It’s a Sunday evening, your phone has six unanswered text messages lighting up the screen and the tail end of your hangover has mostly left the building. What lingers on into the bittersweet Sabbath sundown is a faint strain of anxiety in your chest and the dread of Monday morning as you lay in foetal position on the couch. The trajectory of the remainder of the evening lies within the remote held by your limp hand. I set this scene because the point I’m making is that we all have comfort films we turn to in these moments, the Bridget Jones and Clueless type flicks that don’t require anything more of you as a viewer than pure spectatorship. In these films, we can let Sunday slide away with the only thought pestering you being your unanswered texts and the thoughts of getting up from the couch and going to bed. Last Sunday, I made the (necessary) mistake of watching Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009) and it really got me thinking about the relationship between filmmaker and audience. Having already seen Irréversible (2002), Love (2015), and Climax (2018) previously, I was no stranger to Noé’s distinctive experimental auteurship but as the introduction credits rolled in at manic speed, flashing barely-legible names in neon at me like an arcade trip on acid, my chest tightened and I knew I was not in for an easy viewing.
Enter the Void follows a young American man named Oscar played by Nathanial Brown who is living in Tokyo and dies whilst on a DMT trip (this is no major spoiler as it is the entire premise of the film). The first segment of the film is shot entirely through P.O.V. lens, we the viewer become Oscar. The use of P.O.V. is so highly stylised that it even includes the blinking of Oscar’s eyelids over the lens. We too experience the visual and auditory hallucinations of the DMT trip so convincingly in a manner that evidently took a huge amount of post-production involvement and the incredible cinematography of Benoît Debie. The film navigates through many visually stunning yet troubling scenes and similar to the inner workings of the mind, we learn of the plot and subplots in a non-linear fashion where time is a loose construct. Enter the Void takes a psychological approach to the storyline, where certain on-screen triggers take us back in time to moments of trauma for Oscar. After Oscar dies, his viewpoint continues but less directly so, now through a bird’s eye view. It is here where we watch Oscar’s life playback before us and we witness the lead up to and aftermath of his death whilst moving through each scene in boundless fluidity, simulating astral projection.
Through situating the viewer in the position of the protagonist, Noe forces us to ‘Enter the Void’ with him, a term that becomes symbolic of much more than simply a psychedelic trip, but of life and of death. So experimental it becomes experiential, the film transcends commercial filmmaking and elevates into art house, avant-garde type cinema. The film forces you into a state of discomfort, with drawn-out, seedy sex scenes surpassing the usual or even ‘sexy’ mode of representation, bloodied scenes of grimy violence, and people living on the outskirts of civil society barely existing, pushed beyond the bounds of psychological reasoning. On a hazy Sunday eve, it takes a lot to not turn away from this genre of film, why further subject yourself to discomfort with the work-week looming around the corner? It’s important to consider what you as a viewer may gain from this unsettling type of relationship with a director.
Avant-garde cinema is designed to push the viewer to the limit of what they’re willing to accept, it is a political statement in itself that expects more from you as a viewer than casual participation or something to enjoy whilst haphazardly scrolling through Instagram. When something pushes you to your limit enough, whether through gory SFX or sordid plotlines, it makes you really question where that uncomfortability resides within. Perhaps it mirrors a darkness or a shadow-self of you that you struggle to confront or accept. Regarding Enter the Void, you may become uncomfortable about the way women are portrayed (Oscar’s sister clearly having a dysfunctional relationship with her sexuality) or Oscar’s own maladaptive escapism through drug use. Whatever it may be, the film doesn’t glamourise these issues like the average Hollywood flick has a tendency to, and the realism rooted in these portrayals evokes discomfort precisely because they are so precariously close to how you too would feel or react in these situations. In an interview, after being asked about whether he cares or not about the morality of his characters, having depicted a sex worker and a drug dealer as leads, Noe stated that he doesn’t believe in good, evil, or morality. That the very idea of morality is a Western concept. And regarding theatre walk-outs? He says, “I feel powerful if people walk out because they are offended or scared of a movie.” This fear or offence shows that the work has an impact. It is also important to remember that our ideals on morality or ethics are predicated by our cultural backgrounds. Quite often, we have the same moral ideals highlighted and pushed upon us by a media system that is largely dominated by Western culture and it is easy to forget that the film industry does not have an obligation to provide moral or social ideals in their works.
Ultimately what should be easy viewing? Art doesn’t exist to simply appease or lure the viewer into a false state of security, art reflects life and that, as we know, is not the nature of life. At the end of the day, the origins of cinema lie in art and it sometimes takes artistically ideological directors such as Noé to remind us of that. So, this weekend, do yourself a favour, leave Clueless for next week and relish the discomfort of Gasper Noé. Explore the darkest regions of yourself that his films expose and remember that morality is only societally driven in Western cultures. Fruitful art doesn’t exist to pacify neither you nor me.
Watch the interview referenced above here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbGNy9Z0NgA&t=306s.
WORDS: Fionnuala Short
