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Early Works: half-way revolutions |
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by Dotson Rader
in Grove Press International Film Festival Book
In Zilnik's Early Works, a socialist hymn proclaims, ''Communist Party!
Precious treasure! The whole people follow you!'' as four children of
the party push an automobile on a peasant barge down a Yugoslavian river.
In self-imposed exile on a barge, drifting.
Later, the four take a shit, squatting on the ground by the wall of a collective
farm, and shitting becomes a political act. It becomes as revolutionary a gesture
as young Americans screaming ''Motherfucking pigs!'' at Mayor Daley's police,
and ''Fuck! Screw! Smash the state!'' during Dick Nixon's inaugural parade
celebration. In each situation the young are reacting against the hypocrisy
and bullshit revolutionary myths of the modern corporate state.
The revolutionary
action begins as play, at once provisional and gratuitous, only to be confounded
by its own impotence. Organize. Demonstrate. Protest. Burn. And nothing changes.
War goes on. The ruling circles increase in power. The state becomes fatter,
less responsive, more rigid, more smug, more self-righteous, more offensive
to human sensibility as it shrouds itself in the flag, morality, history, democracy,
peace, and apple pie. And the young, what of the young denied the effect of
their actions? Life for them degenerates into political frustration, hysteria,
corrosive self-doubt, and paranoia. And the cult of death begins. Anything,
even murder, to posit manhood. One knows one exists because one affects
the existence of things. And when one is politically impotent, what then? Death.
The situation in Early Works could be a parable of political rebellion in America.
Both Yugoslavia and the United States are countries with official ''revolutionary''
histories, and both are controlled by corporate managerial, bureaucratic, and
military castes. They share equally false notions concerning the meaning of
their revolutions, and in them the state has consciously co-opted the symbols
and political representations of freedom and employed them to disguise varying
degrees of tyranny. In America, for example, we have the absurd national disgrace
of the President accusing those who demand an immediate end to the war in Vietnam
of being responsible for prolonging the war, and calling for support of his
war in the name of peace. War is peace. We destroy Vietnam to save it. Russia
enslaves Czechoslovakia to free it. In some communist countries administrative
injustice is termed ''socialist legality,'' and the state brands revolutionaries
as counter-revolutionaries, and it accuses Those who fight, in the name of
Marx, for the people against the party's bureaucracy, it accuses them of being
revisionists and ''capitalist dupes.'' Zilnik's young revolutionaries shout:
''Down with the red bourgeoisie!'' In America we cry, ''Smash the state!''
They are similar demands because in both countries the people's revolution
has been stolen by an anti-democratic elite. Everywhere the state is the enemy.
Everywhere new aristocracies rob the people in the name of the people.
Zilnik examines the life of the young rebel in the modern corporate state,
and he describes their inevitable passage into nihilism. For that is what romanticism,
refused an unambiguous ideology and political discipline, refused power, becomes.
''Death to the romantics!'' they cry, condemning themselves.
The four young people are out to create a socialist revolution in a communist
country. And on the way they discover that they are, like the rest of us, impotent
before the state, isolated and incapable of affecting a sufficient response
from the regime. (Unless one considers a police-administered haircut a sufficient
response. It is certainly a totalitarian one.) The state disregards them. Their
difficulty is simply that they are half-way revolutionaries because their enemy
(the state) has co-opted their ideology. The old men act in the name of the
future. Marx, Lenin, even Revolution itself have become as much a property
of the government as the collective farm. Ideas, like those of democracy and
patriotism in the United States, have been copy-righted by the tyrant. It is
an Orwellian madhouse where the System has covered all the options and stands
on every side of every issue. Freedom is slavery.
The four would-be revolutionaries leave home and move across the countryside
to win the peasants to revolution. And the peasants, as peasants will, beat
them up. It is much like the Weathermen of SDS going on a pilgrimage to the
workers. The workers turn them over to the police. The four experiment with
communal forms, and at one point the boys cast lots to see who will bed the
girls. The girls, suspecting quite rightly that the gesture stinks of male
chauvinism, walk off. Pussy Power, as Cleaver would say.
Rejected by the peasants, frustrated by their inability to act effectively,
they gradually drift back to their beginning. There is nowhere else to go,
not with the fields and the woods haunted by, literally ringing with the sounds
of World War II, the Partisan guns - Tito, before he seized villas and hunting
lodges and the trappings of royalty, leading the people against the fascists.
They return, after rehearsing for death, shooting guns, exploding gasoline
bombs - much like American radicals - being teased by death, and they are defeated.
''We couldn't help the people. We were spectators.''
The girl demands that the play acting end. ''Who'll be the first? You always
horsed around,'' she tells the three boys, ''You never finished anything.''
And it is here that Zilnik touches briefly on the birth of nihilism: it is
formed in the rage against powerlessness. The boys shoot the girl and burn
her body. What else is there to do? The victims execute themselves. Those who
make half-way revolutions will be destroyed by them. As Cleaver has pointed
out, the victims internalize their rage and devour each other.
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