Space: concepts, history, and scientific exploration

¶ … compression of cities: Negotiation of space in Mathieu Kassovitz's "Hate," Charles Burnett's 'Killer of Sheep," and Jia Zhangke's "The World"

Cities contain our cultural myths, myths written onto space. Paris is the romantic city of culture and light. Los Angeles is the city where dreams come true. The city is a carnival, filled with delights and wonder. However, Mathieu Kassovitz's "Hate," Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep," and Jia Zhangke's "The World" all invert or mock these myths. For Kassovitz, Paris is a place of darkness and rioting, and hatred against 'darker' people. For Burnett, Lost Angeles is a place of entrapment rather than a place of upward mobility. And Zhangke's film is perhaps bleakest of all. "The World" is about resident workers of an amusement park who are kept metaphorical and literal captors of their occupations and play-worlds -- they impersonate characters from worlds they will never inhabit or see.

Mathieu Kassovitz's "Hate" (La Haine, 1996) tells the story of several non-white and/or non-Christian) French students who strive to transcend the limits of their lives by transcending space. They escape the confines of their neighborhood for a day in the heart of Paris, seeking to escape their families and the dictates of a world that denies them a job, denies them dreams, and even denies them dignity because of their ethnicities. They are improbable friends who are brought together only by their mutual alienation from French society -- they are an Arab, an African and a Jew -- named Said, Hubert, and Vinz. All are working class and despite their location in Paris, their identities are viewed as antithetical to Frenchness. Their disparate ethnic identities are simply seen as darkness by the 'real' French, and national divides melt away in Paris, not because Paris is a city of culture and delight, but because all three friends are mutually denied the promise of the city as a meeting-place, a space where the past does not matter. The past matters inextricably to all three characters, and they cannot escape how the French see them as part of an 'other' race, not as French and not as individuals.

Interestingly, when an Arab youth is killed by the police, Vinz's synagogue is burned down, but despite this attack on Jewish faith, he feels no solidarity with the French authorities. One can reside in a city, but still feel alienated from it, in fact when a city has such a strong history and identity as Paris, one may feel more commonality even with individuals who might be one's enemy, as in the case of Arabs and Jews. But while the film is filled with violence, most of it is perpetrated by others. Even Hubert, the West African boxer, is gentle outside of the ring, as his participation in staged violence seems to make him all the more acutely aware of the perils of violence. Only these dark-skinned residents of the City of Light know that the promise of light and opportunity is a lie, Paris' romantic heart beats with hate.

The loneliness of the city for those whose identity is rejected by large society is also manifest in the 1977 American film written, directed, produced and shot by Charles Burnett American film, set in the Los Angeles Watts ghetto "Killer of Sheep." Stan, the main protagonist, can only find work in a slaughterhouse, and because of his race he finds few outlets for his energies, like the teenage protagonists of "Hate." Unlike the characters of "Hate," however, Stan does not even seem to feel an emotional connection to his 'posse' or other members of his community, his face is largely blank, despairing of the world he is facing, and the fact that the knows his life is unlikely to 'go anywhere.' Only his wife seems to provide him any comfort, such as when they dance together during a rare, tender moment at night. However, it is only by transcending his place in the world that Stan finds peace.

Given that Los Angeles is often called a 'meat market' because of the presence of the film industry, Stan's occupation seems even more bleakly and painfully ironic. The humor that Los Angeles glamour is cast with, in terms of its fixation on the body, is reduced to cruelty and death in the real meat market. Los Angeles' worship of the culture of the car is likewise mocked. For example, Stan and his friend Gene have to find a new engine for their car, and to navigate their way to their other friend's house, they must wander through what looks like a graveyard of parked cars, where people are drinking cheap booze. The metaphor is clear -- they may be in cars, and Stan may be on a fruitless errand to fix his car, but the cars are going nowhere, just as Stan is going nowhere. The violence that resulted from the Watts riots is palpable in the atmosphere of the film.

The city of Los Angeles, instead of being a place of opportunity, is a dead end, just as Paris is hardly a city of refinement for the protagonists of "Hate." The sheep become a metaphor for the people of Watts, treated in an inhuman fashion, ground up to keep the wheels of more affluent whites society functioning. Violence begets violence, not simply in the infamous Watts riots, but even in the dynamics of the family represented in the film -- a child is bullied, and parents take out their frustrations in violence on the child's older brother, for not protecting the younger boy.

Although the city should be expansive, the images are compressed, trapped -- those of small apartments, a slaughterhouse -- and the plot is more of aimless wandering, than a true narrative with an arc rising action, climax, and resolution. When Stan makes a resolution, such as to fix his car, what deems like a plot point merely results in a dead end. Like "Hate," no matter where one wanders in the city, there is a sense of purposeless and anomie in "Killer Sheep." The airlessness of even large spaces in a rejecting city like the slaughterhouse becomes another metaphor for the condition of the rejected, just like the teenagers of "Hate," who, no matter how far they wander find themselves judged only in terms of their race.

This sense of being trapped in a place that is ugly but used for pleasure, like a slaughterhouse, is also seen in a carnival setting in "Shijie," or "The World" (2004) directed by Jia Zhangke. Ironically, the amusement park where the characters work is called "The World" even though because of economic and in some cases physical pressure from their employers, these characters will never be able to leave. The characters are just as diverse as those of "Hate" and just as alienated. The city where they are located is small and airless unlike Paris and Los Angeles, and it is explicitly artificial, manifesting the lies of the dreams of cities in an even more acute and obvious fashion. All cities are carnivals and lies, and "The World" purports to be a delightful universe, but it is all paint and masks.