The Maholian Way - Part Four: Introductory Comments

Escape and reform. These are two options we face when we can’t get our lives to work for us and we don’t want to just accept this.

The escape option is on my mind because two films I have seen recently have explored it. This is an ongoing theme in Western culture: fleeing the humdrum dehumanising experience of ordinary life, the rat-race, the treadmill. One film, Revolutionary Road, opens with a young American couple, Frank and April, who have been drawn into such an existence in the 1950s, he as a functionary in a large, soulless city corporation, she as an isolated housewife in an equally soulless garden suburb. Frank’s plight is wonderfully evoked in one sequence of shots in which he and masses of other men, grey-suited and grim-faced, descend on the city like an army of worker ants. His destination is a glass cubicle identical to dozens of other glass cubicles, where he will spend his entire day before returning home, only to repeat this process day after day after day. April’s angst is clear as she stands at the window of her tidy but empty house gazing into the equally tidy and empty street. They see their chance to break out by moving to Paris with their two children, she to earn the money in some well-paying secretarial job with a multilateral organisation, he to have a chance to discover himself and work out his life’s purpose. But everyone around them – except for an acquaintance certified as insane – is totally nonplussed by their plans, and then April becomes pregnant again and Frank is lured into a new role in his company. As a result he abandons the Paris option and she goes into spiritual decline (before worse happens), and the editorial message is that in changing their plans they have sold out on their true destiny.

In Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona the same theme is played out, most sharply in the dilemma faced by Vicky, one of two young women visiting Barcelona, who must choose between life in Spain with a flamboyant abstract artist and life in New York with a boring lawyer husband. She too chooses the latter more conventional option, and the editorial voice again portrays this as a sellout – clearly expressed in her alienated, far-off look when she re-unites with her fiance and dines with him and his vacuous friends.

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