A Cure for Wellness (2017)

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djross
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A Cure for Wellness (2017)

Post by djross »

A Cure for Wellness, which is a kind of Hollywoodized appropriation of Der Zauberberg, is undeniably flawed. The standard response from critics and audiences is that it looks great but is nonsensical, overlong, has weak dialogue, constantly telegraphs its plot points that are, in any case, all based on familiar ideas from previous movies, and ends up morphing from a horror/suspense Gothic fantasy into a silly hero-versus-villainous-monster battle that fails to satisfy anyone’s generic expectations. All these criticisms can without doubt be justified by referring in general or in detail to the film. Certainly it is a movie that gives the appearance of writing cheques it can’t cash.

Nevertheless, there is something disconcerting about the disjunction between continuously laying bare the narrative so that things are hardly ever experienced as surprising, while at the same time maintaining constant talk about puzzles. There is at least a chance that the film is deliberately misleading audiences into thinking they know what the film is about, when it’s really about something else entirely. If so, then this strategy of misdirection was so successful that it misled critics and audiences all the way out of the theatre and the film into commercial failure (and anyway, being a puzzle is not necessarily a virtue). But if there really is something else going on, what is it? What could the film be about other than what it seems so obviously to be about (identified dismissively by Richard Brody as being ‘something to do with the degrading effects of the world of business in which Lockhart has prospered’)?

One problem the film has been identified as having is that it is about two things, and those two things are inadequately related by the events depicted. On the one hand, the set up is about the emptiness of the contemporary rat race, which leads people to embrace all manner of treatments and cures rather than addressing the true sociopathological causes of dissatisfaction, misery and desperation. On the other hand, the film’s main thrust and denouement is all about a man who at one time married his sister and wants now to marry their daughter so that he can produce some kind of purebred line of super-aristocrats. Perhaps this can be thought of as the film’s rejection of another way of fleeing contemporary existence: that which consists in postulating a fantasy realm ‘outside’ the world, a strategy also related, perhaps, to the supposed self-centred wishes of Silicon Valley types such as Peter Thiel to indefinitely extend their longevity by any means (including vampiric) purchasable at any price.

The film might then be understood as offering a dual critique of two forms of contemporary denial, which are also two forms of hubris, and which, additionally, feed off and exploit each other, culminating in the hero’s victorious return to the world with a new understanding of life beyond the drawn knives of financial capitalism. With this focus on the psychopathologies of hubris and denial, it would indeed, then, be recycling ideas from films such as Shutter Island and Inception (and it certainly comes across as if written for Leonardo Di Caprio). But these two aspects of the film, the rat race setup and the world-rejecting, incest-loving mystery plot, don’t really come together in a very satisfactory way, and, what is more, leave the protagonist’s maniacal grin at the end rather unexplained, as if it should just be dismissed as a final, parting flourish from a filmmaker who doesn’t really have a clue what he’s doing or why.

That’s a definite possibility. But if the film is not just about those things, if it is not just recycling ideas we have seen in numerous other, better movies (although I must say that, for me, Shutter Island may be one of those films borrowed from, but does not count as a better one), then what is the film’s real theme?

One odd thing is the scene when the car crashes into the deer: there is almost a sense, which intensifies with hindsight, that the deer was racing down precisely to hit the car, rather than being oblivious to it. And later we see the (or, at the very least, a) deer restored, wandering about in the steam rooms of the institute itself. How ought this be interpreted?

One possibility for understanding the film’s true but hidden theme is as follows: the real hubris with which the film is concerned is not this or that aspect of contemporary existence, so much as the fundamentally hubristic character of humanity as such. As a species. Hence for example the scene in the tank, which is presented as a kind of return to our marine origins (à la Altered States). On this reading, the key moment in the film is near the beginning, when we see the shot of the dead goldfish. This has been seen as making an association between death and water, as a way of foreshadowing events to be unfolded in the course of the narrative. But to me, this is to ignore the fundamental irony that is set up in the juxtaposition between the voiceover and the image: at the very moment the voiceover informs us that human beings are the only species capable of self-reflection, we see a shot of what, at first glance, seems to be a goldfish observing itself, reflected upon the surface of the water when viewed from below. Only a moment later do we understand for certain that the goldfish has died, and yet, even then, we are left with the impression that the fish is so besotted with its own image that it has so neglected its own real existence as to die, like Narcissus, transfixed.

Is this intended as a symbol of human narcissism? Perhaps: after all, it is only one of many reflections shown in the film, such as the forest mirrored on the glass windows of a moving train in a memorable early shot that seems to indicate something about the relationship of technological humanity to the surrounding world of nature. But perhaps the seeming contemplation by a goldfish of its reflection and thereby of its mortality (a posteriori, as we learn) is intended not only as a metaphor for humanity, but as a repudiation of the notion that such mortal reflection is reserved only for one species: does not the irony set up in this shot also immediately invite the suggestion that human beings may not be the only creatures capable of beholding themselves in a mirror, and so capable of self-reflection, and so capable of contemplating their own mortality? Which in turn invites the possibility that eels who have, somehow or other, figured out a way to live for three centuries, may be susceptible to higher levels of self-reflection than the lowly goldfish.

And this in turn suggests the possibility that the controlling power animating the film’s narrative may not be Volmer’s monstrous desires but rather the eel hive mind, or some such thing. This would explain, for example, the scene involving the cow, whose point would then be to show, not only that not just humans but animals are drinking the water, and not only that not just humans but animals have, in this mountain region, these über-eels inside their bodies, but that calves and other baby animals are being born to those water-drinking, eel-ingesting animals, babies who would then be affected by the strange and powerful properties of these eels in utero. Perhaps this explains how it is that the deer could be compelled to leap in front of a vehicle: it is not Volmer but the eel hive mind who truly doesn’t want anyone to leave and threaten the world it has created, or, perhaps, the world it is preparing. Such an idea could explain how the patients can be suspended in water without breathing apparatus: becoming eel-like, they are beginning to adapt to an aquatic environment, while the hive mind causes them to be unbothered by the utterly bizarre ‘treatments’ they allow themselves to endure.

One might then be able to gather the rudiments of an understanding of that final maniacal grin as something other than a throwaway ruse. Somewhere I read a suggestion that perhaps Volmer has somehow managed to live on through Lockhart, hence the deranged smile, but this seems little supported by any evidence supplied by the film itself. But perhaps it is not Volmer at all but the eel hive mind itself that is unfolding its plan: since Hannah has attained her menarche (through a mechanism that is not terribly clear: does it have something to do with beer, or just the stimulating prospect of sexual assault from local ruffians?), and Lockhart, too, has possibly succumbed to eel-thinking (and has had at least a taste of the concentrated potion used by Hannah and Volmer), perhaps the eels are ready to face the threat of the outside world head-on, ready to propagate beyond the confines of their isolated mountain milieu. (These external threats to the European eel world, by the way, first manifested themselves in earnest in 1997.) Hannah and Lockhart can now be sent back to the saltwater world like a pair of Manchurian candidates…to spawn.

By no means does this analysis claim to have successfully knitted all the loose threads of the film together into a coherent patchwork. What does any of this really have to do with the deaths of both of Lockhart’s parents, for example (and is it just me, or is the age gap between son and mother not implausibly large, as if the actor who should have been playing the protagonist ought to have been, say, around Leonardo Di Caprio’s age?), which seem somehow important, but how so? Nevertheless, such an analysis at least opens the possibility that there is more going on in the film than is apparent at first glance.

This would change, for instance, an ‘elemental’ interpretation that sees the film as being about water, whether as life-giving or as that-which-ought-not-be-drunk: on the contrary, water would in this reading be merely our former milieu and one of the requirements of biological life, part in general of the triumvirate of elements defining the terrestrial cosmos – water, earth, air. Fire, then, would be the ‘outside’ element, the Promethean force partially tamed and maintained by one species only, which then drives this species wild, the source of its mistaken hubris, a hubris lying at the root of the errant paths of both Lockhart’s naked destructive capitalism and Volmer’s nativist and pseudo-naturalist exceptionalism.

What both Lockhart’s and Volmer’s positions lack would then be a genuine reconsideration, on more humble grounds, of humankind’s place within this tripartite cosmology. And it would then not at all be true to say that what the film is really about is the degrading effects of the world of business, because the real locus of the film does not lie within the human world at all: instead, it would be a kind of variation on the Gaia hypothesis, a fable of ‘nature’s’ vengeance against the hubristic threats coming from those ablaze with Promethean fire. Such a Gaian vengeance would derive not just from the operation of automatic, neutral ‘feedback loops’, but from the very thing that human exceptionalism ascribes only to itself, while in fact, according to such a reading of this film, this would be a truth ascribable to the biological world as a whole (or, at least, to 300 year old eels) – that of being a mortal being in the Heideggerian sense of knowing death as constituting my inescapable yet indeterminate future. And the action of this vengeance would consist in giving to humanity a new disease, a new form of unwellness, on the grounds that only by doing so can the delusion of wellness be unveiled, and the possibility of a new cure opened up.

On such a reading, to view the film, as critics did, as a mirror designed only to show a reflection of a human gaze narcissistically concerned only with its human-all-too-human self, would be to fall into the very anthropocentric trap the film sets out to defuse.

It’s a possibility.

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