Jaco Van Dormael’s movies Through Analyzing of Mr. Nobody
The Opinions of a Clown
Amir Siadat
To be or not to be? Apparently, this has always been the question. The issue of absence and presence is a path that every narrative goes through in the most abstract state. Disturbed balance is regained, what was lost is finally found and what was gone - in a way - returns. It is as if the narrator is left in the "absence" and his narrative is a response to longing for "presence" and the "initial unity". It is an action to compensate for the loss, and regain the bliss or unity that seems to have been in the beginning (with god or mother) but is no longer there, and the rest of life should be regarded a fruitless struggle to restore it. It is possible to take this idea back to the Greek tragedies or to the first myth and the struggle of Gilgamesh to take possession of the plant of youth and eternal life, and even to the oldest ancient rites and the desire for immortality which is the goal of all of them, and clearly understand that the narrative is always made of fear caused by the thought of "not to be". " Mr. Nobody is the tale of the future, where man would overcome the angel of death and build a world where there is no sign of nothingness. This immortal world, which has no story to tell, is completely focused on Nemo Nobody, the last mortal, and naturally the last storyteller.
Time
For mortal people who neither fall in love nor have an understanding of the irreparable passage of time, Nemo Nobody with a lot of unfulfilled dreams, failed romances, lost opportunities and untraveled paths is a "case" that should be observed every moment. He is also like the main character of The Truman show, a prisoner of the media who has been surrounded, with the difference that, unlike Truman Burbank, he knows what is going on around him. It is clear that he does not like mortal people to observe his moment-to-moment deterioration with enjoyment and passion. He insists that it is 2009 and he is thirty-four years old, but the psychoanalyst reminds him that it is the year 2092 and gives him a mirror to see what time has done to him. It is not easy for him to face a hundred and eighteen-year-old man with a wrinkled face full of stains, that too in an era when no man is destroyed by the passage of time. The story of Mr. Nobody is actually the story of everyone: "What if I was not who I am?". Mr. Nobody is the story of untraveled paths that we think were the paths of bliss, and it talks more about time and death than about the importance of choice and the role of coincidence. Its reference to The Truman show (a sketch of the human condition in the heart of a virtual world), Run Lola Run (the great influence of invisible details on fate), Sliding Doors and the works of Charlie Kaufman takes on a new color in the light of these two concepts. In Mr. Nobody, whatever actually has happened (which we are not sure what is) is equivalent to what could have happened. If time was not the issue, it could be said about the possibility of compensation and trying other paths (of course, if in that case there was any meaning under the title of "compensation" at all!). If Nemo was immortal, he would not miss the opportunity to be with any of his beloveds. So, he probably would not have fallen in love (same as the people of 2092). And does love mean anything at all when there is no fear of loss? The theories that the film refers to, from the Big Bang to entropy, are all related to time and indicate its irreversibility and destruction. Even the image of the train that takes Nemo's mother away from his father has a feeling of moving forward in time: The time that breaks. It seems that the narrative form of the film is also in harmony with the principle of entropy and increasing disorder over time. The events are often random and unpredictable, and the narrative tends to diverge from one place to the next. The narrative, which seems straightforward until the moment of parting at the railway station, shatters like a jar that slips from Nemo's father's hands and falls to the ground, and each piece leads Nemo to a different place. According to entropy, it is something similar to the change of state of a compound drop (with concentrated and regular particles) after dripping in water, or like the dance of Nemo's father's cigarette smoke in space.
Destiny
When a caged pigeon sees the door of its cage being opened once in a while to offer daily food, it suspects that the opening and closing of the door is directly related to flapping! The ironic mood of Mr. Nobody comes from this "pigeon superstition" and its fatalism is more comical than tragic! How effective can the choice be when a wet leaf or a sparrow can change everything in a blink of an eye? In the complex system of the universe, man is too small for the gods of Olympus to bother themselves to prescribe his destiny and determine a definitive narrative order for his beginning and end. Although the leaf that causes the acquaintance of Nemo's parents fell from the sky, but the movement of the wings of a butterfly lifted it from the ground, and the raindrop that came down to wash Anna's phone number from the paper in Nemo's hand is the result of the egg that an unemployed Brazilian boiled two months ago! Therefore, destiny is determined not by the gods of the sky, but by random events on earth. Mr. Nobody’s journey covers all types of cinemas; From science-fiction (scenes related to the future and Mars) and documentary (scenes related to the pigeon superstition, butterfly effect, Big Bang, entropy, etc.) to silent cinema (the nightmare of the bear attack on Alice and Nemo, who are disguised as cavemen) and melodrama. Even in scenes like Anna swimming in the pool or Nemo's recumbent body flying from the couch, it takes a clip-like tone. This fluidity and not giving in to the certainty and demarcation of genres, except that it is compatible with the worldview of the film and its narrative form, also refers to the dominant role and the aesthetic agency of cinema itself. When Van Dormael combines the proposition "In the beginning there was nothing" with the snowy image of the television in the opening chapter of The Eighth Day, it means that he is pointing out to his godlike status. So, as the creator of the film, he can give his hero a chance to step on his feet in the image arena. Nemo looks longingly at the photo he took years ago by the sea - the photo of the day he lost Anna forever. It is not clear whether what we see is a fantasy or a memory, but in terms of content, the photo is always a tool for preserving memory and cinema is a dream-making device. The view of the sea and the mountain in the frame of the photo is the subject of memory: Stable, definite and timeless. Cinema can revive that moment by taking this frame to a temporal world. The photo suddenly comes to life and Nemo and us are thrown into the same moment. This time, Nemo has a chance to keep Anna for himself with a more reasonable behavior. With cinema, a frozen moment starts moving again. In the immortal world of 2092, even photos are alive and moving! Time can be shattered in the cinema. It is possible to stretch out a second or compress the passage of years in a few seconds in the span of a single frame: 9-year-old Nemo is sleeping in the room. His mother enters with cheerfulness, pulls aside the curtains and the sun illuminates the room. The image frame accompanied by the mother goes around the room and reaches the front door again to let the mother in again, this time with a different appearance. There is nothing left of the vitality of woman. She calls Nemo again. By rotating the camera, we face 15-year-old Nemo sleeping on the same bed. This time, no curtain will be pulled aside, no light will enter. At the moment of Nemo and Anna's chance meeting at the railway station, the acceleration of the image turns the people passing by in the background into blurred lines so that the two - who were struck by this unexpected meeting - become the focus of the image. It is as if time has stopped for them and the two of them are the only issue worth watching in the heart of a world full of chaos. With the magic of cinema, the principle of entropy and the inevitable uniformity of time can be overcome: the cigarette smoke returns to the cigarette, the broken vase returns to its original shape, the scattered things are gathered again, and Nemo runs back until he sits next to Anna in the last shot.
Childhood
Before becoming a filmmaker, Van Dormael worked for years in the circus (as a clown) and theater for children. The wit and innocence that exists in every moment of his films may be due to such an experience. His heroes are not separated from their childhood. If Nemo Nobody’s story is forever affected by the moment of his parents' separation, in Toto the Hero, Thomas is trapped by the inferiority complex that has been with him since childhood and it does not let go of him. Where does this humiliation come from? From the early death of his father and being left unattended as a child? From poverty? Seeing the prosperity and wealth of the neighbor's family? From any of them it is, the shadow of Mr. Nobody can be seen and extracted in the Toto the Hero: an eternal loser claims that he should have been someone else. He says that he remembers that on the day of his birth, during the conflagration of the hospital, he was replaced by another baby (the son of the neighbor), and if it had not happened, he would have studied differently, he would have loved differently, and he would have become a different person. Are all secrets root in childhood? The Eighth Day is like a free adaptation of The Little Prince. The core of Georges and Harry’s friendship is the same plot that we see in the encounter between the pilot and the fair-haired child in de Saint-Exupéry's story: the confrontation of the customs and rituals of the calculated life of the "adults" with childish liberation. If the aviator is involved in the repair of the plane, Harry thinks about solving problems in his family life. None of them take their uninvited travel companion seriously at the beginning. In this retelling, which requires dramatic processing, the aviator has become an "acting teacher" who teaches at an institute of sales etiquette. Harry deals with "masks" and forced smiles, and with skyscrapers and traffic. His world is sad and gray, unlike Georges who is unmasked and in harmony with nature and in a deep connection with his mother. If the former is a person of calculations and logics, the latter lives in the moment, falls in love on the spot and immediately proposes marriage. He is a child and children love him. The travel stops of the two (shoe store, restaurant, Georges’ sister's house, disco, etc.), which are like the star of Exupéry's story, are the manifestation of the confrontation with the "adults", bring Harry closer to Georges, step by step. He is getting younger every moment and his situation more similar to Georges. When he sobs, poor and outcast, Georges takes him to the playground and rides him on a swing. Like the little prince, Georges has a message from somewhere. He, who we have seen walking on water, is like an "envoy" whose mission is to cut off Harry's connection with the world of masks. "Madman" sits in the position of a mentor and the "adult" in the position of a novice who ultimately completes his spiritual path by stepping into the arena of madness. Isn't Georges Harry's denied childhood? Should bliss be sought in childhood?
Bliss
The elderly Nemo says that he lives in a virtual world created by the imaginative mind of a nine-year-old child at the moment of his parents' separation, and everything we have seen is the product of this mind, but who will believe it? It is hard to accept that a nine-year-old child is so familiar with the twists and turns and complexities of human relationships that he creates a story like the story of Nemo and Alice. If we read the whole story as memories mixed with the imagination of a hundred and eighteen-year-old old man, we have not found much solid support. That pure cartoonish world, with those ridiculous monocular cameras and that psychologist doctor - whose appearance does not show sign of mental health - compels us to accept the virtuality of this world. From the beginning, Mr. Nobody puts the audience on a pile of conflicting situations. After we see Nemo's body in the morgue, the images related to his death follow: once he falls into the lake with a car and another time, he is shot dead in the bathroom of a hotel. The mystery of this death has not yet been solved that we find him alive in a strange world and on the threshold of one hundred and eighteen years old, and later in a chariot suspended in space and on the way to Mars! In the following, fragments of his "possible" - and not necessarily "lived" - lives with three women have been assembled together. Nemo's age is the same in all three weddings. Which story is true? These narratives, with all their conflicts, have one principle in common: none of them end happily. Nemo riding a motorcycle and along with Jane, travels the roads of youth as fast as possible and talks about the bliss that he thinks lies in the future; In becoming independent, marrying Jane, getting rich, buying a yellow house with a big garden and swimming pool. Years pass and we see that Nemo has everything, but he is not happy. Oscar Wilde says: “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it”. In the eyes of the old man, bliss is a concept related to youth, but what does this word mean for the young Nemo? It seems that for him it is a repetition of an experience related to adolescence. Thirty-four-year-old Nemo is not happy with Alice, but he thinks of Alice while being with Jane, and in another narrative/life, he is waiting for a reunion with Anna, to be happy once again, just like when he was a teenager. When his relationship with Anna starts again after many years, time and space collide. The editing juxtaposes the scenes related to their making love with similar scenes in their adolescence and creates a kind of asynchrony that evokes the third abstract time. Is what we see the bliss itself? With a little suspicion, one can ask whether those happy teenage days are not a repetition of another bliss in the distant past? When Anna turns her face away from Nemo by lowering the sheet, a similar scene is evoked from the beginning of the film: Nemo's mother puts a cloth between her and Nemo's face and makes her son laugh by revealing and hiding her face. And this game of "apparent" and "hidden" tempts one to return to that "to be or not to be" and "presence and absence" which was the starting point of this article in order to understand the concept of bliss. Is that "primary bliss" that we search for a lifetime and never find it a biological reality? In the absence of original and basic bliss, is there anything but the fake bliss and the fantasy of repeating it? And if the subject of desire is always absent and is something that is lost or not yet achieved, shouldn't we conclude that bliss means loss and death?
Death
Nemo, who is in the coma, is trying to change the events that led to his accident in his mind in order to come back to life. Isn't what we see Nemo's death ravings? Apart from the fact that Toto the Hero's narrator was also a dead man, perhaps the direct reference to Sunset Boulevard (showing Nemo's floating body) and the image of Nemo in the morgue was supposed to strengthen this hypothesis: "What have I done to deserve this situation?". After rescuing the aviator, the little prince appeals to the snake to send him to his star, to his flower, and Georges, after completing his "mission" (bringing Harry back to his family) and before jumping off the roof of the skyscraper, by eating chocolate experience the taste of death. In Toto the Hero, Thomas chews candy at the moment of suicide. Is the taste of death sweeter than the cherry of life for Van Dormael's heroes? The sound of laughter and joy that rises from Toto's ashes after his death will be heard for a long time, and Georges’ smiling face above the clouds will not be forgotten; Likewise, old Nemo Nobody’s laughs in the final reverse shots of Mr. Nobody. As if death is a way out of constant suffering for an old man. All three of Van Dormael's feature films end with a kind of romantic glorification of death. His goal is undoubtedly not to consider life worthless because of its perishability - as Socrates and most of the Eastern mystics have said. The ecstatic moments of his cinema say that it is not like that, and if life has any value, it is because of this perishability and the opportunities we miss. However, Thomas and Georges have chosen "not to be" and Nemo has tried all the ways and found them all painful. It is unlikely that any of them would want to live their lives again! In Van Dormael's cinema, behind all the fun, imagination, joy and vitality, lies a pain that states that not to be is better than living, and the best is never to be born.
