dreamdead
12-10-2007, 01:53 PM
Words are by dreamdead/Paul Petrovic
http://myfilm.com/blogimage/pp.bmp
“You don't wanna hear my message”:
Counteracting a Monologic Language in Watkins’ Punishment Park
Peter Watkins’ docudrama Punishment Park (1971) is a profound indictment on America’s egregious mishandling of social liberties on the home front as opposition to the Vietnam War escalates. In Watkins’ film, public dissidence prompts the government to institute a provisional security act that detains nonconformists. These individuals are then prosecuted under a tribunal and given the choice of either accepting flagrant long-term sentences or partaking in a three-day punishment park, wherein they will receive their liberty if they reach an American flag before police round them up. While the park is ostensibly a vehicle for preserving order, such a provision soon disavows the need for evidence and oppositions to the national orthodoxy are eliminated by an invincible police force if they fail to fall in line with the dominant, government-approved ideology. All the while, a BBC television crew documents these ordeals and engages in interviews with the participants. Punishment Park critiques the repressive political regime that Watkins sees germinating in the late 1960s, but the film also criticizes the media, as they too are often complicit in silencing opposition. Watkins analyzes how institutions of power dominate the control and production of language, and enacts Mikhail Bahktin’s assertion of how a prosecutor-dissenter dialectic is closed down by the arrant monologic discourse assumed, in this case, by both parties. Indeed, “both sides hurl clichéd political rhetoric at each other” (Gomez 118). Most radically, though, Watkins critiques such productions of power when the BBC reporter finally speaks out against the American government that he is documenting, therein subversively reclaiming the willingness to let individuals, and not institutions, control the production of language. Therefore, Watkins emphasizes a counter-language constituted through the cinematic lens, one which can transcend the limitations of a monologic, borderline fascist, discourse and engender true revolution.
Watkins entrusts the cinematic lens with the need to chronicle and bear witness to the neglect and abuse of the dissidents. Because of the polarizing attitudes between the tribunal and the dissidents, any interrogation is regulated through those who possess the dominant power, and this rhetorical exclusion thus prohibits any true empathy from occurring between the two factions. Consequently, the tribunals are understood as staged acts; their air of objectivity is seen as performative, and ultimately facile and dismissive. They adopt a monologic ideology, for, as Bakhtin argues, “[m]onologue pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the represented world and represented persons” (293). Their defiance of the dissidents allows them to adopt a wholly circumscribed perspective which delimits other viewpoints, banishing oppositionality and localizing all sensibility within the monologue. As such, they generate a stable, fixed attitude that can only be counteracted by the BBC reporter and his “dilemma of the journalist (artist) as man-in-the-middle” (Weiner 52). The camera lens becomes the preeminent counter-language which will, as one dissident pleas, “take pictures of this,” and thereby articulate the damage and political injustice of the tribunals.
In the beginning of the film, though, the BBC reporter is impartial to the tribunal, never offering agency to his beliefs or transgressing against the dominant ideology. It is only after one of the dissidents, Jay Kaufman (Carmen Argenziano), articulates his ideas that the reporter begins to question the principles of the administration and engages in the dissenting opinion. Kaufman explains that “War is immoral. Poverty is immoral. Racism is immoral. Police brutality is immoral. […] This country represents all these things.” Though the BBC reporter is silent here, the self-righteous remonstration that the tribunal affects in order to chide Kaufman reinforces the essential truth of their depravity. Shortly thereafter, another dissident, Nancy Smith (Katherine Quittner), cries out, “How many children have entered these tribunals?” Being cognizant of the ineffectuality behind their defense, these two voices interrogate the imbalance of governmental power, and so both make explicit the idea that the tribunal exists to silence rather than to enter into a dialogue. Similarly, their conviction penetrates the ideological bubble of the BBC reporter, awakening him to the mismanagement of the repressive ultimate authority that the tribunal employs.
Shortly thereafter the BBC reporter is traveling with one of the other dissident groups already being hunted in the punishment park, and he consciously enters into a dialogue with one of them. Off-camera, he asks one of the dissidents, “How would you try to remedy the situation in America?” The answer is telling, since the dissident asserts that “I don’t think it can be done.” Though off-camera, the reporter’s question suggests a growing desire to understand, to engage in true dialogue. The BBC reporter thereby opens up the represented individuals in the group and circulates their counterarguments rather than continuously confining them and shutting them down. That is to say, he and his accompanying camera offer liberation from the monolithic prejudice that weighs on the dissidents inside the tribunal. Instead of the tribunal politics, where one of the dissidents shrewdly notes, “you don’t wanna hear my message,” the BBC reporter begins to believe in the counter-message. The answer to remedying the situation, then, exists in Watkins’ meta-narrative; that is, in his indictment of the media since it is the media that must assume agency and report on these governmental transgressions.
For their part, the tribunal remains oblivious to any transformative agency now inherent to the medium in which they are being recorded and (re)presented. Adopting their characteristic monologic attitude, one of the tribunal members, Paul Reynolds (Norman Sinclair), feigns an interest in a true dialogue when he tells the reporter, “We give them the chance to have a fair say, but they just don’t seem to appreciate it.” The tribunal’s offer of agency to the dissidents is, however, denied precisely because the offering is always wrapped up in a controlling environment. The dissidents face a fundamental lack toward any “fair say” because their location within the tribunal itself denies dialogue due to the inherent power relations that privilege the tribunal’s agency. As Mikhail Bakhtin further writes on the monologic condition, the other person—the person outside of the monologue—always “remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. No response is expected from it that could change everything in the world of my consciousness” (293). In other words, the tribunal members disassociates the dissidents from any actual ontology vis-*-vis their projection of infallible innocence. Instead, the tribunal fashion the dissidents as little more than objects, which the camera catches and which thereby allows the BBC reporter the agency to make the tribunal look more and more incredulous in their assertions of fairness.
While the tribunal members are unconscious of how the camera disparages them, the police who are in pursuit of the dissidents are not as oblivious. They are aware of a shifting of the camera’s consciousness, and they are equally attentive to the fact that the BBC reporter possesses an ideology which is slowly becoming apathetic to their own ideology. As such, critic Joseph A. Gomez argues that the police “look into the lens with expressions of distrust, but near the end this distrust turns to hostility” (112). These initial suspicions reveal how tenuous the dominant ideology’s hold on power can be if mass media transgresses and calls into question that dominant production of language. The police are hesitant around the documentary crew even as they assume cautious stances of authority, but there is an anxiety about them now that supercedes that early invincibility. There is an understanding that the camera and the BBC reporter have agency that could be used to topple the tribunal’s reign.
http://myfilm.com/blogimage/pp.bmp
“You don't wanna hear my message”:
Counteracting a Monologic Language in Watkins’ Punishment Park
Peter Watkins’ docudrama Punishment Park (1971) is a profound indictment on America’s egregious mishandling of social liberties on the home front as opposition to the Vietnam War escalates. In Watkins’ film, public dissidence prompts the government to institute a provisional security act that detains nonconformists. These individuals are then prosecuted under a tribunal and given the choice of either accepting flagrant long-term sentences or partaking in a three-day punishment park, wherein they will receive their liberty if they reach an American flag before police round them up. While the park is ostensibly a vehicle for preserving order, such a provision soon disavows the need for evidence and oppositions to the national orthodoxy are eliminated by an invincible police force if they fail to fall in line with the dominant, government-approved ideology. All the while, a BBC television crew documents these ordeals and engages in interviews with the participants. Punishment Park critiques the repressive political regime that Watkins sees germinating in the late 1960s, but the film also criticizes the media, as they too are often complicit in silencing opposition. Watkins analyzes how institutions of power dominate the control and production of language, and enacts Mikhail Bahktin’s assertion of how a prosecutor-dissenter dialectic is closed down by the arrant monologic discourse assumed, in this case, by both parties. Indeed, “both sides hurl clichéd political rhetoric at each other” (Gomez 118). Most radically, though, Watkins critiques such productions of power when the BBC reporter finally speaks out against the American government that he is documenting, therein subversively reclaiming the willingness to let individuals, and not institutions, control the production of language. Therefore, Watkins emphasizes a counter-language constituted through the cinematic lens, one which can transcend the limitations of a monologic, borderline fascist, discourse and engender true revolution.
Watkins entrusts the cinematic lens with the need to chronicle and bear witness to the neglect and abuse of the dissidents. Because of the polarizing attitudes between the tribunal and the dissidents, any interrogation is regulated through those who possess the dominant power, and this rhetorical exclusion thus prohibits any true empathy from occurring between the two factions. Consequently, the tribunals are understood as staged acts; their air of objectivity is seen as performative, and ultimately facile and dismissive. They adopt a monologic ideology, for, as Bakhtin argues, “[m]onologue pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the represented world and represented persons” (293). Their defiance of the dissidents allows them to adopt a wholly circumscribed perspective which delimits other viewpoints, banishing oppositionality and localizing all sensibility within the monologue. As such, they generate a stable, fixed attitude that can only be counteracted by the BBC reporter and his “dilemma of the journalist (artist) as man-in-the-middle” (Weiner 52). The camera lens becomes the preeminent counter-language which will, as one dissident pleas, “take pictures of this,” and thereby articulate the damage and political injustice of the tribunals.
In the beginning of the film, though, the BBC reporter is impartial to the tribunal, never offering agency to his beliefs or transgressing against the dominant ideology. It is only after one of the dissidents, Jay Kaufman (Carmen Argenziano), articulates his ideas that the reporter begins to question the principles of the administration and engages in the dissenting opinion. Kaufman explains that “War is immoral. Poverty is immoral. Racism is immoral. Police brutality is immoral. […] This country represents all these things.” Though the BBC reporter is silent here, the self-righteous remonstration that the tribunal affects in order to chide Kaufman reinforces the essential truth of their depravity. Shortly thereafter, another dissident, Nancy Smith (Katherine Quittner), cries out, “How many children have entered these tribunals?” Being cognizant of the ineffectuality behind their defense, these two voices interrogate the imbalance of governmental power, and so both make explicit the idea that the tribunal exists to silence rather than to enter into a dialogue. Similarly, their conviction penetrates the ideological bubble of the BBC reporter, awakening him to the mismanagement of the repressive ultimate authority that the tribunal employs.
Shortly thereafter the BBC reporter is traveling with one of the other dissident groups already being hunted in the punishment park, and he consciously enters into a dialogue with one of them. Off-camera, he asks one of the dissidents, “How would you try to remedy the situation in America?” The answer is telling, since the dissident asserts that “I don’t think it can be done.” Though off-camera, the reporter’s question suggests a growing desire to understand, to engage in true dialogue. The BBC reporter thereby opens up the represented individuals in the group and circulates their counterarguments rather than continuously confining them and shutting them down. That is to say, he and his accompanying camera offer liberation from the monolithic prejudice that weighs on the dissidents inside the tribunal. Instead of the tribunal politics, where one of the dissidents shrewdly notes, “you don’t wanna hear my message,” the BBC reporter begins to believe in the counter-message. The answer to remedying the situation, then, exists in Watkins’ meta-narrative; that is, in his indictment of the media since it is the media that must assume agency and report on these governmental transgressions.
For their part, the tribunal remains oblivious to any transformative agency now inherent to the medium in which they are being recorded and (re)presented. Adopting their characteristic monologic attitude, one of the tribunal members, Paul Reynolds (Norman Sinclair), feigns an interest in a true dialogue when he tells the reporter, “We give them the chance to have a fair say, but they just don’t seem to appreciate it.” The tribunal’s offer of agency to the dissidents is, however, denied precisely because the offering is always wrapped up in a controlling environment. The dissidents face a fundamental lack toward any “fair say” because their location within the tribunal itself denies dialogue due to the inherent power relations that privilege the tribunal’s agency. As Mikhail Bakhtin further writes on the monologic condition, the other person—the person outside of the monologue—always “remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. No response is expected from it that could change everything in the world of my consciousness” (293). In other words, the tribunal members disassociates the dissidents from any actual ontology vis-*-vis their projection of infallible innocence. Instead, the tribunal fashion the dissidents as little more than objects, which the camera catches and which thereby allows the BBC reporter the agency to make the tribunal look more and more incredulous in their assertions of fairness.
While the tribunal members are unconscious of how the camera disparages them, the police who are in pursuit of the dissidents are not as oblivious. They are aware of a shifting of the camera’s consciousness, and they are equally attentive to the fact that the BBC reporter possesses an ideology which is slowly becoming apathetic to their own ideology. As such, critic Joseph A. Gomez argues that the police “look into the lens with expressions of distrust, but near the end this distrust turns to hostility” (112). These initial suspicions reveal how tenuous the dominant ideology’s hold on power can be if mass media transgresses and calls into question that dominant production of language. The police are hesitant around the documentary crew even as they assume cautious stances of authority, but there is an anxiety about them now that supercedes that early invincibility. There is an understanding that the camera and the BBC reporter have agency that could be used to topple the tribunal’s reign.