Holy Motors/Simulation

Holy Motors

Holy Motors is a film that draws immediate attention to the medium in which it is delivered. From the very opening scene, we are reminded that we are but an audience experiencing what we can from what we are about to be shown. The opening shot itself shows an audience, unwavering, watching an unseen film before them. This is perhaps the intention of the director, to keep us constantly aware that we are watching a film, that the characters and the action of the movie are really the simulated desires of the writer. This theme follows the film around almost all the way through. Our main character, Mr. Oscar, represents an actor within the film, playing different parts for the amusement of his audience. What he does is not up to him. He does what he is told, what the AUDIENCE wants. In one scene, Mr. Oscar asks if he has any jobs coming up that take place in a forest. "No," is his answer, much to his disappointment. He misses the forest, but no one wants to see the forest anymore. He is dragged around by the desires of those running the "simulation". The desire of this audience is once again evident later in the film, when is is tasked with playing a one eyed mad-man who runs through a cemetery eating flowers. He runs into an American film crew who are instantly infatuated with the man as a subject for their cameras. As they try to convince him to be weird on camera for them, he gives them their wish, and bites off the fingers of the camera girl, uses his tongue to smear blood on the armpit of their model, and then picks her up like a viking and carries her away. The director, of course, follows with his camera, thrilled. The director is using scenes like these to hold up a mirror to modern filmmaking. We get the films that we desire. We get the films that we deserve. When a man as strange as this shows up, we cannot look away. That is why all the characters in this simulation of Mr. Oscar actively indulge him. 

In this scene, a character is sort of given the red pill, and goes further down the rabbit hole. He is the only one to actively observe the audience. He has unlocked the truth behind the simulation.

The director uses this reflexivity to repeatedly invest us into a scene before breaking the illusion entirely. When Mr. Oscar is tasked with portraying a motion capture martial artist, he does so flawlessly. We, as the audience, are drawn in and hooked by the scene as truth. This time, the immersion is broken by the edits. After we see what the motion capture has been made to create, we are given a jarring smash cut back to the limo on the street. "Oh," says the audience. "Right, that was all just a simulation." The director is using cuts like these to slap us back into "reality". These kind of things happen constantly throughout Holy Motors. By drawing us in and constantly cutting the cord, the director is able to make us hyperaware throughout the duration of our viewing. Carax is using these strategies to hold up a mirror to the true motivators of our storytelling. Even when the film seems to go straight, and we think that it is going to start to see the real character of Mr. Oscar (in the scene where he meets the man in the limo. Mr. Oscar even mentions the word cameras, making us think we finally broken the cycle of the simulated), we are immediately bungeed back and reminded that he is always playing a part when he leaves the limo and begins his next act. 

This is how the director constantly reminds us of our medium. It is a classic bait and switch. It is a conditioning of recognizing the fabricated. What we are given, in these simulated representations of life, is always what we want to see. Carax wants to make sure we are, at the least, aware of this. 

Simulation

Once I was able to comprehend Baudrillard's style of writing, it was actually pretty fascinating. He sees simulation, justifiably, as a constant resurrection and murder of truth, in a way. Human beings are constantly drawn to try to create artificial representations of what we believe is truth, and we are willing to defend those simulations passionately, and with conviction in their truth. The images eventually become more powerful than their creator. 

This is most evident, perhaps, in iconoclasm, most notably in religion. For centuries, religions, including Islam and Christianity have struggled with iconoclasm, when their followers begin to find more faith in the images representing their gods, and less with the idea of the gods themselves. The iconoclasts saw this idol worship coming, the idea that one day images representing "reality" would becoming the accepted idea OF reality. Or perhaps they simply feared that if an idol was discovered as a fabricated god, that others might begin to see the idea of god himself as such. Just like people thinking that television is realty, people thought that their idols were the gods themselves. 

The most relatable of these, perhaps, is in his example of Disneyland. Disneyland is an isolated little place in Anaheim. It stands to be a cornered off little plot of land that can perfectly encapsulate what culture, and specifically, child culture is truly like. We cling to this simulation as truth. Disneyland sees itself as a miniature America, and we desperately want this simulation to be reality, evidenced by the lines and the crowds. We have a desperate desire to preserve and project what we see as objective truths, for fear of losing them forever, but in doing so we mutilate it, and turn it into something that it never was. It is sort of a fear of mortality, how we want to preserve, we want to document. However, the truth about truth is that something resurrected and observed is never honest.  

This is a good segue into mummification. As Baudrillard states, Walt Disney awaits his resurrection through cytogenesis, much like the mummified bodies of old (although if Baudrillard had done a little research he would have found this to be an urban myth, perhaps Walt is another victim of misrepresented simulation?). Humans have a desire to dig up old mummies and study them, breaking what was supposed to be their eternal slumber in a desperate need to observe and document. We are never satisfied with living a truth covered. While the old pharos sought to immortalize themselves through embalming, we sought to immortalize them through documentation and study.  

When science begins to poke its nose in things, certain aspects of the things that it wants to study become inherently not genuine. The observed can never truly represent the unobserved. Ethnology is a victim to the same concept that Baudrillard brought up about the man who fakes illness. When all that you rely on for your information is the fact that your subject's symptoms are true, you start climbing a ladder where every step is based on another falsehood. Assumptions become based on assumptions because the fact remains that when we can't find an unshakable truth, we will create one.