Code 46
Do you need a knowledge of Roland Barthes to understand Winterbottom's latest? Henry K goes to find out...
Writing Degree Zero
Think of the 'Republic of Letters' as a representative democracy, with the power elite pursuing a policy of trickle-down literacy. I haven't read a word of Barthes, but his titles provide useful points of entry to Code 46, a confused effort at sci-fi from the prolific and eclectic British director Michael Winterbottom, which Stars Samantha Morton and Tim Robbins. From the point of view of most British critics, the film is a test-case for the auteur-status of the director, whose last film, In This World (2002), was an acclaimed semi-documentary on the plight of refugees from the Afghanistan war in their journey across the middle east and southern Europe to the unforgiving shores of England. From the point of view of the film's backers, Code 46 is Minority Report on the cheap and with impeccable art-house credentials.
Mythologies
Set in a future where cloning has become so widespread that total strangers can in law and biological fact be siblings, Code 46, by bringing up the subject of incest, has been related to the Oedipus myth. At the same time, the sci-fi plot also involves memory removal (somewhat less imaginatively than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Simultaneously, there's a Noir plot about detectives falling for suspects. And there is also, somewhere, a documentary about, or critique of, the way the first world, here represented by Shanghai's spectacular business quarter, is increasing imposing substantial barriers between it and its economic servants. Few directors could make more than a cat's cradle out of so many strands.
Empire of Signs
Late in his career, Barthes developed a fetish for the 'meaningless' signs he found in abundant supply in the streets of '70s Tokyo: signs cut off from signifieds, and therefore, for him, divorced from the mechanics of power. Winterbottom is in a similar position without realizing it. At a Q&A session held after a screening of Code 46 at the Cambridge Film Festival, Winterbottom was asked whether his decision to film a story concerning state intervention in its citizens' sex lives in China amounted to a critique of the PRC's policy of mandatory birth control. The answer was a hyperreal "no" – Shanghai was chosen because it looks like the set of Blade Runner. Like In This World, Code 46 has earned no small critical capital on the basis of its engagement with up-to-the-minute concerns (intercontinental migration, cloning), but neither film casts a comprehending eye.
A Lover's Discourse
Code 46 features perhaps the most harrowing sex scene of all time. It's a subjective shot from Robbins' point of view, as he fucks Morton in missionary fashion. Morton repeats the line "I love you" for much of the duration of the shot, sometimes looking directly into the camera. Throughout the film there's the possibility that Robbins is on an 'empathy drug', meaning that he can share in the feelings of those near him. So it's possible that the shot is 'purely subjective', and represents Robbins 'empathising' with Morton. However, extreme close-ups shots of Morton's face reoccur throughout the film (whose cinematographer Alwin Kuchler also worked with her on Morvern Callar), and the shots instead appear to reflect persistent critical claims for Morton's 'other-worldliness'. While appropriate in the introspective key of Lynne Ramsay's film, here they amount to the filmmakers getting high on their own supply.
The Death of the Author
In film culture the liberal-humanist response to the author-dissolving challenge of post-structuralism has been to permit the idea of film as a 'collaborative process', and to ignore the main thrust of arguments such as Barthes' which centre on the pressures which language itself exerts on free expression. The moment of of Barthes' essay was 1968, when even arch bourgeois directors like Claude Chabrol were exploring, if not following through on, the idea of a truly collaborative cinema. Even ten years earlier, when Chabrol's Les Cousins pioneered the transition of the cahiers group from criticism to film-making, there were few illusions as to the extent to which 'industry' considerations like stars and genres imposed their own meanings – and not necessarily in a pejorative sense in which 'personal expression' is counterposed to 'genre and commerce'.
But it isn't in the Barthesian sense only that Winterbottom is not really an auteur. In october's Sight & Sound, Ryan Gilbey attempts the task of claiming Winterbottom as an author along the lines of classical cahiers auteurism: "even anti-auteur directors must recognise that the buck stops with them. The director makes the decisions, and the decisions make the movie". Yet in the terms of classical auteurism he has neither a set of themes to which he returns, nor a consistent visual style with which to explore them. Gilbey's attempt to make the case on these grounds is unconvincing: the shot of Tony Wilson hang-gliding at the start of 24 Hour Party People is somehow "on the same note" as the aerial shot which opens Code 46 and the map in In This World.
The real problem with Code 46 and In This World is given, perhaps unwittingly, by Gilbey: "his films investigate their subjects but don't pretend to make sense of them". It's becoming a familiar line in criticism generally: reviewing the allegedly blank Elephant, the independent's Anthony Quinn argued that "Van Sant isn't going to coddle us with theories about their motivation, or offer us insights into 'teenage violence'. If you can find an explanation, bully for you; if not, you might have to accept the disquieting idea that some things don't have one". By filming a sci-fi plot on location in Shanghai, Winterbottom has invited comparisons with Alphaville, Godard's futuristic detective yarn shot entirely on the streets of Paris in 1964. But while Godard was making a telling critique of what he considered to be the 1984-esque implications of Gaullist state planning, Code 46 has no more to report from Shanghai than Lost In Translation does from Tokyo. It's another exotic backdrop for two mismatched (though less charmingly so here) westerners.
I can just about appreciate the counter-argument that the point of Code 46 is that Shanghai in the film has no more specificity than Seattle (the home of Robbins' character's family) – that the first world has continued its advancement towards total homogeneity. The filmic trace of this idea is found in the dialogue: in the world of Code 46, people sometimes speak a kind of Esperanto in which random non-English words are substituted for 'hello' or 'thank you' – but rarely for words found in the middle of sentences. It's this superficial approach to an interesting idea that undermines the film. Olivier assayas' wrongly neglected Demonlover makes a wounding comparison; that film's apprehension of super-bourgeois culture-meld went fathoms deeper without recourse to alienating gimmicks.
The Pleasure of the Text
Winterbottom's already notorious next film is 9 Songs, which intercuts scenes from a young couple's sex life with live performances from a galaxy of dadrock entertainers including Franz Ferdinand and the Dandy Warhols. Other than the sex scene I've mentioned, the music is the least appealing aspect of Code 46, making the new film the object of some trepidation. Although the score from David Holmes' Free Association is unobjectionable, viewers who manage to survive the two principles singing 'no woman, no cry' have only a Coldplay outro to look forward to. The latter accompanies a shot of Morton dressed as a refugee, and fans of Zoolander will appreciate how much the word 'derelict' resonates with the moment.
Think of the 'Republic of Letters' as a representative democracy, with the power elite pursuing a policy of trickle-down literacy. I haven't read a word of Barthes, but his titles provide useful points of entry to Code 46, a confused effort at sci-fi from the prolific and eclectic British director Michael Winterbottom, which Stars Samantha Morton and Tim Robbins. From the point of view of most British critics, the film is a test-case for the auteur-status of the director, whose last film, In This World (2002), was an acclaimed semi-documentary on the plight of refugees from the Afghanistan war in their journey across the middle east and southern Europe to the unforgiving shores of England. From the point of view of the film's backers, Code 46 is Minority Report on the cheap and with impeccable art-house credentials.
Mythologies
Set in a future where cloning has become so widespread that total strangers can in law and biological fact be siblings, Code 46, by bringing up the subject of incest, has been related to the Oedipus myth. At the same time, the sci-fi plot also involves memory removal (somewhat less imaginatively than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Simultaneously, there's a Noir plot about detectives falling for suspects. And there is also, somewhere, a documentary about, or critique of, the way the first world, here represented by Shanghai's spectacular business quarter, is increasing imposing substantial barriers between it and its economic servants. Few directors could make more than a cat's cradle out of so many strands.
Empire of Signs
Late in his career, Barthes developed a fetish for the 'meaningless' signs he found in abundant supply in the streets of '70s Tokyo: signs cut off from signifieds, and therefore, for him, divorced from the mechanics of power. Winterbottom is in a similar position without realizing it. At a Q&A session held after a screening of Code 46 at the Cambridge Film Festival, Winterbottom was asked whether his decision to film a story concerning state intervention in its citizens' sex lives in China amounted to a critique of the PRC's policy of mandatory birth control. The answer was a hyperreal "no" – Shanghai was chosen because it looks like the set of Blade Runner. Like In This World, Code 46 has earned no small critical capital on the basis of its engagement with up-to-the-minute concerns (intercontinental migration, cloning), but neither film casts a comprehending eye.
A Lover's Discourse
Code 46 features perhaps the most harrowing sex scene of all time. It's a subjective shot from Robbins' point of view, as he fucks Morton in missionary fashion. Morton repeats the line "I love you" for much of the duration of the shot, sometimes looking directly into the camera. Throughout the film there's the possibility that Robbins is on an 'empathy drug', meaning that he can share in the feelings of those near him. So it's possible that the shot is 'purely subjective', and represents Robbins 'empathising' with Morton. However, extreme close-ups shots of Morton's face reoccur throughout the film (whose cinematographer Alwin Kuchler also worked with her on Morvern Callar), and the shots instead appear to reflect persistent critical claims for Morton's 'other-worldliness'. While appropriate in the introspective key of Lynne Ramsay's film, here they amount to the filmmakers getting high on their own supply.
The Death of the Author
In film culture the liberal-humanist response to the author-dissolving challenge of post-structuralism has been to permit the idea of film as a 'collaborative process', and to ignore the main thrust of arguments such as Barthes' which centre on the pressures which language itself exerts on free expression. The moment of of Barthes' essay was 1968, when even arch bourgeois directors like Claude Chabrol were exploring, if not following through on, the idea of a truly collaborative cinema. Even ten years earlier, when Chabrol's Les Cousins pioneered the transition of the cahiers group from criticism to film-making, there were few illusions as to the extent to which 'industry' considerations like stars and genres imposed their own meanings – and not necessarily in a pejorative sense in which 'personal expression' is counterposed to 'genre and commerce'.
But it isn't in the Barthesian sense only that Winterbottom is not really an auteur. In october's Sight & Sound, Ryan Gilbey attempts the task of claiming Winterbottom as an author along the lines of classical cahiers auteurism: "even anti-auteur directors must recognise that the buck stops with them. The director makes the decisions, and the decisions make the movie". Yet in the terms of classical auteurism he has neither a set of themes to which he returns, nor a consistent visual style with which to explore them. Gilbey's attempt to make the case on these grounds is unconvincing: the shot of Tony Wilson hang-gliding at the start of 24 Hour Party People is somehow "on the same note" as the aerial shot which opens Code 46 and the map in In This World.
The real problem with Code 46 and In This World is given, perhaps unwittingly, by Gilbey: "his films investigate their subjects but don't pretend to make sense of them". It's becoming a familiar line in criticism generally: reviewing the allegedly blank Elephant, the independent's Anthony Quinn argued that "Van Sant isn't going to coddle us with theories about their motivation, or offer us insights into 'teenage violence'. If you can find an explanation, bully for you; if not, you might have to accept the disquieting idea that some things don't have one". By filming a sci-fi plot on location in Shanghai, Winterbottom has invited comparisons with Alphaville, Godard's futuristic detective yarn shot entirely on the streets of Paris in 1964. But while Godard was making a telling critique of what he considered to be the 1984-esque implications of Gaullist state planning, Code 46 has no more to report from Shanghai than Lost In Translation does from Tokyo. It's another exotic backdrop for two mismatched (though less charmingly so here) westerners.
I can just about appreciate the counter-argument that the point of Code 46 is that Shanghai in the film has no more specificity than Seattle (the home of Robbins' character's family) – that the first world has continued its advancement towards total homogeneity. The filmic trace of this idea is found in the dialogue: in the world of Code 46, people sometimes speak a kind of Esperanto in which random non-English words are substituted for 'hello' or 'thank you' – but rarely for words found in the middle of sentences. It's this superficial approach to an interesting idea that undermines the film. Olivier assayas' wrongly neglected Demonlover makes a wounding comparison; that film's apprehension of super-bourgeois culture-meld went fathoms deeper without recourse to alienating gimmicks.
The Pleasure of the Text
Winterbottom's already notorious next film is 9 Songs, which intercuts scenes from a young couple's sex life with live performances from a galaxy of dadrock entertainers including Franz Ferdinand and the Dandy Warhols. Other than the sex scene I've mentioned, the music is the least appealing aspect of Code 46, making the new film the object of some trepidation. Although the score from David Holmes' Free Association is unobjectionable, viewers who manage to survive the two principles singing 'no woman, no cry' have only a Coldplay outro to look forward to. The latter accompanies a shot of Morton dressed as a refugee, and fans of Zoolander will appreciate how much the word 'derelict' resonates with the moment.