Evil in the Ordinary: Mouchette

While I am, with the rest of the Orthodox world, lagging "behind" the West in observing Easter (Pascha) this year (April 27), I am stuck, therefore, in Lent for most of April. During Lent I still watch films, though I try in my selections to view cinema that makes me think about spiritual matters. I've come to appreciate a number of the films of Robert Bresson, so rented one I had not seen before, Mouchette. I cannot recommend the film generally because it is so unremittingly grim with no redemption, and the ending so deeply disturbing that it just might, well, disturb in the wrong way.

Mouchette ('little fly') is the name of a 14-year-old girl who lives a miserable existence, surrounded by miserably evil people. What I find so chilling about it is that the film is filled with utterly routine acts by the citizens in the village. There are two very brief scenes inside a church, but we see is no Mass, no priest, the church is simply there, part of the routine existence of people who prefer to pursue their daily rounds of indulgences in the shadow of the church, which it seems they take for granted, at best.

Mouchette's mother is bed-ridden, dying. Husband and son come in from their ho-hum bootlegging business, extend no gestures of love or kindness, but go through their routine before bed. Children go to and from school, cruelly tease others or make off-color comments and gestures, girls to boys and vice versa, while grim Mouchette seems to be the one who can say "no one cares for my soul" from Psalm 142. Except for her mother, but she is dying and needs the care of Mouchette.

The film opens beautifully, with heartfelt concern and then the absence of the mother in church. Towards the end, the mother dies. Mouchette has no one. She has no future. She has been recently abused, all very routinely, as a result of two men, one married, who seem to go about competing for the same barmaid quite routinely, while the villagers consider it all indifferently, some with amusement. What becomes of Mouchette is unspeakable.

In one commentary or interview about this film, I don't recall the source, a comment was made about the evil visited upon the innocent victims in the concentration camps of the 20th century. I think this applies here; there is no redeemer at hand, no way out, just as the victims disappear into the darkness of the camps. These camps and the rivers of human beings that flowed into them were managed routinely, with bureaucrats filling orders, drivers delivering human cargo, guards numbering inmates, and so on. Great evil can be done quite routinely. (Visit a Planned Parenthood "clinic," anyone?)

What about Bresson, the Catholic? He called himself a "believer" and said on camera quite openly that we are redeemed by the death of the Christ. What was he up to in this film that some might want to call nihilistic? I do not know how it compares with the book upon which it is based by Georges Bernanos. As a film, my take on it is based on the opening and closing: when the mother leaves the church in the beginning, the Magnificat is played on the soundtrack (Monteverdi's). Same at the end in reply to a horror. The church is utterly ignored in the film. The few religious actions are purely routine. Life without the church taken seriously, lived day to day in the routines of sinful men, is hopeless, and there was no hope offered to save Mouchette. The film is a penetrating look at an abusive world without the good news offered in the Magnificat.

I am tempted to call the film a masterpiece. Yet we all prefer art that is uplifting, and this is not. It is a look into the depths, and I wonder if Bresson was trying the show his countrymen what they were becoming. In 1967. There are many Mouchettes in the making, here and abroad. Everyday, routinely, silently, with nary a turning of the head of those who claim we are making moral progress and that we need to support them so we can contine on the broad way. If anyone has seen the film and has comments, I am very interested.

Comments

[Maclin Horton]

I'm sorry, I haven't seen this film, but your description made me think of one I saw recently, Landscape in the Mist, by Theo Angelopoulos (approximate spelling). It's mostly pretty bleak--two scenes in particular are pretty hard to take--though maybe not as bad as this, but it takes a definite turn toward the light at the end.

[Sean]

I saw Au Hasard Balthazar, but not Mouchette. It sat next to the DVD player for three weeks before I gave in and took it back. Somehow I knew what it contained. I reacted to Balthazar the way you reacted to Mouchette. Interestingly, this recalls a quote I heard attributed to Saint Silouan, ‘keep thy mind in hell, and despair not.'

[Jim Kushiner]

Sean: I found Au Hasard Balthazar to be brighter than Mouchette by several degrees, though not a bright movie. I can more easily recommend it, to those willing or able to appreciate slow movies with subtitles.... I appreciate the way in which Bresson uses film, and also Tarkovsky, who certainly was influenced by Bresson's work.

[Ethan C.]

I'm afraid I've not seen Mouchette, though I have seen Bresson's Au Hasard Balthasar and Diary of a Country Priest. It is true that Bresson seems to dwell on the darker and more painful elements of life. I have heard that he directed his actors to flatten their vocal effects and restrain their emotions to more forcefully emphasize what one might call the objective factualness of their actions: that is, their cruelty is still cruelty, even devoid of pleasure, anger, or any other emotional motive. The same goes for kindness--on the rare occasions when it occurs.

I can understand Dr. Esolen's hesitancy to recommend such fair, but I must testify that it has been very nourishing to my soul. The progress of my own faith has been the recognition that there is no alternative to Christ, that apart from the miracle of salvation there is only the Wisdom of Silenus, and apart from the goodness of the Father there is only the blind, crawling chaos. I thus often find myself turning to works that can quite reasonably be called "nihilistic." As there is nothing good besides Christ, when Christ does not appear in a work, there should properly be nothing good that remains (I don't mean this too literally--there are many symbols that can properly represent Christ in art).

Many people see a strong attraction to stories of horror, cruelty, and evil as a morbid symptom, which it certainly can be. As Nietzsche said, "He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." Yet for me, to stare into the abyss is to be reminded at once of my proximity to its depths and yet also of the Rock upon which I stand.

As much as I value works of "nihilism," though, there is much to be said for films and other works that introduce within themselves the element of grace, which show light breaking into darkness. I think that this occurs in both the Bresson films that I have seen, though its appearance in Balthasar is rather oblique and arguable. It's also the essence of certain other movies which have affected me deeply, such as Magnolia and The Machinist. It's the catharsis at the heart of Shakespearean tragedy, which sees the world destroyed by judgment but restored by grace. It's the apocalyptic invasion of Christ into Satan's kingdom.

I could wax rapturous about this sort of thing all day. So let me dial it back and say I like Bresson, and I'd like to see this movie.

[Nick Milne]

...and apart from the goodness of the Father there is only the blind, crawling chaos.

And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.

Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away.

[James A. Altena]

"Many people see a strong attraction to stories of horror, cruelty, and evil as a morbid symptom, which it certainly can be."

Dear Ethan,

Especially given your previous expression of admiration for Nietzsche, I will make bold to suggest that some self-examination is in order here. The problem is less one of morbidity than a fascination with contemplation of evil in preference to good, which is directly contrary to St. Paul's counsel in Phil. 4:8.

There are of course times where we must confront and ocntemplate sin, and not flinch from seeing and naming it for what it is. But a regular attraction to so doing, or preference to this rather than direct contemplation goodness as a means for seeking to draw near to God, is something that must be resisted as part of proper spiritual formation. There is a fundamental asymmetry involved, because virtue is a postive entity in and of itself, whereas vice is only a negation and denial, not anything in and of itself. Contemplation of Christ will necessarily lead us to understand sin; but contemplation of sin does not necessarily lead us to understand Christ. However unwittingly, we will become conformed to that which we prefer to contemplate, because the act of contemplation is literally "in-formative" -- it shapes us internally, in mind and soul, and we deceive ourselves with a sin of pride if we imagine that we are fully conscious and in control of that process.

That said, there is value in works such as "Mouchette" (which I have not seen), insofar as they portray truth without distortion, and thus show evil for what it is. And to relate this to the debate on the Tavener thread, this is one reason that secular works can be attended to profitably by the Christian. God sends His rain on the just and unjust alike. Even though such works may not convey the fulness of the Gospel, they offer a witness to it (whether deliberately or unintentionally) to the extent that they present an honest portrait of spiritual realities.

Thus, Dmitri Shostakovich was an atheist; but his musical masterpeices such as the Violin Concerto #1, and the Symphonies # 5, 10, and 13, are penetrating, even harrowing, aural portraits of the human soul fighting the bleak despair and torment of totalitarianism. But something would be seriously amiss if one habitually focused on such music in preference to e.g. Bach's St. Matthew Passion or the symphonies of e.g. Haydn, Beethoven and Bruckner.

[Ethan C.]

Nick Milne:

The very one. Though, as to poetic quality, Lovecraft can't compare to Byron.

James,

You speak well and truly. It certainly is better to contemplate goodness than evil. That is what I was thinking when I wrote the last paragraph of my post above. I should have said "there is much more to be said for films and other works that introduce within themselves the element of grace." And you're right that one should not become habituated to the contemplation of bleakness rather than grace, as I been have at certain times in my past (though not, I think, for the past few years).

I hope I allow myself to be open to correction from you or anyone else who might question my judgments. I don't think my aesthetic appreciation of depictions of misery and horror is always defensible. There is sometimes a certain fascination which I recognize as truly perverse. And there are many works which I do not believe have any redemptive use, such as the writings of the Marquis de Sade or Aliester Crowley, which I would never recommend for reading to anyone, even for academic purposes (though understand that I do not speak from direct experience on many specific works of this nature). Neither am I fully comfortable with Nietzsche or think that he is always honest or insightful. I merely often prefer him to other philosophers who sidestep the horrifying implications of their own anti-Christian philosophies.

I definitely don't wish to prescribe for everyone an immersion in the contemplation of darkness. But there are certain souls, of which I seem to be one, who require an intellectual confrontation with the magnitude of evil. Perhaps it is a consequence of my extreme tendency toward pessimism, which makes it difficult for me to appreciate the abounding blessings of God, that He has seen fit to show me how much worse things would be without Him.

The worse the pig food tastes, the quicker the prodigal returns to his father's house.

[Nick Milne]

You're right, of course; Byron actually succeeds in his striving for a sort of dark beauty, while Lovecraft is meritorious moreover for his enthusiasm. Still, it's not just anyone who can write an enormous sonnet sequence in 1934 and call it Fungi from Yuggoth. Most wouldn't even try.

His sarcastic parody of Eliot's "The Waste Land" is also not to be missed, though I regret to say that it's quite hard to find.

[Ethan C.]

Nick, what's it titled? I haven't heard of it.

[Jenny Islander]

Mouchette is officially going on my list of movies I am never going to watch.

Hayao Miyazaki did something along the same lines. His Grave of the Fireflies is a beautiful and horrible chronicle of two orphaned children, ages about nine and three, who descend from a comfortable middle-class life into squalor and death due to adult indifference. Somehow its being animated in classic Miyazaki style just makes it hit harder. The story begins right at the end of the Second World War and basically charges that when Japan rebuilt itself (with American assistance of course, but there are no occupying soldiers in the film) after World War II, the soul got left out. I'm not sorry I watched it, but I won't watch it again for a very long time, if ever.

[Nick Milne]

Ethan: "Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance."

It turns out that it has become much easier to find since the last time I searched for it online, and is hosted at wikisource here. You should consider getting a copy of The Ancient Track, though, which is all of his poetry (600 pages worth, or so!) under one binding.

Jenny:

You're right; it is a beautiful and heartbreaking film. A live-action remake was produced recently for Japanese television, but I have not yet had the heart to see it. I don't know that I ever will.

[Jim Kushiner]

I saw Graveyard as well. There is something about it that is darker than Mouchette, though on the surface it might not seem quite so; I think underlying Graveyard there is even no absent redemption, whereas my take on Mouchette is that there is a present absence and the consequences thereof. Anyway, I have no desire to view Fireflies again, and your decision to avoid Mouchette a good and reasonable one. We only have so much time.....

[V-Dawg]

Miyazaki did not direct Graveyard. Although Studio Ghibli released it, Isao Takahata wrote and directed.

[Jenny Islander]

I stand corrected.

Grave of the Fireflies does end on a note of subdued hope from a Japanese religious perspective. The two children are now in the spirit world, happy and at peace, as shown by their appearance. But they have nothing to do with the glittering modern city spread out below their hillside. Nobody can reject them or overlook them anymore, but on the other hand, nobody remembers them.

[Ethan C.]

Jenny, I think Grave of the Fireflies is one of the greatest films I have ever seen, and, like you, I have very little desire to see it again any time soon. It is truly heartbreaking. I can cry just thinking about it.

I agree that there is an element of hopefulness in its ending, but it's not necessarily a very Christian hope--it's more like a mere freedom from suffering in the release of death. There's not much offered to the world that they leave behind. I don't know anything about Takahata's religious beliefs, so I can't very well speculate on how he intended the ending to be taken, but it's certainly not an unremittingly grim film. There's a yearning for redemption within it.

[James A. Altena]

Dear Nick Milne,

I’ve enjoyed reading your many thoughtful previous posts, but I fear that I cannot share your admiration for H. P. Lovecroft’s attempt to parody Eliot. I find it feeble and puerile in the extreme, a prime example of the base envy that the mediocre have for superior genius.

For folks generally, a link to Eliot’s original:

http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html

[Nick Milne]

Dear James (or Mr. Altena, if you prefer),

That's a fair criticism. To be clear, any admiration I may have for Lovecraft is tempered heavily by my complete revulsion at his personal philosophies and a heavy awareness of the unattractive features of his writing, one of which, as you rightly point out in this case, is his jealousy of and disdain for writers who were simply better than he was.

His poetry is almost uniformly terrible, unfortunately; as much as I'd like it to be better than it is, it just isn't. In the case of the poem above, I point it out to Ethan not necessarily as something to be admired, for it is, as you say, childish and poor, but rather as a curiosity that is worth experiencing if only to say that one has done so, particularly if one is a Lovecraft fan to begin with. Literary oddities such as this are a matter of considerable interest to me, even when they're poorly done.

In any event, I think T.S. Eliot is quite safe from Mr. Lovecraft's prickly attentions.

[Ethan C.]

>>In any event, I think T.S. Eliot is quite safe from Mr. Lovecraft's prickly attentions.<<

Yes, I doubt his place in the canon is under threat. :)

It is a weakness in Lovecraft (one among a great many, of course, which is one of the fascinating things about him) that he seems to have a tin ear for all but a rather narrow set of authors--which is strange, considering his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" actually demonstrates his fairly good taste in that particular genre. I find his paradoxical elitism--paradoxical because he was conscious that he was decidedly excluded from any actual elite--a rather amusing quirk.

His contemporary champion, S.T. Joshi, seems happy to carry on this aspect of Lovecraft's aesthetics, excluding from consideration of merit such popularly regarded authors as Stephen King in favor of more obscure fare that follows more closely in Lovecraft's footsteps. In Joshi, though, I'd ascribe it more to an ideological prejudice, particularly driven by his adherence to Lovecraft's style of atheism. Lovecraft's was more idiosyncratic.

In both men, it's a crippling weakness, but of the sort that interests me, especially in Lovecraft (Joshi, being a freelance academic rather than a fiction writer, does not greatly stir my literary curiosity).

To return to the topic at hand, no doubt both men would have no interest in the works of Robert Bresson or Studio Ghibli, and would viscerally hate any work that demonstrates grace breaking into a seemingly closed system of despair. But for me, such a universe of darkness, even if it does not overtly portray grace, implies by its very manifest attenuation and yearning a greater grace beyond it. The act of even writing such a work necessarily gives the lie to its ostensible moral of nihilism.

Because of that, such things are often preferable to works that give a false, cheap sense of grace or convey a soupy optimism, particularly if they portray the properly horrific as instead innocuous or winsome (vampire romances are the worst of many offenders, followed closely by much contemporary "serious" fiction).

One of the most powerful single words in the Bible is the "Nevertheless" at the beginning of Isaiah 9:1. This is as much due to what comes before it as what comes after.

[Nick Milne]

Re HPL:

His preening elitism is indeed a cause for mirth and head-shaking, though you're right also to point out his consciousness of his own deficiencies. I was interested to note recently that this goes even beyond his class-consciousness, which was an enormous problem in itself (how can one reconcile being a great gentleman with being a lunatic salesman's son?), to the extent of his making the admission that so many of the seekers after the superman fail to make. De Camp's excellent biography cites this passage from a letter...

"I make no pretence at all of coming anywhere near the type I admire.... You are perfectly right in saying that it is the weak who tend to worship the strong. That is my case exactly.... No doubt I place an exaggeratedly high emotional valuation on those qualities which I least possess...."

I'd like to think that Lovecraft mellowed in the years before his death, or during his battle with cancer, but this does not seem to have been the case. His myopic hatreds, his snobbishness, and his simply monstrous (yes, Joshi, even for his time) racism can surely not have redounded to his credit when he first reopened his eyes and discovered that, no, it wasn't oblivion after all.

Re Joshi:

I'm getting kind of sick of him, to be honest. The ideological bent is one reason, certainly, but more troubling still is his seeming insistence on having a hand in anything that gets "done" in the field of Lovecraft. If he himself were a better scholar, if his annotations were more competent than they are, if he approached his work as a genial but detached enthusiast, then perhaps he might truly be wonderful. As it is, though (and with full credit given to him for everything he really has done), he is not. He is on his way to becoming a sort of uncreative Derleth. Alas.

Re Studio Ghibli:

Grave of the Fireflies was of course followed up by two films, in fairly short order, that can be taken as responses or antidotes to the original film. The first was My Neighbor Totoro which was released simultaneously with Grave in 1988, and showed with it as a double feature (and presumably a counterpoint). I had thought it the most cheerful film I had ever seen until I got to watch the next one, being Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), which is pretty much unmatched in the field of modernist idylls. Even a heart of stone would be warmed by it. I recommend it unreservedly to anyone.

Both films are particularly notable in that they manage to be full of events and conflict and intriguing circumstance without even having an antagonist, let alone a villain. They counter the bleaker view of Grave in that the youthful protagonists do get the help and support and love that they need, and prosper (though not without some hardship) as a result. Most pointedly, one of the rationales of Kiki's Delivery Service (as described by Miyazaki in an interview) is that it is set in an alternate universe where the second world war never occurred.

Also, I broke down and watched the live action version of Grave of the Fireflies last night (my interest got the better of me). It's still heartbreaking, but something is lost by making it "real." It breaks the heart, but it does not rip it from your chest and chew on it as the original film did. This may be because the focus is shifted from the children to the cruelly pragmatic aunt, but there could be any number of reasons.

[Nick]

I haven't yet seen Kiki's Delivery Service, though it is in the Netflix queue, but I've seen My Neighbor Totoro several times and it's a wonderful piece. I heartily recommend it. As my namesake (beautiful name by the way) points out there are no antagonists other than cancer and childhood folly. That is, sadly, rare for a childhood movie. It does have one scene though that reminded me, now that I'm an adult, of just how far the West has slid recently. In the scene the father and his two daughters have a rollickingly good bath. I stopped for a moment and thought, that's just not done! And then, after sitting back for a while, I had to ask, why not?

[V-Dawg]

Your comment that My Neighbor Totoro has basically no antagonists is interesting. It was the first Miyazaki film I saw, and my initial reaction was along the lines of "this has no plot whatsoever--but somehow it works, anyway." Of course, antagonists are a large part of plot.
My experience of it was enhanced (?) because I saw it with a group of friends at Patrick Henry College, one of whom had no idea what kind of movie he was getting into. So all through the movie he was expecting horrible things to happen to the children when they interacted with the various creatures, and was vocalizing his expectations. That made the movie even funnier.
I think the greatest achievement of the movie is its display of the beauty of various seemingly pointless things, whether the odd imaginations of children or old bottles lying in streams.