"Waiting for Godot" with Sex: Seeing The Band’s Visit politically.

I want to thank my wife Donna, for, even though she was tired and didn’t want to be lectured to about film theory, her presence nevertheless, after a long 5 days absence, got picked up by me at the airport and was there in the family room, nodding off, while I clarified for myself out loud some ideas about film I had been mulling over in relation to The Band’s Visit (2008).

We don’t interpret films; they interpret us (or interpellate us, to use Althusser’s term), which is to say, films construct for us a subject position and call us to identify with it, from which we are able to make sense of the “Real.” (By the “Real,” I don’t mean the actual, but the socially constructed “Real” of ideology). These subject positions (which entail also a concept of what it means to be an “individual”) are made to seem intelligible by situating them within those larger frames of intelligibility available at this time in history (global capitalism). In other words, film is the medium through which we are instructed in the nature of the “Real.”  Where else but from film do we get our sense of “how the world works”? Of course, we think that we already know how the world works from “experience” [unmediated, direct knowledge] and we judge film on the basis of how well it reflects or fails to reflect the “real world.”

Film teaches us to make sense of the flux of actuality out there, by turning it into the “Real,” which is still “out there” (external to us) but which now makes sense. Because of the tales movies tell us and teach us to construct, we are enabled to make sense of the world out there and ourselves in it. To do this, film constructs for us a subject position, which “explains” the world in such a way that it seems to make sense, even under world-wide conditions of ruthless exploitation, which is to say, it’s an ideological subject position, which film provides us, which casts us viewers into the position of already always having understood the way things are. We are of course offered no subject positions which would contest this ”way things are.” No, such positions are always already outside the frame of intelligibility needed by world capitalism. To the extent that a movie makes sense to you, you will find that the “Real” makes sense to you too, it’s “the way things are.” Thus, the Real is fetishized. And thus, such questions as: What about 2 million children living on the streets in cities around the world! Whose desire is this? And with whom are we implicated in allowing it? – such questions are ruled unintelligible or else given the answer, “That’s just the way things are.”

So, if I tell the tale of The Band’s Visit, what do I come up with? It’s a tale mainly about subject positions within what Raymond William calls the “structure of feeling,” available at this time (late capitalism) for gendered subjects. It tells a tale of the feminine and the male (heterosexual), the range of their possible behavior toward each other, on the level of “intimacy,”either sexual or verbal. It tells a tale of the nature of loneliness, as the outside of intimacy. The tale of the film is in effect: All are lonely, it’s part of the human condition, it’s with you even in a room with nothing but a lamp and a sleeping baby. It is possible to overcome it through the practice of intimacy, either of a discursive or of a sexual nature, but it is unlikely to be enduring, in either case.

The film is telling you that if you are a woman pushing middle age and you are stuck out in the middle of nowhere permanently and you are lonely and a bit desperate, having an affair with a married man is understandable, even if he is a “Kalb.” Don’t give up, you can still allow your life force expression. Be as free as you want sexually, be natural, use a man to make your lover jealous, if you want; go ahead, indulge in sexual fantasy, if you want, but don’t let it get out of control. If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. You are a sexual woman! A natural woman! You are a good woman. Remember your femininity is not only your sexuality but also your general attitude of friendliness and helpfulness, nurturing qualities, even mothering, even though you are being punished for your fooling-around past, as it were, by your infertility now, that’s a minor issue.

If you are a man of the professional managerial class, being pushed by middle age and a guilty, almost debilitating, past, forget about sex. You’ve got responsibilities, you’ve got to keep an eye on people and organize things. You can appreciate a beautiful woman, though, and perhaps feel a little sad about their loss, but you have had an “exchange of quiet desperation” (Ebert), call it verbal intimacy, with her and it was nice, but you do have your work and your work is music which is feeling and beyond discursive contestation and grounded in nature; feelings are natural, are they not? And thus serve to ground the whole film-ideology in nature, which is what ideology does; it attempts to naturalize the Real, turn it into the way things are now, yesterday and forever, amen. You can be called a good man. And, at the end of the movie, it turns out that the Manager General is a superb singer of beautiful classic Arabic music, the first a dirge with soul; the second, lighter, happy even.

If you’re a young guy, get it while you can! That’s only natural. Just show up and do a good job tomorrow at work! We’ll be watching you.

This movie is supposed to take place in the present (2008), just three years before the Egyptian Revolution, which began as a workers rebellion against the State over economic issues of joblessness and low pay. Clearly, the Egyptian revolution marks the first great experience in a new period of international revolutionary struggles. There is however no sense of these Egyptians having been stirred by any anticipation of social unrest, let alone revolution back home.

The film does gesture toward the memory of the Yom Kippur War (1973), which almost resulted in the defeat of the Israeli Army. The film implies that the legacy of that war can be overcome with more “intimacy” or “sharing of their common humanity” between these former enemies. Intimacy is privileged in this film as a zone free from politics and strife, the concept of intimacy is “private” and as such posits the existence of the unique individual with a public and a private self; one need do hardly more than point to the “obviousness” and “common sense” of it. With this private self,  one is a free individual to enter into contracts, make decisions based on one’s experience. In other words, this private self authorizes and legitimates the humanist, liberal concept of the self as solitary (lonely) and situated beyond all discursive contestations or interventions as relatively fixed and stable and unitary and present to itself in its full plenitude and available to others (often even bodily available) in a state of fully transparent intimacy, if the individual chooses.

The film posits as solution to the world’s strife (Egyptian vs Israeli, eg), individual voluntary acts of intimacy across national, racial and religious divides. Class divisions however are untouched and remain the unspoken of the film.

Sex or verbal intimacy is the only possibility, given the circumstances, which loom large but remain unspoken, limiting the realm of the possible to just this. Intimacy in its sexual form is offered as compensation for lives of boredom, deadendedness, quiet desperation and loneliness. Music is the metaphor for “natural” (beyond discussion) feelings of intimacy and sexuality. Twafiq sings sexy songs.

That’s why this film seems to push the limits of what’s permissible regarding sexual morality (extra marital sex, recreational sex), which gives it its avant-guard quality.  Puritanical Islam’s critique of Western sexual morality is ruled out of bounds. It’s unnatural and outdated in this context.

By taking this seemingly ultra liberal permissive view , the film ideology signals that it doesn’t really care about sex much at all. What it is concerned with is establishing the naturalness of the world capitalist order by constructing subject positions (film viewers), from which perspective, within the structure of feeling historically available, the self as “private individual” is safeguarded and it’s from this subject position that “the ways things are” is made intelligible, and becomes the Real.