Capitalism, Genre, and Humanity at the New Rose Hotel
By Zach Campbell. Presented in Spring 2005 at the NYU Cinema Studies Student Conference.
New Rose Hotel is the 1998 film by director Abel Ferrara, and it stands
as one of his more divisive works. It churns through its tropes and images and
presents them ambiguously, mysteriously, never allowing the viewer the ease of
knowing whether a particular scene or image or line of dialogue is merely
descriptive, or fully parodic, or purely ornamental--et cetera. In a way, it
is a film very much about looking at its own content, about avoiding fixity
when it comes to intention and tone. There is a labyrinthine lineage within
the cinema and culture that enabled this self-analysis in a commercial film of
this kind. I shall try to trace its broadest outlines here first.
In the 1980s Gilles Deleuze argued that after World War II, a certain trend
appeared in cinema in which characters in films no longer simply performed
actions but that they now also saw, that they too were viewers in a way
comparable to the viewers in the seats of the movie house. (1) For Deleuze,
this development marked first an aesthetic of realism—particularly in the
films of Roberto Rossellini—and went on to manifest itself in different strains
of modernism.
Deleuze of course cut off his taxonomical and philosophical project in film
history with the high modernism of the likes of Resnais, Duras, and the Straubs.
Nevertheless, certain conceptual lines have continued, and morphed, into newer
and broader areas of cinema. The last several decades have seen the gradual
rise of what we might call, for lack of a better word, postmodernist cinema.
And this is not only cinema marked by (for example) Fredric Jameson’s famous
principles of nostalgia, pastiche, and schizophrenia, but a different creature
altogether, marked by a certain renewed (if mutated) authorial voice, and which
not only expresses “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” but in fact turns
back upon and engages it. The deliberate admixture of ‘high’ and ‘low’ totems—not
to mention ‘realist’ and ‘non-realist’ ones—has become the blurred launching
pad for this new sort of film. Product of capitalism as well as treatise on
it, partly allegorical and yet partly not, New Rose Hotel is postmodern film
at perhaps its richest and most complex.
Based upon a short story from the 1980s by William Gibson, New Rose Hotel
shares with its literary source the same basic plotline, which is quite simple.
Two men who make a living off of corporate espionage schemes, played by Christopher
Walken and Willem Dafoe, hire a woman (Asia Argento) to seduce a highly profitable
scientist and lure him away from one multinational corporation to another. As
events unfold Dafoe’s character (named X in the credits) becomes romantically
involved with Argento’s, whose name is Sandii. The espionage plan fails because
Sandii—motives unknown—betrays them; Walken’s character Fox meets his end and
Dafoe’s winds up hiding out in a cell at the bizarre, beehive-like New Rose
Hotel of the title. There are many issues to consider relating to globalization,
crime narrative tropes, and other issues that are common to both Gibson’s work
and Ferrara’s. Ferrara’s distinct presentation of the story spurs a lot of
questions that belong entirely to this film, however, and we need precisely
more discussion of these questions.
One of the distinct events specific to the film is the character Fox’s suicide.
The short story presents his death as a murder, but in the film—faced with certain
death—Fox voluntarily jumps off of a balcony and onto the atrium floor below,
Walken laughing and hooting as he leaps over the rail. It’s a surreal moment
that defies characterization in the conventional sense. We can explain this
behavior, though, by looking at the role that Fox plays within the narrative
as a loose allegory of capitalism.
Walken’s first line in the film is “Potaytoes, potahtoes. Government, corporation:
it’s the same thing.” Though it might sound on paper like a simple jab at global
capitalism, it’s in fact an acknowledgment of “the rules of the game,” so to speak.
Fox has no illusions about this globalized, all-powerful corporate oligarchy; what’s
more, he has no ethical compunctions about it. His entire being is in fact devoted
to the service of capitalism. When his place, his role, in the capitalist machine
works itself into an inescapable corner, Fox abandons the organic instinct of
self-preservation. What is remarkable about this suicide is that it’s neither a
matter of honor nor grief, but simply a terminal malfunction in the capitalist machine;
thus it is not in fact a suicide at all, it is a self-destruct event.
Fox is not exactly “human” in a traditional psychological or narrative senses of
the word. And this is where the film’s generic trappings of noir and the crime
narrative are important to consider. Fox, although not a villain in this film, takes
up the trope of the villainous Other that exists in a lot of film noir—he is the
consummate professional, and amoral pragmatist. His is the type that finds its
vilest apotheosis in Richard Widmark’s character in Kiss of Death, who
famously pushed an old woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs. Fox
cannot be a protagonist in a commercial generic narrative because he has no doubts
and no particular weaknesses: he must be something of a rival figure, an Other, to
the protagonist. In fact there are three instances in the film where Fox rejects
outright the weaknesses of, respectively, rest, introspection, and love—to him,
foolish and dangerous impediments to playing the game. “Rest” would mean a pause
that would leave him out of lockstep with a fast-moving, globe-trotting series of
transactions. “Introspection” leads to questions of ethics and guilt: unacceptable
in the world of profitable corporate espionage. And “love,” of course, is
precisely what may have blinded Dafoe’s character from foreseeing Sandii’s betrayal.
Then again, it might not have been possible within the logic of this film for
anyone to have detected Sandii’s true intentions, precisely because the image
of Sandii/Argento is one of indeterminacy and thus she might not have true
intentions at all. Bathed in red light at her introduction, and forever
associated in the film with two colors, red and black, she exists for her
viewers (those in the diegesis and those in front of the screen) ultimately as
a flash of visual excitement (red) conflated with the obfuscation of the
color black. Embodied on the literal levels of form and color, Sandii is a
pure visual stimulus lacking discernible psychology. Yet shortly before she
agrees to work for Fox and X, there is a shot of Argento’s bare midriff,
which is adorned by her recognizable and prominent angel tattoo. This shot
inaugurates a concern with not just Argento’s image but her body, presented
in the shot without context or narrative justification. The presence of the
tattoo is interesting, in that it spurs the question (first) as to whether or
not it is Argento’s own tattoo or Sandii’s—that is, is the tattoo “real”?
Argento does indeed boast this work of body art in real life, of course; but
the answer to this question is not as important as its implication. This early
confrontation with Asia Argento’s body—her specific body—is “justified” as an image
in the film for no other reason than the fact that it releases a residual
“reality-effect.” Sandii, the image of indeterminacy, too obscure, too visceral,
is deeply linked to the physical body of Asia Argento, an actor, a “real person”;
this is all to say, the image helps to embed the concept of an agent behind the
red-and-black veneer which presents itself to Fox, to X, and to viewer alike.
And this is the underlying logic of Sandii’s successful double-cross in the story,
a logic that does not exist in the Gibson source material. Sandii is another trope
just slightly removed from the realm of crime fiction and film noir: a femme fatale,
a scheming female. But the near-requisite downfall of the threatening female
character never comes to her: she “wins.” If this film were presented from Sandii’s
point of view, it might have been subtitled, wryly, The Revenge of the Passive Object
of the Male Gaze—a topic that clearly interests Abel Ferrara, as anyone who has seen
Ms. 45 surely knows. This time, however, the woman’s revenge is in keeping
with the dominant paradigm of hypercompetitive capitalism. She, too, knows the
“rules of the game,” and excels at that game, even more than Fox.
The third character, Willem Dafoe’s protagonist X, is almost completely incompetent
when it comes to capitalism. Unlike Fox, who plays by the rules of the corporate world,
and unlike Sandii, who exploits the ideological consequences of such a world in order
to veil her motives, X has no agency and is a consummately passive character. Bradley
Stevens comments upon this when he writes: “narrative is something that happens to the
protagonist rather than something his actions determines, and although X comes to see
himself as a tragic hero … he exists within a context which is explicitly critical of
his assumptions.” (2)
X’s passivity is absolutely central to the film’s bizarre final reel, when X retreats
to the New Rose Hotel and Ferrara presents the viewer with a recapitulation of the
preceding hour’s plotline. A few of the scenes are altogether new; some are subtly
alternate takes of previous scenes. The implication is that X’s unsettled memory is
now fluid and uncertain, haunted as it is by Sandii (the angel of indeterminacy).
No lover and no fraternal friend exist any more to prop up X, who with this scene
becomes literally like the variable that his credited name suggests.
Memory and subjectivity are the source of New Rose Hotel’s sequential and imagistic
organization. This is why the film is so disjointed and elliptical (and partly why
it infuriated many reviewers). The editing deliberately elides cause and effect, and
there are few dependable establishing shots in which to place the action in a scene.
The space of this traversable global network is linked more by networks of video
technology and memory than by traditional models of action. The ‘any-space-whatevers’
of which Deleuze wrote are in this postmodern manifestation narratively linked, if at
all, by subjective memory and the failure of recording devices to reveal truth.
Several instances in the film present characters watching video images to inform
their espionage strategies and, for X, to revisit Sandii in order to find out what
she “really” was.
This crisis of image, perception, and memory is a major concern in the later films
of Abel Ferrara, from at least as far back as The Blackout. Images are recorded to
video and to memory in these films, in New Rose Hotel especially, in an archive to
which characters appeal desperately at catastrophic moments. Jacques Derrida wrote
that “[t]here is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.”
(3) X, the protagonist, the subject, has no access to political or economic power,
which marks the first order of his passivity. What’s more, though he possesses
recourse to both memory and video—so many images—he lacks the ability to extrapolate
workable meanings from these images. As a result he is even cut off from an
authoritative, archival “truth” in any metaphysical or pragmatic sense of the
word. X’s trajectory is that of lost certitude and thus deeply fractured identity.
The shot in the film’s final reel of X, masturbating to Sandii’s memory, her image,
encapsulates his futile desire for control, for knowledge, perhaps even for ownership.
The traditional male hero of the generic narrative no longer has any power. He is only
one who watches, who sees, and the world he sees eventually passes him by. The process
of filmic and narrative anxiety that marked capitalism and modernity reaches a critical
point in late capitalism and postmodernity, where principles of uncertainty and multiplicity
threaten to entrap and dissolve the subject. For what is X at the end of this film if
not contained quite literally in his cell, floating helplessly amidst innumerable
images and sensations?
Footnotes
1) Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. xi.
2) Stevens, Bradley. The Moral Vision. Godalming, Surrey, England: FAB Press, 2004. 274.
3) Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 4.