Fuzzy Truths

On New Rose Hotel

The advent of video has, among all other things, also brought about an illusion of control. While people are aware of a camera-consciousness and the attitudes the enforced, thin boundary of the screen inspires, as reflected by the diversity of responses on the appropriate camera demeanor in Jean Rouch’s and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961), there’s the widespread belief that “candidly captured moments” must be an irrefutable marker of Truth. People might act differently when they know they are being filmed, but not when a camera accidentally stumbles onto the scene. The office spaces and high-security areas might be governed by the principles of the panopticon, where people discipline themselves through an awareness of surveillance, but a concealed camera is the modus operandi of tabloid journalism and public investigations. Armed with the advantages of video, where one can pause, zoom, rewind and record, everyone is a film (video) critic, to expand and alter François Truffaut’s famous quote. Even if we neglect the possibility of manipulation and tampering, the sheer verisimilitude of the recorded reality invites everyone to weigh in on the veracity of the video, allowing them to peer closely while peeling the layers of the motion picture.

Such myths do not arise just from the verisimilitude but are propagated by movies themselves. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) immortalized the idea of the camera capturing something beyond the auteur’s intention, and this, more than any of Antonioni’s handling of space and upper-class listlessness, captivated the minds of multiple filmmakers who thought of the image as a site for investigation, a possibility of unveiling the Truth™ behind reality. Films across the globe such as Tic Tic Tic (Bharathiraaja, 1981) and Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (Kundan Shah, 1983), to take the Indian example, which owe nothing to Antonioni, despite the directors’ acknowledgements, touted the camera (and later, video) as an egalitarian device for the common man to uncover the lies of the authorities. But when we move from the world of image to sound, as Francis Ford Coppola did in The Conversation (1974), things start taking on a more troubling dimension. The critiqued sounds (or images) are infused with the user’s subjectivity, and further, decontextualized from the larger narrative. The device might record accurately, but its truths, if any, are only concentrated on that moment. The same could be said for the image as well.

However, filmmakers operating on a separate plane from Antonioni and Coppola continue to peddle this misguided notion of camera-truth, albeit in different manifestations. Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), a film that owes its debts to both Blowup and The Conversation, further reaffirmed this notion, even if it had a premise that could be called postmodern. A special effects and sound designer in the movies accidentally uncovers a murder and, unlike the two forbears, this turns out to be unambiguously the truth. I might be overstating the impact of Blow Out, for surely lesser films, the media and corporations themselves started and perpetuated this myth but, in its own way, it does capture the zeitgeist of the video and even the digital generation. The possibility of uncovering the buried truth under layers of falsity remains video’s defining feature, and John Travolta’s character’s triumph is a guiding star for us all, arriving at the murder by isolating each of the sounds. This narrative, unfortunately, stuck, with films even with a left-wing veneer such as John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) and the Wachowski Sisters’ The Matrix (1999) using superior devices (an all-seeing pair of glasses in the former, coding in the latter) to expose the lies. If the Reddit threads and online groups studying the videos of the Boston murders taught us anything (as documented in two video essays, Chris Kennedy’s Watching the Detectives (2017) and Lého Galibert-Laîné’s Foresickness (2020)), it’s that critique through conspiracy is among the dominant modes of video analysis.

Some filmmakers, however, refuse to mindlessly adhere to these simplistic ideas of candid capture. Naturally, they are tagged as intractable and abstruse for the challenging complexity in which they interrogate the image and its mediation of desires. Jean-Luc Godard is among the foremost on this list, but filmmakers like Harun Farocki, Bruce Conner, and Chris Marker are some of the other excellent examples. The only filmmaker in Hollywood (I am happy to be corrected though) who comes to mind is Abel Ferrara, and it’s no surprise that his films, especially his later ones, are barely distributed. With plots that possess the veneer of genre and skirt the edges of exploitation, Ferrara’s films expand our ideas of pleasure and pain in the seedy backwaters of American capitalism filtered through his Catholic upbringing. Though driven by the Catholic concepts of guilt and grace, Ferrara’s ethics and pessimism are firmly grounded in the injustices of the modern world, and how ideologies (capitalism, hedonism, patriarchy, feminism and, of course, Catholicism) affect and transform our consciousness.

One film of his which is firmly anchored to our digital age, even though it was released in 1998, is New Rose Hotel. Adapted from a William Gibson short story with the same title, New Rose Hotel’s plot is set in Tokyo in a distant future and chronicles the actions of two corporate spies, Fox (Christopher Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe), and a femme fatalesque nightclub singer, Sandii (Asia Argento). Both Fox and X are freelance agents who help corporations poach employees and scientists from their competitors. A Japanese firm, Hosaka, hires these two to poach Dr. Hiroshi, a genius scientist from a German company, Maas. Fox discerns that Hiroshi is lacking passion in his marriage, so he hires Sandii to lure Hiroshi to Hosaka. X is supposed to train Sandii for her performance with Hiroshi, but ends up falling in love with her. Sandii succeeds in seducing Hiroshi to join Hosaka, but Maas responds by releasing a biological germ that kills all of Hosaka’s scientists. Sandii disappears, Hosaka blames Fox and X, and X hides in the New Rose Hotel cubicle, all while masochistically reminiscing about his experiences with Sandii and her possible betrayal.

Superficially, the plot has all the accoutrements of an erotic thriller, with some corporate intrigue sprinkled for extra spice. But treating the plot with the same mechanics of linear storytelling and suspenseful investigation would be tantamount to considering its tortuous desires and capitalistic critique as mere window dressing. Ferrara wisely eschews a good deal of plot exposition and instead luxuriates in both Fox’s and X’s delusions of grandeur—a grandeur of ambition and love respectively—while critiquing the system and subtly signaling the power dynamics which lead both Fox and X to underestimate Sandii. For all the hue and cry about the lack of coherent plot and failure in storytelling, Ferrara made his intentions clear in the opening credits itself, where woozy, alternating slo-mos of X and Fox shot in a fuzzy, low-res video camera are overlaid with the credits in three different languages—English, German and Japanese. The music also shifts from the halting strums of the acoustic guitar to a slicker, percussive hip-hop track, all while the video continues to jerkily move at a snail’s pace. Ferrara slowly allows the nightclub sounds to trickle into his soundtrack, erecting a tower of Babel through the collision of multiple languages, English, German and Japanese (maybe even Spanish), before the camera finally settles on Walken and sets the scene in motion.

It seems odd that Ferrara highlights the discordance of spoken language in a highly corporatized setting. Market considerations aside, one would expect the hegemonic language to be the dominant lingua franca, but his tower of Babel is constructed from the building blocks of the old and new visual language through screens, surveillance cameras and film, and the aural languages of music and words. Even as our lives are being streamlined by corporations (both Marrakesh and Tokyo are defined by their skyscrapers in the film), the chaos unleashed by the sheer assimilation of diverse cultures and mangled histories, the information overload and the inundation of images lead to us latch onto confused myths and narratives. Fox, the ever-ambitious schemer, spouts Greek philosophy and managerial motivational myths tinged with a clownish madness. A megalomaniac who plunges audaciously into his schemes with an unearned assurance, Fox fails to grasp the nature of the multitude of forces at play and constantly undermines his accomplices. X, on the other hand, has fewer ambitions in terms of power, but is besotted with Sandii and believes she is with him as well. Both characters luxuriate in their desires, and Ferrara accordingly allows their delusional subjectivity to seize the frame through slo-mos and low-angle shots, but not without critiquing and contextualizing their motives, either by framing Fox awkwardly between towering skyscrapers and mirrors, or by eliding conversations that will later boomerang in X’s memories with a redoubled clarity.

By hewing closely to their subjectivities, Ferrara elides major plot points which would be the focus of most erotic thrillers. Fox’s confidence in his idea renders the seduction and subsequent defection of Hiroshi as foregone conclusions, and Ferrara duly jettisons these scenes. “If you believe, he will. You have to fall in love! That’s the key! In your mind.to be able to make believe,” says Fox, as he instructs Sandii, and later X, to fall in love without falling in love. The rehearsal becomes the main performance, as the lived reality and performative world of make-believe (cinema itself) coalesce, and, as Neil Bahadur writes, switch places with each other. Hiroshi exists only on the screens of their retro-futuristic mobile phones, and these videos are sufficient for Fox to decipher his entire personality. Screen-memory and mind-memory commingle, with events that previously appeared only on screens re-entering as flashbacks. The allure of verisimilitude poisons our brain, whether we believe in it like Fox or doubt it but succumb anyway like X, so much so that characters seemingly trapped in video cameras emerge as highly-subjectivized personalities of their own. Video features such as pausing and zooming interact with the memories of the mind, almost as if we hope to decipher events in our lives the same way we use videos. But while we insist on higher quality images, with even cinephiles demanding and fetishizing their Criterion 4K Ultra Blu-Rays, Ferrara, like his influence, Godard, sticks with the fuzzy, low resolution of video cameras, complicating screen-memories by making things murkier, yet dreamier. The grain clearly indicates the presence of pixels, something which 4K looks to dissimulate, frustrating those like Fox who look to solve problems but for a romantic like X, there’s a shape-shifting quality suggestive of motion even when it’s a still image. Fox’s conviction on the certainty of images is being constantly undermined by Ferrara’s poetry.

Ferrara’s conception of the image isn’t just localized to what we see on screens. There’s always an image of everyday objects and humans stored in our minds, where we slot objects and people into their respective silos and roles. Genre has always played a major role in Ferrara’s films, and they aren’t mere commercial constraints foisted on a maverick filmmaker. Tag Gallagher, in his excellent essay on Ferrara, talks about how genre allows Ferrara’s ethics to come to the fore, especially in his means of exploring pleasure, pain, grace and retribution, an aspect which Gallagher likens to Simone Weil. In New Rose Hotel, Ferrara employs genre to challenge our assumptions of erotic thrillers and, through that, the notion of a femme fatale as well. Though Sandii’s subjectivity is not accorded the same amount of screen time as X or Fox, she silently asserts her authority in her first encounter, before suppressing her intentions in her tight-lipped, impish grin and playful eyes. Fox neglects her barely contained anger when he tells her to seduce Hiroshi by mocking her gender and social status, and though X perceives some changes in her expressions, he chooses to ignore it anyway. Ferrara films these scenes in X’s house like a chamber drama, countering Fox’s blathering with Sandii’s silent gazes and her power over these two in the room. The final 20 minutes of the film, which probably is the summit of Ferrara’s career and contains some of the best use of flashbacks I have ever seen, possibly reveals the double-crossing by Sandii, though it is presented through X’s masochistic fantasy of doubt, duplicity and desire, first as sound, then as image. Her coy answers about her origins, which X conveniently ignored, return as thoughts in his brain, after which her words are matched with the appropriate sequence. These are never stinging, sexist realizations, but more of an erotic yearning to be with her in spite of these lies. X possibly knew about her duplicities but loved her anyway. It was this aspect which attracted Ferrara to this short story, and how this onslaught of masochistic memories is mediated by image, both digital and internal.

But did Sandii really betray X, or is this a mere figment of X’s imagination? If Sandii exists only as a figment, then it is a much weaker portrayal of her even if it seemingly moves away from the femme fatale narrative. However, Ferrara and Argento’s delineation of the femme fatale is dialectical in the sense described by Laura Mulvey, where the femme fatale is likened to Pandora: “The female figure not only is driven by transgressive curiosity, to open the box, but is able to look at the supposed horror of those aspects of the female body that are repressed under patriarchal culture. It is here that the myth, otherwise from its very beginnings truly a symptom of m(isogyny, can find a point of transformation...It is the heroine rather than the hero who can explore and analyze the phenomenon with greater equanimity.”¹ Sandii was always shown to be a character smarter than what the world, especially Fox, made of her, puncturing Fox’s delusions of grandeur through her greater awareness of capitalistic operations. New Rose Hotel was derided by many critics as soft pornography, and I suspect this was mainly in relation to the nightclub sequences, where Sandii freely cavorts intimately with both X and other women, and X’s erotic deliriums. But Ferrara, as with his other films, always skirts the boundaries of exploitation to plumb his characters’ pathology while commenting on the workings of the world which affect their desires. An exploitative director would have indulged in more scenes on Sandii’s seduction of Hiroshi, but Ferrara discards them as superfluous. No character in the film is as in command of their desires as Sandii, and that is why she is both able to navigate the world better than the men while also retroactively emerging as a threat to them. Even as Ferrara shows events as they occur to Fox and X, Sandii assuredly waltzes in and out of their subjectivities, lending an ambivalence to her actions and emotions. The material might be politically incorrect, but Ferrara breaches the boundaries of what we consider civilly acceptable to evoke the anxieties and desires of the 21st century through an age-old fear of beautiful women. This gives New Rose Hotel the feeling of being both modern and timeless. Despite the efforts of many directors to comment on screens, distraction and the image economy, few are able to approach it with such density, depth and nuance as Abel Ferrara, all while never losing sight of the emotions associated with love in the time of transaction.

1. From Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind’s Eye, published by Bloomsbury.

Anand Sudha has a PhD in Applied Physics and tries to squeeze film criticism into his spare time. He has been published in InReview, Film Companion, Ultra Dogme, among others.