http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/07/film/lashings-of-the-old-ultra-violence
by David N. Meyer
July-August 2009
The Baader Meinhof Complex, Dir: Uli Edel; Surveillance, Dir: Jennifer Lynch
The Baader Meinhof gangas the press called them - did not play
around. In the early 1970s, the Red Army Factionthe name they
preferredset off bombs in US Army barracks, German newspaper offices
and various police headquarters. They trained in Palestinian guerilla
camps, robbed German banks, gunned down district attorneys and
kidnapped police chiefs.
The RAF did not lack for hubris or competence as they helped to
invent modern day terrorism. According to this dramatization of the
eponymous non-fiction book, they could bomb, shoot, kidnap and
speechify. But they sucked at avoiding arrest. And so the second
half of their grand political drama played out in German prisons and
courtrooms. Led by whining complainer journalist/social theorist
Ulrike Meinhof (while on the lam she would not stay anywhere without
central heating and kept telling the Palestinians what uncomfortable
shitholes their desert training camps were) and charismatic sociopath
Andreas Baader, the RAF made a mockery of the German justice system
an easy target, granted. While imprisoned, they gained increasing
control over their day to day lives to the point that their
colleagues smuggled in pistols and ammunition. Meinhof hung herself
after four years in jail, much of it spent in solitary and the rest
in the forced company of Baader's main squeeze, Gudrun Ensslin.
Apparently Gudrunsomething of a sociopath her own selfmade
Meinhof's life inside an utter hell.
After members of the RAF had been incarcerated for five years,
Palestinian-trained terrorists hijacked a German commercial flight
with the specific purpose of ransoming out the RAFers and terrorists
held in other countries. When the hijacking failed, and the hijackers
were shot down on a runway in Mogadishu, the RAFers died in their
cells. The film suggests the two with guns shot themselves and the
others followed Meinhof's example….shortly after, a kidnapped German
industrialist was murdered by the new cells of the RAF in revenge.
It's quite a saga, and director Uli Edel captures all aspects of the
gang: their charisma, the romance of their struggle, their sex appeal
(apparently the women robbed banks with Uzis and leapt over teller
counters in mini-skirts, peasant crop-tops and lace-up knee-high
white boots). Not to mention their at one time good intentions, the
repressive German police apparatus which they so despised and the
state-sponsored violence against protestors. With equal emphasis,
Edel depicts the horrific bloody consequences of the RAF's actions
and the internal blood-letting without which no revolutionary cell
would be complete. Gudrun held Meinhof in such contempt that while
they were training at a desert camp, Gudrun gave Al Fatah the secret
code word that Meinhof's fugitive children and nanny would assume
came only from Meinhof. Al Fatah made it clear to Gudrun (who spoke
English, which Meinhof did not), that if they picked up the kids (who
were safe somewhere in Europe at the time), they would be whisked
into Palestinian camps and never seen again. Without consulting
Meinhof, Gudrun gave the go-ahead.
Edel walks the narrowest of tightropes and never falters. He shows
the broader political actions that triggered the gang's rage and the
internal logic of their arguments, yet never once fails to also show
the dismembered bodies of their victims… Or the profound sexual kicks
the gang got from its violence. Edel takes no moral or political
position. He's a historian. I've never seen so brave a film, a film
so willing and even more surprising, able, to embrace such a
narrative with the complexity it warrants.
He takes a while to do it, too. Complex is over two hours long, and
every sequence seems necessary. The opening is a bravura urban
spectacle. Iranian pro-Shah apparatchiks assault anti-Shah protestors
on the streets of Berlin, and, with the cops' passive approval, beat
the living shit of out of them. In a moment evoking Potemkin's Odessa
Steps, the German mounted police charge down the cobbled streets into
Edel's deliriously tracking camera, smashing the heads of fleeing
students. A right-wing goon squad executes a student in the plain
view of the cops. They do nothing. This is presented as the seminal
radicalizing event for the RAF. The brutal thrills of this sequence
evoke Edel's model: Costa-Gavras' Z and State of Siege, two of the
most visually dynamic political histories (and political thrillers) ever made.
Once the leaders get thrown into jail, the pace slows. The RAF argues
with each other in their cells and the judge in court. Baader had
better instincts for political theatre than politics, and he turned
the courtroom into his stage. Newbie cells sprang up around Germany,
and their younger more hardassed members easily equaled the RAF
founders for viciousness. Baader plaintively tells one cop: "These
new groups operating in our name are so much more violent than we ever were."
Jennifer Lynch, the writer/director of Surveillance, takes a much
more American view of sociopathic violence; her protagonists kill and
maim because, in a modern America of alienation, crippling boredom
and dysfunctional relationships, it gets them off when nothing else
will. This forms a rather old-fashioned view of the cathartic killing
off of squares by a hip elite. It springs from the heyday of arty low
budget violent exploitation, the American International Pictures (and
their imitators) of the early and mid 1970s.
Bill Pullman appears to have aged poorly. He looks like a drunk Irish
cop. Julia Ormond was once briefly the next big thing and here
reclaims her career by turning an exploitation caricature into an
icon of sophisticated sex appeal and depth. Lynch's last filmten
years backwas the abomination Boxing Helena, which showcased her
dad's disdain for narrative and her own inability to convincingly
create atmosphere. Here, there actually is a plot. Serial killers
terrorize the countryside; Bill and Julia play the FBI agents brought
in to bring them down.
They arrive in psychotic American nowheresville, where the local cops
shoot out the tires of passing tourists, then sexually humiliate and
rob them. Again, just for kicks and pocket change harmless fun. The
traffic stop scenes prove as harrowing as the explicit serial killer
violence and get as close to a theme as Lynch embraces: America makes
people crazy. And what do crazy people like the best? They like to
make other people crazy.
The traffic stop cops, who see themselves as morally superior to the
serial killers, are presented as only the first falling domino in the
collapse of society. They and the serial kiiller are not ying and
yang, but only points on a continuum. How old-school hipster is that?
The tiny cast are unknown but recognizable character and stage
actors. They relish their hinky roles and only occasionally y drift
into self-parody. The dialogue offers plenty of Lynchian quirk and
some really unsettling subconscious character reveals. Lynch toys
with the idea that the killers are the sanest folks in town, if only
because they are the least in denial. But she chucks that notion
overboard for an orgasmic bloodletting finale both truly disturbing
and creepily hot. Very AIP.
This would be a smart genre picture if this genre still existed. Now
it's an anomaly: a self-conscious, amusing, far from perfect but
still compelling journey into unease, madness and blood. And all, it
turns out, in the service of letting true love thrive.
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