I See Dead People

In the space of a quarter century, Putinist Russia has slowly but surely reevaluated the importance of everyday human life and the significance of its end.  As I mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, Putin's popularity in his first years in office was based on the relief that a firmer hand than Yeltsin's was now in power, a believe that the lawlessness of the 1990s was in the rearview mirror, and confidence in an increasingly high standard of living brought out by increasingly high crude oil prices.  The government displayed little concern with the intricacies of the population's private lives (and, as we have seen, with trying to protect them when they were in danger).  But well before the invasions of Ukraine brought war and death back into the public consciousness, the country's art and entertainment were reminding anyone paying attention that the necropolitical bill might be coming due.  In particular, post-Soviet culture has a fixation on corpses, with a minor sideline in the elderly (future corpses).

In addition to the unwavering focus on blood and mayhem, 1990s mass culture had its sentimental side, repeatedly drawing attention to the superfluous, abandoned, endangered, and occasionally, dangerous late and post-Soviet elderly, a theme that would be continued into the twenty-first century.  One of the last Soviet films was Eldar Riazanov's The Promised Heavens (1991), which told the story of homeless old men and women who live on a landfill that is about to be razed in order to erect an American condom factory.  Their unofficial "President" is convinced that he has been in contact with friendly aliens who will spirit them away to a better life in outer space. The decade came to end with Stanislav Govorukhin's 1999 The Voroshilov Sharpshooter, about a World War II veteran who takes justice into his own hands after his granddaughter is raped. The short stories of Ludmila Petrushevskaya and Margarita Khemlin are littered with abused and abusive grannies.  Old people in these texts are the sad and bitter leftovers of a world that moved on without them, the biological remainders and reminders of mortality.

After the Soviet collapse, Vladimir Sorokin would continue, indeed, intensify, his focus on abject bodies of all kinds, from naked, defecating peasants (Four) to clones used for both resurrection and meat (Blue Lard, Four) to objects of rape and torture (The Day of the Oprichnik) and, of course, corpses. [3]  Nor was Sorokin alone. After his runaway success with the two Brother movies, Balabanov proved to be the cinematic bard of corpses.  His 2005 film Dead Man's Bluff (Zhmurki) was a biting satire chronicling its heroes transition from street-level gangsters to national political figures that would not let the audience look away from the dead bodies left in the protagonists' wake.  This is most evident in an early shoot-out that takes place in a morgue, with the corpses at times serving as (formerly) human shields.  But the apotheosis of Balabanov's necropolitical vision is his 2007 film, Cargo 200.

Named for the Soviet military code for coffins carrying soldiers' corpses, the film takes place in 1984, at the height of the Soviet Union's disastrous war in Afghanistan. Cargo 200 puts the "dead" in "deadpan," repeatedly forcing the viewer to witness outrageous acts of violence and desecration with none of the usual cinematic cues (such as extradiegetic music) to prepare them for what is about to unfold.  In this regard, the viewers are like the hapless teenagers who wander into the plot of this Soviet-era horror movie. A young girl named Angelika and a friend's boyfriend named Valery had stopped by the house of a local moonshiner named Alexey after they had run out of alcohol.  Valery leaves her in the car, gets drunk with Alexey, and never comes back.  Angelika notices that she is being followed by a strange man; the moonshiner's wife Antonina hides her in the banya, but the stranger is unstoppable. He turns out to be Militia Captain Zhurov, whose status allows him to break the law with impunity. When Sunka, the moonshiners' Vietnamese assistant/servant, tries to help, Zhurov promptly murders him and then rapes Angelika with a glass bottle.   He takes her back to his apartment, chains her to his bed, and then brings in a procession of inmates to take turns raping her. Then he finds out that her paratrooper fiance has been killed in Afghanistan, and brings his dead body back to the apartment to put in bed beside her.

Zhurov frames Alexey for Sunka's murder; Alexey is convicted and executed with almost immediately after. Antonina, now his widow, bursts into Zhurov's apartment and kills him; she leaves the chained Angelika in bed, surrounded by corpses.  Much of this horror could have been averted if Artyom, a Leningrad professor who teaches scientific atheism and father of Valery's girlfriend, had told the truth and provided Alexey with an alibi (the two had been drinking together at the time of Sunka's murder); but he was too much of a coward.  Wracked with guilt, Artyom decides to get baptized.  The last scene returns to Valery, who runs into Artyom's son at an underground rock concert. The two of them strike up a fast friendship and begin scheming to make money.

The summary is horrifying enough, yet it cannot convey just how disturbing an experience it is to watch Cargo 200. Soviet and Western audiences have long been accustomed to baroque violence, especially in the wake of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.  But Cargo 200 does not share Tarantino's trademark dark, self-conscious comedy (unlike Dead Man's Bluff, which in that regard is much more familiar). Nor does it provide the cathartic or voyeuristic melodrama of the action movie.  Murder and rape simply happen; the direction resolutely refuses to distinguish visually between a man sitting down to drink vodka, a man raping a young woman, or a woman barging into a stranger's home to shoot someone.  Angelika screams, pleads, and cries, but the film itself rejects affect, throwing the viewers off-guard. More than anywhere else in the chernukha and post-chernukha world, Cargo 200 presents violence and violent death as normative.

Cargo 200 reminds us that the movie camera is not human. There's a reason that the Dziga Vertov's 1929 classic Man with a Movie Camera is not Man Is a Movie Camera; the closest the Kino Eye comes to being human vision is to posit the director and camera as a cyborg unit.  Balabanov was, of course, human, along with everyone else involved in making this movie. But Cargo 200 comes as close as possible to creating a film as if from a non-human perspective.  The camera does not seem to know what it is seeing. Why should it film the cessation of human life differently from any other activity?  As a disaffected, godlike superhuman puts it in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, "A live body and a dead body both have the same number of particles."

I referred to Platonov's Chevengur earlier in this chapter, and I wish to bring it back because there is something very Platonovian about Cargo 200's non-human filmmaking. At one point in the novel,  the narrator posits that within every person is a "little spectator: he participates in neither action nor suffering--he is always cool and unchanging. His function is to see and to be a witness, yet he is without the right of voice in the person's life, and it is not known why this solitary presence exists." The narrator calls him the "eunuch of the human soul," a metaphor stressing both the role of spectator and the incapacity for passion. Valery Podoroga views the eunuch of the soul as a fundamental element to Platonov's work: “The Platonov gaze externalizes any event, even those that by their nature must belong only to inner measurements of the world and of human beings. Even the most thoughtful of Platonov's characters are more akin to sage-automatons than to living, sensible people who are responsible for their actions—like us, the "normal" readers." The result is a profound tension: "Whereas the eye of the eunuch of the soul sees 'reality,' prohibiting any interpretation with respect to itself, we cannot tolerate this reality, for this reality is emptiness" (210-211).

In Cargo 200, the camera, so often the instrument of scopophilic pleasure,  is the eunuch of the soul, but the same does not have to hold true for the filmmakers themselves.  Balabanov had always had an affinity for low-affect characters (Danila in the Brother films, the old woman in Of Freaks and Men), but they usually contrast with emotional characters who find themselves in dangerous, melodramatic situations.  Cargo 200 portrays nihilism without actually being nihilistic, through its rejection of the voyeurism violent film usually encourages.  Rather than titillating, the violence simply is.  At the same time, the film has a clear critical framework, rejecting Soviet pieties while showing the war in Afghanistan as nothing but a conveyer belt that ships out the living and brings back dead and rotting meat.  The film's two final scenes--epilogues, really--are pointed moral statements. The professor of atheism resolving to be Baptized is a modern-day Raskolnikov; technically, he is not responsible for any of the corpses that litter Cargo 200, but he is morally culpable, both as a passive bystander to violence and as the facilitator of the empty ideology that makes this world possible.  The final scene reminds us that the future will belong to the two young men who meet at the concert; all they care about is making money out of the rotting corpse of their civilization.

Next: The Zombies of Postsocialism, Revisited