Carnage (2011)

If Roman Polanski's new film Carnage were a thesis film, arguing that (to quote A.O. Scott), "beneath the surface of civilized behavior lurks an unquenchable animal impulse, a principle of aggression we labor in vain to suppress"--then it would be a pretty bad movie. It's a dumb premise. What is truly awful and uncanny about human indecency and cruelty is (to quote Nietzsche) "human, all too human." Civilization is not built on some successful-but-fragile renunciation of primal violence, but is indeed founded on primal violence (Freud); "discontent" (Unbehagen) is not lurking in the shadows of our primeval natures, but is built into the bitter, vicious circle we know as culture.

We don't get a glimpse behind any curtain here. Although a piece of theater very much in the vein of Sartre's No Exit or Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Carnage isn't interested in dredging up the past. There is no rotating set of monologues that walks us through the moment when each character became fixed in their rut or left to cling to a pipe dream. Nor will "everything be different" for these characters going forward: truth has not emerged to shatter their world.

This isn't mere clunkiness in the script. In refusing to bare for us each character's inner drives, failings, and obsessions, Carnage is much closer to Bergman's episodic, inconclusive Scenes From a Marriage than to the catharsis and soul-bearing of the mid-century stage. Not only do these characters not have discernible, rich pasts--their tantrums and excoriations turn only around sarcastic, shallow perceptions. It is a virtue of the film, not a flaw, that the viewer believes less and less of what any character says, as things get darker and more apparently confessional. We only hear the particular lies that these people tell themselves. John C. Reilly plays at being a nihilist; Kate Winslet pursues a tangent about the sanctity of a hamster's life; Christoph Waltz spends the entire film in another reality (his cell phone); and Jodie Foster's awkwardly tries to get hammered. None of this is wending our way through the defiles of some profound truth of these characters; it is all quite forced on their parts.

The great insight of psychoanalysis is that, at some level, whatever deformation and distortion our activities may take on, this is how we get off. The most crippling hysteria is just the way one person organizes their satisfactions. Applied to Carnage, you might say that these characters are living for this: to trot out these petty, shallow, execrable figures of themselves to wallow in, parading a shameful cynicism and sarcasm. There is an obvious glee to it, even an addictive compulsion. Far from being a "one-off," you get the feeling that everyone would be better off if they could institutionalize these afternoons together. The mask of social convention isn't ripped off here against anyone's will: these characters plunge into their degradation with enthusiasm. It is a kind of holiday: the ideological fantasy of, "When I am awake, am I really a butterfly dreaming I am a philosopher?" The answer of course is, no. No more do these Brooklyn bourgeois need some *additional* flavoring of the atrocious to serve as their tombstone... nor as their alibi.