Tonight at CSUN we saw "Rough Treatment" (original Polish title "Bez znieczulenia) (1978) by Andrzej Wajda. As with "Man Of Marble", seen and reviewed two weeks ago, Wajda is again using metaphor to criticize the Communist/Socialist regime in Poland, and by extension the Big Bosses in the Soviet Union. Here we have a famous Polish journalist who has written and reported from political hotspots all over the world. He's had the same access as any Western journalist and has seen the same realities of war, hunger, poverty and disease. In his home country he is a celebrity and has authored popular books derived from his experiences.
The movie opens with a television interview of the journalist, whose latest book has just been released. As he speaks, however, he opens up too candidly about his own political views. His frankness is not confrontational, but he does cross the Official Party Line in blunt ways about world conditions and economic causes. He is not being defiant but merely basking in his fame for the TV audience, and he has let his guard down. He has revealed his own political opinions.
Now there will be repercussions.
He returns to his editorial position at a major newspaper to find that his desk has been moved to a smaller, cohabited office, and his subscriptions to American magazines have been cancelled. He asks, "Where are my Newsweeks"?
I must butt in as your reviewer to editorialize on this point myself. I grew up during the Cold War and read in the American press about Communism. In past blogs I have confessed to sympathy for the socialist cause when I was young, but I have also reported my obvious and expected horror of unadulterated Soviet Communism under Uncle Joseph, the Left Wing version of Hitler. In America, in the press, I am not sure we ever got an accurate picture of Eastern Bloc communism, and I was unaware until recently that, by the 1970s, there was no longer a total lockdown on the life of the citizens of Iron Curtain countries. I had always thought, for instance, that in those days, your kids were spying on you, and secret police were on every corner, and you had to whisper any personal conversation. That was the impression we got from American reportage.
This type of extreme control may have been prevalent in East Germany or Lithuania. I don't know because I did not live there, but those countries seem like the examples, in hindsight, for strongarm communist repression, where you would get sent to prison for voicing a contradictory opinion.
But in Poland, they took away your magazines. I was surprised by the pettiness of the Party Leaders as expressed in this movie. The journalist also loses his weekly lecture at a local university, which has his students in an uproar.
The main thing that is happening in his life, though, is personal. His wife is divorcing him. This is the main plot of the movie. Right away, from the first scene of the journalist giving his ill-fated TV interview, director Wajda cuts to another scene in an apartment, where the journalist's wife is watching the interview with her lover, a young hothead who is also on the newspaper staff where the journalist holds sway. The hothead resents the journalist; resents his fame, and his bourgeois opinions, which he feels have been gleaned through privilege. This interloper, who has charmed the journalist's wife, has the personality of a street fighter, which I suppose is another General Character that Wajda wanted to represent in his under-the-wire attack on the truly ridiculous political system he found himself living under.
The marital discord between wife and husband makes up the bulk of the story, but as Professor Tim explained tonight, and as Wajda himself elaborated on in a short documentary interview we saw before the film, this strife is really an allusion to the director's own feelings toward the Communists. He wished to divorce himself from them.
Say what you will about America, and right now there is a lot you can say, and much that I will agree with.
But in watching these films by Andrzej Wajda, who lived through the Communist system in Poland, what I get more than anything is that people were afraid to say what they really meant.
And I think that is, quite possibly, the greatest thing about the United States Of America, that our founding fathers included in our constitution a stipulation for Freedom Of Speech.
What does that mean, anyway, when you have to guarantee human beings the right to speak freely?
As a human being myself, I feel that right innately. I do not need any other human, be it a dictator or politician or whoever, to ascribe me the right to speak my mind.
My question would be to such people : "Who the F are you"?
But we see, over the course of history, that these people have always been the aggressive ones, the ones with a very high level of anger energy, and so, in certain political cases (especially in the 20th century), they established themselves through acts of revolutionary violence, as Titans and thus arbiters of their countries and their citizens.
They are, quite simply, Humans who have a maniacal drive to control other Humans, beyond any normal societal reason of setting rational laws that benefit the greater good of society.
I have veered far from my movie review, as I knew I would when I began my tangent, but I am inspired by Wajda's films, which stand up and present an artistic In Your Face to authoritarian a-holes.
I have been pressing, in my blogs, to treat people of an authoritarian bent as psychological cases, because it is clear that they have pathologies.
Hitler, Stalin, Mao.....Trump.
Think of Trump for just a moment. Here is a guy who is very overweight. He is said to eat nothing but fast food. He does not exercise but for a few golf swings.
And yet he has a pathological drive to rule over other humans that is seemingly unstoppable, and would be, were it not for our American system of justice and judicial process.
All that has prevented us from having a dictator is our system. Yes America is fucked up, but we are saved - for now - by our system.
But I present to you, because the movie got me thinking about it, a case for exploring why someone would want to be part of a system where Sheer Authority dominates the lives of average citizens.
What would cause a person to want such authority?
What would cause a person - and remember that all of us begin life as babies - to eventually seek as an adult to gain enough power to decide how others can live their lives, beyond the administration of the reasonable laws that we all need to live by?
The answer is psychological, and that is what Wajda is getting at.
He is depicting a system of people who have a deep-seated psychological and spiritual disorder that causes them to want to dominate others, and also provides them with the boundless physical and mental energy to accomplish their goal.
The most disruptive are also the most driven.
But their energy can be cancelled out by a non-reactive response of serenity, one that bypasses confrontation and supercedes petty authority.
I have probably gone way out on a limb here, and I apologize if I have disconnected from my argument or if I am making no sense. But these films from Andrzej Wajda have been very inspiring to me, because he lived under a repressive government, and now we have a government here in America that is trying to do the same thing : to turn out country into The Soviet Union Part Two.
That is why, for one reason, the Wajda movies resonate so much with me.
But also they are just plain great films.
Sorry if I did not complete my review in a satisfactory way this time, but I give "Rough Treatment" five stars and two big thumbs up. My highest recommendation.
See you in the morn. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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