The suffocating utopia of narratives. Conversation with Rick Alverson
read in Italian
Rick Alverson, born in Spokane, Washington, in 1971, is an American film director and musician. He debuted in 2010 with the feature film The Builder, the story of an Irish immigrant struggling to reconcile the American ideal and its manifestation in the real world, which was soon followed by 2011 New Jerusalem. In 2013 his third movie, The Comedy, premiered at Sundance Film Festival, and in 2015 his fourth feature Entertainment was screened at Sundance and at Locarno Film Festival with high critical praise. In 2018 at the 75th Venice Film Festival premiered his to date most recent work, The Mountain, an antiutopian exploration of America and her contradictions starring Jeff Goldblum, Tye Sheridan, Udo Kier and Denis Lavant. The Mountain, set in the 1950s and freely inspired to the biography of the infamous neurologist Walter Freeman, chronicles a long car ride through the American province where acclaimed doctor Wallace Fiennes on request performs lobotomization on men and women of any age who are either mentally ill or too rebellious; the movie is told by the perspective of the young Andy who, after the dead of his mother, a former ‘patient’ of Fiennes, and his father, follows the doctor as an assistant and a photographer.
Let’s start from a word: utopia. You yourself have described The Mountain as an anti-utopian movie, and the whole feature is underlined by an inner criticism, almost a parody, of the traditional American storytelling of unlimited potential and boundless opportunity in favour of an emphasis on the value of limitations. What do you think have historically been the American utopia and the American dream? When and how were they born and when and why has someone started questioning these ideals?
Well, as you know, the country was founded classically on resource and labour exploitation, but with a brand solidly in place since the Virginia Company sent its naïve foot soldiers over. That brand was the Utopia you speak of, the Idea of America as a place of unlimited bounty and possibility. Arcadia. For me that’s the origin of the cancer that poisons the world and its waters and our minds to this day. America was the European manifest, the outward extension of all the inward gestations of the Old World. At every turn, the promise of an unimpeded upward mobility for those who “worked hard enough”, the manifest destiny doctrine, fueled exploitation and passivity and subjugation. It does that today, now that the disconnect is fully in play. Those crimes were fueled by that promise, so beautifully documented in the Hudson River School for instance, the Arcadian utopias of, what is and was, a very diverse and beautiful landscape.
One of Dr Fiennes’ main objectives in his activity as a lobotomizator – an activity where medicine has no clear borders with a moral-based crusade – is against sexuality: he performs a lobotomy on women who have a too rebellious or disinhibited attitude towards men. Sexuality however always escapes the control: Andy himself, who is little more than a teenager, ends up having sex with one of Fiennes’ patients, the one played by Hannah Gross. Every claimed ‘mental problem’ which Fiennes assures to heal seems to carry an irresistible mimetic power: in the last part of the movie Andy himself loses his ration – and would be eventually lobotomized – when he imitates the insane behaviour of a patient of a clinic. The vision of madness that The Mountain carries seems therefore halfway between Girard’s theories on mimetism and Michael Foucault’s Madness and Civilization. To your opinion, why in every time of the history – and especially in time of crisis as they could be 1950s for the America – there is such a need of control any manifestation of ab-normal and a-typical if even the ‘controllers’ and the ‘healers’ end up showing the same symptoms of the so-called diseased?
The movie definitely looks at the ways in which we allow marginalization, in which we are culpable in it, largely by allowing specialization without wholism. There is the convenience of it for us socially, the binary field it creates, where we, as individuals (actively complicit or not) can choose a side, cleanly, effectively. We love the binary. It’s important to remember though, the parallel with contemporary (pre-2020) America and America of the 1950s is the veneer of complacency, the veneer of absolute promise and general wealth. Both were lies propagated by narratives. The movie for me is more importantly a movie about the danger of narrative, of narrative as a weapon, a soft cudgel, that facilitates everything but too often – in the commonplace, mainstream use of it – nourishes nothing. The film also challenges clarity as a delivery device for meaning by purposely confronting the neatness of narrative. It asks what the danger of a pseudo-understanding of what we see and feel is. What is the danger of a superficial consumption and the idea of digestion as opposed to the messy, real, integrated, complex mechanics of truly contending with a thing?
The lobotomies which Dr Fiennes performs appear to be a metaphor for a wider removal process which seems to involve not only 1950s American province, but the country as a whole in all her historical arc. Instead of dialectically facing the problem of mental illness, Dr Fiennes and many others like him pretend to solve it by a lobotomy, a removal which actually leaves patients definitely disabled. About which topics and events do you think that America has performed a lobotomy on herself?
The lobotomy in question, as a metaphor, is so blatant in the movie as a device it might seem invisible. We have lobotomized ourselves and crave lobotomization by means of narrative in movies, series, journalism, popular fiction, social media interactivity, etc. It has become the form. We cannot see form any longer. It is just a vehicle for content, and we are ignorant to it, incapable of discerning what its actual function is. Cinema, and the arts in general, have become utilitarian and there is a real danger to that. That is a reason why poetry, real poetry (not comfort reading for the toilet) is so unpopular in America. Not solely because it is an outdated form, but because it relies on resonance and the open-ended field of comprehension, it relies on an empirical transference, not cloaked conveyance only. I should say, this is a larger problem of the West, certainly, Europe included. We are losing the poetic.
Many contemporary movies have explored the American province, especially after Donald Trump’s election was highly supported by the voters of the Rust Belt. I am mainly thinking about Taylor Sheridan’s unofficial trilogy of modern-day American frontier, but also to our conational Roberto Minervini’s What you’re gonna do when the world is on fire or to Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana, which were both screened in the same edition of Venice Film Festivals of yours. Your take, even if it is a work of fiction, seems a very dense and clinical study of the American province and its ghosts. What are, to your opinion, the main problems of American provinces and how much do you think it has changed from the 1950s when The Mountain is set?
The issue, again, is contemporary and global (definitely Western) in its particulars. It is an issue of convenient unreality. An identification of the boundless as beautiful, instead of the limited. It is the gulf between actuality and representation, between idea and thing. It is also the toxic nature of optimism as the primary fuel for civilization. Couple that with the absolute denial of the limitations of the world and its resources, and you have the conundrum we are currently living through. That is why I call the movie anti-utopian.
The Mountain unavoidably touches the theme of the distortions of the medicine. To your opinion how much the character of Fiennes and real-life Dr Walter Freeman was aware of the totally-negative consequences that their therapies had on the patients? And why is an always-growing number of people nowadays losing faith in traditional medicine in favour of a-scientific treatments of dubious effectiveness?
Freeman was in that state of convenient unreality. He believed he was forging a utilitarian path through the nonsense of medicine, a path only the individual can forge, the individual prone to excellence and accomplishment. We are a civilization living in two contemporary planes. What we believe we make real in its representation, in its dissemination. It is refracted back to us and envelops us and the more privilege and power we have, the higher our pulpit, the more effective the circulation.
The Mountain displays large attention to the silences, to the empty spaces of the frame and to all the unsaid which underlay between the characters. I read that also your previous movie, unfortunately, unavailable here in Italy, departed from the traditional three-acts structure trying to experiment something new. What do you think is the fil rouge which links your works, what are your narrative experimentations trying to achieve?
I’d like to provide a counterweight to the narrative, something that looks like it and feels like it but doesn’t operate by the rules of intoxication solely, the rules of validation and its market advantage only. Cinema, if it can still exist in any populist way, should seek to destabilize and not to simply confirm.
Jeff Goldblum’s performance as Dr Wallace Fiennes is one of the finest of his career, even if he is known more for his roles in science-fiction/horror cults and in comedies. I read that also in your two previous movies, The Comedy and Entertainment, you cast actors against their type by using famous American comedians in less conventional roles. What indications did you give him to build the character?
Jeff is incredibly curious and studious, maybe the most curious of any actor I’ve worked with. We talked about a lot of these ideas, a lot of these grudges with culture and government and American psychology. Physically, we modelled the character after Bill Evans, so there’s that too.
If you had to explain by a few phrases to a European what do you think is America today, what do you think are now her main issues, which are the episodes of its history which should be more emphasized in order to understand America, how would you answer?
America’s reckoning with its racist history, a contention with the unreality of its historical and contemporary narrative, is in the air as we speak. Will it yield its promises? That’s to be seen. But it’s important to remember, the guilt and ghosts America is reckoning with are the guilt and ghosts of Europe as well.