Freedom films

Just another word for nothing left to lose

 

illustration by Rob Connigale

Escape your mundane life at the flicks ­- but surely there must be more to ‘freedom’ than an anti-Semitic Australian in a kilt. Adam Lee Davies explores what other solutions Hollywood has come up with

 

Cinema is chock-full of uplifting tales. Escapism has always been Hollywood’s watchword, but these days a film is adjudged to have failed in every way if the audience doesn’t walk out of the cinema wearing the beatific smiles of the chemically castrated. Unfortunately, once this buzz has worn off, we soon find ourselves reclaimed by the cold, grey shadows of our everyday lives, picking our way toward the grave with nothing to look forward to but quiz night down the pub and two weeks on some flyblown Greek island every July.

 

 These films offer a utopian promise that most of us yearn for, but are never likely to realise. The heart-swelling emancipation of The Shawshank Redemption or the transmigratory epiphanies suggested by the closing moments of Close Encounters of the Third Kind are simply beyond what most of us might reasonably expect from the average day. There are, however, a few films in which freedom from one’s responsibilities, worries and disappointments are won not by logic-free prison breaks or benign alien abduction, but by embracing the less desirable, less aspirational elements of the world.

 

 Sick office syndrome

The most obvious component of our daily lives is work, and as novelist Chuck Palahniuk notes in his paean to the daily grind, Choke, “masochism is a valuable job skill”. Unless you number amongst that minute, ever-decreasing and unutterably smug fraction of the workforce that actually enjoys its trade, the lion’s share of your life will consist of huge brown swathes of terminally stifling drudgery.

The outlook might seem bleak, but if you were to follow the fine example of Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay) in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar, you’d realise that the treadmill is in fact a yellow-brick road that leads to the Elysian Fields of freedom. Lying, cheating and dreaming his way through the working day, Billy proves that those Germans were really on to something with the phrase ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’… 

Billy Liar

 

Workplace tedium was also very much the lot of Sam Lowry (Jonathon Pryce) in Terry Gilliam’s absurdist dystopian fever-dream, Brazil. Threatened with torture when the authorities suspect his new ladyfriend of being a bomb-crazy terrorist, Sam does the only rational thing and takes a total psychotic break from reality. This wise move finally affords him the Eden that the rusty cage of his recently departed body has only ever denied him.

 

Blessed solitude

Madness may seem an extreme solution, but it’s mere bagatelle to the hero of I Am Legend. Previously filmed as The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price and The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, the most recent incarnation of Richard Matheson’s horror novel saw Will Smith as the only survivor of a global biological apocalypse. Big Willy has no demands upon his time and can indulge his every whim but, with no-one else around to show-off to, he starts to suspect that he’s gone a little overboard in his pursuit of that permanent vacation.

The rest of us can gird ourselves for such lone shenanigans when next season’s brand of viral Armageddon ­- be it SARS, bird flu or the return of the mad cow – is served up to us.

 

Mind games

Any number of drug films suggest themselves for contention, as do the excesses of such drink-dramas as Leaving Las Vegas and The Lost Weekend, but let’s sidestep the obvious for a more allegorical take on short-term memory loss. Christopher Nolan’s thorny puzzler Memento presents us with the confused and forgetful Guy Pearce waking up every day with a newly-minted tattoo: a finer metaphor for the morning after than night before is hard to imagine. Those who forget the past may well be doomed to repeat it – but they are at least spared the shackles of conscience that so constrain the rest of us.

Kiss of the spider woman

 

Incarceration is the name of the game in both Kiss of the Spider Woman and The Enigma of Kasper Hauser. In the former, William Hurt and Raul Julia are freed from the mundane to gambol through a fully realised fantasy world by the desperate privations of an especially squalid South American prison cell. Kasper, on the other hand, spends the first 17 years of his life in a windowless cellar somewhere near Nuremberg with no form of human contact whatsoever. Booted out into the gale-force pandemonium of early-19th century Germany, the poor sod must have felt like anything was a plus after his cruelly overextended stay in the naughty corner.

 

The enigma of Kasper Hauser

 

The unseen ministrations of an all-powerful Big Brother assure the continuation of Jim Carrey’s Arcadian existence in underwhelming media satire The Truman Show. Born into his own private universe, where cameras lurk to record his every move, Truman’s subsequent life is screened 24/7 to the mouth-breathers and chowderheads out there in TV Land. Only when he starts asking some uncomfortable questions do the golden-fretted halls of his own personal Asgard come crashing down. The lesson is clear – if God gives you lemons, you make lemonade.

 

The Truman Show

 

What, no spoon?

In the future as predicted by The Matrix we will see a massive growth in such superintended pod-life. The most persuasive of many science fiction films to investigate the oft-predicted paradigm shift between man and machine, it promulgates an inevitable evolutionary leap after which humankind will be kept in blissful suspended animation while our atrophied bodies are used to power the machines that wet-nurse us through our virtual lives. No job, no bills, no hassle, just leather trench coats, killer shades and fun, fun, fun.

Let freedom reign indeed.

 

written by Adam Lee Davies

1. February 25th 2009 | 1
   

     Bill says:

   FYI, the video of Julie Christie at the top is for another schlesinger film, “Darling”, and not “Billy Liar” as suggested.

2. February 25th 2009 | 2
   

     The Hussy says:

   Thanks. I will do some more research and update.

3. February 25th 2009 | 3
   

     testington says:

   This article feels entirely random and bizzare.

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