It’s time again for film and music critics’ end of the year lists, which give everyone a chance to catch up on the highlights of mainstream culture as well as significant contributions that may have slipped through the cracks. With the slogan fin du monde, fin du mois, même combat, the French Gilets Jaunes protests brought to light the contradiction of living in times in which the looming climate catastrophe makes the end of the world as pressing for many as making payments before the end of the month. With wretched figures like Donald Trump and Javier Milei ruthlessly lowering the bar on social standards, and with the United States literally green-lighting genocide in Palestine, a malaise sets in that makes optimism seem like a naïve, Quixotic illusion that could only exist in a bygone era. How can one feel ardour for this past year’s most-liked – such as Domino’s recent release of Richard Dawson’s The Ruby Cord Live – when times are so bleak? What is nevertheless obvious is that the kind of gloomy, nihilistic realism that is presented as serious cinema, and in some cases serious music, doesn’t offer audiences anything more than a reflexive acknowledgement that grim times make people feel unwell. Against this malaise, and in the spirit of doing something about it, the 2021 film Don’t Look Up and the 2023 Roger Waters tour This Is Not a Drill are instances where popular culture can help us keep the faith.
A few new to me highlights this past year were the belated discovery of the work of Czech filmmaker Juraj Herz, the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi and the Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo. Herz’s Ferat Vampire, about a car that uses human blood as fuel, was a nice complement to the all too real El Conde. Enys Men was a good film but a bit of a chore. Unrueh was a welcome addition to the why-did-it-take-so-long-to-make-this-film list. Werewolf by Night led me to the intriguing series The Nevers, which, as could be expected, suffered from the limitations of the superhero genre. Emma Seligman’s eagerly anticipated Bottoms was a commercial departure after the ingenious Shiva Baby. In that regard, the coming-of-age theme was best captured by Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo series, which proves once again that Riley is the Spike Lee replacement we were waiting for. In that zone, I was surprised to find that I rather liked Antebellum. The Tale of King Crab was worthwhile, as was Paint, Asteroid City, (and Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl series as well), White Noise, Leonora Addio, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Funny Pages, Fabian Goes to the Dogs, Skies of Lebanon (Sous le ciel d’Alice), All Quiet on the Western Front, Argentina 1985, The Old Oak, Adieu Godard, Vortex, To Leslie and The Hole (Il Bucole). Tsai Ming Liang’s Days, which I had been meaning to see, and Belladonna of Sadness put me to sleep. Among classics, Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death was charming, and The Great Race was worthwhile given also that this year marks the 40th anniversary of Billy Bragg’s Life’s a Riot with Spy vs. Spy. In the music department, Adrian Belew’s Elevator, Dry Cleaning’s Stumpwork, P.J. Harvey’s Inside the Old Year Dying, Wednesday’s Rat Saw God and Sweeping Promises’ Good Living Is Coming for You are the only additions to my iTunes that were produced recently. I’ve also caught up on most of Polyphia’s backlog. P.I.L.’s new album is somewhat of a disaster and the band has unfortunately not regained the comeback energy of This Is PiL. And the folks at Pere Ubu’s ubu projex owe me a t-shirt from the new album Trouble on Big Beat Street.
Neverminding the above, my selection for most problematic film of the year is Mike Cheslik’s Chaplinesque homage to rugged pioneer individualism, Hundreds of Beavers (United States, 2022). This slapstick take on Saturday morning cartoons like Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner combines Guy Maddin surrealism with Pixar (Monsters, Inc.) madcap to create an at times tedious but nevertheless engrossing redemption of the Edwardian beard fad. The film follows the adventures of Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) as he learns to survive in the wintery late-nineteenth-century Wisconsin wilds by trapping rabbits, beavers and raccoons. This tale of survival recovers the basic themes of the fiction of the previous fin de siècle, as found in Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” These include: bohemian aestheticism, men acting on instinct and ingenuity, the frontier as a reflection on the (male) self, adventurism for the sake of storytelling, the indifference of the natural world, heroism as paradox, meaninglessness victories and pyrrhic conquests, military honour as a form of decadence, observation and forensic science, avoidance of the abnormal, the relativism of archetypes, social Darwinism and natural selection as displaced resentment of living conditions in an administered world, entrenched social attitudes vis-à-vis race and gender, reality lived as fiction, irony and disaffection, middlebrow escapism, pioneer self-sufficiency in a world of commodities and opiates, obsessive behaviour, grand guignol sensationalism, morality tales that do not show consequences, evasion of socialism and the crisis of civilization, and lastly, destruction as fate. All of this is brought into being through a wondrous combination of black and white cinematography, cute animal costumes, set pieces, stop motion animation, digital effects and near-silent movie sound effects and grunts.
The main character loses his applejack cider business because of his alcoholism and the work of busy beavers. He turns to fur trapping instead, a practice in which he is outperformed by a type of Santa Claus character who nevertheless serves him as a role model. His at first meagre catches are redeemed at the local dry goods store, where the attractive daughter of the shop owner serves as the ultimate, Freudian meaning to life. However, eros is complemented by thanatos, which is not only the hundreds of beavers that Kayak must kill to earn the furrier’s daughter’s hand in marriage, but also the struggle to the death that is represented by the robotic restlessness of the beavers themselves, who work day and night building a lodge that turns out to be the kind of underground missile silo one would expect to see in a James Bond film. This is where the problematic aspect of the film becomes even more problematic. One cannot help but think of the buck-toothed beavers as the equivalent of the late nineteenth-century stereotype of the buck-toothed Chinaman, a cliché that brings the film in line with anti-communist sinophobic films like Seth Rogan and James Franco’s The Interview (2014) and more ambiguous representations like Laibach’s Liberation Day (2016). Unlike the drone slave workers in White Zombie (1932), there is no sense that the beavers are unhappy in their work and there is also no Mabuse-type villain who controls the beavers in their mechanical wood-chomping choreography. The only indications of a division of labour among them are the beaver soldiers who guard the lodge, a kangaroo court judge and lawyer, and the Holmes and Watson beavers who figure out who is murdering their comrades.
While I’m prepared to accept that Cheslik had no more an intention to represent the Chinese with his beavers than the makers of Cocaine Bear did the Russians, the contrast between the collectivist beavers and the individualist pioneer could not be more ideological. In addition to the oncoming war with China that the US, the AUKUS league, and Pacific nations like Japan and the Philippines have signed up for in an effort to offset US economic decline through military imperialism, the Chinese response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 25 million people globally, demonstrated how science and social cohesion (or communist domination, depending on how you want to think of it) can avert pandemic deaths – with China keeping the number of COVID-19 deaths in the first two years of the pandemic to fewer than 10,000. Against the mere thought of political or even civilizational superiority, the Western nations that imposed an ongoing “let it rip” policy of mass infection propagated the lab leak hypothesis, fear mongering over spy balloons and misconstrued reports about Uyghur persecution because it is in actuality afraid of being economically and technologically outgunned by a people it once considered a market for Western-made shoes. For the time being, Western exceptionalism has focused on Russophobia and on magically remaking anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism. Hundreds of Beavers nevertheless anticipates the “yellow peril” that, based on Pentagon propaganda, is expected to come into full force by 2025.
There is a small chance that Hundreds of Beavers might actually serve as a warning about the possibility that the US and partner nations will repeat something like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The Joe Biden administration’s recent pledge to the Republicans that it will further clamp down on the US-Mexico border in exchange for $100B more in pointless Ukraine military spending is one indication that no one in Congress pays any attention to such admonishments. The rise of post-neo-con etho-nationalism in the US and elsewhere makes Sean Penn-style due deference to rugged individualism the more likely response on the part of red-blooded patriots and your everyday yes man who has been disciplined by five decades of neoliberalism to keep his or her or their eyes on the prize. The entrepreneurial and ever-diligent Kayak is this unexpected hero – a loveable alpha-male (only because he’s a cartoon character) whose plucky ambition and death-defying good luck is a God-Bless-America notch above your average working man, the kind that Joe Biden promises to keep employed through the building of America’s “arsenal of democracy,” as United Auto Workers bossman Shawn Fain puts it. What seems then like an exception to the fin-de-siècle fiction phenomenon of professionals to the rescue (think of Dr. Kemp, Pierre Aronnax, Edward Malone, Abraham Van Helsing or Otto Lidenbrock) is here inverted, with the hero gladly taking on the burden of villainy. However, since it’s unlikely that the twenty-first century will be another American century, the professional is replaced by the petty-bourgeois independent businessman. This figure appears as an ideal in a society in which the function of the state is ostensibly limited to the management of markets. At the same time that the billionaire class is treated to exorbitant rewards, the average American is still expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, elbow their way to success by individual means alone, and make some meaningless wisdom out of the fact that they live in a cartoon universe where failure or success are predetermined by the parameters of the game.