Who am I (Kein System ist sicher, 2014)

Who am I? A nobody. A nobody superhero whose secret power is to be invisible.  Baran bo Odar's latest film had two screenings recently at TiFF 2014. I only had the chance to make it to the second one and the director was conspicuously absent. He gave "missing his daughter" as an excuse. It's hard to be disagreeable with such an excuse and really I didn't have too many questions.

I haven't seen his first film Silence yet and now it has made it onto my list of to be seen. Not because his latest is particularily brilliant, but rather that it is a solid piece of rather unusual filmmaking from Germany. Instead of the often slow and contemplative pieces coming from the Berlin School like The State I am In. Odar's Who am I? has more in common with Run Lola Run, Tom Tykwer's 1998 film about a disenfranchised rebellious daughter, and the neat tricks you can play with time and film. Like Tykwer's film, Obar explores the Berlin landscape in a fast pace of filmmaking more in tune with the Berlin electronic dance music scene than with emo.

Obar's film latches on to the theme of young alienated masculinity with power and parallels the hardship of the protagonist, Benjamin, with his comic book heros, who all inevitably lose their parents to a violent death. Obar however casts a wide social net beyond the question of "belonging" that touches on the effects of alzheimer's, suicide, the absent father figure, social alienation, racism, consipiracy theories and also love.



The film is centered on genius hacker Benjamin who belongs to a small group of activist hackers known as CLAY. They escalate their pranks, seeking recognition (and ultimately a sense of belonging) from the "big players" until they come up against a group involved with the Russian mafia. This could have been another movie on an almost worn out trope, but its playfulness and the fast pace keeps it going, even tricking the audience at the end into believing the authenticity of the reveal.



One of the curious turns of the film involves its emphasis on reality. The internet, the dark net and so on are all composed eventually of real people sitting in real coffee shops. Forgetting that this reality exists is portrayed of the potential problems of the immersive virtual world we are in the midst of creating. No system is safe because no person is infallible. But also because each virtual system is interwoven with a dynamic and changing reality. At the heart of this film is the recognition that the immaterial and the material cannot be separated.

Jumanji: The Case of the Killer Animal-Plant

I recently watched Jumanji again after almost 20 years and as is usually the case, I saw the film through fresh eyes. After having written a dissertation on plants, I notice plants all the more and especially monstrous portrayals of them.

For those of you not familiar with the film, two children find a magical board game in a house and they begin to play it, in effect, restarting a game begun some 26 years earlier. The premise of the game invites the players to "seek to find a way to leave their world behind." Each time they roll the dice a new challenge materializes in the form of nature gone wild. Whoever finishes the game, wins and puts everything back to normal.


One of the enticements to play comes from the invitation to experience a new world. A new world that is really an other nature that is amplified in some way, where the distinctions between species are blurred and the laws of regionally disparate biomes are ignored causing jungle and sub saharan animals come to small town America. Mosquitoes become larger than life and can pierce glass. Various wild animals ranging from elephants to rhinos stampede through the town. A lion appears from nowhere and then is trapped in a bedroom. A hunter kills humans instead of animals. The little boy becomes a wolf when he tries to cheat. A torrential downpour - a monsoon - threatens to drown all four players. The monkeys ride motorcycles and a vine like plant grows with such speed that it can grab onto people with its tentacle-like tendrils and kill them with a poisonous spray or gobble them up with its vicious flower-mouth.



The game distinguishes between two natures (or two worlds), the orderly and predicable nature of small town America and the nature of the jungle and sub saharan Africa. On the one side is the civilized world, but one where a small boy feels disenfranchised and misunderstood. On the other is the uncivilized world of the jungle that transforms the young civilized boy who is sent there into a wild man, played by a very hairy Robin Williams, who is also clothed in leaves. As soon as possible after returning from the jungle Robin Williams transforms himself into a civilized man by cutting his hair, shaving his beard and putting on proper clothes.



This distinction is also critical for the out-of-control killer vine. Just as William's long hair represents his descent into the uncivilized world, the incredible speed of the plant's growth signifies its own uncivilized character. The vine does not behave as a proper plant should. Instead of the docile house plant that exists as more of an object than a being with agency, or the agricultural crop that we eat, the vine can both kill and eat us. This visualizes the hidden dangerous properties of some plants that can poison us and the slow growth of a vine that is otherwise invisible to the naked eye. The unusual speed of the plant's growth also gives the vine animal properties, making it seem more animal-like. It can strangle like a python and spray poison like a snake. It breaks the natural laws that divide animals from plants, which is really breaking the laws of the civilized world - or how plants are supposed to behave in America. The vine's effect on the civilized world is to return it to a precivilized state as seen in the way it eventually transforms the house into a mini-jungle.



The effect of making a plant monstrous is to make it seem even less like us. It amplifies the plant's position as the radical other, by revealing it to be also uncivilized. In contrast to the short, well-manicured lawns of the small town, this plant takes over the house and crosses over the boundary that divides nature and civilization.



This plant also represents a comment on the fauna of Africa and the sub sahara. This world belongs to the uncivilized world and is an other world. The film reinforces stereotypes about Africa through its representation of an other nature that has not been dominated by humans. What makes a civilized world is its domination of the natural world - its taming of plants and animals.



Winning the game becomes a metaphor for human civilization. The order of the small town returns and the chaos brought on by misbehaving nature recedes or is put back in its place. However, the heartbeat of the game - its locating signal beats on and represents the primal threat involved in this natural world - it's always possible to return to this precivilized state... or to leave our world behind.