In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter regarding his Paradise trilogy, Ulrich Seidl explains his idea that life is contained by institutions. He says, “You were born in a hospital, which is an institution; you go to school and the church; you serve the military, and then you die in a hospital. And then all the government departments that you have to approach to do administrative work about your life. So life is an institution and a prison as well.” His statement echoes Michel Foucalt’s theory that life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and part of the twentieth century—is set in disciplinary societies. Gilles Deleuze summarizes this idea in his essay, Postscript on the Societies of Control, “The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school […] then the barracks […] then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison”. (3) However, Postscript on the Societies of Control is not about disciplinary societies. It is about the death of them, and the birth of the societies of control at the onslaught of the twenty-first century. In disciplinary societies, one was always in the act of starting over, of jumping through one hoop to the next: school, work, home. Societies of control function in the exact opposite manner—instead of always in the state of starting over, one is in the state of never finishing. (Deleuze 5) An employee may leave her workplace to come home, but due to technologies such as email and personal laptops, she is never finished working. A felon is freed from prison, but remains a felon for the rest of her life. In the societies of control, life is a hell that is never ending; we are trapped in a state of suspension, of limbo—always competing against one another, always seeking but never finding. However, as with all new forms of sovereignty, there exist new forms of resistance. When Deleuze describes the machines associated with each type of society—simple, mechanical machines (societies of sovereignty), machines involving energy (disciplinary societies), and computers (societies of control)—he also describes the integral accidents that inevitably emerge each time a new technological or societal advancement is made. (Deleuze 6) Machines can be sabotaged and computers hacked, so while the future may look bleak the possibilities for revolution will always be there.
In Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy, his three main characters are on a search for each of their own paradises. Unfortunately, paradise is an end-game, and there is no end to life in the societies of control. Fortunately, there remains a glimmer at the end of the tunnel—a glimmer called hope. It is fitting then, that Seidl named the last and most optimistic film in the series, Paradise: Hope. While Paradise: Love and Faith are undeniably tragic—Teresa never finds love in the sex tourism industry, and Anna Maria never finds faith in religion—Hope, though still not a happy film, reassures us that life in the societies of control is at least survivable. In Paradise: Hope, Seidl maintains relevance to the 21st century’s societies of control both in the narrative of the film and in its aesthetics. By comparing and contrasting Hope to its sister films, Seidl’s relevance to our time period will be unveiled.
In the societies of control, one is always in the middle of things, so it is appropriate that Seidl puts viewers in the middle of things as well. Hope, as well as Love and Faith, starts in media res. In fact, almost every scene starts in the middle of things. Even in scenes that appear to be the beginning of something, Seidl quickly denies us and reveals that we are still just in the middle of the action. During Melanie’s first visit to the doctor, it seems that we have walked in on the start—she is waiting outside of his office. (figure 1) A few seconds later, however, Verena walks out of the office and we realize that we have walked in on the middle of something again. (figure 2) This is not the start of Melanie’s doctor visit, it is the middle; she had gone there with Verena so that they could wait for each other. We never get to see the end of any scene either, as Seidl cuts to a different scene right before the previous scene is able to finish. We don’t see Melanie walk out of the doctor’s office, but jump straight to the middle of a scene where Melanie and her roommates are dancing after lights-out. Similar situations exist in Love and Faith as well. In Love, we see Teresa venturing out of her hotel room. (figure 3) Next thing we know, she is sitting at a bar and chatting to her friend. (figure 4) We are never told how she got there exactly, or even how she was able to meet her friend. We are not even sure she is speaking with a close friend; we only assume that after listening in on their conversation for several minutes. Even in Faith, when Anna Maria travels from one house to another in an attempt to spread her faith, she is never seen fully entering or leaving any particular household, not even her own. She is always filmed in the middle of a stairway leading up to an apartment (figure 5) or in the process of locking her door before she leaves. (figure 6) By keeping us in the middle of the action and never allowing us to see the beginning or end of it, Seidl subjects us to the constant frustration of having to figure out the context of each scene ourselves. We are always in-between, always in a state of being unable to decipher the context of one scene before it leaps to the next. Seidl puts his viewers in a state of limbo, reflecting the limbo we are in as the constituents of societies of control.
Another way Seidl reflects the societies of control is in the composition of his shots. Most of the still shots are composed in an unnervingly symmetrical way. We are placed in a sort of physical limbo in relation to the scene, our eyes suspended on the line of symmetry in the middle of each shot. In Hope, the symmetry of the still shots function to characterize the claustrophobic, sterile-white halls of the fat camp. (figures 7-11) Out of the three institutions criticized in each film, the fat camp is the only physical one. It functions as a society of control, albeit a very small one. The children go from the mess hall, to the gym, to their rooms, but they are never finished with the fat camp while they are there. Even in the privacy of their rooms they have to adhere to the rules of the camp and obey the authority figures that are constantly on surveillance. The camp is more like a prison than a typical summer camp, and the controlled, symmetrical shots set it up to feel that way. While the symmetry in Hope functions as a symbol of authority and control, the symmetry in Love is as artificial as the affection Teresa receives from the beach boys. The symmetry in Love still has an unnatural, middling presence as it does in Hope, suspending us in the middle of the screen. However, since Love is a different story about a different institution (the sex tourism industry), it is inevitable that the symmetry in this film has a different affect than in the other two films. Teresa desperately longs for genuine love and affection, even though she is fully aware that she will never be able to find it when her “suitors” are feigning attraction in order to eke out their livings. The symmetric compositions in this film reek of the same amount of artifice that Teresa stubbornly tries not to inhale. It is especially apparent when the line of symmetry serves as a barrier between the white vacationers and the black laborers. Near the beginning of the film, patrons are welcomed onto the resort by a group of singing and drumming women. Teresa is delighted to see this, even though the black women are not genuinely welcoming the tourists to the resort—they are just doing what they are paid to do. (figure 12) In Faith, much of the symmetry in the shots rely on the religious decorations in Anna Maria’s home. (figures 13-14) It is an indication of her desperate attempt to create a happy, religious household following the absence of her husband. As Anna Maria’s marital situation worsens, the perfectly symmetric shots become a foil to the chaos in her life as her attempts to maintain her religious household become more and more desperate. Though symmetry has different affects in each of the three films, it has the same function in all of them; it creates a visual limbo that suspends us in the scenes, echoing the fact that we are always in the middle of things when living in the societies of control.
The films never end in the traditional sense of the word. The characters do not cease existing after the tragedy occurs. They must continue living despite the pain as the films linger past their tears, petering out slowly to give way to the credits, and even then the sounds of the last scenes remain. Again, this fits the notions of the societies of control that we are never finished with anything. The characters are never finished, and Seidl does not let his viewers finish either. In the last few scenes of Hope, we barely see Melanie as an individual at all. She is with the rest of the camp, exercising and then lining up for food. It is fitting that the last time we see Melanie is in the mess hall of her fat camp, eating. The last sounds are that of silverware clinking against china. We do not know how she is feeling—it is hard enough finding her in the group of fat camp attendees. Seidl never gives us closure as viewers, and we are never allowed to find out how Melanie survives heartbreak. We never finish with the characters, as they remain in our heads after the film closes while we wonder about their fates. Seidl gives Love and Faith the same treatment. We only see Teresa’s silhouette in the distance while she takes a walk on the beach in the dawn, but we do not have a clue as to what her life will be like from there. Faith is the only film in which we have a less ambiguous idea of the main character’s fate, but even then that idea is tenuous at best. Anna Maria has lost faith in her religion, but we have no idea how her relationship with her husband will turn out. Seidl has us suspended; we leave these films with questions in our minds that will never be answered.
By keeping us in the middle of everything—the action, the image—and never giving us closure, Seidl has created a trilogy that echoes life in the societies of control. As bleak as life in the societies of control may seem, there is a reason Seidl named his last film, Hope. Melanie is the youngest of the three main characters, and therefore her future is brightest. Out of the three films, Hope is the least tragic. While the possibilities have run dry for Teresa and Anna Maria at the end of their films, they are nothing short of endless for Melanie. Though the Paradise trilogy is about the characters’ inability to find paradise, Seidl leaves us with Hope to say, “Life goes on.” Perhaps it is alright that one is doomed to a constant state of limbo in the societies of control. Life goes on.
