Sisyphean Cinema

            In the post-9/11 world, a new cinema has emerged that is characterized by voluntary repetition of actions, spaced out across a vast period of time, almost always concluding in failure. This is the new style of Sisyphean cinema which has slowly but forcefully made a place for itself in modern arthouse cinema. Sisyphus was a mythical Greek king who was punished by the gods and forced to push a large boulder up a hill for all eternity, knowing that, once it has reached the top, it would roll back down again. In his philosophical study of suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus used this myth as a metaphor for life. It is important to differentiate this philosophy from existentialist thought and, perhaps more importantly, from nihilistic thought: these two philosophies have been rampant in cinema since its beginnings. This is the understanding of this myth that has become the source of this new cinema. Of course, this is not to suggest that this phenomenon is wholly new: after all, it is named after a legend that is practically as old as time, and has shown up in many well-known fables, like the tale of the monkey's paw. Furthermore, it shares many similarities with other types of cinema, such as certain types of what-if cinema. However, its recent use in cinema has come to symbolize much more. Sisyphean cinema has surreptitiously become a big enough phenomenon to pervade not just the arthouse, but also cult cinema, with a view towards the mainstream; it has even spawned its own auteurs.

            The film that made me aware of this phenomenon and which inspired this essay is Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's 2014 film Two Days One Night. The Dardenne brothers have been on the verge of this style since as far back as 1997, when their film Rosetta portrayed a young girl and her inability to succeed due to circumstances beyond her control. These side effects of poverty in a capitalist society followed their films all the way to their most recent film; Two Days One Night just happens to be the most blatant such example. This film sees Sandra, a character portrayed by Marion Cotillard, attempt to return to work after a depressive period left her incapable of committing to her job. She soon after realizes that her job has been terminated in favour of a pay raise to her former coworkers. This follows the traditional Dardenne style, placing an insurmountable obstacle in front of the protagonist which is naturally, mentally and socially out of her control. What is different here, however, is the structure of the film: Sandra is allowed another vote and she takes on the task of attempting to convince her coworkers to forgo their bonuses, so she may remain employed. This process, taking place across a weekend, has one setup repeated numerous times. Sandra has a prepared introduction and she questions each individual with that statement. Furthermore, each time she looks like she is making progress, by way of receiving a positive response from a co-worker, it is counteracted by a negative response from another co-worker. In other words, every time she reaches the top of the hill and finds herself in ecstasy, the boulder rolls down again and she is reminded of her inability to cause any changes in society. Of course, the film also takes the other characters into account. Rather than being mere obstacles for her goals, the other coworkers are themselves portrayed as individuals rolling boulders up hills; each person who refuses to take the bonus is shown to be on the brink of their own personal failure, as if capitalist society in and of itself is Hades. The Sisyphean myth, the Camusian conception of it, is further reinforced in this film by two scenes. First, in a painfully long, real-time take, Sandra decides that this unwinnable journey is pointless and decides to take her own life by emptying all of her depression medication into a cup and taking it all at once. After getting news that another co-worker was on her side, she admits to her act and is immediately hospitalized. This goes along with Camus' idea that, even though life may be harsh and meaningless, suicide is not a logical response; suffering is human and must be met head on. Similarly, the ending of the film, where Sandra turns down a job that would cause one of her supportive coworkers to lose his job, she again refuses to take the easy way out, instead opting to seek her own way in a world full of potential failure. The ending is portrayed happily, but it is a happiness of realization and acceptance of absurdity, not one of completion; Sandra does not reach her goals, but she does reach self-actualization.

            Two Days One Night is perhaps the most perfect realization of this Sisyphean myth, but it is not alone in cinema. What is perhaps rarer is the cult cinema/periphery of mainstream conception of this myth. It is important here to make some definitive statements about my understanding of cult and genre cinema within mainstream culture, in order to demonstrate the importance of this concept's slow acceptance in these spheres. Cult and genre filmmaking are, by definition, on the precipice of mainstream culture, but they also have the capability to break into the mainstream or even exist within the mainstream while cultivating a cultic audience (i.e. the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises). It should also be noted that Sisyphean cinema is, by its very nature, anti-mainstream, so a legitimately Sisyphean film, like Two Days One Night, could not exist in the mainstream. However, large Sisyphean elements are freely available in a lot of mainstream films. The difference is that in a mainstream film, the repeated failures occur on the path to a resolution, rather than being the entirety of the path. Sandra fails and fails well past the ending of her film, while someone like Dory from Finding Nemo only fails until she succeeds, resulting in the resolution. Horror films are much more likely to be Sisyphean in this way. For example, Teeth is one slaughtered rapist after another all the way to the end, where the protagonist of the film is sitting in a car with an old pervert, indicating that everything is about to happen again Similarly, the slasher film is a repeating example of Sisyphean horror: the failure of adults to protect their children, the failure of children to keep it in their pants, the failure of the killer to kill the final girl and the failure of the final girl to kill the slasher, resulting in another sequel full of failure; it is failure all the way down. The best example of a truly Sisyphean horror film appears in the recent strange genre film Nina Forever, where the repeated failure is not meant to represent an existential dilemma or the errors of society, but something much more tangible and universal. Holly learns about a young man named Rob who tried to commit suicide after his girlfriend Nina died in a car accident: immediately, the film begins with not just suicide, with all of its implications, but a failed suicide attempt. The two begin seeing each other and that is when they realize their Sisyphean struggle: every time they attempt to have sex, Nina's bloody corpse drags itself out of their bed (or other surface) to interrupt them. Once again, this film works almost solely in repetitions: Rob and Holly think their struggle is over, they attempt to have sex again, Nina shows up, they struggle, they avoid sex (in a way, a return to the slasher convention where an attempt at sex led to a different kind of death) until they attempt it again, restarting the pushing of the boulder from the other side of the hill. At the end of the film, nothing is resolved, which would in another case be lazy storytelling. In this case, this lack of resolution is like that in Teeth, a realization that this struggle will continue on and on well past the film's running time (the inclusion of mortality in this story could even suggest that death will not end this). And yet, this is a genre film; its themes and imagery may make it difficult to sell to a mainstream audience, but the other half of its runtime is occupied by horror conventions, a generic understanding of death and mortality and elements of mainstream cinema, which is to say that this is not an attempt at creating Sisyphean cinema nor is it a completely generic exercise; this is a hybrid which will lead to an advancement in this type of filmmaking.

            In the meantime, this style has also developed its own auteurs. While filmmakers like the Dardennes and, to some degree, Michael Haneke and Aki Kaurismaki have roots in this cinematic style, one filmmaker who must be mentioned in this conversation is screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman, a man who made a career out of writing Sisyphean screenplays before going into the concept headfirst for his directorial efforts. Kaufman's early cinematic work involved writing screenplays for music video directors Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. These films were unquestionably absurd (read: of the cinematic offspring of the theatre of absurd) without quite reaching Sisyphean levels of discourse, mainly due to the fact that they were handed to or co-written by more traditionalist filmmakers. Jonze is too much of a romantic and Gondry is much more concerned with the inner workings of the mind than with anything approaching absurdism. This is why Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., two films completely immersed in uncanny representations of reality (of the daily lives and existences of John Malkovich and Kaufman himself, respectively), both ended in much more traditional ways. In the first, all the characters gain closure and the villains are punished and in the latter, the most blatantly Kaufmanesque of these early screenplays, fate and reality are confirmed, with the elimination of the superfluous Kaufman twin and the realization of Kaufman's screenplay. In the two Gondry films, both of which were co-written by Gondry himself, Kaufman's work is clearly watered down resulting in the only average Kaufman written film, Human Nature, as well as the deeply romantic and life-affirming ending of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The latter film, which ends in a decidedly non-Sisyphean way, is shown as a heavily Gondry inspired work by the fact that his follow-up to the film was The Science of Sleep, a film which has similar themes but is much less competently written. At this point, Kaufman became free to take total creative control of his works when he directed his first feature, Synecdoche, New York.

            Synecdoche, New York finally allowed Kaufman to show his truly absurdist leanings by making a film all about the path towards death. This is, in fact, Kaufman at his most absurdist, including many interesting touches that would need to be studied on their own time. While this film is not characterized immediately by repeated failures, repetition is inherent in both its structure and its mise-en-scene. The film follows Caden Cotard, already named after self-destruction, as he works on his newest theatre piece. One thing that differentiates this film from others is that Cotard begins the film on success. Unlike the failures of Sandra to return to work and Rob to kill himself before him, Cotard begins by earning a MacArthur Fellowship. The only failure in his story is internal, a mixture of apathy and imposter syndrome. From this point on, his life begins to fall apart, but it is not this steady failure that makes this a Sisyphean work, but rather his product: a play which quickly becomes layered. Cotard's play is a dramatization of reality taking place in a warehouse. This warehouse becomes the reference point analogous to the top of the mountain. Each time Cotard's vision becomes complete, all of reality within a single building, the new representation of the warehouse becomes a new, smaller dramatization of reality. While no one would consider the play in this film a success, it would be assumed to be a far distance from a failure. However, it is a failure if only because it points out the inherent incompleteness (and proves that completion is impossible) in the artistic vision and, by extension, in life. In a sort of modern day version of Zeno's paradox, Cotard will never be able to complete a new layer of reality without falling into a new failure. So it is that, despite Cotard's "success", this film is entirely structured as a repeated failure. And, of course, right at the end where it looks like Cotard has finally figured it out, with the aid of an all-knowing figure, he dies. No fanfare, no pomp and circumstance, just a quick, uneventful death that would befall anyone, no matter how great.

            Kaufman followed up Synecdoche, New York almost a decade later with another film which proved him to be a strictly Sisyphean auteur, Anomalisa. Anomalisa is much smaller and more personal than its predecessor, but it is again characterized wholly by failure, failure which seems at first to be external but is soon after proven to be internal. Michael Stone lives in a world where everyone shares the same face and voice. This mundanity becomes a fact of life for him until he meets Lisa. This film, unlike its predecessors, reads as a conventional story with an unconventional problem: there is nothing here to suggest failure until the third act. Once Michael and Lisa fall in love, Lisa begins to change, taking on the form of everyone else and it is only here that we realize that the world is not this way, but rather that Michael, in all his narcissism, sees everyone else like this. While the failures are not all represented, Lisa's transformation serves as proof that Michael's inability to make connections with others is a result of his depersonification of everyone around him. It is this failure to make personal connections which once again places this work squarely within a Sisyphean context, demonstrating exactly where Kaufman's head is.

            And this is all only a small sampling of this new style of filmmaking. With the rise in independent filmmaking and new production methods, filmmakers have more freedom to experiment with non-traditional methods of storytelling and many of these filmmakers are turning to their deepest fears: that what they create will be a failure and no one will watch it. Of course, the majority of art fails. Very few people are remembered past their work's exhibition. As a result, artists become disillusioned and they need to find a place to which to turn. The result become this: stories of individuals striving for success, climbing that hill, reaching for the top, only to see their dreams roll back down the other side, continuing thusly for the rest of their existences.