Apolitical Alienation in 'The Passenger'

Recently re-released in North America and Europe, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 film 'The Passenger' (also known as 'Professione: Reporter') represents a crystallization of the subjectivist themes and attitudes that characterize much of his previous work. Instead of portraying the alienation of the times dialectically, against the background of social, economic and political interconnections, the film presented a static depiction of stylized despair - angst packaged for popular consumption. At another time in history such an approach could have been easily dismissed, but at the time of its release the treatment of alienation as a purely subjective phenomenon carried an extraordinary credibility with contemporary film audiences.

The narrative begins with David Locke (played by Jack Nicholson), a British correspondent, traveling by jeep through the streets of an oppressively hot, North African village. Locke appears bleached out, confused and in search of something or someone. He tries to make contact with the natives, but they respond indignantly either by walking away from him or gesturing for a cigarette and then refusing to talk. His frustration appears to be mounting when he mysteriously finds an English-speaking guide who agrees to lead him to a clandestine group of guerrillas. But the guide is soon frightened off by a passing patrol of soldiers and Locke disconcertedly returns to the jeep alone. The jeep gets stuck in the desert sand; Locke gets out and kicks the tires and hollers what appears to be his first coherent insight into his thoughts and feelings, 'All right, I don't care!'

 

The motif of Locke's alienation and personal suffering slowly begins to come into focus, but not before he dejectedly wanders back to his hotel and finds that a recent acquaintance, David Robertson, has died of a heart attack in his bed. Locke seizes the moment and begins an act of self-transformation. He decides to kill himself metaphorically by assuming David Robertson's identity. Locke switches the pictures of their respective passports and puts on Robertson's clothes. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, David Locke is deceased. Using Robertson's air ticket, which appears to be made out for most of the major capitals of Europe, and a date book filled with mysterious appointments, Locke begins a journey that is as whimsical as the fatalism that seems to have motivated it. He arrives in London first to check out a locker with a key he had discovered among Robertson's possessions. He finds a briefcase filled with diagrams of guns, but has no clue as to their meaning. Soon thereafter, Locke is approached by two men who think he is Robertson; they reveal themselves as agents of a guerrilla force fighting somewhere in North Africa. Locke hands the gun diagrams over to them, finding himself in the role of a political gunrunner inadvertently committed to the cause of national liberation.

Locke then flies from London to Munich to Barcelona in an effort to keep up with Robertson's 'appointments.' It is in Barcelona where he coincidentally meets The Girl (played by Maria Schneider). We learn little about her except that she is a student of architecture who suddenly abandons whatever plans she has in order to join Locke. He persuades her to help him escape from his former wife and director-friend who frantically searching Barcelona for 'Robertson' because they believe he was the last person to have seen David Locke alive. The Girl complies readily, neither protesting nor explaining her decision.

They travel through Spain together to Robertson's various 'appointed' destinations, only to find that time after time there's no one to meet them. Locke knows that everyone is catching up with him - his wife, his director, the police and the past identity from which he is trying to escape. He keeps on, resigning himself to his ill-fated future while doing nothing to alter the predictable course of upcoming events. Locke and The Girl finally end up in a small, dismal, hotel; the fantasy seems to have played itself out. He tells The Girl to leave him, and in her absence he is killed by agents of the established colonial government that David Robertson had opposed by shipping guns to the local guerrillas. The Girl returns long enough to identify the body of David Robertson. Locke's former wife appears on the scene only to claim that she has never seen the man before. Thus, David Locke dies as meaninglessly as he lived, and the film ends without any sort of hope that could be translated into political terms.

Antonioni's refusal or inability to portray anxiety and insecurity as products of history leads him throughout the film to utilize devices that clearly fail to legitimize alienation as part of the human condition. He uses flashbacks, for instance, in order to lend some depth to the personality and character of David Locke. While the flashbacks do lend coherency to the initially disjointed images of the film,they never provide us with adequate insight into the psycho-social dynamics behind Locke's life or the milieu of which he is a product. They serve as little more than simplified connections that allow us to follow the story.

The dialogue throughout the film is banalized by the weight of the existential malady it so strongly tries to project. At one point in a hotel room, for instance, Locke reveals to The Girl the depth of his angst through a story he tells about a blind man. The blind man, it seems, regained his sight at the age of forty, only to see how poor and filthy the world actually was. When he had been blind, he had been able to cross the road with a stick, now that he had his sight, he was afraid to leave his house. He finally killed himself. In another scene, Locke is sitting in a Barcelona park where he meets an old man. The old man looks at the children who are playing nearby and tells Locke that the ninos are so sad because everything for them will simply be a replay of history, and isn't it unfortunate that they will have to grow up and relive the oft-repeated tragedies of the past. Dialogue of this sort strains too hard to fit comfortably within the contours of the film's philosophical message and ends up hollow and barren of any concreteness, reduced to nothing more than alienating and alienated verbiage.

The characterizations follow suit. Although some critics have suggested that Locke is a man who years to walk amidst the risks and dangers of life, such a suggestion presupposes a quest to live, regardless of how that quest may translate itself. There is nothing Locke's character to indicate that for him living is anything more than what Sartre called 'a senseless passion.' Lock appears to be the paradigm of a single, undiluted message - make an end with things as they are, to end it quickly, and in this case to wait for the moment of final release, the liberating act of uncontested death. As The Girl, Schneider seems miscast, projecting little or no feeling at all for the part. The character's devotion to Locke appears fatuous and unrealistic and so she fails to provide any sort of ideological or explanatory counterweight to Locke's development. While she does query Locke about his immediate circumstances, she never attempts to question the ethical, political or philosophical basis of his action. She doesn't appear to care either.

Whatever element of revolt is present in the chief characters is vitiated by formless despair and evasive, non-militant individualism. Locke and The Girl are one-dimensional participants on the world stage. Their horizons are limited by their immersion in the moment, a moment divorced from both history and authentic rebellion. This rebellion remains a purely private affair and therefore it exists innocuously in the face of brutalizing social reality - it has no lasting consequences. There is never the choices they make, or whether they have attempted to understand the nature of the alternatives with which they were faced - they seem empty of any content.

Nevertheless, some critics have claimed that there is an element of rebellion in the film. They are right, but it is more poetic than practical. Herbert Marcuse rightly commented on the nature of such 'rebellion' - 'It is divorced from reality inasmuch as it creates a world of beautiful illusion, of poetic justice, of artistic harmony and order which reconciles the irreconcilable, justifies the unjustifiable.' In other words, it doesn't contain the truly negating power of political art. Thus, although throughout 'The Passenger' one encounters a strategy of defeatism and failure, most of the important scenes are presented against stunning visual imagery and color. Against the despair of David Locke we have incredibly beautiful shots of the desert; against the hollowness of personal resignation in the face of a world waiting to be transformed we have the colorful street life of Barcelona and the stark, alabaster villages of North Africa. The sense of alienation as a primary force in the film blends into a brilliant montage of color, imagery and style. Style, in successfully subordinating the message of 'eternalized despair' to its own laws of beauty.

But in the end it is Antonioni's perspective on alienation that rakes across the viewer's intellectual and political sensibilities. this perspective determines in the final analysis the narration, distinguishes the important from the trivial, and gives shape to both the episodic and the superficial aspects of the film. All this adds up to a film narrative that is far from new - people are alone facing the abyss that overwhelms their desire to live. Such a theme may seem shopworn to some, but the fact is that people are in trouble, and the trouble is ominous; such a theme should be seen as neither shocking nor foolish. But the real questions that become important in such a film are the subordinate ones - How is their trouble to be explained and described? What should people do about it? These are the questions that Antonioni not only fails to answer properly, but he falls back upon a sloppy existentialism that weds people to the politics of despair.

To simply depict the alienation of the contemporary West, without explaining its social and historical roots, represents a political methodology that seems to fly in the face of Antonioni's recognition of the need for change. He utterly fails to go beyond the mere apprehension or depiction of angst. Instead of placing it critically in the system of relationships  within which it exists, he isolates it and reduces it to an ontological fact. By defining his characters as ahistorical and asocial, Antonioni has deprived them of their right to participate in their own history. David Locke and The Girl live in a social and political vacuum punctuated only by the immediacy of the moment. Authentic engagement in 'The Passenger' is never portrayed. the film is filled with the motif of flight - flight from family, a society, and a general emptiness which is felt to be catastrophic. Between the personalized anguish and boredom, we are given glimpses of the catastrophes of our times - guerrilla war, bloodshed, torture, fear and cruelty. The world appears to be dark, and for Antonioni's characters there seems to be only one solution - to retreat into one's own psychic wilderness.

Antonioni's 'The Passenger' shares a common theme with the works of Camus, Beckett and the young Sartre, who also set out to divorce man from society and to portray him as the mysterious agent of 'timeless despair.' Such a position clearly reveals Antonioni's political roots and places him squarely in the existential camp. People are certainly more than the mere mask of their social character, but the tendency to turn them into formless actors in a play of cosmic mysteries is to blot out their social and individual identities while leading them into a world of nothingness. Such a world has never existed, except in the minds of those who erect their fortunes on the foundations of an oppressive status quo.

There is one scene in 'The Passenger' in which the 'real' Locke is on assignment, interviewing a Western-educated, African witch doctor. Locke queries the man with a series of humiliating questions until the witch doctor points out to Locke that his questions expose a great deal more about himself than any answers might expose about the witch doctor. Antonioni's film may be judged the same way. If we are to hold Antonioni responsible for making films about his time, then it follows that he cannot be exempt from political judgment concerning the consequences of his work. Antonioni has not only failed in this film to retrieve people from the 'culture of silence,' he has also reneged on his ethical responsibilities be perpetuating the mystification of an oppressive order. The themes of the 'The Passenger' are quite clear - life is absurd, we are all victims, communication is worthless, everyone is alone, etc. In a necrophilic manner, Antonioni has transformed isolation, despair and alienation into eternal and incontrovertible verities.

Man is a social being and represents more than the eternal cycle of birth, pain, anguish and death. Antonioni's rejection of man's ability to transcend the limitations of his time is the bulwark of political ignorance, not progressive change. Herein lies the failure of both Antonioni and 'The Passenger.'

[This is a slightly edited version of an essay written by Henry Giroux that was originally published in the journal Cineaste, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 1975, pp. 37-39. Giroux has subsequently written widely on media and education, including a 2001 book on Disney entitled The Mouse That Roared, and he has explored similar themes of alienation in a recent book on Youth in a Suspect Society (2009).]