Dying on the Way in Jacques Tati: Part II

… Continuing from previous post

The Route

Jour de Fête tells the story of François, a postman in a French village, who takes long routes and detours on his bike to deliver mail. After watching a documentary about the speed and efficiency with which mail is delivered in America, he attempts to incorporate unrealistic acrobatic gestures and movements in his biking, and tries to bike in straight lines rather than the actual laid-out paths, which are, as usual, curved. This, unsurprisingly, lead to mishaps and inconveniences, both for him and the people around him. At the end of such an attempt, when he’s overwhelmed by everything that has passed, an old lady tells him not to get so worked up and that news is rarely good, so he should let it takes its own sweet time.

An obvious reaction to such a story is more-or-less the cliché that, in trying to be efficient, we forget to enjoy what makes life worth living, etc. This is not wrong, but what is it that makes it so strikingly obvious to the audience, when such a story is told? That is, what is it about life that makes this an inescapable feeling upon watching this film?

My answer to this involves understanding the film in terms of the life-versus-death and public-versus-private dichotomies.¹ I will describe two ways these dichotomies have appeared to me in this film. The first might seem quite silly, but I venture it isn’t. It involves the simple fact that François shifts from curved routes to straight routes. The way I began this series of posts becomes helpful here: the private/death pole seems to be represented by things that are soft, curved, undomesticated by a ruler, in both senses of the word, while the public/life pole seems to be represented by things that are straight and hard; and, crucially, it’s this shift that has destructive consequences. In other words, when François tries to perfectly “deprivatize” his street activities — arguably the most public region we come across in our everyday lives — life itself becomes cumbersome for the entire community. And this is indeed what we see happen in real life: when what is supposed to be private is perfectly banished from what is public, we tend to forget that the banished private realm really exists and needs round-the-clock attention, even — and perhaps especially — when we’re in public. For instance, when certain people are banished from sleeping outdoors, cooking outdoors, change their kids diapers outdoors — for whatever reason — their need to do those things somewhere fails to appear in a public form, it falls into communal oblivion; it’s only when they undertake this extremely private activity outdoors that they are remembered by onlookers as people who want to appear in public, by virtue of having been well-slept and well-fed before such an appearance. One way the text of reality² expresses this truth is by making uncompromisingly straight biking paths perilous. This might seem far-fetched or too “symbolic,” but I think it’s neither, simply because the fact/quality of bending/curvature suggests that what has been bent/curved yielded to certain environmental constraints which prevented it from being a straight line, that it didn’t do what François does. That is, curves are the proof of a prior impossibility of straight lines, they’re an expression of a material need that appears in the interaction of matter with matter. Therefore, if one is unyielding to curves, they are, more microscopically speaking, unyielding to (the legitimacy of) certain material needs. So, no wonder François makes everyone’s life hell. And, more crucially, perhaps we all know these things, and that’s precisely why the cliché makes so much sense.

The same attachment to “unstraightness” reappears in Mon Oncle and Playtime, both of which place Hulot in the middle of buildings with stark, unkind, straight lines that befuddle him. In Mon Oncle, he is shown to be most in control in his apartment, which he needs to reach through a tortuous set of stairs inside a building so helplessly unplanned that it unapologetically lands him in front of a woman in her lingerie, most probably running between a communal bathroom and a living space — a situation both seem to command rather gracefully, suggesting it’s not particularly surprising to either. Here, again, the extremely private moment of the woman is inextricably linked to the roundabout way she and Hulot both have to take through the building to just go about their days. Playtime ends in an assortment of vehicles sluggishly circling around a decorative spiral sculpture installed at a traffic island in the middle: François seems to have taken the old woman’s advice. A carnivalesque background score presides over this circling, cheering for the circularity of the movement, as if there is something to be jubilant about when a circle is made to spin in the middle of a whole sea of onlookers and passers-by inhabiting a forest of straight lines. The circling itself appears to receive an inordinate amount of screen time, as if there were something to be observed in it. My contention is that, indeed, there is: we see these “circles” — these gooey, curved shapes — when people — which is literally goo swimming in tiny sealed bubbles called cells — sleep, die, live on the streets, when someone on a wheelchair crawls a flight of stairs to access a public building because there are no ramps, every time there is non-violent resistance on the street, every time someone does something in public that makes us think, “What the fuck are they thinking? Couldn’t they just stay home, or at least, out of my sight?”

Another way the distinctions of interest here have appeared to me in Jour de Fête would probably sound a bit less silly, although it’s absolutely related. It involves what the old woman tells François in the end, about letting news take its own sweet time. Again, it has this cliché feel of being the wise advice to enjoy life, rather than to just seek efficiency, but the same question arises here: what is it about life that makes us find such an interpretation satisfactory? Perhaps, here too, we’re resorting to things we already know, such as, the worst news of all — the one we want to take all the sweet time in the world — is that of death, our death. So, we should ask: what does it look like when we don’t let the approach of death take its own sweet time? Obviously, it consists in killing ourselves right now. Besides suicide, one way that can come about is to exist like an immortal/automaton, because, as I’ve explored here, immortality, invulnerability, being devoid of material needs, remove the unaccounted-for from the structure of our being. So, the old woman can be understood as saying that, when François tries to deliver mail fast, along straight lines, that requires him to disregard the material needs due to which the actual laid-out paths are curved, for instance, the need to not go through buildings while traveling. That is, letting news take its own sweet time requires the public to acknowledge its continuum and contiguity with the private, that the only reason we find ourselves wanting the public to be a “perfect,” “well-ordered” space is because we’re constitutively besieged by imperfections like disease, disorder, the need to pee in the middle of a speech. If the public tries to “perfect” itself, by, for instance, avoiding curves, then that “perfection” will remove the gooey unaccounted-for, and all of human existence and experience will collapse. The architect of the building Hulot lives in in Mon Oncle could have done a better job, but then, Hulot would have never learned that people need to shower, be (almost) naked, sometimes outside bathrooms, and if he never learns that, then he will never know what it means for a person to require privacy and what it means for another to make that privacy possible. This is not me saying that we should all get naked and get outdoors or that it’s desirable for people to find themselves forced to do that; this is me saying that, when someone is seen to be doing exactly that, there is value in registering that nakedness as a reminder of something indispensable, instead of banishing the naked person from public view. I also especially do not want to say that I understand Tati as saying something about what we should or should not do; I’m saying instead that he can be understood as saying that reality is already structured in such a way that the porosity between the public/free/can/ability/life and the private/unfree/must/necessity/death — the impossibility of the “purely public” — sustains both of them.

Notes

1. That Tati’s films tend to blur the line between the public and the private has already been noted by Michel Chion, in The Films of Jacques Tati (translated by Antonio d’Alfonso, 2nd ed., Guernica Editions, 2003). Here, I’m extending this to the life-versus-death, straight-versus-curved, freedom-versus-necessity dichotomies as well. ↩︎
2. And yes, it is indeed a text, because reality is citable, in the sense, that (parts of) events, phenomena, acts, things that happens in general, can be repeated, reproduced, related, i.e., cited. ↩︎