A few months ago I decided to take a break by watching The Beach, which someone had put on in the common area of the hostel I was staying at in Thailand. The choice was apropos: the movie is all about a young traveler Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio) who visits Thailand but spurns the commercialized experience and boorish, ugly-American behavior of the typical tourist.
Playing the familiar archetype of an idealistic young man discontented with the world and seeking the authentic, Richard rails against the "cancers" and "parasites" that spend their time in Thailand binge drinking out of large plastic cups and whooping and shouting obnoxiously. He does this in a self-important, monotone narrative that cinematic convention--from classic noir to Apocolypse Now to Terminator 2--has deemed the appropriate way of conveying a cynical protagonist's world-weary pronouncements about the human condition. Helpfully, in the world of The Beach, figurative ugliness and beauty are reinforced by the actual, physical kind: the good tourists, who are either basically decent or amiable eccentrics, are invariably good looking (Richard, his French friends, most of the inhabitants of the commune), whereas the bad tourists, who are seldom seen without a drink in hand, nonsensically shouting, are invariably plain or cartoonish (the surf dude interlopers, the various shots of revelers). At one point the beautiful DiCaprio looks with disgust at a fat, hairy tourist as a Thai masseuse forcefully massages his buttocks. An ugly American indeed! The audience is all but asked to shake its collective head at the shame of it.
Eventually Richard finds himself on a real adventure: mysterious map in hand he sets out to find a paradise, a rumored island with surpassingly beautiful beaches, ample supplies of marijuana, and--most important of all--no tourists. When he gets there he finds that in fact there is a community of like-minded travelers who have settled there and have, over the years, created a sort of hippy-commune for themselves, where they frolic and do hedonistic things during the day, along with a healthy dose of chores like hunting for fish, doing carpentry work around the commune, and light gardening. However, interestingly, Richard himself recognizes that this utopia, for all its alternative-lifestyle trappings, is in substance no different than the sort of mainstream tourism he despises. It was, in the end, "just a beach resort--for people who don't like beach resorts". And throughout his stay, he only refers to his life in the commune as one dedicated to "pleasure" and "fun"--there is no overriding pretense of anything more important going on, either religious/spiritual or ideologically (the place is not connected with environmentalism, for example). For Richard, we are led to believe that--while certainly an improvement over the obnoxious drunken hordes of Koh Phangan, and an interesting and unique enough experience in itself--it has not satisfied his search for the truly authentic and meaningful travel experience. Our protagonist, surprisingly shrewd, has retained his cynicism.
All of which makes what follows so baffling: for even though Richard has admitted the underlying frivolity of his supposed utopia, he goes ahead and jettisons all notions of morality and common decency in order to preserve it. It begins with his indifference to the painful cries of a member who is denied permission to leave the island to visit a dentist, and who has the tooth forcibly removed by the commune's carpenter; and accelerates quickly as he passively allows the murder of four innocent tourists, and soon after goes ahead and deliberately murders an injured man in cold blood by suffocating him. All of these actions, to one degree or another, are motivated by the desire to keep the secret of the commune from leaking--for the commune can only exist in isolation from the hideous tourist-industrial complex that has ravaged the rest of Thailand. His actions--cold blooded murder to preserve what he himself refers to as mere "fun"--render him a monstrous character who ought not to have a shred of the audience's sympathy; yet the movie continues to treat him as the same credible narrator who not long ago encouraged us to judgmentally leer at a tourist merely for receiving a massage in a tacky bathing suit.
This is where I have trouble with The Beach. At first it seems to treat the problem of tourism, of authenticity in travel, with a surprisingly subtle handling: we are hit over the head with the awfulness of the typical drunken partier only to have this complicated by the observation that even the antithesis of this--the alternative life-style hippy commune--is morally no better, both being exercises in vapid hedonism by Westerners who are incurious about and insulated from the authentic native culture they are purportedly there to explore. But Richard's reaction is not to reject the commune and continue his search for the authentic, perhaps by, I don't know, interacting with some locals--no, instead he abruptly leaves the commune and runs around like an idiot in the jungle for a while. What is he doing in there? It is difficult to say. Sometimes it feels like he has rejected all of society in a contented Robinson Crusoe sort of way; other times it feels as if he has reverted to some kind of Rambo-style Vietnam commando mode that the audience had not previously been informed about. Watch him slowly eat a bug! Watch him unblinkingly track his human prey! He even sets a rudimentary jungle booby-trap that seriously maims a druglord's henchman. It is, to me, a nonsensical mish-mash of various Vietnam/jungle tropes that don't connect with the first part of the story.
Eventually he wends his way back to the commune, where--after the aforementioned cold-blooded, first degree murder of a fellow member--he collects the original friends he arrived with and flees the imploding mini-world he had killed to defend, as the druglords run them out by force and their charismatic, murderous-psychopath leader is exposed as a murderous psychopath. Time passes, and we end on a winsome, sentimental note: back in civilization, presumably Bangkok, Richard is checking his email (with the improbable user name "Richard"--but we'll look past that), and has received a photo from his friend he had gone to the island with: it is a group photo of everyone in the commune, jumping and cheering in merriment. The movie insanely asks us to sigh along with Richard at those great times they once had, even though one of the pictured men was killed by a shark and another one was murdered by Richard himself. The movie shows no sign that it is aware of this startling juxtaposition; there is neither wink nor nod, at least that I can detect.
So for me The Beach begins promising but ends in frustration, seeming to fall into thematic incoherence just when it starts getting interesting. Interesting problems are posed, but not only is no remedy or resolution forthcoming, but the latter part of the movie doesn't even seem aware that the problems were posed in the first place. Lame.
2 comments:
Let me start off by saying…I've never seen this movie. So this is will be a reading solely based on your reading. The movie, in fact, sounds fascinating (Danny Boyle, right?). I remember when it came out; I remember not seeing it; I remember reading reviews that trashed it. What's interesting about this movie - as you describe it - is that it seems to run through nearly every conservative iteration of the relationship between utopia and community imaginable. First, the commune must of course be on an island, which is consistent with the original, Thomas Moore sense of utopia (a play on both "good place" and "no place"). Moore's Utopia was contemporary to his native England but remote and thus cut off from all those contracts, social stratifications, and the market economy, native to his homeland, that he abhorred (his Utopia banished money and private property). For Moore, and many many after him, the trappings of society interrupted and obfuscated a more genuine bond among people (kinship, for example). So in The Beach the new community must necessarily separate itself from the degraded society of the mainland (i.e. obnoxious, beer-swilling tourists).
That's all well and good, but utopia, in its post-Enlightenment forms, has shifted from spacial to temporal. Utopia is no longer some remote island out there somewhere, but is instead always in the future. It is the community to come that one must constantly struggle to achieve (that Richard just stumbled across this place should have been his first clue that something was amiss). Utopia of the future is a reaction to all the failed promises of Modernity, which, instead of cohesion, has only brought further and further fragmentation. In addition to looking forward, and contrary to Moore's Utopia, these modern utopias must always look to the past, to some always lost ideal community. This is what Richard finds on his island. But his community turns out to be an artificial one that reaches back, with misguided nostalgia, in search of "genuine forms" to emulate: a pre-industrial (i.e. pre-capitalistic) mode of production embodied in hand tools, paleo-diets and, I guess, "natural" dentistry. In other words, all the trappings of the invented past that is now the stuff of survivalist and DIY home improvement reality television.
Because The Beach was made in the nineties, it can't help but be concerned with issues of globalization. And isn't the tourist the figure of globalization par excellence? "Genuine" community, then, would necessarily be destroyed by Richard's very presence on the island in the first place. His being there - being the bo-bo tourist that he is -is symptomatic of a globalization that has already eradicated whatever was left of genuine community, the final nail in the coffin. However, if I understand your right, if the community he "discovers" is made up of bo-bo tourists like himself who have come across this island before him, then the film seems to already take into account this work of globalization on community. In other words, this isn't some native tribe that he's found. Maybe it's more like a response to Dances With Wolves.
Part II
The Beach is at its most cynical at the point where Richard passively observes and later engages in murder. Ostensibly, the greater good of the community is at stake here; it can only be defended by maintaining its secrecy, which is put at risk with the introduction of each new stranger that the community fails to accommodate. This moment is cynical for two reasons. The first concerns the community's fall into totalitarianism. This is actually an unfortunately typical move of anti-utopianism. What is so insidious about anti-utopianism is that it plays on anxieties and fears that Westerners - and Americans in particular - have about any kind of centralization, attempting to foreclose in advance any ideas about a radically different mode of living. It effectively promotes that kind of malaise and de-politicization that has become a hallmark of postmodern society. Of course, the very link between community and totalitarianism is tenuous indeed. As much as totalitarian regimes make appeals to senses of tradition and community (Blut und Boden) in order to rally their subjects, totalitarianism always annihilates community, fully subsuming it under the state. Rather than any kind of communal (read: non-capitalist) living leading directly to some sort of malevolent dictatorship, community is never really a part of totalitarianism in the first place.
The second reason the movie is so cynical at this point concerns commitment. It seems to me that the only real way to combat precisely the sort of disconnection and anomie that is brought on by a fragmented society, and felt by The Beach's dispassionate narrator, is political commitment. The problem with political commitment, however, is the decision of which politics to commit to. What politics is correct? At the time The Beach was made and released, cultural studies is reaching its apex in the academy and making its way further into the public sphere as cultural politics. This rise of particularism is a challenge to classic liberalism's older strivings for universal rights. What kind of claim could any universal ideal (say, 'natural' or even 'human' rights) have over the rights of a particular group? The only way to fight such cultural relativism is through participation in civil society, to simply commit to a politics. The Beach, knowing this, has Richard do just that. He commits to the community and murders on its behalf. So again, The Beach, makes an anti-utopian claim; it chooses to depict the horrible consequences of bad commitment. It de-politicizes via a promotion of the anxiety of decision and thus promotes postmodern political paralysis.
Finally, the most interesting moment seems to be Richard's longing look at the photo of the happy community of which he was once a member. Here the movie is at its smartest- depicting the way in which the very nostalgia for community is an ideology generated by the empty society that no longer has any connection to past traditions. It demonstrates the power of this ideology: Richard knows the community was actually murderously bad, that it was a failed community, and yet he longs anyway.
Calling the film incoherent is putting it nicely. It seems, rather, to be pretty conservative.
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