Film examination questions and analysis

La Haine

Post-Modern Dystopia in La Haine

Paris is among the most frequently and lavishly glamorized city-scapes in the history of cinema. As a context both rich with cultural activity and rife with early revolutionaries in the field of cinema, its lights, fountains, arches and thoroughfares have been justifiably given their visual due. However, there is another Paris that is often left unseen in these depictions, a Paris teeming with fear, poverty, discontent and directionlessness. This is the Paris that is given representation in Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995), which depicts a multiracial trio of friends persisting miserably in a low-income housing settlement outside of the city. Where Paris and many of the other great cities of the world are often seen through the eyes of opportunity, here we see them through the eyes of imprisonment. The three young men at the center Kassovitz's film are seemingly incapable of avoiding conflict, violence and misery from their particular vantage of the metropolis. It is from the experiences of a single day in the city that the film derives its distinctly dystopian vision of modern city life for those living in abject poverty.

Quite certainly, the Paris shown in the Kassovitz film demonstrates life in Paris to be something worse than simply inhospitable to the immigrant and minority populations seeking life there in the late 20th century. Indeed, exclusion of such groups takes the form of segregation and harassment with anti-immigrant skinheads and sadistic police officers, portraying life for the three young men as one in constant detention of misery. This invokes the notion of the panopticon as this pointedly philosophical notion has come to apply in the language of cinema. For the protagonists of the Kassovitz film, we are given the impression as the viewer that they are incapable of being freed from the conditions that have delivered them to their state of shared discontent, bitterness and alienation. In the text by Friedberg (1994), we are provided with an explanation for this experience as the viewer. Friedberg reports that "the panopticon model has served as a tempting orignary root for inventions that led to the cinema, an apparatus that produces an even more 'mechanically . . . fictitious relation' and whose 'subjection' is equally internatlized. Feminist theorists have invoked the 'panoptic' implant as a model for the ever-present 'male gaze,' while 'appartus' film theories relied more on the immobility and confined spatial matrix of the prison." (Friedberg, p. 19)

For the characters in the film by Kassovitz, this immobility is a socio-economic one and moreover an immobility dictated in no small part by their varied by simultaneously 'otherly' status within the context of French society. This is such to the extent that they simply cannot escape the experiential and cultural differences that appear to distinguish them as they attempt simply to interact with mainstream French society. The degree to which they are shown as incapable of doing so -- and to which French society is shown as being equally incapable of interacting with them -- illustrate the degree to which a certain cinematic panopticon has been placed around the subjects. From the omniscient perspective of the viewer, there is no apparent escape provided from this disposition.

And in this immobility and the resultant anger that drives the idle lives of the young men in the film, the Kassovitz film emerges as part of an increasingly saturated body of modern cinematic work dedicated to exploring the dystopian realities of modern urban life. While so many depictions of this experience center on the privileged experience of industrialists in generations past, post-industrial life has given way to the cinematic obsession with such experiences as those faced by Vince, Hubert and Said. According to Shannon-Jones (2011), we can define the dystopia as "a fictional society in which life has taken a turn for the worse -- the opposite of a utopia, or 'good place'. In contrast to a utopia, which celebrates individual freedom and well-being, a dystopia is poverty-stricken, subjugated and dehumanised. This sorry state of affairs is usually the botched result of mankind trying and failing to create the perfect society. Global warming, nuclear holocaust, religious fanaticism, animal testing and rampant technological advancements have all been responsible for one dystopia or another" (Shannon-Jones, p. 1)