July 16, 2007
severance
The serial obliteration of a bunch of employees for a defense firm by the ghost remainders of the Balkan troops they've armed is the obvious moralizing structure, but in fact is almost trivial. Rather, this film achieves even the barest intelligibility (even within the flexible near-magical-realism of the horror b-film) via the acceptance of one unquestioned premise: that First World anglos are unable to distinguish between a luxury hotel and a derelict state medical facility.
As long as it's in Eastern Europe.
And this is in fact somewhat interesting, highlighting exactly the peculiar place of Eastern Europe within the core/periphery order of civilization, as it exists in anglo imaginations: at once industrialized and premodern, citizens of a new European order in which state war seems unimaginable — except for the actual presence of internecine conflicts, that thus seem to belong to more distant states and centuries. The cultural anxiety is clear: geographically, it seems like the kind of place that should follow First World "rules," and thus be navigable by, well, us. And yet even in the last two decades since the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact, it isn't.
Would we know what a nice hotel looked like? And might our lack of code-comprehension, our uncertainty about the success of the project which involves remaking the world core in our image, turn out to be fatal?
Posted by jane at July 16, 2007 12:48 AM | TrackBack