Look Out! Foreign Film Incoming!: "Z"

I must admit, I'm beginning this entry with a bit of trepidation. The film I'm writing about this week, Costa-Gavras's Z (1969), combines a large number of elements that tend to distress certain moviegoers, making it a dicey choice on my part. So before I dive into those elements, I'm going to start by just telling you what happens in the film, because it's a darn good story.

There's this up-and-coming, charismatic politician, and he's planning to give a speech. It's on a pretty significant topic – the importance of peace in the world – and this topic, the fact that the politician is popular (particularly with young people), and his rather left-leaning politics have the generals and cops and ruling party in the country poo-pooing in their pants. There are demonstrations and counter demonstrations, and after the speech the politician is walking through the crowd when out of nowhere a funny little three-wheeled delivery cart comes roaring past. A man in the back hits the politician in the head with a club, and the cart drives off before anyone can do anything.

The politician ends up in the hospital with a broken skull, and then eventually dies. And now the government's in a pickle, because people are starting to suspect that it was an assassination. For the sake of propriety, they assign a young independent prosecutor to the case. This guy really is independent. He has no leftist sympathies, and is one of those formal, pedantic men who is only really interested in the truth. But when he starts investigating, he discovers some odd things, the first of which is that no one can seem to agree what really happened.

His higher-ups are pushing the story that the politician was injured in an accident, claiming that the cart simply hit him and he fell to the ground, striking his head on a curb. The two men who were apparently in the cart first say that they were not in the cart, and then once they do admit that they were in the cart use the exact same oddly-worded phrase to describe the "accident." Oh, and they deny being in a right-wing paramilitary group that has ties to the government and often comes out to battle the leftists during political rallies, even though there are pictures of them attending that group's meetings.

As he moves from fact to fact – and the second half of the film moves like a cross between a political thriller and a courtroom drama – the young prosecutor cannot help but realize that what he's investigating is clearly an assassination plotted by the highest-up members of his government. When he begins to confront them, these plotters bemoan the rise of the young leftists, claiming that these misbegotten kids have come along "just when we dream of renewal" and are interrupting their vision of a "country without parties, without Left or Right, heeding God and its destiny." Which is to say that they claim their actions were necessary to the survival of the moral and political fabric of their nation. But what is the young prosecutor to do? He just believes in the truth and the law. He indicts four generals on counts of murder, and the film ends on a triumphant note…except for one coda, which I'll get to in a moment.

So that's it. Sounds pretty good, right? So what's the problem? Why might this distress folks?

Well, first off, it's a foreign film, filmed primarily in Algeria, and the people in it speak French. This means that it indeed has subtitles. Additionally, the story it tells is based on real events – the assassination of a Greek politician named Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. So not only does the weary American viewer have to wade through subtitles, the film also asks them to have at least a passing awareness of the existence of things like countries outside their own, as well as that period lost to the dim mists of time known as the 20th Century.

Beyond this, horror of horrors, Z covers that most distressing of all topics: the way politics and power actually function, rather than the way they do in social media screeds. This means that our viewer, in addition to being subjected to the indignity of having to read while they watch a film and the affront of being forced to know, or learn, or even look up on Wikipedia, a few facts about a time they believe to be far different than their own, also has to think a bit while watching this film, or perhaps in response to it.

Finally, you should also be aware of the fact that in this movie there are no computer-generated special effects, no fight scenes, no sex scenes, no dinosaurs, no insistence that children or family are the most important things in life, no jokes about bodily functions, no platitudes about race relations, actually, no platitudes at all, no fantastic-looking American actors with overly-muscled bodies, no paeans to how cool expensive cars are or how cool it is to be rich, no monsters, no explosions, no homey wisdom, no teenage love stories, no cartoon characters, no evil supervillains getting their comeuppance, and no paeans to how cool violence is when it's filmed in slow motion. So, basically, none of the elements that many of us good ol' red blooded Americans think make movies fun in the first place.

That's a lot of downside. But bear with me, because Z does have some upside as well.

First off, it has a lovely, sly, sardonic sense of humor. It understands, as do most of the greatest works of art about political tragedy, that in human affairs one can almost never separate large-scale horror from its bedmate, absurdity.

In this, it reminds me of novels like Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, which details the rather difficult attempt to come to terms with the incineration of whole populations during a war, or Asturias's El Senor Presidente, which grapples with the extreme trickiness involved in the attempt to stay alive and sane under the rule of a dictator. Like Z, 20th Century novels in this vein tend to be shocking, and to be funny, and to understand that sometimes monstrosity can only be properly conveyed with something that is half smile, half rictus of outrage.

All of which is to say that Z not a dour affair, and it might even make you chuckle once or twice. There is, for example, the coffin maker who comes in to testify that one of the assassins mentioned that he'd been hired to bash a man in the head; this coffin maker is himself bashed in the head on the way in to testify in an attempt to prevent him from doing just that. He testifies anyway, from a hospital bed. But why? Not out of nobility so much as out of petulance: he's incensed about the idea of anyone getting away with anything, and annoyed that the assassin got his picture in the paper. Or there is the general who makes the following statement, one of my favorite in the film, about where he was on the night of the assassination: "I'd decided to attend the Bolshoi. Not out of love for dance – I'm no pervert, thank God. it was a chance to spot Communists."

There are numerous visual bon mots as well. My favorite involves each of the indicted generals leaving the prosecutor's office, furiously, entering a hallway, and immediately turning to a door they think will let them out of the building. The door is locked, and it has to be pointed out to them that to get out they have to continue down the hall. Each general is more powerful than the last, and each is more furious than the last that this locked door will not open for them.

As with the coffin maker, the effect of this sequence, other than to be delightfully amusing, is to remind us that monstrosity at the political level is both committed and combated by human beings, and human beings can be ridiculous. That this does not prevent them from being destructive, or stopping destruction, is not beside the point – it is the point. To actually understand politics, one must take the difficult position of embracing the truth of contradiction.

A second point I should make about the noble qualities of Z is that it is a terrifically well-made and well-acted film, so even if you find politics and seriousness offensive, but really love to talk about the way your heroes like Martin Scorsese or Zack Snyder make movies, you can just watch it with the sound (and subtitles) off, and find a great deal of merit in it.

The final, and most important, thing I'll note about Z is that pulls off that wonderful orbital trick of coming from a time so different from our own – the nineteen-hundreds, as the kids call it – that it has circled all the way back around to be distressingly like our own. Which is to say that if you watch it you might learn a thing or two about our own world. And this is a fairly important kind of thing to be doing right now.

Because the truth is, and I really do hesitate to mention this, but I think you're old enough to hear it, our world is not in great shape. In fact, it's a shitshow.

We have lost the battle to do anything substantive about climate change; we have just put on a merry demonstration that we're unable to react in any substantively coherent way to something like a major public health crisis; we have neither the ability nor the will to do anything to help the most vulnerable – the homeless, those addicted to drugs, those living in desperate poverty, etc. – among us; rather than acting in any kind of solidarity, we spend an astoundingly large amount of our time arguing about wealthy nincompoops who do things like threatening to buy Twitter, or less wealthy nincompoops who try to convince us that all our problems can be solved by the fact that they've made up their own kind of electronic money; we live in a culture where people literally – and I'm using this word correctly – go around killing each other, and each other's children, with guns all the goddamn time; and we literally hate each other and want each other to die. (Once again, I'm using that pesky "literally" correctly, as an accurate indication of the way discourse is conducted in the public sphere: Christians in South Carolina are calling for the execution of people whose sexuality they disagree with, people of all stripes have spent the last several years secretly or not so secretly hoping that their political adversaries will succumb to the choices they've made regarding COVID, it's par for the course on the internet to tell someone that they should die, and on and on to all the rest of it that I'm sure you're familiar with and hope you haven't just written off as "the way things are," because that's not the way things should be, which is something that you really should be able to acknowledge if you have any shred of humanity left.)

No, this is not good at all. And is the answer that we should all just watch a movie like Z? you ask, cleverly thinking ahead to where I'm going with all this?

Actually, yes, that is the answer. Or at least a tiny part of it.

Because, and I think you're old enough to hear this too, just getting your favorite person elected, or expanding the number of people who vote in this country, or passing a law that forces teachers to carry AR-15s in the classroom isn't going to change things on its own. Sure, we need all of that kind of stuff (except for the bit about arming the teachers, which is idiocy, because they should be forced to carry hand grenades and bayonets too) but the idea that we're all just a couple of electoral victories away from finally being able to substantively vaporize all those people who disagree with us falls somewhere between naïve and asinine.

What we also need is to work on is changing our culture.

We need more thought and less visual novocain. We need more wisdom and less obsession with trying to make our fortunes by chasing the aggrievedly popular. We need more of an understanding that the things plaguing us are not much different the things that have tended to plague humans for a long time, and that there is a deep well of wisdom – particularly in the arts – available to draw from when we want to understand how to face these things.

So what does Z have to offer in this regard? I've already mentioned that it forces the viewer to understand that human depredation and human absurdity are physiologically-joined twins. It also works as a bracing reminder that the quest to make the world a less violent place and the quest for solidarity in the face of abusive power are unadulteratedly good things. One cannot be on the side of the powerful and the wealthy and against the side of the ordinary person without being a malignancy on the face of the world.

On a more granular level, the film lays out with a devastating precision the way that politics tends to operate, as we have recently in this country witnessed. When the men who are generals, or worship generals, or wish they were generals, or simply believe that their class of person is the only deserving class of person come into power, they do so with a vision of national greatness that is insuperable from a vision of their own greatness.

They believe that the poor and the different are a kind of cancer that needs to be eradicated, or at least shackled, or at the very least reeducated. And so they plot to maintain their own power, through public proclamations of generosity and decency and national destiny…and through behind-the-scenes maneuvering through which they convince ordinary people – perhaps a bit more gullible than some, perhaps a bit more desperate than others – that by doing some dirty work, by hating the different and loving their own kind, by perhaps just bashing a few people in the head here and there, they can make the world right again.

Who are these men who come into power? They are for the most part stupid, greedy, ignorant, and tiny-spirited. They are the kind of men who, one after another, throw themselves at a locked door and grow furious that it will not open before someone redirects them to the course that the ordinary person would have seen long ago. And, most tragically, they often hold enormous, terrifying amounts of power.

Laying this truth bare, along with the truths about how these men might best be resisted, is one of the purposes of a film like Z.

So that's why it's worth watching. Am I, in the end, going to try to convince you that if we sat the entire population of America down and forced them to watch this film, our problems would vanish? Of course not. But art is one of the most powerful forces there is in human life, and by promoting it, by relentlessly believing in it, we might help push the culture a degree or two in a better direction.

And the stakes, my friend, are high. I mentioned that there is a coda at the end of the film that takes a bit of the shine off its triumph. It's a coda that details the actual historical outcomes of the events detailed in the film, following the assassination of Grigoris Lambrakis; I will leave you with it and will let you determine for yourself whether it bears any resemblance to our current moment, our current culture, our current future.

In real-life Greece, the truth-besotted young prosecutor did not live long enough to see the trial of the four generals. He died of what the coroner described as a heart attack. Seven of the witnesses he meant to call also died before the trial, in a car accident, a gas explosion, a suicide, a drowning, an accident at work, another car accident, and another heart attack. The two assassins – the men in the three-wheeled cart – were given four and five-year sentences, respectively. The generals were given administrative reprimands, and the charges dropped. Grigoris Lambrakis's party seemed certain to win the next election, but instead the military seized power in a coup. Lambrakis's leftist associates also ended up dead or disappeared: one had a stroke while being transported by the police, another fell out of a seventh-floor window during an interrogation, another was exiled. The new military regime banned Sophocles, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Euripides, long hair, miniskirts, Trotsky, Sartre, Ionesco, Russian-style toasts, workers' strikes, the Beatles, Albee, Pinter, freedom of the press, sociology, Beckett, Dostoyevsky, modern music, new math, and many other things, including the letter "Z," which means "he lives" in ancient Greek.

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