All of the Plans Are Meaningless

Amerikan Rüyası diye bir şey var mı? Gelecek hakkındaki planlar en azından birer anlam taşır mı? Hepimiz eninde sonunda birer varoluşçu muyuz? Belki henüz bunun farkında değiliz. Max ve Francis de değildi. Ama er ya da geç anladılar. Kabul edelim. Hayatlarımız anlamsızlık çukurunun derinliklerinde öylece duruyor. Kabul edelim ki elimizden hiçbir şey gelmeyecek!

Ah bir de unutmadan:
Max Millan: The god damn crows are scared.
Lion: No, crows are laughin'.
Max Millan: Nah, that's bullshit...
Lion: That's right, the crows are laughin'. Look, the farmer puts out a scarecrow, right, with a funny hat on it, got a funny face. The crows fly by, they see that, it strikes 'em funny, makes 'em laugh.

Scarecrow is one of the road movies that contain most elements of this genre. With two male characters, Max and Francis, it seems more like a buddy film. Similar to other buddy films, the two main characters of the film have opposite personalities and different sights of life. At the same time, they are complementary for each other. However, beside all of these obvious things, the film suggests that their lives are completely pointless. The characters don’t realize this in the movie at first but throughout the film they gradually find out some clues that points to the meaningless of their lives.

Max’s character is more pessimistic. He is more aggressive and because of this feature he was in prison. He’d like to fight in order to solve problems in his daily life. He never trust people and has no friends. He only has a plan for his own business and in order to keep this plan alive he tries every single way. He is on the road because he saved his money in a bank, in Pittsburgh and wants to get the whole money to found a car wash job. He doesn’t have children or wife, in other words he has no family which depends on him. On the other hand, Francis is just opposite of Max. He is optimistic and very funny person in comparison with Max. He believes in making people laugh and this is like his religion. He has a son and wife but he does not have a regular family relationships. He leaved them from their home five years ago, and his only purpose is to send them his all money. The reason why he is on the road is to give a present to his child back home. Max’s and Francis’ opposite characters also are obvious in their physical appearance. Max is a very big and tall man whereas Francis is short and skinny.

Those first impressions are very important for us because we start to see them in their characters and try to understand them in these measurements. While their journey, we see them trying to teach each other their own philosophy of life. In the hotel scene, Francis tries to convince Max that scarecrows do not make crows scared but make them laugh. According to Francis scarecrows have funny faces and hats then these make crows laugh. However, Max sees this picture from the other side. Max thinks that they are just scary for crows. This is one of the most important scenes in the film because it says a lot. We believe in Francis and see the changing of Max’s character on this way throughout the movie. Max believes in Francis too, but he recognizes this at near the end of the movie.

When they get in jail, Francis experienced an important situation that makes him believe in Max’s sight of world. He -probably- got raped and beaten. This experience tears apart him from his religion, making people laugh. After they get out of the prison, in the bar scene, when Max is about to fight, Francis gets mad at him and shows his anger. Max suddenly realizes that the only person he trusts is trying to keep him safe by being angry. Max starts to make laugh all people in the bar, plays a show. In this scene one of turning points comes true. Camera makes a close-up to Francis and we see him not laughing. This scene is remarkable because we see both Max and Francis changed. Making people laugh is no more funny for Francis but Max has some hopes now.

At the end of the film, when Francis hears very bad news from his ex-wife and he loses everything he had. First he lost the ability to make people funny and now he loses his child which is the last straw. He gives it another shot to make children on the public square. But he can’t make it. At this point, he realizes that his life is pointless. After Max takes him to the hospital, Max also realizes that he has nobody but Francis. Max is now ready to spend his all money which is his all life, without thinking. All of his money that he saved for car wash job now seems meaningless and insignificant for him. From now on, Max has no plan for planning his life and has nobody to keep his life meaningful.

Silence of God

Theo Angelopoulos'un "Silence" üçlemesinin son filmi olan Landscape in the Mist için Tanrı metaforu üzerinden yaptığım okuma:

*Metnin ingilizce olmasının sebebi "Avrupa Sineması" dersimin ödevi olmasından kaynaklanıyor.

Silence of God

Landscape in the Mist is the last film of Theo Angelopoulos’s “Trilogy of silence”. The film is about a story of two children who start a journey to find their father. In fact, even from this sentence, we easily recognize the figure of the father is the primary metaphor for the entity of God. There are several figures that remind us and the characters that God’s in silence. He only reminds himself but never intervenes the events that the children struggle with.

One of the figures, and the most obvious one, is the tree. The tree appears at the end of the film. Orestes, the actor who helps the children, finds an empty film strip on the floor in one of the scenes. He says that he saw a tree on the strip and he tries to show it to the children. But they can’t see the tree. Actually, this is the first appearance of God in the film. This tree figure reminds us the “Tree of Life”. Tree of Life is the metaphor for the livelihood of the spirit, in mythology. It means eternity in most mythologies and it is the way to God. “If you find the Tree of Life, you find the God.” In this scene, children can’t see the tree because they have some more jobs to do and some more distances to cover. Therefore this is not the right time to find the father.

Another figure that represents the metaphor of God is the giant hand sculpture. God reminds himself again by appearing from the sea which is the ultimate mother of the mankind in mythology. The first finger of the sculpture is torn apart. The first finger points something and gives orders and directions. This sculpture makes the children desperate because he says that he couldn’t give the directions. Therefore they have to find out their directions and the right way. In this scene, sculpture is removed from them to the sky by the helicopter of the army. This scene basically shows how miserable the human in the new world that is governed by the state and the technology which is projected to us as a monster in the whole film. Angelopoulos brings back that new world which is governed by this monster technology in the scene that a man with a car trails along a horse in the street. The children watch the horse dying. And this is another figure that destroys our hopes about the God’s power on human beings. The horse is the figure of the holly power of God. In the primitive ages, the horse is the symbol of power. However in the new world human with the power of the technology kills the horse, the power of God. Therefore we completely believe that God’s in silence now.

One of the most tangible figures is the third character, Orestes that represents the silence of God. Orestes is an actor in a theatre group. He is also despised by the new world just like another artist, violinist, in the film. Orestes is a mentor to the children on their journey to find their father. Again in mythology, Agamemnon’s and Klytemnestra’s son Orestes kills his mother because she had an affair with someone. Klytemnestra also killed her husband Agamemnon. I believe that the name of the character is not a coincidence in the film because Orestes loves his father and he is the one who guides the children which loves their father more than their mother. However, his guidance is not forever because he is one of the losers of the new world and God again does not solve this problem for the children because he is in silence for them.

In the first part of the film, we listen to some monologues as the letters that are supposed to be sent to their father but never be sent. We know that their father doesn’t even exist. But Angelopoulos surprises us at the end of the film. He shows the tree of life from the mist and says that the children actually find their ultimate father and their letters are sent now.