Japan, and San Francisco.  There have been various close-calls, short and long car chases, a sequence in which Claire and Farber are fettered together and have to flee through Lisbon's medieval alleys, lots of portentous dialogue about the imminent end of the world and much incredibly beautiful footage of canals, mountains and mist, ancient cities, tightly crowded trains, and urban slums. (The characters never have enough money and they are always staying in picturesquely squalid motels full of brawling extras under radiant sunset skies.)

With the cheerful thug, Chico, Sam and Claire take a Korean trawler to Australia.  We next see them in Coober Peedy, a limitless plain scoured by red gravel roads and countless craters from which gems have been mined.  The town is little more than tin shacks and some hangars where Sam and Claire with an aboriginal mechanic are fixing a small Cessna plain, apparently the most efficient way to travel to where Sam's parents operate a sort of mission among the desert dwelling natives.  Of course, Mr. Winter with his harmonica and Gene, the novelist played by Sam Neill arrive on the scene, occupying a huge rented RV somewhat similar to the vehicle housing the maniacal accountant on Sunset Boulevard in The State of Things. Gene and Sam get into a fistfight and are jailed; Winter has to bail them out.  The aboriginal detective tracking Sam on account of his opal theft also shows up in town, administers sleeping pills to Claire and chains her to the door of the Cessna, seemingly planning to come back later with the authorities to claim his bounty on her.  Sam gets the battered Cessna operating and with Claire takes off -- they travel a hundred km or so and, then, abruptly the engine fails.  Every electro-magnetic system in the world simultaneously ceases operation -- this is said to be the result of the United States firing a nuclear missile to destroy the Indian satellite threatening to crash to earth.  Sam has to crash-land the plane and. with Claire still chained to the door, (they unhinge it and she has to carry it in her arms), they set off across the desert.  After suffering some privations, they make it to a road where some folks are still mobile, driving old vehicles with crank transmissions that continue to work.  In the middle of nowhere, they encounter blind Edith Farber nee Eisner (after Lotte Eisner, I assume), Sam's mother with her native friend, Maisie.  Edith Farber is played by an indomitable-looking Jeanne Moreau, very pale and cranky in the broiling sun of the Australian outback.  Sam, Claire and his mother travel to a place called the Mbuntua Cultural Center, a magical oasis where there is a limpid spring cradled between tall heaps of sun-fractured red rock.  This is where Sam's father, played by Max von Sydow (also pale-looking, gaunt, and crabby), is conducting experiments in his cave laboratory.  Dr. Farber is an archetypal obsessed mad scientist and his lab is a state-of-the-art update of the crazy machines and weird electrical equipment that Dr. Frankenstein used to animate his monster.  The devices are installed on platforms in a cave with smooth interior surfaces decorated with aboriginal paintings -- it's like a kind of womb or looping small intestine and there's a huge transparent vat with glowing equipment submerged inside, strange little nooks and crannies within the intestinal chambers, diverticula you might say, as well as altar-like beds with huge horseshoe magnets at their heads.  This is where Farber intends to inject the images recorded on the strange camera operated by Sam into the blind woman's brain.  There are various malfunctions and the mad doctor curses at his son for his lack of attention.  Ultimately, Claire, who seems to be a clearer thinker and more capable of focusing on her memories, is recruited into the project and, at first, she is more successful than her lover in the "second viewing" project -- that is, creating biochemical reactions in Edith's brain that will create the simulacra of actual vision.  (The visions we are reminded have been recorded as images in the brain-camera and, now, are really further distorted because they are memories.).  The sequence at the mad scientist's Utopian community is about ninety minutes long and is the exact opposite of the film's first 2  1/2 hours -- in these extended scenes almost nothing happens.  The first half of the film involved frantic travels, "the ultimate road movie" as Wenders pitched the project to the money-men.  But the second half of the movie is very still, tethered to a spectacular exterior location and an equally spectacular cavernous mad scientist's laboratory.  Wenders has now shifted gears entirely and the film takes on a strange, utterly becalmed mood -- it is very much like the similarly becalmed scenes that were the best thing in The State of Things, the actors and crew members in that film getting drunk together, engaging in desultory sexual encounters, playing cards and walking along cold wintry beaches while the director of the science fiction film that they have been making goes to Lisbon first and, then, Hollywood to try to procure funding to finish the picture.  In Until the End of the World, all of the characters gradually assemble at the magical green oasis.  Gene and his sidekick, Mr. Winter, appear as does Chico and, even, the black aboriginal detective.  Ultimately, everyone in the movie is gathered together and we see, slowly developing, two alternate visions of how people should interact -- Mr. Winter, Gene, the detective, Chico, with a couple of Australians, including a skinny guy missing an arm, all form a band and spend their time rehearsing next to the green, limpid waters of the oasis.  In the cave, the mad scientist has made human beings into kinds of animate movie cameras and strange experiments take place with respect to the production of images.  Edith dies on New Year's Eve 1999, perhaps, exhausted by the experiments with injecting images into her brain.  There is a native burial service conducted by the aboriginal women -- Edith actually came to the oasis forty years earlier to study the women's societies among these native people.  Dr. Farber, who was in love with her followed -- he was, at that time, a great opthalmogist and spent years eradicating trachoma among the natives.  Alone, Dr. Farber becomes increasingly unhinged.  He embarks on his most perilous experiment yet -- "there are lines that should not be crossed," his lab assistant, a sort of pale,ferret-faced Igor says portentously.  Farber is now recording people's dreams and playing them back on computer monitors.  We have learned that the world did not perish. Gradually, the electro-magnetic web is restored.  After a kind of concert, Mr. Winter, Chico, the detective, and the rest of the Australians leave the oasis.  Sam and Claire have become increasingly immersed in their dreams -- they are now half-comatose sprawled in corners of the cave which has become a literal dream factory.  (At this point, Wenders' allegorical intentions seem clear.)  Both Sam and Claire become media-obsessed -- they spend every waking hour watching the playback of their dreams.  Finally, Gene kidnaps Claire and takes her to an open pen where strange white birds, mostly invisible, are constantly making derisive calls.  He locks her in the cage with the dream-playback device now inoperative -- it's batteries have failed.  It's like weaning a drug addict from heroin.  While she rages and bellows, he quietly types out a novel about her adventures.  He gives her the novel to read and the words effect her cure -- she is no longer addicted to images of her dreams.  Dr. Farber is captured by the CIA who want to know the secrets of his Second Viewing apparatus -- apparently, they torture him to death.  Sam Farber gets lost in an amazing labyrinth of eroded red hoodoos.  His aboriginal brother cures him of his obsession with dreams by having him sleep between two native holy men.  He sits in a barren eroded river-course and carefully draws a picture of a rock labeled helpfully "rock."  Later, we see Sam and Claire meeting in Tosca's in San Francisco -- but this is revealed to be just an alternative ending to Gene's novel that he discards.  Describing the second half of the film, Gene writes:  "In the beginning was the Word.  In the end, there will be nothing but images and there may be no cure for this disease of images."

Wenders' film accordingly consists of two parts.  In the first part, we see a world of images parsed by other images, the genre of the film noir and road movie mashed together, in an unreal spectacle of constant, frenetic motion.  The last half of the film is the opposite of the movie's first part -- it takes place in a single location where the characters are at loose ends, where nothing much happens, and where two models for human interaction (and community) are dramatized:  the scientific endeavor which ultimately leads to calamity and the gradual establishment of the eight-member musical ensemble that performs at the New Year's Eve party 1999 to 2000.  You can have science or music, the film suggests.  Movies are a combination of both science and music.   And, indeed, Until the End of the World, a complete catastrophe as a movie (never even screened in its entirety) spawned a CD that was an enormous international success -- the film's soundtrack, much of it commissioned for the picture, includes U2, REM, Patty Smith, Julee Cruise (as produced by David Lynch and Angelo Baldamenti), Lou Reed, kd lang and numerous other luminaries.  In the film, the team working in the dream factory, that is, the would-be scientists succumbs to insanity -- all science, perhaps, but particularly the science of the movies, is a form of "mad science".  The cave set, which is clearly a soundstage somewhere, represents the madman's laboratory from which film's come -- the embodiment of people's dreams.  The more successful the film, the more it diminishes life.  Seeing, Wenders suggests, is a zero-sum game.  The more you see, perhaps, the less you know and the more time you spend peering into your electronic screens, the less life is available to you.  The movie is incredibly prescient with respect to the plague of images that now afflicts us.  The scenes of Dr.  Farber, Claire, and Sam mesmerized and motionless while peering into their small hand-held screens are extraordinary.  Wenders longest and most expensive and most elaborately produced movie turns out to be a cautionary tract about movies -- better that you read poetry (one of the characters carries a copy of Walt Whitman's poems) or novels than go to the movies.  Images make the blind see, but they also fabulously addictive -- cell-phones, designed to keep you in touch with the world, in fact, abstract from real life and can addict you to images that are ultimately destructive.  The long second half of the film is designed to cancel out the delirious chase sequences in the first half of the movie.  Images span the world in the first part of the film; the second part of the picture is an allegory as to the destructive impact of allowing pictures to take over our lives.

Wenders Until the End of the World is ultimately an immense and self-destructive cult film.  Very few people will see the movie.  Most will tune it out during the frenzied parody that is the movie's first half.  But the picture takes a radical turn in its last two hours, develops self-critical muscles, and, then, in effect throttles itself.  And this is all while serving up a lush and extraordinary banquet of images accompanied by equally absorbing rock and roll.  In Wenders' masterpiece, 1976's Im Lauf der Zeit ("Kings of the Road" in this country), two men, one of them suicidal, travel from movie theater to movie theater in a German wasteland that looks like North Dakota -- they are trying to salvage old movie projectors, repairing them for the tiny, generally abandoned theaters in small hamlets.  The films projected are mostly John Ford Westerns and the movie depicts the inadequacy of film images to provide any meaning to the denuded and war-ravaged landscape.  All the men have is American pop culture ("the Yanks have colonized our subconscious" one of them laments), but this culture, rock and roll and American Westerns, isn't enough.  The more time you spend in the dark watching movies, the less time you spend living.  Until the End of the World takes these themes and develops them on a truly epic scale.  It's a necessary movie but one that is maddening to watch.