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Not too long ago, I started Grad School.
Eek. At the request of a few buddies, and considering the fact that
this is also sort of a movies blog, I now present a paper I wrote now some time ago. Notes and citations are near the bottom.
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The history of Iranian cinema is
a long and torrid affair, much like that of American cinema, as Hamid Dabashi’s
“Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past Present and Future” (2001) at times
heartbreakingly describes. But despite the government’s frequent and
unrelenting attempts at stifling creativity deemed irreputable or in any way
damaging to the state (Dabashi, 32; Tait; Rostami-Povey,
6-7; Wright), there
has always been, if not a strong, then a strong-willed underground scene
(Dabashi, 33-75), and in recent years Iran has enjoyed more relaxed regulations
(Dabashi, 253; Ghazi; Issa; Wright). Iranian American director Ana Lily Amirpour’s film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014),
exists as an extension of this constantly reinventing cinematic history by
offering a film which, like many classic underground Iranian films (Dabashi,
28), presents an engaging film which nonetheless succeeds in questioning
authority. By merging the genre of the western and the vampire film, as well as
employing a variety of inversions of the male gaze, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night critiques and denounces
patriarchal ideology as well as discusses how westernization has reshaped
Iranian culture.
A
Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (AGWHAAN)
presents the story of the nameless lonely vampire, The Girl (Sheila Vand), and
the poor, traditionally minded young Arash (Arash Marandi). The film opens with Arash returning home,
after stealing a cat, to find his junkie father, Hossein (Marshall Manesh),
once again stoned on heroin. Shortly
after arriving home, Saeed (Dominic Rains), local drug dealer and pimp,
arrives, looking for an installment on Hossein’s debts. With Arash and Hossein having no money to
speak of, Saeed steals Arash’s classic car, which Arash begrudgingly
allows. Saeed takes his new ride to meet
Atti (Mozhan Marnò), one of his prostitutes, in the park, to bully and take
advantage of her. Watching this occur, The
Girl follows Saeed home, enticing him to invite her in. After Arash retrieves his keys from Saeed’s now
dead body, meeting The Girl on his way, he nurses his father through his
withdrawal period, now that his heroin supplier is dead. The Girl then stalks the feverous Hossein
after he is rebuked by Atti, who wants nothing more than a professional
relationship with him. Arash, walking
home after a rave, high on ecstasy and dressed as Dracula, is picked up by The
Girl, who takes him home after at first mistaking him for a vampire. Following an intimate dance scene, and The
Girl befriending Atti, she meets with Arash outside an industrial plant, where
she tries to dissuade him from pursuing her, all while hiding her true nature. Hossein, unable to loosen heroin’s grip,
scrounges the last of his money, purchases a night with Atti, and, against her
will, forces her to shoot up. The Girl
arrives, and after she kills Hossein, she dumps his body in the alley, with
Atti’s assistance. Upon discovering his
dead father, he decides to leave Bad City, and he asks The Girl to come with,
even after realizing she murdered his father.
They drive off not into the sunset, but into the dark, for stopping only
for a moment’s reflection, before driving off camera and into the unknown.
In stylizing the film as an
“Iranian vampire spaghetti western” (Macaulay) Director Amirpour invokes the
image of the western film. The western, a
film genre created during the closing of the American frontier in the early 20th
century, is arguably as old as popular cinema itself, spaghetti westerns
themselves understood as the mid-20th century Italian revitalization
of the genre (Reed, 54). Even prior to
the death of the “real” west, the actions of various notable frontier
celebrities were dramatized in “wild west shows, theatrical plays, dime novels,
newspapers” (Reed, 55), so it comes as no surprise that film would continue in
this dramatization. As the years between
the death of the west and the creation of new westerns grew, the films continued
to use certain signs and signifiers now synonymous with the genre, but towards
different purposes. Guns, horses, open
ranges, these signs remained, but their purposes within the films became more
than just western paraphernalia. A shot
of a lone man on a horse, before an enormous empty expanse, is no longer just a
character, but the embodiment of the “pure hero of the western,” a man pitted
against the open and terrifying wilderness (Reed, 58). Through the manipulation of these signs, the
western developed into a system that not only allowed (glorified/false) reminiscences
of the country’s past, but a system by which American filmmakers could discuss
relevant contemporary issues, such as mid 20th century westerns
using Native American/Caucasian race relations as a metaphor for African
American/Caucasian relations. In this
way, modern westerns nostalgically reference not only the narrativized notions
of America’s past, but also western cinema’s own history of playing a major role
in that narrativization.
The question then posed is
whether AGWHAAN can itself take up
the “western,” or even “spaghetti western” film mantle. Toby Reed, in his article “The
Six-gun Simulacrum: New Metaphors for an Old Genre” (1996), wrote “the notion of a
pure genre is impossible” (Reed, 56), quoting French philosopher Jacques
Derrida who believes “as soon as the word ‘genre’ is sounded,” an “impossible
boundary,” one in which everything exists both inside and outside of, is drawn
(Reed, 54). Reed notes that “every element
inside the genre also exists outside the genre in another context,” but while no
genre is pure, or self-contained, the notion of such a thing being impossible,
a myth. Derrida saw this impossible boundary as “a permeable membrane” (Reed, 53,
54, 56). In this sense, the actual
signifiers, the guns, the horses, the ten-gallon hats, do not necessarily need
to be present in a film for it to be called a western. The signifieds, the notions the signifying
signs point to, do.
Reed writes that Robert Warshow,
in his highly influential article "Movie Chronicle: The Westerner"
(1962), posits that the “the western is preoccupied with the extrinsic nature
of the image – with the image’s surface” (Reed, 64). Warshow sees this preoccupation with style,
as “seen in the images of cowboys,” guns, and other western accouterments, this
obsession with “an extrinsic relation to an object,” as standing in direct
opposition to the “anti-style of modernism,” to modernism’s intrinsic relation
to an “idea” (Reed, 64-65). The western
figure, for Warshow, is all surface, all veneer, no substance, “he is a walking
sign whose appearance is his essence” (Reed, 65), Warshow himself saying that,
in westerns, “a hero is one who looks like a hero” (Warshow, 200).
We see this preoccupation with
image, with outwardly visible signs, at play all throughout AGWHAAN.
Shown almost directly after an extended scene in Arash’s dilapidated
apartment, we see the focus on extrinsic preoccupation inherent in the drug
peddling pimp Saeed, who surrounds himself with a variety of wealth-signs: an
entirely modernized home theater, mounted animal heads, a poorly assembled and
obviously unused drum kit. But Saeed is
not the only one putting up a front.
Arash too wishes to appear stylishly wealthy, momentarily succeeding to
do so, a street urchin (Milad Eghbali) disbelieving Arash’s claims to have no
money to spare based on Arash’s mode of transportation. Even our vampire, The Girl, has put up a
veneer. Cultural norms notwithstanding,
before her hunts she dons a long black hijab, dark black eyeliner, and
segmenting black and white striped t-shirt, intimidating to some, enticing to others,
but all of which ritualistically layered on, like a protective coating.
The western film’s abhorrence of
modernization is played out through The Girl’s systematic humiliation and
destruction of Saeed, the film’s most modernized figure, with his modern hair
cut and decked out house, and her obsession with and sparing of Arash, a man, a
gentleman, with a variety of traditional worldviews, who simply wants to
reclaim his classic car steed. The Girl
herself stands as a figure straddling modernity and orthodoxy, or
traditionalism. Posters of modern and
classic musicians live harmoniously on her walls, her taste in music,
contemporary artists, pressed into vinyl, performing neo-dark wave and
post-punk revival, are just a few examples of her transgressive nature, living
at once in the past and the present. She isn’t seen outside her home without
her hijab, but, beyond being a figure the spectator has been allowed to view
topless in a bathing scene, her character has no problems being alone with a
man to whom she is not wed, as seen not only in her scene with Saeed, but with
Arash. Her existence as a vampire, transgressing the lines between life and
death, seem almost secondary in this light.
According to film theorists
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, the cinema itself, much like how Derrida
described the western genre, is a permeable, transgressable membrane, one which
“simultaneously connects and separates,” this division implying “special proximity”
(Elsaesser, 37). These thresholds,
liminal spaces, such as the auditorium’s screen, or Saeed’s veneer of wealth,
can “hide and protect, but they also open up and reflect,” simultaneously
protecting and opening up, bringing close and making something present, instead
of filtering (Elsaesser, 39). As well as
outwardly reflecting his western-genre-required personal adherence to a
preoccupation with style, Saeed’s façade of prosperity and power protects him
from being attacked by Arash or Atti when he takes advantage of them. This façade, however, is also what attracts The
Girl. It is this which catches her
attention, bringing her close, inviting her in, to the point where she has not
only transgressed the boundaries of his home, and his veneer, but his very skin.
The skin too is a border. Elsaesser and Hagener see it as a “symbolic
interface between Self and the outside world,” “negotiat[ing] and
re-distribut[ing] the relation between inside and outside” (Elsaesser, 111). While
skin can be seen as “only a cover,” it is also a “means of expression and
surface of inscription, … suggesting that much that used to be kept ‘inside’
now wants to be exposed and displayed” (Elsaesser, 115-116). This mirrors both Derrida’s and their earlier
position that borders, drawn boundaries, both protect and reflect. But much in
the same way the liminal threshold of the screen opens up and brings close,
skin too invites itself to be transgressed, “evok[ing] the cut, the incision
and the mark” (Elsaesser, 111). This “transgression between ‘inside’ and
‘outside’, between Self and Other,” for Elsaesser and Hagener, is foundational
to the nature of cinema (Elsaesser, 111).
However, this invitation, this desire to “‘reach out and touch
someone,’” or conversely, to have the Other’s proximate body draw near, to have
someone reach out and touch oneself, commonly evokes horror within the
spectator (Elsaesser, 115). For film
theorist Linda Williams, the genre of the horror film combines this horror of
an Other’s proximity, of a monster’s boundary transgressions, with images of
the abject, which challenges the concept of boundaries at all (Elsaesser, 121).
Both of these qualities are
present in AGWHAAN, explicitly so in
The Girl, with her existing as a monster, a vampire, that transgresses
boundaries, both social and physical, and in doing so presents the spectator
with abject images, such as fingers being bitten off, and necks being torn out. But it is not purely from her undead stature
that horror is being evoked, it is also in that she is a woman at all.
Williams discusses in her essay
“Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess” (1991) how the success of a horror film
is “often measured by the degree to which the audience’s sensation mimics what
is seen on the screen” (Williams, 270).
If characters in the scene are experiencing something horrifying, and
the audience is horrified, then the scene is a success. Horror lacks what other genres, such as drama
or documentary, see as “proper esthetic distance,” the audience feeling
manipulated by these texts’ “over-involvement in sensation and emotion”
(Williams, 271). Though in apparently
unorthodox ways, like other popular genres, horror also often addresses
persistent cultural problems (Williams, 276), namely, according to film
theorist Barbara Creed, that of the monstrous-feminine.
In “Horror and the
Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection” (1986), Creed describes how “all
human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine,” and how this
concept is situated “in the horror film in relation to ‘abjections’,” or “that
which does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’ … threatens life, [and] must
be ‘radically excluded’ from the place of the living subject” (Creed, 251-252).
Creed posits that the horror
film works as “an illustration of the work of abjection” through copious
culturally/socially specific constructed “images of abjection,” including
images of the corpse, blood, feces, and images of the crossing or threatening
to cross of a ‘border’” (Creed, 253-256). In other words, a bringing about of
“an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its
stability” (Creed, 256). While The Girl
certainly threatens life, and does not “respect borders,” as has already been
discussed, it is not clear as to why too her femininity is monstrous until
Creed outlines how, “as constructed within/by a patriarchal and phallocentric
ideology,” “the concept of the monstrous-feminine … is related intimately to
the problem of sexual difference and castration” (Creed, 251-252). The horror film’s preoccupation with the
abject image of blood, particularly images of “the bleeding body of a woman,” “suggests
that castration anxiety,” a terrifying shock Freud believed no human male is
spared when viewing female genitals, “is a central concern of the horror film”
(Creed, 251, 256). The sign of a slashed
and mutilated female body, Creed writes, is what suggests, what signifies “her
own castrated state,” as well as “the possibility of castration for the male”
(Creed, 256).
All that said, director Amirpour
did not simply create a theoretically successful western/horror film, but one
that critiques patriarchal ideology, as well as both glorifies and denounces
the westernization of Iran.
Film has a long and sordid
history of perpetuating patriarchal ideology.
Creed’s statements are mirrored by film theorist Laura Mulvey in her
essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975). Mulvey agrees that, in film, “the image of
the castrated woman,” symbolizing the threat of male castration via her “real
lack of penis,” going further to say that this is what makes cinema’s
phallocentric position possible (Mulvey, 14).
The image of woman under this phallocentric film regime, Mulvey posits,
“can only exist in relation to castration and cannot transcend it,” signifying
the male Other, tying women to their place as “bearer, not maker, of meaning”
(Mulvey, 15). This meaning that they are
forced to bear is that of sexual difference, “thus the woman as icon … always
threatens to evoke the [castration] anxiety it originally signified” (Mulvey,
22). Mulvey believes films have two
avenues of escape from this anxiety: “fetishism or sadism” (Elsaesser, 96),
meaning either taking joy in the objectification of the female image, or taking
joy in the destruction of it. It is
within this dynamic that the monstrous-feminine exists, and thrives.
Film theorist Carol Clover, who
too mirrors Mulvey and Creed in their assertion that, to the male observer,
“the lack of the phallus … is itself simply horrifying” (Clover, 240), wrote in
her essay "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the
Slasher Film" (1987)
that, as with her topic of choice, slashers, classic horror monsters, such as
the wolf man, the poltergeist, the vampire, “represent not just ‘an eruption of
the normally repressed animal sexual energy of the civilized male’ but also the
‘power and potency of a non-phallic sexuality’” (Clover, 238). At the climax of most slashers, when the
“final girl” has turned the table on the stalking male figure, generally at the
moment she takes the weapon from the antagonist and uses it against him, she is
effectively “phallicised,” at that moment halting the plot and ceasing any
horror (Clover, 240). The potential for
a feminine victory is thwarted by her reversing of the roles, “angry displays
of force” being gendered as masculine, turning the monster into the receptacle
of that force, a state the film had up until that point gendered as female
(Clover, 240). While this phallicising
of the female protagonist and reversing of roles may seem to only support the
first half of Clover’s assertion, the “power and potency of a non-phallic
sexuality” is expressed through these film’s desires to stamp out non-phallic
power, either through having a phallicised stalking male figure decimate female
characters attempting to assert their non-phallic sexuality, or by destroying
the de-phallicised/castrated monster once it has failed to retain its agency,
its murder weapon. Horror films express
“female desire only to show how monstrous it is” (Clover, 238).
If female desire is only shown
to make it monstrous, Amirpour’s The Girl is doubly effective. Even without
Clover equating slasher monsters and classic horror monsters in her initial
assertion, we can see elements of this playing out in AGWHAAN, again best shown through the first interaction between The
Girl and Saeed. Up to this point in the
film, the primary antagonist has been Saeed.
We have seen him intimidate some, bully others, and facilitate and
profit from one man’s, and presumably many other’s, self-destructive
tendencies. When The Girl enters his
home, an unknowing spectator may be concerned for her safety, assuming her fate
to be the same as Atti’s. After doing a
line of cocaine, Saeed approaches The Girl, and attempts to push his finger
past the threshold, the border, of her lips.
The Girl opens her mouth slightly, only to reveal her vampiric nature,
via the exposure of her fangs. Saeed,
like the spectator, whose wish to transgress the skin, to reach out and touch
the Other, has now been amplified, and he allows The Girl to draw his finger
into her mouth, taking momentary pleasure from the transgression. When The Girl, eyes menacing, bites down, and
severs Saeed’s digit, she spits it out again, de-phallicising Saeed, but
refusing to become phallicised herself.
She playfully mocks his attempts to breach the Other’s skin, caressing
his lips with his own severed finger, not only remarking on his now castrated
state, but symbolizing the terror inherent in one’s loss of phallic power
within the patriarchy, and with her emasculating instrument, her fangs, she
then wrestles Saeed’s life from himself.
The truly horrifying aspect of
The Girl in AGWHAAN, however, is not
her fangs, but her eyes. Elsaesser and
Hagener speak to this power, writing that various structures of visibility and
looks find their privileged point of convergence in the eye through film’s
articulation of shot, framing, and montage, a presupposed distance allowing
“seeing” to act as a “pure act of ocular perception” has the potential power to
promise or threaten “mastery or possession” (Elsaesser, 83). As with all their themes, this concept can be
understood as one that effects not only spectators, but characters
themselves. Mulvey mirrors this bleak
ending sentiment, writing that while the look can be pleasurable in form, it “can
be threatening in content” (Mulvey, 19).
The “traditional exhibitionist role” for women, Mulvey continues, is to
simultaneously to be looked at and displayed, “with their appearance coded for
strong visual and erotic impact” (Mulvey, 19).
This leads to the implication that “in a world ordered by sexual
imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and
passive/female” (Mulvey, 19). Clover
writes that women are hideously punished when they exercise the “‘active
investigating gaze’ normally reserved for males” (Clover, 238-239). For Elsaesser and Hagener, this leaves “no
doubt about the phallic nature of the probing, inquisitive eye,” no doubt about
it being the male gaze, aided by prosthetic devices, i.e. cameras, being the
one exploring and scrutinizing the female body (Elsaesser, 86).
This is what makes The Girl not
only horrifying, but also an instrument wielded in service of critiquing
phallocentric films and culture. When
men in the film, be it Saeed, Hossein, or the Street Urchin, attempt to use
their gaze to intimidate or control either herself or Atti, her counterpart, a
reflection of herself, The Girl meets their gaze, and inverts its power. She investigates their houses, mimics their
actions, interrogates their actions. The
Girl meets them on their plane of power by claiming an active gaze, but, from
their perspective, an inverted, perverted, and worst of all female active gaze,
and there is nothing within their power that they can do to “redirect” her to
her “traditional exhibitionist role.”
When The Girl is in the presence of men, she is there to see, not be
seen. But The Girl is not the only
active gazing feminine presence in AGWHAAN. Director Amirpour is, too, a woman, using an
active, probing, investigating, inquisitive, if prosthetic, eye.
Elsaesser and Hagener discuss
how film theorist Rudolf Arnheim believed that “the fundamental premise for our
understanding of film” was that it is the spectator’s aptitude of combining
disparate data and sensations, of creating a “gestalt,” that gives film realism
(Elsaesser, 22). In order for spectators to achieve this, it was the job of the
director to capture, with the camera’s lens, “the complex totality of the world,”
which can only be caught through a “collision of shots extrapolated from this
totality” (Elsaesser, 24-25). In other
words, it was the purpose of the filmmaker to direct the spectator’s gaze, to
combine shots “in such a way as to have a specific effect on the audience”
(Elsaesser, 25). Theorist Sergei Eisenstein
also wrote that “‘film cannot be a simple presentation or demonstration of
events,’” rather that they should be composed of shots and scenes assembled to
“elicit certain responses in the spectator” aimed at influencing them,
“‘moulding (sic)’” them in accordance with the filmmaker’s purpose, “‘through a
series of calculated pressures on its psyche’” (Elsaesser, 25, 26). Eisenstein believed that by assembling these
shots in a specific way, what he called “montage construction,” films can guide
spectators to “follow a specific train of thought,” presented exclusively
through images, to a “pre-ordained idea or experience” (Elsaesser, 27).
Elsaesser and Hagener are quick to point out, however, that while “it is the
film that directs the thinking,” it is dependent on “the cognitive, moral and
affective associations the spectator invests” (Elsaesser, 27). In other words, the thought being expressed
on the side of the film would not exist if it did not transgress the screen,
and coalesce within the mind of the spectator.
Their existences are dependent upon one another, existing as it were on
both sides of the border, the barrier of the screen again simply existing as a
permeable membrane evoking the cut. Like
The Girl does with her vampiric abilities, Amirpour meets and inverts the
spectator’s active male gaze, understanding that their “pure act of ocular
perception” also has the potential power to promise them mastery or possession
of the images they see (Elsaesser, 83), by employing the trope of the vampire
film.
Film theorist Ken Gelder, in his
essay, "Citational Vampires:
Transnational Techniques of Circulation in Irma Vep, Blood: the Last Vampire
and Thirst" (2013), writes that vampire films allow for encounters with the Other, with
something “remote,” between “something modern and something very old,” is “a
key generic feature of vampire films” (Gelder, 81, 82, 83), much like the
western. However, the major difference
between the two is that vampire films are also designed to
“to interrogate
one’s assumptions about cultural and geographical distance, and difference,”
that “they take the ‘local’ and the remote into proximity with each other,
juxtaposing them but also drawing them together” (Gelder, 81). Once again the concept of disparate entities being
drawn together by a border, by a boundary, is evoked. Critical theorists Johan
Höglund and Tabish Khair continue on this line of thought in the introduction
to their book Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood (2013), in which Gelder’s essay is
found. They write that “the vampire narrative
effectively and continuously maps transnational, colonial and postcolonial
concerns” (Höglund, 2). Höglund and Khair describe how, when Bram Stoker’s
Dracula drives the visiting English Jonathan Harker, this, in many ways, marks
the crossing, the transgressing, of the border between East and West, or
“between the imagine self of Europe and the Oriental Other” (Höglund, 1),
introducing that vampire narratives, even from their early days, are also about
transgressions.
Amirpour is using the trope of
the vampire to prop up her use of the western, not only to discuss the
conflicts between tradition and modernity, but between Eastern and Western
ideals. However, Amirpour is approaching these two Western genres, or tropes,
from an Eastern perspective, completing the meaning behind her description of AGWHAAN as an “Iranian vampire spaghetti
western.” Gelder implies that critics
“geographically and culturally distanced” stand at a disadvantage when it comes
to comprehending the underlying themes and messages of films they understand as
foreign (Gelder, 81), which only further encourages a complete understanding of
the purpose of the vampire in modern geographically-western horror stories*.
(*If not
for examples such as Billy the Kid vs
Dracula (1966), BloodRayne 2:
Deliverance (2007) (also featuring Billy the Kid), and Curse of the Undead (1959), it would seem surprising that, with
both genres dealing explicitly with the juxtaposition of modernity and
traditionalism, there are not more, or at least any other, successful
vampire/westerns.)
Höglund and Khair write that
Stephan Arata, in his essay “The Occidental Tourist” (1990), argues “Bram
Stoker’s Dracula can be viewed as an Eastern terrorist imperialist, a being set
on bringing the horrors of colonization to the British” (Höglund, 2-3). This modern critique of Dracula mirrors the
assertions of Glennis Byron and Aspasia Stephanou in
their essay “Neo-imperialism and the Apocalyptic Vampire Narrative: Justin
Cronin's the Passage” (2013), an essay also found in Höglund and Khair’s book.
Wasting no time in critiquing Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri’s statement in their book Empire (2001), “Imperialism is over” (Byron, 189), Byron and
Stephanou start their essay
discussing how the early 2000’s “US venture into the Middle
East has made it absurd ‘to speak of ours as a postcolonial
world’” (Höglund, 3).
Byron and
Stephanou write that the image of vampires in modern tales stays true to the
vampire story’s roots as a conversation about the juxtaposition of the old
world and the new, exemplifying “a threat produced from within the ‘civilized
world’” (Byron, 193), the stories’ focuses have shifted. They
suggest that as a result of the US “‘seeking to reinvent the imperial tradition and reintroduce
imperial rule – and on a global scale,’” the image of the vampire began to be
exploited “in order to address issues relating to the new American imperialism”
(Byron, 190), with the Muslim often being “pictured by dominant post-9/11
discourse as a vampire” (Höglund, 8).
What is not surprising is that,
after this development, a vampire story would be produced with a presumably Muslim
monster. What is surprising is that the story would be set in a Muslim nation,
directed by someone with hereditary links to said nation. Amirpour’s
manipulation of the western and vampire genres, as viewed from an Eastern
perspective, is ironic, considering the critique of westernization that can be
culled from their use.
It is not the specter of the
vampire, of The Girl, which haunts this film, but of the West. Showing in quick succession images of dead
trees and oil drills, oil processing plants and ditches overflowing with dead
bodies, industrial plants and the undead, this Eisensteinian montage of images
draws a connection, one that can’t help but evoke images of the West. This land is vampiricly being sucked dry by
its own people, to feed the west, and to make those in charge, those with
power, rich. This is driven home by the
juxtaposition of the opening sequence, filled with these images, with the
scenes shot in Arash’s and Saeed’s apartments. Arash’s is nearly empty save for
his junky father, and Saeed’s is decadently decorated using the money extracted
from the citizens unfortunate enough to have been tricked by the luxurious
lifestyle offered to them, if only they open a vein. The lonely vampire, seemingly birthed out of
the city itself, birthed out of their neglect of their land’s, as well as their
own, well being, stalks through the night, feeding on her neighbors. The inhabitants reliance on western money to
feed their addictions has poisoned their culture, from top to bottom. The women no longer respect the tradition not
to be alone in a room with a man to whom she is not wed, the music they listen
to is exclusively western, even Arash is unable to escape is classic car
obsession. The traditional
western-genre’s hero’s preoccupation with traditionalism, in AGWHAAN, is not presented as Eastern
traditionalism, but Western, manifesting itself within Arash as a sort of
hybrid of the two, confusing even him, as he is shown stealing earrings simply
to get his classic car, his symbol of Western traditional values, back. Amirpour is using her own monster, her
monster film, to invert the active gaze of the spectator, to transgress the
border of the film, and critique the real world.
Doubly ironically, this is
precisely the type of film an imperial West would want to see. They want to see that the East is just like
the West, or at the very least that they desire to be like the west, that they
loathe themselves, their “foreign Western culture,” as much as the imperial
West, secretly, also does. In that
sense, the film could be Amirpour presenting to Western audiences what the West
thinks it wants, but instead the film itself acts as the Eastern Other, coming
back to haunt them, tricking them into inviting it into their (film)houses, so
it can drain them of their blood(money), one at a time, and grow stronger,
possibly returning one day to burn the whole corrupt city down. As Red Skeleton once said, "it only
proves what they always say, give the people what they want to see and they'll
come out for it" (Keyes, 198).
All of this said, the other half
of AGWHAAN’s origin must not be
ignored. It was shot in a small town in
southern California, by a director who is herself half American, as well as
half Iranian. Born in England, partially
raised in both Florida and California, Amirpour is herself a person who has
straddled and transgressed borders. This
film straddles borders as well, being produced by western companies, shown at western
movie festivals, and having a cast list largely consisting of American actors
primarily, if not exclusively, having worked in American, but being set in a
fictional Iranian town, having Persian as the primary language of the film, and
getting its start winning “best short film” in an Iranian film festival. Its critique of westernization begins to pale
under this light.
In Iran, currently, the most
popular films are, by far, films created in the West. Iran’s entertainment sanctions are becoming more
relaxed due to the “millions of Iranians
[that] have been switching to the use of banned satellite television
equipment,” simply to watch Western films and television shows (Ghazi). The Iranian government likely wanted to start
seeing revenue from these taxable hours of entertainment.
It is unlikely, but remains a possibility, that, so as to have her film
be more likely to appeal to the ever-evolving tastes of her Iranian brethren,
Amirpour created a film that speaks directly to Western sensibilities. It is no surprise that, as stated above, the
Iranian government too is uninterested in the Westernization of their culture
(Tait), but their insistence on impeding and discouraging female creativity is
reason to suspect that this film may not play on legal channels in Iran
(Wright).
Throughout AGWHAAN, there is both an abundance of lionizing and decrying of
the West. What is most likely, however,
is that neither is what was intended.
Being herself born in the “millennial” date range, Amirpour is most likely
presenting a discussion of what this essay would like to term as “culture
bleed.” Amirpour identifies, as stated
above, as both Iranian and American. As
with the western film, and the vampire film, and any boundary-defining feature,
there is no pure, or self-contained, example of an Iranian-American. She exists on either side and within the
transgressions between both definitions, a state of existence ever more
feasible with the advent of the internet.
With the internet at one’s fingertips, cultures we’ve been cut off from,
eras we haven’t considered, histories and narratives never imagined, all of
these things are instantly accessible, and are, both fortunately and
unfortunately, appropriable. Enough exposure to this deluge of information, and
one’s identity is bound to start taking a different shape. Under this light, it becomes evident that
Amirpour is not just able to identify as Iranian-American, but, like all
people, able to take on a variety of identities, all of which possessing their
own transgressable boundaries and non-self-contained definitions. Her identity is as fluid as that of her
film’s, the evidence for one message as fluid as the evidence for another,
making it impossible to discuss every example.
Laura Mulvey once discussed how,
“‘if women’s cinema is going to emerge, it should not only concern itself with
substituting positive female protagonists, focusing on women’s problems, etc.;
it has to go much further than this if it is to impinge on consciousness. It requires a revolutionary strategy which
can only be based on an analysis of how film operates as a medium within a
specific cultural system’” (Hagener, 97).
Amirpour’s film exists at once around and within the transgression points
of an almost innumerable amount [LHJE1] of
boundaries. If other filmmakers follow
in suit, Mulvey’s utopian “women’s cinema” may yet come to fruition, and not
simply as “a counterpoint” to classical Hollywood cinema (Mulvey, 16).
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