SCHIZOPOLIS
D: Steven Soderbergh
Wow, I'm honestly at a loss as to how to do this. For a decade now, this has been one of my very favorite movies. The reasons I first embraced it are typical, in some ways: it's well shot, the plot is idiosyncratic, the narrative devices are clever, the soundtrack and score are great, and it's funny as hell. However, the reason the movie has remained so firmly stuck in my brain--and that really is the way to describe what this movie does to you: it sticks in your brain--has taken much longer to discern.
...but I think I'm getting closer.
There are two key scenes in the film. The first is a brief scene late in the third act, when Attractive Woman #2--betrayed, frustrated, and lost in her own life--seizes an opportunity to perform the same "body swap" Soderbergh's Munson takes part in earlier in the film. Like Munson, Attractive Woman #2 stumbles on a lookalike (played, of course, by the same actress) whose life--at first glance--seems infinitely more appealing. In this case, her double is sitting across from her in a coffee shop reading a magazine. Her demeanor and body language are relaxed, and she seems pleasantly distracted by her reading. She is also wearing something new: whereas Attractive Woman #2 (AW2 from now on) and her lookalike, Munson's wife, have spent the entire movie in a plain cotton dress pulled over a t-shirt, this woman is dressed in a way that is both casual and mature. Read: she does not have a husband or children. Seeing her opportunity, AW2 closes here eyes and, through the magic of editing and shifting sound cues, she opens them as her alternate self: holding the same cup of coffee in her hand and glancing over the same magazine. Instantly, she is at peace: her husband is gone, her parental responsibilities are relieved, and she is free. She breathes a sigh of relief--and as she exhales, Soderbergh takes the seat across from her. Although much better dressed, she has done it for the third time: she has ended up in a romantic relationship with a man who we immediately know will be self-involved, panicky, easily threatened and numb. Her eyes widen slightly and the weight of her situation settles softly in them. Soderbergh's unnamed third character begins to speak: his voice is dubbed in French. We see AW2 (or is it AW3?) look him over and say quietly, "I want to get out of here." Like Pavlov's dog, we have been trained how to read this line, and Soderbergh's off-camera tone of voice suggests he is reading her the same way. But then she responds: "No--back to your room." The scene cuts and we open in, presumably, his hotel room. She is lying on the couch with her head in his lap as he strokes her hair. She speaks: "I could just lie here forever and do nothing but this." This, we must be clear, is not starting over. But it is moving on. In this way, Attractive Woman #2--whose very name attempts to marginalize and mute her--gets the last laugh: in a movie which cycles three times back through its own beginning, she has found independent--if tragic--agency.
The second key scene comes near the very end of the film, when the exterminator (and lady's man) Elmo Oxygen is being interrogated by two detectives. The detectives are questioning him about his attempt to assassinate the film's keynote speaker, T. Azimuth Schwitters. Their questions are obvious and--if they think they are talking to a madman--useless: why did you do it? Were you angry with Mr. Schwitters? Had Mr. Schwitters wronged you in some way? Where did you get the gun? Oxygen replies in his own language (and, incidentally, the only successful language in the film): he calls them houseplants. Oxygen goes on to ramble only semi-coherently about his role as the film's resident prophet, and, as we should expect, the detectives stare at him confused and befuddled. His speech concludes in two parts. The first is linguistic: he tells the detectives he can "make sense out of yesterday--can you understand how important that is?" The second is both verbal and physical: he stands (his head above the frame) and begins to unzip the crotch of his jumpsuit. We hear him say, "You will learn something from me," and then the camera jumps back to the full bodies of the detectives, both of whom are covering their eyes now and screaming hysterically as Elmo stands with his back to the camera, holding his jumpsuit open. Now, obviously the scene is absurd: it plays for laughs, and (at least from me) it always gets them. But I think the point here is necessarily aggressive--even more aggressive than Oxygen's "revelation": Elmo's phallus is the only thing these two "dicks" can understand. Now, I apologize for that crudeness, but I think this pun is essential to the language games the movie plays: if what distinguishes Elmo from every other man in the film is his ability to communicate with women (an ability verbalized in an apparently non-sensical code of "aardvarks," "nose-armies," and "zygotes" which only he and the film's various housewives understand), it makes to sense to position him as Soderbergh's cypher. Therefore, in his exposure, we see another anti-linguistic move which solicits a clear response: when he unzips his jumpsuit, the detectives see in him exactly the horror they went into the room expecting to find.
Schizopolis is littered with language games: dubbing, subtitles, half-heard conversations, doublespeak, psychobabble, and criticism. Most of these deserve close scrutiny and analysis, and I have to admit my own sense of inadequacy in dealing with this movie, if only because I don't know that I can do even one part of it any justice. But before I close, I feel obligated to a take a stab at that title. Schizopolis is a compound word, built from the Greek "schizo," meaning "to split" and "polis," meaning "city." Of course, it also carries psychological overtones connected to the disorder, "schizophrenia," which is commonly misunderstood as "split-personality disorder," although a clinical definition would more accurately characterize it as a disorder in which the brain struggles to accurately distinguish fantasy and reality. In the case of this film, all three definitions are applicable and, to varying degrees, intended: the title references a "split city" that is itself inhabited by people of two (or three) minds, each wandering among the others, oblivious of (or skeptical towards) the possibility of connection. The vision is cynical, and this cynicism is manifested in Soderbergh's use of a pants-less man to bring in title cards for the film which have been conveniently printed on his shirt(s).
However, there is more to the notion that these characters are of "two minds." Pioneering linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure theorized that all language systems are built on a fundamental instability between a "signifier"--the sound-image used to refer to a thing or idea--and the "signified"--the thing or idea itself. According to Saussure, all our communicative acts rely on the impossible notion that we can ever "name" a "thing" in a way which makes it possible to truly and completely communicate that thing to someone else. However, the presence of language suggests this action is, in fact, possible. To give an example: when I write the word "tree," I am thinking of a particular kind of tree--specifically, the tree at the end of my parents' driveway. However, there is nothing I can do short of taking you to my parents' house to ensure that you truly "see" the tree I "mean;" instead, you are going to picture your own tree, forever changing the linguistic action ("signification") taking place between us and eliminating my tree from the equation altogether. Obviously, the more words we introduce into our interaction, the more impossible the process ought to become. But what Saussure found was that language is strangely tenacious, and that tenaciousness is rooted not in its codes but in its flexibility--it succeeds because we want it to, trading not on words and images, but on "Signs," or the combined forms of "signifiers" and "signifieds." Now, I know that's a bit tortuous, but stick with me:
In Schizopolis, Soderbergh converts his characters--and us--into embodied "Signs." We each contain two distinct parts of ourselves: the selves others see and the selves we believe ourselves to be. The issue here is not that we don't listen to each other, but that we don't speak for ourselves. That's what these (male) characters have lost: Munson, the speech writer; Kolchak, the platitudinous dentist; Schwitters, the arrogant mouthpiece of a pseudophilosophical cult. But the movie isn't a motivational poster--the point here isn't to match our public personae to our personal goals; rather, the point is that our public personae are and have always been the only "real" selves we have: just as "my" tree became yours when I spoke it, we become ourselves when someone hears us. We don't have a right to a private self...because we don't even speak our own language. As the film's anonymous "host" (and secret speechwriter) tells us near the movie's end,
"We are who we pretend to be...because we pretend to be who we--really--are."
This is the theoretical move which grounds the paranoia these characters verbalize over and over again, and in this sense, Nameless Numberhead Man is right when he whines about feeling that he is at the mercy of forces beyond his control. We don't determine ourselves--we are made in the Schizopolis.
